1928: My father was born.
1964: I was born.
1981: I gave him a card for his birthday that read “Congratulations! For the first time in your life, you’ve got more than a full deck.”
1990: On my birthday, a small package came in the mail with no return address. It contained half of a deck of cards.
I attended two elementary schools, one for 1st through 3rd grades, one for 4th through 6th. One day in 1974 or 1975, I found what I thought was a cool-looking rock in the gutter outside school. I brought it home and that night my father asked me why I was playing with a lump of coal.
In the 1990s, several hundred NYC public schools that still had coal-fired boilers were converted to “dual fuel” boilers that could burn oil or gas. I got worked on about a dozen of these projects designing a hole: creating a shaft next to the basement wall and a hole through the basement wall that could be used to lower in the new boilers in one piece. One of the schools was my second elementary; thus I denied future kids the joys of gutter anthracite.
There were three movie theaters within walking distance (in my family, defined as “under two miles”) of where I grew up. The Prospect was boring and mid-sized, the Quartet (one of the first multiple-screen theaters in NYC) had four living-room sized theaters that were never clean, but the RKO Keith was a palace. I can list the movies I saw there not because they were necessarily good but because going there was a treat in itself.
The outside was a plain box:
The theater was beautiful:
But the true genius was the lobby:
They split it into three theaters in the late 70s, which pretty much destroyed the theater interior, but the lobby remained. Then a developer bought it and decided that what downtown Flushing – one of the most active commercial areas in the city – really needed was a mall. And he destroyed most of the lobby. And now another developer is planning on finishing the job.
It was built beautiful in the 1920s for crass commercial reasons, and crass commercial logic has killed it. That’s not what gets me angry, although it obviously saddens. It’s the 24 years of slow torture that gets me angry. I have yet to meet the developer who could be trusted and I’m wracking my brain trying to think of one who was a reasonable facsimile of a human being.
Now with more ZORBS!
I understand that you come from a part of the country without mass transit.
I understand that you’re on vacation.
I understand that you don’t often walk further than the width of a parking lot.
I understand that you’re incapable of telling the difference between an actual city center (something outside of your ordinary experience) and Disneyworld.
I understand that your head is pretty much permanently lodged in your ass.
But express anger at me because I’m walking down the street in my own hometown and I may send you back to Dipshit, Indiana with fewer teeth than you came here with.
My high school occasionally surfaces in public discussion, most recently when Elena Kagan was nominated to the Supreme Court. She was five years ahead of me, but her brother, who now teaches there, was a classmate. (For the bloggerati, I should mention that Steve Gilliard was also a classmate.)
The school is in the odd position of being part of the City University of New York and therefore outside the control of the city’s Board of education. When I started, it was housed on the 13th and 14th floors of an office building in midtown; from my second year onward it has been in a surplus intermediate school on the Upper East Side, a few blocks from Regis. The building was unwanted for several reasons, including having a piss-poor heating plant and being butt ugly. It resembles a cartoon dungeon, because its talentless architect was inspired by the building previously on the site that was demolished for its construction: the Squadron A Armory.
The armory filled the entire block, while the school does not; the Madison Avenue wall and corner towers remain as a somewhat ridiculous landmark. A single wall of a demolished building may serve some purpose as a form of sculpture, but it tells you little about the old building or its use and fails the narrative history part of the landmark process. It is a landmark manqué at best.
One guy, C.B.J. Snyder, designed (or oversaw the design of) all public schools in New York for thirty years…starting 120 years ago. Might not seem important…except that a lot of his 400+ schools are still in use, including:
and
The Journal says snake entries by toilet are rare, but when one occurred in Cobble Hill in 2007, the building’s pipes had to be removed to get the 7-foot python out.
Manhattan’s geography is a large topic (for a small area) that I will probably revisit, but I want to start on it with the topo map created in 1865 and revised in 1874 by Mr. E. Viele.
It simultaneously shows three data sets: (1) the topographical of the island in 1624, before European settlers started messing with it, (2) the edges of the island in 1865, (3) and the street layout as of 1865. The street layout mostly matches that in existence today up to 155th Street, the original northern boundary of the Commissioner’s Plan. The small piece of the map I’ve shown above illustrates the amount that landfill has changed the overall shape of the island and eliminated fresh-water streams and ponds.
The map is not accurate enough to locate individual building lots, so in my line of work it’s more of a guide than a certain reference, but it’s good for shutting up the history buffs who want to claim that their unmaintained basements are wet because of fictitious buried streams.
All structures move under load. Some move imperceptibly. Others do not: the Manhattan Bridge is a suspension bridge carrying four tracks of subway near its outer roadway edges. The entire deck twists several inches with every train.
In the fifteen or so years since Frank Gehry started designing blobs, and particularly in the thirteen since his Guggenheim Bilbao was completed, the idea of “sculptural” forms and facades has been slow to spread. Straight lines and flat walls are cheaper to build and more difficult for an architect to screw up. Two buildings I’ve been looking at recently show the evolution of the idea:
The Aqua condominium in Chicago
uses the cantilevered concrete slab edges to create the sculptural effect in front of a flat curtain wall.
Gehry’s Beekman Tower in New York
uses a figured steel curtain wall. Given Gehry’s history of leak problems, we’ll see how well Beekman performs in NYC’s 47 inches of rain each year.
The idea predates Gehry’s experiments, of course. Mad Magazine covered it in 1974.
Mrs. __B is cooking some oddball things that she believes our friends will want to eat this afternoon. I stocked up on beer and liquor.
I was in a depressing apartment today, full of junk to the point that the bathtub was a newspaper storage area. I was just passing through to get to a terrace, so I was there for maybe 90 seconds, but it was enough to bring to mind one of the truly horrifying stories of life in the big city.
The Collyer brothers were obsessive-collector recluses who died in their trash-filled house in Harlem. Central Harlem was built up in 1890-1910 as an upper-middle class neighborhood full of nice brownstones. Theirs was particularly nice, as it was corner and therefore had side windows:
The part that gets me is not that two well-off men lived and died in squalor and insanity, but the way they died. Homer Collyer was physically incapacitated; when his brother Langley was killed by a cave-in of trash (believed to be a booby-trap he himself had set for intruders), Homer starved.
Obsessive hoarding is not uncommon and my understanding is that fire-fighters and other first responders in much of the country refer to the homes so filled with trash that only narrow paths remain as “habitrail houses.” In New York, they’re called “Collyer houses.”
I was at a meeting this morning at a middle-rank expensive apartment house in Manhattan. While standing in the lobby, James Earl Jones walked by. For a 79-year-old, he looked pretty good…other than being annoyed by people standing in his lobby discussing construction.
I was up the Hudson yesterday for a small inspection at the Cathedral of All Saints. I cannot express my disappointment that the church’s name is not “the Pantheon.”
There are a lot of sculptures in Central Park, and in a city this size, I’m sure each has its passionate defenders. My favorite is almost hidden off the East Drive – placed out of most people’s line of sight, so that I suspect a lot of people walk right by and don’t see it. It’s called “Still Hunt” and it’s a panther, life-sized, about to pounce.
Up close, it’s not like you’d confuse it with an actual panther:
But very few people see it up close because there’s no easy way to get to it. Most people see it from some distance:
Every once in a while, someone sees it for the first time from the drive:
I spent the first few anniversaries curled in a ball on the couch, drinking and watching the idiotic public ceremonies. The progress of construction moved the ceremonies off site; this year’s politics have degraded the whole thing to cartoonish levels. I walked from my office (two blocks south of the WTC site) to a client’s office (eight blocks north of the site) this afternoon and the police were putting concrete barricades in the side streets off Broadway, presumably to create choke points to stop any kind of riot or attack between the various protesters about Park 51.
I took a class in grad school on memory as a sociological phenomenon. Some interesting reading, lousy professor. In any case, my paper was on the arc of public remembrance of the General Slocum fire in 1904 and the Triangle fire in 1911. The Slocum was far worse, killing roughly eight times as many people, including entire families, but is much less well known today. In short, the community it decimated – the German immigrant community on the Lower East Side – disbanded and by doing so chose to forget. On the other hand, the immigrant garment workers used Triangle as a rallying cry until the labor reforms of the FDR administration 20 years later. If newspapers are the first draft of history, people’s actions are the first draft of sociology…which is a thought that leads nowhere but shame over what’s going to happen in the streets of lower Manhattan in about twelve hours.
The most famous gargoyles grotesques people of the masonry persuasion in New York are at the Woolworth Building. Tallest skyscraper for a respectable 18 years, it’s a damned big chunk of gothicky terra cotta. In the lobby are PotMP including the architect, Cass Gilbert:
Gunvald Aus, the structural engineer:
And F.W. Woolworth himself:
