The News has some recent photos from the top of One World Trade Center, and a few of them are pretty amazing. I went to a planning event on Tuesday at the Museum of the American Indian, which is located in the old U.S. Custom House on Bowling Green (an amazing building, itself). Heading back to the PATH train, my event companion and I walked along Church Street, past the Trade Center site. I was surprised to see the sudden progress that’s now been made on the other buildings. I thought I’d read somewhere that the developers were going to hold off on the second and third main-site towers until the commercial real estate economy recovered. But the tower at the southeast corner of the site, at Church and Liberty Streets, seems to have gone up overnight; while the one at the northeast corner, at Church and Vesey, now has a ground level that’s beginning to take shape. Meanwhile, the frame of One World Trade itself now appears to be approaching its ultimate height. (Seven World Trade Center, across Vesey Street from the main site, was the first to be completed.) After all the maddening time it took to plan and approve the new complex, it’s now being built very quickly.
Spotlights
Spotlight: Woodycrest Avenue Detached Victorians
I’ve spent some time looking over satellite images of the Bronx and Upper Manhattan, and here’s what I’ve found:
1. As mentioned earlier, there’s a row of five small detached Victorians on Terrace View Avenue in Marble Hill.
2. There is a good number of large, (possibly) Victorian-era detached houses on either side of University Avenue, just south of 183rd Street, near the old N.Y.U. campus. Presumably, most of the houses here date from either the very-late-Victorian period or after 1900. (Note that the architectural detailing is not very elaborate on most; and that N.Y.U. arrived in 1894.)
3. There are random extant detached Victorian houses throughout the Bronx and Marble Hill. They are frequently sandwiched between more recent apartment buildings, and their original details have often been neglected or obscured by modern siding, roofing, pavement, or other modifications.
4. The houses on Woodycrest Avenue are unique. They combine (1) large houses and lots, (2) green, spacious landscaping, (3) distinct architectural details, and (4) an uninterrupted series of original structures. Together, these qualities preserve a small but remarkable slice of New York City’s suburban Victorian fabric.
5. This fabric deserves legal protection. Here’s a spreadsheet that I put together. It lists the land parcels that might comprise a small historic district. It also provides a photo of each. Not every one of these houses is individually noteworthy, but some are. And those that are not are included because they remain part of the historical context, and play an interstitial role in the cohesion of this small but noteworthy district.
Rebuilding the South Bronx
The Times‘ Michael Kimmelman takes a walking tour of the Melrose section with Amanda Burden, director of New York City’s Department of City Planning, and a video of their interview highlights some striking examples of new development that is ongoing in the South Bronx. Some of these blocks are the same ones that were infamously devastated by arson, property abandonment, and street crime in the 1970s and ’80s. Among my earliest memories of New York City, I remember riding through parts of the city that looked like scenes from a war zone: shells of buildings, flame-scorched, hollow, scattered among vacant lots, and defaced with neon-colored graffiti. And, of course, people on the streets reflected a human version of the same desolation. Fortunately, most of that Dante-esque nightmare is now gone, but the vacant parcels have persisted for a long time. Notably, the Bloomberg administration’s strategic focus, according to Ms. Burden, is centered on the construction of high-density affordable housing, and on rebuilding the area’s traditional fabric of standard blocks and mid-rise, mixed-use buildings.
Spotlight: Little Falls and Canajoharie, New York
NY's Mohawk Valley. Source: Google.
More than a dozen small towns dot the countryside of New York’s Mohawk Valley between Albany and Utica. In most, compact urban neighborhoods give way at their edges to farmland and forests: That is to say, the towns of this region still furnish the contrast between efficient development and pastoral nature that was blurred by the sprawling postwar model. Internally, a few are near perfect examples of artful, practical town plans.
I like the physical layouts of Little Falls and Canajoharie, in particular: Both are river towns, built on steep banks, with winding streets worked into the rough topography of the land. Both have very good surviving stocks of Victorian architecture– including factories, simple houses, and showcases– arranged around the common spaces that traditionally organized settlements in the Northeast. And both are, essentially, walkable time capsules. On a recent drive home from from the Adirondacks, I took some photos of these towns.
A slide show, here:
The Mohawk Valley has been settled for as long as nearby parts of New England. Visually, the region’s mountainous terrain casts a haunting daylight shade over certain twists in the river. The valley is largely forgotten by its former industries, and remains mostly undiscovered by sprawl developers or New York City vacationers. Notably, an Amtrak line that runs through the valley skips over the entire stretch between Amsterdam and Utica without a stop.
The development patterns of the smaller, most isolated Mohawk Valley towns reflect the old urban elements of the early-industrial, pre-automobile constellation. In particular, the influence of traditions, building codes, physical restraints, and market forces can be observed through the architecture, street layouts, and walkable accommodations of both topography and transportation routes in both towns. Historically, the the instrumentalities that linked these places with the wider world were the Mohawk River, Erie Canal, and N.Y. Central Railroad (in that order). From the maps of Little Falls and Canajoharie, it is apparent that the nodes of development were sited in proximity to these routes, and to meet the challenges posed by the rough topography on either side of the river. Similar evidence could still be found today in more developed regions, but the persistence of the Mohawk towns in the original matrix of a rural countryside allows much evidence of the early functionality of their patterns to be preserved. (Note the similar street patterns of the river towns along the lower Hudson, here, as they existed in 1906.)
A Google satellite map of Little Falls is here:
And one of Canajoharie:
One tradition worth noting in both towns is the presence of an open public space near the town center. In Little Falls, two separate greens characterize the upland neighborhood just north of the river, in the tradition of English town planning. Interestingly, the geometric convergence of several streets around a wide swath of pavement in Canajoharie is (in its current form) more reminiscent of a Continental plaza.
Spotlight: ‘New York by Gehry’
Eight Spruce Street, NYC.
Frank Gehry has designed a significant new building at Eight Spruce Street, New York City. The sinuous, 76-story tower, featuring curtained walls, bay windows, and a structural frame of reinforced concrete, is now nearing completion. Situated just between the Brooklyn Bridge and the Beaux-Arts canyons of Wall Street, the development is slated to be mostly rental flats, with a mixed-use element near street level.
Today, I had a chance to see the project up close. It is quite stunning. Its scale illustrates the spatial possibilities that are feasible on just a small canvas of urban land. In an interview last October with the WSJ, Gehry explained how he wanted the building’s design to complement the architecture of the surrounding cityscape. He has largely succeeded. One disappointment: in contrast to the silvery, free-flowing form of the tower that comprises most of the structure, the street level floors that reach to the traditional build-to lines are composed of horribly mundane walls made of beige brick.
Here are some snapshots that I took today with a BlackBerry. The building is essentially done, but work is ongoing. Next time, I’ll try to get inside.
Spotlight: Tralee, Ireland
This is another amazing town. The curved facades, the streets that trace the contours of the land, the stone walls, the variety of paint colors: a lot of these design elements are similar to the ones in Ouro Preto; and both are also upland towns, rather than ports. (Tralee does have a basin with access to the sea in its far southwest.) One important difference: unlike Ouro, whose continental roots have its streets converging on a paved plaza, Tralee is laid out more in the English style (apologies to Uncle Don and other Irish patriots), with smaller green squares worked into its grid, and a large park set aside on its outskirts.
Most of the attached buildings in Tralee appear to be built on the standard 20′-25′ (7m) wide lots– the same as in New York City or anywhere else. (On a random note, the forward-pitched roofs on these buildings, which seem so classically Irish, are also common on a certain period of the houses in Newark and Philadelphia.) Meanwhile, the setbacks of the detached houses are modest, the gardens are often bounded by stone walls, and the lot coverages are substantial, all contributing to a sense of enclosure on the greener blocks leading away from the town center.
Photos remain the copyright of Google, and are used in accordance with the principles of Fair Use. Explore the streets of Tralee, yourself, here.
The Mall.
Spa Road.
Russel and Rock Streets.
Rock Street.
Lower Castle Street.
Ivy Terrace, and the Kerry Co. Museum
Denny Street.
Ashe Street.
Spotlight: Ouro Preto, Brazil
Amazing town. Architecture dates to the Brazilian Gold Rush, mid-19th c. Nearby Belo Horizonte, a pre-planned city, replaced it as the capital of Minas before industry or growth set in. Check it out in Google Street View.
One thing that’s really captivating about this town’s plan is the natural way in which it was built into the wild contours of the land. For example, take a look at the 0-200 blocks of Ruo Claudio Manoel, and note how the dense buildings of the town center are worked into the steep hillside, without any sacrifice to the quality of architecture on a lot-by-lot basis. A little further up the hill, near where the map is centered, the Praça Tiradentes represents an almost perfect adaptation to the land of a classic plaza or forum that one might find in a small European city.
Photos remain the copyright of Google, and are used in accordance with the principles of Fair Use. Explore the streets of Ouro Preto, yourself, here.
Rua São Francisco.
Praça Tiradentes.
Rua Conde de Bobadela.
Ruo Claudio Manoel.