That’s a very…interesting…facade. It’s a small commercial building at the southwest corner of 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue, with a big department store wrapping around it on both lot-line sides. Fortunately, it’s in the Ladies’ Mile Historic District, so information is easy to come by. The district, as a whole, contains a lot of stores …
Yesterday I laid out some of the issues involved with restoration of one of the most famous buildings in the world. Today, as the picture above suggests, I want to look at the question of whether preservation as a field has anything meaningful to say about buildings that are not famous, were never famous, and …
Marie and I have each taken a stab at discussing the fire at Notre Dame, but it seems there’s more to discuss. The implications of the damage and restoration may well be news for the next twenty years. Even as people are trying to stabilize the masonry and remove the tangled mess of scaffold from …
We’ve been working for some time – by which I mean a little over nine years – at the Roslyn Grist Mill on Long Island. It’s not often we get to work on a building this old, and it’s a challenge in every possible way: the heavy-timber frame had been badly altered in some places …
270 Park Avenue, a late-1950s skyscraper, is currently being demolished. The picture above shows the south side of the building at street level. Those two sentences are just about the only thing that I can say that are undisputed fact, as everything else on this topic is either politically and architecturally fraught or is speculation …
