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Developer of NYC Accessible accepts Runner-up Prize for Best Accessibility App for Disabled MTA Customers during an App Quest 3.0. event sponsored by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, AT&T, Transit Wireless, and New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), to announce winners in their global competition to solicit development of new mobile solutions designed to help improve commutes for millions of subway, bus and rail riders across the five boroughs. Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Patrick Cashin
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Back row:
David T, James F., _, Koichi, Felix, Nanda
Front row
_, James L.?, Eryn, Michael D., _
Developer of iRideNYC accepts Large Organziation Regognition Award during an App Quest 3.0. event sponsored by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, AT&T, Transit Wireless, and New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), to announce winners in their global competition to solicit development of new mobile solutions designed to help improve commutes for millions of subway, bus and rail riders across the five boroughs. Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Patrick Cashin
Fagus grandifolia in winter foliage, Korstian Division of Duke Forest
Pentax K-1
SMC Pentax-M 1:4 75~150 @ 150mm
Iridient Developer
Affinity Photo
Developer of YoTrain! accepts Grand Prize award for Best Accessibility App for MTA Customers with Disabilities during an App Quest 3.0. event sponsored by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, AT&T, Transit Wireless, and New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), to announce winners in their global competition to solicit development of new mobile solutions designed to help improve commutes for millions of subway, bus and rail riders across the five boroughs. Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Patrick Cashin
Developer of 1-Touch NYCT accepts Popular Choice award during an App Quest 3.0. event sponsored by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, AT&T, Transit Wireless, and New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), to announce winners in their global competition to solicit development of new mobile solutions designed to help improve commutes for millions of subway, bus and rail riders across the five boroughs. Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Patrick Cashin
But you may still find some benefits and drawbacks to think about when discussing responsive sites:
RESPONSIVE WEBSITE PROS RESPONSIVE WEBSITE CONS
Automatic - Generally 1 web developer (when completed with “responsive-design”) is it's important to handle all devices, meaning much less time with upkeep.Redesign - Because the responsive movement/standard continues to be a newcomer some which are 2 years of age most likely aren’t responsive and could require a redesign or retooling to operate.
Marketing - It’s become obvious that Google along with other search engines like google are rewarding websites that custom-tailor encounters for every audience and supply the very best encounters. You might even see a lift searching traffic by applying a mobile-enhanced experience.New/Flexible - This really is partly for designers and partly for that companies thinking about responsive, due to the “flexible” nature of responsive set it up means design conventions are new.
Less Costly - With time, particularly if you’re creating a site today responsive is usually included in most development companies processes and really should be painless/cost-liberated to maintain.
WHAT’S The Conclusion ON MOBILE Versus. RESPONSIVE?
At Atilus the selection continues to be simple. Because the Bootstrap 3 (mobile first) framework arrived on the scene we’ve been creating every new site with responsive web developer. It’s meant a big change internally on design thinking, execution and testing - but it’s why is sense for 99% in our clients.
Within our opinion, there’s only 2 conditions when you think about a “mobile-only” form of your site:
You possess an existing website and would like to not incur the expense of redesigning it using responsive. We’ve carried this out for a lot of clients, and you will find even tools available to help with this particular rapidly and instantly.
You’re a company that’s doing lots of internet businessOrproduct sales and also the economies of developing out another website seem sensible. Creating a separate website experience for the screen makes lots of sense whenever a small rise in conversions on sales means huge amount of money in extra revenue. In most other cases, responsive design will accommodate your audience all right and can let your business to see the very best harmony of updating your site one place, but ensuring web developer still very functional on cellular devices.
What exactly are your requirements? Can there be anything I missed? Don't hesitate to leave a remark or ask any queries and I’ll make sure to answer.
Ribbit was an early user of the LinkedIn API (in Ribbit Mobile). We congratulate the LinkedIn on the formal launch of their new developer site and tools.
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5"x7" B&W photochemical print of "water under the bridge"
Lumsden, Saskatchewan, Canada
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Ilford 5x7 Multigrade IV resin coated glossy paper with grade 3 filter, Beseler 45MX enlarger, Schneider Kreuznach f4.5 135mm enlarging lens, PQ Universal paper developer
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Toyo View 45F Large Format 4"x5" monorail view camera - bag bellows, Yankee fresnel ground glass
Nikkor SW 75mm f4.5 lens in Copal #0 shutter (~20mm effective vs 35mm film)
Ilford FP4+ 125 ISO B&W sheet film exposed at f8 for 1/500 sec. with front swing & rise
stand developed in BTZS tube at 20 C for 1 hour with slow inversion every 3 mins and no agitation in "PQ-MAX" Development details on FilmDev:
7.5ml Ilford PQ Universal, 2.5ml Kodak T-MAX Developer, 1L water
Ilfostop at 1:19, Rapid fixer at 1:4 for 10 minutes, Ilford Washaid in rinse
scanner Epson Perfection V500 at 6400 dpi 48 bit
Ah those cagey developers! They buy up our farm land, scrape the topsoil away and cover it over with junky, low-density houses. But they "protect the environment" by using biodiesel fuels. Wow.
So, my C41 chemicals were exhausted, haha.
Mamiya C330
Seiko 80mm f/2.8
Kodak Ektar 100
Jobo C41 Press Kit
Software Developer
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Hire Toolbar Developer for Your Custom Toolbar Development in USA and India. www.total-toolbar.com/hire-toolbar-developers.php
CAMERA: Canon NEW F1
LENS: Canon fd lens 85mm f/1,8 S.S.C.
FILM: Color Negative Film Fuji Eterna 250D ISO 250 36 exp. manual winding
FILM DEVELOPMENT: author's manual film development
ECN-2 handmade ki [8min 30sec 30 °C]
FILM SCANNED: OpticFilm Plustek 7400 with SilverFast Software
SHOOTING DATE: 10/2015
DEVELOPER DATE: 09/2016
TECHNIQUE: Multiple Exposure unedited.
NUMBER OF EXPOSURES: 2
NO POST-PROCESSING
OBJECT: "LUKOIL" Charitable Foundation
PLACE: Moscow, Russia 2015
Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States
The former Manufacturers Trust Company Building, erected in 1953-54 on the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and West 43rd Street, was one of the first buildings in the United States to introduce International Style modernism to bank design. Planned by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, with Gordon Bunshaft serving as chief designer, the building is an important early work by one of the country's leading architectural firms, best known for its pioneering International Style business buildings that provided a potent symbol of corporate America in the post-World War II period. A five-story glass box, featuring clear glass window-walls, thin polished aluminum mullions, and dark gray facings, the monochromatic building is notable for the spare elegance and refinement of its design. The design's transparency and the articulation of the underlying skeletal structure of the building led the Architectural Forum to praise it as "the first big building truly to fulfill architects' immaculate drafting board idea of glass as an invisible material."
The modernity and openness of the design reflect the concerns of Manufacturers Trust president Horace C. Flanigan who had wanted this prominently sited branch building to present a modern image and an "inviting look" in keeping with contemporary trends in the banking industry that emphasized customer service. The novel aspects of the design elicited extensive press coverage and attracted 15,000 visitors to the bank in its first week of operation. By proving that good modern design was a lure to customers, the Manufacturers Trust Company Building led many other New York City banks to create similar glass-walled banks in the 1950s, and by the 1960s such banks were found throughout the country.
History of the Site
In the late nineteenth century, Fifth Avenue between 34th Street and 59th Street was the most fashionable residential street in New York. The blockfront on the west side of the avenue between West 42nd and West 43rd Streets was occupied by the Hotel Bristol and the homes of several wealthy businessmen, among them financier Russell Sage who lived at No. 506 in the 1880s and 1890s. West 43rd Street and vicinity contained a number of private clubs and associations: the Columbia Club at No. 4 (Clarence S. Luce, 1890-91); the Century Association at No. 7 (McKim, Mead & White, 1889-90); the Racquet & Tennis Club at No. 27 (Cyrus L.W. Eidlitz, 1891); and the Academy of Medicine at No. 17 (R.H. Robertson, 1889). By 1900, the character of the neighborhood on the blocks north of 42nd Street began to change with the construction of, or the conversion of private residences to, exclusive retail shops, restaurants, and office buildings.
The eight-story Hotel Bristol at 500 Fifth Avenue became the Bristol Building in 1902 with offices in its upper stories and stores at street level. A few blocks to the east, the construction of the present Grand Central Terminal and the electrification and submergence of the railroad tracks along Park Avenue in 1903-13 spurred the development of an important hotel and business district. By 1923, so many banks and trust companies had established uptown branches in the Grand Central vicinity and on the blocks of Fifth Avenue north of 42nd Street, that Rider's New York City guide reported the area was popularly known as "Little Wall Street." Forty-second Street, which linked this business district to Times Square, became one of the busiest thoroughfares in New York while Fifth Avenue remained the most fashionable shopping street in the city, leading the Real Estate Record & Guide to declare the Bristol Building parcel at 500 Fifth Avenue, at the northwest corner of 42nd Street, as "the most valuable building site on Manhattan Island north of Wall Street. "
The demolition of the Bristol Building and subsequent construction of the office building at 500 Fifth Avenue had a significant impact on the eventual development of the adjacent Manufacturers Trust Company, because its planning affected the zoning of the entire Fifth Avenue blockfront. In 1922, Gerry Estates, Inc. entered into an agreement with Walter J. Salmon, one of the most successful real estate developers in the midtown business district, to redevelop the site at 500 Fifth Avenue. With other projects in the works, including the adjacent Salmon Tower at 11-27 West 42nd Street, Salmon delayed beginning work on the corner site until the summer of 1929. At that time he announced plans for a fifty-eight-story building with frontages of 100 feet on Fifth Avenue and 208 feet on 42nd Street to be built to the design of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon. The zoning code permitted a taller building on 42nd Street than on Fifth Avenue, so Salmon acquired a long-term lease on the adjacent four-story converted dwelling at 508 Fifth Avenue in 1927; by merging the zoning lots of this twenty-five by 102-foot building and that of 500 Fifth Avenue he was able to build a higher tower than would have otherwise been possible. No. 508 Fifth continued to be subleased to various concerns, including the Gotham Silk Hosiery Company and Huyler's confectionery store. The adjacent eight- story Ziegler Building, at 510-514 Fifth Avenue, constructed c. 1900, housed the tobacconist Alfred Dunhill of London, as well as numerous lawyers, accountants, and insurance brokers in the 1920s and 1930s. Both properties were owned by the Mutual Insurance Company in 1941 when Manufacturers Trust Company — then occupying a branch at 513 Fifth Avenue — began negotiations to lease them as a site for a new bank building. Wartime restrictions on building supplies kept the project from going forward immediately, but in October 1944 the two institutions entered into a lease in which Mutual Life agreed to construct a new bank building to the specifications of Manufacturers Trust. A corollary agreement with Walter Salmon permitted Manufacturers Trust Company to sublease (and ultimately redevelop) 508 Fifth Avenue, provided that during the time Salmon's lease remained in effect (1944-65) any building erected on the portion of the lot at No. 508 would not exceed the height of the then-existing building (sixty-three feet) or otherwise interfere with 500 Fifth Avenue. Thus, the height of the new bank building was effectively limited to four or five stories.
Manufacturers Trust Company and Its Fifth Avenue Branch
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS
The Mechanics Bank of Brooklyn, the parent organization of the Manufacturers Trust Company, was organized in 1853 to serve the business
community in Brooklyn's Fourteenth Ward. In 1865, it reorganized as a national bank under the name Manufacturers' National Bank of New York with offices in the Wall Street area. After financial reverses in 1867, the bank moved back to Brooklyn. In 1914 it merged with another Brooklyn institution, the Citizens Trust Company (established 1904), to create the Manufacturers-Citizens Trust Company, which changed its name to the Manufacturers Trust Company in 1915. From the beginning the bank emphasized neighborhood banking services, acquiring numerous branches by purchasing and merging with such institutions as the West Side Bank (1918), the Ridgewood National Bank (1921), the North Side Bank of Brooklyn, the Industrial Savings Bank (1922), the Columbia Bank (1923), the Yorkville Bank, the Gotham Bank, the Fifth National Bank, and the Commonwealth Bank of New York (1927). By 1944 Manufacturers Trust had sixty-seven branches in addition to its main office at 55 Broad Street and was committed to further expansion. Many new services were introduced during the late 1930s and early 1940s, including personal loans, property improvement loans, special checking accounts, construction loans, and industrial credit for manufacturers. The bank's Annual Report for 1944 noted that "the rapid growth of many of our offices, furthered by the various new services we are extending to our customers and by the special services incident to the war effort, will soon call for additional expansion of quarters." The situation was particularly acute in the firm's midtown branch at 513 Fifth Avenue, which was "second only to the Head Office in the amount and importance of its business." According to a document prepared by the bank in 1944, this small branch had begun to approach its limit almost ten years before when it was serving approximately 7,500 customers and since then had added 10,000 new accounts."
In December 1944, the architectural firm of Walker & Gillette filed plans with the Department of Buildings for a four-story building "in what has been called the Federal Classic style of architecture." Construction was delayed due to government restrictions on building materials and rent control provisions which prevented Mutual Life from dispossessing the commercial tenants from the existing buildings on the site. In 1948, the bank announced it had cancelled its plans for the new Fifth Avenue branch, but after considerable negotiation the project was revived in July 1950. Walker & Poor, the successor firm to Walker & Gillette, was retained to revise the plans and in
January 1951 the insurance company delivered the Ziegler Building free of tenants to Manufacturers Trust. The day after the last of the office tenants vacated the building, new federal restrictions were imposed on the use of steel and other critical materials in response to the Korean War effort. Faced with the prospect of paying rent on an empty eight-story building, Manufacturers Trust leased the Ziegler Building to several government agencies. Finally, in July 1952, after eight years of delay, the government released the steel needed for the new building. New plans were filed with the Department of Buildings in April 1953. However, the new designs were not by Walker & Poor, which had been dismissed by the bank in 1951 after a dispute over an unusually high bill for professional services, but by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, a firm that had just established a place for itself at the forefront of modernist design with its revolutionary Lever House building.
The International Style and the Manufacturers Trust Company Building
The modernism exemplified by the Manufacturers Trust Building is that of the second wave of the International Style which flourished in this country in the post-World War II period. This style was given its name in 1932 when architect Philip Johnson and historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock organized a momentous exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in which they presented a body of avant-garde modernist architecture that they argued represented a new "International Style" within the modernist movement.
A worldwide depression in the 1930s, the rise of authoritarian governments in Germany, Russia, and Italy which favored conservative architecture, and later the disruptions caused by World War II, severely restricted the number of new buildings produced by avant-garde architects in Europe; however, the widespread publication of existing works and the emigration of such key figures as Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, both of whom found academic positions at architecture schools in the United States, inspired a new generation of architects and presaged the broad acceptance of the International Style in the post- World War II period.
Gordon Bunshaft was among this younger generation of architects in America, which also included Eero Saarinen, Wallace K. Harrison, I.M. Pei, and Philip Johnson, who were particularly influenced by European modernism. Mies, himself, had a successful career in the United States, producing a number of buildings in Chicago which were to have a major impact on American architecture. At the Armour Institute (later the Illinois Institute of Technology, master plan 1939- 41, buildings 1942-56) and Lake Shore Drive Apartments (1948-51), Mies sought to reduce his buildings to skeletons of polished metal with glass "skins" which achieve their beauty through a clear articulation of structure and proportional relationships, and refined detailing. Mies's American buildings were especially influential for Gordon Bunshaft in his design for the Manufacturers Trust Building. Among the particularly Miesian elements of Bunshaft's design was the use of thin vertical mullions, projected ten inches from the curtain walls, to create shadows "that provide texture and depth to the glass wall" and emphasize the skeletal construction of the building. Because Manufacturers Trust was partially shielded from direct light by taller, surrounding buildings, Bunshaft used clear rather than tinted glass; this, coupled with the controlled lighting of the interior allowed him to achieve an ideal envisioned by Mies in the early 1920s, the transparent building. (In contrast, the glass at Lever House is tinted blue- green and the mullions are raised only one-and-one quarter inch from the glass, so that the wall reads as a taut, impenetrable skin.) Thus, the Architectural Forum considered Manufacturers Trust, "the first big building truly to fulfill architects' immaculate drafting board idea of glass as an invisible material" and concluded that "at last the deeply sculptural feeling of a steel frame under construction has been retained in the completed building." In addition, the Forum believed the lack of color in the glass and the monochrome palate of the Manufacturers facade created a greater sense of "severity and dignity than [at] Lever."
Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore. Owings & Merrill The firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was established in 1936 in Chicago by Louis Skidmore (1897-1962) and Nathaniel Owings (1903-84). By 1950, in addition to the original headquarters, the firm had established offices in New York City, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon. Although the offices were managed individually, professional expertise was shared among them, and they followed a common approach to building design and project management. Organized along the model of a large business enterprise with numerous employees trained in a variety of disciplines, the firm was able to offer a complete package of architectural, interior and environmental design, engineering, planning, and project management. Among its major innovations within the field of architecture was the use of a team approach, in which a core group consisting of an administrative partner, a design partner, a project manager, senior designers, and technical personnel remained constant on a project in order to ensure consistency and integrity of design. From its inception, the firm made the ideological commitment to design only in the modern mode and "embraced the belief that architecture could improve the quality of human life."
The New York office of the firm opened in 1937, when Skidmore and Owings were offered a commission for alterations to the New York offices of the American Radiator Company, on the condition that a partner remain in New York to supervise the work. By 1939, the partners decided to keep two non-centralized offices, with Skidmore at the head of the New York branch and Owings in charge of the Chicago office. Specialists were hired in varied disciplines in order to take on larger commissions. One of these specialists was John O. Merrill, an architectural engineer who joined the firm as a limited partner in 1939. Two years earlier, Gordon Bunshaft had been hired as a designer. His imprint was eventually to shape the design image of SOM.
Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1909 to Russian immigrant parents, Gordon Bunshaft was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in architecture and came under the influence of a young professor, Lawrence B. Anderson, who fostered an appreciation of modernist design. Bunshaft worked briefly for Edward Durrell Stone and Raymond Loewy before beginning his forty-two year career at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. In his early years with the firm he designed buildings for the New York World's Fair of 1939-40 and Hostess House, a hospitality center for cadets at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Illinois (1941-42). After serving in the Corps of Engineers during World War II, Bunshaft rejoined SOM in 1947. Later that year he transferred to the firm's New York office; he became a full partner in 1949. It was as chief designer for Lever House (1950-52) that Bunshaft first earned renown. In the words of architectural critic, Paul Goldberger, this twenty- four story office tower was "New York's first major commercial structure with a glass curtain-wall (only the United Nations Secretariat preceded it), and it burst onto the stuffy, solid masonry wall of Park Avenue like a vision of a new world."
Following Lever House, Bunshaft was involved in the design of a number of outstanding buildings, including the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company headquarters (1957) in Bloomfield, Connecticut; the Pepsi-Cola Building (1958-60) on Park Avenue; the United States Air Force Academy (1959) in Colorado Springs; the Chase Manhattan Bank Headquarters and Plaza (1960-61) and 140 Broadway (1964-67) in lower Manhattan; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (1963) at Yale University; the W.R. Grace Building (1973) on West 42nd Street; the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library (1971) at the University of Texas, Austin; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (1974) in Washington, D.C.; and the National Commercial Bank (1983) in Jedda, Saudi Arabia.
Gordon Bunshaft was awarded the Brunner Prize of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1955, and its gold medal in 1984. He also received the Medal of Honor from the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. He was awarded the Pritzker Prize, often called the architectural equivalent of the Nobel Prize, in 1988, two years before his death.
The Design of the Manufacturers Trust Building
In an interview with architectural historian Carol Krinsky, Gordon Bunshaft indicated that Manufacturers Trust Company first consulted SOM about plans for a new Fifth Avenue branch in 1953 on the recommendation of Lou Crandall, a member of the Board of Directors at Manufacturers Trust, who headed the Fuller Construction Company which had built Lever House. It should be noted, however, that Manufacturers Trust had already established a relationship with Louis Skidmore (head of the New York branch of SOM) who had been serving on the advisory board of the bank's 57th Street branch since 1950. Skidmore's longstanding friendship with Horace C. ("Hap") Flanigan, who had been elected president and chief executive officer of Manufacturers Trust Company in September 1951, may well have been a factor in securing the commission for SOM. Initially, the bank requested that SOM review Walker & Poor's plans to see if the design could be improved while retaining the structural drawings. According to Krinsky, only an hour after their initial meeting, "Bunshaft called to convince Crandall that it would be unwise to try to save a small amount of money on engineering fees when a better building might result from a fresh start."
In creating a new design for the bank, SOM had to take into account certain programmatic restrictions that were written into the 1953 agreement between the Mutual Life Insurance Company and Manufacturers Trust, amending the lease of 1944. This agreement required Manufacturers to erect a new building that would have "no less than 25,000 and no more than 70,000 square feet of floor space at or above street level," would "occupy the entire legally permissible street frontage on Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street" at street level, and would "be planned as to make available for banking purposes the major portion of the street floor." In contrast to the original agreement of 1944, the entire cost of the building was to be borne by Manufacturers Trust, though Mutual Life agreed to loan the bank $1,000,000 toward demolition and construction. The covenants regarding 508 Fifth Avenue remained in effect, limiting the height of the building on at least one quarter of the site. In addition, Horace Flanigan expressed several major requirements for the design. First, the design had to be adaptable for some other type of business, since as a banker during the Depression he had come to realize how difficult it was to sell or lease a traditional bank building when a branch closed. Second, the building had to be capable of serving a high volume of retail and commercial customers, and have offices and a conference room where the bank president and officers could meet with clients who found it inconvenient to travel downtown. Most of all, the building had to present a modern image and "an inviting look" in keeping with the bank's emphasis on customer service, as epitomized in its advertising slogans "Everybody's Bank Just Around the Corner" and "Come and See Us, You'll Be Very Welcome."
"Sensing the opportunity for a masterpiece," Louis Skidmore followed a procedure he had initiated for the firm's World's Fair projects, sponsoring an informal, weekend competition among the young designers in the firm to produce conceptual sketches. According to Nathaniel Owings, "they were encouraged to come up with whatever popped into their heads, and the history and tradition of banking be damned." Designer Charles Evans Hughes III placed first with a sketch that contained several elements which were eventually incorporated into the executed bank building. Hughes envisioned a glass-walled building of four stories, with two principal floors given over to customer services and a penthouse story surrounded by a roof garden for the executive offices. A principal feature of the design was a massive bank vault that could be viewed easily from the street through the bank's clear glass walls. Hughes's design underwent many modifications as the firm's experts in design, materials, and construction developed the project, but his basic concept remained. Responsibility for this prestigious project was given to the firm's senior designer Gordon Bunshaft and to William S. Brown, an expert on modern pre-fabricated materials, who served as project coordinator.
The resulting building is a transparent, luminous clear glass box which architectural critic Louis Mumford likened to a lantern. Occupying the entirety of its 100 by 125-foot site, it has curtain walls of clear glass on both Fifth Avenue and West 43rd Street. Thin, polished aluminum mullions and horizontal rails hold the glass in place (the panes on the second story, measuring 9 feet-8 inches x 22 feet and weighing 1,500 pounds, were the largest ever installed in a building at the time). Dark gray spandrel panels of polished opaque wire-glass conceal the floor slabs. Treated as an uninterrupted expanse of clear glass, the Fifth Avenue facade originally was designed with no entrance or signage, but rather the building's use was to be indicated solely by the gleaming polished steel vault visible through the plate glass window. The entrance to the banking space is on West 43rd Street; it originally was marked only by a discrete aluminum sign with white lettering. A second entrance at the west end of the 43rd Street facade provides access to the elevator corridor at the rear of the building.
Supporting the building are eight interior columns set eleven feet from the Fifth Avenue building line and twenty feet from the West 43rd Street building line. Concrete floor slabs are cantilevered over the relatively short spans from the columns to the clear glass walls. At the second story, the cantilevered floor is pulled back from the exterior wall, so that the main banking areas appear to be contained within one forty-foot-high space. The concrete slabs were deliberately kept thin both to meet the building height limitation and to create an impression of extreme lightness. This aesthetic of lightness is enhanced by the thinness of the external metal skeleton which the construction superintendent for the project described "as more like jewelry than building." At the same time, the illumination produced by thousands of cathode tubes concealed behind thin plastic panels dematerializes the surface of the ceiling, contributing to the sense that the slabs are weightless and floating. This high level of illumination was intended to counteract the natural reflectivity of the clear glass walls. As the
Architectural Forum noted it is "an old merchandizing trick" to put more illumination inside a store window than outside the clear glass to ensure that the contents can be seen,
But doing this to a five-story building is new and surprising, a true landmark in the delineation of space. It makes a glass wall into something it has not been before, an invisible control instead of a mysterious barrier.
The International Style as a Corporate Symbol
In addition to its aesthetic appeal, the design of the Manufacturers Trust Company Building also created just the "inviting" impression Horace Flanigan had requested from the architects. The striking difference between this modern clear glass- walled bank and "the ponderous stone piles which banks have traditionally inhabited" was viewed by Manufacturers Trust as being symbolic of the institution's commitment to modern banking service. This was acknowledged by Flanigan in a news release published by Manufacturers in conjunction with the bank's opening in September 1954: These walls give the bank a wide-open, inviting look and turn it, day and night, into a giant showcase. . . . The building will be its own best salesman, a merchandising concept new in banking and one that we believe pioneers the way to better customer service.
Gordon Bunshaft conceived of his building in terms of a department store:
This is a store type of operation, . . . open, departmentalized, efficient. Downstairs on street level we put the special checking division where the main volume of business is handled — the 10 cents-a-check department where you go in, cash a check, and get out fast. On paydays the traffic is terrific.
The emphasis on new services and customer relations had been central to Manufacturers Trust's growth from the late 1930s. In this the bank was one of leaders of a general trend in the banking industry known as "the rise of department store banking," a term coined by R.W. Goldschmidt, a student of American banking, in 1933 to describe the trend for commercial banks to take on the traditional roles of savings, trust, and investment banks in order to offer their customers an ever expanding variety of services. The increasing role of federal and state regulatory agencies in fixing rates of interest and terms of loans had also played a part in Manufacturers' expansion of service, since it was through customer service that banks could most effectively compete with one another. It had long been realized that attractive architecture was good advertising for a bank and a lure to customers. In fact, even before World War II certain experts on bank architecture had urged the adoption of features found in the Manufacturers Trust Company Fifth Avenue branch: bright lights, a friendly atmosphere, and "large windows to permit the public to see into the bank." But with a few exceptions (most notably the PSFS Building in Philadelphia), the prewar designs that incorporated these features remained architecturally traditional. It was the post-war generation of architects, led by SOM, who were to provide an idiom that would convey the modem image desired by the banking industry. As Carol Krinsky writes:
Some clients chose the ostensible fiinctionalism of modernism because it was practical; others chose it out of a heightened aesthetic sensitivity or the desire to appear progressive. 'We never had to sell modernism to anybody,' said Bunshaft. 'You have to understand the time. It was a unique and marvelous thing, the situation after the war. Lots of young architects, disciples of Mies and Corbusier, had just finished their training and were anxious to do something new. At the same time, the heads of these big corporations needed new facilities and they all wanted something new-looking. I'm sure these corporate presidents all lived in colonial houses in Connecticut, but for their offices they wouldn't consider anything but modern. They all wanted buildings they could be proud of.
Manufacturers Trust's new Fifth Avenue branch building was an immediate success. The modern style, then so novel for banks, the transparent walls so at odds with traditional bank imagery, and such remarkable features as the 1.000 ton Mosier safe "ten feet from the sidewalk" and "the largest plates of glass ever made in this country" evoked vast press coverage and public response. The New York Times, New Yorker, Life, Saturday Evening Post, and Fortune were among the publications that covered the opening of the building, which attracted 15,000 visitors. Buildings, Lighting, Office Management, and Management Methods also covered novel aspects of the building design for their specialized audiences and the Architectural
Forum, Architectural Record, and Progressive Architecture were united in their praise for the design. For the bank, the greatest praise came from the depositors — nine months after the new branch opened the Times reported that the branch's savings accounts had tripled and special checking accounts and commercial accounts had doubled since moving across the street from its old location. Harold Miner, the vice-president in charge of the branch, credited "it all to the sparkling, nearly all-glass building that has caught the eyes of bankers, business men, and architects the world over."
With such strong evidence "that modern banking premises are a strong attraction for new accounts," Manufacturers Trust stepped up its program of modernizing and redecorating its branch offices in the modern style. Within a few years, many New York City banks opened similar glass-walled banks employing International Style design. By the 1960s such banks were found throughout the country.
Description
Five stories high, including a setback penthouse for executive offices and mechanical equipment, the Manufacturers Trust Company Building has frontages of 100 feet on Fifth Avenue and 125 feet on West 43rd Street. Curtain walls of clear glass are employed for both the Fifth Avenue and West 43rd Street facades. The arrangement of the two facades is asymmetrical; at the south end of the Fifth Avenue facade a narrow strip of polished Canadian black granite sheathes the building's side wall, and at the western end of the West 43rd Street facade, the blank wall of the corner fire stair is also sheathed in black granite (inscribed with the names of the architects, "Skidmore Owings & Merrill," and of the builders, "George A. Fuller Company"). Black granite is also employed for the plinth that runs along the base of the building. Above this plinth is a polished aluminum sill that supports the slender polished aluminum mullions and horizontal rails that hold the panes of clear glass in place.
Dark gray spandrel panels of polished opaque wire- glass conceal the floor slabs and provide horizontal accents to counter the strong vertical rhythm established by the mullions (these panels survive intact on the West 43rd Street facade; many have been replaced on Fifth Avenue with dark, non- reflective panels). The clear glass window panes are extremely large for the period, those at the double- height second story measuring 9 feet-8 inches x 22 feet.
At the fifth story, the T-shaped penthouse is divided into office and mechanical sections. Located in the eastern portion of the penthouse, the office suite is faced with clear glass curtain walls and has an overhanging roof which is trimmed with a wide cast-stone and aluminum coping that provides a strong horizontal accent to crown the building. The mechanical section at the west end of the penthouse is faced in gray brick and abuts the eastern side wall of the adjacent building. This penthouse is partially screened from view by an aluminum and translucent glass parapet which is set back from the edge of the fourth-story roofline. As with its design for Lever House, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill provided a special window cleaning gondola that was lowered from the fourth-story roof. Small movable brackets are used to suspend the gondola. A pair of flagpoles projects from the roof at the south end of the Fifth Avenue facade.
At the ground story, the Fifth Avenue facade has no entrance, although the building's use is indicated by the gleaming polished steel vault visible through the clear plate glass windows. On West 43rd Street, at the east end of the facade, the entrance to the banking space occupies the second, third, and fourth bays. The second and fourth bays each contain three glass doors with vertical stainless steel door pulls, while the third bay is filled by a polished granite panel which is fitted with a circular steel night deposit door. An aluminum Chase Bank sign with a white logo spans the three entrance bays. A second entrance at the west end of the 43rd Street facade, providing access to the elevator corridor, also has three glass doors and a non-historic metal band with the numerals "510" applied to a non-historic black panel.
Subsequent History
The Manufacturers Trust Company Building was awarded the Architectural League's Gold Medal for Architecture and the Municipal Art Society's Plaque of Commendation in 1955, and the Fifth Avenue Association's Award for Excellence in 1956.
Today, the building's exterior remains intact except for the changes in signage, alterations to the West 43rd Street entrances, the replacement in kind of several clear glass panels, and the replacement of many of the dark gray glass spandrel panels on the Fifth Avenue facade with dark, non-reflective panels. In the years since the building opened, Manufacturers Trust continued to grow, merging with Hanover Bank in 1961 to create the Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company. According to a representative of that bank, the Fifth Avenue branch office remained "from a business perspective . . . one of the most important in the branch system. With balances of more than $160MM, it serves the hub of the midtown market, and — for decades — has been a lynch-pin in our Manhattan system."
In February 1992, Manufacturers Hanover acquired full ownership of the land beneath the building from Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York. Manufacturers Hanover Trust later merged with Chemical Bank, which subsequently merged with Chase Manhattan Bank, which was renamed Chase Bank in 1996. The building remains in banking use, with the addition of retail use on West 43rd Street.
- From the 1997 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report
this was where all the developers sat at my old job (only showing half the room.) aside from many dual monitor pc's it was filled with nerf guns, marshmellow guns, usb-powered operator controlled rocket launchers, bean bag chairs. basically what everyone should have in their work environment.
NBR Land Developers,is a young,dynamic and vibrant real estate developer from Bangalore formed to fulfill the aspirations of people to have their own house.
The Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler relational model is an intermediate model between the logical model and the physical models. It supports relational design decisions independent of the constraints of the target physical platform(s). The relational model displays views, tables, columns and their datatypes and all relationships. Diagrams can be formatted to highlight groups of tables. In this example the tables assigned to different schema are highlighted through colour differentiation.
Photo USE: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 You must give photo credit: by Maggie Hallahan, Microsoft, Azure, Visual Studio. Public Institution, Non-profit NGO, Educational, Private Person, and Researchers may use this image for free. This image may not be used in Commercial: Advertising, Entertainment, or in any for-profit use with out a partnership agreement with Microsoft.
View approximately SSE during a December 2011 flight from Palm Springs to Chicago.
Upper (southernmost) reaches of Canyon de Chelly National Monument in northeastern Arizona.
Pentax K10D
Pentax 105/2.8
Iridient Developer + Affinity Photo
I couldn't resist. Yes, I had to turn around, park, meter and make this image, all for the yuk-yuk of it all. I make no apologies.
Pentax SV, 50mm Takumar, Kodak Double X.
Collection: A. D. White Architectural Photographs, Cornell University Library
Accession Number: 15/5/3090.00865
Title: Warwick Castle
Building Date: ca. 1300-ca. 1499
Photograph date: ca. 1865-ca. 1895
Location: Europe: United Kingdom; Warwickshire, Warwick
Materials: albumen print
Image: 6 x 8 1/4 in.; 15.24 x 20.955 cm
Provenance: Transfer from College of Architecture, Art and Planning
Persistent URI: http://hdl.handle.net/1813.001/5sz9
There are no known copyright restrictions on this image. The digital file is owned by the Cornell University Library which is making it freely available with the request that, when possible, the Library be credited as its source.
We had some help with the geocoding from Web Services by Yahoo!
Silver gelatin print
Nikon F3
Kodak Tri-x
Several layers of developer, stopped and washed between, fixed at the end.
Just some fooling around for fun
Highbridge, The Bronx, New York City, New York, United States
Noonan Plaza Apartments, in the Highbridge section of the Bronx, is one of the most impressive Art Deco style apartment complexes in the borough. Built in 1931 for Irish-born developer Bernard J. Noonan, it was designed by the firm of Horace Ginsberg, with the exterior credited to Marvin Fine. The prolific Ginsberg and Fine helped to provide the Bronx with one of its architectural signatures, the urban modernist apartment building, including Park Plaza Apartments (1929-31) on Jerome Avenue. Noonan and Ginsberg had previously collaborated on a number of speculative 1920s apartment buildings in Highbridge, prior to Noonan Plaza.
Situated on a large sloping site, with frontages along Ogden and Nelson Avenues and West 168th Street, the complex is six-to-eight stories with a sophisticated site plan – it is divided into units with exterior perimeter light courts and an interior garden court, an arrangement that provided for apartment layouts with multiple exposures for maximum light and air. The building is clad in tan ironspot brick, with a vertical emphasis consisting of continuous piers contrasting with brown-and-black brick spandrel panels and black brick and geometric pattern accents on the top story. The main entrance, at the corner of Nelson Avenue and West 168th Street, has an angled portico leading into the garden court, flanked by towers (originally with ornamental lanterns) with corner windows.
Apartment Buildings in the Bronx in the 1920s-30s
Noonan Plaza Apartments (1931), in the Highbridge section of the Bronx, is one of the most impressive Art Deco style apartment complexes in a borough characterized by its number of significant urban modernist apartment buildings. The enormous growth of New York City’s population in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was accompanied, after World War I, by a housing shortage. As observed by Carla Breeze in New York Deco (1993),
Manhattanites turned to suburbs in Queens and the Bronx where reasonably priced apartments and houses were available, often in more pastoral surroundings. The garden apartment complex, built around a green commons, was appealing in comparison to the vertical congestion of Manhattan. ... The Bronx became a viable suburb as railroad and subway lines opened vast tracts of land to development. Open space was assiduously protected, and six major parks were within reach of the major new projects along the Grand Concourse.3
Many of these Bronx apartment buildings, for professionals and upwardly mobile middle-class families, were among the best in the city in terms of architecture, planning, size of living space, and amenities. Housing historian Richard Plunz identified the garden apartment as a short-lived phenomenon in New York City development, reaching its apogee in the 1920s. It was (and still is) among the most liveable housing in New York. It set a standard of urban housing that has remained unmatched since. Fundamental to the success of the garden apartment was the balance between building mass and open space so that a level of proximity was maintained which involved a strict definition of the public realm to be shared by neighbors.
Important to this neighboring was a sense of theater, which required use of architectural language bordering on the scenographic. The language of the “garden” of the garden apartment, together with its enclosing facades, was critical to the transformation of housing from a consequence of economic formulas to a unique environment. This entered a realm of fantasy, providing every building with an identity that called forth particular places or tenants. The garden was a critical symbol of arrival for the new middle class, while also facilitating the making of a kind of public theater in which the most joyous myths of urban existence could be acted out.
The conception and development of speculative garden apartments was influenced by two movements in New York City by the beginning of the 20th century: the “model tenement,” or improved housing, movement, and “Garden City” movement. Exemplars of these were the City and Suburban Homes Co. Estates, First Avenue (1898-1915) and Avenue A (1900-13), Manhattan, and Sunnyside Gardens (1924-28, Clarence Stein and Henry Wright), Queens. Architect Andrew J. Thomas, in the Jackson Heights neighborhood in Queens in the 1910s-20s, developed by the Queensboro Corp.,5 and elsewhere, was one of the masters of garden apartment design in a wide variety of styles. Plunz wrote that
Jackson Heights... [was] unusual for the notable concentration of a wide range of garden apartment types, but similar building was prominent throughout the city for moderate-income private housing development until the end of the 1930s. The “garden” spaces tended to become more elaborate as time went on. The Queens, Bronx, and Manhattan versions varied, however, with coverages reflecting their differing conditions of density.6
During the housing boom in the Bronx of the 1920s, the design of apartment houses evolved from simpler brick-clad buildings in historical revival styles of previous decades towards more luxurious and ornamented structures and complexes. Around 1929, influenced in part by Manhattan skyscraper, apartment, and commercial design, variations on “Art Deco,” “Moderne,” or “modernistic” styles came to dominate Bronx apartment buildings through the 1930s.
Park Plaza Apartments (1929-31, Horace Ginsberg and Marvin Fine), 1005 Jerome Avenue, is usually considered one of the first and most influential in the borough in the Art Deco style.7 Many of the apartment architects in this period were recent immigrants from Europe, and European modernist trends seen in social housing and other projects, were also incorporated in the borough’s buildings. An example is the United Workers’ Cooperative Colony second complex (1927-29, Herman Jessor with Stefan S. Sajo), 2846-2870 Bronx Park East, reflecting Northern European Expressionist influences.
Among the hallmarks of the 1930s modernist modes in apartment houses were decorative and polychrome brickwork (usually lighter in palette), vertical and horizontal patterning, abstracted decoration, streamlined elements, curved walls, recessed spandrels, corner windows, and “Machine Age” materials such as steel, chrome, and glass brick. As observed by Paul Goldberger of the New York Times,
Art deco was style built largely on the image of a new kind of elegance – sleek and streamlined. It was not so much truly modern as romantically evocative of the modern, using modernism as a decorative theme rather than as a justification for the absence of decoration. Thus the art deco buildings of the Bronx are full of striped metal ornament, abstract geometric patterns on the door and radiator grilles, and vertical stripings of brick.9
The west Bronx, like Miami Beach, became renowned for the large number and variety of apartment houses in the modernist styles of the 1930s; though there was not a distinct Bronx district of these buildings per se, many are located along the Grand Concourse and environs. Located near the Grand Concourse, Noonan Plaza, with its elaborate garden court and impressive Art Deco style, exemplifies the significant trends of this neighborhood and era.
Horace Ginsberg and Marvin Fine, Architects
Among the leading and most prolific architects of apartment house design in the Bronx were Horace Ginsberg and Marvin Fine. Ginsberg (originally Ginzberg) (c. 1897-1969),11 born near Minsk, Russia, of Jewish descent, immigrated to the U.S. as a boy. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School, attended the Cooper Union and Columbia University, and worked for the architectural firm of Jacob Gescheidt & Co. before establishing his own architectural firm by 1921. Ginsberg (he changed his name to Ginsbern c. 1933) was especially active in the design and layout of hundreds of apartments in the Bronx from 1924 to 1940.
The task of designing the facades of these buildings, however, was assigned to Marvin Fine after he joined Ginsberg in 1928. Born in Harlem and raised in Upper Manhattan, Fine (1904-1981) was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (1929), where he was influenced by the work of architect Paul Cret. Early in his career, Fine had worked as a draftsman for Cass Gilbert (1925-26) and George and Edward Blum (1927-28). After the Park Plaza Apartments (1929-31), Fine’s first major job with the Ginsberg firm, they produced designs for numerous modernist apartments on the Grand Concourse and elsewhere throughout the city. Fine is known to have been directly influenced by the contemporary work of architects Raymond Hood and William Van Alen, who were responsible respectively for the American Radiator and Daily News Buildings, and the Chrysler Building.12 Carla Breeze in New York Deco opined that the Ginsberg firm “developed a unique style featuring streamlined forms with modernistic detailing. His [sic] experiments in brick, while planer [sic] rather than three-dimensional, rival those of Ely Jacques Kahn.”13 Noonan Plaza is significant as one of the earliest Ginsberg and Fine collaborations, as one of their early works in the modernist/Art Deco vein, and as a large apartment project with a highly sophisticated planning scheme.
Ginsbern participated in the design of the Harlem River Houses (1936-37, in association with Archibald Manning Brown and other architects), Harlem River Drive and 151st - 153rd Streets, the first federally-funded, -built, and -owned housing project in New York City, constructed to house African-American residents of Harlem, and was architect of the Chock Full O’ Nuts restaurant chain. Horace Ginsbern & Assocs. was organized in 1944, with Fine; Ginsbern’s son, Frederick Morton Ginsbern (1919-1986), a graduate of New York University (1942); and Jules Kabat (1913-1991). Kabat, born in Brooklyn, graduated from New York University (1934), worked as a draftsman and designer for Ginsbern (1934-41), and practiced independently and for Kindland & Drake (1941-45). Horace Ginsbern & Assocs. lasted until 1986.
Bernard J. Noonan
Bernard J. Noonan (c. 1875-1943), the Bronx developer of Noonan Plaza Apartments (1931, Ginsberg and Fine), was born in Edgeworthstown, County Longford, Ireland. He emigrated in 1886, lived in Pennsylvania, and attended St. Bonaventure’s College in Allegany, N.Y., prior to moving to New York City, where he was first listed in a city directory, and naturalized, in 1899. From 1901 until 1918, he was a saloon proprietor, in Greenwich Village, then Hell’s Kitchen, and later, the Upper West Side. For a few years (c. 1919-21), Noonan was working as a dry goods merchant -- through relatives, he became owner of “Flood’s Department Store” on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village.
After venturing into real estate in Yonkers, he acquired several Manhattan apartment buildings, then decided to become involved in real estate full-time around 1921, both as developer and insurance broker. Noonan selected the Highbridge neighborhood in the Bronx as “the most desirable location”15 in New York City for constructing better apartment buildings, and by 1925 had moved his office to one of his buildings there.
The village of Highbridge (originally Highbridgeville) had developed on the high ridge of land along the Harlem River located to the east of High Bridge (1838-48, John B. Jervis, engineer), which was constructed as part of the Croton Aqueduct system that brought New York City its first adequate fresh water supply. The Bronx shore of the Harlem began to be subdivided in the 19th century for building lots along the main thoroughfare, Highbridge (now Ogden) Avenue.
The village was initially settled by the workers who built the Croton Aqueduct and High Bridge, as well as the railroad along the river. Almost entirely Irish originally, these workers were followed later by Jewish immigrants. Development of large apartment buildings was spurred by the Jerome Avenue elevated railroad in 1918 and the subway (with a stop at the Grand Concourse and 161st Street) in 1933. Remnants of the earlier days of Highbridge include the Union Reformed Church of Highbridge (1887-90, Alfred E. Barlow), 1272 Ogden Avenue, and Public School 91 (1889, George W. Debevoise), 1257 Ogden Avenue.16
Noonan’s apartment projects in Highbridge, at first centered in the southern portion of the neighborhood around West 162nd and 163rd Streets, appear to have mostly been collaborations with Horace Ginsberg as architect. Bernard Noonan served as president of the various real estate firms responsible for their construction, including the Manonga Realty Corp., R&B Building Corp.,
Woodycrest Building Corp., and Killsalough Realty Co., and in 1925 he also served as a director of the Broadway Central Bank. Noonan constructed Bernard Court (1921; demolished), 942-948 Woodycrest Avenue; Maryknoll Terrace (1924, Ginsberg), 957-965 Woodycrest Avenue; Wynne Terrace (1925-26, Ginsberg), 963-975 Anderson Avenue; Rose Terrace (1927, Ginsberg), 950 Woodycrest Avenue; Summit Lodge (1927, Ginsberg; demolished), 979-981 Summit Avenue; Noonan Towers and Annex (1924-28, Ginsberg), 939 Woodycrest Avenue and 930 Ogden Avenue, called by the New York Times in 1937 “one of the largest apartment properties in the Bronx;”17 and Noonan Manor (c. 1930), 1001 Woodycrest Avenue. In 1923, Noonan also purchased No. 1130 Woodycrest Avenue (demolished).
Noonan Plaza Apartments
After the mid-19th century, descendants of the James Anderson family began to sell parts of their Highbridge property, previously a farm and then an estate called “Woody Crest,” with a villa at today’s Anderson Avenue and West 164th Street. Following the death of Andrew Anderson, his executors in 1925 sold a large (312 by 288 feet) parcel on the sloping site at West 168th Street and Nelson and Ogden Avenues to real estate investor Stanley Murray for $42,500. This parcel was transferred in July 1930 to Walter J.M. Donovan, a wealthy real estate operator and stockbroker, for $100 subject to the $35,000 mortgage.
In October, the newly-chartered Nelden Corp. (Bernard J. Noonan, president; Morris E. Gallo, treasurer) acquired the property, also for $100 subject to the mortgage, of which $25,000 was due. In March 1931, a ten-year, $1 million dollar first mortgage was obtained for the construction of an apartment complex that came to be known as Noonan Plaza. The Times announced that the six-to-eight-story building, of the garden apartment type, would contain 283 apartments, including suites ranging from one-and-one-half to five rooms (the larger units having two baths), with the layout permitting “at least two exposures for each apartment,” 14 stores, and a “garden court 125 by 110 feet.” The Nelden Corp.’s prospectus, stating that “the style of architecture is modernistic,” boasted that
Noonan Plaza, as planned, represents the highest development in the art of the modern apartment house design and construction. The quality of workmanship used in the structure is unquestionably perfect, showing the finest type of craftsmanship possible. ... One may confidently choose NOONAN PLAZA as one’s permanent home, with the assurance that an attractive and perfectly planned apartment has been selected in a location destined to remain ever free from mediocrity.
A later advertisement claimed that Noonan Plaza and Noonan Towers were the “most modern apartment houses in the Bronx.” Noonan Plaza was touted as convenient to transportation, via bus, New York Central Railroad, subway, and elevated lines; nearby public and parochial schools; and “the Heights shopping and theatre section.”
With principal frontages along Ogden and Nelson Avenues and West 168th Street, Noonan Plaza is clad in tan ironspot brick with a vertical emphasis consisting of continuous piers contrasting with brown-and-black brick spandrel panels and black brick and geometric pattern accents on the top story. The complex, with a sophisticated site plan, is divided into eight units (each with an elevator) with exterior perimeter light courts and an interior garden court – this arrangement provided for apartment layouts with multiple exposures for maximum light and air.
The stores in the building were originally accessible from the interior of the complex. The main entrance, at the corner of Nelson Avenue and West 168th Street, features an angled “portico” (with cast-stone elements) with a gate lodge (“protect[ing] tenants from unwelcome passers-by”),23 and steps and a walkway leading to the interior terraced and landscaped Garden Court. Richard Plunz called the “courtyard entry at Noonan Plaza... one of the best-known examples of the [garden apartment] genre.”24 This entrance is flanked by twin towers with corner windows, intended as “an outstanding landmark of distinction,” which were originally ornamented with etched-glass lanterns (flanked by fins, according to original drawings).
The large Garden Court, onto which all of the interior apartments look and which has five building entrances, originally featured “mosaic” patterned cement walks, trees and shrubbery, statuary, a pond (with fish and swans) crossed by rustic wooden bridges, a lighthouse, and a waterfall in one corner. The complex contained a ballroom and community room, as well as a roof garden promenade (protected by a high balustrade) and playground with sand boxes, swings, and games. Noonan Plaza was assessed at $950,000 in 1931, at a reported investment of $2 million.
The New York Irish (1996), edited by Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher, stated that, despite Bernard Noonan’s heritage as an Irish immigrant and the fact that the Highbridge neighborhood was heavily Irish, Noonan Plaza was rented to upper-middle-class Jewish tenants until they began moving out in the 1950s.26
Later History
Noonan Plaza Apartments was continuously owned by the Nelden Corp. until 1962, when the complex was sold to Southern Assocs., Inc., an entity of what the New York Times called the “largest real estate empire in New York City,”28 that of partners Alex DiLorenzo, Jr., and Sol Goldman. The building’s mortgage (originally $1 million), held by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., was assigned to the Union Life Insurance Co. of Cincinnati, which consolidated it with a second mortgage of $580,000. At the time of DiLorenzo’s death in September 1975, the DiLorenzo-Goldman holdings encompassed over 400 apartment and office buildings just in Manhattan, including the Chrysler Building, as well as hotels, shopping centers, and industrial structures.
The partners were notorious for shielding their ownership through a variety of corporate names – Noonan Plaza was later owned by their Oxford Associates, Inc., Chatham Associates, Inc., and Avon Associates, Inc. The Times reported in May 1976 that Goldman had been “forced by financial reversals and the legal problems of Mr. DiLorenzo’s estate to relinquish more than 40 properties” and that his “setbacks have consequences not only for himself and his late partner’s heirs but also for the banks that hold mortgages on his properties, for tenants – 10,000 live in his apartment buildings and hundreds of thousands work in his office structures – and for the city government, which is owed taxes, and further affected by a drop in property values.”
At the same time as the reverses in the fortunes of the DiLorenzo-Goldman real estate empire, the west Bronx, including the area of the Grand Concourse, was suffering a severe decline that had begun after World War II. The rapid de-industrialization of the city, increasing suburbanization, heavy-handed urban renewal policies, disinvestment by area landlords, and the redlining of much of the Bronx by local banks all contributed to the economic downturn of the area. In the 1970s, many apartment buildings were abandoned by their owners and were set on fire, and the neighborhood suffered a catalogue of ills until it began to stabilize in the 1980s. The demographic composition of the Highbridge neighborhood also underwent substantial changes. The area’s residents, largely of European Jewish extraction, began to move to suburban areas, and the west Bronx became a diverse urban community as African-Americans and Latin Americans settled here.
After the DiLorenzo-Goldman interests defaulted on Noonan Plaza, in 1976 the property fell under the receivership of the Union Central Life Insurance Co., holder of the mortgage. The apartment building was featured in an exhibition that year organized by Donald G. Sullivan and Brian J. Danforth (with the Hunter College Graduate Program in Urban Planning) spotlighting the Art Deco style apartment houses of the Bronx, in which they called Noonan Plaza “nearly devastated” and “represent[ing] the worst that can happen to our fragile housing stock when it is left unprotected.”
This referred to charges of stocking the building with welfare families, followed by squatters, drug dealers, vandals, and hundreds of housing code violations. The New York Times observed that “vandalism has destroyed much of the art deco detailing that once made the building... one of the prides of the Bronx.”
A rescue of Noonan Plaza was attempted in 1976 by the Settlement Housing Fund, a nonprofit housing development corporation, with plans to rehabilitate the complex and convert it into a coop, with the participation of the Noonan Plaza Tenants Association and financing from the New York City Dept. of Housing Preservation and Development. Title to the property was taken by the Highbridge Development Corp., and in 1977 by the Highbridge Housing Development Fund Corp. By 1980, however, the situation reached its nadir, with only six families living there; the Settlement Housing Fund, too beleaguered by the project’s problems and costs, was forced to petition to sell the property, a decision followed by another round of vandalism.
In 1980, the property was acquired by Noonan Plaza Assocs., an entity of Glick Development Affiliates. A $9 million rehabilitation for federally subsidized apartments was completed in 1982 by Glick Construction Co., with the participation of Frederick Ginsbern, son of the original architect. This project received a 1982 Certificate of Merit Award from the Municipal Art Society of New York. Ownership passed in 2004 to Noonan Plaza Assocs., L.P., then in 2005 to Noonan Plaza LLC.
Description
With principal frontages along Ogden and Nelson Avenues and West 168th Street, Noonan Plaza is six to eight stories due to its sloping site, and has a sophisticated site plan, divided into units with exterior perimeter light courts (there are four sections and three light courts along Ogden Avenue; three sections and two light courts along West 168th Street; and two sections and one light court along Nelson Avenue) and an interior garden court. Storefronts are located at the corner of Ogden Avenue and West 168th Street.
The complex is clad in tan ironspot brick with a vertical emphasis consisting of continuous piers contrasting with brown-and-black-brick spandrel panels (above the third through seventh stories), brick patterning, and black brick and geometric pattern accents on the top story. The windows of the end bays of each section have polygonal-shaped heads (with brown-and-black-brick spandrels) on the second story, and historic ornamental wrought-iron railings on the third story. Some windows in the light courts on the second and uppermost stories have polygonal-shaped heads (with brown-and-black-brick spandrels). The original three-over-three double-hung metal sash were replaced by one-over-one double-hung anodized aluminum sash (1980-82). Fire escapes are placed in the light courts. Metal mesh grilles have been placed over the lower story windows. The walls are terminated by metal coping (1980-82). Ogden Avenue Facade: The base has stepped sections of brown-and-black-brick retaining walls (with concrete coping) with historic wrought-iron fencing with a geometric design.
The front of the northern light court has a low tan brick wall (with concrete coping), and non-historic wrought-iron fence and gates. The central light court has concrete steps, non-historic wrought-iron fence and gates, and concrete courtyard paving; a tunnel to the interior Garden Court has a geometric-design black-brick entrance surround. The southern section has an exterior fire escape. The southern light court and southern section of the building have five small shopfronts (all with non-historic entrances, windows, rolldown gates, and awnings); a section of historic black-brick cladding survives, with three windows (two with metal mesh grilles and one with a metal panel) and a geometric-design panel.
West 168th Street Facade: The two western sections and the western light court have continuous shopfronts (all with non-historic entrances, windows, rolldown gates, and awnings); significant portions of the historic black-brick cladding survives. There is a visible roof bulkhead above the western light court. The front of the eastern light court has a low tan brick wall with posts (all with concrete coping), and non-historic metal mesh fence and gates. A concrete ramp with metal railings leads to a basement entrance with non-historic metal doors; basement windows have been covered with metal. The eastern section has an exterior fire escape.
The openings of the base of the eastern section of the building have a non-historic metal door, four windows covered with metal, and the rest with metal mesh grilles. Nelson Avenue Facade: Many of the windows of the base have been covered with metal; the others have metal mesh grilles. The southern section has an exterior fire escape. The front of the light court has a low tan brick wall with posts (all with concrete coping), and non-historic wrought-iron and metal mesh fence and gates. Bluestone steps (with metal railings) lead to a sunken courtyard, paved with asphalt.
The upper portion of the wall of the unarticulated setback northernmost portion of the complex has been parged with concrete. North Facade: This facade, at the rear of the property, consists of four sections and three light courts (having fire escapes), as well as the northern side of a section along Nelson Avenue (which has a rubble stone base). The tan brick walls are unarticulated. There are concrete steps and a non-historic metal gate at Ogden Avenue; a concrete walkway along the building with a chainlink fence; and a concrete ramp with a metal railing leading to the basement, with a metal mesh gate and chainlink fence, at Nelson Avenue. Entrance Portico and Towers: The complex’s main entrance, at the corner of Nelson Avenue and West 168th Street, features an angled “portico” set on a concrete base with tan-brick piers and geometric-design parapets (with cast-stone elements) supported by steel plates above the openings; the red-brick edging of the parapets and piers dates from 1980-82.
There are non-historic wrought-iron security gates (1980-82). The portico has an historic geometric-patterned ceiling, a section of surviving historic concrete paving with a geometric pattern, and end walls with black-and-brownbrick geometric-patterned panels. Several signs and functional boxes have been placed on the walls. In the center of the interior side of the portico is a round gate lodge, clad in tan brick, with historic multi-pane metal windows, and (on the interior side) a curved metal door (1980-82).
The entrance portico is flanked by twin “towers” with corner windows (originally with multi-pane steel casements, now paired one-over-one double-hung anodized aluminum sash (1980-82)); the lintels of these windows have been re-built. The towers were originally terminated by etched-glass lanterns (flanked by fins, according to original drawings); the bases have been parged (1980-82). These are flanked by sections of historic ornamental wrought-iron railings. Garden Court: Beyond the entrance portico is an angled two-level forecourt, paved in concrete, with a polygonal balcony (with tan brick walls (with metal vents), concrete coping (now painted), and historic ornamental wrought-iron railings), two sets of concrete steps and a later (1980-82) concrete ramp (with metal railings) flanked by similar tan brick walls with historic railings, leading to another set of concrete steps, flanked by similar brick walls (now painted) with historic railings and lamp bases, and the central walkway, which is lined with chainlink fencing set on concrete edging and planting strips.
Originally, the landscaped Garden Court featured a large polygonal pond, crossed by rustic wooden bridges, with a lighthouse and a waterfall in one corner. Today, there is a central round planted area (edged with concrete and a chainlink fence) and a circular concrete walkway with benches, radial walks to the apartment entrances, and outer planting areas with chainlink fencing. In the northwest corner is the altered rubble stone remnant of the waterfall, with a stone archway with a metal mesh door.
Garden Court Facades: The five entrances are ornamented with geometric brown-and-black-brick surrounds with molded openings with polygonal heads, piers with brick patterning supporting historic ornamental wrought-iron balcony railings (that at the northwestern corner is missing), historic milk glass transoms with wrought-iron decoration, and historic metal-and-glass double doors. The original entrance sconces are missing; there are modern light fixtures and brick patching. The tunnel leading to Ogden Avenue has a simple geometric black-brick surround with historic wrought-iron brackets, and non-historic wrought-iron gates. The walls follow a scheme similar to those on the exterior of the complex, with continuous piers contrasting with brown-and-black-brick spandrel panels and panels between windows, brick patterning, and black brick and geometric pattern accents on the top story. There are bowed brown-and-black-brick panels below some second-story windows. Fire escapes are placed on three sides of the court.
- From the 2010 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report
please feel free to use this texture... grab the original here
farm4.static.flickr.com/3093/2801064601_1904a07921_b.jpg
i'd love to see what you do with this texture, please post a small image so i can see what you've done!!
On January 22, 2025,Lyon, France, I had to pick-up my GOMZ Leningrad camera from the repair shop, unfortunately ... not repaired, due to some really stuck pieces. I decided to push my way to Saint-Georges through Saint-Jean*** to purchase some Rollei RPX 400 films to replace the used ones recently.
I brought along again in my bag my beloved year-1976 Olympus OM-1 MD film SLR that is one of my preferred camera of my collection (see bellow for details). The camera was equipped this time with a wide-angle OM-System lens Zuiko Auto-W 1:2.8 f=28 mm and loaded with a Rollei RPX 400 film which is the former formula of the Agfa APX 400. I appreciate this film giving a large tone ranges and quite good image densities even in low light.
For all the frames, the lens was fitted with a generic yellow 49mm screwed filter. The light metering was done through the lens (TTL) for 400 ISO using the camera built-in CdS cell and/or my external lightmeter Minolta Autometer III (at 200 ISO to compensate the filter absorption in the daylight and 320 ISO for artificial tungsten light) with the 10° viewer for selective metering privileging the shadows areas. The weather was milder (8°C) than my last session two days before but still cloudy.
Place de la Basoche, January 22, 2025
69005 Lyon
France
After completion the film was rewound and processed using 350 mL of Adox Adonal (Agfa Rodinal) developer prepared at the dilution 1+25 for 12min30 at 20°C.
Digitizing was made using a Sony A7 camera (ILCE-7, 24MP) fitted to a Minolta Auto Bellows III with the Minolta slide duplication accessory and Minolta Macro Bellow lens 1:3.5 f=50mm. The light source was a LED panel CineStill Cine-lite.
The RAW files obtained were inverted within the latest version available of Adobe Lightroom Classic (version 14.1.1) and edited to the final jpeg pictures without intermediate file. They are presented either as printer files with a frame or the full size JPEG's together with some documentary smartphone color pictures.
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About the camera :
My Olympus OM-1 MD was purchased from a local photography shop in Lyon, France, May 31, 2022.
Olympus OM-1 MD was commercially available from 1974 to 1978 and represented the fully mechanical SLR of a new class ("miniature SLR's") , smaller and lighter than any other SLR's of that time. It prefigured the size of most of the SLR's of the 80's.
The kit included the normal lens G.Zuiko Auto-S 1:1.4 f=50 mm in perfect condition, a Zuiko Auto-Zoom 1:4 f=75-150 mm with Olympus original rigid case, a Sigma Tele-Macro x2 converter, a small flash Olympus PE200 (GN 14 at 100 ISO) with case, A Crystal Titanium x 0.48 wide-angle converter (still never tested), and several 49 mm filters.
This specific OM-1 MD was constructed in Jan. 1976 according to the printed reference "ス ("su ") 615" on the back of the film plate.
The OM-system Zuiko Auto-W lens 1:2.8 f=28mm was purchased soon after from an eBay seller. To my experience it is one of the best 28mm lens I have in my collection leading to generally crisp and contrasted images.
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*** Saint-Jean is a district of the 5th arrondissement of Lyon. It is one of the three parishes of Old Lyon, with those of Saint-Georges and Saint-Paul, and takes its name from its Primatiale Saint-Jean de Lyon of the Primal of Gaul, dedicated to Saint John the Baptist.
Historic center of Lyon, of the protected perimeter registered as a UNESCO World Heritage site, urban site category recognized with its preserved old historic districts as "one of the most beautiful cities in the world"1 this district is with its pedestrian streets, and its important Renaissance architectural heritage (the most important in the world after Venice) the most important picturesque historic tourist district of Lyon, and one of the high places of Lyonnaise cuisine, with its many shops, restaurants, bouchons lyonnais, brasseries, bistros, and bars.