Ploughed Field. Caspar David Friedrich. Circa 1830.
Art
Another One
My cousin recently found an apartment near this surviving NYC detached Victorian-type house. The Victorian sits on an oddly shaped corner lot at Briggs Avenue and East 201st Street. The owner seems to like gardening, and there is at least one well-fed cat living in the yard. It’s two blocks down from the Grand Concourse, and it’s in much better shape than most of the similar houses on Woodycrest Avenue in High Bridge. Unfortunately, it’s not part of a cluster. There are some other detached houses nearby, but they’re not of the same style or period.
Update: I’m using Google Maps Engine now to create a database of these houses. Since there are thousands of examples of Victorian architecture in New York City, here are the criteria, for now:
1. The structure must have been built within the legal boundaries of the pre-1898 City of New York. That is, the present-day borough of Manhattan, or the portion of the present-day Bronx that lies west of the Bronx River.
2. For the time being, I’m going to cut off the year of construction (if determinable) in 1910, because there was a burst of this type of construction around the turn of the century. (So, we’re actually looking for Victorian and Edwardian-era houses.) I don’t want to exclude structures that were part of an organic phenomenon, simply because the city’s legal boundaries were expanded to include other, non-NYC-proper phenomena (e.g., Brooklyn, Flushing, etc.). But at some point, I may create separate categories for pre-1898 and post-1898 houses.
3. The structure must be (or show evidence of having once been) a fully-detached house. Evidence could include side-windows and façades, and side yards that are (or clearly were) more than mere alleyways.
4. Finally (the fun part), the structure must show evidence of Victorian-era (especially, American Queen Anne-style) architectural details, such as cones, turrets, towers, stained-glass windows, bays, wraparound porches, asymmetrical façades, and the like — or strong evidence that such features were originally incorporated into the structure, but have since been modified or removed.
And, by all means, please send along any new finds that meet the criteria!
Spring: Olmsted & Vaux
Just some pictures of the light in Central Park, last night, about 7-7:30 PM.
Matisse at the Met
Acanthus. Henri Matisse (1911-13).
The show is closing soon. If you’re going to be around New York City, you should check it out before it does. If the exhibit has an overarching theme, it’s a comparison between the slight variations in perspective, style, and palette that distinguish Matisse’s studies of particular scenes. For example, two beach scenes painted at Saint-Tropez — one divisionist, one not. Or two landscapes depicting the same spot in Morocco, each shown in different light. If you go, just don’t try to snap any pictures or walk back through the exhibit after reaching the end. The Met’s art police will be sure to lay down the law. . . .
Our Sea-Washed, Sunset Gates
And other amazing vistas of nature meeting human settlement, from of AirPano.
The Old Jail on New Street
112 Years Later
The similarities are striking.
After the Rain, Paul Cornoyer (c. 1900).
Art Imitates Land Use
After the Rain. Paul Cornoyer, c. 1900. (More about the artist, here.)
There’s something captivating about the contrast between nature and human development. Parks, urban waterfronts, skyline views from the countryside: People are drawn to these. I think Paul Cornoyer captured these kinds of contrasts well, and he also depicted other aspects of nature, such as weather, season, and light, as they affected the city.
One of the unique qualities of late-Victorian urbanism, which Cornoyer painted, is that it was the latest and most modern period in which development norms maintained a bright line between human construction and the wildness of nature. This was done by placing parks amid the concrete, and also at the city’s edge. Cast-iron, elevators, and railroads made very high densities possible by the late 19th century. Meanwhile, cars had yet to facilitate market-driven sprawl, and Howard and others had yet to provide the vision of a democratized suburbia.
So, there was still a market- and tradition- and technology-driven compactness to new places. And, at their edges, one would typically find very sharp transitions to much lower densities. Below is a detailed lithograph showing the northern frontier of New York City’s real estate development, as it stood in 1897— approximately when Cornoyer was painting Madison Square. Harlem can be seen at the far left; the foreground is (today) the Bronx; and Washington Heights is in the background, beyond the Harlem River:
Art Imitates Land Use
Côte du Galet, at Pontoise. Paul Cezanne, c. 1880. (More here.)
Patrick Geddes and Tel Aviv
White City, Tel Aviv. Photo: Google.
Esra Magazine has a nice piece about Sir Patrick G., and his role in planning the Israeli seaside city. Geddes had a special impact on what would become known as the White City– a coastal neighborhood with one of the world’s largest concentrations of ultramodern Bauhaus-style architecture. The combination of white concrete, modern lines, green desert brush, wide boulevards, and the blue Mediterranean make the White City a striking conceptual project in town planning. Sadly, a look around the newly released Google Streetviews of Tel Aviv shows that many of the structures in the neighborhood have not been well maintained over the years; worse, many parcels are occupied by ugly buildings that fail to realize the vision’s potential.