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Shunfu located in Bishan where Jadescape will be developed, is also called Bishan New Town or Bishan town, is a developed residential area found in northern most portion of central region of Singapore. By numbers this area is ranked the 38th most largest area by size and 21st most populated area in the country. This though, makes Bishan ranked 15th in relation to population density. Bishan shares a boundary with central water catchment in the west, apart from this is also shares borders with three planning areas which are Ang Mo Kio to the north, Toa Payoh to the south and Serangoon to the east.
Kingsbridge, Bronx, New York City, New York, United States
Designed in 1900, and built from 1901 to 1902 by the New York architects Arthur J. Horgan and Vincent J. Slattery, the former 50th Precinct Police Station House is prominently sited at the intersection of Kingsbridge Terrace and Summit Place. Its style, scale, materials of construction, direct relation to the street, and ornament contribute to the monumental character, which distinguished the building from the surrounding two- and three-story frame structures of rapidly expanding Kingsbridge.
A symbol of the authority of the police force and of the presence of municipal government in early 20th century Kingsbridge, and an exemplar of Beaux-Arts principles of composition, the building should be seen within the context of the City Beautiful Movement.
Historical interest in the building further derives from its being among the best surviving works of an architectural firm that was very much in the public eye at the turn-of-the-century.
Development of the Kingsbridge Area
Coincident with the growth of the northwest Bronx generally, the modern development of Kingsbridge and of the area presently known as Kingsbridge Heights dates from the latter half of the 19th century.
Rural and sparsely populated, with a varied topographical character, the Bronx of the 19th century depended for its growth on the gradual subdivision of estates, on changed attitudes respecting the desirability of the area, and on the completion of the Harlem River Railroad, which provided a first impetus to the development of the "north side."
Kingsbridge formally began to take shape as a residential community in 1847 when the Macomb family's "Island Farm," an extensive tract, was surveyed and subdivided into building lots, which were then sold for development.
Notwithstanding its late development relative to communities on Manhattan Island, Kingsbridge has had a rich history beginning as early as 1609 with the arrival of Henry Hudson on the Spuyten Duyvil peninsula.
Apparently, the Dutch had considered siting their projected New Amsterdam colony at Kingsbridge. The plan was soon abandoned, but by the early 17th century, the Dutch were fanning areas, on Manhattan as far north as the flatlands of Harlem.
It was not long before they began to seek areas into which the population could expand; thus, in addition to disaffected New Englanders, among the first settlers of Westchester County (chartered in 1683) and the Bronx — the land "upon the Maine" — were the Dutch. Indeed, the earliest European settler of the immediate Kingsbridge area was the Dutchman Jonkheer Adrien Van der Donck in 1641.
Van der Donck's tract, known as de Jonkheers, included all of the land from Spuyten Duyvil north eight miles along the Hudson River and east to the Bronx River.
The construction of the Boston Post Road in 1673 facilitated travel and communication between Manhattan Island and the northern colonies. Originating in lower Manhattan, the route ran the length of the island, crossed the Spuyten Duyvil Creek, traversed Westchester County and Connecticut, and terminated in Boston.
Until 1693 and the construction of the King's Bridge by landowner Vredryck Flypsen, crossing of the Spuyten Duyvil was accomplished by ferry. From the bridge, the Boston Post Road ran to Albany Crescent (which is just north of the old West Farms/Kingsbridge town line), followed Boston Avenue (the original name for that block of Kingsbridge Terrace in which the police station is located), and then veered toward the northeast, crossing the Bronx River at William's Bridge.
Another of the early roads radiating from the location of the King's Bridge and moving north along Bailey Avenue, was the Albany Post Road (opened in 1669 as far as the Sawmill River and in 1700 to Albany), which then continued along the western side of the Van Cortlandt properties.
That the King's Bridge served as the principal passage from the northern tip of Manhattan Island to the Bronx mainland, underlines the significance of the greater Kingsbridge area during Revolutionary times. As the main military artery for the armies of both the British and the Americans, the bridge was under constant attack during those Revolutionary War years when New York City was subject to British occupation (1776-1783).
Boston Hill (the name for the rise in the immediate vicinity of Albany Crescent) was the scene of many battles in the years following 1776, and from 1777 to 1779, the British established a presence at the Van Cortlandt mansion (located on the eastern side of the Albany Post Road).
Early indications of the eventual residential development of the area can be seen in the period immediately following the Revolution, at which time, well-to-do New Yorkers focused on the natural beauty of the area with an eye toward moving northward.
The eventual annexation of the Bronx proceeded in piecemeal fashion and not without opposition: against the incorporation were those Bronx residents who thought that nothing would be gained by aligning themselves with heavily populated Manhattan, and those New Yorkers who saw no advantage to appropriating farmland.
Nevertheless, on 1 January 1874, the townships of Kingsbridge, West Farms, and Morrisania formally became the twenty-third and twenty-fourth wards of the City of New York; from that time until 1898, they were known
collectively as the "Annexed District". It was not until 1895, however, that the annexation of the Bronx east of the Bronx River was effected.
In 1897, the New York State Legislature passed a charter for the creation of Greater New York City; in 1898, twenty-four local governments including all the annexed districts north of the Harlem River, as well as the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, and Richmond (Staten Island) were officially consolidated.
Commenting on building operations in the Bronx and noting a remarkable thirty-three percent increase thereof between 1898 and 1899, a dealer in real estate averred: "as to the future of the borough, that is assured, for the natural trend of the city's growth is northward, and the Bronx with all its proposed improvements will reap a golden harvest."
Corroborating his opinion, the Real Estate Record and Guide of 1901 observed that "more families continue to forsake their downtown neighbors for better homes and the purer air and ampler room above the Harlem and especially brisk in the matter of building is [sic] the upper and eastern sections of the Bronx, where both private and tenement houses are springing up."
In point of fact, just after 1895 and the annexation of the eastern section, booms in both real estate and population occurred. These were attributable to a combination of factors, the most important being inclusion into the metropolitan area, self-government, and the improvement of transportation.
Bronx Police History and the 50th Precinct
Bronx police history formally began in January 1866 when the Metropolitan Police District, created by an act of the New York State legislature in 1857, established a substation in the Village of Tremont in the Town of West Farms.
Previously, police activity in Kingsbridge had been under the jurisdiction of Manhattan's 32nd Precinct (currently the 30th), located at Amsterdam Avenue and 152nd Street.
Due to an increase in criminal behavior accompanying the immediate post-Civil War growth of the area, the residents of Yonkers and West Farms had favored incorporation within the Metropolitan Police District. Participation in the State's Metropolitan Police District was not long-lived, however; in 1870, as a result of the reorganization of local government according to the terms of the Tweed Charter, the City reclaimed control of the police department.
In the following year, Yonkers withdrew from the Metropolitan Police District and organized a police force of its own. In November 1871, the Yonkers police established a substation at Kingsbridge (the predecessor of the 50th) to serve the precinct extending from the West Farms town line to just south of the present Yonkers city line; an existing frame building, located at Verveelen Place, just east of Broadway and south of 231st Street, was adapted for use as a station house.
As a consequence of the separation of the Township of Kingsbridge from the City of Yonkers in 1872, the force headquartered at Kingsbridge was administered by a joint Board of Police Commissioners of Yonkers and Kingsbridge. Following annexation in January 1874, the district constituted of Kingsbridge, Morrisania, and West Farms was divided into two precincts and one sub-precinct of the New York Police Department.
Shortly thereafter, the sub-precinct, headquartered at Kingsbridge, came into its own as the 35th Precinct.
With the consolidation of 1898, the Police Department of Greater New York assimilated eighteen small police agencies, and a move was initiated to conform the boundaries of police precincts to the lines of the individual townships. New precincts were created to serve newly annexed areas and to accommodate rapid population increases and building and commercial development in already established ones.
In accordance with the general objective of creating a flexible system that would provide for future expansion of the force, several renumberings of Bronx precincts occurred during the next thirty years. Upon consolidation in 1898, Kingsbridge was redesignated the 40th; in January 1918, the 74th; in April of the same year, the 57th; in 1924, the 26th; and on 1 August 1929, the 50th, which it remains to this day.
Despite its changed status upon incorporation into the Greater New York City Police Department, the 40th Precinct (subsequently the 50th) continued to occupy its makeshift quarters at Verveelen Place, which were enlarged in 1886 by taking possession of a two-story frame building to the east. This measure served only as a stopgap, however, for conditions had become progressively unsatisfactory and indeed unsavory.
Not only were the quarters cramped, but the basement of the building had flooded so often that the jail had settled out of plumb. A newspaper reporter of the time remarked that "no more unhealthier police station exists in the City of New York than this one, and in the late 1880s, the Board of Health condemned the building. Nevertheless, although a project for construction of a new facility finally was initiated in 1898, new accommodations would not be had until 1902 when " 'the shanty', as the frame building which . . . sheltered the blue-coat guardians ever since the 40th precinct was established [was] abandoned for a modem structure.
In a review of the official architecture of New York City, The Real Estate Record and Guide (November 1898) branded municipal architecture a disgrace, deplored its standards, and observed that there appeared to be a tendency to employ builders over professional architects.
This situation — in which "there is not even one architecturally decent police station"^ — began to improve as New York embarked on a citywide reconstruction and renovation campaign to modernize police facilities. The turn of the century enthusiasm for constructing civic monuments provided a further impetus.
Horgan and Slattery were commissioned to design a new 40th Precinct Police Station House sometime between 1898 and fall 1900, although the City of New York did not purchase the land on which the building is situated until 2 October 1900.
The firm estimated the construction costs for the station house, stables, and a prison, at $70,000. Plans were filed in December 1900, but approval to proceed was denied due to the omission of tie rods between the steel floor and the spruce beams of the one-story carriage house.
The New Building Application was approved on 9 January 1901 only after the architects filed a petition demonstrating that their use of the Roebling System of Fireproof Construction would constitute a sufficient tie in itself. Construction began 18 March 1901 and was completed 16 April 1902.
Horoan and Slattery
From 1894, when The New York Times initially reported on the financial difficulties of the firm, until the period 1899 to 1903, when the newspaper regularly and eagerly followed the professional lives of Horgan and Slattery, the architects gained more and more notoriety.
While political patronage certainly was not an invention of the Tammany administrators, Mayor Robert Van Wyck was overly zealous about stamping the municipal architecture of New York City with the seal of his administration. It appears to have been Van Wyck's intention either to convey all city projects directly to Horgan and Slattery or to install them in a consulting capacity over more widely renowned architects such as John Thomas (Hall of Records) or Frederick Withers (City Prison).
The firm first achieved public recognition with the rehabilitation of the interior of the Democratic Club in 1897. Upon completion of that job, apparently ". finding. . .hundreds of odd jobs, large and small. . .for the favored architects."
Queries from a perhaps overly critical press respecting any architect's professional qualifications or lack thereof are not in themselves objectionable.
However, in the case of Horgan and Slattery, the situation was rather more complicated as the attacks became a vehicle for denouncing the Van Wyck administration generally and pertained very little, if at all, with a fair assessment of the firm's work. In order to bolster their charges of corruption in the Van Wyck administration, the press seized upon the seeming irregularity in the relationship between the architects and the administration, claiming that the firm name had become "a trademark of municipal disrepute and jobbery".
Horgan and Slattery were characterized as political pawns "who had no standing artistic, political, scientific, or financial [but were] used as the cat's paw of politicians anxious to get control of municipal building in New York. . ."
Despite the scandals surrounding the firm, political affiliations carried the day, for "on the death of the architect J.R. Thomas, the contract for the completion of the Hall of Records was granted to the favorite Tammany contractors Horgan and Slattery in spite of strong denunciation of such action."
Considered cogs in a great political machine and sarcastically dubbed the "universal solvents" or experts in all fields of architecture, the firm was taken to task for lapsed professional and moral responsibilities:
The new city administration has acted none too soon and with none too much severity in the cases of those two "devouring absurdities" Horgan and Slattery. Two self-respecting men in their places — but that is unimaginable. Two self-respecting men could never occupy their places. But two men with not more than twice the average thickness of skin would have got out, when Tammany was defeated, without waiting to be kicked out amid the cheers of the bystanders.
Upon his election in 1902, Mayor Seth Low called for the "dishorganizing and unslatterifying" of municipal architecture and insisted that "all business relations between the city and Horgan and Slattery, who received the award of all city contracts during the administration of Mayor Van Wyck should be terminated as soon as possible."
Mayor Low's administration adopted a hardline position according to which it would be preferable to pay damages in court than to honor any outstanding contracts with the architects.
Although ethics rather than aesthetics constituted the point of departure for the accusations in the local press — there having been very little critical coverage of the design work —the artistic capabilities of the architects were fair game as well.
Nevertheless, the firm's rise to prominence, even in the context of its alleged association with the great turn-of-the-century New York City Democratic party machine, cannot nullify the inherent value of their designs, which, in large part, combined classical vocabularies and Beaux-Arts principles of composition.
The Architects' and Builders' Magazine of January 1907 recognized that, "[J. R. Thomas'] work has been carried on in praiseworthy fashion by Messrs. Horgan and Slattery who have added to Mr. Thomas' brilliant conception much of the virility of design which characterizes their other well-known masterpieces."
Scant biographical information exists on the two architects. Photographs or drawings of a fair number of their projects were published in architectural journals, but accompanying text is rare. Arthur J. Horgan (1868-1911) and Vincent J. Slattery (1867-1939) entered into partnership in 1886. Until 1897, the New York City Directory listed them as builders; interestingly, in the 1898 edition, they emerged as architects.
Evidently, they had incorporated as such and were working out of an office at 1 Madison Avenue. Apart from Horgan's testimony in 1899^^ before the Mazet Committee that he had studied architecture for five years in the offices of his godfather, Colonel Arthur Crocks, virtually nothing is known about the professional educations of the architects.
Slattery testified that the "outside work" of the firm was his responsibility, while Horgan assumed the "inside work"; he also referred all technical questions to Horgan. In the absence of conclusive information concerning their respective positions in the firm, which would elucidate Slattery's statement, one may speculate either that Horgan was the principal designer and Slattery the business partner, or that Horgan dealt with structural questions and Slattery with interior embellishment.
Following Horgan's death in 1911, Slattery went into business for himself, retiring in 1934.
The Design
The former 50th Precinct Police Station House is a handsome example of Beaux-Arts classicism, a mode of design that characterized much public architecture at the turn-of-the-century and became the emblem of the City Beautiful Movement.
Although clearly indebted to the architectural styles of the past, the design does not endeavor to replicate historical models exactly, nor did such archaeological accuracy underlie the historicism of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Rather, the elements are derived from classical prototypes but are freely interpreted and ingeniously combined.
Typologically, the building refers to an Italian Renaissance urban palace; the ornament is eclectic.
Horgan and Slattery approached the design of this small (relative to the grandest examples of the style in New York City, among them the Public Library and Grand Central Station) but imposing building in an imaginative way. The building dominates its site; further, it is the dominant architectural feature on the primarily residential block.
The architects' masterful handling is demonstrated in the sensitivity to the site, an understanding of the rules of Beaux-Arts composition, the use of ornament, and the adaptation of an ancient but particularly appropriate building type to a modern use.
Their studied application of Beaux-Arts principles is evident in the clear articulation of the parts of the building, the bilateral symmetry, the clearly marked and elaborated openings, the hierarchy of constituent elements in the facades, the play of advancing and receding planes, and the consistency of the articulation.
The form of the building refers to two distinct phases in the evolution of the Italian Renaissance urban palace. The 15th-century palace, such as the Pitti or the Medici, with its massive presence, direct relation with the street, and rusticated base, is an appropriate model for the expression of such values as power, security, invulnerability, and monumentality, which, surely in the public mind, are associated with the police force.
Strengthening this association are the horizontal extension of the station house, which intensifies the image of its being firmly wedded to its site, and the battlements or crenellations of the roof parapet.
The horizontal lines of the building are reiterated in the surface treatment on every level of the facades: by the granite base; by the continuous channels of the recessed brick courses; by the lines of the windows; by the projecting stringcourses; by the continuous cornice, which is distinguished from the fabric of the building both in color, texture and materials; by the roof parapet, which is defined as a series of advancing and receding planes.
In the 16th-century type, exemplified by the design for the House of Raphael by Bramante, the ground story rustication is mediated by the application of architectural ornament in the upper stories, which is also the case here.
Description
The Kingsbridge Terrace of today, which is rather an unprepossessing street lined with detached houses as well as low-rise apartments, does not figure prominently in the street system of the Bronx, or even of Kingsbridge. This was not always the case, however.
From the 18th century until 1913, that portion of Kingsbridge Terrace north of what is presently Albany Crescent, was known as Boston Avenue, the name deriving from its having been a segment of the Boston Post Road. As the east/west section of the almost elliptical Albany Crescent (running roughly perpendicular to the present Bailey Avenue) was also a part of Boston Avenue, and Bailey Avenue formed part of the Albany Post Road, the station house is in close proximity to the intersection of two historically significant roads, and at the crest of Boston Hill.
From the street, the building appears as a massive two-story masonry block. In plan, however, it is a "U", oriented southward such that its eastern arm forms the principal or Kingsbridge Terrace facade, and its base (at the north) constitutes the secondary or Summit Place facade.
The principal facade is 83 feet in length and two stories in height; the secondary facade is 119 feet in length and three stories in height, only two of which are expressed, corresponding to those on the principal facade.
The juncture of the eastern and northern facades is mediated by a curved comer treatment. This transitional element, the articulation of whose second story departs from those of both street facades, constitutes the focal point of the composition if the building is viewed obliquely from the northeast.
The focal point, shifts, however to the center bay of the principal facade if
the building is viewed directly from the east or obliquely from the south; from either vantage point, the comer construction is virtually invisible.
In both cases, the corner element and the axis of symmetry (formed of the entry, the parapet directly above it, the window in the second story, the plaque identifying the building) provide vertical accents in an otherwise horizontally disposed composition. The principal facade consists of five bays, the central three flanked by projecting end bays in the north and south.
This "ABA" rhythm is repeated in the secondary facade with the difference that the projecting end bays flank a central section of seven bays. Three bays define the curved comer section.
Gamboge bricks, which are variegated in hue and are laid in Flemish bond, constitute the veneers of the facades, including the southern wall of the eastern arm of the "U". The contrasting limestone members of the windows, door, stringcourses, and columns, the granite of the base, the terra-cotta ornament, and the green tin denticulated Doric cornice create an impressive polychromatic image.
Like the urban palaces of the Italian Renaissance, the two stories are differentiated in characteristic ways: a projecting stringcourse composed of a series of classical moldings (the lowermost of which is egg and dart) literally cuts the building in half horizontally; the elaboration of the second story contrasts with the relatively unadorned ground story; the individual bricks in the second story are slightly more saturated in color than those in the first; and the apparent rustication of the ground story, achieved by recessing one course in every seven, is abandoned at the first stringcourse, above which the wall is planar.
In keeping with the unadorned character of the ground story are the openings, which receive identical articulation in both facades, in the corner, and on the southern side of the eastern arm. They differ only in their proportions: those in the north facade are squatter than those in the projecting bays and in the principal facade, and those in the curved section and the eastern arm are more attenuated.
The sash is one-over-one double-hung aluminum surmounted by a fixed pane of glass. The openings are unframed, vertically-oriented rectangles with flat-arch brick lintels and limestone sills with classical contours. A console at either end of the sill provides support, and a console serves as keystone in the flat arch (the console keystone is omitted in the outermost bays of the curved unit).
There are three distinct window treatments in the second story, although the sash remains constant. While the same size as those in the east, the windows in the north side are the least elaborate, treated in much the same way as those on the ground story. Replacing the consoles, however, are wedge-shaped limestone keystones that are articulated in three dimensions.
One such opening marks the second story of the southern side of the eastern arm. The windows of the corner element are squeezed within the intercolumniations of four Roman Doric, unf luted columns on bases, the two end ones of which are engaged; a series of classical moldings constitutes the lintels.
The surface bounded by the upper edge of each lintel and the lower edge of the second story stringcourse is pierced by a round window enframed with a terra-cotta wreath; the comers are enlivened with foliate terra-cotta forms.
All windows in the second stories of both the principal facade and the projecting bays are aedicular in type.
The aediculae, which frame the windows, are constituted of a series of freely interpreted classical elements including flanking pilasters, which are articulated with deep channels running vertically from the base, a capital, impost block, and lintel of classical moldings.
The window sill is tripartite: at either end, a segment projects slightly to form a base for the pilasters. A console with pendant foliate and vegetal ornament decorates each pilaster from just above mid-height to the capital. The window extends from the sill to the top of the capital; in the space that is roughly the height of the impost block and extends from the capital to the egg and dart molding of the lintel, is a flat, blank plaque.
The panel duplicates on a reduced scale the one crowning the axis of symmetry in the principal facade, which is inscribed with the name of the precinct. Each aedicula of the projecting bays is enframed by a larger aedicula, which is vestigial in that it is composed of thick pilasters that are simply projections of the brick fabric. Elaborating each pilaster are a cartouche, festoon, and pendant foliate form, placed in series within a vertically-oriented rectangular panel.
The axis of symmetry in the principal elevation serves a dual function: it divides the facade into two equal and opposite parts, and it creates a strong central focus. The double doors are preceded by two granite steps set between granite blocks, upon which originally were lampposts.
Rectangular hollow metal double doors, which have been painted bright red, with a transom on which the name of the Kingsbridge Heights Community Center has been painted in white, are placed within a basket or depressed arch with prominent brick voussoirs. A large, elaborate stone cartouche serves as the keystone.
Flanking the arch, large ancones with foliate ornament, surmounted by impost blocks, support the stringcourse, which breaks forward from the plane of the building at the entry. Directly above, a parapet is elaborated by a blank panel flanked by two triglyph-like elements surmounted by scrolls.
The triglyph/scroll unit (which resembles a section of fluted pilaster) supports a projecting molding along the upper edge of the parapet. Flanking each of the triglyph/scrolls is an S-shaped scroll in bas-relief.
The uppermost element of the axis is a plaque identifying the building as the 50th Precinct Police Station House. The limestone plaque is a horizontally disposed rectangle; a continuous egg and dart molding serves as a border. A tripartite guttae-like feature dangles from each side of the lower edge of the panel.
A block with a console in its center projects from the center of the lower edge of the inscribed panel.
The facade of the western arm of the "U" is undistinguished and virtually invisible from any street. The brick wall is punctuated by windows in the second story.
Alterations to the exterior have been few and have not significantly affected the street facades. The police moved from the building to their current location at 3450 Kingsbridge Avenue in December 1974; the present tenant, the Kingsbridge Heights Community Center, took possession in summer 1975. In 1979, with funding from the New York City Capital Budget and the Federal Community Development Budget, the Community Center embarked on a major rehabilitative program, which was completed in 1981.
Undertaken by the New York architects, Edelman and Salzman, most of the alterations were in the nature of adapting the interior spaces to new uses and upgrading
systems. The architects were sensitive to the original exterior; the north and east facades of the building remain virtually untouched.
The terracotta band courses were partially repointed; the existing wooden entrance doors and frames were replaced with hollow metal doors and frame, and the transom was closed; a new wrought iron gate to the courtyard was installed at the south end of the Kingsbridge Terrace facade; the wooden windows were replaced with aluminum ones, and stainless steel security screens were placed on every opening.
Unfortunately, the material condition of the exterior appears to be steadily deteriorating. The cornice, a section of which is missing from the curved elevation, shows an advanced state of erosion especially on the underside. Spalling marks the limestone members of the windows, door, stringcourses, as well as the terra-cotta ornament, and large pieces of the window sills have broken off.
- From the 1986 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report
Title: Memorial of Queen Liliuokalani in relation to the Crown lands of Hawaii, 12/19/1898
Creator(s): U.S. House of Representatives. Committee on Territories. (12/13/1825 - 1946)
Persistent URL: arcweb.archives.gov/arc/action/ExternalIdSearch?id=306653
Letter from Liliuokalani, Queen of Hawaii to U.S. House of Representatives protesting U.S. assertion of ownership of Hawaii, December 19, 1898; HR 55A-H28.3; Records of the U.S. House of Representatives; Record Group 233; National Archives.
Access Restrictions: Unrestricted
Use Restrictions: Unrestricted
Friday Late took its theme from the Undressed exhibition. Culturally emblematic and the most everyday of items, underwear attracts interest, debate, and even controversy. With activities addressing underwear’s relation to everything from sex and gender to fashion and form, visitors came and joined the conversation and took a peek at what lies beneath.
The Mustafa Prize is a top science and technology award granted to the top researchers and scientists of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) member states biennially.
The Mustafa Prize seeks to encourage education and research and is set to play the pioneering role in developing regional relations between science and technology institutions working in the OIC member countries. It also aims to improve scientific relation between academics and researchers in order to facilitate the growth and perfection of science in the OIC member states.
Malaysia’s prominent University of University Putra Malaysia (UPM) is slated to host a Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Development Forum in collaboration with Mustafa (pbuh) Science and Technology Foundation (MSTF) under Science and Technology Exchange Program (STEP) among Muslim Countries on December 1923 this year.
According to the Mustafa(pbuh) Prize Public Relations and Communications (MPRC), MSTF aims to appreciate scientists in the Islamic world by awarding the Mustafa Prize biennially and strengthening the scientific collaboration globally through STEP.
Guest: Dr. Wael Mamdouh, Assistant Professor of Nanotechnology, The American University in Cairo (AUC), Egypt
Full Interview: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IytD89LNcU&feature=youtu.be
Lower East Side, Manhattan
The Hamilton Fish Park Play Center is among the most notable small civic buildings in New York City. Designed in 1898 by Carrere & Hastings, one of America's foremost architectural firms at the turn of the century, this park pavilion is an exuberant Beaux-Arts style building that is the only survivor of the architects' original playground plan.
Beautiful in its own right, the building is even more exceptional when considered in relation to its surroundings. Hamilton Fish Park is located in an area that, for over 100 years, has been one of New York City's most depressed neighborhoods.
In fact, the park was constructed as part of a movement to add open space to the densely populated slums of the city. The. building was not planned simply as a utilitarian structure, but was designed in the manner of a small garden pavilion placed within a formal park. It was hoped that this sophisticated design would have a positive effect on the area's Immigrant population, lowering the crime rate and improving the respect of the residents for the law and for America in general.
In the post Civil War period, immigration from Europe to the United States increased dramatically. New York City's Lower East Side became the home of millions of these new residents and the area developed into one of the world's most densely populated slums. By the late nineteenth century, older buildings in the area had either been converted from private residences to multiple dwellings or had been replaced by three-, four-, or five-storv brick or frame tenements, built with few amenities and no regard for light or sanitation.
Conditions were made worse by the construction of additional tenements in the rear yards of the buildings that fronted on the streets, thus increasing the population density.
The Tenth Ward, centering on Hester and Orchard Streets, was described in 1897 as "notoriously the worst specimen of city overcrowding in the world. This ward contained 109 acres and a population of 70,168 people, or 643.8 per acre; there was an average of 229 children under the age of fifteen per acre, and the population was increasing. The Eleventh Ward, where Hamilton Fish Park was to be located, had a population of 86,722 squeezed into 213 acres (407.1 people per acre).
Prior to the 1880s the Lower East Side had almost no open space; no parks had been planned by the city and schools were built without playgrounds. The mayor's Committee on Small Parks wrote in 1897 that:
In the original plan of the City of New York the children seem to have been forgotten. Doubtless this oversight was due to the extensive area of unoccupied land which was available for the games and sports in which the youth of that day were wont to indulge. But as the city has grown in population, and especially within the last thirty years, this unoccupied space has been covered by improvements . . . -
In the nineteenth century there was a widespread belief that urban life was inherently evil and that the sins of urbanise could be cleansed by nature and open space. It is not surprising that such a philosophy would develop in this country which was founded in a sparsely populated virgin wilderness where open land seemed to be limitless. Thomas Jefferson, who wrote about the evils of urbanism, was a proponent of the rural agrarian life; many other nineteenth-century writers, philosophers, and theoreticians condemned the immoral city and praised the moral character of rural life.
As the United States developed into a great industrial power, the open spaces began to be devoured by the growing cities of the East and Middle West. As natural areas became harder for urban dwellers to reach, men like Andrew Jackson Downing and Killiam Cullen Bryant began to campaign for the creation of large parks that would be breathing spaces for the urban masses, bringing the cleansing and healing powers of nature to the city dweller.
These men believed that by bringing nature into the cities many of the evils of urban life would be eradicated. This campaign for urban parks led to such great open spaces as Central Park and Prospect Park. The philosophy of creating parks as a way of improving urban life, decreasing crime, and improving the quality of citizenship among urban residents was also a determining factor, later in the century, in the movement for the construction of small parks in Manhattan's slums.
Those people who fought for the creation of small parks believed that they would aid in combating crime among young people and increase respect for the law and for American traditions. The mayor's Committee on Small Parks, established in 1897, was "convinced from the careful consideration which they have been enabled to make... that the failure to provide for the reasonable recreation of the people, and especially for the playgrounds for the rising generation, has been the most efficient cause of the growth of crime and pauperism in our midst.
It was thought that since there was no parks, children were forced to play in the streets where they obstructed traffic. This caused the police to interfere with their activities, leading to hostility towards the police and, thus, the growth of the criminal class. Parks and playgrounds, it was felt, would give young people a place for healthy activity, insuring their respect for the law and their development as healthy and law abiding citizens. Although this belief seems simplistic and naive today, it was the leading argument used by the proponents of small parks.
The first step towards the creation of small parks on the Lower East Side came in 1884 when New York State authorized the laying out of Corlears Hook Park on the East River at Cherry Street in the Seventh Ward.
This was followed in 1887 by a major bill passed by the New York State Legislature that "authorized and empowered" the Board of Street Opening and Improvement of the City of New York "to select, locate and lay out such and so many parks in the City of New York, south of One Hundred and Fifty-Ninth Street, as the said board may from time to time determine." One million dollars a year was allocated for this purpose.
In 1895 a private group called the Committee of Seventy established a Subcommittee on Small Parks to study the effect of the 1887 law. The sub-committee found "that the lav of 1887, known as the Small Parks Law, which was intended to give needed relief to those congested districts, has failed of its purpose, the net result of such relief of seven years effort under this measure being one park, Mulberry Bend Park, which is as yet only on paper." The only other parks laid out were Corlears Hook, which had been authorized in 1884, St. John's Park (renamed Hudson Park and now known as James J. Walker Park on Hudson Street at Leroy Place and Clarkson Street) which was formerly a burial ground and thus did not add open space to the city, Rutgers Slip Green, which had been a street, and East River Park, which the sub-committee believed was not urgently needed and had no effect on relieving the overcrowded conditions of the area.
The sub-committee felt that "urgent and immediate action for needed relief" was needed aand recommended that: l)more small parks be built; 2) all public schools be built with playgrounds; 3)Mulberry Bend Park be immediately constructed; 4)the one million dollar yearly allocation under the 1887 law be made cumulative; and 5)that the mayor appoint an advisory committee on small parks.3 Many of the sub-committee's recommendations were acted upon. Mulberry Bend Park was completed, replacing the notorious Five Points; a mayoral committee was established in June 1896; and at least one new park, Hamilton Fish Park, was begun.
In March 1896 the Health Board announced that it had selected a site for a new park that "would give an open air space in the most crowded locality and will remove the greatest number of conditions which may have become a menace to the public health."
The blocks chosen for this park contained a large number of tenements including seventeen rear tenements. In May 1896 an official announcement was made, reporting that the area between Houston, Pitt, Stanton, and Sherriff Streets, with Willett Street running through the middle, would be purchased for park use."
The 1898 Department of Parks Annual Report noted that land had been acquired and cleared of buildings, but no funds had yet been made available to begin work on the design and layout of the park.
In 1899 funds were finally allocated and the architectural firm of Carrere & Hastings was given the commission to design the park and the small gymnasium building that was to face Pitt Street at the west end of the site. Work finally began on the park in April 1899.
John Merven Carrere (1858-1911) and Thomas Hastings (1860-1929) were the leading American exponents of the design philosophy of the French Ecole des Beaux-Arts. While both men had attended the Ecole in the late 1870s and early 1880s, each belonged to a different atelier, and they did not meet until after their graduation when both were employed by the office of McKim, Mead & White. In 1885 the two architects established a partnership, first renting space in a small back room of McKim, Mead & White's office and then moving to an old Federal style residence at 3 Bowling Green.
According to David Cray, who wrote a biography of Hastings in 1933, it was Hastings who did most of the firm's design work,while Carrere managed the office and negotiated with clients and contractors.
The firm's earliest commissions were from real estate developer Henry Flagler. Flagler was a friend and parishioner of Thomas Hastings' father, the Rev. Doctor Thomas Hastings, minister of the West Presbyterian Church in New York and president of the Union Theological Seminary. For Flagler, Carrere & Hastings designed the Ponce de Leon and Alcazar Hotels in St. Augustine, "Whitehall," the Flagler estate in Palm Beach, and several churches.
Flagler's patronage established the success of the firm and commissions for residences, churches, hotels, and office buildings followed. In 1891 Carrere & Hastings gained prominence for the design they submitted to the competition for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The proposal placed second to Heins & LaFarge's winning scheme. It was, however, their winning design in the New York Public. Library competition (1897) that established Carrere & Hastings as one of the leading firms in the United States.
Most of the work designed by Carrere & Hastings was in the French Renaissance tradition and this accorded with the philosophy espoused by Thomas Hastings in his numerous articles and lectures. Hastings believed that American life was still motivated by the forces that had brought about the Renaissance. He saw himself as a
Renaissance architect and believed that only architecture based on Renaissance precedents was applicable to modern building. These forms were seen as appropriate to contemporary culture, while the. use of styles other than those of the Renaissance was inappropriate. He noted, in a 1913 lecture, that "the irrational idiosyncrasy of modern times is the assumption that each kind of problem demands a particular style of architecture" and believed that the use of medieval styles "has shown a want of life and spirit, simply because it is an anachronism."
It was Hastings' belief that architects needed to be educated in one style and that this should be a style that reflected their own time. This style, however, should not be an imitation of past architecture, but an adaptation of past work to modern needs. Hastings chose to adapt French Renaissance precedents because he felt that on.lv in France was architecture "consistently modern."
To Hastings, French architecture had evolved a style that was distinctly representative of the nineteenth century. This was because of the "high classic standards of study which has... always been adhered to by the authorities in the art schools."-
An overview of the Carrere & Hastings oeuvre shows how closely they worked wienie this philosophy. Almost all of their work is based on French Renaissance prototypes, and it shows the influence of the educational system of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The New York Public Library, with its classical forms, bold carving, and union of architecture, sculpture, painting, and the decorative arts is the firm's most famous Beaux-Arts design, but city and country residences, churches, office buildings, government buildings, and other works by Carrere & Hastings also reflect a consistent design outlook with roots in the French Renaissance.
Among the major surviving French-inspired works designed by Carrere & Hastings in New York City are the Henry T. Sloane Residence '1894-1896) at 9 East 72nd Street, the First Church of Christ, Scientist (1899-1903) at Central Park West and West 96th Street, the Henry Hammond Residence (1902-1903) at 9 East 91st Street, the Staten Island Borough Hall (1903-1906), the arch and colonnade approach to the Manhattan Bridge (1912-1915), the William Starr Miller Residence (1912-1914) at 1048 Fifth Avenue on the corner of Fast 86th Street, and the Frick Collection (1913-1914) at 1 East 70th Street.
Occasionally Carrere & Hastings designed works in other Renaissance- inspired styles. For example, Hastings showed an interest in English architecture, particularly evident in the Fort Washington Presbyterian Church (1914), 21 Wadsworth Avenue at West 174th Street. In addition, Italian Renaissance precedents are prominent in the design of the Richmond County Courthouse (1913-1919).
Carrere & Hastings received the Hamilton Fish Park Commission shortly after winning the prestigious New York Public Library competition. The library design consisted of a large symmetrical Beaux-Arts style building surrounded by a formal axiallv-designed park composed of terraces with parterres and trees. Carrere & Hastings' design for Hamilton Fish Park also includes a Beaux-Arts style structure set amid formally designed grass parterres, trees, benches, and exedra.
Hamilton Fish Park was not Carrere & Hastings' first commission for a small park laid out along formal lines. The firm had already designed Hudson Park, replacing St. John's Cemetery. This park was modeled on formal Italian gardens. It contained a small rustic stone pavilion, and axially arranged stairs, balconies, parterres, and fountains (none of these features are extant).
At Hamilton Fish Park, the small pavilion is strategically placed to the west, making it visible to those approaching from the heavily populated areas that lay between the park and the Bowery. Behind the building was a pair of small curving exedra and sculpted water fountains and grass parterres, benches, and trees, all arranged in straight rows. Across Willett Street, which was left open to traffic, was the play-
ground, demarcated by larger exedra, near Houston and Stanton Streets, and by additional symmetrical arrangements of lawn, trees, and benches.
The park plan is in accord with Hastings' view of small city parks. Hastings believed that:
A small park bounded by straight lines in the heart of the city, with winding paths and irregular grades, is in my opinion quite out of place; such a park should be architectural in character. It should be in other works a public square rather than a park.
Although built in the midst of one of the world's worst slums, the park building, meant to be used as a gymnasium with minor bathing facilities, was not designed as a dull utilitarian structure, but rather was given great architectural distinction. A key tenet of Beaux-Arts theory was that every type of building, no matter what its use, should be given a careful and sophisticated architectural treatment.
This belief nicely complemented the American view of parks as areas that would serve to cleanse the masses of the evils of urban life. Just as the open space of the park and the recreational opportunities afforded by its presence were planned to add to the health and moral conduct of the residents of the area, so too, the architectural embellishments of the park would have a positive effect on the well being of the people in the neighborhood.
The following comment on Carrere & Hastings' Hudson Park, which appeared in the Scientific American, Building Edition in June 1899, is equally appropriate to Hamilton Fish Park:
It might, of course, be argued that the architectural adornments of this park would be more suitable for Central Park, the park par excellence of the rich and well-to-do; but there is really no harm in allowing the poor to enjoy good architecture, and such adornments...cannot fail to have an elevating influence on visitors.
The Hamilton Fish Park gymnasium (now the play center) is not the only example of a sophisticated architectural design being applied to a utilitarian structure in New York City. Many public baths were modeled after the Roman Baths of Caracalla; the power stations of the original IRT subway system were designed to resemble Italian Renaissance palazzi; both Carrere & Hastings and McKim, Mead & White designed comfort stations based on monuments of classical architecture (in Bryant Park and Fort Greene Park), and many of the parks on the Lower East Side and elsewhere in New York were graced with structures modeled after classical and Renaissance garden pavilions.
The design for the Hamilton Fish Park gymnasium was inspired by Charles Girault's Petit Palais in Paris. The Petit Palais was designed in 1895; construction began in 1897 and was completed in 1900. The building won critical acclaim from the time of its initial design.
With their deep interest in contemporary French architecture, both Carrere and Hastings certainly were familiar with the structure. The stone Petit Palais centers on an enormous centrally-placed round-arched entrance portal flanked by wings that end in projecting pavilions with round-arched windows and pedimented rooflines.
For their gymnasium design, Carrere & Hastings have compressed and adapted Girault's building to fit the demands of a small urban park in America. This was not the only design for which Carrere & Hastings took the Petit Palace as precedent. The
-6-
Agricultural Building at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition also borrows heavily from the Girault work.
As at the Petit Palais, the Hamilton Fish Park building is symmetrically massed and focuses on a projecting centrally-placed round-arched entrance portal, here constructed of limestone with brick trim. This portal, with its modillioned stone cornice rises above the roofline of the mair section of the building.
A short flight of nine steps leads to the entrance which is set within a Doric-columned enframement topped by a large sexpartite round-arched window. This entrance enframement and window opening are set within the deep concave intrados of the arched portal. To the sides of the arch are brick piers that support the cornice which enframes the arch. These piers have stone quoins and rusticated limestone dados ornamented with smooth oblong panels. The dados rest on smooth stone bases.
To either side of the entrance are three brick and stone bays sit above a continuous high limestone basement. Projecting brick and stone piers, similar to those at the entrance, although lacking the oblong panels, separate the window bavs. Each bay is composed of a large arched window, set above brickwork accented by a small blind rectangular opening with a limestone enframement located near the base.
Each limestone-enframed arch is marked by a faceted keystone and each is surmounted by a pedimented cornice. Four growling lion's heads carved in limestone glare down from the imposts between the windows. At the corners of the building, the piers are accented by the oblong panels seen at the entrance. These projecting panels visually strengthen the corners.
A handsome iron fence on a stone platform (part of the original park layout) gives additional emphasis to the southwest and northwest corners. With the exception of the arched entrance, which forms a barrel vault running through the entire building, the structure is crowned by a copper-clad mansard roof. Ocular windows once lit this mansard, but they have been removed. Each side elevation copies a single bay of the front facade. The rear elevation is virtually identical to that of the front, with the additions of an octagonal brick chimney and a limestone clock frame (the clock face has been removed) above the entrance enframement.
On the interior, the building was designed with a central entrance hall of brick, flanked by identical gymnasiums, each with a length of 60' 5M'; to the north was the men's gymnasium and to the south that for women. Each gymnasium was designed with a gallery to be used as a running track (removed) and a wood beam ceiling (intact). In the basement was a boiler room, coal storage room, toilets and dressing rooms for men and women, each with three "needle baths," i.e, showers.
The building was not meant to be used as a public bath house, thus the bathing and dressing facilities were designed to be large enough to service only those who were using the gymnasiums.
Hamilton Fish Park was completed in 1900. By the time of its completion a new administration had been installed at City Hall and the new parks commissioner, George C. Clausen, postponed the opening of the park because of his disappointment with many of its features. Commission Clausen felt that the "designers of this park seem to have secured neither a park nor a playground. The improvement is on very extravagant lines, $183,000 having been so far spent upon it; this in addition to the $1,719,505 which it cost to acquire the property. Most of the $183,000 has been put in an extensive building whose architectural features are not at all consistent with the character of the park or its surroundings.
This expenditure for buildings has not resulted in providing for any practical use that seems at all adequate. The gymnasium feature is not complete, and is without apparatus. The public-bath feature is ridiculously inadequate, there being room for only 3 persons to bathe at a time on each side, that for men and that for women, yet with nickel-plated plumbing and costly tilework, enough money has been spent to fit up in a highly sanitary and useful manner much more bathing room." He also complained that there was little planting for the money, and was quite clear in noting that all of this had been approved under a previous administration.
Despite Clausen's objections, some of which seem justified (particularly those about the planting and arrangement of the grounds) and some of which were not (those about the building, which was designed according to a perceived need for a small gymnasium with related bathing facilities), the park was opened on June 1, 1900.
The New York Times reported that the park had been "hewn out of the darkened mass of brick and mortar in the very heart of the east side," and that upon its opening "a throng of nearly 10,000 children of the tenements swarmed out upon it with a mighty shout and claimed it for their own."
The park, as designed by Carrere & Hastings, did not wear well. Planned for quiet activity, its formal arrangement of architectural and landscape features was not appropriate to the activities of large numbers of slum children. The park was soon in ruins "owing, it is said,to the radical defects of the original plan and to the strenuous nature of the youth of the neighborhood."
The park was soon closed and redesigned. In October 1903, the park was reopened with new trees, new asphalt paths, basketball and tennis courts, and an eight-lap running track. Much of this remodeling was removed in 1935-36 when Aymar Embury designed a swimming pool for the park. Embury adapted the original gymnasium building to locker rooms for the pool.
The Hamilton Fish Park Gymnasium, now known as a play center, but still used for locker rooms and as the entrance to the swimming pool, stands as a monument to nineteenth-century civic betterment — to the belief that great architecture and design would aid in the formation of citizens of outstanding moral character. Although the park itself has been redesigned twice since it was completed, the pavilion has remained a success and is one of the Lower East Side's great architectural treasures.
- From the 1982 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report
Negative No: 1972-3462 - Negatives Book Entry: Yew Tree Road/Princess Parkway, Views in relation to footbridge
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Rita Ora has relation with son Tommy Hilfiger
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In 1704 accusations made by a sixteen-year-old youth Patrick Morton (Peter Morton in some accounts) brought several persons to trial on charges of practising witchcraft at Pittenweem, a coastal town in the east of Scotland. Though none of the accused was condemned to death by the court, a mob, enraged by the escape of one of the prisoners, Janet Corphat (or Cornfoot), pursued her and pressed her to death.
A true and full relation of the witches at Pittenweem. Edinburgh, John Reid Junior, 1704; duodecimo (Sp Coll Mu56-h.29)
Title: A matter of health, or, West Texas and its relation to pulmonary complaints
Creator: Mayo, Henry Mash, 1862-1950
Contributors: Southern Pacific
Date: ca. April, 1898
Part Of A matter of health, or, West Texas and its relation to pulmonary complaints
Place: New Orleans, Orleans Parish, Louisiana
Description: This pamphlet describes the suitability of the West Texas climate for sufferers of lung diseases.
Physical Description: 20 p. 15 x 9 cm
File Name: File Namef394_f63_m396_1900z_opt.pdf
Rights: DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University
Digital Collection: Texas: Photographs, Manuscripts, and Imprints
For more information, see: digitalcollections.smu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/wes/id/2318
From this view, it's relation to the Chevrolet Camaro is unmistakable.
2016: Concours on the Avenue, Carmel:
Title / Titre :
Row of books (left to right: Euclid’s Elementa, 1482; Milton’s Paradise Lost, 1758; Relation de ce qui s’est passé en la mission des pères de la compagnie de Iésus …, 1651; Sophocleos Tragoediai, 1502; The Lower-Canada Watchman, 1829 /
Rangée de livres (de gauche à droite : Éléments d’Euclide, 1482; Paradise Lost de Milton, 1758; Relation de ce qui s’est passé en la mission des Pères de la Compagnie de Jésus […], 1651; Sophocleos Tragoediai, 1502; The Lower-Canada Watchman, 1829)
Description :
In 1967, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Canadian Confederation, the British government gave a number of rare books to the National Library of Canada. These five books were part of the gift. /
En 1967, pour célébrer le 100e anniversaire de la Confédération canadienne, le gouvernement britannique a donné à la Bibliothèque nationale du Canada un certain nombre de livres rares. Ces cinq livres faisaient partie du cadeau.
Creator(s) / Créateur(s) : Dave Knox
Date(s) : February 8, 2018 / 8 février 2018
Reference No. / Numéro de référence : AMICUS n/a, MIKAN n/a
Location / Lieu : Gatineau, Quebec, Canada / Gatineau, Québec, Canada
Credit / Mention de source :
Dave Knox. Library and Archives Canada, IMG_3472 /
Dave Knox. Bibliothèque et Archives Canada, IMG_3472
Sugar seems to have developed a reputation as the big bad wolf in relation to health. We have reported on numerous studies associating sugar intake with increased aging, cardiovascular disease, obesity and even cancer. Such research has led to many health experts around the globe calling for reductions in recommended sugar intake, with some saying we should cut out sugar completely. But is it really that bad for our health?
“sugar is a crystalline carbohydrate that makes foods taste sweet”
There are many different types, including glucose, fructose, lactose, maltose and sucrose. Some of these sugars, such as glucose, fructose and lactose, occur naturally in fruits, vegetables and other foods. But many of the foods we consume contain “added” sugars – sugar that we add to a product ourselves to enhance the flavor or sugar that has been added to a product by a manufacturer.
Healty Low Sugar Shake
The most common sources of added sugars include soft drinks, cakes, pies, chocolate, fruit drinks and desserts. Just a single can of cola can contain up to 7 tsps of added sugar, while an average-sized chocolate bar can contain up to 6 tsps.
It is added sugars that have been cited as a contributor to many health problems. In December 2014, MNT reported on a study in the journal Open Heart claiming added sugars may increase the risk of high blood pressure, even more so than sodium. And in February 2014, a study led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) associated high added sugar intake with increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease (CVD).
“Perhaps most strongly, added sugars have been associated with the significant increase in obesity”
In the US, more than a third of adults are obese, while the rate of childhood obesity has more than doubled in children and quadrupled in adolescents over the past 30 years.
A 2013 study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition suggested that consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages increases weight gain in both children and adults, while a review paper from the World Health Organization (WHO) notes an increase in the consumption of such beverages correlates with the increase in obesity.
Are we becoming addicted to sugar?
High Sugar Chocolate Cookies
In support of these associations is Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California-San Francisco and author of the book Fat Chance: The Hidden Truth About Sugar, who claims sugar is a “toxic” substance that we are becoming addicted to.
A 2008 study by researchers from Princeton University, NJ, found rats used to consuming a high-sugar diet displayed signs of binging, craving and withdrawal when their sugar intake was reduced.
A woman tempted by chocolate
Dr. Lustig: “We need to wean ourselves off. We need to de-sweeten our lives. We need to make sugar a treat, not a diet staple.”We need to wean ourselves off. We need to de-sweeten our lives.”
“We need to make sugar a treat, not a diet staple”
Dr. Lustig told The Guardian in 2013. “The food industry has made it into a diet staple because they know when they do you buy more,” he added. “This is their hook. If some unscrupulous cereal manufacturer went out and laced your breakfast cereal with morphine to get you to buy more, what would you think of that? They do it with sugar instead.”
In her popular blog, Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow cites sugar addiction as one of the reasons she decided to quit sugar completely.
“The bottom line is that sugar works the addiction and reward pathways in the brain in much the same way as many illegal drugs,” she writes. “Sugar is basically a socially acceptable, legal, recreational drug with deadly consequences.”
Bowl of Cereal and Forrest Fruits
Statistics show that we are certainly a nation of added-sugar lovers. According to a report from the CDC, adults in the US consumed around 13% of their total daily calorie intake from added sugars between 2005-2010, while 16% of children’s and adolescents’ total calorie intake came from added sugars between 2005-2008.
These levels are well above those currently recommended by WHO, which state we should consume no more than 10% of total daily calories from “free” sugars – both naturally occurring sugars and those that are added to products by the manufacturer.
In 2013, however, MNT reported on a study by Prof. Wayne Potts and colleagues from the University of Utah, claiming that even consuming added sugars at recommended levels may be harmful to health, after finding that such levels reduced lifespan in mice.
Is eliminating sugar from our diet THE healthy THING TO DO?
Healthy Low Carb Diet
The array of studies reporting the negative implications of added sugar led to WHO making a proposal to revise their added sugar recommendations in 2014. The organization issued a draft guideline stating they would like to halve their recommended daily free sugar intake from 10% to 5%.
“The objective of this guideline is to provide recommendations on the consumption of free sugars to reduce the risk of noncommunicable diseases in adults and children,” WHO explained, “with a particular focus on the prevention and control of weight gain and dental caries.”
In addition, it seems many health experts, nutritionists and even celebrities like Gwyneth have jumped on a “no sugar” bandwagon.
But is it even possible to completely eliminate sugar from a diet? And is it safe? Biochemist Leah Fitzsimmons, of the University of Birmingham in the UK, told The Daily Mail:
“Cutting all sugar from your diet would be very difficult to achieve. Fruits, vegetables, dairy products and dairy replacements, eggs, alcohol and nuts all contain sugar, which would leave you with little other than meat and fats to eat – definitely not very healthy.”
Many people turn to artificial sweeteners as a sugar alternative, but according to studies, these sweeteners may still drive diabetes and obesity.
“Together with other major shifts that occurred in human nutrition, this increase in artificial sweetener consumption coincides with the dramatic increase in the obesity and diabetes epidemics,” the authors note. “Our findings suggest that artificial sweeteners may have directly contributed to enhancing the exact epidemic that they themselves were intended to fight.”
via The Little Moment ift.tt/2KjPJLt
Lower East Side, Manhattan
The Hamilton Fish Park Play Center is among the most notable small civic buildings in New York City. Designed in 1898 by Carrere & Hastings, one of America's foremost architectural firms at the turn of the century, this park pavilion is an exuberant Beaux-Arts style building that is the only survivor of the architects' original playground plan.
Beautiful in its own right, the building is even more exceptional when considered in relation to its surroundings. Hamilton Fish Park is located in an area that, for over 100 years, has been one of New York City's most depressed neighborhoods.
In fact, the park was constructed as part of a movement to add open space to the densely populated slums of the city. The. building was not planned simply as a utilitarian structure, but was designed in the manner of a small garden pavilion placed within a formal park. It was hoped that this sophisticated design would have a positive effect on the area's Immigrant population, lowering the crime rate and improving the respect of the residents for the law and for America in general.
In the post Civil War period, immigration from Europe to the United States increased dramatically. New York City's Lower East Side became the home of millions of these new residents and the area developed into one of the world's most densely populated slums. By the late nineteenth century, older buildings in the area had either been converted from private residences to multiple dwellings or had been replaced by three-, four-, or five-storv brick or frame tenements, built with few amenities and no regard for light or sanitation.
Conditions were made worse by the construction of additional tenements in the rear yards of the buildings that fronted on the streets, thus increasing the population density.
The Tenth Ward, centering on Hester and Orchard Streets, was described in 1897 as "notoriously the worst specimen of city overcrowding in the world. This ward contained 109 acres and a population of 70,168 people, or 643.8 per acre; there was an average of 229 children under the age of fifteen per acre, and the population was increasing. The Eleventh Ward, where Hamilton Fish Park was to be located, had a population of 86,722 squeezed into 213 acres (407.1 people per acre).
Prior to the 1880s the Lower East Side had almost no open space; no parks had been planned by the city and schools were built without playgrounds. The mayor's Committee on Small Parks wrote in 1897 that:
In the original plan of the City of New York the children seem to have been forgotten. Doubtless this oversight was due to the extensive area of unoccupied land which was available for the games and sports in which the youth of that day were wont to indulge. But as the city has grown in population, and especially within the last thirty years, this unoccupied space has been covered by improvements . . . -
In the nineteenth century there was a widespread belief that urban life was inherently evil and that the sins of urbanise could be cleansed by nature and open space. It is not surprising that such a philosophy would develop in this country which was founded in a sparsely populated virgin wilderness where open land seemed to be limitless. Thomas Jefferson, who wrote about the evils of urbanism, was a proponent of the rural agrarian life; many other nineteenth-century writers, philosophers, and theoreticians condemned the immoral city and praised the moral character of rural life.
As the United States developed into a great industrial power, the open spaces began to be devoured by the growing cities of the East and Middle West. As natural areas became harder for urban dwellers to reach, men like Andrew Jackson Downing and Killiam Cullen Bryant began to campaign for the creation of large parks that would be breathing spaces for the urban masses, bringing the cleansing and healing powers of nature to the city dweller.
These men believed that by bringing nature into the cities many of the evils of urban life would be eradicated. This campaign for urban parks led to such great open spaces as Central Park and Prospect Park. The philosophy of creating parks as a way of improving urban life, decreasing crime, and improving the quality of citizenship among urban residents was also a determining factor, later in the century, in the movement for the construction of small parks in Manhattan's slums.
Those people who fought for the creation of small parks believed that they would aid in combating crime among young people and increase respect for the law and for American traditions. The mayor's Committee on Small Parks, established in 1897, was "convinced from the careful consideration which they have been enabled to make... that the failure to provide for the reasonable recreation of the people, and especially for the playgrounds for the rising generation, has been the most efficient cause of the growth of crime and pauperism in our midst.
It was thought that since there was no parks, children were forced to play in the streets where they obstructed traffic. This caused the police to interfere with their activities, leading to hostility towards the police and, thus, the growth of the criminal class. Parks and playgrounds, it was felt, would give young people a place for healthy activity, insuring their respect for the law and their development as healthy and law abiding citizens. Although this belief seems simplistic and naive today, it was the leading argument used by the proponents of small parks.
The first step towards the creation of small parks on the Lower East Side came in 1884 when New York State authorized the laying out of Corlears Hook Park on the East River at Cherry Street in the Seventh Ward.
This was followed in 1887 by a major bill passed by the New York State Legislature that "authorized and empowered" the Board of Street Opening and Improvement of the City of New York "to select, locate and lay out such and so many parks in the City of New York, south of One Hundred and Fifty-Ninth Street, as the said board may from time to time determine." One million dollars a year was allocated for this purpose.
In 1895 a private group called the Committee of Seventy established a Subcommittee on Small Parks to study the effect of the 1887 law. The sub-committee found "that the lav of 1887, known as the Small Parks Law, which was intended to give needed relief to those congested districts, has failed of its purpose, the net result of such relief of seven years effort under this measure being one park, Mulberry Bend Park, which is as yet only on paper." The only other parks laid out were Corlears Hook, which had been authorized in 1884, St. John's Park (renamed Hudson Park and now known as James J. Walker Park on Hudson Street at Leroy Place and Clarkson Street) which was formerly a burial ground and thus did not add open space to the city, Rutgers Slip Green, which had been a street, and East River Park, which the sub-committee believed was not urgently needed and had no effect on relieving the overcrowded conditions of the area.
The sub-committee felt that "urgent and immediate action for needed relief" was needed aand recommended that: l)more small parks be built; 2) all public schools be built with playgrounds; 3)Mulberry Bend Park be immediately constructed; 4)the one million dollar yearly allocation under the 1887 law be made cumulative; and 5)that the mayor appoint an advisory committee on small parks.3 Many of the sub-committee's recommendations were acted upon. Mulberry Bend Park was completed, replacing the notorious Five Points; a mayoral committee was established in June 1896; and at least one new park, Hamilton Fish Park, was begun.
In March 1896 the Health Board announced that it had selected a site for a new park that "would give an open air space in the most crowded locality and will remove the greatest number of conditions which may have become a menace to the public health."
The blocks chosen for this park contained a large number of tenements including seventeen rear tenements. In May 1896 an official announcement was made, reporting that the area between Houston, Pitt, Stanton, and Sherriff Streets, with Willett Street running through the middle, would be purchased for park use."
The 1898 Department of Parks Annual Report noted that land had been acquired and cleared of buildings, but no funds had yet been made available to begin work on the design and layout of the park.
In 1899 funds were finally allocated and the architectural firm of Carrere & Hastings was given the commission to design the park and the small gymnasium building that was to face Pitt Street at the west end of the site. Work finally began on the park in April 1899.
John Merven Carrere (1858-1911) and Thomas Hastings (1860-1929) were the leading American exponents of the design philosophy of the French Ecole des Beaux-Arts. While both men had attended the Ecole in the late 1870s and early 1880s, each belonged to a different atelier, and they did not meet until after their graduation when both were employed by the office of McKim, Mead & White. In 1885 the two architects established a partnership, first renting space in a small back room of McKim, Mead & White's office and then moving to an old Federal style residence at 3 Bowling Green.
According to David Cray, who wrote a biography of Hastings in 1933, it was Hastings who did most of the firm's design work,while Carrere managed the office and negotiated with clients and contractors.
The firm's earliest commissions were from real estate developer Henry Flagler. Flagler was a friend and parishioner of Thomas Hastings' father, the Rev. Doctor Thomas Hastings, minister of the West Presbyterian Church in New York and president of the Union Theological Seminary. For Flagler, Carrere & Hastings designed the Ponce de Leon and Alcazar Hotels in St. Augustine, "Whitehall," the Flagler estate in Palm Beach, and several churches.
Flagler's patronage established the success of the firm and commissions for residences, churches, hotels, and office buildings followed. In 1891 Carrere & Hastings gained prominence for the design they submitted to the competition for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The proposal placed second to Heins & LaFarge's winning scheme. It was, however, their winning design in the New York Public. Library competition (1897) that established Carrere & Hastings as one of the leading firms in the United States.
Most of the work designed by Carrere & Hastings was in the French Renaissance tradition and this accorded with the philosophy espoused by Thomas Hastings in his numerous articles and lectures. Hastings believed that American life was still motivated by the forces that had brought about the Renaissance. He saw himself as a
Renaissance architect and believed that only architecture based on Renaissance precedents was applicable to modern building. These forms were seen as appropriate to contemporary culture, while the. use of styles other than those of the Renaissance was inappropriate. He noted, in a 1913 lecture, that "the irrational idiosyncrasy of modern times is the assumption that each kind of problem demands a particular style of architecture" and believed that the use of medieval styles "has shown a want of life and spirit, simply because it is an anachronism."
It was Hastings' belief that architects needed to be educated in one style and that this should be a style that reflected their own time. This style, however, should not be an imitation of past architecture, but an adaptation of past work to modern needs. Hastings chose to adapt French Renaissance precedents because he felt that on.lv in France was architecture "consistently modern."
To Hastings, French architecture had evolved a style that was distinctly representative of the nineteenth century. This was because of the "high classic standards of study which has... always been adhered to by the authorities in the art schools."-
An overview of the Carrere & Hastings oeuvre shows how closely they worked wienie this philosophy. Almost all of their work is based on French Renaissance prototypes, and it shows the influence of the educational system of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The New York Public Library, with its classical forms, bold carving, and union of architecture, sculpture, painting, and the decorative arts is the firm's most famous Beaux-Arts design, but city and country residences, churches, office buildings, government buildings, and other works by Carrere & Hastings also reflect a consistent design outlook with roots in the French Renaissance.
Among the major surviving French-inspired works designed by Carrere & Hastings in New York City are the Henry T. Sloane Residence '1894-1896) at 9 East 72nd Street, the First Church of Christ, Scientist (1899-1903) at Central Park West and West 96th Street, the Henry Hammond Residence (1902-1903) at 9 East 91st Street, the Staten Island Borough Hall (1903-1906), the arch and colonnade approach to the Manhattan Bridge (1912-1915), the William Starr Miller Residence (1912-1914) at 1048 Fifth Avenue on the corner of Fast 86th Street, and the Frick Collection (1913-1914) at 1 East 70th Street.
Occasionally Carrere & Hastings designed works in other Renaissance- inspired styles. For example, Hastings showed an interest in English architecture, particularly evident in the Fort Washington Presbyterian Church (1914), 21 Wadsworth Avenue at West 174th Street. In addition, Italian Renaissance precedents are prominent in the design of the Richmond County Courthouse (1913-1919).
Carrere & Hastings received the Hamilton Fish Park Commission shortly after winning the prestigious New York Public Library competition. The library design consisted of a large symmetrical Beaux-Arts style building surrounded by a formal axiallv-designed park composed of terraces with parterres and trees. Carrere & Hastings' design for Hamilton Fish Park also includes a Beaux-Arts style structure set amid formally designed grass parterres, trees, benches, and exedra.
Hamilton Fish Park was not Carrere & Hastings' first commission for a small park laid out along formal lines. The firm had already designed Hudson Park, replacing St. John's Cemetery. This park was modeled on formal Italian gardens. It contained a small rustic stone pavilion, and axially arranged stairs, balconies, parterres, and fountains (none of these features are extant).
At Hamilton Fish Park, the small pavilion is strategically placed to the west, making it visible to those approaching from the heavily populated areas that lay between the park and the Bowery. Behind the building was a pair of small curving exedra and sculpted water fountains and grass parterres, benches, and trees, all arranged in straight rows. Across Willett Street, which was left open to traffic, was the play-
ground, demarcated by larger exedra, near Houston and Stanton Streets, and by additional symmetrical arrangements of lawn, trees, and benches.
The park plan is in accord with Hastings' view of small city parks. Hastings believed that:
A small park bounded by straight lines in the heart of the city, with winding paths and irregular grades, is in my opinion quite out of place; such a park should be architectural in character. It should be in other works a public square rather than a park.
Although built in the midst of one of the world's worst slums, the park building, meant to be used as a gymnasium with minor bathing facilities, was not designed as a dull utilitarian structure, but rather was given great architectural distinction. A key tenet of Beaux-Arts theory was that every type of building, no matter what its use, should be given a careful and sophisticated architectural treatment.
This belief nicely complemented the American view of parks as areas that would serve to cleanse the masses of the evils of urban life. Just as the open space of the park and the recreational opportunities afforded by its presence were planned to add to the health and moral conduct of the residents of the area, so too, the architectural embellishments of the park would have a positive effect on the well being of the people in the neighborhood.
The following comment on Carrere & Hastings' Hudson Park, which appeared in the Scientific American, Building Edition in June 1899, is equally appropriate to Hamilton Fish Park:
It might, of course, be argued that the architectural adornments of this park would be more suitable for Central Park, the park par excellence of the rich and well-to-do; but there is really no harm in allowing the poor to enjoy good architecture, and such adornments...cannot fail to have an elevating influence on visitors.
The Hamilton Fish Park gymnasium (now the play center) is not the only example of a sophisticated architectural design being applied to a utilitarian structure in New York City. Many public baths were modeled after the Roman Baths of Caracalla; the power stations of the original IRT subway system were designed to resemble Italian Renaissance palazzi; both Carrere & Hastings and McKim, Mead & White designed comfort stations based on monuments of classical architecture (in Bryant Park and Fort Greene Park), and many of the parks on the Lower East Side and elsewhere in New York were graced with structures modeled after classical and Renaissance garden pavilions.
The design for the Hamilton Fish Park gymnasium was inspired by Charles Girault's Petit Palais in Paris. The Petit Palais was designed in 1895; construction began in 1897 and was completed in 1900. The building won critical acclaim from the time of its initial design.
With their deep interest in contemporary French architecture, both Carrere and Hastings certainly were familiar with the structure. The stone Petit Palais centers on an enormous centrally-placed round-arched entrance portal flanked by wings that end in projecting pavilions with round-arched windows and pedimented rooflines.
For their gymnasium design, Carrere & Hastings have compressed and adapted Girault's building to fit the demands of a small urban park in America. This was not the only design for which Carrere & Hastings took the Petit Palace as precedent. The
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Agricultural Building at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition also borrows heavily from the Girault work.
As at the Petit Palais, the Hamilton Fish Park building is symmetrically massed and focuses on a projecting centrally-placed round-arched entrance portal, here constructed of limestone with brick trim. This portal, with its modillioned stone cornice rises above the roofline of the mair section of the building.
A short flight of nine steps leads to the entrance which is set within a Doric-columned enframement topped by a large sexpartite round-arched window. This entrance enframement and window opening are set within the deep concave intrados of the arched portal. To the sides of the arch are brick piers that support the cornice which enframes the arch. These piers have stone quoins and rusticated limestone dados ornamented with smooth oblong panels. The dados rest on smooth stone bases.
To either side of the entrance are three brick and stone bays sit above a continuous high limestone basement. Projecting brick and stone piers, similar to those at the entrance, although lacking the oblong panels, separate the window bavs. Each bay is composed of a large arched window, set above brickwork accented by a small blind rectangular opening with a limestone enframement located near the base.
Each limestone-enframed arch is marked by a faceted keystone and each is surmounted by a pedimented cornice. Four growling lion's heads carved in limestone glare down from the imposts between the windows. At the corners of the building, the piers are accented by the oblong panels seen at the entrance. These projecting panels visually strengthen the corners.
A handsome iron fence on a stone platform (part of the original park layout) gives additional emphasis to the southwest and northwest corners. With the exception of the arched entrance, which forms a barrel vault running through the entire building, the structure is crowned by a copper-clad mansard roof. Ocular windows once lit this mansard, but they have been removed. Each side elevation copies a single bay of the front facade. The rear elevation is virtually identical to that of the front, with the additions of an octagonal brick chimney and a limestone clock frame (the clock face has been removed) above the entrance enframement.
On the interior, the building was designed with a central entrance hall of brick, flanked by identical gymnasiums, each with a length of 60' 5M'; to the north was the men's gymnasium and to the south that for women. Each gymnasium was designed with a gallery to be used as a running track (removed) and a wood beam ceiling (intact). In the basement was a boiler room, coal storage room, toilets and dressing rooms for men and women, each with three "needle baths," i.e, showers.
The building was not meant to be used as a public bath house, thus the bathing and dressing facilities were designed to be large enough to service only those who were using the gymnasiums.
Hamilton Fish Park was completed in 1900. By the time of its completion a new administration had been installed at City Hall and the new parks commissioner, George C. Clausen, postponed the opening of the park because of his disappointment with many of its features. Commission Clausen felt that the "designers of this park seem to have secured neither a park nor a playground. The improvement is on very extravagant lines, $183,000 having been so far spent upon it; this in addition to the $1,719,505 which it cost to acquire the property. Most of the $183,000 has been put in an extensive building whose architectural features are not at all consistent with the character of the park or its surroundings.
This expenditure for buildings has not resulted in providing for any practical use that seems at all adequate. The gymnasium feature is not complete, and is without apparatus. The public-bath feature is ridiculously inadequate, there being room for only 3 persons to bathe at a time on each side, that for men and that for women, yet with nickel-plated plumbing and costly tilework, enough money has been spent to fit up in a highly sanitary and useful manner much more bathing room." He also complained that there was little planting for the money, and was quite clear in noting that all of this had been approved under a previous administration.
Despite Clausen's objections, some of which seem justified (particularly those about the planting and arrangement of the grounds) and some of which were not (those about the building, which was designed according to a perceived need for a small gymnasium with related bathing facilities), the park was opened on June 1, 1900.
The New York Times reported that the park had been "hewn out of the darkened mass of brick and mortar in the very heart of the east side," and that upon its opening "a throng of nearly 10,000 children of the tenements swarmed out upon it with a mighty shout and claimed it for their own."
The park, as designed by Carrere & Hastings, did not wear well. Planned for quiet activity, its formal arrangement of architectural and landscape features was not appropriate to the activities of large numbers of slum children. The park was soon in ruins "owing, it is said,to the radical defects of the original plan and to the strenuous nature of the youth of the neighborhood."
The park was soon closed and redesigned. In October 1903, the park was reopened with new trees, new asphalt paths, basketball and tennis courts, and an eight-lap running track. Much of this remodeling was removed in 1935-36 when Aymar Embury designed a swimming pool for the park. Embury adapted the original gymnasium building to locker rooms for the pool.
The Hamilton Fish Park Gymnasium, now known as a play center, but still used for locker rooms and as the entrance to the swimming pool, stands as a monument to nineteenth-century civic betterment — to the belief that great architecture and design would aid in the formation of citizens of outstanding moral character. Although the park itself has been redesigned twice since it was completed, the pavilion has remained a success and is one of the Lower East Side's great architectural treasures.
- From the 1982 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report
Norwood, Bronx
Designed in 1900, and built from 1901 to 1902 by the New York architects Arthur J. Horgan and Vincent J. Slattery, the former 50th Precinct Police Station House is prominently sited at the intersection of Kingsbridge Terrace and Summit Place. Its style, scale, materials of construction, direct relation to the street, and ornament contribute to the monumental character, which distinguished the building from the surrounding two- and three-story frame structures of rapidly expanding Kingsbridge.
A symbol of the authority of the police force and of the presence of municipal government in early 20th century Kingsbridge, and an exemplar of Beaux-Arts principles of composition, the building should be seen within the context of the City Beautiful Movement.
Historical interest in the building further derives from its being among the best surviving works of an architectural firm that was very much in the public eye at the tum-of-the-century.
Development of the Kingsbridge Area
Coincident with the growth of the northwest Bronx generally, the modern development of Kingsbridge and of the area presently known as Kingsbridge Heights dates from the latter half of the 19th century.
Rural and sparsely populated, with a varied topographical character, the Bronx of the 19th century depended for its growth on the gradual subdivision of estates, on changed attitudes respecting the desirability of the area, and on the completion of the Harlem River Railroad, which provided a first impetus to the development of the "north side."
Kingsbridge formally began to take shape as a residential community in 1847 when the Macomb family's "Island Farm," an extensive tract, was surveyed and subdivided into building lots, which were then sold for development.
Notwithstanding its late development relative to communities on Manhattan Island, Kingsbridge has had a rich history beginning as early as 1609 with the arrival of Henry Hudson on the Spuyten Duyvil peninsula.
Apparently, the Dutch had considered siting their projected New Amsterdam colony at Kingsbridge.5 The plan was soon abandoned, but by the early 17th century, the Dutch were fanning areas, on Manhattan as far north as the flatlands of Harlem.
It was not long before they began to seek areas into which the population could expand; thus, in addition to disaffected New Englanders, among the first settlers of Westchester County (chartered in 1683) and the Bronx — the land "upon the Maine" — were the Dutch. Indeed, the earliest European settler of the immediate Kingsbridge area was the Dutchman Jonkheer Adrien Van der Donck in 1641.
Van der Donck's tract, known as de Jonkheers, included all of the land from Spuyten Duyvil north eight miles along the Hudson River and east to the Bronx River.
The construction of the Boston Post Road in 1673 facilitated travel and communication between Manhattan Island and the northern colonies. Originating in lower Manhattan, the route ran the length of the island, crossed the Spuyten Duyvil Creek, traversed Westchester County and Connecticut, and terminated in Boston.
Until 1693 and the construction of the King's Bridge by landowner Vredryck Flypsen, crossing of the Spuyten Duyvil was accomplished by ferry. From the bridge, the Boston Post Road ran to Albany Crescent (which is just north of the old West Farms/Kingsbridge town line), followed Boston Avenue (the original name for that block of Kingsbridge Terrace in which the police station is located), and then veered toward the northeast, crossing the Bronx River at William's Bridge.
Another of the early roads radiating from the location of the King's Bridge and moving north along Bailey Avenue, was the Albany Post Road (opened in 1669 as far as the Sawmill River and in 1700 to Albany), which then continued along the western side of the Van Cortlandt properties.
That the King's Bridge served as the principal passage from the northern tip of Manhattan Island to the Bronx mainland, underlines the significance of the greater Kingsbridge area during Revolutionary times. As the main military artery for the armies of both the British and the Americans, the bridge was under constant attack during those Revolutionary War years when New York City was subject to British occupation (1776-1783).
Boston Hill (the name for the rise in the immediate vicinity of Albany Crescent) was the scene of many battles in the years following 1776, and from 1777 to 1779, the British established a presence at the Van Cortlandt mansion (located on the eastern side of the Albany Post Road).
Early indications of the eventual residential development of the area can be seen in the period immediately fol lowing the Revolution, at which time, well-to-do New Yorkers focused on the natural beauty of the area with an eye toward moving northward.
The eventual annexation of the Bronx proceeded in piecemeal fashion and not without opposition: against the incorporation were those Bronx residents who thought that nothing would be gained by aligning themselves with heavily populated Manhattan, and those New Yorkers who saw no advantage to appropriating farmland.
Nevertheless, on 1 January 1874, the townships of Kingsbridge, West Farms, and Morrisania formally became the twenty-third and twenty-fourth wards of the City of New York; from that time until 1898, they were known
collectively as the "Annexed District". It was not until 1895, however, that the annexation of the Bronx east of the Bronx River was effected.
In 1897, the New York State Legislature passed a charter for the creation of Greater New York City; in 1898, twenty-four local governments including all the annexed districts north of the Harlem River, as well as the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, and Richmond (Staten Island) were officially consolidated.
Commenting on building operations in the Bronx and noting a remarkable thirty-three percent increase thereof between 1898 and 1899, a dealer in real estate averred: "as to the future of the borough, that is assured, for the natural trend of the city's growth is northward, and the Bronx with all its proposed improvements will reap a golden harvest."
Corroborating his opinion, the Real Estate Record and Guide of 1901 observed that "more families continue to forsake their downtown neighbors for better homes and the purer air and ampler room above the Harlem and especially brisk in the matter of building is [sic] the upper and eastern sections of the Bronx, where both private and tenement houses are springing up."
In point of fact, just after 1895 and the annexation of the eastern section, booms in both real estate and population occurred. These were attributable to a combination of factors, the most important being inclusion into the metropolitan area, self-government, and the improvement of transportation.
Bronx Police History and the 50th Precinct
Bronx police history formally began in January 1866 when the Metropolitan Police District, created by an act of the New York State legislature in 1857, established a substation in the Village of Tremont in the Town of West Farms.
Previously, police activity in Kingsbridge had been under the jurisdiction of Manhattan's 32nd Precinct (currently the 30th), located at Amsterdam Avenue and 152nd Street.
Due to an increase in criminal behavior accompanying the immediate post-Civil War growth of the area, the residents of Yonkers and West Farms had favored incorporation within the Metropolitan Police District. Participation in the State's Metropolitan Police District was not long-lived, however; in 1870, as a result of the reorganization of local government according to the terms of the Tweed Charter, the City reclaimed control of the police department.
In the following year, Yonkers withdrew from the Metropolitan Police District and organized a police force of its own. In November 1871, the Yonkers police established a substation at Kingsbridge (the predecessor of the 50th) to serve the precinct extending from the West Farms town line to just south of the present Yonkers city line; an existir^ frame building, located at Verveelen Place, just east of Broadway and south of 231st Street, was adapted for use as a station house.
As a consequence of the separation of the Township of Kingsbridge from the City of Yonkers in 1872, the force headquartered at Kingsbridge was administered by a joint Board of Police Commissioners of Yonkers and Kingsbridge. Following annexation in January 1874, the district constituted of Kingsbridge, Morrisania, and West Farms was divided into two precincts and one sub-precinct of the New York Police Department.
Shortly thereafter, the sub-precinct, headquartered at Kingsbridge, came into its own as the 35th Precinct.18
With the consolidation of 1898, the Police Department of Greater New York assimilated eighteen small police agencies, and a move was initiated to conform the boundaries of police precincts to the lines of the individual townships. New precincts were created to serve newly annexed areas and to accommodate rapid population increases and building and commercial development in already established ones.
In accordance with the general objective of creating a flexible system that would provide for future expansion of the force, several renumberings of Bronx precincts occurred during the next thirty years. Upon consolidation in 1898, Kingsbridge was redesignated the 40th; in January 1918, the 74th; in April of the same year, the 57th; in 1924, the 26th; and on 1 August 1929, the 50th, which it remains to this day.
Despite its changed status upon incorporation into the Greater New York City Police Department, the 40th Precinct (subsequently the 50th) continued to occupy its makeshift quarters at Verveelen Place, which were enlarged in 1886 by taking possession of a two-story frame building to the east. This measure served only as a stopgap, however, for conditions had become progressively unsatisfactory and indeed unsavory.
Not only were the quarters cramped, but the basement of the building had flooded so often that the jail had settled out of plumb. A newspaper reporter of the time remarked that "no more unhealthier police station exists in the City of New York than this one,and in the late 1880s, the Board of Health condemned the building. Nevertheless, although a project for construction of a new facility finally was initiated in 1898, new accommodations would not be had until 1902 when " 'the shanty', as the frame building which . . . sheltered the blue-coat&i guardians ever since the 40th precinct was established [was] abandoned for a modem structure.
In a review of the official architecture of New York City, The Real Estate Record and Guide (November 1898) branded municipal architecture a disgrace, deplored its standards, and observed that there appeared to be a tendency to employ builders over professional architects.
This situation — in which "there is not even one architecturally decent police station"^ — began to improve as New York embarked on a citywide reconstruction and renovation campaign to modernize police facilities. The turn of the century enthusiasm for constructing civic monuments provided a further impetus.
Horgan and Slattery were commissioned to design a new 40th Precinct Police Station House sometime between 1898 and fall 1900, although the City of New York did not purchase the land on which the building is situated until 2 October 1900.
The firm estimated the construction costs for the station house, stables, and a prison, at $70,000. Plans were filed in December 1900, but approval to proceed was denied due to the omission of tie rods between the steel floor and the spruce beams of the one-story carriage house.
The New Building Application was approved on 9 January 1901 only after the architects filed a petition demonstrating that their use of the Roebling System of Fireproof Construction would constitute a sufficient tie in itself.23 construction began 18 March 1901 and was completed 16 April 1902.
Horoan and Slattery
From 1894, when The New York Times initially reported on the financial difficulties of the firm, until the period 1899 to 1903, when the newspaper regularly and eagerly followed the professional lives of Horgan and Slattery, the architects gained more and more notoriety.
While political patronage certainly was not an invention of the Tammany administrators, Mayor Robert Van Wyck was overly zealous about stamping the municipal architecture of New York City with the seal of his administration. It appears to have been Van Wyck's intention either to convey all city projects directly to Horgan and Slattery or to install them in a consulting capacity over more widely renowned architects such as John Thomas (Hall of Records) or Frederick Withers (City Prison).
The firm first achieved public recognition with the rehabilitation of the interior of the Democratic Club in 1897. Upon completion of that job, apparently ". finding. . .hundreds of odd jobs, large and small. . .for the favored architects."
Queries from a perhaps overly critical press respecting any architect's professional qualifications or lack thereof are not in themselves objectionable.
However, in the case of Horgan and Slattery, the situation was rather more complicated as the attacks became a vehicle for denouncing the Van Wyck administration generally and pertained very little, if at all, with a fair assessment of the firm's work. In order to bolster their charges of corruption in the Van Wyck administration, the press seized upon the seeming irregularity in the relationship between the architects and the administration, claiming that the firm name had become "a trademark of municipal disrepute and jobbery".
Horgan and Slattery were characterized as political pawns "who had no standing artistic, political, scientific, or financial [but were] used as the cat's paw of politicians anxious to get control of municipal building in New York. . ."
Despite the scandals surrounding the firm, political affiliations carried the day, for "on the death of the architect J.R. Thomas, the contract for the completion of the Hall of Records was granted to the favorite Tammany contractors Horgan and Slattery in spite of strong denunciation of such action."
Considered cogs in a great political machine and sarcastically dubbed the "universal solvents" or experts in all fields of architecture, the firm was taken to task for lapsed professional and moral responsibilities:
The new city administration has acted none too soon and with none too much severity in the cases of those two "devouring absurdities" Horgan and Slattery. Two self-respecting men in their places — but that is unimaginable. Two self-respecting men could never occupy their places. But two men with not more than twice the average thickness of skin would have got out, when Tammany was defeated, withqut waiting to be kicked out amid the cheers of the bystanders.
Upon his election in 1902, Mayor Seth Low called for the "dishorganizing and unslatterifying" of municipal architecture and insisted that "all business relations between the city and Horgan and Slattery, who received the award of all city contracts during the administration of Mayor Van Wyck should be terminated as soon as possible."
Mayor Low's administration adopted a hardline position according to which it would be preferable to pay damages in court than to honor any outstanding contracts with the architects.
Although ethics rather than aesthetics constituted the point of departure for the accusations in the local press — there having been very little critical coverage of the design work —the artistic capabilities of the architects were fair game as well.
Nevertheless, the firm's rise to prominence, even in the context of its alleged association with the great tum-of-the-century New York City Democratic party machine, cannot nullify the inherent value of their designs, which, in large part, combined classical vocabularies and Beaux-Arts principles of composition.
The Architects' and Builders' Magazine of January 1907 recognized that, "[J. R. Thomas'] work has been carried on in praiseworthy fashion by Messrs. Horgan and Slattery who have added to Mr. Thomas' brilliant conception much of the virility of design which characterizes their other well-known masterpieces."
Scant biographical information exists on the two architects. Photographs or drawings of a fair number of their projects were published in architectural journals, but accompanying text is rare. Arthur J. Horgan (1868-1911) and Vincent J. Slattery (1867-1939) entered into partnership in 1886. Until 1897, the New York City Directory listed them as builders; interestingly, in the 1898 edition, they emerged as architects.
Evidently, they had incorporated as such and were working out of an office at 1 Madison Avenue. Apart from Horgan's testimony in 1899^^ before the Mazet Committee that he had studied architecture for five years in the offices of his godfather, Colonel Arthur Crocks,35, virtually nothing is known about the professional educations of the architects.
Slattery testified that the "outside work" of the firm was his responsibility, while Horgan assumed the "inside work"; he also referred all technical questions to Horgan. In the absence of conclusive information concerning their respective positions in the firm, which would elucidate Slattery's statement, one may speculate either that Horgan was the principal designer and Slattery the business partner, or that Horgan dealt with structural questions and Slattery with interior embellishment.
Following Horgan's death in 1911, Slattery went into business for himself, retiring in 1934.
The Design
The former 50th Precinct Police Station House is a handsome example of Beaux-Arts classicism, a mode of design that characterized much public architecture at the tum-of-the-century and became the emblem of the City Beautiful Movement.
Although clearly indebted to the architectural styles of the past, the design does not endeavor to replicate historical models exactly, nor did such archaeological accuracy underlie the historicism of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Rather, the elements are derived from classical prototypes but are freely interpreted and ingeniously combined.
Typologically, the building refers to an Italian Renaissance urban palace; the ornament is eclectic.
Horgan and Slattery approached the design of this small (relative to the grandest examples of the style in New York City, among them the Public Library and Grand Central Station) but imposing building in an imaginative way. The building dominates its site; further, it is the dominant architectural feature on the primarily residential block. The architects' masterful handling is demonstrated in the sensitivity to the site, an
understanding of the rules of Beaux-Arts composition, the use of ornament, and the adaptation of an ancient but particularly appropriate building type to a modern use.
Their studied application of Beaux-Arts principles is evident in the clear articulation of the parts of the building, the bilateral symmetry, the clearly marked and elaborated openings, the hierarchy of constituent elements in the facades, the play of advancing and receding planes, and the consistency of the articulation.
The form of the building refers to two distinct phases in the evolution of the Italian Renaissance urban palace. The 15th-century palace, such as the Pitti or the Medici, with its massive presence, direct relation with the street, and rusticated base, is an appropriate model for the expression of such values as power, security, invulnerability, and monumentality, which, surely in the public mind, are associated with the police force.
Strengthening this association are the horizontal extension of the station house, which intensifies the image of its being firmly wedded to its site, and the battlements or crenel lations of the roof parapet.
The horizontal lines of the building are reiterated in the surface treatment on every level of the facades: by the granite base; by the continuous channels of the recessed brick courses; by the lines of the windows; by the projecting stringcourses; by the continuous cornice, which is distinguished from the fabric of the building both in color, texture and materials; by the roof parapet, which is defined as a series of advancing and receding planes.
In the 16th-century type, exemplified by the design for the House of Raphael by Bramante, the ground story rustication is mediated by the application of architectural ornament in the upper stories, which is also the case here.
Description
The Kingsbridge Terrace of today, which is rather an unprepossessing street lined with detached houses as well as low-rise apartments, does not figure prominently in the street system of the Bronx, or even of Kingsbridge. This was not always the case, however.
From the 18th century until 1913, that portion of Kingsbridge Terrace north of what is presently Albany Crescent, was known as Boston Avenue, the name deriving from its having been a segment of the Boston Post Road. As the east/west section of the almost elliptical Albany Crescent (running roughly perpendicular to the present Bailey Avenue) was also a part of Boston Avenue, and Bailey Avenue formed part of the Albany Post Road, the station house is in close proximity to the intersection of two historically significant roads, and at the crest of Boston Hill.
From the street, the building appears as a massive two-story masonry block. In plan, however, it is a "U", oriented southward such that its eastern arm forms the principal or Kingsbridge Terrace facade, and its base (at the north) constitutes the secondary or Summit Place facade.
The principal facade is 83 feet in length and two stories in height; the secondary facade is 119 feet in length and three stories in height, only two of which are expressed, corresponding to those on the principal facade.
The juncture of the eastern and northern facades is mediated by a curved comer treatment. This transitional element, the articulation of whose second story departs from those of both street facades, constitutes the focal point of the composition if the building is viewed obliquely from the northeast.
The focal point, shifts, however to the center bay of the principal facade if
the building is viewed directly from the east or obliquely from the south; from either vantage point, the comer construction is virtually invisible.
In both cases, the corner element and the axis of symmetry (formed of the entry, the parapet directly above it, the window in the second story, the plaque identifying the building) provide vertical accents in an otherwise horizontally disposed composition. The principal facade consists of five bays, the central three flanked by projecting end bays in the north and south.
This "ABA" rhythm is repeated in the secondary facade with the difference that the projecting end bays flank a central section of seven bays. Three bays define the curved comer section.
Gamboge bricks, which are variegated in hue and are laid in Flemish bond, constitute the veneers of the facades, including the southern wall of the eastern arm of the "U". The contrasting limestone members of the windows, door, stringcourses, and columns, the granite of the base, the terra-cotta ornament, and the green tin denticulated Doric cornice create an impressive polychromatic image.
Like the urban palaces of the Italian Renaissance, the two stories are differentiated in characteristic ways: a projecting stringcourse composed of a series of classical moldings (the lowermost of which is egg and dart) literally cuts the building in half horizontally; the elaboration of the second story contrasts with the relatively unadorned ground story; the individual bricks in the second story are slightly more saturated in color than those in the first; and the apparent rustication of the ground story, achieved by recessing one course in every seven, is abandoned at the first stringcourse, above which the wall is planar.
In keeping with the unadorned character of the ground story are the openings, which receive identical articulation in both facades, in the corner, and on the southern side of the eastern arm. They differ only in their proportions: those in the north facade are squatter than those in the projecting bays and in the principal facade, and those in the curved section and the eastern arm are more attenuated.
The sash is one-over-one double-hung aluminum surmounted by a fixed pane of glass. The openings are unframed, vertically-oriented rectangles with flat-arch brick lintels and limestone sills with classical contours. A console at either end of the sill provides support, and a console serves as keystone in the flat arch (the console keystone is omitted in the outermost bays of the curved unit).
There are three distinct window treatments in the second story, although the sash remains constant. While the same size as those in the east, the windows in the north side are the least elaborate, treated in much the same way as those on the ground story. Replacing the consoles, however, are wedge-shaped limestone keystones that are articulated in three dimensions.
One such opening marks the second story of the southern side of the eastern arm. The windows of the corner element are squeezed within the intercolumniations of four Roman Doric, unf luted columns on bases, the two end ones of which are engaged; a series of classical moldings constitutes the lintels.
The surface bounded by the upper edge of each lintel and the lower edge of the second story stringcourse is pierced by a round window enframed with a terra-cotta wreath; the comers are enlivened with foliate terra-cotta forms.
All windows in the second stories of both the principal facade and the projecting bays are aedicular in type.
The aediculae, which frame the windows, are constituted of a series of freely interpreted classical elements including flanking pilasters, which are articulated with deep channels running vertically from the base, a capital, impost block, and lintel of classical moldings.
The window sill is tripartite: at either end, a segment projects slightly to form a base for the pilasters. A console with pendant foliate and vegetal ornament decorates each pilaster from just above mid-height to the capital. The window extends from the sill to the top of the capital; in the space that is roughly the height of the impost block and extends from the capital to the egg and dart molding of the lintel, is a flat, blank plaque.
The panel duplicates on a reduced scale the one crowning the axis of symmetry in the principal facade, which is inscribed with the name of the precinct. Each aedicula of the projecting bays is enframed by a larger aedicula, which is vestigial in that it is composed of thick pilasters that are simply projections of the brick fabric. Elaborating each pilaster are a cartouche, festoon, and pendant foliate form, placed in series within a vertically-oriented rectangular panel.
The axis of symmetry in the principal elevation serves a dual function: it divides the facade into two equal and opposite parts, and it creates a strong central focus. The double doors are preceded by two granite steps set between granite blocks, upon which originally were lampposts.
Rectangular hollow metal double doors, which have been painted bright red, with a transom on which the name of the Kingsbridge Heights Community Center has been painted in white, are placed within a basket or depressed arch with prominent brick voussoirs. A large, elaborate stone cartouche serves as the keystone.
Flanking the arch, large ancones with foliate ornament, surmounted by impost blocks, support the stringcourse, which breaks forward from the plane of the building at the entry. Directly above, a parapet is elaborated by a blank panel flanked by two triglyph-like elements surmounted by scrolls.
The triglyph/scroll unit (which resembles a section of fluted pilaster) supports a projecting molding along the upper edge of the parapet. Flanking each of the triglyph/scrolls is an S-shaped scroll in bas-relief.
The uppermost element of the axis is a plaque identifying the building as the 50th Precinct Police Station House. The limestone plaque is a horizontally disposed rectangle; a continuous egg and dart molding serves as a border. A tripartite guttae-like feature dangles from each side of the lower edge of the panel.
A block with a console in its center projects from the center of the lower edge of the inscribed panel.
The facade of the western arm of the "U" is undistinguished and virtually invisible from any street. The brick wall is punctuated by windows in the second story.
Alterations to the exterior have been few and have not significantly affected the street facades.36 The police moved from the building to their current location at 3450 Kingsbridge Avenue in December 1974; the present tenant, the Kingsbridge Heights Community Center, took possession in summer 1975. In 1979, with funding from the New York City Capital Budget and the Federal Community Development Budget, the Community Center embarked on a major rehabilitative program, which was completed in 1981.
Undertaken by the New York architects, Edelman and Salzman, most of the alterations were in the nature of adapting the interior spaces to new uses and upgrading
systems. The architects were sensitive to the original exterior; the north and east facades of the building remain virtually untouched.
The terracotta band courses were partially repointed; the existing wooden entrance doors and frames were replaced with hollow metal doors and frame, and the transom was closed; a new wrought iron gate to the courtyard was installed at the south end of the Kingsbridge Terrace facade; the wooden windows were replaced with aluminum ones, and stainless steel security screens were placed on every opening.
Unfortunately, the material condition of the exterior appears to be steadily deteriorating. The cornice, a section of which is missing from the curved elevation, shows an advanced state of erosion especially on the underside. Spalling marks the limestone members of the windows, door, stringcourses, as well as the terra-cotta ornament, and large pieces of the window sills have broken off.
- From the 1986 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report
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Seriously, everywhere I turned was another image oppurtunity. This happened to be just in time as I the light had just turned green right when I saw how small the car was. Texas on the other hand would probably have a truck twice the size of the guy in front. I thought it was pretty cool to see an actual mini this size or in this case a Daihatsu Copan.
Also I tend to post photos from the other side of the bridge on my Facebook (link above) in which I don't believe they don't fit on my Flickr. If you wish to check those out follow me on there too!
celebrate relation in best way by ordering cakes in online cake delivery in Jaipur. Winni also offers unique services like midnight cake delivery in Jaipur along with same day cake delivery in Jaipur.
The Leongatha Memorial Hall and Shire Offices were opened and dedicated by Brigadier General
Elliot and Chaplain Colonel Cookston on 24 May, 1926. Chaplain Cookson dedicated the Hall with a prayer that concluded with "In the Name of the Town and Residents of the District, I Dedicate this Hall". It was designed by local architect, T. E. Molloy, and was constructed by Raymond V. Ritchie for £14,000.
The interior decoration included 12 panels depicting scenes from the leading "purely Australian" battles of World War I, with the proscenium being flanked by scenes depicting Gallipoli, and the battle between HMAS Sydney and the Emden. These were painted by Mr. J. Broche of Inverloch.
The need for a new Memorial Hall and Shire Offices to replace the original buildings constructed in 1890 and 1891 respectively was recognised from the early 1920s, and a resolution was passed at a public meeting held on 13 August 1923 that Council be approached in relation to this matter. The issue came to a head when the old Mechanics Hall and adjoining Shire Offices were destroyed by
fire on 19 February, 1924. A committee was formed after the fire and after several meetings it was decided to advertise for suitable designs. On 22 July 1924, the plans of T. E. Molloy were chosen and following this a loan to finance the project was made, while the Leongatha Branch of the RSSAILA donated £1,000 on the condition that a suitable room was placed in the building "for the exclusive use of members". Tenders were called and on 15 April 1925, the offer of Mr. Raymond V. Ritchie was accepted.
The Leongatha Memorial Hall and former Shire Offices is a large brick, hip roofed public hall fronted by a two storey Free Classical facade and single storey wings to either side, terminating at the corner with an engaged colonnaded rotunda and returning north along Michael Place in a single storey classical facade which fronted the shire offices. A notable element is the symmetrical central façade. This is constructed of clinker brick at the ground floor with paired double hung windows on either side of a battered and coursed render arched entry surround connecting through a wide rendered band with the words “In Remembrance” in raised letters to the piano nobile above. The clinker bricks are tuck pointed in blocks, rather than as individual bricks. The whole of the piano nobile is rendered, with windows between alternating single and paired detached Tuscan columns carrying a wide architrave with triglyphs and bosses, cornice and a parapet with a central pediment containing the sunburst coat of arms of the Australian armed forces. It climaxes with a statue of the “Winged Victory” carrying a palm frond and sword and flanked by bronze lamp standards now missing their opal spheres. Pedimented render plaques commemorating the fallen are mounted at the sides of the entry element. The side wings are single storey and are almost symmetrical in form. They have paired and single detached columns supporting an architrave with triglyphs and bosses, cornice and solid balustrade, dividing each side into two brick bays with central windows. The columns sit on short pedestals to the window sill height. Perhaps its most notable and dominating feature is the corner rotunda. This has a matching pattern but slightly higher columns and architrave capped with an octagonal metal clad dome. This rotunda serves as an entry and separates the McCartin Street facade from the Michael Place front. The slightly lower Michael Place front is designed as a separate composition of three bays divided by paired piers with the central element projecting slightly and capped with a pediment. There is a small granite obelisk at the curb opposite the hall entry which commemorates later war dead.
The Australian Federation period represented an important phase in the development of Leongatha. The new butter factory, which was erected in 1905, led to increased prosperity in the town and agitation for better public facilities. The new Post Office in 1906 was the first of a number of new buildings added over the next ten years including the Railway Station (1910), Mechanics Institute Library (1911), Court House (1912) and Agricultural High School (1914). After the interruption caused by the Great War (1914 – 1918), this civic building program finally reached its zenith with the construction of the new Memorial Hall and Shire Offices between 1925 and 1926.
Leongatha is a town in the foothills of the Strzelecki Ranges, South Gippsland Shire, Victoria, Australia, located 135 kilometres south-east of Melbourne. The town is the civic, commercial, industrial, religious, educational and sporting centre of the region. The Murray Goulburn Co-operative Co. Limited, is a farmers' co-operative which trades in Australia under the Devondale label, and has a dairy processing plant just north of the town producing milk-based products for Australian and overseas markets. First settlement of the area by Europeans occurred in 1845. The Post Office opened as Koorooman on 1 October 1887 and renamed Leongatha in 1891 when a township was established on the arrival of the railway. The Daffodil Festival is held annually in September. Competitions are held and many daffodil varieties are on display. A garden competition is also held and there are many beautiful examples throughout the provincial town. The South Gippsland Railway runs historical diesel locomotives and railcars between the market and dairy towns of Nyora and Leongatha, passing through Korumburra.
Last week, I photographed this series of my nephew giving his little daughter a horseback or 'horsey-back' ride. What a sweet relationship they have! All photos taken with available light, ISO 320, with my Canon EF 50mm f1.4 (stopped down to f1.6) mounted to my Canon 7D.
(you-can-do-it-daddy_0077)
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni; 6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564), known simply as Michelangelo, was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect and poet of the High Renaissance. Born in the Republic of Florence, his work had a major influence on the development of Western art, particularly in relation to the Renaissance notions of humanism and naturalism. He is often considered a contender for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man, along with his rival and elder contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci. Given the sheer volume of surviving correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences, Michelangelo is one of the best-documented artists of the 16th century and several scholars have described Michelangelo as the most accomplished artist of his era.[3][4]
He sculpted two of his best-known works, the Pietà and David, before the age of thirty. Despite holding a low opinion of painting, he also created two of the most influential frescoes in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and The Last Judgment on its altar wall. His design of the Laurentian Library pioneered Mannerist architecture. At the age of 71, he succeeded Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as the architect of St. Peter's Basilica. He transformed the plan so that the western end was finished to his design, as was the dome, with some modification, after his death.
Michelangelo was the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive. In fact, two biographies were published during his lifetime. One of them, by Giorgio Vasari, proposed that Michelangelo's work transcended that of any artist living or dead, and was "supreme in not one art alone but in all three."
In his lifetime, Michelangelo was often called Il Divino ("the divine one"). His contemporaries often admired his terribilità—his ability to instill a sense of awe in viewers of his art. Attempts by subsequent artists to imitate Michelangelo's impassioned, highly personal style contributed to the rise of Mannerism, a short-lived style and period in Western art following the High Renaissance.
Reformance: recycled performance festival.
This photo is a reinterpretation of Marina Abramovic & Ulay's "Relation in Time". Claremi and I, as Miranda & Mirón, organised the festival's first edition with 9 different pieces in spring 2010. We took these photos to accompany the call for submissions and inspire some reinterpretations using two well-known performances of art history. Info, photos and videos on the results at
www.fernandezmiron.com/reformance
Reformance: festival de performance reciclada
Esta foto es una reinterpretación de "Relation in Time", de Marina Abramovic & Ulay. Claremi y yo, como Miranda y Mirón, organizamos la primera edición del festival con 9 piezas diferentes en primavera de 2010 e hicimos estas fotos para acompañar la convocatoria e inspirar algunas reinterpretaciones mediante dos de las performance más conocidas de la historia del arte. Información, fotos y vídeos de los resultados en www.fernandezmiron.com/reformance
Spanish Lance Corporal Roberto Landaburu, International Security Assistance Force servicemember delivers boxes of donations to Afghan children at a girl's orphanage in Kabul, Afghanistan, May 31.The ISAF volunteer comunity relation's mission led by U.S. Chaplain Capt. Antonio Ortiz Guzman, distributes school supplies, clothes, toys to schools and orphanages. Photo by French Navy Chief Petty Officer Christian Valverde.(Released)
Moda Womenswear fashion show
Location: Birmingham NEC
Photographer: Michael Kelly
www.constructphotographic.co.uk
Twitter: @constructphoto
for information in relation to this and other images: Contact Michael On (+44) 7900 985 951 or E-mail us on Michael@constructphotographic.co.uk