The Masterpiece Next Door

80q. SoHo Historic District

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 03:54:00 +0000

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, and August 8, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report

569-575 Broadway (Thomas Stent, 1882) is currently Prada's New York flagship. Can't say much about the interior of the store because...well, can't take any pictures of it as it's private property. OK, OK, I haven't even been inside. I'm a guy! Oops, wait, it's got menswear, too. Yeah, I've been lazy.

Prior to that, it was the Guggenheim's SoHo branch. Originally envisioned as extra offices and storage, it became a full-fledged exhibition space that both served as the anchor for a downtown "Museum Mile", and an opening volley of the feverish expansion plans the Guggenheim tried to realize throughout the nineties and early aughties. I have fond memories of the SoHo branch, particularly the John Cage Rolywholyover: A Circus show staged only two years after he died. In it, artwork by and about Cage, his compatriots, and from city museums were displayed in four rooms according to chance operations in a kind of well-curated anarchy; some of them would hung and rehung at odd places on the museum walls, leaving many a hole from the vacated nails. I thought it was so neat.

I took my friend Colin Meeder there when I wanted to show him New York City in general and SoHo in particular. (He was impressed.) I am almost embarrassed to say that now. Did I become too hip for SoHo or did SoHo become too unhip for me? I don't know. The loss of the artworld, even in the canon-ready form that the Guggenheim offered, meant the area became less fun to me--that I know. In my mind the show was the last broadcast from SoHo's artside carnivalesque (even if it was a traveling exhibition): soon after, I stopped thinking of the neighborhood as something other than a shopping epicenter. Of SoHo's museums on Broadway, the Guggenheim SoHo died in 2001, the New Museum shuffled off to the Bowery, the Museum of African Art is moving uptown, and the Alternative Museum is now online-only.

And way way way before all that, the building was one of the homes of the pioneering men's clothier Rogers, Peet & Co. 14to42.net (who I really must put on my links list) lists the company's innovation: "they attached tags to garments giving fabric composition, they marked garments with price tags (the established practice was to haggle), they offered customers their money back if not satisfied, and they used illustrations of specific merchandise in their advertising."

The building itself is charmingly brawny. Although its partly-swizzly columns on the ground floor and its cornice are iron, I think it might've been designed to stand out amongst the neighborhood's cast-irons, of which I bet fickle New York was tiring in the 1880s: ivory paint replaced by furious red brick; instead of the dazzling repetition of forms, the Broadway side gives every story gets a markedly different treatment.

80p. SoHo Historic District

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 05:34:00 +0000

80o. SoHo Historic District

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 03:34:00 +0000

80n. SoHo Historic District

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:25:00 +0000

80m. SoHo Historic District

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 03:45:00 +0000

"More than this, cast-iron was strong: its tall, thin columns could support large, open interior spaces with high ceilings and big windows--just what department-store owners wanted for their showrooms during the age of the gas light."

As racked.com's photos show, it's still good for showrooms, even in the age of electric light. (Parties, too.)

In spite of 72-76's grandeur, I can't tell if the stores of its early years were especially ritzy. I've found a furrier and a wholesale silks outfit. The upper floors appear to have been devoted to the storage and/or manufacture of things like caps and wigs. Which is numbingly predictable, actually. During our little SoHo jaunt, I've been laboriously going through mentions of each address in Google Books and The New York Times archives, seeing if there is some fresh insight, some hidden irony about these buildings that I can share with you, gentle reader. Mostly what I've discovered are names after names of apparel companies that bequeathed no obvious progeny to history: they started up, labored on for a while, then went out of business, often when the owner died or faced bankruptcy during one of the 19th century's many economic busts. SoHo is so dense with these little businesses sometimes seems as if the linchpin to New York's Gilded-Age economy was women's apparel.

Also utterly forgotten: Isaac F. Duckworth, the architect of both the King and Queen. The 1973 LPC Landmark Designation Report for SoHo flat-out says he "was a New York City architect about whom little is known"; there are only two contemporary mentions in The New York Times, and both involve legal action between he and a John Roach. The nature of these suits are not detailed, but if this is the same John Roach as the New York shipbuilder, it might've been about both men's construction material of choice: iron.

80l. SoHo Historic District

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 03:27:00 +0000

80k. SoHo Historic District

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 03:42:00 +0000

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, and August 8, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report

From left to right: 65, 67, 69-71, 73, 75, 77, 79 and 81 Greene Street. Save for two, all the buildings were designed by one man, Henry Fernbach. He is the best-represented architect in the SoHo historic district, with thirty-four buildings to his name, twenty-five of them on Greene Street alone, in fact. Many are defined by rows of simple Tuscan columns, often supporting some seriously chunky arches whose name (if they even have one) escapes me.

Possessing both consistency and prodigiousness leaves an architect open to charges of hackery, and requesting a building that blends in rather than stands out leaves a client open to charges of immature taste. ("I want the same thing as that, only different. A little bit different.") On the other hand, the relative homogeneousness of Greene Street (as well as the rest of SoHo) might've been something collectively sought by architects and clients alike. How else to explain the spectacle of 65 and 67 Greene Street, the grey building on the left which is actually two separate buildings built by two separate architects (J.B. Snook and Fernbach respectively) for two separate owners, yet joined by a common façade? The result may have looked good. Even today, even after so much has come and gone in the neighborhood, even with the disfiguring fire escapes and new interlopers in former parking lots, when certain blocks are given a wide-angle view--say, looking down a street from somewhere in its middle--the brain and eye delights in blurring out all the nominal differences between buildings and connecting what they have in common until what it sees are faint and broken lines all merging towards a point on the horizon. But architectural homogeneity also had a more practical value, too, I'm guessing. It likely underscored the buildings that didn't fit in, which in the 1870s would've been the vice-breeding remnants of the neighborhood's residential and entertainment life--the very thing the industrialists and retailers moving into the area would want to isolate and destroy, physically and psychologically.

Fernbach is primarily remembered for his work on Central Synagogue, which is something else altogether from his stern neo-Grecs--it's...a polychrome celebration. He is sometimes cited as New York City's first Jewish architect of consequence, or even the first Jewish person to practice architecture in the country, though his sometime collaborator Leopold Eidlitz has been called similar. That this bellwether of cultural acceptance comes after nearly two hundred years of a Jewish presence in the city genuinely shocks me--though that's probably because I'm shamefully ignorant of Jewish history. Give me time.

80j. SoHo Historic District

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 11:22:00 +0000

80i. SoHo Historic District

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 03:59:00 +0000

As an influence on my own design work Bogardus looms larger, let us say, even than Louis Sullivan. Even Richardson, a greater architect, was not such a direct ancestor of mine as James Bogardus. It is, fortunately, easy to say why. With his cast-iron facades, he acquainted Americans with modular rhythm, which is the basis of modern design. Imagine Mies without a module. Imagine Le Corbusier wihout the basic freedom of evenly spaced windows.

More about cast-irons in subsequent posts. (Phew, this one got in right under the wire.) But what of 427-429? The Joseph Pell Lombardi website calls it both "The A. J. Ditenhoffer Building" and "The A. J. Dittenhoffer Building"; the LPC designation report favors the latter spelling. And both are probably wrong. The building's namesake is almost certainly A. J. Dittenhoefer (note the "oe."). He was one of New York's hardcore Republicans, having been involved in the campaigns to elect
Lincoln. He was a judge, and later, more famously, something of a Gilded Age celebrity lawyer, successfully defending Enrico Caruso charges of sexual molestation, and The Metropolitan Opera Company against Cosima Wagner and Siegfried Wagner, who sought to prevent all staged performances of Richard Wagner's Parsifal outside of Bayreuth. And that's really all that I can say about the building--what Dittenhoefer was doing with a cast-iron as lovely as this, sadly, I don't know.

80h. SoHo Historic District

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 03:12:00 +0000

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report

Haphazardly tallying up all the surviving buildings within the SoHo historic district by year, a narrative presents itself to the intrepid landmark blogger. There's a small construction peak in the early 1820s, followed by little in the 1830s, then nothing whatsoever in the 1840s. Things pick up in the 1850s, then, from about 1860 to the turn of the century, a boom: anywhere from 5 to 15 or more new buildings a year, this in a district of only 26 city blocks covering 70 acres. Things permanently trail off in the first years of the 1900s, and from an Indian Summer echo in 1907 to the time the LPC report was written, there are only blips. During the boomtime, there are revealing dips in activity, roughly corresponding to the Civil War--this is when the neighborhood took a decisive turn from residences to whorehouses and warehouses--a circa 1870 depression and the Panic of 1873. So, as we proceed in rough chronological order, we leap from buildings dating back to 1860 and 1861 to one built in 1868.

When I think of American tobacco, I think of withered leaves within North Carolina and Virginia in the older kid-specific maps of all the 50 states. I think of it as very specific to the South, and assume there must be climatological and geological excellences that make tobacco farming such an irresistible proposition there. Perhaps. But the Dutch grew tobacco in Manhattan, and before them, the Lenape; New York State once farmed non-trivial amounts of the demon weed, and Connecticut and Massachusetts still do. And Lorillard, the oldest Tobacco company in America, was New York born and bred, begun as a snuff-grinding mill and shop in 1760 on what later became Park Row. In 1868, after 108 years of catering to the American nic fit, William Leete Stone describes the company as "the largest Tobacco House in America, if not in the world" as if there could be no doubt, no need to compare figures to make sure.

383-385 West Broadway is built for Lorillard the same year, one of four buildings on the block J.B. Snook designed between 1867 and 1890. The LPC report describes its original function as a "Factory for drying and moistening tobacco." How tobacco was dried in a warehouse (as well as where the tobacco came from, why it was moistened, etc. etc.) is unknown to me. High ceilings (on the first and second floors) and numerous windows seem like requirements for air-drying the tobacco, if that's how it was done; on the other hand, these features are identical to a number of warehouses in the district, especially those on Crosby Street, so...I dunno.

In any case, what made for a good industrial building is often awesome for other uses, as we will no doubt explore further. 383-385 is now a gallery, a designer's studio, lofts, and in nice bit of full-circle, a cigar store. A much later (1890) Lorillard building next door, 391-393 West Broadway, features a contemporary artwork that might only have been possible within in the spacious confines of a former warehouse: Walter De Maria's Broken Kilometer, 500 brass rods laid down on a floor oh so so so precisely. (Fuck you, don't laugh, I think it's beautiful even though I have not actually seen it or anything; plus the guy's responsible for The Lightning Field and you cannot front on directed lightning.) Question: did De Maria think up Kilometer before he had a space for it, or did develop the work with the space in mind?

Incidentally, Lorillard got gobbled up by a tobacco trust in the 1890s, then was spat back out in 1911. Philip Morris and fellow trust constituent R. J. Reynolds would later far outpace the company in sales, though they are responsible for Newport, the country's biggest cigarettes after the almighty Marlboro. And after all that time here, they consolidated executive and manufacturing by moving their headquarters from New York City to Greensboro, North Carolina in 1997.

Mon semblable! Mon frère!

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 05:55:00 +0000

Recovering from Friday's Gawker party, I've been more interested in sleep than research, so no blog entry for Saturday. (I've been trying for at least two a week.) Until I get my ass in gear, why not say hello to Big Orange Landmarks? It's something of a Los Angeles version of The Masterpiece Next Door, though Mr. Bariscale (nb: probably not his real name) is covering landmarks declared as such by a local board, whereas I'm writing about federally-designated ones. My distinction is boring; the blog is not.

80g. SoHo Historic District

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 03:30:00 +0000

We certainly owe it to the well=known house of [D.] Appleton & Co. that it is now possible to get American books which, in respect to typography, paper, and illustrations, are in all respects equal to the best works turned out from British houses...It is the simple truth to say that no American firm could, or at any rate did, attempt to rival the best works of both London and Edinburgh till within the past ten years. In that period there has been an immense advance in American printing, and no house has done more in this forward movement than that of [D.] Appleton & Co."

(An aside: when did it become redundant to assert American quality in this fashion? When--if ever--will we stop affecting surprise when China or India equals or excels in something we Americans assume America is the best at?)

So, D. Appleton & Co. Along with limitless vistas of the forgotten, they were responsible for the memoirs of Matthew C. Perry, William Tecumseh Sherman, and William H. Seward; and, heading the charge for native intellectual respectability, served as the American publishers of such eminent Victorians as Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Charles Lyell, and--most monumentally--Charles Darwin. The evidence allows for no easy conclusion, but their neo-Renaissance office at 443-445 Broadway (Griffith Thomas, 1860) may be where On the Origin of Species was first published in the United States. It is a handsome focal point for in an intellectual revolution.

I might as well explain why I haven't talked about SoHo's cast-irons yet. I'm covering structures in rough chronological order, from the surviving Greek Revivals to the 21st century invading species; we're at about the early 1860s and the most interesting cast-irons come a touch later. (The exception is what's maybe the most famous thing in all of SoHo, E.V.Haughwout Building of 1857, but as it was landmarked separately, it'll be covered separately.) 18 Mercer (John Kellum, 1861) is an interesting cast-iron from this time, perhaps only for accidental reasons: a mossy green in contrast to the white and ivories throughout SoHo, and stripped of nearly all its ornament (no column bases, and only two capitals left), it is an unwitting precursor to Ian Schrager's 40 Bond Street. A shame about the hideous tacked-on sixth floor, though.

80f. SoHo Historic District

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 03:37:00 +0000

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report

The first thing that really made me conquer my fear of the city and visit the place on my lonesome was clothes. Music...well, Record World, when supplemented by the some of the used record joints on Long Island, covered most of the music I wanted to know about. Clothes, though, were a weirder proposition. When I started yearning for obsolete styles of suited slick, suburban casual, subcultural hip, there was just no place round my parts that could touch that satorial g-spot. My mom and I spent my nineteenth birthday driving around Long Island trying to find a decent a vintage clothing on Long Island, we said fuck it and spent the next day in scary New York City, buying stuff at Star Struck, Cheap Jacks, Unique Boutique, Antique Boutique, some of which I still have, some of which I still wear. This experience was so satisfying I stopped using my ma as the city-chauffeur and started going alone--sometimes to See/Hear for fanzines, or The Strand for books, or museums for kicks, but more usually the aforementioned vintage shops to capture a look I maybe saw in a magazine somewhere.

502-504 Broadway (John Kellum, 1960) used to house Canal Jeans. I went there a couple of times after I got a job in New York City in 1993, at which time vintage shops were starting ever-so-slowly to suck from growing prices and shrinking selection, then disappear POOF! in a cloud of musty gabardine. Still, the place was impressive: just when you thought you'd seen everything it had to offer, there'd be a new door or walkway with a more jeans, more shirts, more stuff. Naturally I never bought anything. Once they sold new jeans for $20! My God, I was so disbelieving I didn't even try them on. I figured there had to be something unseemly about them.

Some years later, touring SoHo with a copy of the AIA Guide to New York City in hand, I finally got a good look at the building. So grand it was. Like 85 Leonard, an almost exact contemporary, it was built in the "sperm-candle" style, though in marble rather than cast-iron (except for the ground floor), its columns soaring upwards into supple arches. It was late spring but the building felt like...it felt like Christmas. I don't know how else to put it. It was oddly festive, special. I don't even know why the association came about--Was it the façade's snowy whiteness? The Victorian-era architecture? The lure of shopping?--but it did, and it came strong.

It's now a Bloomingdale's. (Canal Jeans shuffled off to Brooklyn.) Here's a rare moment on the blog where I have to mention a potential conflict of interest: the place where I work for employs a number of the people behind the renovation while at a now-defunct design firm. They're good folks, some of the nicest people you'd ever meet, so I may be biased when I say I'm rather fond of the place. The department stores I knew from my Long Island mall days were near-windowless boxes so wide you could practically see the curvature of the earth; this location is half the size of the company's next-smallest stores, and filled with natural light coming through the windows on Broadway and Crosby Street, as well as two sets of roof windows--restoring it, perhaps unwittingly, to something like the fabulous retail showplace it must've been in the 1860s.

80e. SoHo Historic District

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 05:49:00 +0000

Along with many another notable, President Hoover last week sent a congratulatory letter to William C. Creamer, octogenarian silk salesman of Manhattan's Arnold, Constable & Co. Salesman Creamer remembers selling silk by the yard to Mrs. Abraham Lincoln, Mrs. Ulysses Simpson Grant, recalls seeing Theodore Roosevelt brought to the store by his mother.

307-311 Canal Street may not look like much now (though a sympathetic renovation is underway), but this 1856 building was the company's attempt at a jawdropper showcase, a "Marble House" built in obvious reaction to A.T. Stewart's much larger "Marble Palace" half a mile down Broadway, built a decade before. (Though Tom Fletcher says the Arnold, Constable building as faced with limestone, though, and the LPC report noncommittally says it's "stone.") As luck would have it, when Arnold, Constable finished an expansion to this store in 1862, A.T. Stewart would leapfrog up to Broadway and Ninth Street in deference to New York's overall northward vibe migration.

After several more moves of its own, Arnold Constable eventually wound up at Fifth Avenue at 40th Street before it passed away in 1975. How something can accrue 150 years of experience and then just expire feels like a mystery to me. Well, not really: a few years of bad decisions can wipe out any business no matter how old, and what worked in 1856 won't necessarily work in 1929 or 1947 or 1975, obviously. Even so, the sense that institutions, no matter how old, are actually vulnerable offends an intuitive sense that they can and will just...well...remain once an undefined threshold is reached, as if age is a sufficient bulwark against changing markets and competition.

80d. SoHo Historic District

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 01:42:00 +0000

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report

The headline for Christopher Gray's NYT article on 139 Greene Street called it "The Longest-Running Restoration in New York City."

The article was written in 1989.

And the restoration started in 1974, making it...what? A journey of thirty-four years? YEAH, THIRTY-FOUR YEARS.

Except possibly not really. Another 1997 NYT article referred to it as a site of a 1997 fund-raising auction, which suggests 139 was at least restored enough to hold a public gathering. If so, it went back under construction soon after, as an anonymous tipster to Curbed who wrote that by 2007, it had been boarded up for "10 years at LEAST." There has been progress, though. Compare my photocomposite above with another one from 2006: the dormer windows have been fixed up quite well.

Why is this taking so long? It's a Federal townhouse, not Pompeii! Well, a commenter on the Curbed thread posted above mentioned it was owned by Peter Ballantine--someone connected to the Judd Foundation--and his wife, adding "You just try maintaining a building in SoHo on an art supervisor's wages!" Reason enough, I think!

Still must be maddening to have that building in your everyday life, even if you just walk down its street from time to time. It always troubles the consciousness as a mystery, an occasion to ask oneself "why the fuck is this thing not done yet?" (Must be even more maddening to OWN it, obviously--you have to feel for the Ballantines--but bear with me here.) I say this from my personal experiences living in the city, and living with construction: nothing ever seems to happen as fast as you think it should. There's a townhouse near where I live that's been going through a protracted restoration process since I've moved to New York in 2001. Months, perhaps years go by where nothing seems to happen, then we spectators get a couple days of guys carrying out trash in big bins, then more silence and waiting. It doesn't seem as if there's much left to do. You know, just give the walls a good paint job and install some carpeting, and it's good to go. Like a variation on one of Zeno's paradoxes, we never arrive at the project's completion, slowing ourselves down as we have to finish each task as they become simultaneously become more trivial but more numerous.

Did I say 105 Mercer Street was the second-oldest building in the district? I did. But 143 Spring Street pre-dates it by a year or two, according to the NYC LPC report. Back when the world was young and I just started working in the city, I was oft tempted to dine here, as it was home to a tempting BBQ restaurant; now the horrible horrible shoe-slinger Crocs is scheduled to move in. Fuck you. Seriously, fuck you and your goddamn already-over shoe, Crocs! Stay away from my historic district! Not that I actually live or work in SoHo, but SoHo is still mine because I am a New Yorker and nothing New York is foreign to me and everything New York is a part of me! At least in a certain sense! Or whatever, just piss off!

80c. SoHo Historic District

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 02:20:00 +0000

80b. SoHo Historic District

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 23:50:00 +0000

"No part of New York better exemplified mixed land use. Churches were across the street from brothels, police stations were next door, and, when the National Theatre was destroyed by fire in 1841, it toppled onto the brothel of Julia Brown, partially destroying that establishment and killing one resident prostitute."

105 may not have served as a brothel for long. Hill argues that prostitution in New York City was unconstrained by any geographic location, and was often on the move, following clientèle, fleeing the law, and just relocating almost for the sake of relocating as was common in New York City in those days. (The first of May functioned as something of an unofficial moving holiday.) Everything was moving further and further uptown, all manner of commerce included; by the 1870s, the streets that once boasted some of the city's toniest brothels had sunk to levels of depravity almost as bad as Five Points.

Today, the red lights seem to have settled around Midtown. According to Gridskipper, most of them are between 40th and 59th Streets.

80a. SoHo Historic District

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 03:05:00 +0000

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report

390 West Broadway (unknown architect, 1895) lies outside of the ostensible subject of this post, the SoHo Historic District. Instead, it looks forlornly at the other side of the street, where other buildings sit snugly-wugly under the protection of the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission. The Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in America has been agitating to get district expanded; while 390 is within one of the areas under consideration, its 72-page submission to the NYC LPC has almost nothing about it. And why should it? Architecturally, it is nothing special; historically, it was the site of an unusually large police raid ("...they included some of the worst pickpockets and second-story men who ever were in Sing Sing.") and that appears to be about it.

I start my blog's investigation of SoHo with this middling exception because this is where I began with SoHo, close to a quarter-century ago. 390 used to house a store called Think Big!--yes, the exclamation point was part of the name. Its great gimmick was that it sold comically oversized replicas of the quotidian. Pencils, crayons, toothbrushes, postage stamps--stuff you'd learn to manipulate through years of delicate negotiation with your fingers, now scaled to barely fit the hand. This was stuff with the immediacy of pop art--the store seems to have been called "Pop/Eye-Think Big" at first--but with none of that nasty distance even Warhol could give off.

I first heard about the store from a Games Magazine article the year before. It had a picture of a woman carrying a giant yellow crayon and a quizzical expression; it was love. After a year of fascination, Dad took drove me there one humid morning near my twelfth birthday. (That was June 20th, 1983.) North Bellmore, Queens, Brooklyn, a special trip over Brooklyn Bridge, because it had just turned 100, then down to SoHo. I remember faint surprise that dad would take me someplace so desolate; mind you, I'm almost twelve at the time and have little experience with true urban desolation, so the discomforting SoHo of 1983 might be nothing to me now, or it might be the scary human-free void of pre-gentrification lore. Can't remember. There's too space between the then and now. In fact, in my memory of the place as it was, most of the buildings are lopped off to one story, and dad parks the car on cobblestone. I don't know how I could've imagined that. After about forty-five minutes agonizing, I selected a $60 yellow crayon and we went home. It stayed a few years in my room, complementing the navy blue laminate furniture I'd get a year or two later to replace. Then it was no longer fun--but could a giant non-functioning plastic crayon ever be FUN fun?--and I gave it away.

Think Big! disappeared sometime in the 90s but its idea strikes me as archetypally SoHo, lending me another good reason to start with 390. It sold items that both were amusing Pop-Art comments on the everyday, and quite excellent corporate gifts appropriate for clients during holidays. Arty commerce and commercial art, ironized consumerism and unironized consumerism: it fits in well with SoHo's own overall historical trajectory from artist lofts to retail chains. I'll talk more about that in future posts, presumably.

79. MacDougal-Sullivan Gardens Historic District

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 02:28:00 +0000

Location: 74-76 MacDougal Street and 170-188 Sullivan Street
Built: 1844 (MacDougal side) and 1850 (Sullivan side); extensively remodeled in 1920
Architects: Unknown; remodeled by Francis Y. Joannes and Maxwell Hyde
National Register Number: 83001736
Listed: June 30, 1983
Visited: June 1, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report

A quick jaunt to the outskirts of Greenwich Village before we head back down to SoHo and the Civic Center.

These twenty-two row houses are smoove, as fresh and dewy and uniform in appearance as a newborn set of quints. There are few small differences for variety's sake. For example, the Sullivans' ground entrances are alternately topped with arches or ironwork; except for the left- and right-most ones, the MacDougals have paired first floor windows (originally entrances) with either lintels or fanned arches. And then there are the unusually vivid colors: some blacks, grays, and reds, but several blues, and with 180 Sullivan, a yellow. That all said, the continuous heights of lintels, sills, cornices make this district two real rows of row houses.

A key reason why these rows maintained their relative homogeneity is due to their continuous chain of ownership, staying in the hands of Nicholas Low and his descendants from 1796, when Greenwich Village was really just a village, to 1920, when it was the bohemian enclave of universal reputation. They were purchased by the Hearth and Home real estate company, owned by William Sloane Coffin (father of William Sloan Coffin Jr.). Instead of tearing them down and building bigger as would be customary for those days, the company remodeled them to provide attractive housing for the middle class and a communal--but private--garden in the space between the two properties. This makes MacDougal-Sullivan is not just an important specimen of New York City architecture, but a pioneering example of both historic preservation and block greening.

Today, the middle class couldn't afford squat here--recent residents include Debra Perelman, Anna Wintour and Richard Gere. (Edgar Varèse and Bob Dylan also lived here, decades ago.) Gere's house went for an insane $12 million last year. $12 million!

78b. Charlton-King-Vandam Historic District

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 05:00:00 +0000

Location: Roughly bounded by Varick, Vandam, MacDougal and King Streets
Built: Mostly the early to mid-1820s
Architects: Multiple
National Register Number: 73001215
Listed: July 20, 1973
Visited: June 1, 2008

With Richmond Hill out of the way, and the hill it sat upon leveled, John Jacob Astor set about developing Aaron Burr's old estate. He divided up the land and sold it off to builders who then filled it with the Federal style row houses then multiplying virally throughout the city to meet the growing city's housing needs.

Their constructors were multiple; their dates of construction, all throughout the early and mid-1820s. A few Charlton Street homes were felled by fire in 1840 and replaced by Greek Revival buildings. Others were replaced with larger interlopers, including a sizable Queen Anne school on King Street. Many buildings--including a hair-raising five addresses on both sides of Charlton--were demolished for various transportation schemes, including the widening of Sixth Avenue and the construction of the IND subway line: the blankness of walls facing Sixth Avenue serve as mute testament to missing neighbors. And yet the district is relatively homogeneous. Heights and features are frequently matched from building to building. It has a recognizable feel: small and residential and somewhat quiet.

It also feels rather dead. The streets are lined with cars, people walk out from time to time with laundry, but once again, there are these little details, like another dead Christmas wreath, that makes me wonder if anybody lives in these places. The white-noise from air-conditioning in Varick Street buildings--this on a Sunday, mind--overpowers most audible signs of life.

The premier reference book for New York City row houses, Bricks and Brownstones, describes the Federal row house in almost Tocquevillean terms. They were occupied by the "builders, lawyers, and merchants" (both B&B and the NYCLPC report uses the same phrase, hmm...) that were getting rich from the city's growing power as a port, a market, a manufacturer--yet both social attitudes and economic conditions conspire to keep most homes built in this period spare in detail and modest in scale:

"This handsome simplicity of the Federal style showed that the Classical ideals of architectural restraint were influential then, that the high cost of hand labor made elaborate architectural forms and details too costly except for the finest houses, and that social customs in New York did not yet demand a pretentious dwelling."

I'm going to guess that nowadays these homes' seductiveness as tokens of old New York make them more and more expensive than they were when they were built. Knowing the way New York is today, they can be only be owned by a certain social class who probably treat them as weekday pied-à-terres at best. They may own the houses but they don't live here--but then they don't live anywhere, per se. Maybe. Don't hold me to that.

78a. Charlton-King-Vandam Historic District

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 03:10:00 +0000

Location: Roughly bounded by Varick, Vandam, MacDougal and King Streets
Built: Mostly the early to mid-1820s
Architects: Multiple
National Register Number: 73001215
Listed: July 20, 1973
Visited: June 1, 2008

There were hills and swamps here, once. Britain took the land as if it could be taken, as empires are wont to do. Queen Anne gave it to Trinity Church, who leased it to British major Abraham Mortier. On this property, he built an estate called Richmond Hill, one author describing it as a "stately mansion, with its lofty chambers and beautiful mahogany staircases, raising its graceful portico of Ionic columns against a background of splendid oaks and cedars." When Mortier became the enemy during the Revolutionary War, George Washington seized it; this is was where he lived on July 4, 1776. When we won, Richmond Hill became John and Abagail Adams' mansion during John's tenure as Vice President. After the nation's capital moved south to DC, the property was owned by poor, sweet, doomed Aaron Burr, he of an infamous duel with Alexander Hamilton that fills an uncertain space in the school-taught minds of Americans. Burr made attempts at developing the space, but after the duel he was shit out of luck, and his creditors sold everything to John Jacob Astor, already mindbogglingly rich. He put the mansion on logs, and rolled it down the hill and out of the way. It carried on for a while. Sometimes it was a theater, and sometimes an opera house--a fashionable and respectable thing in those Rossini-tormented days-- eventually devolving into a saloon and, in 1849, rubble.

Except not completely rubble. When some of the surrounding streets were being widened in 1913, workers discovered fragments of the mansion had been subject to re-use. A gentleman by the name of George H. Brennan is quoted by the New York Times as saying:

"A part of the old theatre must have been used for the rear of the stable, for on some of the beams were evidences of ancient painting or fresco work, which, perhaps, formed a part of the old theatre decorations. People used to go to the stable to see these faded decorations and the proprietor always said that his horses occupied a section of the theatre as altered from Aaron Burr's residence."

Then, after this amazing discovery, this unearthing of a rare fragment from Revolutionary New York...they demolished it for good. Of course. Did somebody at least take photos of the damned thing?

I'll talk about the homes that replaced Richmond Hill next week.

77. House at 203 Prince Street

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 05:52:00 +0000

Location: 203 Prince Street
Built: 1833-34
Architects: Unknown
National Register Number: 83001731
Listed: May 26, 1983
Visited: June 1, 2008

203 is considered to be designed in a "transitional" style that borrows elements of Federal buildings James Brown House or 83-85 Sullivan and later Greek Revival ones. It sure seems a little showier, a little more genteel than those two, but apart from the interior, which I obviously can't view, documentation on the building cites the main Greek Revival elements as the cap moldings on the moldings--so this building distinguishes itself from other Federal Style buildings in ways that are totally lost on an uneducated doof like myself. Sure is nice, though. It immediately registers as a home in a way the others don't: blinds may be drawn, but there are stained glass pieces in some of the window panes.

Aaron Burr had a mansion round these parts, and its gateway stood where 203 now is. We'll get to the mansion next week when I cover the Charlton-King-Vandam district. But it summons the delicious sci-fi idea that on this land, maybe even inside this house, the gateway still stands, a portal to the ghost New York City that lives unseen alongside the New York City we can sense.

Oh hey, it's my birthday.

76. Houses at 83 and 85 Sullivan Street

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 01:11:00 +0000

Location: 83-85 Sullivan Street
Built: 1819
Architects: Unknown
National Register Number: 80002696
Listed: November 17, 1980
Visited: June 1, 2008

Is anybody living here? 85 Sullivan's door has a computer-printed sticker you'd think a tenant, pissed at the vandalism of an authetic Federal Style row house, would've peeled away long ago; but no, while scraped at the edges, it's otherwise intact and weather-beaten. On 83's door, sky blue and framed by columns, there's a crispy Christmas wreath still hanging six months after the holiday season. Are they undergoing subtle renovations? Are folks summering out in the Hamptons? Do the neighborhood kids think they're haunted, much like my childhood self used to think the old and hollow pre-war homes on my suburban street were? So curious.

75. James Brown House

noreply@blogger.com (Michael) — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 18:40:00 +0000

A.K.A.: The Ear Inn
Location: 326 Spring Street
Built: 1817
Architect: Unknown
National Register Number: 83001717
Listed: August 11, 1983
Visited: June 1, 2008

Good God, y'all. A dignified gent that refuses to live out its golden years in retirement, this rare Federal townhouse is home to the Ear Inn bar, a neighborhood bar without a neighborhood. On the hot June Sunday I visit, folks with kids and strollers lounge around in the front, sipping Heinies under two trees as almost as crooked as the building. There are strings of lights and dead garlands from the holiday season that nobody's bothered to take down. There's no need to. People are chill here. It is a island of vibrancy, practically the only life in the neighborhood, which is still industrial in feel regardless of all the glassy new residences, including the impressive modern-parasitizes-old Greenwich Street Project, but they stay dumb save for the white noise roar of air-conditioning. (Where are these people coming from? How far must they walk?)

I don't go in. I'd feel awkward going in with a camera, just to take pictures.

James Brown: it has not been definitively established just who he was. The Ear Inn website relates stories, passed down from generation to generation, of a black man who may have been an aide-de-campe to George Washington and who just might be depicted in the iconic Washington Crossing the Delaware painting. (Amusingly, the site refers to the artist as Cass Gilbert, probably meaning Gilbert Stuart, even though it's actually Emanuel Leutze.) Christopher Gray, in a 2001 Streetscapes column, shows that the census records don't quite support the story, as the James Browns we have evidence of were either too young or too old. Or white. The landmark plaque above the entrance doesn't even go into all of that, preferring to talk in the certainties of its later life, its unique architectural detail, blah blah blah. As such, James Brown is this half-forgotten specimen of New York City history, just as his house is a half-forgotten specimen of New York City life.