Thread by @cinemashoebox

NY thread cont.:

a l b e r t u s v a n l o o n

(ps if you're just joining this thread, due to twitter being dumb, i had to restart it halfway through, it actually begins here:

https://twitter.com/cinemashoebox/status/1179375251664363521

)

wonderful shingle-style 1890 church by J Cleaveland Cady. the rhythms! inside and out, the rhythms!

do not adjust your set, we are still in upstate New York...

specifically, we are at the Russian Orthodox Monastery of the Holy Trinity in Jordanville, NY, a massive complex that since 1930 has been a sort of citadel of Orthodox exile.

Jordanville is one of the most important locations for the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), which was founded by exiles and dissidents after the 1917 revolution. ROCOR realigned itself with the mainstream church after the USSR fell, so now is less of a big deal...

...but for about 50 years, from the late 40s onwards, Jordanville was the only place on the place on the planet outside the USSR where Old Church Slavonic was printed, using a press smuggled out of Czechoslovakia in 1946.

there are several chapels there, but the finest is the tiny one dedicated to John of Kronstadt:

(the fact that this chapel was dedicated in 1998, and that John of Kronstadt was a notoriously anti-semitic priest of the late 19th/early 20th century who is idolised by the Russian far right, is your clue that Russian Orthodox exilic politics are...a bit dodgy)

(Air's "Sexy Boy" plays)

🎵chunkyyyy boiiii🎵

this is a yacht house. it contains:

a circular tower containing reception rooms,
a central group of three yacht bays,
a large east yacht bay,
a combination office and storage wing with a crenelated tower, and
a large caretaker's residence

👏EAT 👏THE 👏RICH👏

(for some reason it listed but the house it was built for isnt, but go look up Boldt Castle if you don't yet believe that the rich need eating)

's brown tho

Seth Green played Oz on Buffy AND brought culture to fish. What have you done with your miserable little life?

JUST PICK A FUCKING DORMER STYLE

this is what most of New York state looks like, by the way. there isn't, yknow, a great deal to say about it, but i ought to record it somewhere in this damn thread

oh my god. i found it.

i found the worst building in America

you might think you're ready for this. but you're not

pause. savour this moment. stop and remember the life you have now. you will never again be as happy as you are now. not once you have seen...

CANASTOTA METHODIST CHURCH

i quit. i'm done. this is it. architecture cannot be redeemed.

at one time it looked like this. pretty bad, yes. this is when it was a church

but at some point it became a Community Centre - for planning war crimes, presumably - and received this...treatment on the top of the tower, and this glaring stone treatment, and i just...my god. remember me in my happy times, please.

but what is this...my limbs...they move...my heart...it pumps still...

it is as i feared. i am bound to my task. i cannot die until i have read and tweeted about the National Register of Historic Places listings for every state and territory in the US. what a diabolical fate!

onward, then, towards my blessed rest, through every last round barn in the Western Hemisphere, if that is how it must be

in the abstract quite a dull church, but now decaying into a whole spectrum of beautiful greys and browns

we've seen these in a few other states but they are, alas, back: cobblestone houses, which appear to have a horrible skin disease at all times

it's like a care home except they just completely neglect you instead

(it's actually a very interesting 1957 experimental house made almost entirely of aluminium, promoted as requiring no maintenance. they didn't take off but it's a nice house)

New York is, of course, famous for its major cities: cities like Albany, and Buffalo, and our next stop, Rochester

Susan B Anthony , famous Rochesterer, was arrested here in 1872 for trying to vote

the other thing Rochester is famous for is Kodak, which was founded there by George Eastman - the fortunes of the city have been tied to it ever since, and lately those fortunes are...not great. but at least Eastman's house is nice!

this being NY, there is an overly immense town hall...

also a lovely fire department with rather spooky sculptures

anyway, there's one Big Thing in Rochester, and it's this, Louis Kahn's typically typical First Unitarian Church:

this is one of the Kahnonical classics, designed in close concert with the congregation, resulting in something that typifies his approach: the strong total structure that's still filled with details, corners, pauses, subtleties.

as ever i recommend Wendy Lesser's brilliant biography, and then slightly throw up my hands while trying to say anything really useful about Kahn's work

brb converting to Reformed Dutch Stone Arabianism

Isaac G Perry, you've done it again

(programming note for those who care, since i just got to a Long Island county: i'm going to skip Long Island for now and do it along with the city at the end of the thread)

...

the cobblestone disease has spread to the churches

oh my god nevermind go back to the cobblestones please

apparently the park around Niagara Falls is the oldest state park in the US. i've been here! it's...fine. those towers are the city of Niagara Falls, on the Canadian side, one of the dullest places i have ever spent a night

there IS, though, a historic cemetery containing the graves of several people who died trying to go over the Falls in a barrel

AND the grave of Annie Edson Taylor, who in 1901 did it and survived

(somewhat horribly, she tested the idea with a cat first - but the cat too survived, and they used to pose for photos together. later her manager stole the barrel, and it was tracked down in Chicago)

in the same graveyard is Matthew Webb, an idiot and the first man to swim the English Channel, who died trying to swim the Falls, because of course he fucking did

this (in the town of Niagara Falls, NY) is sublime. the colour is really like that: the bricks used gradually lighten as they rise. god, this is wonderful

it also has wonderful terracotta detailing. James A Johnson, 1929 (his last building - he was an interesting guy who spent most of his career in Buffalo, doing things that seemed to anticipate Art Deco, much of it now gone. and then Art Deco arrived just as he stopped working).

Roscoe Conkling? lmao what a du-- oh, jeez

there are so many brilliant Philip Johnson projects just waiting out there. this one's a 1960 art museum in Utica

the gothic is about majesty, splendour, sobriety. it is an escape from the frills and fripperies of rococo and baroque, a return to architecture as something more than just cake decor--

Syracuse, NY, another of the moderately sized cities upstate, appears to be rich in listings, but actually fully a quarter of them are fairly dull houses by the absurdly named Ward Wellington Ward, local architect hero and slightly interesting arts & crafts-er

Syracuse does have one out-and-out masterpiece, the Niagara Mohawk Power Building, with its 1930 chrome angel, spreading its mighty wings to bring electric lighting to the nation:

also this interesting, fluent Lutheran church, described as "mission revival", which, kind of, but it's doing its own thing. i really, really like this.

also the Syracuse Savings Bank of 1875 by the interesting Joseph Lyman Silsbee: a rare bit of "true" high Victorian Gothic in the US. Our boy Frank Lloyd Wright worked in Silsbee's office for a time.

Silsbee also did this mortuary chapel in Syracuse's main cemetery, which is much more fun than any mortuary chapel has a right to be

one of the themes of all these threads is the wild differences between various states' seriousness about listing & preserving native american culture & architecture. New York -along with, I suspect, much of the East Coast- appears to be one of the places lagging behind on this

this tho is Ganondagan, formerly a major town of the Seneca people. the longhouse here is a reconstruction - the settlement was destroyed by the French in 1687 during the spate of commercial-colonial wars between England and France in the region

the Native American cultures of the eastern US can feel particularly irrecoverable - overlaid and attacked so comprehensively and so early by European settlement. suspect this will be more of a them as we go on...

this, apparently, is the Balmville Tree, a beloved local landmark tree that started growing in 1699. so beloved that it got special protection: in this picture you can see all 31 square metres of New York's smallest state forest (population: one tree). However...

...it was an old and rickety tree and bits kept falling off onto passing cars and whatnot, so it was cut down in 2015 and now looks like this. which sucks!

horrible

horribler

jeremiah jeremiahmore morehouse house

(we're back in the Hudson Valley now, with its gentle and genteel moneyed, aged air)

this house was Washington's HQ for over a year of the revolutionary war - but notable to us nerds as the first building in the US ever bought up by the state for reasons of historic preservation

not far away, appropriately, is West Point, the US Army military academy. obv it's mostly, like, the Donald Rumsfeld Memorial Lecture Hall and the Wasn't Vietnam Fun Quadrangle etc, but the great late American gothicists Goodhue and Cram did some of their most forceful work here.

also an unexpectedly good Jewish soldiers' chapel (not called a synagogue, apparently, idk why)

this is tacky as shit but honestly there isn't enough listing of tacky roadside nonsense, so, i support this

honestly just a great deal of nothing up here in central NY. entire counties with lots of listings that are all just... eh

i do however like this 1817 (!) Palladian fun-size stately home which is doing a very bad job of hiding the fact that they had to build a whole bunch of extra rooms on the back to accommodate everyone, wrecking their careful composition

are rich people - specifically, 19th century tycoons with large estates in the Hudson River Valley - ok?

the great ceramicist and industrial designer Russell Wright injects some calm into the area with his self-built home, Manitoga, built slowly during the 40s and 50s. a breathtaking, wonderful home (that then became the template for a later generation of zillionaire getaways...)

esek bussey

unclear if there's too much or not enough going on here, but either way i don't like it

CHONK

isn't that that skunk guy

the 18th century charm is strong in Rockland County

the little liberal arts school called St. Lawrence Universityhas a wonderful memorial chapel...

...and a wild, bizarre, bijou little hall of 1869 where no part matches any other part but everyone ends up having fun anyway

delighted that ridiculous 1901 office block is now the home of "Alchemistress Body Arts"

extremely fucking ominous rock. it's like the Purge, but it's a rock

"we should probably build a monument to the first guy to get killed in the American civil war, right? he was from around here"

"yeah, good idea. i hope he doesn't have a fucking ridiculous name, huh"

that's right, ladies, my organ is recognised as being historically significant

fossilised stromatolites! fuck yes! this - Petrified Sea Gardens - is where these funky little barely-alive pillars of microbes were first paleontologically identified. one of the oldest forms of life on the planet

(they're still around, too - chiefly in Australia, inevitably)

i will never acknowledge your extensive network of historically significant canals, New York

Edward Durell Stone is something of a neglected guy, given how many major works he did in his lifetime - US Embassy in New Delhi, Kennedy Center, Aon Center. the high priest of decorative, strict, vaguely tropical moderno-classicism (at least until Yamasaki came along).

anyway i mention this because i think this must be the first listing for him we've seen, and one of very few altogether - a very typical Unitarian church in Schenectady

but if you're in Schenectady (SO fun to say) and you like your buildings a little more ...more, then you can go instead to the Nott Memorial Library

(affectionately named "The Nipple of Knowledge" by students, apparently??)

it is "one of the very few 16-sided buildings in the world". it's a bit mad, but in an enjoyable, pan-Abrahamic kind of way (there's a quotation in Hebrew that runs right round the dome, apparently)

EXTRA cursed

excellent library photographed on an excellent day

Seneca Falls, as you may be aware, is where women's rights were first discovered. it has the usual somewhat concerning visitor centre

the town of Canisteo has - somehow - obtained historic preservation rights for its "living sign", which is a hillside with CANISTEO spelled out in spruce trees (if you squint)

we've seen many, many bad armouries - i.e. National Guard bases - in this thread, mostly by one-time state architect Isaac G Perry, but here's an unexpectedly good one by his successor in the job, William Haugaard...

...aaaaaand here we are in a town a few miles ago back to Perry's bullshit. this town, as it happens, is Hornell, NY, which i mention because, as it happens, i have family there and have been there, and for me it's the typical template of an upstate town. its NRHPs bear that out:

there's the armoury, a historic mansion demolished in 2010, a public library (1st pic here), an elementary school, an office building (2nd), a disused synagogue (3rd) and a post office (4th). i go on about this just to reiterate the point that this is what New York looks like!

- just as much, that is, as Manhattan, or Brooklyn, or some enormous Hudson mansion, or a little 17th century Dutch colonial village.

that said, all the NYC stuff *is* coming, soon! next week, tho, at the earliest.

i live here now

that's Dundas Castle, Roscoe, NY, supposedly modelled on the Dundas Castle outside Edinburgh (seen here) which...ok?

anyway we're in the Catskills now, land of shabby small-town rural synagogues, which really are a curious thing

then...

...now (the site of Woodstock which is, pleasingly, listed)

extremely fukken haunted

one of the lesser spotted sub-themes of this thread is the very American world of outsider art/roadside oddities - this one, Opus 40, a quarry-turned-megasculpture worked on by Harvey Fite for decades, is a very upscale and wonderful instance

less successful, but not far away, is the home and sculpture garden of Emile Brunel, who was just a French dude who got obsessed with Native Americans and had access to too much time and clay

RIP funk

̶h̶o̶u̶s̶e̶ horse

wonderful little rustic 1916 concert hall out in the woods. John Cage's 4'33'' premiered here!

unfortunately rustic cuteness sometimes gets completely out of control

i usually consider listed boats to be my enemies and refrain from commenting on them, but am losing it at the good ship Land Tortoise, a raft that was built and them immediately intentionally sunk for later recovery and use, and which is still down there 250 years later

yup. built his whole dang house out of his own hair. sure is crazy, ol' Uriah

ANYWAY with that delicious image, i have finished with upstate New York, more or less. it was...fine.

so what's left to do - which is, like, 50% of the listings in the state - are the 5 counties of the city (the Bronx, Queens, Kings - i.e. Brooklyn, Richmond - i.e. Staten Island, New York - i.e. Manhattan) and also Westchester, north of the Bronx, and the 2 Long Island counties,

there's no hugely obvious order but i'm gonna go Westchester-Suffolk-Nassau-Richmond-Kings-Queens-Bronx-New York (and within Manhattan will go roughly north to south down the island). just in case you cared

(but not today. over the next couple weeks, i guess. as it happens i'm going to NYC in two weeks, so aiming to dig through all this before then and put some stuff on my list to actually see with my own two eyeballs. i know this matters a lot to you)

alright. Westchester, motherfuckers

we are not *formally* in NYC at this point, but Westchester is the county immediately north of the Bronx, where the city bleeds up into the state. it has like a million people in it

(i'm not going to get into it but the validity of the US county system really is...debatable. the most populous county has 10 million people, the least has...89 people. some are the size of Sri Lanka. some are a few square miles. anyway)

here's a good pre-Halloween site: the church and graveyard of Sleepy Hollow. much modified, but the church is the 2nd oldest in the state - at its core it's a late 17th century Dutch protestant church. later the setting for the classic horror story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow...

...which also made the graveyard famous: subsequently some of New York's mega-wealthy, including Andrew Carnegie and assorted Astors, were buried there.

also: great sign

Sleepy Hollow is a little outcrop of the very old - this mill & manor house there is also late 17th century

but there is also some celebrated modern stuff round here: notably the 1935 Mandel House by Edward Durrell Stone...

...and the completely wonderful minimalist home that Arthur Witthoeft, then working for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, built for himself in the late 50s.

further pre-Halloween goodness at Lyndhurst, the estate of railway tycoon Jay Gould. this crops up as a filming location all the time

it is, for example, a key location in this, possibly the worst film ever made

here, instead, is a totally different Westchester story that really should be made into a film:

The year is 1808. Hachaliah Bailey - a local farmer - bought, somehow, an elephant (previously residing in Boston for unclear reasons), for $1,000, intending to use it for farm work.

Hachaliah (Hachaliah!) names his new elephant Old Bet and brings her back to his farm, in Somers, Westchester County. Old Bets turns out not to be all that good at farm work - but Hachaliah notices that lots of people are coming to Somers just to see her.

so he does what any of us would do in this situation - he builds a hotel for all the people coming to see the elephant, and starts charging money. and the hotel is still there!

Old Bet, sadly, is not - she was murdered by a farmer in Maine for reasons that remain unclear. Asshole. But from the Elephant Hotel and its personnel grew many of the traditions of American circus life (and, let's be real here, animal cruelty) - and it remains hallowed ground.

Yonkers. even more fun to say than Schenectady?

contains 0 buildings of interest, though, oh well

i'm trying to hate it and i just can't

other delightful oddities of Westchester: this 1928 pagoda-style hot dog stand...

...and this

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if i told you that there was, in Westchester, a once-pioneering, then long-forgotten, now rediscovered modernist house built with innovative methods & experimental concrete precasting, then you - if you were, say, me - would probably be quite excited (also, a loser, but whatever)

what is this great lost piece of the American Modern? a bold 1936 experiment, designed for mass production, a sad road never taken by American architecture - can it be? what is this strange glimpse into an alternate history?

well, it's, uh...ummm...

it's called the Hastings Prototype House and it is Historically Very Interesting and let us never speak of it again, jesus fucking christ

so you know how one of the sub-themes of this endless thread has been "rich people in New York City build mansions outside the city so they can have fancy weekend getaways"? so, yeah, welcome to Long Island

the Western extremity of Long Island is actual New York city, and Nassau is sort of...kind of that too. but Suffolk County is Gatsby country. it's the Hamptons. it's, like, three allegedly quaint fishing villages, each of which is lost amid the endless stately homes. 'ere we go.

actually, we begin somewhere even weirder: see that little island in the jaws formed by the eastern end of the island? this one, here, Gardiner's Island:

Gardiner's Island is - sort of - the last feudal domain in American (you know, not counting neo-feudal capitalist estates or whatever): the Gardiners have owned the entire island since 1639, and they're still there.

They own, among other things, a chunk of the treasure of legendary pirate Captain Kidd, who buried a hoard there in the early 18th century. Very occasionally, they show it to visitors:

(they don't really like having visitors, mind you. Jackie Kennedy came for a party in the late 60s and the then self-styled Lord of the Manor, Robert Gardiner, accused her during the party of having stolen a golden cigarette lighter from his wife)

they used to live in a proper colonial mansion, but it burned down in the 1940s. an outbuilding - a carpenter's shed - survived, and is believed to date to the 1640s. it is consequently the oldest building in the state, but there are no pictures or proper records of it.

anyway back on Long Island proper, rich people be riching, and it ain't pretty

same

(that's from Jackson Pollock's Long Island home and studio, the floor of which looks...exactly as you would expect)

(Lee Krasner also lived and worked there, but because she knew how to paint without getting it all over the place, she didn't leave quite the same mark)

because of the climate - the salt whipping in off the North Atlantic, and whatnot - Long Island also has a long history of shingling its buildings. i love this stuff but it's a pretty acquired taste, i guess? initially very practical, it got taken to increasingly creative heights

this is Benson House, aka the Wading River Radio Station. between 1942 and 1945 it was a broadcast station for fake spy reports broadcast back to Germany by an FBI team led by Donworth Jonson, pretending to be Nazi spies and intentionally supplying misleading information.

Jonson claimed locally to be a TB sufferer who needed the sea air - he and his family moved into the remote house for 3 years. something spooky about the idea of this man out on the stormy coast, whispering an entire fake war across the ocean to the men who thought he was theirs.

before rich people, one of the chief industries of 18th/19th century Long Island was whaling - hence the Old Whaler's Church of Sag Harbor, an 1844...thing...which is, for some reason, in white clapboard Egyptian Revival style (the spire blew off in the 30s).

extremely gross fact: the little battlement-y bits around the cornice are in the shape of "blubber spades", as a tribute to the whalers' work

The Old House: it's old! but 2003 dendrochronology showed it to be quite a lot less old than everyone thought (like, it is not, in fact, 17th century) and everyone's mad about it

anyway you wanna see the most architecturally important building in Long Island?

IT'S THE BIG DUCK, MOTHERFUCKERS

[poultry store that is literally shaped like a giant duck]

Me: [chanting] duck, duck -

Other patients: duck, DUCK

Poultry saleswoman: [pounding her clipboard] DUCK, DUCK, DUCK!

yes. YES

but no seriously, THE BIG DUCK (which is, indeed, a poutry shop) is a major feature of 20th century architectural theory. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, theorists of postmodernism, used it as a central example in their discussion of symbolic form in architecture.

(this is their famous diagram of the issue)

to this day, "duck" is architectural parlance for buildings shaped like what they produce or sell, or more broadly for buildings whose shape is determined by some larger symbolism

this, from wayyyy back in Washington, is a classic duck -

https://twitter.com/cinemashoebox/status/1039461081205358592

in conclusion: BIG DUCK

anyway we should probably just end the thread there, huh

but how could we, when delights such as Tesla's lab await? not much of this structure actually remains, but this is where, depending on what you read, Tesla "did some fairly useful groundwork" or "opened tunnels through time and space and had to be destroyed by Shadowy Forces"

i promised you fancy estates and mansions and there are masses of them, but rich people being rich people there aren't any, like, pictures of them, and access is super hard to obtain. you gotta content yourself with pictures like this one, of a Stanford White-designed estate:

indeed, the more you look for pictures of them, the more you end up feeling like some sort of Peeping Tom:

the only good pictures of a 1915 mansion called Rassapeague, for instance, date from *after* the 2011 fire that totally wrecked it:

there are also - what with the ocean, and whatnot - a lot of listed boats about which, as usual, we will not be talking

SHINGLE ME TIMBERS

that truck guy from Transformers lives here

NOW we're talking. these are the massive, historically illiterate mansions i came to Long Island for. what the FUCK is this. the person who designed this was apparently literally actually French?

Occasionally during the 20th century patches of Long Island land that hadn't previously been mansionized would be mansionized in a modern manner: the best of these is architect Wallace Harrison's own home. this is what being the Rockefeller's in-house architect could buy you...

but the jewel of Suffolk County's mansions is this one, Oheka - now a hotel - which was built in an icy chateau-minimalism manner. do you recognise it?

it's the Blank Space mansion!

we stan an NRHP-using queen, etc

a little way down the island, the Goulds - railway tycoons - built themselves a castle, then found out living in it was, in fact, gross and damp and cold, so built a new mansion next door from which they could just observe their empty castle

eventually they just sold the whole damn complex to the Guggenheims, as you do

[deep sigh] we have to talk about Robert Moses now

that's right, this guy

https://twitter.com/cinemashoebox/status/1189880668261621760

so, Robert Moses - who ran all large-scale planning and building in New York state for about 30 years, becoming one of the most influential and powerful,planners and builders in history - is..complicated. mooostly he is now perceived as a villain.

that's chiefly because Robert Caro wrote the single greatest biography ever written - of anyone - about Moses, and took him to pieces in it, convincingly blaming Moses for the murder of the American city in the name of the car, the suburbs, etc etc.

(there are like 700 caveats to everything i'm saying here, shhhhhh)

but like all great villains, Moses started out a hero, and the great testimony of his heroism - and yet, also, containing within it, the seeds of his downfall - is Jones Beach. the drama! the tragedy!

Jones Beach, on the southern coast of Long Island, is a nice bit of beach, easily reached by the teeming millions of New York City - but not when huge tracts of the island are owned by immensely wealthy and powerful families, sitting in their mansions, drinking leopard blood.

in the 1920s, Moses was running the Long Island State Park Commission, a previously fairly toothless body which he transformed into an engine of political power and patronage. he was determined to open Jones Beach to the people of the city for their use and enjoyment.

so, while dredging the beach up out of the ocean and stabilizing it, *and* building a series of wonderful, understated but extremely high-quality bathhouses and facilities out on the beach, Moses also battled the combined tycoons of Long Island for their land.

now, you all think i'm crazy, and that's fine, but i need you to believe me: the chapter in the Power Broker about the way Moses gradually threads a road through this network of power and privilege is moving and beautiful and downright awe-inspiring.

and it totally worked! he built the beach, he opened it to millions of visitors from New York's extremely grim slums, and he made it possible to get to...

[long, ominous pause]

...if you had a car.

the elaborate, wide, spacious parkways Moses built carried, and still carry, millions of people to Jones Beach every year. but they had - not coincidentally, but intentionally - no provision at all for public transport. not just "he didn't build a train track"...

...no, there are *intentionally* low bridges all along the route that make it impossible to get a bus of any real size out there. Moses wanted his beach to be for the deserving poor - not for those so poor that they couldn't drive out there themselves.

this was the start - Caro argues, convincingly - of a disturbing kind of controlling, judgmental streak in Moses' work, and ultimately of his obsession with the sheer exercise of power, power literally made concrete.

if you *don't* want to read Caro's 1200 page book, then,

a) we can't be friends

b) this is a very good short overview of this stuff, with nice pictures too:

ny.curbed.com/2017/6/21/1583…

(a lot of this, we should also note, was also specifically about *race*: much of Moses' planning, here and elsewhere, seemed to be specifically about excluding poor *black* visitors)

anyway, that's enough Moses for now. but he'll be back...

and indeed, enough New York for now. when we return, it will be to the city itself...

NEW YORK
CONCRETE JUNGLE
BABBA-DAA-BUH-BUH
HUBBA DI DUBBA
LET'S HEAR IT FOR
NEW YORK

a reminder: this is the plan of attack. Manhattan has masses of NRHPs - 500+ - but there are arguably surprisingly few NRHPs in the outer boroughs. 57 in all of Staten Island!

blaze it

New Dorp City

it's a standing joke that there's nothing interesting in Staten Island but it also appears to be true

there's some late 17th century Dutch stuff, clinging on in the less-urbanised context of Staten Island (tho as we'll see there's a surprising amount of this stuff in other borough too)

and there's a museum of Tibetan Art that has been superficially remodeled to look Tibetan in quite an adorable way

...i think that's literally it tho

(generalised observation for NYC: it has, like most other big cities, a city-level landmarking system - the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. these listings are somewhat broader, but some things are NRHPs and not NYC landmarks, and vice versa, and some are both...

...but i'm not reading those listings for this project because come on, my god, are you not entertained. but those lists do - hopefully - provide for broader historic preservation within the city)

anyway, onward to Brooklyn, and some tired-out 2011-era jokes about hipsters and craft beer

housing for class traitor horses

anyway, Brooklyn *is* fucking gorgeous (these buildings aren't individually listed but are part of the Brooklyn Heights Historic District listing, which must be one of the finest such districts in the country)

that rich red-brown sandstone - brownstone, which also gave its name to the terraced houses also built out of it - is found all over NYC but is especially associated with Brooklyn. Minard Lafever (Minard Lafever!) used it well in his St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church there:

our old goth pal Richard Upjon also employed it for the gates to Green-Wood ceremony there, which are him in his most decorative and elaborate mood. arguably not his best mood, actually, but fun nonetheless

they are now also - as extensively documented on Wikimedia - a popular nesting spot for feral parakeets (??)

inside the ceremony is the Van Ness-Parsons pyramid, where a notably crazy Egyptologist is buried

how long'd it take you to come up with that, huh

lmao, the Old Stone House was built in 1935

it is a replica of a late 17th century house that burned down in 1897. hmm. cute tho. a crucial battle of the revolutionary war was fought in and around it

*genuinely* old is this house, the Wyckoff House: indeed it's the oldest in New York city - the smaller bit on the right is the original house, probably 1640s, and the bigger house is a century or so later.

Brooklyn Heights kind of peaks with the Brooklyn Historical Society building and its extremely - but lovably - self-important terracotta detailing. the inside appears to be pleasingly unreconstructed

and here really is the Brooklyn story in one building - Kings Theater in Flatbush, an incredibly lavish vaudeville and movie palace from the 20s that closed in 1977 and reopened a few years ago as a concert venue

numerous excellent 20th century synagogues. i kind of love the cheesy faux-Hebrew typefaces

slightly unclear on how i should handle the bridges here, since they are by definition in two boroughs. anyway bridges are all just engineering, yawn. at least they're not covered

(obviously i jest, the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges are two of the most elegant and photogenic bits of engineering ever devised)

construction of them both was also legendarily epic. decompression sickness - the bends - was first discovered by modern medicine when men working in the foundation shafts of the Brooklyn Bridge, sunk deep below the river, began to experience it coming back up

the chief engineer of the project, Washington Roebling, got it too, since he was the hands-on type and liked to inspect the work (he personally supervised the operation that put out a catastrophic fire in one of the shafts, which must have been literally hellish).

the experience crippled him such that he had to spend most of the next several years in bed and his wife, Emily Roebling, essentially took over the role of chief engineer, masterminding the rest of the project and fighting off attempts by men to get her and her husband removed.

when it was finished, Emily became the first person to cross it in a carriage, at the grand opening - she spent the rest of her life campaigning for women's rights and basically exhibiting herself as living proof that women could do engineering too

we don't tend to think of the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges as Gothic structures, but them right there? them's Gothic arches, me hearties, and don't you forget it

like, excuse me, but, New Fucking York

anyway my fav thing wholly within Brooklyn is Alfred Morton Githens and Francis Keally's 1935 Central Library and its wonderful entrance gates:

it's a cool, smooth slice of a building where all the attention is focused on the monumental entrance, with its decoration by C. Paul Jennewein and Thomas Hudson Jones depicting mythological figures and stories from American literature

lastly for Brooklyn tho i wanna talk about the Cobble Hill Tunnel, the oldest subway tunnel in the world, built to take trains under a busy part of Brooklyn in 1844 and then closed up a couple of decades later

which is all fine and whatever, but after this fairly large tunnel under one of the most populated spots on the planet was sealed, it was just...lost. people couldn't find it anymore. it sat there, sealed, somewhere under everything, faintly remembered by older Brooklynites.

it became a place of secrets & mysteries. supposedly it was rediscovered in 1916 by FBI agents looking for German spies: they didn't find any, and resealed it. in the 20s it was said to be used by bootleggers, but there was no proof of it: same for German spies (again) in the 40s

in the 1950s two railway historians tried to dig their way into it but couldn't find it. in 1980, though, a guy called Bob Diamond opened a manhole cover, crawled 70 feet through a two foot high gap between tunnels, and rediscovered it:

Diamond became an - ahem - underground hero: for almost two decades he led tours of the tunnel, just him and a ladder opening up the manhole and leading people down there. he had plans to build a museum, and funding was secured.

but in 2010 the city decided it was a safety hazard and seized the tunnel, sealing it off again, and - except possibly for Department of Transportation maintenance people - nobody has been in since. alas, poor tunnel! alas, poor Bob Diamond!

(this is all very well covered here - theverge.com/2014/2/5/52809…)

anyway, that was Brooklyn. it's pretty nice there!

meanwhile in Queens there's...not a great deal going on, NRHP-wise? 2 and half million people live in Queens, and yet.

i've talked before here about big states and cities underlisting and i think New York City is the best example of this.

in fact i did the stats because of course. New York - the state - has about 1 NRHP for every 3200 people, which is slightly over the national average. New York *City* has one for every 8,300 people - so well, well below the average

But Queens has one for every 22,000 people. In the Bronx it's about one for 20,000, in Brooklyn over for every 14,000, in Staten Island one for every 8,300 - bang on the city average - and in Manhattan one for every 2,900 people.

(comparing this with a list of the racial make-up of each borough would be...informative)

ANYWAY what *is* listed in Queens? well, there's this excellent church

and *this* excellent church by Ralph Adams Cram. god, i love Cram

and another great bridge to Manhattan - the Queensboro, aka the Ed Koch Bridge, aka the 59th St Bridge

the drama of high-level bridges interacting with the cities around them is just endlessly fascinating (see also: Newcastle)

because Queens had more space than the rest of the city (although not really anymore) it was for a long time the place that slightly odd, important, space-hungry projects went: like, the 1964 World's Fair, where Richard Foster & Philip Johnson built a wonderful space-age pavilion

it's been sadly derelict ever since the Fair closed, though there are periodic plans to revive it one way or another

(other parts of the fairgrounds, including the famous globe, appear to not be listed, which is a shame)

another thing that takes up lots of space is airports, and Queens has two - LaGuardia, where the 1939 Marine Air Terminal is New York's last relic of pre-war air travel...

and JFK - formerly Idlewild - which is enormous and sprawling and mostly fairly grim (as is most of LaGuardia, tbf) but does contain one notable architectural gem...

...in the form of Eero Saarinen's TWA Flight Center, the masterpiece that launched a thousand knock-offs (for example: literally everything Santiago Calatrava has ever done).

externally, the TWA is a perfect sculpted form of self-supporting concrete - the wing-like canopies aren't supported at all by the glass or by any pillars, they hold up their own weight.

internally it's gloopy, swooshy, Googie joy. the airline running it went bust, though, and its fate was uncertain for many years - it had its context badly damaged by larger terminals being built around it, and is now a hotel - but it has, at least, been saved.

one last thing of note in Queens - not architecturally as such, but historically/socially/urbanistically - is Parkway Village, a 1947 housing development. what makes it notable is that it was built as housing for workers at the then-brand new UN, in Manhattan.

many diplomats working at the UN - being not white - had trouble getting housing in 40s New York, so the UN and the city built them a little global village: for decades it was a weird oasis of nations living alongside each other

it became a spot for other Bohemians and intellectual too -Betty Friedan lived there. this is a lovely reminiscence of it in the much-missed Awl: theawl.com/2015/05/frieda…

anyway, that was the somewhat alarmingly underlisted Queens...

it's a similar picture in the Bronx, though there is fun to be had there too: fun like the Woodlan Cemetery, final resting place of our friend Robert Moses...

...and of various people with more money than sense, like the art collector Jules Bache, whose tomb is a replica of one in Aswan, Egypt.

*Woodlawn, that should be, not Woodlan

weirdest of all is the sort of fairy skeleton tripod of Richard Hudnut, a perfume manufacturer, complete with crying child

hilarious 1918 Hagia Sophia knock-off

one of the highlights of the Bronx is Marcel Breuer's work for Bronx Community College - a lecture hall, Bergisch Hall, waiting on the hill like a good dog...

and a richly textured building attached to it, Meister Hall. Breuer is just SO GOOD

(on a listings note, these buildings are NRHPs kind of through sheer expansiveness - the Bronx Community College campus is listed because Stamford White did some dull work there several decades previously, but happily the listing covers the whole campus as a whole entity)

Oddest Thing In The Bronx goes to the immense Kingsbridge Armory, sort of like a huge whale accidentally beached in the middle of the borough. a National Guard regiment used to be based here and it was used for reviewing 10,000 troops in one go during WW2: it's now mostly vacant.

the sheer scale of it is boggling. why was this ever considered to be in the slightest bit necessary?

and there too we shall leave the Bronx - which again feels alarmingly underlisted. that just leaves us with Manhattan, where there are, as it happens, quite a few listings...

ok so i'm going to New York on Tuesday, can i finish looking at all its buildings before that

there's only one dumb little island left right, how many important buildings can there even be in this "Manhattan"

or, no, there are also a handful of NRHPs on New York's various minor islands. those islands have historically been used for isolating various people - sick people, prisoners, immigrants - and consequently all manner of interesting things happen there

which leads to things like this now-ruined smallpox hospital, possibly the single gothest thing in New York City

the most famous minor islands of NYC are Ellis Island and Liberty Island, which are a single co-NRHP (the two small islands in the bottom centre of this image). they're also, due to an arcane dispute about state borders, exclaves of New York, surrounded by New Jersey waters.

as part of the long-running dispute, New Jersey declared in the 70s that the Statue of Liberty was a New Jersey State Historical Landmark, which is sort of amazingly petty

anyway, you know what the statue of liberty looks like, but the surreal photos of its construction never get old

incredible

https://twitter.com/stejormur/status/1192398545799831554

right, Manhattan proper. we're going north to south

here's the thing about Manhattan, yeah? the people who are like "it's the centre of the universe" may be annoying but they're also kind of...right. if you at all enjoy or are interested in cities and human life in them, there's just something profoundly exciting about the place.

tbh this is true about all of New York to some degree, but if can walk down Broadway and not really feel anything in particular then i'll basically never understand you. the reasons may not be good but Manhattan is a strange and significant nexus of our planet

ANYWAY i say all that just to get it on the record before i start dunking

one thing that there's been alarmingly little of on the NYC lists so far has been apartments and housing projects - of which, obviously, NYC has masses, but very little seemed to be getting recognition and preservation. happily this seems less true of Manhattan:

those are the 1936 Harlem River Houses: these are the 1926 Dunbar Apartments, both notable interwar Harlem housing projects with pioneeringly large amounts of light and green space - and pioneeringly decent housing provision for largely African-American neighbourhoods

those are both fairly restrained, architecturally - but we can't say the same of George F. Pelham's somewhat berserk 1924 block, Hudson View Gardens. fun, tho

Harlem is strange though, because in among the huge housing complexes you stumble upon places that date from when it was a well-place country getaway from the city at the other end of the island: this is an 1785 farmhouse that is actually on Broadway.

and here comes the work of our old friend Robert Moses again: Riverside Park, a long, narrow, beautiful piece of parkland running along the western side of the island, largely created by Moses in the 30s by covering over railroad tracks that blocked public access to the riverside

it was a famously successful, beautiful project (as well as a Depression-busting job creation scheme), and it remains a great park, lavishly provided with recreation facilities, including excellent playgrounds. except that up around Harlem, the provision of playgrounds is thin...

...in fact, there's only one, where other parts of the park, adjacent to white neighbourhoods, got several. those playgrounds were decorated with elaborate cast-iron wave motifs. and how is the one playground in Harlem decorated? well:

(i take this detail again from Caro's book: the paragraph where he explains this is maybe the most devastating moment in the whole thing)

within the park is also the extremely ridiculous tomb of Ulysses S Grant

lovely little deco substation. substations - buildings which do not require windows - are such a gift to architects

lastly from Harlem (broadly defined), two masterpiece churches: on the left, Goodhue's 1915 Church of the Intercession, and on the right Allen, Pelton and Collens' 1930 Riverside Church. these are two of the finest churches in the city

Intercession is one of Goodhue's masterpieces, so much so that he was buried there: his long-time collaborator, the sculptor Lee Lawrie, carved his tomb with some of his greatest buildings, which long-time thread followers may recognise...

Riverside, meanwhile, was a project of John D Rockefeller, who threw his essentially infinite resources at the creation of an interdenominational church that would serve as a base for social justice campaigns - which is what it still does.

Martin Luther King gave his major anti-Vietnam speech here, a year to the day before his assassination. the architects toured Europe at Rockefeller's expense and ultimately drew heavily on Chartres: the immense tower makes it the USA's tallest church.

one of the big sources of NYC listings is subway stations - lots of them are listed individually. but it's actually a bit hard to get architecturally excited about the New York Subway. the signage is Good but they don't generally have a strong look beyond "tiles and low ceilings"

some of them have neat little pavilions like this one, and lots of them are enjoyable bits of heavy industrial infrastructure, but compared to Paris or London the subway doesn't really have a very strong design identity? a shame, really.

anyway, we're down around Central Park now, where you can't spit without hitting a historically important structure

this is where Shit Gets Grand

the great apartment blocks along the park are one of the finest architectural set-pieces in the world

the whole parade is listed as a historic district, although several of the best blocks - the San Remo, for example - aren't listed individually, which is a pity

plenty of them are, though - they all compete for grandness and for the longest list of notable former residents. this is the Barbizon, which was unusual in being a block just for single women, built as a kind of refuge for professional women in the city.

former residents include Joans Crawford and Didion, grace Kelly, Sylvia Plath, Liza Minelli, Lauren Bacall...

perhaps the grandest of them all is the Dakota - filming location for Rosemary's Baby, home to Leonard Bernstein, Judy Garland, Boris Karloff and John Lennon...

...who not only lived but died there: he was shot in the entrance, here, on the 8th December 1980.

the strangest, though, is surely the Ansonia, originally a hotel but not condos, built by a copper tycoon who kept cows on the roof in an early form of urban farming. the tycoon hired a French architect to sign off on the plans but later, when sued by a contractor, claimed...

...that the architect had been in a lunatic asylum in France for the entire building process and should never have been allowed to sign anything. there was a fountain in the lobby with live seals in it.

the extensive Turkish baths that were also part of the building became a legendary gay bathhouse in the 60s - Bette Midler and Barry Manilow were the in-house entertainers for a while. it closed in 1974, but three years later reopened as a straight swingers' club

one could write an entire book on each of the great blocks, frankly, but i only have so much time and sanity

ofc if you were ~really~ fancy you had an entire mansion just for yourself built in the same neighbourhood: spot the difference between these two, by the same architect, built 10 years apart and 10 blocks from each other

same game with these two synagogues within 6 blocks of each other

o jeez great, *another* Goodhue masterpiece (St Vincent Ferrer)

(that said one can never celebrate Goodhue enough, which is why it is *extremely* strange that his Church of the Heavenly Rest, also in this part of town, is not listed, wtf)

the oddest church round these parts is the First Hungarian Reformed Church of New York, a 1916 piece by the Hungarian - but usually very Internationalist - Emery Roth, who allowed all his Hungarian vernacular art nouveau instincts out to play here, very successfully

[the silence is broken by A KLAXON]

📢📢📢📢📢📢📢
IT'S GUGGENHEIM TIME
📢📢📢📢📢📢📢

the Guggenheim is now famous to the point of familiarity but what you have to remember about it is how intensely weird it is. as you can see, uptown Manhattan is all historicist piles of money trying to look French or Baroque or whatever, and then this spaceship just lands

Wright knew this, of course: he said it was going to make the Metropolitan Museum of Art, just up the road, "look like a Protestant barn". Frank, you messy bitch

the Guggenheim was his last major work - conceived and designed in the 40s, built in the 50s, opened in late 1959, six months after Wright had died. i've talked before about how his big late projects were often a bit...wacky...but the Guggenheim is where he got it all right.

it's one of those ideas that seem obvious in retrospect - what if you made an art gallery that was essentially one big spiral ramp people could walk up, hanging painting along it - but it was a whole thing at the time, obviously

and then again in its rejection of colour and detail it's very *un*-Wright, as well: it stands alone in his carer and in its neighbourhood, but is all the better for it

anyway, here's a Protestant barn

uhhhhh

https://twitter.com/Warped_Horizon/status/1192475012030009345

anyway, the barn. it's ...hmm. the core is a vaguely Ruskinian gothic thingummy by Calbert Vaux, now almost invisible under McKim, Mead and White's immense Beaux Arts frontage.

it *is* very good *as gallery space*, which is the main thing. but architecturally the best bit is Sackler Wing (awkward) by Kevin Roche, which is strong but minimalist and a beautiful response to the Egyptian Temple of Dendur at its centre

the third of the big museums on the park is the American Museum of Natural History: also a bit of a barn...

but obviously by far the most fun inside.

its most architecturally moment is the Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda, which is a completely berserk mural-covered shrine to the man himself (who was involved with the founding and running of the museum).

he can be seen doing fun things like "ending the Russo-Japanese war", "opening the Panama canal" and "shooting anything that moves"

not to whinge but obviously these are all world-famous buildings and there isn't a great deal of useful stuff i have to say about them: the "finding hidden gems" and/or "clowning on dumb history" aspect of these threads is, er, falling apart here.

on that note what can i really say about Central Park beyond the fact that it's probably the most successful piece of landscape art in human history and really has to be walked to be believed? not much.

so instead i will finish our time in uptown Manhattan by celebrating...a municipal asphalt plant. look at this! it's so good!

it made asphalt from 1944 to 1984 and was then converted, delightfully, into a swimming pool, which it still is. Robert Moses hated it: he called it "the most hideous waterfront structure ever inflicted on a city by a combination of architectural conceit and official bad taste"

so we'll stop there, for now, with a brilliant piece of concrete and a slap in the face to Robert Moses

ok kings, let's get that architectural bread

we're in midtown now, and midtown means skyscrapers

for essentially geological reasons (i.e. that's where the ground can support them), there are two clusters of skyscrapers in Manhattan: way down at the tip (left of this picture), and in midtown, just south of the park (right of this picture).

as we saw way back in Chicago, the skyscraper wasn't invented in New York - but it was, arguably, perfected there. certainly it is the place that the form was most extensively explored

there is really only one major early (like, turn of the century) skyscraper in New York - by Daniel Burnham, who, again, did most of the crucial work in Chicago: the 1902, 22-storey Flatiron Building, the first major steel-framed building in the city.

two years after it was built, Edward Steichen took the world's most atmospheric photograph of it

a little later, in 1908, a tower went up - the Singer Building - that was the tallest in the world, and for the next 65 years, until 1973, New York was the site of the world's tallest building, though within the city the title changed hands several times

the Singer building was demolished in 1968 - i'm not over it - but in any case was only the tallest building in the world for a year, because in 1909 the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, also in midtown, stole that title:

this is sort of a classic very early skyscraper where they're like "well, it's a tower, right? gotta do it like other, pre-modern towers". it's imo not very interesting, for that reason

it, in turn, was only the tallest in the world until 1913, when the title moved downtown to the financial district for a while - but in 1930 it came back to midtown in the middle of a berserk explosion of late 20s Deco skyscraper creation

(almost as if there was some sort of speculative financial bubble in the late 1920s that was ultimately going to go horribly wrong...)