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Robertiella robertiana) commonly known as Herb Robert, Red Robin, Death come quickly..In traditional herbalism, Herb Robert is used as a remedy for toothache and nosebleeds. An infusion made from the whole plant, minus the root, has been used for its diuretic and tonic effect and as a remedy for dysentery. It is also used on wounds for healing and to prevent scarring, having both an antiseptic and a styptic effect.
Freshly picked leaves have an odor resembling burning tires when crushed, and if they are rubbed on the body the smell is said to repel mosquitoes
This is the first photo captured with my NEW Olympus Stylus Tough 8000 point-and-shoot camera.
It was pouring rain almost all day today here in NY.
Finally it slowed down a bit and allowed me to go out and get this photo with "raindrops falling on my head".
September 27, 2009
Pelargonium species are evergreen perennials indigenous to Southern Africa, and are drought and heat tolerant, but can tolerate only minor frosts. They are commonly known as geraniums.
129 East 19th Street, NYC
by navema
East 19th Street, between Irving Place and Third Avenue, is known as the Block Beautiful for its notable row houses of East 19th Street. The block was an informal colony for artists and writers in the 1920s and 1930s, such as author Ida Tarbell, painter Cecilia Beaux, and the sculptor Zolnay. Music critic and novelist Carl Van Vechten, lived at 151 East 19th Street and with his neighbors, painters George Bellows and Robert Chanler, threw wild parties, about which Ethyl Barrymore commented, "I went there in the evening a young girl and came away in the morning an old woman."
Frederick J. Sterner, the architect credited with starting the revival of the block in the early 20th century, lived at No. 139, which he coated with stucco and decorated with colored tiles. A few other houses on the block have similar stucco, and some have unusual artistic touches like the pair of jockey statues at No. 141 and the nuzzling giraffes above the door at No. 149.
One of Manhattan's most interesting landmarks is the picturesque stable-studio at 129 East 19th Street. Charles Moran, an importer, built a town house at 24 Gramercy Park in 1847 on a lot stretching back to the north side of 19th Street between Irving Place and Third Avenue. Moran still had not built on the 19th Street side of the lot when he sold the house in 1855 to James Couper Lord. It was Lord, an iron merchant and philanthropist, who built the two-story stable at 129 East 19th Street in 1861.
A later account stated that the building never was used as a stable, and census records for the Lords and neighboring families show no coachmen or stablemen living on their properties. There is no record of the Lord stable's appearance in the 19th century.
The first account of its 19th-century occupancy is a 1903 article in The New York Times, which attributed its diamond-paned leaded glass windows to an unidentified glass worker who occupied it for some time in the 1890's. Indeed, classified directories show that Craig F. R. Drake, "stained-glass maker," leased and occupied the building for a year, in 1899.
In 1903, a new lessee, F. Berkeley Smith, filed plans to convert what was described as a studio into a residence. Smith was trained as an architect but was apparently independently wealthy -- he summered in Paris and wrote "The Real Latin Quarter," "How Paris Amuses Itself" and other books. He had worked with the architect R.H. Robertson, and a Robertson employee, August Pauli, designed extensive interior alterations for the 19th Street house.
Smith installed fireplaces for heat -- a Bohemian touch in a time when a furnace was considered civilized -- two bedrooms, a boudoir for Mrs. Smith and a trunk room, all furnished with wooden wainscotting, antique metal lamps, furniture and art work.
A photograph taken by Joseph Byron in 1904 shows a brick stable with neo-Gothic trim, window moldings, bottle-end stained glass and other artistic touches. In 1903, The Times wrote that there was "no more picturesque exterior" in the whole city, "none so riotously gay in color" with window boxes of geraniums, evergreen shrubs, bright brass hardware, green painted brick and white trim, "an exterior that attracts the attention of the least observant passerby."
ABOUT THE BLOCK BEAUTIFUL
The picturesque little ''block beautiful' is a mixed bag of houses on 19th Street between Irving Place and Third Avenue. A variety of owners there are making changes that reflect multiple attitudes toward the individual buildings and even the block as a whole. Brick and brownstone rowhouses went up on 19th Street in the 1840's and 1850's, especially after the establishment of Gramercy Park in 1845. Although conceived as upper-class accommodations, half a century later they were simply aging housing, especially as newer districts with newer houses opened up farther north.
The usual pattern for such districts was a gentle slide into middle- and working-class housing -- Victorian gentry showed a distinct distaste for settling in anything but virgin territory. It took Frederick Sterner to reverse this trend. Born in London in the 1860's, Sterner emigrated to the United States in 1882 and practiced architecture in Colorado before coming to New York in 1906. He took an office on Fifth Avenue near 19th Street and rented space in an old house at 23 West 20th Street.
Casting about for a place to build his own house, Sterner was discouraged by high land prices in more desirable areas farther north, and then determined to make over a house to his own taste closer to the business section of town. He bought an old brick house at 139 East 19th Street and gave it what became his signature touch -- a coat of tinted stucco, shutters, decorative ironwork and a projecting tile roof. Sterner carefully used old brick and polychromed tile panels to give his design an informal, handmade character -- the direct opposite of the showy limestone town houses that were still in favor farther uptown.
On a block of aging brick and brownstone, the effect was dazzling, something like Bob Dylan's shift from scruffy folk music to electric guitar in the 1960's. Sterner used inventive and brilliantly colored tile work around the doorway of 139 East 19th Street -- even the tiled planters are still miraculously intact. Sterner's example attracted others interested in a slightly bohemian location, among them Joseph B. Thomas, a banker and polo player, who had the architect redo 135 East 19th Street into a picturesque Gothic house.
But Sterner bought more houses on the block and, also working with other owners, gradually spread his delicate Mediterranean style to at least eight of them, enough so that the Sterner style quickly became the dominant character and was even imitated by other designers. In 1911 House Beautiful praised Sterner's work and added, ''Why does anyone build a city house when a remodeled one can be made so fascinating?''
Harriet Gillespie, writing in American Homes and Gardens in 1914, described 19th Street as a ''block beautiful,'' a term that had been in general use since the turn of the century, when reformers first considered how to stabilize aging neighborhoods.
Working for Thomas, Sterner also designed the dramatic half-timbered apartment house at 132 East 19th Street. Completed in 1911, it was soon home to the muckraking author Ida Tarbell, the society painter Cecilia Beaux and the stockbroker Chester Dale, who was then beginning to assemble his great art collection. The architect's brother, the painter Albert Sterner, also lived at No. 132.
THE painter George Bellows took over an old house at 146 East 19th Street, adding an attic studio, and the painter-muralist Robert Winthrop Chanler had a studio at No. 147; perhaps it was he who added the surprising colored panel over the doorway of two giraffes, with necks intertwined.
Writing in The New York Times in 1921, Helen Lowrey, a reporter, firmly credited Sterner with the idea of the picturesque ''Italian'' front and the entire idea of reviving older neighborhoods for upper-class occupancy. By that time developments at Turtle Bay, Sutton Place and other areas had spread Sterner's ideas widely.
In 1914 Sterner moved up to 63d Street between Lexington and Third Avenues and repeated the block beautiful process there, finally building his own magnificent house at the southwest corner of 65th Street and Lexington. In 1925 he moved to London, and never practiced again in New York; he died in Rome in 1931.
Gradually East 19th Street between Irving and Third became the block beautiful, as other efforts faded away, and it was included in the Landmarks Preservation Commission's Gramercy Park Historic District, designated in 1966. Many minor changes have been made to the houses, both before and after landmark designation. The Thomas residence, now owned by Oleg Cassini, is unchanged, but the stucco-front Sterner houses have lost many of their distinctive elements -- in some cases shutters have been removed, in others the pastel colors have been toned down. Some previous owner destroyed Sterner's distinctive tile and brick entryway at 145 East 19th Street, and in 1992 Lee Ann Jaffee, working with the architect Richard Ayotte, decided to substitute a nominally Greek revival doorway, but the effect does not reverse the earlier dilution of the house's character.
Next door, at 147 East 19th Street, someone has chopped away at the two giraffes to put in an electrical conduit.
At 143 East 19th Street Lynn Wagenknecht has one of the few intact mid-century houses, and her architect, Thomas Tsue, has been restoring that building to its original character.
On the south side of the block other architects are more in evidence. In 1924 the architect Frank Forster stripped the mid-19th-century brownstone at 142 and gave it a neat Dutch door and supremely intelligent ironwork. Despite an extensive interior alteration, the front has been left lovingly unrestored by the new owners. Cicognani Kalla Architects designed the recent alteration, and Pietro Cicognani says ''there's some beauty in being anonymous.'' And at 128 East 19th Street, an unidentified designer put some trim Art Moderne ironwork up on the house of the late Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder of the New York City Ballet, probably after Kirstein bought it in 1953.
At the apartment house at 132 East 19th Street, now a co-op, the board has just finished replacing the four stone spheres on the pillars in front, and Jonathan Foster, the board president, says that they are gradually restoring the entire front to Sterner's original designs.
ABOUT GRAMERCY PARK
The area which is now Gramercy Park was once in the middle of a swamp. In 1831 Samuel B. Ruggles, a developer and advocate of open space, proposed the idea for the park due to the northward growth of Manhattan. He bought the property, which was then a farm called "Gramercy Farm", from James Duane, a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant. Ruggles developed the property: he landscaped it, drainied the swamp, and caused about a million horsecart loads of earth to be moved. He then laid out "Gramercy Square", deeding possession of the square to the owners of the 60 parcels of land he had plotted to surround it, and sought tax-exempt status for the park, which the Board of Alderman granted in 1832. It was the second private square created in the city, after Hudson Square, also known as St. John's Park, which was laid out by the parish of Trinity Church. Numbering of the lots began at #1 on the northwest corner, on Gramercy Park West, and continued counter-clockwise: south down Gramercy Park West, then west to east along Gramercy Park South (East 20th Street), north up Gramercy Park East, and finally east to west along Gramercy Park North (East 21st Street). Landscaping and construction of Gramcery Park occured between 1833 and 1844.
At #34 and #36 Gramercy Park (East) are two of New York's first apartment buildings, designed in 1883 and 1905. Elsewhere in the neighborhood, nineteenth century brownstones and carriage houses abound, though the 1920s brought the onset of tenant apartments and skyscrapers to the area.
On September 20, 1966, a part of the Gramercy Park neighborhood was designated an historic district, and extended in 1988. The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.
Notable residents:
*James Harper – #4: an original resident, 1847-1869, Mayor of New York from 1844–1845 and one of the founders of the Harper publishing firm.
*Samuel J. Tilden – #15: New York Governor and 1876 Presidential Candidate whose house (a Victorian Gothic mansion), a National Historic Landmark, is now the National Arts Club.
Edwin Booth – #16: famed Shakespearean actor, founded the Players Club. The brother of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. In the center of Gramercy Park is a statue in his honor.
John Barrymore – #36: star of stage and screen.
Daniel Chester French – #36: sculptor responsible for the seated figure of Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Alfred Ringling – #36: who founded the Ringling Brothers Circus.
Stanford White – an architect, who renovated The Players Club, lived where the Gramercy Park Hotel is now located.
James Cagney – the actor once lived in one of the buildings on Gramercy Park South (East 20th Street).
Geranium is a genus of 422 species of flowering annual, biennial, and perennial plants that are commonly known as the cranesbills.
Red Geranium flowers are the color of friendship and known to represent romance, affection or power. Giving or receiving red geraniums could be thought of as a gesture of love or desire.
Geranium
Designer: Tomoko Fuse
Assembled with: no glue
Paper size: 7.5* 7.5 cm
Final height: ~ 9 cm
Diagram: Tanteidan Origami Magazine, №130, p. 4