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I'm stampolina and I love to take photos of stamps. Thanks for visiting this pages on flickr.
I'm neither a typical collector of stamps, nor a stamp dealer. I'm only a stamp photograph. I'm fascinated of the fine close-up structures which are hidden in this small stamp-pictures. Please don't ask of the worth of these stamps - the most ones have a worth of a few cents or still less.
By the way, I wanna say thank you to all flickr users who have sent me stamps! Great! Thank you! Someone sent me 3 or 5 stamps, another one sent me more than 20 stamps in a letter. It's everytime a great surprise for me and I'm everytime happy to get letters with stamps inside from you!
thx, stampolina
For the case you wanna send also stamps - it is possible. (...I'm pretty sure you'll see these stamps on this photostream on flickr :) thx!
stampolina68
Mühlenweg 3/2
3244 Ruprechtshofen
Austria - Europe
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stamp Austria 55c Theodor Herzl 1860-1904 stamp 55 cent € 0,55 Austria postage timbre autriche selo sello Austria francobolli bollo bolli mapka Austria special issue stamp, commemorative issue, émission commémorative timbre stamp selo franco bollo postage porto sellos marka briefmarke
following info 'bout this stamp-theme with friendly acceptance by austrian post:
Theodor Herzl
Theodor Herzl was born in Budapest (Hungary) on May 2, 1860, and was a writer, journalist and essayist. He studied law in Vienna, acquiring his doctorate in 1884, although his actual ambition was to be a writer. When the Viennese "Neue Freie Presse" offered him the post of Paris correspondent, he seized the opportunity and moved to France in 1891 to work as a journalist. In Paris, his activity involved observing the Dreyfuss affair and the resulting antisemitic riots. It was under the influence of these events that he began to write his 86-page book "The Jewish State - An Attempt at a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question". In 1896, he was appointed editor of the famous Neue Freie Presse Review in Vienna, and in the same year published his book in an edition of only 3000 copies. This book made the journalist Herzl the most famous Zionist, and the book itself became the prelude to the state of Israel. In 1897, together with O. Marmorek and N. Nordau, he initiated the first Zionist World Congress in Basle with participants from 16 countries, at which he was elected the first President of the World Zionist Organisation. The Viennese monthly journal "Die Welt" was the central publication of the new movement. Herzl negotiated with the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Turkish Sultan, England and Russia, but without success.
Theodor Herzl himself never saw the realisation of his dream, dying of exhaustion on July 3, 1904 in Edlach (Lower Austria). His corpse was transferred to Israel in 1949, and is now buried west of Jerusalem on a mountain named after him.
The stamp is issued jointly with the Hungarian and Israeli post offices.
As its name indicates, the transition metal chromium contributes colour to our world. The purple/red of ruby and the vivid green of emerald both arise from traces of chromium within their crystal structure. Chromium oxide is a green pigment familiar to artists and chrome yellow was originally used for painting US school buses and German postal vans.
A property that is important for gemstone colouration is that the Cr^3+ ion and the Al^3+ ion have similar physical sizes and this means that chromium can occasionallly replace the aluminium in a crystal structure such as corundum (Al_2 O_3) at around the one percent level, resulting in ruby. The three outer electons remaining in the Cr^3+ ion are free to interact with visible light in a number of ways that each contribute to the colour of the crystal (the electrons are 'unpaired').
The role that these electrons play in the absorption and emission of light depends on the strength and symmetry of the electric field around the ion produced by the neighbouring atoms in the crystal: oxygen in the case of ruby. In crystals with different compositions such as the examples in this figure, the electric field - or 'ligand field' as it is known - is different. This moves the absorption bands to different wavelengths and produces different colours such as the rich green of emerald and the pink-red of spinel.
Some of the light energy that is absorbed by these crystals is converted directly to heat, but some fraction remains to be re-emitted as light in the far-red part of the spectrum. This luminescence - the conversion of shorter wavelength (bluer) light to red light - can produce rather pure colours (called narrow lines by spectroscopists), notably those in ruby that were utilised by T H Maiman in 1960 to produce the first laser. The symmetry and strength of the ligand field in the different gemstones affects the number and positions of these luminescence lines to produce the variations shown in the figure. Some of the stones shown here are synthetic but they display the same types of luminescence as the natural crystals. The luminescence patterns can be used with high confidence to identify the gemstone.
These observations were made by exciting the crystals with a 20mW 404nm blue diode laser, covering the spectrometer input with a yellow filter to exclude the scattered blue exciting light.
The narrow emission line in emerald at 683nm in these two examples is rather weak. I have another natural emerald - a small cut stone - where the line is relatively stronger by a factor of about 10.
Note from 11 May 2017: I realise now that the small triangular yellow stone referred to here as a topaz is actually a chrysoberyl ( Be Al2 O4). This has been confirmed with a measurement of the refractive indices as 1.73, 1.74.
Details of a pigeon's wing as it balances on one of our feeders trying to get at some seeds. Primary and secondary wing feathers are clearly seen along with the covert feathers underneath. These are surprisingly delicate structures and it's not often we get the chance to get a good look at them like this
House Island (in Casco Bay), Portland, Maine USA • Settling between cut granite blocks, seen during a private tour of the island and its historic structures.
Update: The Portland Historic Preservation Board is considering approving the nomination of House Island to the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) as an Historic District. At their 6 August, 2014 meeting they received an Analysis of Eligibility. This is a richly informative document; it begins on page 23 of the linked PDF.
☞ House Island is a private island in Portland Harbor in Casco Bay, Maine, USA. It is part of the City of Portland. The island is only accessible by boat. Public access is prohibited, except for an on-request tour sanctioned by the island's owners. House Island includes three buildings on the east side and Fort Scammel on the west side. The buildings are used as summer residences. The island's name derives from the site of an early European house, believed that built by Capt. Christopher Levett, an English explorer of the region. …
Henry A. S. Dearborn built Fort Scammel on the island in 1808 as part of the national second system of fortifications. It was named after Alexander Scammell, Adjutant general of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, who was killed in action during the Battle of Yorktown. The fort was designed for harbor defense, with cannon batteries designed to protect the main shipping channel into Portland harbor, along with Fort Preble. In the 1840s–1870s, as part of the national third system of fortifications, Fort Scammel was modernized. Thomas Lincoln Casey, known for his work on the Washington Monument rebuilt the fort in 1862 at the time of the American Civil War. Of all the forts in Casco Bay, Fort Scammel was the only fort to fire a shot and be fired upon in battle, in early August, 1813. …
The island was later the site of an immigration quarantine station from 1907 to 1937, and was considered the 'Ellis Island of the North'. The quarantine station was busiest in the early 1920s, after the adoption of the Emergency Quota Act, which restricted the number of immigrants who could enter the country. In November 1923, the ships President Polk and George Washington were diverted from New York City to Portland and 218 immigrants from those ships were quarantined at the station.
The island was considered "ideal" by immigration officials. A Grand Trunk Railway station was located at the docks in Portland, allowing easy rail access for immigrants arriving in Portland. Additionally, William Husband, Commissioner General of United States Immigration, said the whole island was secure and "The whole of House Island was available in that case, instead of those detained being obliged to go out under guard with only few patches of green grass upon which they might set foot, as at some other places."
The 1920 brick detention barracks have been demolished, but the original 1907 buildings remain, including the doctor's house, the detention barracks, and the quarantine hospital. – Source: from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
• Here's a terrific link to FortWiki with historic plans, and other interesting details.
• On June 21, 2012, the WSJ reported the island for sale for $4.9m. Here's a link to a short video with glimpses of the island and structures.
∆ GeoHack: 43° 39′ 10″ N, 70° 12′ 35″ W.
Passes through Bedford en-route from Bedford to Brighton at 1920hrs on 07-May-2009.
It was only a brief visit to the South Coast, as at 0645hrs the next day it was going back home , passing trough Bedford at 0635 hrs.The sound of the 2 x 31s woke up a few early morming commuters as the waited at Bedford for their trains to the City
Douglaston Historic District, Douglaston, Queens, New York City, New York, United States
Type: Freestanding house with attached garage (on lot 93) Style: Vernacular cottage Stories: 1
Structure/material: Frame with stucco facing
Notable building features: Intersecting gable roofs, flared over front porch; round-arched, batten door; brick chimney; brick stoop with non-original wrought-iron railings; some brick veneer; windows with historic multi-pane sash and casements.
Notable site features: Mature trees; flagstone walkway; gravel driveway; perimeter hedge; storage shed; cobblestone curb.
INTRODUCTION
The Douglaston Historic District contains more than 600 houses set along landscaped streets on a mile-long peninsula extending into Little Neck Bay, at the northeastern edge of Queens adjoining Nassau County.
Its history over the past four centuries ranges from a native American settlement to an eighteenth-century farm, a nineteenth-century estate called Douglas Manor, and an early twentieth-century planned suburb, also called Douglas Manor.
The Douglaston Historic District encompasses the entire Douglas Manor suburban development, plus several contiguous blocks. Most of the houses in the proposed district date from the early- to mid-twentieth century, while a few survive from the nineteenth century, and one from the eighteenth century.
The landscape includes many impressive and exotic specimen trees planted on the mid-nineteenth-century estate, as well as a great white oak, located at 233 Arleigh Road, believed to be 600 years old.
Douglaston's location on a peninsula jutting into Flushing Bay at the eastern border of Queens County is an important factor in establishing the character of the district. The very early buildings surviving in the district include the c.1735 Van Wyck House, the c. 1819 Van Zandt manor house (expanded in the early twentieth century for use as the Douglaston Club), and the Greek Revival style c. 1848-50 Benjamin Allen House.
Much of the landscaping, including the specimen trees, survives from the estate of Douglas Manor, established by George Douglas and maintained by his son William Douglas.
Most of the houses in the historic district were built as part of the planned suburb of Douglas Manor, developed by the Rickert-Finlay Company, that was part of the residential redevelopment of the Borough of Queens following its creation and annexation to the City of Greater New York in 1898.
A set of covenants devised by the Rickert-Finlay Company helped assure a carefully planned environment, including a shorefront held in common, winding streets following the topography of the peninsula, and single-family houses ranging in size from substantial mansions along Shore Road on the west to more modest cottages closer to Udalls Cove on the east.
The houses of the historic district, which are representative of twentieth-century residential architecture, were designed in a variety of styles including the many variants of the Colonial Revival, many houses in the English manner incorporating Tudor Revival, English cottage, and Arts and Crafts motifs, as well as the Mediterranean Revival. In most cases, they were designed by local Queens architects, including over a dozen who lived in Douglaston itself.
The district includes three houses of the Craftsman type pioneered by Gustav Stickley. Eight of the houses in the district were designed by Josephine Wright Chapman, one of America's earliest successful women architects, and they constitute an important body of her work.
The Douglaston Historic District survives today as an important example of an early twentieth-century planned suburb adapted to the site of a nineteenth-century estate. The stylistically varied suburban residences, the distinctive topography, the landscaped setting, and the winding streets create a distinct sense of place and give the district its special character.
HISTORICAL AND ARCHITECTURAL BACKGROUND OF THE DOUGLASTON HISTORIC DISTRICT
Native American and Colonial antecedents
The Native American presence on the Little Neck peninsula today known as Douglaston included the Matinecoc,1 one of a group on western Long Island linked by culture and language to others in the area surrounding Manhattan Island (including the Nayack, Marechkawieck, Canarsee, Rockaway, and Massapequa). A number of finds from those settlements have been identified at various sites on the peninsula.2 The Matinecoc, who fanned the peninsula and apparently also produced wampum, were summarily evicted in the 1660s by Thomas Hicks, later Judge Hicks, in what has been described as the only such seizure of property recorded in Flushing town records. In the 1930s, according to local histories, a Matinecoc burial ground was destroyed to make way for a widening of Northern Boulevard, and the remains reinterred in the cemetery of Zion Church.3
The property seized by Thomas Hicks in the 1660s passed through the hands of several of his family members, and several subsequent sales to other families, before being acquired in 1813 by Wynant Van Zandt. In 1819 Van Zandt bought an adjoining farm from the Van Wyck family. Both tracts had been farmed during the eighteenth century. The Van Wycks built and lived in a shorefront house which still stands (the Cornelius Van Wyck House, at 126 West Drive aka 37-04 Douglaston Parkway, a designated New York City landmark).
Nineteenth-century country seat: Wynant Van Zandt. George and William Douglas, and Douglas Manor
Wynant Van Zandt (1767-1831) kept his property in agricultural use. Unlike his predecessors, mostly local formers, Van Zandt was a prominent New York City merchant, active in New York civic affairs. As a city alderman, Van Zandt served as chairman, starting in 1803, of the building committee for City Hall, and in 1804 as chairman of a committee on water supply, among other duties. Van Zandt established his Queens County property as a country estate, and built himself a manor, or country seat, in 1819; the building survives, with additions, as the Douglaston Club.
In May 1835, following Wynant Van Zandt's death, George Douglas acquired the estate from Robert B. Van Zandt; the deed identifies Van Zandt as a "farmer" and Douglas as a "gentleman."5 One obituary, in the Flushing Journal Weekly, described Douglas as "what the world would call an eccentric man."6 Another, in the New York Evening Post, described him as a wealthy young man from Scotland, who during a fifteen-year stay in Europe "collected some very valuable pictures," and later turned to philanthropy.7
Douglas's son, William Proctor Douglas, inherited the property after his father's death in 1862. The younger Douglas served as vice-commodore of the New York Yacht Club in 1871-74. During his tenure, Douglas Manor became a center for New York society yachting and polo. In later years, Douglas rented out the estate house to a variety of well-connected tenants, including European royalty.8
In 1869, Douglas hired landscape architect William McMillen to, in the words of McMillen's daughter, "superintend the Estate, improve driveways, and lay out plantings and trees and ornamental shrubs."9 McMillen was later associated with Frederick Law Olmsted and his work on the park system in Buffalo, New York.10 Although McMillen spent six years working on the estate, it is not known exactly what he undertook for Douglas. From turn-of-the-century photographs and other records analyzed in a landscape history undertaken in 1994, it appears that under Douglas's
ownership the landscape was characterized by "an informal 'English' look...with English ivy, winterberry, Boston ivy and wisteria."11
It was also during Douglas's tenure that a number of exotic specimen trees were planted on the property. Local histories suggest a connection with Samuel Parsons (1819-1906), a pioneer horticulturist with a nursery in Flushing; Parsons owned land near the Douglas Estate. The trees have been a distinguishing characteristic of Douglas Manor since William Douglas's day.12
Early suburban subdivision
Although the suburban development called Douglas Manor dates from 1906, William Douglas apparently attempted a suburban subdivision half a century earlier south of Douglas Manor. The dominant force propelling development was the gradual extension of the Long Island Railroad, which ran as far as Flushing until 1866 (with stage coach connections for points east), when its extension to Great Neck opened. Even in the 1850s, anticipating the railroad's extension to the Little Neck peninsula, William Douglas had subdivided part of his property (the area today known as "the Hill").
Douglas donated land for the railroad's right of way, and later, according to local histories, relocated one of his farm buildings to be used as a railroad station, asking in exchange that the new village be called "Douglaston" (instead of Marathon, a competing name).13 He named a number of new streets after the abundant trees on his property (Pine, Poplar, Willow, Cherry).
The Rickert-Finlav Realty Company
Besides the three early surviving houses already mentioned (the Van Wyck House, the Douglaston Club, and the Allen House), almost all the rest of the houses in the historic district were built as part of the early twentieth-century planned suburb of Douglas Manor, named for Douglas's estate, laid out by the Rickert-Finlay Realty Company. The redevelopment of Douglas Manor was part of the vast transformation of much of the newly created Borough of Queens into new residential neighborhoods. In 1906, the year Rickert-Finlay bought Douglas Manor, several major transportation projects to speed connections between Manhattan and Queens were underway: the Pennsylvania Railroad and Long Island Railroad tunnels under the East River, and the Queensborough Bridge at 59th Street.14 According to the Real Estate Record and Guide of that year:
The development of numerous farms into building lots and the erection of hundreds of new buildings have necessarily advanced the value of real estate in that section of Greater New York. It is said that more than 8,000 new apportionments have been made in the Borough of Queens during 1906, and that considerably more than 10,000 acres of land have been cut up into lots....
Chief among the new developments cited:
Title has just been taken to the Douglass [sic] homestead of about 180 acres by the Douglass Manor Co. This will probably be the highest class development on the island. It has a mile of water front and most magnificent shade trees. This property will be subdivided immediately.16
The Rickert-Finlay Realty Company, which bought Douglas Manor, was active in real-estate development in Queens and Nassau Counties in the early years of the century, buying up large farms and estates on the north shore of Long Island, preferably those with attractive topographical features, and subdividing them into new suburban communities. Their projects included Norwood in Long Island City, Broadway-Flushing in Flushing, Bellcourt in Bayside, Douglas Manor in Douglaston, and Westmoreland in Little Neck.17 By 1908, the company, with offices at 45 West 34th Street in Manhattan,18 was advertising itself as "The Largest Developers of Real Estate in Queens Borough ~ over 10,000 lots within the limits of New York City."19
The company's typical strategy for selecting development sites was described by E.J. Rickert in a 1914 article in Architecture and Building: "It was selected because it was on high ground, with a splendid outlook . . . and only four blocks from a railway station. It was . . . noted for the magnificent row of maples and lindens, nearly a mile long, extending through the entire property."20 The company then developed each tract according to a formula based on past successes. E.J. Rickert described the progression of the firm's ideas:
The first property developed was Bellcourt in Bayside, which was improved along the same lines as had heretofore prevailed on Long Island — that is, gravel sidewalks were laid, streets were graded and shade trees were set out, no other improvements being made. In the sale of Bellcourt, however, it was found that there was a demand for better improvements, and, consequently, when Douglas Manor was developed, cement sidewalks were laid, macadam roads were built and trees and hedges were set out. Broadway-Flushing and Westmoreland, which came next, were developed to about the same extent as Douglas Manor, all then being considered the best improved properties on Long Island.
The next development, Kensington, saw the addition of complete "sanitary sewer system, water mains and underground conduit for street lighting."
The new suburb of Douglas Manor
The qualities of the nineteenth-century Douglas Manor on which the Rickert-Finlay development capitalized included its hilly topography, its mile-long waterfront accessible to the entire narrow peninsula, and its lush plantings, especially the specimen trees planted during Douglas's tenure. The development also based its new road system on the major farm roads already in place, which became West, East, and Centre [Center] Drives.23
The company then established a series of protective covenants to guarantee a certain manner of development and density within the new suburb. In an era pre-dating the adoption of zoning regulations,24 the character of a new development could be guaranteed in no other way.
The covenants affected the architectural character of the houses only peripherally — by prohibiting flat roofs, thereby encouraging a more romantic roofline. Instead, they focused on the kind and size of houses and the nature of the landscaping of the new development. They required all houses to be single-family residences, with the sole exception of the Douglaston Club (commercial uses and two-family buildings and flats were specifically prohibited). They encouraged an economically mixed development, with a boulevard of substantial mansions along the Shore Road waterfront, while smaller, less expensive houses would predominate on the peninsula's east. (Such conditions were guaranteed by requiring houses of a certain cost and lots of a certain size). A verdant landscape was ensured by requiring houses to be set back 20 feet, leaving room for greenery, and by prohibiting fences and encouraging hedges, creating vistas not of individual, fenced-off gardens, but rather of a continuous, green, park-like, landscaped environment.
Rickert-Finlay went even further, taking steps to protect that environment and shape the community's social character by creating, in 1906, the Douglas Manor Association. Its stated objectives were the creation and maintenance of a club house to promote "social intercourse" among the residents, and to preserve and protect the development's physical amenities, including the roads, parks, shorefront, and plantings.26
Selling Douglas Manor
Promotional brochures prepared by Rickert-Finlay characterized the new neighborhood as a private community of houses, nestled in a landscape similar to Central Park, surrounded with a mile of shorefront, just blocks from each home.27
Douglas Manor's convenience to Midtown Manhattan via the Long Island Railroad was compared favorably to subway commutation to new Bronx neighborhoods. The commute was touted at "only 33 Minutes to Manhattan, 52 Trains a Day," and predicted to become "20 Minutes to Herald Square, when Pennsylvania-Long Island Tunnels are completed." The neighborhood was just three blocks from the Douglaston station, itself very near the Long Island Sound, "being the only station on the line near enough to the Sound to bring the shore front within easy walking distance. "28 The history and character of the old Douglas estate were emphasized, especially the trees planted by Douglas: "Scotch Holly, Magnolia, Japanese Maidenhair, Chinese Cypress, European Beech, Scarlet Maple, Horse Chestnut, Tulip, Lime, evergreens... Even Central Park does not possess a greater variety of rare trees....
" This park-like effect would be "preserved and increased by setting out hedges along winding roads, following the natural contour of the land as much as possible.... The shore drive, curving along the bay for over a mile, will be made the finest boulevard on Long Island." To all these suburban advantages, Douglas Manor also boasted the services provided by the City of New York: "city water, stone sidewalks, macadamized streets" and the "full benefit of all departments of the city government, including schools, water, police and fire protection."
From 1906 through the Depression, several hundred houses were erected in Douglas Manor, following the plan suggested by the Rickert-Finlay covenants. In general, the lots along Shore Road on the west were developed first, with larger, more substantial houses, followed by the more modest
homes to the east towards Udalls Cove. Property owners often acquired lots adjacent to those on which their houses were built to accommodate more generous lawns or gardens. The mile-long waterfront remained undeveloped, held in common by the Douglas Manor Association. The large caliper specimen trees planted in Douglas's day remained in place. The grounds of the various houses were separated by perimeter hedges only — no fences. Two smaller lots formed by irregular street intersections were planted as small parks, maintained by the Association. Together, the parks, commonly held shorefront, specimen trees, and hedged gardens created something close to Rickert-Finlay's version of Central Park, surrounded by water, with several hundred houses nestled in the landscape.
The Architecture of the Douglaston Historic District
The architectural styles of the over 600 houses and some 150 related structures (mostly garages) in the historic district reflect three centuries of Douglaston's built history. From the eighteenth-century colonial Van Wyck House, to the early nineteenth-century Van Zandt House and mid-nineteenth-century Allen House, to the twentiethth-century suburban houses of the Rickert-Finlay development, to the additions of the post-World War II period, they tell the story of the development of this part of eastern Queens, part of the larger developmental story of New York City and the country as a whole.
The Cornelius Van Wyck House, at 126 West Drive, survives as the oldest extant house in the district, and one of the oldest in New York City (it is a designated New York City landmark). Built c.1735 for an early Dutch settler as a farmstead, the house reflects eighteenth-century New York colonial styles. Douglas, who transformed the farm to Douglas Manor, is said to have used the house as an "entrance lodge to his estate.w29 In 1907, one year after the acquisition of the Manor by the Rickert-Finlay Company, the Douglaston Country Club enlarged the building for use as a clubhouse. In 1921, the Van Wyck House passed back into use as a single-family residence, and its owner, E.N. Wicht, hired Frank J. Forster, designer of Colonial Revival and Tudor Revival style houses in the new Douglas Manor development, to restore it to its original Dutch Colonial appearance.
The Wynant Van Zandt House, at 600 West Drive, reflects both the older and the newer history of Douglaston. Built in 1819 as a home for Wynant Van Zandt, it was significantly altered after 1906 for use as the Douglaston Club, but still reflects some of the character of Van Zandt's original two-story Greek Revival manor house.
The Benjamin P. Allen House (a/k/a the Allen-Beville House, a designated New York City landmark) at 29 Center Drive, built c. 1848-50, is another rare Queens farm house. Predominately Greek Revival in style, it also shows the influence of the newly fashionable Italianate style, especially in its cornices and brackets.
Almost all the other buildings in the district date from the twentieth century, and the greater number of them from its first three decades, when Douglas Manor was developed by the Rickert-Finlay Company. Douglas Manor is a contemporary of several other planned communities in New York City, notably Fieldston in the Bronx and Forest Hill Gardens in Queens, all three of which began as subdivisions in the first decade of die century, and blossomed in the late teens and twenties. Like them, Douglas Manor was developed with houses based on historic styles of the past.
The first few decades of the century constituted a period of ferment and development in the design of American single-family houses. The epoch has been characterized as "a resurgence of individualism and an indulgence in residential architecture, a reaction to the standardization of the previous two decades. Fanciful cottages in fairy-tale styles were part of that image."30 In some ways, that approach is a logical continuation of late nineteenth-century architectural eclecticism, characterized in the 1890s as "rampant eclecticism in all fields of life and taste, of triumphant individualism, when authority sits so lightly on men's interests and lives; in this age of archaeology, when the different periods of history are made to live again in our imagination. "31 At the same time, residential architecture was affected by notions of progress and efficiency, and a drive toward simplicity and sanitary conveniences in home design.
Rickert-Finlay's protective covenants left the architectural character of the buildings almost entirely in the hands of owners and architects, requiring only that building roofs not be flat.32 The result was a collection of early twentieth-century eclectic residential styles, ranging from grand Colonial Revival mansions on the Shore Road waterfront, to picturesque Tudor Revival or Mediterranean Revival houses or houses in the English cottage manner or Colonial Revival houses on the blocks between West and East Drives, to modest cottages near Udalls Cove. Houses were sited in harmony with the topography, which tends to get hillier in the southeastern section of the peninsula.
One Douglas Manor architect, Alfred Scheffer, expressed his point of view in an article published in 1929. He described the Tudor Revival house he designed for himself at 216 Beverly-Road — a particularly useful indication of both the architect's and the client's point of view. Tellingly, the very first observation he makes is about the siting of the house, overlooking Long Island Sound: "The water is only a stone's throw — of a conservative marksman — from our front door and the second floor bay window has a certain suggestion of the forecastle deck of a ship, for the intervening land and highway are quite lost to sight and I can get a fine sense of sailing the seas, when I stand there." Only then does he turn to the formal style of the design, and sums up in a sentence the attitude of his day towards historically-inspired styles: "The construction is quite definitely in the English manner although / was not concerned with making it exact or authentic [emphasis added]
Scheffer then lists the elements that make his house "English": "stucco and halftimber walls with slate roof . . . The substantial chimney of common brick is typical of many English country houses. . . . The main entrance doorway of the house, at the end of a narrow flagstone walk, forms a Gothic arch of oak timber, framing a paneled oak door with iron straps and two small leaded glass windows, the effect completed by a semi-circular stone stoop. Beside the door is a lantern of pierced wrought-iron in the shape of an inverted tunnel, with wrought-iron bracket." Clearly it is details like the paneled oak door and leaded glass windows which give the house the English "effect" Scheffer wanted. But when he turns to describing the interior, practical matters take precedence: "The interior of the house was designed to take full advantage of our gorgeous outlook over the water."
Historical details are listed — "The walls are of rough English hand finished plaster" - but so are the "built-in bookshelves," "built-in comer cabinets," and "convenient and numerous closets and the very large closet and bathroom which join the master bedroom and add much to its convenience." "The interior of the house," concludes Scheffer," will probably grow from year to year. Things will be taken out and others put in until eventually, it comes near to realizing my mental image of what it ought to be. Already, I think, it has the liveable quality which is most essential of all."33
The majority of houses in the historic district reflect a variety of styles, loosely adapted by architects like Frank Scheffer, typical of suburban residential architecture across the country. The predominant style is the Colonial Revival in several variants, ranging in date from c.1910 to the present. Most are of frame construction with shingle and/or clapboard siding. Besides a generic Colonial Revival style, the district has such distinctive variations as the Dutch Colonial Revival, New England Colonial Revival, and Cape Cod Colonial Revival. Colonial Revival houses of brick, or frame with brick facing, often have a more formal neo-Georgian appearance. The English manner, the other major stylistic mode, is expressed with Tudor Revival, English cottage, or Arts and Crafts details. These houses, too, are often of frame construction with stucco facing and brick and/or stone trim. The Mediterranean Revival style was also popular.
These houses usually have stucco facing and tile roofs. The district also has a handful of houses of the Craftsman type pioneered by Gustav Stickley. Suburban houses of the type found in the district were judged by their picturesque qualities. The Architectural Forum, for instance, featured a Douglas Manor house by Frank Forster, the same architect who restored the Van Wyck House to something approaching its original Dutch colonial appearance. The writer praised Forster's "excellent use of half-timber in connection with brick or stucco," but more importantly his "rare skill in grouping, which creates a picturesque and architectural composition, wholly unaffected or exaggerated and involving no sacrifice in the matter of interior planning to secure this effect."
An additional group of houses in the historic district, on the south side of Bay Street, predates the Douglas Manor development by several years. Designed c.1900, they are excellent examples of the Colonial Revival and Queen Anne styles popular at the end of the nineteenth century.
Playing an important role in the historic district are the many related garage structures, often designed in architectural styles compatible with the houses they serve. Some were constructed originally as carriage houses and stables, often with residential accommodations, and later converted for garage use. By about 1920, the automobile had supplanted the horse, and garages were built as freestanding structures, some with chauffeur's quarters at the second story, usually situated close to a side or rear lot line. By the late 1920s, some houses were constructed with attached garages, or garages were constructed later, atttached to earlier houses. After World War II, many houses were built with basement garages, while other earlier houses were modified to provide basement garages.
The Douglas Manor Architects
A few prominent New York City architects with Manhattan offices received commissions in the new neighborhood; however, the vast majority of Douglas Manor houses were designed by local Queens and Brooklyn architects, and a surprisingly large number by architects who themselves lived in Douglas Manor or had offices nearby.35
Among the better known firms from outside the neighborhood who worked in the historic district, Buchman & Fox, architects of many Manhattan office buildings, designed 1008 Shore Road, a substantial Colonial Revival mansion overlooking the Bay. George Keister, whose practice included churches, hotels and Broadway theaters, designed 24 Knollwood Avenue, an Arts and Crafts style house, and 104 Hollywood Avenue, a Colonial Revival house. Diego DeSuarez, who planned villa gardens at both La Pietra, outside Florence, and Vizcaya, outside Miami, designed a one-story Mediterranean fantasy at 231 Beverly Road. Lionel Moses, of the firm of McKim, Mead & White, designed a house in the English cottage manner at 1102 Shore Road overlooking Little Neck Bay. The architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White is credited with the formal French Renaissance Revival style house at 4 Ardsley Road. Dating from 1919, it is constructed of hollow terra-cotta block, a form of fireproof construction, and faced with stucco.36
Architects from Brooklyn and Queens represented in the historic district include Arthur H. Allen, an architect very active in Forest Hills (a Colonial Revival house at 217 Ridge Road); Philip Resnyk (Tudor Revival, English cottage manner, and Colonial Revival houses on Warwick, Beverly, Grosvenor, Hollywood, Knollwood, Richmond, Kenmore, Richmond and Manor); Benjamin Dreisler (an Arts and Crafts/Colonial Revival house at 243 Forest Road); Louis Feldman (English cottage type houses at 211 and 217 Forest Road); J. Sarsfield Kennedy (a Tudor Revival house at 369 Beverly Road and a grand English bungalow/Arts and Crafts house at 1114 Shore Road), and Shampan & Shampan (a Colonial Revival house at 110 Arleigh).
Almost 60 of the over 600 houses in the historic district, built in the first decades of the century, are known to be the work of fourteen Douglaston architects.37 Alfred Scheffer, whose views are quoted above, designed at least ten, most in the Colonial Revival style or English cottage manner with Tudor Revival or Arts and Crafts detail.
John C.W. Cadoo designed at least sixteen houses, mostly Colonial Revival in style. Frank Forster designed at least three houses, one Colonial Revival, the others in the English cottage manner, as well as overseeing the restoration of the eighteenth-century Van Wyck House. Albert Humble designed at least ten houses, most in the Colonial Revival style.
Josephine Wright Chapman
Eight houses in the historic district are known to have been designed in the 1910s and 1920s by one of America's earliest successful women architects, Josephine Wright Chapman (1867-?). Chapman was professionally active from 1892 to 1927, but little is known about her education or commissions.
She pursued her interest in a career in architecture over opposition from her family, working from 1892 to 1897 as a draftsman in the office of Boston architect Clarence H. Blackall. Very few academically trained women became architects in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, and Chapman may have entered the profession as an apprentice.
By 1898 she was listed in the Boston City Directory as an architect, and developed a successful practice, despite the rejection of her application for membership in the American Institute of Architects.
Chapman's first major project was the New England Building at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901. Other known work includes the Craigie Arms Apartments (1897) in Cambridge, Mass., the Episcopal Church in Leominster, Mass., and the Women's Clubs in Worcester and Lynn, Mass.
In 1905, Chapman began to devote herself to the design of houses. She preferred the "English type," long, low and rambling, with gables and timber and plaster detailing. In 1907 she moved to New York, where she was listed in directories as an architect until 1925. Among her few published works was a sixteen-story apartment building on Park Avenue, described as demonstrating "the feminine idea of correct planning . . .and many innovations were to be introduced."
While in New York, she also received the commission for Hillandale, an Italian Renaissance style villa in Washington, D.C., built 1922-25. In the words of historian Gwendolyn Wright: "Neither Chapman's early public success in Boston nor her conversion to professional pursuit more appropriate for a woman qualified her for coverage in the architectural press.
But her career was remarkable, for few women had the financial independence to experiment with their own offices."
Chapman's known Douglaston houses, which date from 1909 to 1917, are in the historic district's two prevalent stylistic modes — five Colonial Revival and three in the English cottage manner.
They share picturesque silhouetttes with rooflines that feature gambrel or gabled roofs with hipped or shed dormers, and exposed brick chimneys; and distinctive entry and porch details, including one with Tuscan columns, one with a pointed-arch batten door, and one with a panelled entrance with side-lights and transom.
The Craftsman style houses
Several Craftsman style houses, including No. 122 Arleigh Road, 140 Prospect Avenue, and 111 Hollywood Avenue, may be one of the largest such collections in any New York City neighborhood.
Furniture designer Gustav Stickley of Rochester, New York, created the Craftsman architectural movement and disseminated it throughout the country via his Craftsman magazine.
The Craftsman aesthetic drew on the English Arts and Crafts movement, California Mission design, Japanese architecture, and Native American design, and was supported by an ideology influenced by concepts of socialism, the nobility of work, and the value of manual training.
Stickley developed his interest in architecture in the years 1902-05, initially as a way of creating the proper environment for his furniture. He hired architect Harvey Ellis to help develop a Craftsman architecture, and the Craftsman magazine began publishing prototype houses initially designed by Ellis, encouraging the public to take them as models for their own homes.
The published houses included floor plans, sketches, renderings of room schemes, elevations, and descriptions of appropriate rugs, fabrics, furniture, and color schemes. Stickley then encouraged his readers to alter the plans to suit local conditions.
In 1909, Stickley became involved in the actual construction of houses when he organized the Craftsman Building Company, which constructed houses in New Jersey and on Long Island.
The company was active for just under a year; the exact number of houses built is unknown. Most "Craftsman" houses were built by contractors using Craftsman plans.
The Craftsman house embodies a number of characteristics in its exterior. It is generally designed to take advantage of its site and views. Picturesque in its composition, it incorporates an "honest" expression of its materials and structure.
It makes use of exposed or emphasized structural elements, especially a broad, overhanging roof, often supported by large, open rafters extending beyond the eaves.
There may be wooden elements including curved roofs, or exotic piled capitals. Often such houses include pergolas, porches, balconies or verandas. Windows are grouped together to create large openings.
Craftsman houses use a variety of materials, preferably local. Stonework is often textured and ornamental, with variegated colors and shapes. Other common materials include clinker brick, and stucco, often mixed with rough sand or bits of glass.
Historical and Architectural Introduction
No. 111 Hollywood Road was designed by the Craftsman architects in 1914.55 The interior follows the Craftsman aesthetic, while the exterior borrows the distinctive eyebrow window and brick Tudor arched entrance from neighboring houses.
No. 122 Arleigh Road corresponds to Craftsman plan number 70, a "Ten-Room House for Town or Country Life" published originally in the Craftsman in July 1909 and again in More Craftsman Homes. Its horizontal orientation, large living porch, emphasis on structural elements including low, spreading, overhanging eaves and extended rafters, and central entrance and symmetrical facade with grouped windows, all reflect the Craftsman mold.
No. 140 Prospect Road correspond to Craftsman plan number 85, a "Small Two-Story Cement House with Recessed Porch and Balcony," published originally in the Craftsman in March 1910 and again in More Craftsman Homes. Its low-pitched roof revealing the rafters, porch and balcony, decorative use of structural elements, and grouping of windows and openings, all fit the Craftsman aesthetic.
A number of other houses in the historic district reflect the Craftsman aesthetic, even though they do not follow published Craftsman plans.
Prominent residents and later history
The first residents to move into the new Douglas Manor development, in 1907, were "the Misses Butler, of Flushing." They were followed by a number of newspapermen including "Mr. Mayer, World cartoonist, on Shore Road and Knollwood Ave.," "George C. Minor, of the New York Herald" on West Drive and Knollwood, and "Arthur Greaves, city editor of the New York Times" on West Drive, as well as a Mr. Slater of Manhattan and a Mr. Burtis, "manager of the Brooklyn branch of Swift & Co."56 Country Life in America the following year showed houses for sale in Douglas Manor priced at $8500 and $10,000.
Over the years, the historic district has attracted many famous residents, including a number of people in theater and the arts. Besides the above mentioned Herbert Mayer, cartoonist for The World, and architect Elbert McGran Jackson, who also illustrated covers for the Saturday Evening Post, artists included Percy Crosby, author of the "Skippy" comic strip; Robbie Robinson, another
illustrator for the Saturday Evening Post, Norwegian born sculptor Trygve Hammer, whose house is at 329 Forest Road,59 and satirist George Grosz.
Douglaston's location on the Long Island Rail Road, which made it convenient to the Astoria Studios in Long Island City, an early movie center, attracted many actors in the days before the ascendancy of Hollywood.
Residents have included Ginger Rogers, Hedda Hopper, Richard Dix, Ward Bond, Bonita Granville, Clifton Webb, Arthur Treacher, Jack Donahue, and William Collier Sr., as well as Ziegfeld Follies star Margaret Corry.
Other notable residents have included author Ring Lardner, as well as Olympic swimmer Annette Kellerman, tennis pro John McEnroe, Jr., and pianist Claudio Arrau.
Douglaston resident Anne E. Hayes was one of the first women to attend Cornell University's medical school, and later became a clothing designer.
In the half century since the end of World War II, the Douglaston Historic District has seen numerous houses altered or demolished, and much new construction. Some of the new houses have maintained the scale and repeated the materials and styles of earlier houses; others have not.
They have ranged in style from ranch houses to modern versions of the Colonial Revival. Overall, however, the Douglaston Historic District survives, maintaining much of its original architectural character as a planned suburban community, as well as rare surviving reminders of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and significant landscape features including the commonly-held waterfront, specimen trees, and generous landscaping.
All create a distinct sense of place, recalling a significant period in the history of Queens.
- From the 1997 NYCLPC Historic District Designation Report
Pier 45 (Christopher Street Pier), Greenwich Village, Manhattan
The Empire State Building is today the best-known symbol of New York City. Its name, Its profile, and the view from its summit are' familiar the world over, and a visit to New York is generally conceded to be incomplete without a trip to the Empire State Building's observatory.
The Empire State was the final and most celebrated product of the skyscraper frenzy produced by the economic boom of the 1920s, and'the most prominent of the modernistic towers that created the midtown skyline in those years. Its completion in April, 1931, on the former sits of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, marked the transformation of midtown from New York's preeminent residential area for the social elite into the commercial center of the metropolis.
The engineering and construction of the Empire State Building were perhaps the most awesome accomplishments of its creators. Its design, in many ways shaped by the constraints of time, cost, and structure, was the finest work of architect William Lamb, chief designer for Shreve, Lamb 6 Harmon. The slender, modernistic silhouette he created fit the building so well that even today, when it is no longer the tallest, it remains one of the handsomest of New York's skyscrapers.
With the decline in construction which accompanied the Depression, and the tendency in the post-war period towards shorter, denser office buildings, the Empire State it 1250 fser remained the world's tallest building until the 1970s, when the Sears Building in Chicago took the title of the world's tallest, end the World Trade Center took the title of New York's tallest. Yet despite the loss of the title which was one of the sources of its original renown, the Empire State Building remains New York's most widely recognized symbol, and the city's quintessential landmark.
The Site Development of Midtown Manhattan into the commercial center of New York
The site of the Empire State Building was part of a farm, owned by John Thompson, which was acquired In 1827 by William B. Astor. The site remained in Astor hands over a hundred years of development until Its purchase, in 1929, by the Empire State Building Interests.
Astor was the second son of John Jacob Astor, founder of the Astor dynasty in America. Using the family fortune, he acquired a great deal of undeveloped property in Manhattan, foreseeing that the northward expansion of New York along the island would eventually make his property worth many times its original price. Over the next fifty years, the area around 34th Street and Fifth Avenue developed first into an outlying rowhouse neighborhood of New York, and then into the city's most fashionable residential area.
By the 1850s, Fifth Avenue was lined with the palaces of the Vanderbilts, A.T. Stewart (the "merchant prince," one of New York's wealthiest men), and other millionaires. The Astors themselves moved from Astor Place up to Fifth Avenue in 1859, when John Jacob Astor, Jr., built his house at the northwest corner of Fifth and 33rd Street; shortly thereafter his brother William Backhouse Astor built an adjoining house at the southwest corner of Fifth and 34th Street. The Astor houses soon became known as the central meeting place of New York society, and home to the famous balls thrown by Mrs. Astor for "the four hundred," New York's social elite.
Following the traditional pattern of Manhattan growth, the city's hotels, theaters, clubs, and restaurants followed the residential development up Fifth Avenue. By the 1890s, guides to the city identified "the great hotel district" as lying "between 23d and 59th Streets, and Fourth and Seventh Avenues.... in that territory, which is little less than two miles long by a half mile wide, are half of the leading hotels of the metropolis.
In 1890, William Waldorf Astor, son of John Jacob Astor, Jr., having decided to move to London, tore down his house and filed plans for the Waldorf Hotel, a thirteen-story building designed by Henry J. Hardenbergh and completed in 1893. in 18S7, the neighboring Astor house having been demolished, the Astoria Hotel was erected by Astor's aunt, and connected to the Waldorf to form the Waldorf-Astoria. The new hotel soon became a major social institution of New York.
Forty years later the area was changing again, largely because of the influx of department stores just before and after World War i. During the final decades of the 19th century New York's fashionable stores had clustered in the area called the "Ladies Mile," along Fifth and Sixth Avenues and Broadway between 11th and 23rd Streets.
Altman's started the new trend northward by moving in 1906 from Sixth Avenue and 18th Street to Fifth Avenue at 34th Street. Others followed, and by the early 1920s Fifth Avenue was lined from 34th Street north by stores such as Best s, Tiffany's, Franklin Simon, Bonwit Teller, Lord & Taylor and Arnold Constable. Along with the department stores came several tall
office buildings, beginning in 1902 with the Flatiron Building at Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street.' Rider's New York City Guide noted that "Hotels and restaurants that have long been landmarks, such as the Manhattan, the Buckingham and Sherry's, have disappeared and tall office buildings are multiplying even on the side streets.
Newspapers picked up on the changes taking place in the area. Capt. William J. Pedrick, executive vice-president of the Fifth Avenue Association, was quoted extensively on the development of Fifth Avenue; he noted in particular the avenue's new tall commercial buildings: the 15-story New York Trust, the 34-story Squibb Building, the 58-story Salmon Jower (500 Fifth Avenue), and the plans for the Empire State Building.
To demonstrate the rate of change on Fifth Avenue, Rider's Guide gave a capsule history of the site across Fifth Avenue from the Waldorf-Astoria: a house belonging to Dr. "Sarsaparilla" Townsend, popularlzer of soft drinks, was replaced in 1867 by the "marble palace" of A.T. Stewart; in the 1890s the house was converted for use by the Manhattan Club; in 1901 it was demolished to make way for the four-story Knickerbocker Trust Building, to which, finally, in 1920-21 were added another twelve stories to create the Columbia Trust Building.
The changeover of Midtown Manhattan from social to commercial center was finally consummated by the demolition In 1930 of the Waldorf-Astoria Itself, and the opening on its site the following year of the Empire State Building, a speculative office building and the tallest In the world.
A New, Modernistic Midtown Skyline and the Skyscraper Race
A new skyline was created for the newly commercial Midtown by the progressively larger office buildings being erected during the 1920s, Since the beginnings of skyscraper development in New York in the last decades of the 19th century, architects had tried to adapt historical sty.es to the modern American invention of the skyscraper. The most successful and famous of these attempts produced the Woolworth Building (Cass Gilbert, 1913), the sixty-story Gothic tower christened the "Cathedral of Commerce." Towards the end of the 1920s, however, under the influence of a "modernism" derived in part from the European Art Deco, New York architects created a new "skyscraper style" which, it has been argued, more fully expressed the nature--the verticality, the metal structure, the sense of an industrial and technological future—of the skyscraper. The series of skyscrapers constructed in midtown, including ;be Chrysler, Daily News, McGraw-Hill, Chanin, RCA (now GE), Fuller, and Empire State buildings, helped Introduce the new modernistic Art Deco style to urban America, and defined midtown's characteristic look for the next several decades, until the new round of skyscraper buildings began in the 1960s.
At the same time, the builders of skyscrapers began to reach for progressively greater heights. The WooIworth Building's sixty stories
had rested unchallenged for a decade, and Its observatory was considered to have the finest view of New York.
In the late 1920s, however, the new commercial buildings began to challenge the title. A 110-story building announced in 1926 by developer John Larkin was never built, but in 1929 two towers, the Bank of Manhattan (927 ft, 70 stories) downtown on Wall Street, and the Chrysler Building (1,050 ft, 77 stories) in Midtown on East **2nd Street, competed in a race to see which would be the new tallest building in the world. The race was heightened by the rivalry between the architects of the two buildings, H. Craig Severance and William Van Alen, who had formerly been partners.
Chrysler won by arranging to have the building's spire secretly constructed inside the building and then jacked up through the top at the last minute. Shortly thereafter, however, the Chrysler Building lost Its title to the Empire State Building.
The Empire State Building was a speculative office building planned by John J. Raskob, who hired former New York State Governor A1 Smith to be president of the Empire State Company. As an executive of General' Motors, Raskob no doubt considered himself a rival in many ways of Walter Chrysler.
According to rental manager Hamilton Weber, the originally planned 86 stories of the Empire State Building were only four feet higher than the Chrysler Building, and "Raskob was worried that Walter Chrysler would pull a trick—like hiding a rod in the spire and then sticking it up at the last minute." Hence, according to Weber, the Idea for the 14-story dirigible mast which raised the building's height to 1250 feet but proved, in the end, to be unusable for its Intended purpose. The Chrysler and Woolworth buildings, seeing there could be no hope of competition with the Empire State, eventually closed their own observatories.
The 1920s procession of skyscrapers might have continued producing ever taller buildings: according to a Herald Tribune article discussing the Empire State project in 1930, "Charles F. Noyes let it be known some time ago that he was considering erecting 150 floors over two square blocks in the old mercantile district downtown."
The Depression put an end to any such plans, however, and the Empire State Building remained the tallest by far of the city's commercial towers.
John Jacob Raskob and Al Smith.
The man who conceived the idea for the world's tallest speculative office building was a self-made multi-millionaire industrialist named John J. Raskob.
Born Into a poor family in Lockport, New York, Raskob went to work early In life to support his widowed mother and family. He found work as a secretary for a small street railway company in Lorain, Ohio, that happened to be owned by Pierre Du Pont, of the Du Pont chemical industry family.
When Du Pont bought the Dallas Street Railway Company In Texas, he made Raskob treasurer, and eventually he took Raskob with him to Wilmington, Delaware, where Du Pont became president of E.I. Du Pont de Nemours and Raskob became vice president in charge of finance.
Early In the century, Raskob Invested heavily In the newly formed General Motors Corporation, and convinced Du Pont to do the same.
In 1915, Du Pont became chairman of General Motors, and in 1918 Raskob became chairman of its Finance Committee. The spectacular growth of the value of General Motors stock made Raskob a multi-millionaire, and one of the wealthiest men in the country. Shortly before the Depression Raskob co-authored an article in the Ladies' Home Journal entitled "Everybody Ought to be Rich."'
Aside from his organizational abilities, Raskob's chief contribution to General Motors was the invention of the installment plan for buying automobiles.
Like many businessmen of the time, Raskob was interested in politics, and like most millionaires he was a Republican. His entry into politics, however, was as a contributor to the gubernatorial campaign of populist Democratic governor A1 Smith. Raskob was introduced to Smith in New York City in 1926.16 The two men came from similar backgrounds--poor Irish Catholic famlies—and shared a dislike of the Prohibition amendment, an issue in Smith's later campaign for the presidency. They became friendly, and Raskob volunteered generous contributions to Smith's 1926 gubernatorial re-election campaign. Although many of Smith's closest aides distrusted Raskob, they were unable to prevent his appointment two years later as campaign manager for Smith's unsuccessful 1928 race with Hoover for the Presidency, an appointment which resulted in the anomaly of a conservative Republic millionaire becoming Chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
(One of Raskob's first actions as Chairman was to move thecommittee to offices in the General Motors Building on West 57th Street.)
Although Raskob was blamed by some Smith aides for the loss of the 1928 election, and by others for Smith's gradual shift towards a more conservative political philosophy, the relationship between the two men remained strong. When Raskob decided to get into the real estate business, and to build the tallest building in the world, he offered Smith the $50,000 a year job of President of the Empire State Corporation.
Al Smith and the World's Tallest Building: Public Relations at the Highest Levels."
Raskob's rationale for building the world's tallest building, and for making Governor Smith its president, was never clearly stated, although several explanations have been offered. Unlike its immediate predecessors—the Woolworth Building for Frank W. Woolworth and his company, the Manhattan Company Building for the Bank of Manhattan, and the Chrysler Building for Walter Chrysler and his company—the Empire State was not built to symbolize one man or company: it was not the General Motors Building or Raskob Tower, for instance.
The Empire State Building was instead simply a speculative office building, and it was named for New York State, home of the building and the state of which Al Smith had been four times governor. Rather than being a corporate symbol, the building became identified as the world's tallest building and a venture of Al Smith's.
The explanation of its height offered by the company in Its various promotional brochures was simply that of a human adventure, carrying on "the Pharaoh's dream":
Down through the ages, men have yearned and toiled and planned, that they might build a structure nearer to the skies than ever had been built before. Something of this great desire burned in the souls of the Pharaohs of Egypt, when the Great Pyramid of Gizeh was erected, 451 feet high, equal to thirty-four stories. St. Peter's, at Rome, lifts its dome 435 feet toward the sky. That slender and marvelous minaret in Cairo spears the heights at 280 feet and the Cremona Campanile in Italy rises 396 feet above the earth. The famous Cathedral of Cologne attains an altitude of 512 feet; the Washington Monument is 555 feet high. Then came the era of steel, heralded by the world-famous Eiffel Tower in Paris, 984 feet high, useless except as an awe-inspiring demonstration of what men, steel and machinery can accomplish.
The Woolworth Tower was for long the world's tallest building, rising in beautiful Gothic design to a height of sixty stories, 792 feet. The Bank of Manhattan at last surpassed it with its height of 838 feet, only to be in turn surpassed by the 1046 foot elevation cf the Chrysler Building's topmost spire. But Empire State is higher than all these. It carries to triumphant completion the vaulting ambition of the Pharaohs, of Pope Julius when he began the building of St. Peter's.
As for bringing ex-Governor Smith into the project, Raskob apparently suggested at the time that he was going to build the Empire State Building to give his old friend a job. Smith, having lost the presidential election and retired from the governorship of New York, faced an uncertain future.
His friend, actor and producer Eddie Dowling, recalled being present at the moment of Raskob's offer, the occasion being a dinner thrown by the New York State Democratic party for newly elected Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt. Smith and Dowling had gone to the men's lounge during a lull in the proceedings, and Smith was telling him of his worries, when Raskob appeared and announced, "Don't worry, A1, I'm going to build a new skyscraper--biggest in the wor!d--and you're going to be president of the company," maintaining that he was doing it all to give Smith a high-paying job.
The key to understanding the actual motives behind the height of the building and the involvement of Governor Smith seems to involve a newly developing science that was becoming more and more important to the art of architecture: advertising.
Advertising seems to have become an accepted function of office buildings in the 1920s. Arthur Tappan North, writing on the subject, noted:
The incorporation of publicity or advertising features in a building is frequently an item for consideration.... This feature, when possessing intrinsic merit, is consonant with and is a legitimate attribute of good architecture. It stimulates public interest and admiration, is accepted as a genuine contribution to architecture, enhances the value of the property and Is profitable to the owner in the same manner as are others forms of legitimate advertising.
The Empire State Company in fact launched an extensive advertising campaign capitalizing on several features of the building: its "historic site," formerly that of the Astor Mansion and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel; its convenience ot the two rail terminals in midtown; "a board of directors that inspires confidence;" and its advertising campaign, run by the public relations firm of Belle Moscowitz, former political aide to Al Smith, hit all the leading New York newspapers 'week after week with very clever ads.
The value of advertising for the Empire State Building was picked up by the Real Estate Magazine, in an article entitled "Good Publicity Something More Than 'Hitting1 Front Page," in which the Empire State Building was singled out as an excellent example of how it should be done:
The Empire State Building has received extensive newspaper attention because of former Governor Smith's connection with the enterprise and through a number of clever creative publicity stunts, notable the mast which will top the building as a mooring spot for Zeppelins duly authorized by official Washington with reporters and cameramen obligingly on hand.-1
The two primary subjects of the advertising, however, the two attributes most closely identified with the building, were the involvement of Al Smith, and the building's unmatched height.
Al Smith's relationship to the enterprise was frankly stated In the booklet released on May ], 1931> for the building's opening ceremonies:
Raskob and his associates selected a leader, a man so well known to the public that his very presence placed the seal of integrity upon their undertaking. He was Alfred E. Smith, four times Governor of New York State, Presidential candidate of the Democratic Party.... known and beloved by his countrymen. He became president of Empire State, Inc. even while the mighty structure was only a dream.
Lists of the building's board of directors invariably began with Alfred E. Smith, and ended humbly with John J. Raskob. A New Yorker article of early
1931 noted that the building was "inevitably associated with ex-Governor Al Smith, fn its earlier stages his picturesque statements made excellent publicity and drew all New York's attention to the steelwork as it grew to dizzy heights."
Smith's biographers have noted that his functions at the building were "largely ceremonial.... The staff handled all the rental and maintenance problems, while Smith served as attention getter, greeter, and publicity man delux." To the public, however, the building was Al Smith's, and from the opening ceremonies, when his grandchildren, as representatives of "posterity," cut the ribbon at the main entrance, through the following years of giving tour upon tour to visiting royalty, politicians, sports heroes, and celebrities of every kind, he remained the building's symbol.
Similarly, the building's height played a major role in the company's public relations campaign. Besides constantly comparing the building's height to other tall monuments, the company emphasized the extraordinary daring of the construction workers involved in erecting the world's tallest building by commissioning photographer Lewis Hine to document the work.
The Company arranged for a special mechanical cage that would enable Hire to be swung out into the air to photograph the most difficult feats. The photographs were then used in advertisements, and put on display in the ground floor store windows.
The publicity value of tall buildings was apparently considered to be great enough that it could actually be figured in as a legitimate "expenditure," designed to bring increased prestige and, presumably, income. R.H. Shreve, one of the Empire State Building's architects, wrote in 1930 that the constraints of zoning, wind-bracing, and general costs of a very tall building determine a point...
...where the balance begins to swing back and the rate of return on capital investment begins to diminish as the building goes higher, unless the owner gets a markedly greater unit return for the higher space, or charges the decrease in the direct net return to "advertising."
Justification for this approach was probably found in the tremendous public interest which developed during the late twenties in skyscraper heights.
The New York Sun published a list of the fifty tallest buildings in New York, arranged by height, and shortly afterwards the architectural journal Pencil Points found It necessary to reprint it, in January 1931, noting that "Interest in the heights of New York skyscrapers does not seem to abate, if we may judge by the inquiries concerning them received in this office."
A cartoon in the same issue showed an architect with a rendering of a pointed skyscraper and a caption reading: "Enthusiastic Architect: 'You See, This Spike Runs Down the Entire Length of the Building and if Anyone Builds a Taller Building We Can Jack Up the Spike and Still Be the Tallest!"
In short, Raskob's strategy was based on an aggressive advertising campaign to market the Empire State Building, a speculative real-estate venture, as the world's tallest building, headed by the world's most popular former politician, with the world's most competent board of directors, on the world's most prestigious site, and the world's most
daring engineering feat, with Ai Smith personally conducting the world's famous to see the world's most overwhelming view.
If advertising was indeed the goal of the builders of the Empire State Building, they were extraordinarily successful. Twenty years later, Collier's described the effect of the building on the publicity-minded:
Douglas Leigh, who makes those superspectacular signs for Broadway, is itching to transform the top into a giant soft-drink bottle, or a glowing cigarette. Human flies want to walk up the front, flagpole sitters want to sit on the lightning rod, and high-wire artists want to traipse through space over to the Chrysler tower at Forty-second Street,
The effort spent on public relations paid off much sooner than the building's promoters imagined. Two weeks after the project was announced the stock market crashed, and throughout the early years of the Depression the building remained seriously undertenanted. The Empire State Building was saved from bankruptcy, in part, by the million or so visitors to the observation decks each year who paid one dollar a piece admissions.
Shreve, Lamb & Harmon
John J. Raskob was no doubt attracted to Shreve, Lamb 6 Harmon by their business-like approach to architecture. Raskob first encountered Shreve S Lamb in 1926 when his company, General Motors, commissioned a new headquarters on West 57th Street from the firm. He must have been impressed by their performance; he may also have considered it an advantage that Shreve, Lamb £ Harmon had been called in as consulting architects for the Bank of Manhattan Building, and therefore had some experience in races for the "tallest building" title, as well as experience working with the Starrett & Eken construction company which built the^Bank of Manhattan and which was later awarded the Empire State contract.
Richmond Haroid Shreve (1877" 1946) was born in Cornwall is, Nova Scotia, son of a former Dean of Quebec Cathedral. He studied architecture at Cornell University, graduated in 1502, and spent the next four years on the faculty of the College of Architecture there. While at Cornel! he supervised construction of Goldwiri Smith Hall, designed by the prominent New York firm of Carrere £ Hastings, and at the conclusion of the work he joined the firm.
William Frederick Lamb (1883-1952), son of New York builder William Lamb, was born in Brooklyn. After graduating from Williams College in 1904, he studied at the Columbia University School of Architecture, and then went to Paris to study at the Atelier Deglane. Having received his diploma from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1911, he returned to New York and joined Carrere S Hastings. in 1920, both Shreve and Lamb became partners in the new firm of Carrere £ Hastings, Shreve & Lamb.
Four years later they broke away to form Shreve & Lamb, and in 1925 they were joined by Arthur Loomis Harmon (1878-1958) to form Shreve, Lamb & Harmon.Harmon, born in Chicago, had studied at the Art Institute there, and graduated from the Columbia University School of Architecture in .1901. From 1902 to 1911 he was a designer in the office of McKim, Head & White, in 1912-13 an associate of the firm of Wall is & Goodwlllie, and then practiced under his own name until joining Shreve £ Lamb. His work alone included battle monuments at Tours, Cantigny and Somme-Py in France, a YMCA in Jerusalem, and the award-winning Shelton Hotel in New York.
Of the three architects in the firm, Lamb was generally acknowledged to be the designer, and Shreve the administrator. Shreve was also active as a planner outside the firm's work; he was the director of the Slum Clearance Committee of New York after its formation in 1933, and chief architect of the group preparing plans for the Williamsburg Housing Project, as well as chief architect of the Vladeck Houses on the Lower East Side and also of Parkchester in the Bronx.
Shreve, Lamb & Harmon worked principally on commercial office buildings, although they also designed a number of estates and residences in the New York suburbs, and a few apartment houses in Manhattan, Their residential work largely in the neo-Tudor and other popular styles of the 1920s, while their commercial work tended to be spare and functional, reflecting little of the Beaux-Arts ornament for which Carrere & Hastings had been famous.
Their buildings in New York, including 500 Fifth Avenue, 14 Wall Street, the Lefcourt National Building, and the Mutual of New York Building, and also their commissions outside the city, such as the Standard Oi! Building in Albany, the Reynolds Tobacco Company building in Winston-Salem, and the Chimes Building In Syracuse, are all similarly designed with unadorned limestone cladding, metal framed windows, and simple set-back massing, occasionally with Art Deco or Streamlined ornamental motifs.
The spareness and economy of the firm's designs were a reflection of several architecturai notions gaining currency in the 1920s. As office buildings grew larger and their engineering and financing more complex, the nature of architecture had to adapt to new conditions, Many architects in the 1920s and 1930s, recognizing new constraints, adapted the language of the international Style and functionalist schools of thought and wrote about a new art of architecture.
All three architects in the firm wrote on the subject of the changing nature of architecture. Harmon listed the various forces at work on design as: steel construction, congested business areas, the need for light and air, property shape, internal lighting, zoning, the ratio of rentable area to overall area, the cost of steel, wind bracing, and elevators. William Lamb, the partner concerned least with organization and most with design, concurred:
An interesting development in the planning of present day office buildings is the change in the conception that the architect has of his work. The day that he could sit before his drawing board and make pretty sketches of decidedly uneconomic monuments to himself has gone. His scorn of things "practical" has been replaced by an intense earnestness to make practical necessities the armature upon which he moulds the form of his idea. Instead of being the intolerant aesthete, he Is one of a group of experts upon whom he depends for the success of his work, for the modern large building with its complicated machinery is beyond the capacity of any one man to master, and yet he must, in order to control the disposition and arrangement of this machine, -have a fairly accurate general knowledge of what it is all about. Added to this he must know how to plan his building so that it will "work" economically and produce the revenue for which his clients have made their investment.39
Lamb's design inclinations corresponded very well to the kind of work that Shreve brought into the office. Mrs. Lamb recalls that his tastes in most matters tended to the simple and classical. The architecture he loved best was the spare Romanesque of the southern French cathedrals. Among his contemporaries he greatly admired Raymond Hood, particularly his spare, vertical Daily News Building; HoGd also wrote about the practical side of architecture, dismissing fantastic design as unnecessary. The two men were close friends. Although Lamb's "work had much of the Modernistic to it, his opinion of the flamboyant variety of Moderne represented by the Chrysler Building was rather low—he referred to it once as the "Little Nemo school of architecture," meaning fancy and fantastic, like the comic strip. He never considered his work to be in any way describable as "Art Deco."
Precisely because the firm was a well-organized producer of practical and unadorned office buildings, it was able to organize the myriad elements involved and produce a striking, handsome, but still economical design for the Empire State Building, which was above all a creation of business considerations and an unrivalled engineering feat.
Conception and Design
According to the architects, the Empire State Building was largely shaped by the various economic and engineering considerations involved.
The program was short enough—a fixed budget, no space more than 28 feet from window to corridor, as many stories of such space as possible, an exterior of limestone, and completion by May 1, 1931, which meant a year and six months from the beginning of sketches, The first three of these requirements produced the mass of the building and the latter two the characteristics of its design.
Planning of the building's layout — involving the placement of elevators, utilities, ventilation, and pipe shafts in such a way as to obtain the maximum amount of rentable office space-~centered on a prototypical plan for the 30th floor, at which point the tower legally began to rise with a zoning-mandated floor-area of one-quarter the lot size.
The principles, established by these cooperative investigations, which covered a period of four weeks, together with the owner's requirements... formed the complete program. The "parti" was arrived at in two hours, the evening before a meeting of the owner's corporation. An all-night "charette" produced the next day a series of five or six of the essential plans, an elevation, a perspective, and a fairly accurate tabulation of rentable areas and cube.
Lamb described the plan arrived at through the various consultations:
The logic of the plan is very simple. A certain amount of space in the center, arranged as compactly as possible, contains the vertical circulation, toilets, shafts and corridors. Surrounding this is a perimeter of office space 28 feet deep. The sizes of the floors diminish as the elevators decrease in number. In essence there is a pyramid of non-rentable space surrounded by a greater pyramid of rentable space....^
The massing of the building was to a great extent affected by the elevator system. The elevators were placed in four banks parallel to the building's main axis, with those on the east and west sides being the low-rise group. The low-rise elevators drop off as the building rises, enabling the tower to step back...
...from the long dimension of the property to approach the square form of the shaft, with the result that instead of being a tower, set upon a series of diminishing setbacks prescribed by the zoning law, the building becomes all tower rising from a great five-story base.^
Elevators and budget were said to be the determining factors of the building's height. The elevator contractor, and Starrett Brothers and Eken, asked independently to calculate the height limit of the building based on their economic priori tie:;, each arrived at a limit of eighty stories plus five for the executive offices.
Floor-plan, massing, and height arrived at, the architects turned to the building's exterior. The spare design, based on massing and vertical window strips, was a product of both the building program's practical needs, and Lamb's aesthetic preferences.
The exterior is defined almost entirely by a system of vertical strips of windows, projecting slightly beyond the limestone walls, set in continuous vertical metal surrounds, and separated by dull aluminum spandrels; these strips are arranged singly, in pairs, and in sets of three, and run continuously from bottom to top. There is almost no ornamental detail, other than modernistic ripples in the aluminum spandrels and modernistic caps where the window strips terminate at building setbacks.
The practical source of the window system was "the last and perhaps_ the most important item in the owner's program-speed of construction."
Completion of the building by May 1st was required because that was the traditional day for the signing of new commercial leases in the city, and therefore of crucial importance in the economic planning of a speculative office building. With such a complex building program, construction had to proceed smoothly and as quickly as possible. The advantages of the system were outlined by Shreve in a special article.
The total effect of the massing, height, and window-spandrel-wall design is of a very tall tower, rising from a five-story base, and topped by a modernistic spire. The window strips break up the mass of the building, and emphasize its verticality, while the elimination of reveals creates effectively a smooth glass, metal, and stone skin. The expression
of the building's taliness is simple arid elegant, the epitome of the kind of design most admired by William Lamb.
On the question of the building's style, Lamb wrote:
Whatever "style" it may be is the result of a logical and simple answer to the problems set by the economic and technical demands of its unprecedented program.
He never thought of it as Art Deco. Much of the ornament can only be described as "modernistic," especially the glass and steel dirigible mooring mast, and in that sense would fall under the generic term "Art Deco" or "Moderne," but the design of the building has little in common with that of the flamboyant Chrysler Building, almost its contemporary and the generally accepted prototypical Art Deco skyscraper.
In its reliance on stacked massing, vertical window strips, and simplicity of materials, and in the public insistence by its architects that these elements were largely determined by sheer practical necessity, the Empire State Building seems closer to Raymond Hood's Daily News Building, also contemporary with it.
It is quite possible that Lamb discussed his work with his close friend Hood; he admired his work, and the Daily News was Hood's most recent success at the time. The Daily News Building is also riot a purely Art Deco creation, but in some respects an International Style slab; similarly, Hood's contemporary McGraw-Hill Building combines aspects of both, If the Empire State Building, a spare tower on a base with some modernistic details, belongs In a line of succession, it might be that of the News and McGraw-Hill Buildings, followed by the RCA tower in Rockefeller Center, of which Hood was a chief designer.
By contrast with the News Building, however, the Empire State is thoroughly symmetrical, and not treated with bright colors. Unlike many skyscrapers, it does not present an overwhelming mass: in midtown, pedestrians are conscious only of its five-story base, which blends into the scale of the area, while from a distance It presents 3 slender silhouette, rising from the center of the metropolis, which Is visible and recognizable from almost every point in the city and some beyond. In this sense, the Empire State Building is in its own class, and its design reflects what it, uniquely, is.
Description
Although the 1250-foot high Empire State Building is often described as 102 stories tall, that is not quite accurate. The major portion of the building is comprised of 80 stories of commercial office space, with five stories above that for the building's executive offices, and the observatory at the 86th floor. The enormous metal "mooring mast" above the building contains only an elevator encircled by a staircase, and no floors per se; its height, however, is considered by the Empire State Building management to be the equivalent of 14 stories; these, added to the 86 offices floors and two basement levels, produce the figure of 102 stories.
The building's tower sits on a five-story base, with facades at the lot line on West 33rd Street, Fifth Avenue, and West 34th Street. The base is a monumental modernistic version of a classical scheme: basement, colonnade, and attic. The basement is formed by the first floor shops and entrances •> the colonnade is approximated by a giant order of molded stone piers piers flanking vertical window strips; and the attic consists of small windows alternating with molded stone panels.
The Fifth Avenue facade centers on the building's main entrance which consists of a central pair of doors flanked on either side by a revolving door; a three-story high, three-bay wide set of windows set in modernisticalIy-designed patterns; and an attic story of a pair of windows, all set off from the rest of the facade by two giant molded-stone piers topped by stylized stone eagles above which are inscribed the words EMPIRE STATE. The rest of the facade is comprised of monumental bays, three on either side.
Each bay consists of a storefront of chrome-metal and glass at the first floor levei, two three-story vertical window strips separated by a narrow stone mull ton and flanked by a wide stone pier with a modernistic top in place of a capital, and two windows at the fifth-floor level separated by a narrow squat molded-stone mull ion and flanked by wide squat stone piers. These three bays are set off from the central*-entrance bay by a half-bay comprising one vertical strip of windows, and end at either corner with a half-bay set between two monumental stone piers.
The identical 33rd and 34th Street facades each comprise three sections of monumental bays, similar to those on the Fifth Avenue facade, separated by two entrance bays. The three sections consist of six, seven, and six bays, slightly emphasising the central section. The two entrance bays on either facade, which project slightly outward, are less elaborate versions of the main Fifth Avenue entrance bay: doors at the first floor level, three vertical window strips, and a three-window attic story, all enframed by a wide stone surround.
The two West 33rd Street entrances, however, are actually recessed; these entrances have sets of side doors perpendicular to the building front, and front revolving doors; a moderne light fixture hangs In the center of the recess; the doors are aluminum, set in marble walls.
Streamlined metal marquee-type canopies with curving corners project over the entrances on West 33rd and West 34th Streets; each is ringed by three sets of continuous horizontal metal bands. The original storefronts are almost entirely glass-fronted. Each has a black-granite base, a cornice of horizontal molded-aluminum bands framing a black-granite panel, and a central recessed entrance, and each is separated from the next by narrow molded aluminum mull ions topped by modernistic finials.
The storefronts form a glass wall which projects three feet beyond the five-story base and forms a banding around it; the continuous black-granite cornices are at the same level as the metal canopies over the 33rd and 34th Street entrances and form a black band course at that level. Several of the storefronts have been unsympathetically altered.
The design scheme above the five-story base is determined simply by massing and fenestration. On both the eastern, Fifth Avenue, facade and the western, rear, facade, the tower is dramatically set back above its base, and rises, with shallow setbacks at the 21st and 25th floors, to the 30th floor; from there It rises unobstructed to a .shallow setback at the 72nd floor, then to the 81st floor setback, somewhat more pronounced, which marks the top of the commercial office portion of the building--wi th corresponding elevator banks—and the beginning of the five-story executive suite; a final setback at the 85th floor marks the observatory. Above the tower rises the metal-faced dirigible mooring mast, topped by an enormous television broadcasting antenna.
The tower on the east and west facades is nine bays wide from the sixth to the 25th floor, seven bays wide to the 72nd floor, six bays wide to the 81st floor, and five bays wide to the mooring mast.
The north (34th Street) and south (33rd Street) facades, wider than the east and west facades, are fifteen bays wide from the sixth to the 21st floor, eleven bays wide to the 30th floor, and nine bays wide to the mooring mast; the nine bays from the 30th floor up are divided into three sections of three bays each: a central section enframed by two projecting side sections; the central section rises unbroken to the 85th floor, while the flanking projecting sections rise to a shallow setback at the 72nd floor and another at the 81st. The various setbacks produce a symmetrical massing that emphasizes the verticality of the building, and creates at the lower levels the effect of a tower rising from a layer of surrounding tapered masses.
A fenestration pattern of long vertical window strips is used to break up the mass of the building and emphasize Its verticality. Each window In the vertical strips protrudes slightly from the Indiana limestone cladding of the tower, and is enframed by a strip of nickel-chrome-steel ; each window is separated from the one above by a dull aluminum spandrel with modernistic molding. Where the vertical window strips rise to a setback, they end in simple modernistic metal caps, and begin again above the setback. The three central window strips on the north and south sides end at the 85th-floor level in much larger and more elaborate modernistic metal plates.
The strips on most of the building are arranged in pairs, each level comprising two adjacent windows separated by a nickel-chrome-steel mull ion and enframed by nickel-chrome-steel surrounds, each window having an accompanying dull aluminum spandrel; several bays however comprise triple window strips, while others comprise single window strips. The alternation between paired, triple, and single strips Is used to create a horizontal rhythm of vertical lines accentuating the center of each facade.
On the east and west facades, all windows are arranged in paired vertical strips, with these exceptions: the outer bay on either side from the sixth to the 25th floor, and the outer four bays on either side from the 21st to the 25th floor, consist of single vertical window strips; the outer bay on either side from the 72nd to the 81st floor likewise consists
Sf a single vertical window strip, and also the outer two bays from the 81st to the 84th floods. The arrangement on the wider north and south fronts Is more complicated. The outer two bays, on either side, which rise from the sixth to the 21st floor, are paired vertical window strips.
The next five bays on either side, rising from the sixth floor to a shallow setback at the 25th, and projecting out past the central section, are symmetrically arranged with a centra! paired-window strip bay in the center flanked on either side by two single window strips; these bays above the 25th floor setback to the 30th floor are rearranged as two paired vertical strips and a triple strip. The central five bays, from the sixth to the 30th floors, are paired vertical window strips. Above the 30th floor, where these facades are divided into two projecting sections flanking a central section, the latter comprises three paired window strips, while the former are symmetrically arranged as a triple-window strip flanked on either side by a paired window strip.
Rising above the 86-story office building is the aluminum, chrome-nickel-steel and glass mast, originally designed to be used for mooring dirigibles but now serving only as a support for the upper observatory tower, and housing for display lights, Four progressively smaller rectangular levels form a base from which springs a cylindrical shaft rising to a conical top. The sides of the levels forming the base are ringed by continuous horizontal metal banding. At each of the four corners of the cylindrical shaft, rising to half its height, Is a set of three overlapping metal wings from which the shaft appears to grow; the four sides of the shaft are formed by continuous glass walls.
The top is Jr. three sections: a cylindrical enclosed observation level, still used, of the same circumference as the shaft; a second, smaller cylindrical level surrounded by an open-air observation area, no longer in use, originally Intended as a landing platform for dirigible passengers; and a top section In the shape of a truncated cone--pierced by eight circular openings--which houses the mooring mechanism and beacon lights, and which is topped by a metal mooring pole; each of these three sections is ringed by continuous tubular metal bands. The mooring mast Is now the base for a 200-foot high television antenna, added In 1953, which completes the silhouette of the building as It has been known since that year.
Empire State Building: Symbol of New York
Following the uncertain first years of the Depression, during -which the half-tenanted building was nicknamed "Smith's Folly*" or the "Empty State Building," the Empire State became a successful commercial office building. The continuing northward trend of Midtown took the prime corporate tenants whom Raskob had hoped to attract away to office buildings north of 42nd Street; the tenancy of the building therefore has since bean largely drawn from the surrounding garment district. Among others housed In the building are the notions, shoe, shirt and hosiery industries, as well as many international corporations and banks.
The Empire State Building, however went beyond the aspirations of
Raskob for a prestigious and profitable commercial office building. The success of the observatory in drawing crowds of tourists, arid the guided tours by Governor Smith for all visiting celebrities, started a process which helped make the building famous the world over. March 1940 saw the building's four-millionth visitor (actor Jimmy Stewart), and May 1971 its forty millionth. "
The Empire State Building's place as symbol of New York derives perhaps equally from its function as a place to visit, from where the most spectacular view of Mew York can be had, and its function as a centrally located landmark, whose slender, pointed silhouette can be seen literally from miles around, marking out midtown Manhattan, the center of the metropolis. The famous silhouette has been reproduced in countless images, and small statues of the. building have been spotted in Far-Eastern bazaars 55 as well as In Times Square tourist shops. The building has figured In television and movies--most famous of these being King Kong—as a symbol of the summit of New York, the greatest creation of a great city.
In the 1970s, when the building lost Its title as world's tallest, the office of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon announced a plan to remove the mooring mast above the 86th floor observatory and replace it with twenty stories of office space, to reestablish the building's position as world's greatest skyscraper. The plan—apparently more a public relations ploy than a serious proposal —was quickly forgotten, and indeed would have been counter-productive, as It would have destroyed the silhouette by which the building is known.
Despite the loss of Its "world's tallest." title, In fact, the Empire State Building has lost none of Its original distinction or renown. Its design, its history, and perhaps also its position In the center of the city, have all helped it retain Its symbolic significance.
On the occasion of its 50th anniversary—May 1, 1981--a special proclamation was Issued by the Mayor of New York, declaring the week of May 1-8, 1981, to be "Empire State Building Week."
The Empire State Building remains New York's preeminent landmark.
- From the 1981 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report
Chilina, Alto Selva Alegre, Arequipa, Peru. Helios-103 (double-Gauss/Planar-type) • LAINA Zeiss-RF→Leica M + K&F Leica M→Sony E
(Be sure to press "L" on your keyboard)
Browsing through some photos from about two years ago I came upon a few I quite liked.
"Bridge 2"
STRUCTURES is a series of generative art pieces the explores the constructions of our world by taking photographs of man-made and natural structures and placing them into a new structure. This process semi-randomly fragments and rearranges the photographs into a grid of my design. I'll often run the images through this process several times, using various grid structures along the way.
Programs used: Lightroom, Photoshop, Processing
Projektidén väcktes redan förra sommaren då de första bilderna togs. Detta är dock den första tidigt i våras efter projektplanen skrevs fram.
Jag saxar från projektplanen:
SAMMANFATTNING
Att genom fotografering (både med stillbild och video) undersöka människokroppens möte eller relation till naturen. Jag vill använda mig själv som verktyg och den estetiska (och kinestetiska) processen som metod. En iterativ process där både fotograferings- och bildbehandlingsflöde prövas och omprövas mellan årstider, miljöer och element.
SYFTE
Jag intresserar mig för idén om att undersöka något genom ett konstnärligt tillvägagångssätt. Jag har frågor snarare än en given berättelse. Vad sker i mötet mellan människokroppen och naturen? Hur speglas och återspeglas "naturliga strukturer" i olika typer av miljöer, element och årstider? Hur sårbar eller utsatt är människokroppen i relation till naturen? Fascineras av idén om det formsliga eller kompositionella mötet mellan människokroppen och landskapets/miljöns naturliga och befintliga former.
The "Christopher Johnson Cottage" in Lynchburg isn't just old, but is one of the few still-standing structures in our area dating to the Colonial era. Per a Historic American Buildings Survey on file at the Library of Congress, Christopher Johnson, born in Louisa County on November 22, 1731, moved to this area in 1764, acquiring over 1000 acres through purchases and grants. The HABS further states, "While not authenticated by record, family tradition holds that the cottage was built by Christopher Johnson in the years 1764-1765." Per online genealogy info, Johnson would fight in the Revolutionary War, and he died circa February 1807. This land then passed through inheritance to his youngest son Samuel, and was sold in the 1800's to Odin G. Clay, one of the founders and first president of the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad. The land later passed from the Clay family to the Graves family, where it remained until sold circa 2015 to its present owner, which operates the Bella Rose wedding and event venue here. I shot this photo of the Johnson Cottage in 2013, and while it still stands, it has been significantly modernized.
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