March 20, 2007
IF YOU CAN'T SAVE IT, AT LEAST DOCUMENT IT
This week's feature at Gotham Gazette (put out by the Citzens Union Foundation) is an transcript of a recent Gotham Gazette Readiny NYC Book Club meeting. Featured guests were Kevin Walsh of ForgottenNY and Roberta Gratz, the author of two books about urban development. Walsh recently published a book version of his site and I was reading it in the Grand Central Terminal bookstore the other day [if Kevin is reading this, rest assured I intend to actually buy a copy soon] and it is fantastic. Forgotten New York: Views of Lost Metropolis is an everyman's guide to discovering the little-known about the city, as well as documenting and sharing the bits of NYC that are disappearing without most of us even knowing they were there. The Gotham Gazette transcript comes with some great photos illustrating essential NYC items lost to the ages. Here's some of the transcript:
In 1963, they also eliminated all the cast iron lampposts on 6th avenue. These lampposts dated back to 1910. Overnight, they were wiped out. Even at that young age, I had been filling notebooks with drawings of these cast iron lampposts, in all their different designs.
Those two events put a kernel in my head: you better get stuff on camera before they destroy it. Much to my regret, I didn't do anything about it until 1998. Imagine if I had done that all those years.
With the onset of the Internet, I got the idea of doing a Web site called Forgotten New York about all the things that you see in the street that are unusual, unnoted, that people don't look at or don't see.
In New York everybody's rushing around. They're not looking up, they're not looking down. They just want to get where they're going. But I took a slow walk around, and took a bicycle, and looked at the painted ads on the side of buildings. Some of these things go back to the 1880s. There's one on 17th street and 6th avenue that talks about Victorian carriages and trotters for horses. We call them Wall Dogs ads, because the guys who used to paint them were called wall dogs.
I took photographs of all this ephemera – all these things that people had not noticed. I got a critical mass of 50 pages together, and I set up the Web site. We have been around for eight years, and we've got four million hits so far. So it's been moderately popular.
Read the whole transcript.
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March 18, 2007
NAME THAT STREET, BUILDING , SLIP, AND/OR MONUMENT, NO MATTER HOW LONG AGO IT VANISHED
Almost exactly a year ago––perhaps a few days before––I went to the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, NY. Hop on a MetroNorth train and get off one stop after Marble Hill and you're there. Cars are for suckers: just walk across the platform and some playing fields and you find yourself at the Hudson River Museum front door.
Inside the museum, one will find an interesting (alright, it depends on what your threshold for interesting is) overview of the entire course of the Hudson River. Other floors of the museum have some great displays on advertising and sublime 1950's marketing trends, including kitchen hardware. One of the best things about the Hudson River Museum is its planetarium. If you feel the computer-generated effects and real-time synchronized movement of the heavens was too overwhelming when you were at the Rose Center on CPW and 85th St., only the Andrus Planetarium can manage to pass off a filmstrip projected on the ceiling while simultaneously begging for funding and pitching b-day parties at the planetarium. It might have been the most interesting planetarium experience I've had in a while.
Anchoring the Hudson River Museum is the Glenview Mansion, one of dozens of family Hudson River manses surrendered to the State when the age of Robber Barons drew to a close. For as many of these examples I've been in, The Glenview Mansion is one of the better ones: full access, a working pool table, accessible art galleries upstairs, and some kickass curatorial commentary posted along the way.
One of the more interesting parts was the annex between the Hudson River Museum and the Glenview Mansion. It included a floor-to-ceiling mural of the Manhattan waterfront that I took a picture of in stages. Just yesterday, I stitched those pictures together; the above image is an excerpt. 19th Century photographers loved to architecturally conflate their images by cutting and pasting. I thought I was relatively familiar with NYC's architectural history, but I'm having a lot of trouble getting a bead on many of these larger late-19th Century buildings.
Drop a note if you can ID some landmarks. Check Flickr here for the largest versions available of the composite picture.
Super Bonus Points: What is that obelisk to the southwest of the Manhattan-side Brooklyn Bridge Tower? It looks like it has windows. Perspective would seem to place it further south than City Hall Park. What the hell is that thing?
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March 3, 2007
ARCHITECTURAL ORPHAN
Not every block featuring notable buildings can be landmarked an entire historic areas. Sometimes buildings have to fend for themselves when developers come knocking down. Occasionally this will result in a single building weathering the storm; then it must stand alone, simultaneously out of place and remarkable. Pictured to the right is an example. On the southern border of Manhattan's Murray Hill neighborhood, at 207 East 32nd St., is a building worth stopping and examining for a few minutes.
It's hard to miss because it's an incredible Beaux Arts rowhouse rich in architectural detail that has lost its row-neighbors. According to the AIA Guide to New York City, the building was built ca. 1910 with no known architect listed. Its original purpose was to serve as The Tammany Central Association Clubhouse. Even 30 years after Boss Tweed's death, Tammany Hall was still a powerful political machine. Under the leadership of 'Silent' Charlie Murphy, Al Smith--a man who grew up watching the Brooklyn Bridge being constructed outside his childhood home near the Fulton Fish Market--would be elected Governor of New York in 1918. Tammany Hall's power began to wane significantly with the election of FDR to the Presidency and the New Dealer's funneling of patronage money away from the organization. I could not identify when 207 E32nd St. left Tammany hands.
The building features three rows of identical-sized windows that are nonetheless widely divergent in styles and ornamentation. There's a mansard roof crowned with twin chimneys and two lion heads appear to serve as rain spouts at the top of the facade. More details about the building's features can be found here.
Somewhere along the line, 207's neighboring row houses were razed and it now has no abutting neighbors, but rather stands alone as an ornate architectural sliver of 32nd Street's past. To its west on the corner of 32nd St. and 3rd Ave. now stands an enormous and charmless highrise, whose only salient feature is a column of identical balconies, the likes of which I would probably have to jump from if I ever found myself living in such a building. To 207's east, is an asphalt playground for a neighboring school. The flatness of the lots to the east only accentuate the crushing overshadowing to the west. It's an interesting sight.
Currently, 207 East 32nd is the home of Milton Glaser's design studio. "Art Is Work" is painted on the transom above the building's main entrance. New York is nothing if not continuous history. Glaser is the man who designed the "I ♥ NY" logo in 1977.
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March 1, 2007
RUINING WITH AN EYE TOWARDS THE FUTURE
The New York Sun has a lengthy article today on real estate development in Brooklyn: it is absolutely on fire. Some people are extremely hostile to development. The people at Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB) are foursquare against Forrest City Rattner's plans to build a stadium and mini-city of skyscrapers along Atlantic Ave. and in the middle of their low rise neighborhood. While I think a 70-story tower in that spot, would be absurdly out of scale, I think it's foolish to think that one can preserve a city in amber, nor would one want to.
I do object, however, to development for development's sake. Architecture is an extremely lasting artistic medium. While treasures like Penn Station that should stand for the ages fall to the wrecking ball, hideous buildings have a way of sticking around interminably. And unlike the ugly person at a party who makes everyone seem more attractive in comparison, an ugly building serves more like bad lighting at a party, making even the best looking neighbors struggle to look even presentable.
As an example I give you this picture to the left. It is currently under construction by Boymelgreen Developers and will be a 93-room hotel with 50 residential condo units when it opens this spring. It's located at the intersection of Atlantic Ave. and Smith St. in Boerum Hill. I'm not sure how to describe it, other than as a short squat inbred cousin of the sort of soulless highrises Billy Wilder made the landscape of Prisoner of Second Avenue in 1975. The lowest mud I can sling at this type of architecture is to say that the building doesn't belong in Brooklyn, it belongs in Crystal City, VA, a weird city/non-city on the outskirts of DC that I consider to be the epicenter of architectural and urban planning hell. This completely undistinguished hotel could be plunked down unremarked on any Route X across the country that briefly passes through a mid-size city in a sea of strip malls and car dealerships. It looks awful today. In 20 years it will simply be embarrassing.
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January 20, 2007
PERISHING PARISHES
The Catholic Church released its list of churches it intends to shutter or fold into separate parishes as changing demographics, dwindling attendance at services, and a constant demand for more condos and CVS Drug Stores conspired to make the houses of worship superfluous in the grand scheme of things.
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York yesterday issued a final list of 21 parishes that will close, ending a wrenching period of uncertainty for thousands of parishioners, some of whom had waited for several years to learn the fate of their church.
The tally was considerably fewer than the 31 parishes that were on an initial list, released last March, of those recommended for closings.
Ten parishes in the archdiocese will close completely — the parishioners will be forced to go elsewhere. Some among the other 11 will get a smaller chapel built for them, perhaps within another building, that is under the jurisdiction of another parish, or they will be able to keep their building and become missions attached to other parishes. But they will lose their pastor and many of the services that come with being a full-fledged parish, a bitter outcome for many.
I was disappointed to see that one of the church's slated for closing is St. Vincent de Paul, located on 23rd St. between 6th and 7th Aves. I wrote a piece about it late last year [see CHELSEA CLASSIC, 12/31/06], singling the building out as a gorgeous example of neoclassical architecture that was otherwise in need of a good exterior cleaning. A full-sized picture can be seen here. Its clergy took the news with some equanimity:
Across town at St. Vincent de Paul, which features a French-language Mass that draws French speakers from across the city, the Rev. Gerald Murray said he understood the archdiocese’s decision but expressed worries about reports that the Chelsea church, with its vaulted ceiling and images of angels, will be torn down.
“It’s sad to be losing this beautiful building,” he said. “I understand the cardinal’s reasons and I think it’s a reasonable decision.”
Looks like I better head over and get some pictures of the interior while it's still standing.
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SLEEPWALKERS
Weather can be a friend and a foe for an outdoor art installation and its visitors. Seasonable January temperatures and a spitting drizzle go a long way to deterring crowds from forming around a public exhibit. At the same time, it may necessitate some childish strongarming* to get a woman to agree to stand in an alley watching a silent movie with you on a weeknight.
This particular visitor was lucky enough to come prepared with a hat, scarf, and gloves while waiting for his friend--delayed momentarily by anti-foie gras protestors outside the museum's restaurant entrance. The view from 53rd St. is underwhelming. One is backed up against the museum store across the street, so the upward angle to watch the films is pretty acute. Also, I believe that particular screen is being projected on from the inside of the museum. How that will make a difference follows in the next paragraph.
Around the corner from 53rd St. is a rather odd-looking vacant lot. It's bigger than an alley, but smaller than a skyscraper footprint. Given the location, the museum could probably have shoehorned about $90 million worth of condos into the space. Nonetheless, viewers huddled under an awning to watch films of Tilda Swinton and Cat Power. Turning onto 54th St., one immediately is confronted across the street with the awning of the restaurant Il Gattopardo, which is strange because I just started reading that book. But I digress. 54th St. is where the whole Doug Aitken "Sleepwalkers" exhibition comes together. In the Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, multiple projectors throw Aitken's work onto three different walls simultaneously and the parallel action of the movies is synchronized with each other. The effect was more interesting in the alley view, when one could watch two projections simultaneously out of the corner of one's eyes, but the sculpture garden stole the show hands down. It could very well have been the result of the weather. With steam columns pouring out of open manhole covers and from the tops of buildings into a cold drizzly atmosphere, Manhattan looked like a movie set. Images spun by huge projectors and thrown from kilowatt bulbs materialized in the atmospheric ether inside the sculpture garden. The facade of MoMA wasn't the only canvas for Aitken's work. For an evening, the weather managed to co-opt the entire space with rays of flickering light. It was pretty goddamn cool.
Proceeding down 5th Ave. following our visit, it was remarked that NYC that evening--especially St. Patrick's Cathedral--was looking like Gotham City and ready for its closeup. A side trip into Brooks Bros. was necessary and I can advise that almost everything on the floor of that repository of "old school" is 50% off. So, if you want a $200 pair of gloves on the not-so-cheap, they'll only cost you a Franklin.
*"I know you said you didn't want to go if it's raining, but it is raining, but not really, so basically whether you come or not is based on how much of a baby you are when it comes to getting your hair wet."
[Actual voicemail left to instigate art participation]
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January 15, 2007
MODELS OF WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN
From a dank vaulted storage room on Randall's Island, architectural models that used to grace the headquarters of Robert Moses's Metropolitan Transportation Authority have been removed, refurbished and are prepared to go on display at three different museums int the city. They offer an opportunity to get a sense of the scale of the projects Moses was attempting and the civic debt we owe to the people that thwarted some of his more horrifying grand plans. The New York Sun reports:
This scale model with Matchboxsize poplar buildings was recently salvaged from an enclosed vaulted storage space under the Triborough Bridge on Randall's Island. It will be on public view for the first time along with other models as part of a threepart exhibition, the most comprehensive ever, about Moses and New York City — " Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Road to Recreation," opening January 28 at the Queens Museum of Art, " Robert Moses and the Modern City: Slum Clearance and the Superblock Solution," opening January 30 at the Wallach Gallery of Columbia University, and " Robert Moses and the Modern City: Remaking the Metropolis," opening February 1 at the Museum of the City of New York. A related book, " Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York," co-edited by the curator of the three-part exhibition, Hilary Ballon, and Kenneth T. Jackson, will be published simultaneously by W.W. Norton.
Some of Moses's projects seem downright insane from a historical perspective. Rather than viewing the city as a destination to be reached and inhabited, Moses appears to have viewed the city as an obstacle to be razed in order to get someplace else more quickly.
At times, Moses could make the building process look all too easy. The model of Moses's proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, which was to connect the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges to the Holland Tunnel and West Side Highway, has a portion with Lucite handles whereby one can simply lift a neighborhood out and replace it with part of the expressway. Ms. Ballon doubted that inserting the expressway in the city could be done in such a simple, benign manner without spillover effects to neighborhoods. It certainly was not the way the preservationist Jane Jacobs saw things, Ms. Henry said.
The Mid- Manhattan Expressway would have carved a corridor along 30th street, an area chosen to avoid Grand Central Terminal, Penn Station, and Herald Square. This proposed elevated six-lane highway, Moses boasted, would solve "the worst problem of traffic strangulation in history." As explained in the book accompanying the exhibit, groups like the fur industry, Murray Hill Home Owners Association, and Midtown Realty Owners Association vigorously opposed it.
Moses's Brooklyn-Battery Bridge would have demolished Castle Clinton in Battery Park. The proposed Long Island Sound Crossing provoked the town of Rye to commence a lawsuit and Oyster Bay to donate 3,100 acres in the path of the bridge as a wildlife refuge to the federal government. Most famously, Jacobs helped halt a highway from running through Washington Square Park, an idea Lewis Mumford likened to "civic vandalism."
The Queens Museum exhibit is the one I'd like to see the most, because I've never seen its existing scale model of the city known as The Panorama.
The models of the Mid- Manhattan Expressway and the Long Island Sound Crossing were made by a company called Lester Associates. The Queens Museum exhibition on Moses will coincide with the reopening of the most famous model made by Lester Associates, the huge sprawling panorama of New York that spans 9,355 square feet, making it the largest architectural scale model in the world. Consisting of 890,000 buildings, the panorama took a couple hundred people three years to build by hand. (As though in a Saul Steinberg cartoon, Nassau County and New Jersey are painted in black with no buildings.)
935,000 square feet! That is HUGE! I'd make the trip to Queens County for that alone.
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December 31, 2006
CHELSEA CLASSIC
For many reasons, it can be rare to catch an unobstructed view of an entire building's facade in Manhattan. Traffic, scaffolding, the sheer size of buildings and so on all conspire to obstruct decent views of the city's architecture. That's why I was thrilled to get a shot of the church pictured above. It's St. Vincent De Paul's on 23rd St. between 6th and 7th Aves. St. Vincent is the patron saint of charity, but the reserved and unostenatious nature of the church--likely designed in the spirit of the saint--is now belabored by the level of filth that has accumulated on its facade. It's a shame, because it's an impressive work of classical architecture.
In the spirit of conservatism and spacial conservation, the building features pilasters rather than columns along 23rd St. The spare architrave supports a frieze adorned only with the name of St. Vincent De Paul. If it weren't for the Corinthian-style heads of the pilasters, the dentillation of the pediment's cornice would be almost the only ornamentation on the building. A broken pediment lies across the doorway to the church, with statuary of St. Vincent and a child. I didn't get close enough, but it looks like the doors of the church are bronze. They've weathered to an almost aquamarine patina. The spareness of the building's ornamentation puts its weather-beaten condition in high relief.
While I appreciate the sentiment behind the simplicity of the building's design, I think to let such a structure become so rundown looking is a shame.
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December 22, 2006
TOWERING TALENT
Photography could be described as an effort to capture and freeze the ever-in-motion with a static medium. Nature, people, almost all living and even inanimate subjects are in some sort of motion, albeit of various speeds. One exception is architectural photography; the practice of taking portraits of immoveable objects most frequently with a tool that emphasizes light, dark, lines, shape, and detail.
The small-format camera — 35 mm or the digital equivalent — is terrific for capturing fast moving action and doing it inconspicuously. It is virtually impossible to use a view camera unobtrusively. They are big, maybe 8 inches by 10 inches, with a bellows that can extend for two feet. Because they are heavy, they have to be supported on a tripod. To see the ground glass properly, the photographer uses a black cloth that drapes from the rear of the camera to his waist. But they are ideal for certain types of photography, and one of them — architectural photography — was Mr. Trager's first enthusiasm. (He went on to become an important photographer of modern dance, but for that he used a handheld camera.)
The view camera, because it is fixed on its tripod, allows meticulous framing. The photographer decides with great precision exactly what he wants in his picture, and what he wants to exclude. It favors photographers with a strong sense of composition, Mr. Trager's great strength. The image the photographer sees on the ground glass is upside down and reversed, which gives him a sense of its abstract qualities. (Representational painters will look at a canvas upside down for the same purpose.) The bellows can be adjusted to eliminate parallax, the illusion that the sides of a building are converging. And the large negative size captures an enormous amount of detail. Mr. Trager used all these traits to great effect in his 1977 book "Photographs of Architecture." Six blackand-white vintage prints from it are at Stevenson.
The photographer mentioned above is Philip Trager, a lawyer turned photographer whose work is currently being shown at the John Stevenson Gallery at 338 W. 23rd St. between 8th and 9th Aves in an exhibit called Philip Trager: Retrospective. Some examples of Trager's work is available online at the Stevenson Gallery site here.
The New York Sun ran a great review of the retrospective in yesterday's paper.
Mr. Trager's impulses are not those of a documentarian, or even properly those of an architectural photographer, but of an art photographer. He uses his view camera to make a handsome picture that happens to have this or that house as its subject. His indebtedness to the Walker Evans of "American Photographs" is clear, but so is his difference. The simple two-story wood framed house in "Glastonbury" (1976) is shot head-on, as Evans might have taken it, but from farther away, to give a sense of its placement in a treerimmed field. It is winter and the two large trees on either side of the path leading to the front door are bare of leaves. Mr. Trager shot with the sun low so that the trees cast dramatic shadows on the front of the house and on the lawn, upsetting its symmetry. There is a calculated beauty in the image that careful manipulation of his view camera made possible.
Philip Trager: Retrospective runs through January 13. The gallery is open to the public Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 - 6 p.m.
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December 13, 2006
GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DOWNTOWN?
Sometimes the most random walks turn up the most fascinating stories. A couple of weeks ago, when I was gathering pics for my Block Beautiful, [12/11/06] piece, I wandered around in a southwesterly direction, back towards Union Square. Walking down 15th St., I was confronted with an odd site: it was a huge waving flag in the early morning light, flapping in the wind with the logo of the Trinity Broadcasting Network.
Now that is interesting. Why is a mostly southern-based evangelical broadcast channel planting its flag a few blocks east of Union Square? I really have no idea; but coming they are. 111 E15th St. is now in the process of becoming a Trinity Broadcasting Theater, with full production and broadcast facilities.
The dichotomy of this Daniel-In-The-Lions'-Den / Dogooders-In-The-Belly-Of-The-Beast scenario barely scratches the surface of how weird this story gets. The true meat of this NYC story has less to do with a broad cultural division or urban ecumenicism and more to do with NYC.
Let's go to the Real Estate:
It wasn't even until 1988 that 111 E15th St. was recognized as a possibly significant historical building. At that time, the building between Irving Place and Union Sq. West was being used as a travel agency and was being considered for destruction. Then, architectural historians realized that it may be one of the only surviving H.H. Richardson-designed buildings in NYC, not to mention the original site of the Century Association clubhouse.
The Century Association was formed in 1847 as a respectable refuge for men of arts and letters. Famous poets and authors of the day kept their keep there. And with that type of attraction came the rich and influential and those that sought their patronage. Both Roosevelt Presidents were members, as were painters Frederick Church, Albert Bierstadt, and William Cullent Bryant. Mark Twain characterized it as one of those insufferably incestous places where the absurdly rich meet-cute with the ridiculously talented.
The Century Association is now located at 7 West 43rd St. Due to a street re-mapping, many people thought the original location had been destroyed. On the contrary, it's been sitting tight on E15th St. After the tourist agency, the property became the Century Center For the Performing Arts.
The Cushman-Wakefield press release pretty much does the whole transaction justice:
The Century Center for the Performing Arts is equipped with three main theatrical production spaces, including a theater that can seat about 300 people, a ballroom and a studio," said Mr. Rosenbloom. "These unique features will be useful for Trinity Broadcasting Network's production studios."
Trinity Broadcasting Network offers 24 hours of commercial-free inspirational programming that appeals to Protestant, Catholic and Messianic Jewish denominations. The company reaches every major continent, with 47 satellites and 12,000 television and cable affiliates. Trinity Broadcasting Network currently operates 3,000 television stations globally, and is the seventh-largest broadcast group owner in the U.S.
The Center for the Performing Arts, a historic landmark originally built in 1847 by architect Henry Hobson Richardson, was the original home of the Century Association, a members-only club of distinguished New Yorkers, including former Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt. The building received a complete renovation project in 1996 that faithfully restored the late nineteenth century to its original grandeur.
Two doors down from the Lee Strasberg theater and school, expect broadcasts of bible prophecy and panhandling that's gonna make Eddie Wise reevaluate his non-career choices. On the plus side, continued occupancy retards any efforts by developers to tear down what is a beautiful and historically significant building. Praise the Lord!
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December 11, 2006
BLOCK BEAUTIFUL
A few weeks ago I wrote about a building I'd come across [see MIDTOWN STUCCO, 11/29/06] that featured some very ornate stucco relief designs on its outer walls. I learned that it used to be the home and office of Frederick J. Sterner, who designed the structure. Sterner was a turn of the century architect who pioneered the "Block Beautiful" movement that sought to beautify the city by breaking the uniformity of row after row of brownstones. The movement's best example is reputed to be the block where it originated and the one-time home of Sterner: 19th St. between Irving and 3rd Ave.
I took a trip down to 19th St. early one morning and managed to snap some pictures that are generally representative of what one can hope to see between Irving and 3rd Ave. To see my whole Block Beautiful set of photos, check out my Flickr site here.
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November 29, 2006
MIDTOWN STUCCO
This is my secret shame: When walking the streets of NYC I often notice interesting buildings that seem completely out of place with their surroundings. On these occasions, I will snap a few pictures, pull out my notebook and write down the address, and then later try to find out what the structure's story is. This happened a few weeks ago while I was searching out another building whose lights flash randomly from floor to floor in rapid-fire fashion every night; but that is a whole different story.
The Thursday before Thanksgiving, I was walking down Lexington Ave. from the Upper East Side when I came across a building on the corner of Lexington and 65th St. that looked like an 19th-Century Teutonic Tudor amalgamation of styles. What made it stick out, aside from its relatively low profile on Lexington Ave. and its mansard roofing was an abundance of stucco relief on the 65th St. side of the building. Here's what the AIA Guide to NYC has to say about it:
The Parge House, 132a E. 65th St., SW cor. Lexington Ave., Altered, 1922, Frederick J. Sterner. Altered since.Though compromised by the addition of a Lexington Ave. shop, this picturesque conversion of a row house into architect Sterner's office and apartments remains an unusual work. Note the decorative stucco relief.
NB: While the AIA Guide lists the origin of the building as 1922, the relieving arch over the door on 65th St. that identifies the structure as The Parge House says 1921.
So who was Frederick Sterner? According to a NYTimes article written in 2003, Sterner was an architect most famous for the "Block Beautiful" movement in the early 20th Century. At the time, Sterner prompted the conversion of drab uniform rowhouses into eclectic collections of differing colors and facades.
What to do with mid-19th-century brownstones -- built by the mile, of identical boring design, awkwardly planned and often poorly constructed -- was a subject that puzzled writers at the time, and the question was in the air when Sterner arrived. His earlier projects offered no hint of what he was to introduce in New York. He removed the stoop, covered the dark brownstone with a coat of light cream-colored stucco and replanned the interior. It is now a common approach, but nothing like it had been done in New York before.
Perhaps by design, Sterner's architectural sleight of hand sparked a wave of renovations on the block. Within a few years, several rebuilders changed the East 19th Street block into one of tinted stucco, iron balconies, Arts and Crafts style tilework, flower boxes and projecting tile roofs, mostly in a Mediterranean style and clearly embodying a new vision for an aging city.
The block mentioned above is 19th St. between Irving Place and 3rd Ave. I actually find myself in that neighborhood frequently. The next time I'm over there I'll try to take some pictures.
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