to the Castle on the Concourse
Back on a mid-July day in 2010, as I was making my way across central Montana, people were standing along the banks and bridges of the Hudson River in upstate New York, gawking at this 2,400-ton structure gliding downstream toward New York City, perched atop two barges that had been welded together specifically for the task. After a fortnight of R&R in New Jersey, it was hauled up the East River to this spot on the Harlem, where it would soon replace the original Willis Avenue Bridge. In an attempt to preserve the old bridge (as required by funding agreements with the federal and state governments), the city offered to sell it to any interested party for $1 — and provide up to 15 miles of free shipping — but there were no takers. Instead, it was floated to a junkyard in Jersey City, where it was dismantled and sold for scrap.
(That's the Harlem River span of the Triborough Bridge in the background.)
Built in 1879-82, this building currently serves as the Julia de Burgos Latino Cultural Center.
Built in 1891 as a German Methodist Episcopal church
at Seabury Playground. 15 years from now, some kid's gonna ace a question about the Seabury Commission on his college history exam and have no idea how he knew the answer.
This is the former site of the Spite House, a four-story structure built on a 5-foot-by-102-foot sliver of land. Even if you never click on the links in my posts, you need to read this article about the house. Trust me. And then check out these pictures.
Opened in 1913 at Hunter College (then known as Normal College), this Lexington Avenue castle was built to house an elementary school and a high school, and was designed by — who else? — Charles B.J. Snyder.
Dedicated in 1918; designed by Bertram Goodhue. Take an architectural tour!
Completed in 1872, this magnificent structure (photos!) was almost destroyed by fire in 1998. It was fully restored, however, and was rededicated a few years later — note the date of this article about the reopening.
From the pages of The New Yorker:
When planning for Citicorp Center [now known as Citigroup Center] began, in the early nineteen-seventies, the site of choice was on the east side of Lexington Avenue between Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth Streets, directly across the street from Citicorp's headquarters. But the northwest corner of that block was occupied by St. Peter's Church, a decaying Gothic structure built in 1905. Since St. Peter's owned the corner, and one of the world's biggest banking corporations wanted the whole block, the church was able to strike a deal that seemed heaven-sent: its old building would be demolished and a new one built as a free-standing part of Citicorp Center.In 1978, the year after Citicorp Center was completed, Bill LeMessurier, the project's structural engineer, was reviewing his design and discovered, to his horror, that a perfect storm of factors — an omitted calculation (one not required by the city's building code) on his part, plus two cost-saving shortcuts taken by the construction team (neither of which would have been a problem on its own) — had resulted in the building being highly susceptible to catastrophic collapse if hit by strong diagonal winds.
To clear space for the new church, [the architect and engineer] set their fifty-nine-story tower on four massive, nine-story-high stilts, and positioned them at the center of each side, rather than at each comer. This daring scheme allowed the designers to cantilever the building's corners seventy-two feet out over the church, on the northwest, and over a plaza on the southwest. The columns also produced high visual drama: a nine-hundred-and-fourteen-foot monolith that seemed all but weightless as it hovered above the street.
And it was almost peak hurricane season.
LeMessurier alerted the architect and the Citicorp higher-ups, and they embarked on a secretive plan (known by city officials, but not by the general public) to strengthen the structure's wind braces, bringing in welders every night over the course of two months to fortify more than 200 bolted joints in the building's skeleton, starting with the most critical locations.
If people had found out what was going on, it could have been extremely damaging to the reputations of the bank and the design team, but the media never picked up on the story. The day after Citicorp put out a press release "in language as bland as a loan officer's wardrobe" about the upcoming welding work, the city's papers went on strike, and they didn't resume publication until weeks after the last joint had been fixed. It was only the aforementioned New Yorker article (well worth reading) that finally revealed the tale to the public in 1995.
And as for the building: with its reinforced, welded joints, Citigroup Center is now said to be one of the safest structures ever built.
Although it's been surpassed in height by many nearby buildings since its 1929 completion, this "exuberant Art Deco" skyscraper was once a prominent feature in the Midtown skyline. Here's a great video of a daredevil named Benni doing his "acrobatic lamppost act" on top of the building in 1933.
The "ultimate boutique hotel".
The sign at the bottom of the photo reads "Welcome to all personnel of the Armed Forces of the United States and its allies".
On Feb. 17, 1913, an act of cultural sabotage called the International Exhibition of Modern Art, or the Armory Show, hit the 69th Regiment Armory on East 26th Street, lodging there for nearly a month. Installed in a sequence of temporary rooms, the show revealed horror after grating horror in the form of up-to-the-minute European paintings and sculptures by the likes of Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp and Henri Matisse.
New York had never seen anything like it. The American artists in the exhibition, all milquetoast traditionalists, were stunned into silence. No one even noticed they were there. The critics and the paying public, shocked and appalled, had eyes only for the European art and looked daggers at it.
That, at least, is the account of the Armory Show that has come down to us, repeated endlessly in the history books. But in the show’s coming centennial year, at least two exhibitions will propose alternative readings that attempt to dispel, or at least modify, an accumulation of myths and misperceptions, and in the process suggest that shock can be just another form of entertainment.
Now a residence hall for the School of Visual Arts
"Deep in the Heart of Texas, a Glimpse of Old New York"
Or was it? According to the AIA Guide to New York City:
Irving's connection with this house is the wishful thinking of an ancient owner; this is one Washington who never slept here. In the real world, Elsie de Wolfe and Elisabeth Marbury lived here from 1894 to 1911, maintaining a salon where notables from all walks of life gathered amid Elsie's "white decor," the stylistic statement that launched her career as America's first paid (and highly paid) interior decorator.
One of those two entities was formerly the largest hotel in New York City, with 2,632 rooms contained in the full-block complex. The building pictured above is now a college dorm.
from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade at an under-construction portion of Brooklyn Bridge Park (that's Pier 3 on the left and Pier 2 on the right), with the southern tip of Manhattan in the background
As I was taking this picture, a guy in his 50s or 60s walked by and said, "I think I had sex in a van like that back in high school."
The church, academy, and rectory buildings here at the former St. Peter's have been converted into 60 "high-end residences". There's even a two-level apartment in the church's bell tower.
These town houses were built for workingmen and their families in the late 1870s by Alfred Tredway White ("the great heart and mastermind of Brooklyn's better self"), a philanthropic housing reformer who once wrote:
The badly constructed, unventilated, dark and foul tenement houses of New York, in which our laboring classes are forced to live, are the nurseries of the epidemics which spread with certain destructiveness into the fairest homes; they are the hiding-places of the local banditti; they are the cradles of the insane who fill the asylums and of the paupers who throng the almshouses; in fact, they produce these noxious and unhappy elements of society as surely as the harvest follows the sowing, and, by these, punish the carelessness of those who own no responsibility as keepers of their brethren.Times change, of course. One of these homes currently on the market is listed for $1.35 million.
Like the town houses on Warren Place, this complex was built by Alfred Tredway White in the late 1870s to provide decent accommodations for working-class tenants. Many of these units have recently been converted to condos.
lining Hicks Street (and featured in this painting by Albert Pucci)
This old mews was presumably named for the nearby, and short-lived, Brooklyn Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies.
Not surprisingly, the street sign for this quiet, two-block-long lane has been stolen. Also not surprisingly, there are multiple opinions about the origin of the street's name. The Daily News, not known for its devotion to fact, claims:
Love Lane takes its name because it was a popular necking area where men would park their carriages in the 1880s before dropping their girlfriends off at the all-girls college around the corner (the Brooklyn Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies was built in 1822 and later became a hotel).I particularly like the time-travel aspect of this theory: the Brooklyn Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies had been out of existence for decades by the 1880s.
In their book Brooklyn by Name, Leonard Benardo and Jennifer Weiss, whose inaccurate reporting (as channeled through the writing of a Daily News columnist) touched off the Corbin Place controversy, make this assertion:
Two older, unmarried members of the DeBevoise family, John and Robert, adopted young Sarah, the daughter of their housekeeper. She later charmed a wealth of gentlemen callers. According to local folklore, Love Lane comes from the so-called love-lines — initials of Sarah DeBevoise and her suitors — scrawled across the fence near their home.But the best line of all can be found in Gerard Wolfe's New York: A Guide to the Metropolis: "Love Lane was, as its name implies, a favorite path in Colonial times for young swains to promenade with their maidens fair."
A converted stable built by the Brooklyn Fire Department in the 1880s
The sign's still hanging by the door, but the Heights Veterinary Hospital closed last January after more than 50 years in business. Supposedly, this building also served as the architectural office during the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.
This is the massive Brooklyn War Memorial in Cadman Plaza. What you see here is one wall of the memorial hall, the interior of which is now closed to the public, its basement used by the city as office and storage space.
Largely forgotten today, William Jay Gaynor, a former judge who served as the city's mayor from 1910 to 1913, was an incorruptible, brutally sincere, singularly courageous political reformer, not to mention a member of Louis Windmuller's Pedestrians Club, "the most exclusive, distinguished, and enthusiastic walking club in America". Early on in his mayoralty, he was known for commuting exclusively by foot to City Hall from his home in Brooklyn, saying "I walk because I've always walked."
After several months on the job, in August of 1910, he was shot by a disgruntled ex-watchman who had recently been fired from the city's docks, making Gaynor the only mayor of NYC to be wounded in an assassination attempt. He seemingly made a solid recovery — although the bullet stayed lodged in his neck — but then died suddenly a few years later, near the end of his first term, possibly from complications of the shooting (sources vary on this).
In a review of a book about Gaynor by Louis H. Pink (eponym of the Pink Houses), H.L. Mencken had this to say about the man:
Gaynor was that great rarity in American political history: a judge who actually believed in the Bill of Rights. When he sat on the bench in Brooklyn he tried to enforce it to the letter, to the natural scandal of his brethren of the ermine. Scarcely a day went by that he did not denounce the police for their tyrannies. He turned loose hundreds of prisoners, raged and roared from the bench, and wrote thousands of letters on the subject, many of them magnificent expositions of Jeffersonian doctrine. Unfortunately, his strange ideas alarmed the general run of respectable New Yorkers quite as much as they alarmed his fellow judges, and so he was always in hot water. When Tammany, with sardonic humor, made him mayor, he began an heroic but vain effort to give New York decent government. He might as well have tried to make the stockyards of Chicago smell like a field of asphodel. In the end, worn out and embittered by the struggle, he died unlamented, and today political historians scarcely mention him. Yet he was a great political philosopher and a great soul. It is the tragedy of the Republic that such men are so few, and that their efforts, when they appear, go for so little. Gaynor's life was wasted. But was it really? Perhaps some young man will read Mr. Pink's excellent account of him, and come away from it remembering that there is still such a thing as decency, and that even when it fails it is somehow glorious.If you're interested in learning more about Mayor Gaynor, check out this fascinating collection of his letters and speeches. (He was a "prolific" and "perspicacious" letter writer who "spent a considerable amount of his workdays personally answering his constituents.")
A "fresh flash point in a swiftly changing neighborhood where luxury apartment towers have risen in the last few years" — or maybe not.
