Apthorp and Heckscher Buildings

Above: top of the entranceway to the Apthorp Apartments, which occupy the full city block between West End Avenue and Broadway, and 78th and 79th Streets. Beyond the barrel-vaulted tunnels with their enormous wrought-iron gates is a spacious courtyard with a fountain. The Apthorp was built 1906-1908 by Clinton & Russell on land owned by the Astors.

Below: originally the Heckscher, now the Crown Building, 730 Fifth Ave. (southwest corner 57th St.); designed by Warren & Wetmore (architects of Grand Central Terminal), completed 1921. There is something about this shade of green combined with gold that I find very pleasing: associations with money, perhaps? This was one of the earliest buildings constructed after the City's 1916 Zoning Resolution restricted the height and shape of buildings. Augustus Heckscher Sr. (1848-1941) made his fortune in mining and real-estate ventures and donated the much of it to philanthropic endeavors, including the Heckscher Museum on Long Island and the Heckscher Foundation for Children (now El Museo del Barrio). The largest playground in Central Park and the only one included in the original Greensward Plan also bears the Heckscher name.

Memorial Day: Washington at Union Square, Bethesda Terrace, Irises

Top: Brown's Washington at Union Square (Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan, Essay 13) - finally, a good shot of the west side, taken on a cloudy day (no harsh shadows) and with a long enough zoom that I could back up so his arm doesn't cover his face.

Middle: Balustrades and arches at Central Park's Bethesda Terrace. The detail and the variation always amazes me.

Bottom: Irises from someone else's garden. (If I had a green thumb, it would be made out of patinated copper.)

Greenpoint Savings Bank & Williamsburg Bridge

Above: Formerly the Greenpoint Savings Bank, now a branch of North Fork: I love the scaly roof. The building imitates ancient Roman architecture (in this case, the Pantheon), a favorite device ca. 1900 for implying that a bank was steady as a rock and would last for centuries. Manhattan Ave. at Calyer St., Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Below: On the one hand, it's nice to be able to walk across the Williamsburg Bridge without fearing it will fall into the East River - which seemed possible 10 years ago. On the other hand, the new pedestrian walkway is so fenced in that it's nearly impossible to take any photos except of the bridge itself.

Photos of Peter Cooper and 455 Lafayette

Lately I've been retaking sculpture photos in TIFF format, which brought me back to Saint Gaudens's Peter Cooper at Cooper Union (Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan Essay 10). At left is a view I never could have gotten with my old 3x optical zoom.

Many historians are vehemently opposed to change, but what studying history taught me is that change is natural, inevitable, and often a vast improvement. I like 455 Lafayette, the new building on the south side of Astor Place, which has been panned by the New York Times architecture critic. Not all buildings have to be composed of right angles. Not all of them have to neatly match whatever's already in the neighborhood. Not all curved surfaces need to be formed of custom-made curved glass rather than narrow, flat glass panes.

For a tidy summary on the hullabaloo over 455 Lafayette, see
http://nymag.com/realestate/vu/2006/17319/

Photos of architectural details

In my travels around NYC I often carry a camera in order to take photos of sculptures. Sometimes I snap architectural details as well: once you learn to look, you start looking at everything. Occasionally I'll upload a few of my favorite recent photos here, at considerably reduced resolution. If you want to see more images or higher resolution, ask me. In time, I plan to offer such photos for sale on www.ForgottenDelights.com.

Above: Sullivanesque capital from 11th St. in Manhattan (west of Broadway). Compare the Bayard Condict Building.

Below: 122-124 Milton St., Greenpoint, Brooklyn. 1889, architect Theobald Engelhardt. AIA Guide to NYC (4th ed.) p. 762, G15: "Brick and brownstone Queen Anne. The bracketed canopies over the entrances are lusty celebrations of entry" (!). I love the quality of the details and especially the spiderweb grills on the matching front doors. Are they original? I don't know - the brackets holding them certainly look old enough.

Horace Greeley on literature as a vocation

Horace Greeley, founder of the New York Tribune (est. 1841), was well known for his vehement opinions on everything from slavery and women's rights to unions, nativism and education. Here are his thoughts on books:

"It is a very common but a very mischievous notion, that the writing of a book is creditable per se. On the contrary, I hold it discreditable, and only to be justified by proof of lofty qualities and generous aims embodied therein. To write a book when you have nothing new to communicate, - nothing to say that has not been better said already, - that is to inflict a real injury on mankind. A new book is only to be justified by a new truth. If Jonas Potts, however illiterate and commonplace, has been shipwrecked on Hudson’s Bay, and has traveled thence overland to Detroit or Montreal by a route previously unknown, then he may give us a book – if he will attempt no more than to tell us as clearly as possible what he experienced and saw by the way, - which will have a genuine value, and which the world may well thank him for; and so of a man who, having manufactured charcoal all his days, should favor us with a treatise on burning charcoal, showing what was the relative value for that use of the various woods; how long they should be on the fire respectively; how much wood should be burned in one pit, and how the burning should be managed. Every contribution, however rude & humble, to our knowledge of nature, and of the means by which her products may most advantageously be made subservient to our needs, is beneficent, and worthy of our regard. But the fabrication of new poems, or novels, or essays, or histories, which really add nothing to our stock of facts, to our fund of ideas, but, so far as they have any significance, merely resay what has been more forcibly, intelligibly, happily, said already, - this is a work which does less than no good, - which ought to be decried and put down, under the general police duty of abating nuisances. I would have every writer of a book cited before a competent tribunal and made to answer the questions: “Sir, what proposition is this book intended to set forth & commend? What fact does it reveal? What is its drift, its purport?” If it embodies a new truth, or even a new suggestion, though it seem a very mistaken and absurd one, make way for it! and let it fight its own battle; but if it has really no other aim than to be readable, therefore salable, and thus to win gold for its author and his accomplices, the printer and the publisher, then let a bonfire be made of its manuscript sheets, so that the world may speedily obtain from it all the light it is capable of imparting."

I emphatically disagree with Greeley that all published books ought to be didactic: see the essays in Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan on Hale and Bryant, and more definitively, Ayn Rand's Romantic Manifesto. Of course millions of books have been and will be published that offer neither practical advice nor inspiration, but better to let the workings of the capitalist system punish those who perpetrate such works than have authors face censorship.

The bibliography and out-takes for Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan Essay 7 offer several other substantial quotations from Greeley's Recollections of a Busy Life (1868), plus an anecdote by Mark Twain and a pithy comment by William Cullen Bryant (OMOM Essay 22).

The image at the beginning of this post is by Thomas Nast, famed 19th-c. caricaturist; see the end of the Greeley bibliography for details.

Horace Greeley on literature as a vocation

Horace Greeley, founder of the New York Tribune (est. 1841), was well known for his vehement opinions on everything from slavery and women's rights to unions, nativism and education. Here are his thoughts on books:

"It is a very common but a very mischievous notion, that the writing of a book is creditable per se. On the contrary, I hold it discreditable, and only to be justified by proof of lofty qualities and generous aims embodied therein. To write a book when you have nothing new to communicate, - nothing to say that has not been better said already, - that is to inflict a real injury on mankind. A new book is only to be justified by a new truth. If Jonas Potts, however illiterate and commonplace, has been shipwrecked on Hudson’s Bay, and has traveled thence overland to Detroit or Montreal by a route previously unknown, then he may give us a book – if he will attempt no more than to tell us as clearly as possible what he experienced and saw by the way, - which will have a genuine value, and which the world may well thank him for; and so of a man who, having manufactured charcoal all his days, should favor us with a treatise on burning charcoal, showing what was the relative value for that use of the various woods; how long they should be on the fire respectively; how much wood should be burned in one pit, and how the burning should be managed. Every contribution, however rude & humble, to our knowledge of nature, and of the means by which her products may most advantageously be made subservient to our needs, is beneficent, and worthy of our regard. But the fabrication of new poems, or novels, or essays, or histories, which really add nothing to our stock of facts, to our fund of ideas, but, so far as they have any significance, merely resay what has been more forcibly, intelligibly, happily, said already, - this is a work which does less than no good, - which ought to be decried and put down, under the general police duty of abating nuisances. I would have every writer of a book cited before a competent tribunal and made to answer the questions: “Sir, what proposition is this book intended to set forth & commend? What fact does it reveal? What is its drift, its purport?” If it embodies a new truth, or even a new suggestion, though it seem a very mistaken and absurd one, make way for it! and let it fight its own battle; but if it has really no other aim than to be readable, therefore salable, and thus to win gold for its author and his accomplices, the printer and the publisher, then let a bonfire be made of its manuscript sheets, so that the world may speedily obtain from it all the light it is capable of imparting."

I emphatically disagree with Greeley that all published books ought to be didactic: see the essays in Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan on Hale and Bryant, and more definitively, Ayn Rand's Romantic Manifesto. Of course millions of books have been and will be published that offer neither practical advice nor inspiration, but better to let the workings of the capitalist system punish those who perpetrate such works than have authors face censorship.

The bibliography and out-takes for Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan Essay 7 offer several other substantial quotations from Greeley's Recollections of a Busy Life (1868), plus an anecdote by Mark Twain and a pithy comment by William Cullen Bryant (OMOM Essay 22).

The image at the beginning of this post is by Thomas Nast, famed 19th-c. caricaturist; see the end of the Greeley bibliography for details.