If you want to choose an exhibition to break out of the difficulty and isolation that the Covid pandemic has produced for more than a year-and-a-half, how about one where you can see the original umbrella connected with Mary Poppins, a tablet of cuneiform characters from the 3rd to the 1st millennia BCA, and a […]
Entries Tagged as 'Explore New York'
Jane’s Walk NYC 2021 Steps Up
May 4th, 2021 · No Comments · Explore New York
The house where Dennis Harris lived, at 857 Riverside Drive, is worse for the wear of many decades, shorn of its dignified shutters and cupola. Yet the rich history the house holds and the life story of Harris, the man who owned this Greek Revival-Italianate place in Washington Heights, are important to keep alive even […]
Tour and Learn in New York, Virtually
November 22nd, 2020 · No Comments · Explore New York
It was just the kind of peek into a dark brick hallway that Joseph Mitchell would have appreciated, a glance at a crooked passageway on an upper floor of 6 Fulton Street, at South Street Seaport. But now we were doing it virtually, through a screen. In fact, with a trace of excitement in her […]
Marking 55 Years of New York Landmarks
April 24th, 2020 · No Comments · Explore New York
This week is an anniversary worth honoring, yet one that is going by relatively quietly. Fifty-five years ago, on April 19, 1965, New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner signed the city’s Landmarks Law. Groundbreaking at a time of widespread demolition and clearing of buildings and blocks in New York and elsewhere, it established the […]
Tags: architecture·landmarks·new york
Preservation Triumphs of 2018
January 26th, 2019 · No Comments · Explore New York
The beautifully proportioned, sand-colored, two-story Beaux Arts building at 236 President Place in Brooklyn is not as grand as the larger structures of this style one finds in New York City. Yet its purpose was great and historic, in its own way, as those places, and its stateliness reflects that higher good. The late 19th […]
Tags: architecture·Brooklyn·historic preservation·Hudson Valley·landmarks·manhattan
Honoring the Landmark IRT Powerhouse
January 9th, 2018 · 10 Comments · Explore New York
It may be the most underappreciated major historic building in New York City. Finally, however, the magnificent powerhouse that generated electricity for New York City’s pioneering rapid transit subway system when it first opened in 1904 is a protected city landmark. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission’s (LPC’s) recent action to designate the IRT […]
Tags: architecture·cities·historic preservation·manhattan·midtown·new york·terra cotta
Spring Exhibits: Noguchi, Photography
April 22nd, 2017 · 7 Comments · Explore New York
In the middle of extreme inhumanity, some of us go more deeply and courageously into our humanity and act from this place. The Japanese-American artist and sculptor Isamu Noguchi brought the best of his humanity, dignity, and a sense of the capacity of beauty and art to elevate people during a horrendous time. He did […]
Stonewall: The Power in History’s Places
June 26th, 2016 · 4 Comments · Explore New York
If you ever for a moment doubt the importance of declaring a site as a landmark, preserving at least some part of it, or placing a sign at a spot of historical significance, go to The Stonewall Inn this month, in New York’s Greenwich Village. There, hundreds have converged in vigils and left remembrances such […]
Tags: historic preservation·landmarks·manhattan·midtown·new york
Sacred Sites Open for Exploration
May 20th, 2016 · 2 Comments · Explore New York
New York’s sacred places of worship possess countless life stories and historical chapters as well as inspiring and magnificent art, architecture, and design. Jacob Riis, the social reformer and photographer whose works brought to light the suffering of the poor living in New York City tenements, was one of the early parishioners of the Church […]
Tags: architecture·historic preservation·landmarks·new york·spiritual places
Goodbye to the Greenwich Street Tree
May 3rd, 2016 · 6 Comments · Explore New York
The tree wasn’t a towering oak on the rolling landscape of a New York City park, a magnificent elm with big-shouldered limbs, or a bright, showy dogwood welcoming the spring on a village street. It was, in fact, the most unlikely of survivors, sort of scrawny, alone, between city buildings and flanking some very inhospitable […]
Tags: manhattan·meditations·nature·new york
Art Deco’s Wisdom of the Ages, Part II
January 29th, 2016 · 4 Comments · Explore New York
How many schoolchildren over the decades glanced above the doorway to see a woman reading to a boy while a girl nearby is working on an abacus? It is a simple, beautifully sculpted panel, attentive to detail, as the architectural historian William Rhoads writes, “down to the shoelaces.” The scene is one of two on […]
Tags: architecture·art deco·Hudson Valley·manhattan·new york
The Tree as Artist and Art Form
December 30th, 2015 · 8 Comments · Explore New York
To Paul Klee, a tree embodied the creative process. In a public lecture, the artist likened the artist to a tree. The artist is deeply rooted in the world, while the artist’s work is similar to the tree’s crown, as the book Art and Phenomenology explains. “Standing at his appointed place, at the trunk of […]
A Message in a Lobby
January 26th, 2015 · 8 Comments · Columns and Features, Explore New York
It was just before Christmas, and thousands were in the mad rush and jostling along Fifth Avenue, with their cameras and shopping bags, to see the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. The shoppers lined up at the boutiques and gift shops in Midtown Manhattan. Just south, however, is a building that doesn’t make a list of […]
A Peek Inside Dazzling 29 Broadway
June 20th, 2014 · 6 Comments · Explore New York
It’s hard to quantify the exuberance of Art Deco. Its energy can make an immobile decorative element feel like it’s about to move. Its images jump off of flat surfaces. Its zigzags, lines, and circles seem to dance. Such is the quality of the lobby of 29 Broadway, a lesser-known beauty in New York’s Art […]
Joseph Mitchell’s Regard for Ornament
April 18th, 2014 · 6 Comments · Explore New York
Joseph Mitchell possessed a lifelong fascination with New York City’s survivors, both its characters and its buildings, especially ones that often escaped notice. For some 26 years, from 1938 to 1964, his essays in The New Yorker portrayed the city’s inhabitants from the bearded Lady Olga of circus sideshows and the stout Germans carrying their […]
Pennsylvania Station: Its Glory and Death
February 18th, 2014 · 9 Comments · Explore New York
If ever a hallowed place existed for the travel of the common man and woman, it was New York’s original Pennsylvania Station. Yet a magnificent, soaring station that Alexander Cassatt and the Pennsylvania Railroad built for the ages and opened in 1910 lasted barely over a half-century. Two days after workers started tearing down the […]
Tags: architecture·Beaux Arts·historic preservation·landmarks·manhattan·new york
Art Deco Jazz in Brooklyn Heights
January 19th, 2014 · 19 Comments · Explore New York
Naomi Fatouros, one of three children of architect H.I. Feldman, once wrote that her father “had no pretensions about being artistic.” Still, architects and builders had high regard for Feldman for creating building plans that minimized construction costs and that provided renters and buyers with good views and high-quality apartment layouts, she said in the […]
Tags: architecture·art deco·Brooklyn·new york
The Art Deco Pleasures of 29 Broadway
November 15th, 2013 · 6 Comments · Explore New York
Their names are unknown, but the fine results of their craftsmanship remain today. On an evening in late February, 1931, the New York Building Congress gave awards and gold buttons to 26 craftsmen for their outstanding work in constructing 29 Broadway. The awards went to William John Delaney, a stonecutter; Louis Materossi, a cement mason; […]
Roped In at Madison Square Park
August 12th, 2013 · 5 Comments · Explore New York
You cannot miss Orly Genger’s Red, Yellow and Blue art installation this summer in Manhattan. If people say this statement, they may mean, “You have got to see this!” Or, they may mean, “You cannot escape seeing this!” when walking through Madison Square Park. During the late spring and summer, this 166-year-old gracious park has […]
New York’s Dark Days: The Draft Riots
July 18th, 2013 · No Comments · Explore New York
On July 13, 1863, Chief Engineer John Decker of the New York City Volunteer Fire Department stood before a mob that had ransacked a building and were now intent on setting it afire. It was known as the Colored Orphan Asylum, a refuge for hundreds of black children located on Fifth Avenue between 42nd and […]
Tags: civil war·historic preservation·landmarks·manhattan·new york·women
