The Seminary Block of West 20th Street
The General Theological Seminary’s Chapel of the Good Shepherd overlooks the center of one of New York’s best blocks. The Seminary’s brick collegiate gothic buildings were designed by Charles Coolidge Haight. The Chapel and bell tower of his design were built in 1886-88. The block of West 20th Street in Chelsea between Ninth and Tenth Avenues is one of...Continue reading→
Mapping New York's Shoreline, 1609-2009
Henry Wellge’s “Greatest New York”, published by The New York Times Company in 1911 and featured in a new exhibition at the New York Public Library, places the city within a liquid embrace. Its foreground features the Jersey City waterfront. New Jersey commuters transferred from Central Railroad of New Jersey trains onto ferries bound for Lower Manhattan, tracing a...Continue reading→
Robert A.M. Stern, part 2
Stern’s presumptuousness may owe something to the huge attention and acclaim that attended upon 15 Central Park West, the luxury condo he designed for the Zeckendorf Brothers. Based on classic prewar apartment buildings by Rosario Candela, the project is probably the biggest real estate phenomenon New York has ever seen. Quarterly New York real estate reports had to be adjusted to factor...Continue reading→
Robert A.M. Stern, part 1
A rendering shows the main entrance of Robert A.M. Stern’s George W. Bush Presidential Center. “I’m not considered avant-garde because I’m not avant-garde,” Stern says, “but there is a parallel world out there – of excellence.” Earlier this month Robert A.M. Stern presented his preliminary design of the the Bush Library. Stern has just the right attributes to be...Continue reading→
Here Was My City
A sketch of the Brooklyn Bridge by Lewis Mumford On the eve of another 9/11, a love letter to New York from Lewis Mumford comes to mind. His autobiography, Sketches From Life, describes a youthful walk across the Brooklyn Bridge when he caught “a fleeting glimpse of the utmost possibilities life may hold for man.” Yes: I loved the...Continue reading→
Guernsey Street
It’s one of New York’s redeeming qualities that it never runs out of sights to offer even a regular wanderer of its neighborhoods. In addition to planned street-scapes and open spaces, endless random combinations of elements accidentally yield distinctive places. ArchiTakes launches its “New York Places” category with one of these, in Brooklyn. The block of Greenpoint’s Guernsey...Continue reading→