17. First Police Precinct Station House
AKA: First Precinct Police Station; New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission Offices
Location: 100 Old Slip
Built: 1909-1911
Architects: Hunt & Hunt
National Register Number: 82001193
Listed: October 29, 1982
Visited: August 5 and 26, 2007
A great number of modern thinkers I respect, ranging from Christopher Lasch and Norman Mailer to Tom Frank and Simon Reynolds, seriously bug out -- vomit coming to the throat and all -- when people adopt discontextual historical styles for seemingly fuck-all purpose, airily referring to ironized mix-and-match as a peculiarly modern sickness. OK, OK, so if this is true, answer me this: what's a distinctly pre-modern New York City police station doing decked out as an Italian Renaissance palazzo? Don't look at me, I don't even know what a palazzo is.
Wikipedia says it's "a grand building of some architectural ambition that is the headquarters of a family of some renown or of an institution, or even what the British would call a 'block of flats' or a tenement." The AIA Guide to New York City is no more specific: "the super town house of Italian nobility (i.e., palace), later a description of any big, urbane building in an Italian town." NOT HELPFUL! Especially when (concerning the latter definition) the First Police Precinct Station House is not especially big, nor in Italy. Ah well. (Today I find the thicket of architectural terminology intractable. One day I won't.) But this I know: It looks like it was covered in giant peppermint Chiclets, which apparently means the surface is "rusticated."
The building housed the 1st Precinct of the New York City Police Deparment until 1909 to 1973, when a merger with the 4th Precinct necessitated a move into bigger quarters. (It is somewhat staggering to think criminals were ever processed in such a handsome building -- were they contemptuous of such fancy, or was it viewed as just another old-looking building in a city crowded with them?) The station house was left fallow until 1993, when it was used as the offices of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.
Since 2001, the building has housed the New York City Police Museum. You have to wonder how video displays and artifacts in glass vitrines could possibly communicate anything of value. What the police do strikes me as being essentially social and psychological in nature, and hance maybe better described by a work of the imagination like a movie, a TV show, or a book. And yet the museum is compelling, intimate. Its features -- a documentary about pioneer women officers and the preposterous crap they had to deal with; mugshots of hoods long dead; a portrait of a uniformed office with icy blue eyes and a leather jacket; uniforms; weapons; a motorcycle; a police car -- have enough evocativeness to fuel a museum-goers' own, entirely private, work of the imagination about police life.
Location: 100 Old Slip
Built: 1909-1911
Architects: Hunt & Hunt
National Register Number: 82001193
Listed: October 29, 1982
Visited: August 5 and 26, 2007
A great number of modern thinkers I respect, ranging from Christopher Lasch and Norman Mailer to Tom Frank and Simon Reynolds, seriously bug out -- vomit coming to the throat and all -- when people adopt discontextual historical styles for seemingly fuck-all purpose, airily referring to ironized mix-and-match as a peculiarly modern sickness. OK, OK, so if this is true, answer me this: what's a distinctly pre-modern New York City police station doing decked out as an Italian Renaissance palazzo? Don't look at me, I don't even know what a palazzo is.
Wikipedia says it's "a grand building of some architectural ambition that is the headquarters of a family of some renown or of an institution, or even what the British would call a 'block of flats' or a tenement." The AIA Guide to New York City is no more specific: "the super town house of Italian nobility (i.e., palace), later a description of any big, urbane building in an Italian town." NOT HELPFUL! Especially when (concerning the latter definition) the First Police Precinct Station House is not especially big, nor in Italy. Ah well. (Today I find the thicket of architectural terminology intractable. One day I won't.) But this I know: It looks like it was covered in giant peppermint Chiclets, which apparently means the surface is "rusticated."
The building housed the 1st Precinct of the New York City Police Deparment until 1909 to 1973, when a merger with the 4th Precinct necessitated a move into bigger quarters. (It is somewhat staggering to think criminals were ever processed in such a handsome building -- were they contemptuous of such fancy, or was it viewed as just another old-looking building in a city crowded with them?) The station house was left fallow until 1993, when it was used as the offices of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.
Since 2001, the building has housed the New York City Police Museum. You have to wonder how video displays and artifacts in glass vitrines could possibly communicate anything of value. What the police do strikes me as being essentially social and psychological in nature, and hance maybe better described by a work of the imagination like a movie, a TV show, or a book. And yet the museum is compelling, intimate. Its features -- a documentary about pioneer women officers and the preposterous crap they had to deal with; mugshots of hoods long dead; a portrait of a uniformed office with icy blue eyes and a leather jacket; uniforms; weapons; a motorcycle; a police car -- have enough evocativeness to fuel a museum-goers' own, entirely private, work of the imagination about police life.
Labels: Financial District, Hunt and Hunt, South Street Seaport and Water Street Corridor
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