A New Generation
As seen from a scaffold at Fifth Avenue and 70th Street, the extreme slenderness of the new super-talls really does set them apart from older skyscrapers.
Architecture
Tempus Fugit Slowly
The New York General Post Office used to be located at the south end of City Hall Park, when most of the business district of the city was south of there. Around 1900, when Penn Station was planned as the first direct rail connection between Manhattan and the west, plans were made to move the …
The Original Tenants Did Not Care About Architecture
Those are two very fancy and basically identical carriage houses on East 77th Street. They’re on the tony block between Madison and Park Avenues, but that wasn’t such a nice address in 1898 when they were completed: Park Avenue was at that time still Fourth Avenue, with a railroad cut (with some sections of tunnel) …
The Original Tenants Did Not Care About Architecture Read More »
Oddly Real, But Exaggerated
The picture above is a long-abandoned flagpole mount on the roof of a 1905 building. The current roofing was installed in the 1970s and the portion of the mount that was at the roof surface was either removed then or was already gone. When I looked at it, I started thinking about how many building …
A Fake That Is Real
The picture shows an old mansion in Brooklyn, currently in renovation. It’s got the standard 1910 New York mansion construction: brick bearing walls, steel beams and tile arches for the floors, and terra-cotta block partitions for the room dividers. The groin vault on the left is fake: it’s plaster on metal lath, hung from the …