new york, new york 
YES i am BACK this is HAPPENING i APOLOGISE for the long WAIT to ALL of my SEVEN fans
also yes this is the one where i die
also yes this is the one where i die
New York: it's not just a city! there's an entire state out there! a state with just over SIX THOUSAND NRHP listings. this is the most of any state, by far. even if you take away the roughly 1000 in New York City, it's more than any other state. so this might take, like, a while.
so, as is usual when i do states where there's one giant city, i'm going to do all the other stuff first and work my way round eventually to Long Island and NYC last of all. the other counties i'll just do in alphabetical order, so expect me to reach Manhattan in like 2033.
this means, quite neatly, that we begin in Albany County, where we find the actual capital of the state. are you strapped in tightly with no chance of escape? then we'll begin
o right traditionally i say something here about what i expect to see/what i imagine a state will be like. this one...it's New York. there are Quite A Lot Of Buildings. but as for upstate, will be interesting to see the weird, mixed vibe;
kinda colonial New England, kinda industrial North-East, kinda huge great lakes wilderness, kinda generico suburbia. a lot going on. here we gooooooo
and as a useful corrective to my above tweet, Albany County features stuff like this too, a 1690 Dutch colonial farmhouse: NY is not just bits of everywhere else it's got very much its own stuff too
hmmmmm
indeed there is a *massive* amount of colonial Dutch stuff around Albany, as e.g. this 1730s house which was also the state capitol for all of 3 days in 1777
the Dutchness does also mean that everything has, to be frank, completely ridiculous names
names like John L Schoolcraft, a congressman who built himself a wonderful and ridiculous house
once you're into Albany the actual city, the mood is HELLO YES HI HELLO DID WE MENTION WE ARE IN A CITY! A CAPITAL CITY! IN MANY WAYS THE MOST IMPORTANT CITY IN NEW YORK! VERY GRAND! VERY SERIOUS! HELLO YES HELLO no i will NOT tell you the way to Manhattan
but i am being unfair, because there's lots more! like this outstanding movie theatre
are the kids these days still into Hamilton? this is Philip Schuyler's mansion - general, senator (until he lost his seat to Aaron Burr), father of Angelica, Eliza (and Peggy!)
the Dutch heritage is celebrated in this delightfully silly 1912 fire station
the architect of that, Marcus T Reynolds, is kind of the local hero architect - he did one of the major landmarks, this delicately berserk set of offices for a railway company (now part of a university)
City Hall is by, of course, HH Richardson, in full HH Richardson mode
Richardson also had a hand in the most important building in Albany, the State Capitol - but he was one of several people to have a hand in it, and frankly it shows. on the one hand, thank god we don't have another dull dome. but what exactly DO we have?
this thing is a damn mess. the initial architect was Thomas Fuller, a very talented Canadian Gothicist who worked on it between 1867 and 1875 but ran up huge costs and didn't get much done, though he did begin the ground floor in a - for him - uncharacteristic classical mode.
he was fired and replaced with Richardson, then at the height of his chunky powers, and a weird, showy architect called Leopold Eidlitz, and the legendary landscaper Frederick Law Olmsted. this trio proposed a new design and got some of it done, but then fell out with each other
the whole weird botch-job was eventually finished by Isaac G Perry, a frankly 2nd rate Richardson follower: he was forced to abandon aspects of Richardson's plan, including a massive dome, when the building turned out to be horrendously structurally unsound even without the dome.
the interior is lavish and definitely Richardsonian - the grand staircase is good - but the overall building is a mess. an interesting mess, with much more to engage the viewer than most US state capitols, but a mess.
(the terms of my curse prevent me showing anything from the Capitol-adjacent Empire State Plaza, a 60s/70s project to expand the government services buildings there, because it is - outrageously - not NRHP listed, but you should go look it up because it owns)
to finish up with Albany, a couple of outstanding 19th century Gothic churches: Richard Upjohn's 1860s St Peter's Episcopal, with a typically Upjohn exterior/interior contrast:
and Patrick Keely's 1852 Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, which is by the book, but it is a very good book:
100% friendship free. you will find no friendliness here
an attempt was made
extremely love this tiny terracota hut, built by a terracotta tile company in 1892 as a kind of physical sales catalogue for their products. the factory around it burned down in 1909 and now a university owns it. (the company still exists tho! ludowici.com)
have found my dream house. it is in Binghamton, NY. it is 83% roof. it is called THE ALFRED DUNK HOUSE. donate to my patreon so i can live there
lol
historic house yadda yaddWAIT. ENHANCE! there...and...there
we mentioned Isaac G Perry yday - this is one of his major works, the New York State Inebriate Asylum. in 1864 it was pioneering in that it sought to treat alcoholics as ill people (although it wasn't *that* pioneering, in that it still involved locking them in a fake castle)
"we have the funds for EITHER a decent-sized synagogue OR a lavish rose window, but not both. i think it's pretty obvious what we should do here, no?"
you will never make me care about historic canals. i simply refuse
the deeply lavish Willard Memorial Chapel is apparently the the last surviving complete installation of Tiffany glass in its original location, which seems alarming. i go back and forth and back and forth on Tiffany but I can't deny the charm here
i was not expecting "step-gabled fire stations" to be a New York specialism but they evidently are
absolutely the worst soundcloud rapper out there right now
i can never quite get my head around the fact that New York borders Quebec but, like, it does, and there's a whole weird world of 18th/early 19th century military infrastructure up there. lot of savage stuff went down around here in the Revolution and the War of 1812
it's this part of the world, basically, so catch me listening to this on repeat for the next ten weeks
buildings schmuildings, this is now a Last of the Mohicans appreciation thread
daniel daddy lewis
ok back to buildings now i promise
double-span whipple bowstring truss it
double-span whipple bowstring truss it real good
double-span whipple bowstring truss it real good
so if NY has an emerging ~thing~ it's rustic-fancy, multi-coloured, multi-textured Carpenter/Arts & Crafts-y Gothic of a deeply delightful kind: curious, experimental fun like this 1878 Hudson Valley church
that was a fancy-pants example. but here are two humbler 1840s ones: on the left Richard Upjohn's Church of St. John in the Wilderness (what a name!), on the right the church of St. John the Evangelist in Stockport, NY
anyway speaking of the Gothic, if anyone wants to write a haunted house novel can i interest you in the Oliver Bronson House, early work by major American Gothic architect Alexander Jackson Davis, rich in strange detail...
...which for sections of the 20th century was used as a girls' boarding school and is now derelict and within the grounds of a prison. i mean that the FUCK
anyway the Hudson Valley really is nice
nonoNO what are you DOING that isn't how ANY of this works
now THIS on the other hand is how you make yourself a silly mansion
it's Olana, a wild house built by Calvert Vaux (chiefly a landscape architect) for the landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church
before the rich Anglo-Americans got there, there was also lots of 17th/18th century charmingness being built in the Hudson Valley by somewhat more modest Dutch farmers
one of the weirder instances of this is the Van Rensselaer Lower Manor House. there *two* different 18th century farmhouses inside this white cladding, now sort of fused. i quote Wiki: "One local historian called the result a "growth" that no longer had any architectural merit."
and once again, just to finish off Columbia County, a couple of wonderful churches, a simple little Upjohn chapel...
and a CHUNKY ARTS AND CRAFTS BOI
it's ANOTHER Dutch Colonial Revival fire station. i so love that these are A Thing
i really, really dislike Isaac G Perry. one of nature's fascists
anyway we were (that is to say, i was) talking about the chunky, polychrome churches of the Hudson - but their flipside is to be found in more sober (less rich?) parts of the state:
some of them have really lovely detailing...
...and some them, er, do not. (this looks Mormon as hell but it isn't, apparently)
particularly startling to suddenly run into a synagogue in this mode
in Delaware County, New York, criminals and evildoers fear only one man. his name?
absolutely not
the vagaries of alphabetical order take us back to the Hudson Valley, to Duchess County, on the Connecticut border, where New England begins to seep across the state line...
...and even into some of the churches (this is 1802, remodelled 1861). i can't help feeling that a church like this, with its two-and-a-half levels of windows, badly wants to be something fancier.
you can practically hear the local sigh of relief once the churches get round to being like this instead:
leave it to Richard Upjohn, though, to find the middle way with his sublime St. Thomas Episcopal Church of 1851, which is sober and yearning all at once
the thing Duchess County is really heavy on, though, is mansion. we're that perfect distance from NYC where the rich could get there easily on the weekend in the 19th century, and when they did get there, they went hogwild
FOR EXAMPLE
this one calls itself Neo-Georgian, which...kiiiiiiiiinda? a lot of stuff was just getting thrown at walls up around here
this one, on the other hand - Montgomery Place - is *actually* Georgian (if, you know, American) - it's 1803. must have felt like it had landed from another planet among the clapboard houses - though the wings and much of the exterior decoration were added later.
about a hundred years later, we'd progressed to this - this is an actual Vanderbilt house. the biiiiiiiiiiiig money. by McKim, Mead & White, the ultimate New York society architects of the age. i'm afraid to say it's very very dull
the really most influential family in the area, though, was the Roosevelts, whose huge estate, Springwood, is up there, now a museum of FDR's life, also featuring his and Eleanor's tomb:
here's Eleanor and her late husband's dog at the ceremony where the house was declared an NRHP:
in the grounds is this small guesthouse, Top Cottage which is in fact completely fascinating: FDR designed it himself in the 30s to be fully wheelchair-accessible, one of the first such buildings in the world actually designed by a disabled person.
it was consequently one of the very few places he felt comfortable being seen and photographer in his wheelchair: here is on its porch with the very same dog, Fala, and the caretaker's daughter.
and here, in 1942, entertaining, among others, the King of Greece and the Crown Princess of Norway.
more wonderful Hudson chonk (this is a library)
anyway. deep breath for one of the weirdest NRHPs i have yet encountered, which is saying something and a half
i give you...BANNERMAN'S CASTLE
the year is 1900. Arms dealer and Northern Irish immigrant Francis Bannerman the VI realises that he is running out of space in which to keep the guns, powder, artillery etc that he sells, so he does what anyone would do: buys an island and builds a warehouse-castle on it.
it has a practical use but it's also a giant advert for his business - i too would have seen it and thought "yes, this is the man i would go to if i needed to outfit a small private army". he also builds a wing onto the castle to be his family's private home
indeed, he just keeps on building - which is to say he, with no training, just draws castles and hands the drawings to his baffled builders, who do what they can with them - until his death in 1918.
but gunpowder, as you may have heard, is a tricky thing, and in 1920 an accident blows up most of the castle, almost killing his widow with a giant chunk of flying concrete and reducing the castle to a ruin. which is what it has been ever since
it's hard to know what to *do*, exactly, with a ruined warehouse-castle that was structurally unsound to begin with and is on quite an inaccessible island, so there it sits, with occasional tours being held. god, i love this stuff. i wanna go realllll bad
also you can't just let people wander round it, because, you know, bombs. God bless you, Francis Bannerman VI.
the gift that keeps on giving
i'm hearing that there are buildings in this state that *aren't* Bannerman's Castle. more as we get it
the price of all these mansions, you ask? well, uh,
chief feudalists the Astors decided to build an orphanage to Give Back To The Community and they made it haunted as fuck, obviously
Poughkeepsie: allegedly a real place
what's upjohn
isaac g perry stop following me
remember when you could make your myspace profile look like this
Millard Fillmore - president, silly name-haver, and Alec Baldwin impersonator - lived here
our first New York 📢!
and now to Buffalo, another of those "hey, did you know there are other cities in New York" cities
ok so it turns out Buffalo absolutely owns. chunkiest city in the US of A
any city that lists 3 different grain elevators is ok by me
meanwhile its civic architecture - and i mean this in the best possible way - seems to be aiming for the same mood as the grain elevators. here's the (abandoned) train station, by Fellheimer & Wagner (who did the similar one in Cincinnati too)
...and then you have County Hall...
...which is just a warm-up for *City* Hall, a MASSIVE piece of civic deco.
The exterior is absolutely wild: a kind of rococo deco with murals by William de Leftwich Dodge.
*interior, obv. tch
it also has, of course, that apparently quintessentially upstate NY thing: a giant asylum castle. this one is the real deal, by HH Richardson
and then - chunkiest and inevitablest of all - Isaac G Perry built a National Guard Armory that's basically Harrenhal
there's also the post office, complete with Buffalo buffalo. are you getting the message yet? HELLO WE'RE A REAL CITY
the intense chonk vibe carries over to the churches too (these are four different churches):
somewhat more graceful - needle-like, really - is Upjohn's St Paul's Cathedral of the 1850s, which is wonderful
there really is a LOT of good stuff here, actually
this 1964 synagogue by Max Abramowitz...
The crown jewels, as it were, of Buffalo are three major works by three major masters: Wright, Saarinen and Sullivan.
Wright (📢!) did the Darwin Martin House in Buffalo in 1905: it's arguably the prototypical house of his Prairie Style mode, all long low liquid lines. It was one of the buildings Wright was proudest of
the Saarinens - father and son, actually, Eliel and Eero - collaborated on the Kleinhans Music Hall. this is 1940! 1940!
and then of course the Most Important Building In Buffalo, the Prudential Guaranty Building by Sullivan and Adler, 1896. If you've been following these endless threads since Illinois you'll remember Sullivan's pioneering skyscraper work, and while it was mostly done in Chicago...
...but as it happened one of their most important such works was done in Buffalo: a sign, I think, that Buffalo was positioning itself a a major industrial Great Lakes city like Chicago, and very intentionally *not* hiring New York (city) architects.
As ever with Sullivan, it was a masterpiece that had beautiful, striking upward lift, right up to the curving cornice like a breaking wave; but also, in successful harmony, incredible, intricate detail, all in warm, tactile terracotta.
ULTIMATE TROLL OPINION, but also, you really could make this argument: this is the best & most important building in New York.
this is neatly timed! More on the immense Buffalo - and wider New York area - Kirkbride-style asylums of the later 19th century
and shoutout to @PokPopCulture who hast just told me that this house is, in fact, LITERALLY THE HOUSE OF THE HEAD OF THE CHURCH OF SATAN (which, yes, is based in Poughkeepsie)
@PokPopCulture CHECK IT OUT HERE HE IS AT HIS FRONT DOOR
@PokPopCulture *extremely John Darnielle voice* hail satan churchofsatan.com/the-black-hous…
@PokPopCulture Poughkeepsie, it emerges, is awesome
@PokPopCulture bracket fungus of a house
@PokPopCulture back up in Mohicans country. the sheer weird futility of the French and English trying to stay one step ahead of each other, indescribably far from home, is moving somehow
@PokPopCulture there are lots of camps and soforth up here - the Adironack Forest Preserve is huge, bigger than Wales - many of which are all a bit samey, but i like this one that seems to float on the lake
@PokPopCulture the very best such camps - this is Camp Eagle Island - have a full-on Elf Village feeling
@PokPopCulture ...but that kind of thing tips over into twee pretty easily
@PokPopCulture the houses roundabout are all called cottages but they're massive, much too big for the word, and sort of...uncontrolled-feeling
@PokPopCulture nice mausoleum, huh? you know what paid for it?
JELL-O
this is the mausoleum of Mr Orator Francis Woodward (1856-1906), the man who brought Jell-O to the world
JELL-O
this is the mausoleum of Mr Orator Francis Woodward (1856-1906), the man who brought Jell-O to the world
@PokPopCulture ah, but the Woodward Mausoleum is only of of *several* Jello-O-related NRHPs in the town of LeRoy, NY:
@PokPopCulture this, for example, is the historic Jell-O factory:
@PokPopCulture this is LeRoy's historic schoolhouse (1823), long predating the Jell-O empire. it is nevertheless now a Jell-O museum.
"The building also has a large research library. There, museum staff process research requests on genealogy, town information, and Jell-O history."
"The building also has a large research library. There, museum staff process research requests on genealogy, town information, and Jell-O history."
@PokPopCulture the graveyard is actually insanely interesting, even aside from the evident Bixby-Woodward Jell-O discovery beef
@PokPopCulture "Pearle Bixby Wait, the actual inventor of Jell-O"
@PokPopCulture more recently (like, 2011), LeRoy was the sight of a mass psychogenic Tourette's outbreak among teenage girls. Erin Brokovich came to investigate it. maybe it was mass environmental Jell-O poisoning?
anyway, greatest small town ever
anyway, greatest small town ever
@PokPopCulture on the left here is the oldest house in upstate NY: 1663. the oldest European structure we've seen since New Mexico, even, I think
@PokPopCulture it's a farmhouse - sadly, there is also a (19th century) round barn on the farm, so, we have to hate it
@PokPopCulture when the alarm goes off at 6am
@PokPopCulture as ever there are whole broad classes of buildings i just don't care very much about. if you're a fan of white clapboard churches then you'd enjoy upstate new york, i'm just not your guy
@PokPopCulture if, on the other hand, you want to hear about a cliff-face where a 19th century congressman called Zadock Pratt amateurishly carved scenes from his own life, then i extremely am your guy
@PokPopCulture (i mean, that's it, that's the story. you've heard about it now)
@PokPopCulture ok because of a frankly bizarre twitter thread problem with tagging, this thread continues here, my apologies to the kind person i've been accidentally tagging all day
