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So, my C41 chemicals were exhausted, haha.
Mamiya C330
Seiko 80mm f/2.8
Kodak Ektar 100
Jobo C41 Press Kit
I tend to avoid photography on blue-sky days, so to shake myself out of that I went looking for strongly backlit subjects on just such a day. A tree leaning over the Eno River.
Pentax K-1
Mirex tilt/shift adapter
Pentax-A 645 150/3.5
Iridient Developer
Developers at the facebook f8 hackathon. Bart and I were going to write an app, but we were a bit tired and decided to hang out with the Red Bull peeps.
•TEPIC
992 hectares (2450 acres) on new hwy with distant ocean views. Ready for development. 4-5 km to beach. Only 65,000 pesos (appros $7150 U.S.)per hectare.(2.47 acres in a hectare)
Help - is this developer re-usable?
The instructions say you make a litre of stock.
This stock is then diluted in 3 parts water to develop film.
But the part i don't understand is the instructions say the litre of stock can develop no more than 3 films.
Does this mean I can re-use the stock three times?
I'm really lost on this one.
It's been just over 9 months since the last One-A-Day Project came to an end, and I've been waiting for an excuse all of 2012 to get started on a new one!
Well, I received a package in the mail last month, containing 200 sheets of Kodak Green Latitude X-Ray film, and what better way to get to know this film than to shoot at least one sheet of it per day? :)
As with all good film shooters, I loaded up three holders worth of this super-cheap wonder film, and set out nearby my house in search of a test subject. The afternoon light was consistent, the contrast of the scene high (I like it like that!), and the subject matter was static. I rated this film from ASA 25, 50, 100, 200, 320, and finally to 400. The results you see above are, surprisingly, from ASA 400, with a #12 yellow filter. This is going to be a good One-A-Day, I can already feel it.
Eastman Commercial B 8x10
Goerz 14" Red Dot Artar f/9 + Yellow Filter
1/60th @ f/11 + front shift
Kodak Green Latitude X-Ray Film
Obsidian Aqua 1:500
Semi-Stand in stainless steel hangers and tanks
Hasselblad Planar 80mm, Plus-X rated at 400 ASA, developed in eco film developer 2+1+40 (N+ 1,5) 22°C 17 mins (normal speed = 250 ASA 10 mins)
printed on Adox MCC in Fatman with Finisher Blue
I will probably not like it in the morning.
Its the morning and I don't mind it but it looked better when all the lights were off..
A trip to Jem at Real Camera Manchester resulted in a pack of Leicanol powder developer.
Must be dated between 1975 (HP5 introduced) and 1989 (HP5+ replaced HP5) as the times are for HP5. Made byTetenal. Not a lot on the WWW about this developer.
Sugar Hill, West Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States
486-92 Convent Avenue (aka 438-444 West 152nd Street)
Borough of Manhattan Tax Map Block 2066, Lot 46
Name: Fontenoy
Date of Construction: 1905-06 (NB 1297-05)
Architect: John Hauser
Original Owner/Developer: McKinley Realty and Construction Co.
Type: Apartment house Style: Beaux Arts Stories: 5 and basement
Materials: Roman brick with limestone base and terra-cotta trim History
This apartment building is part of a trio that includes the Iroquois and the Osceola at 480 and 482 Convent Avenue. The building was originally planned with 21 apartments. The McKinley Realty and Construction Co. purchased the property in 1905 and held onto the completed buildings until 1916.
Description
Stucco basement with altered fenestration; rusticated limestone first story; pale yellow Roman brick with white, glazed terra cotta above; historic areaway pipe railing; building anchored by three window wide rounded comer bay. Convent Avenue facade: ten bays wide with subsidiary bay of small rectangular windows just to the right of the seventh bay; entrance pavilion near center with short stoop with stone wing walls leading to historic glass and iron-grille doors in bay six; Fontenoy carved into panel above door; entrance flanked by pairs of heavy brackets with cartouches supporting a balcony; all window openings rectangular with non-historic sash; bays two, six, and nine on second through fourth stories are set within keyed vertical enframement capped by pediment and ornamented with garland panels; other windows on second through fourth stories with splayed lintels; at either end of facade are terra-cotta ornamental panels - an eared rectangular panel with a cartouche between the second and third stories, and an oval panel with fruit and flowers between the third and fourth stories; quoins at ends of the facade; windows of tower ornamented with full enframements, keystones and garland panels; non- historic store entrance and canopy in basement level of tower. 152nd Street facade: nine bays wide, 152nd Street facade similar to Convent Avenue facade; smaller windows in bay four; bays two and eight with vertical frames; historic wrought-iron fire escape; pressed-metal bracketed comice with garland frieze.
The Early History of the Area
The development of the property in and around the Hamilton Heights/Sugar Hill Northwest Historic District was influenced both by the natural geography of the area and by the pattern of land subdivision extending back to the seventeenth century. The district is located on high ground just west of the steep escarpment that separates the '‘Heights” from the Harlem Plain to the east. These cliffs run north from about 110th Street almost to the northern tip of Manhattan Island with only a few natural breaks. They are of solid Manhattan schist, in contrast to the easily eroded Inwood limestone on the lowlands.
During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, estates were laid out to the north and south of the Hamilton Heights/Sugar Hill Northwest Historic District; the land within the district never became part of such an assemblage. Rather, it was farmland that, after passing through several hands, was opened for development. In 1624, the first European settlers arrived in the Dutch colony of the New Netherlands. In order to encourage settlement in the New Netherlands, the West India Company, which had the exclusive right to property, provided immigrants with large land grants. In June 1639, Captain Jochiem Pietersen Kuyter arrived in New Amsterdam, the major settlement in the New Netherlands, from Holstein, Denmark. Kuyter was given a large land grant in northern Manhattan, along the Harlem River, extending west as far as what is now St. Nicholas Avenue. Reginald Pelham Bolton notes in his history of the Washington Heights neighborhood that “a title to the contiguous wooded upland seems to have been claimed by the settler, so that the hill became known in all the early records of the township of New Harlem, as Jochem [sic] Pieter’s Hills.” Thus, Kuyter was the first European to claim ownership of the property within the Hamilton Heights/Sugar Hill Northwest Historic District.
Kuyter was killed during an Indian attack in 1654 and when Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant established the village of New Harlem in 1658, land was to be sold for the benefit of Kuyter’s heirs and creditors. The lowlands near the Harlem River were divided into village and farm plots, but the heights (Jochem Pieter’s Hills) was not part of this early land division, and instead was regarded as common land.
In 1691, the residents of Harlem decided to subdivide the common lands of Jochiem Pieter’s Hills into parcels of approximately equal size, with village residents drawing lots in order to acquire the property. The land included most of the property between what is now St. Nicholas Avenue and the Hudson River from about 133rd to 162nd Streets, as well as some property to the east of St. Nicholas Avenue. Most of the historic district, west of St. Nicholas Avenue, was included in allotment No. 14, which was acquired by Jan Dyckman.
Jan Dyckman was an immigrant from Westphalia (now part of Germany) who first became a land holder in Harlem in 1666. By the time that Jan Dyckman died in 1715 ownership of his property had been conveyed to his son Gerrit. It is probably Gerrit who erected a farmhouse that stood on St. Nicholas Avenue between 151st and 152nd Streets, at least until the late nineteenth century. Gerrit died in 1729 and the property was held by his widow until it was passed on to Gerrit’s son, Jan Dykman (he dropped the “c”). Dykman sold the entire property on November 13, 1767 to John Watkins.
The eastern portion of the historic district was subdivided as a result of an act passed by the governor, council, and general assembly of New York in 1708 to partition the remaining common lands of Harlem. The blockfronts of the historic district along the east side of St. Nicholas Avenue and the west side of St. Nicholas Place were part of allotment No. 19 of the fourth division, subdivided in 1711-12. This plot was acquired by Captain Charles Congreve, an English gentleman who came to New York to serve Governor Combury. Congreve sold the property in December 1713 to Jonathan Waldron. The property passed to his son Samuel and then to the Dykman family and was sold, along with the Dykman property to the west, to John Watkins. In 1776, during the Revolutionary War, American forces constructed their second line of defense, including a series of earthworks, on 153rd Street, across Watkins’s property.
Jonathan Watkins extended the size of his holdings by purchasing lots 15 and 16 to the north, eventually incorporating 142!/2 acres. In order to purchase his property, Watkins borrowed money from General John Maunsell whose wife was a relative. The Maunsell’s owned the property to the
south. In 1793, the Maunsell’s foreclosed on Watkins, but continued to allow his family to live on the property. Mrs. Maunsell died in 1815 and bequeathed her farm to John Watkins’s three children. Dr. Samuel Watkins acquired the property to the north, which includes the southwest comer of St. Nicholas Avenue and West 155th Street, in the historic district. The bulk of the historic district is located on land acquired by one of John Watkins’ two daughters, Elizabeth Duncan, widow of Robert Duncan or Lydia Beekman, the wife of James Beekman.
The development of the farmland in the historic district contrasts with the appearance, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, of estates owned by wealthy New Yorkers to the north and south. These estates were erected on the high ground in northern Manhattan, taking advantage of the area’s picturesque views over the Hudson and Harlem Rivers and its cooling breezes. To the south of the historic district was Pinehurst, the 110-acre estate of Samuel Bradhurst, with its elegant Federal style mansion (demolished), while south of that was the Grange, the 1801-02 home of Alexander Hamilton (a designated New York City Landmark). To the north of the district was Mount Morris, the eighteenth-century villa of British military officer Roger Morris (1765; a designated New York City Landmark), which was used by General George Washington as his headquarters in September and early October 1776.
The farmers and estate owners on the Heights reached New York City via the King’s Way, renamed King’s Bridge Road (or Kingsbridge Road) after the opening of the King’s Bridge over the Harlem River in the 1690s. This road, dating back to the seventeenth century, connected New Amsterdam/New York with outlying regions to the north. The Commissioner’s Plan of 1811, which laid out the grid of rectangular blocks over Manhattan Island, from 1st Street to 155th Street, called for the elimination of the Kingsbridge Road. However, since it would be many decades before the grid of streets was actually laid out in northern Manhattan and this road was heavily used, it remained. In 1867, the Commissioners of Central Park, who, in the previous year, had been given jurisdiction by the New York State Legislature over altering the street grid and laying out streets in northern Manhattan, prepared a map of new streets that included St. Nicholas Avenue.
The commissioners referred to it as the “Avenue St. Nicholas.” Convent Avenue was also an addition to the 1811 grid plan. As planned in 1866, Convent Avenue terminated at 145* Street, but by 1892 it had been pushed farther north, angling slightly northeast at 150th Street and terminating when it joins St. Nicholas Avenue at West 152nd Street. The other streets in the historic district are those at the northernmost edge of the 1811 grid plan, including St. Nicholas Place which is actually a portion of Ninth Avenue (Columbus Avenue).
The earliest urban intrusion into the rural character of the district was the construction of the Croton Aqueduct in the 1830s, which brought fresh water from northern Westchester County to New York City. The route of the aqueduct cuts across the district. The aqueduct entered Manhattan over High Bridge, at 174th Street. The aqueduct then ran south through what is now Highbridge Park until about 158th Street. At 158th Street, the aqueduct crossed beneath what is now Edgecombe Avenue, then continued south, cutting through several blocks and turning southwest beneath St. Nicholas Avenue at about 154th Street. The aqueduct route then traverses the southeast comer of the block between St. Nicholas and Amsterdam Avenues and 154th and 153rd Streets in the historic district and diagonally across the block directly to the south before reaching Amsterdam Avenue and continuing south towards the receiving reservoir in Central Park. The aqueduct’s route through the historic district is evident since this undeveloped property has determined the eccentric shape of buildings on adjacent properties.
In the 1850s, property within the historic district left the hands of the early landholding families when the Beekman and Duncan holdings, extending as far west as the Hudson River, were sold to Richard F. Carman. The area soon became known as Carmansvilie. Carman built a few houses on the property, close to the river and to the Hudson River Railroad’s Carmansville station at 152nd Street. Carman died in 1867 and inl880 his holdings were divided into 257 lots that were sold for $181,609. Buyers, however, refused to take title to the property because of legal difficulties and a second sale, registering only $67,809, took place in 1881. The property was soon subdivided into smaller land holdings, leading eventually to the development of a residential neighborhood. Speculative Development in the Historic District
Development in Washington Heights and other northern Manhattan neighborhoods, including the Upper West Side, Upper East Side, and Harlem, was inhibited by a lack of mass transit facilities permitting people to live in these areas and easily commute to jobs, shops, and places of entertainment that were located several miles to the south. In 1878 and 1879, elevated rail lines were extended north along Second and Third Avenues on the east side and along Ninth Avenue (Columbus Avenue), as far north as 110th Street, continuing north on Eighth Avenue to 155th Street, on the west side. This resulted in the earliest speculative development in the district, the construction of a row of six houses at 450-460 West 153rd Street in 1881. With only a few exceptions, all of the row houses and apartment buildings in the historic district were erected as speculative ventures.
The section of Washington Heights, south of 155th Street, seemed to be a natural location for first-class development. The area was, as the Real Estate Record noted, “a very salubrious one.” The magazine reported on the area’s high ground, fine views, and “pure and bracing atmosphere.” Nevertheless, development south of 155th Street proceeded slowly. Although the elevated station at 155th Street was close to the property in the historic district, it was virtually inaccessible because of its location below the cliff east of St. Nicholas Place.
In order to reach the station from Washington Heights, a potential commuter would have had to ascend and descend between eighty and ninety stairs each day. The Real Estate Record commented that residents were “compelled to do this or walk down to the 145th street station at 8th avenue, or take the cable car to 125th street.” The difficulty in actually reaching the 155th Street station from the Heights inhibited speculative development; “this has been the reason why Washington Heights has not been improved more than it has,” charged the Real Estate Record in 1890. The 1881 row of six houses was followed, in 1882, by a single mansion (demolished); in 1883, one row of eleven houses (one has been demolished) were erected; in 1884, a single row house and a row of four (demolished); in 1886, three row houses and a related apartment building; in 1887, a single mansion; and in 1889, a single row house. By the end of the decade the streets of the historic district were lined with scattered rows, a single apartment building (468 West 153rd Street), and a few freestanding houses, most predating the period of speculative development.
While development on Washington Heights was slow during the 1880s, land values rose rapidly since it was obvious that development pressures would eventually lead to large-scale development. In its survey of conditions on Washington Heights in 1890, the Real Estate Record reported that:
Within the last five or ten years many changes have taken place in the value of vacant lots on Washington Heights. Less than a decade ago lots could be purchased for a few hundred dollars in a greater portion of that section of the city; at this moment it would be difficult to find any lots that could be purchased at that figure. Indeed, thousands of dollars are now the asking price, where it was formerly hundredsf
This article also noted that “there is probably no finer residence section on the Heights than St. Nicholas avenue and St. Nicholas place, between 145th and 155th streets,” an area that, within the historic district, already contained two rows.
Access to the neighborhood improved with the construction of a short-lived cable-car railway on Tenth (now Amsterdam) Avenue in the late 1880s. The Real Estate Record maintained that by riding on the cable car “it is possible to travel more quickly ... from 155th street and 10th avenue to City Hall than to get from the City Hall to 125th Street and 3rd avenue [on the elevated railroad].”
In the 1880s, the recently established Washington Heights Taxpayers’ Association and other civic-minded groups began a campaign to solve the transit problem in lower Washington Heights by advocating the construction of a viaduct that would link the Heights to the elevated station at 155th Street. In 1886, the Commissioner of Public Works announced plans to construct a steel viaduct across 155th Street, linking 155th Street at St. Nicholas Place with the elevated station and with the Central Bridge (now Macomb’s Dam Bridge; the bridge and viaduct ensemble are a designated New York City Landmark). This ambitious scheme, begun in 1890 and completed in 1895, also improved vehicular circulation in northern Manhattan, linking the Bronx to northern Harlem and Washington Heights.
As construction proceeded on the viaduct, the number of buildings under construction in the historic district slowly increased, leading to the development of the middle-class neighborhood that survives today. In 1890, a row of three houses and a single row house were erected; in 1892, a row of five and another single row house; in 1893, a row of five; and ini894, a row of two and another of eight. After the completion of the viaduct, many new row houses were constructed and these were joined by the beginning of large-scale apartment house development. In fact, as early as 1895, in an article focusing on the row at 43-57 St. Nicholas Place, the Real Estate Record noted that “the transformation of what was once the old-fashioned village of Carmansville into one of the residence portions of New York City has gone on so rapidly that but very few of the rural characteristics remain about it... .These [improvements] have been either the builder of first-class residences who sold his houses to professional and business men for their own occupation, or wealthy merchants and manufacturers who purchased plots and built for their own use.”
Almost all of the construction prior to the opening of the viaduct was row houses. However, the viaduct increased the convenience of the neighborhood, undoubtedly also increasing land values. This resulted in the beginning of large-scale apartment house construction in and just outside of the historic district. In fact, ini895, three apartment buildings were erected in the district. These were followed, in 1897, by eight apartment buildings and a single row house. Construction in the district peaked in 1898, with the construction of fifteen row houses in four separate rows, as well as three apartment buildings. Nineteen additional apartment buildings and one store were constructed in the district between 1901 and 1924.
Between 1881 and 1898, sixty-five row houses were erected in the historic district, fifty-nine of which are extant. These row houses exemplify the speculative development that created New York’s middle- and upper-middle-class row house neighborhoods in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Almost ail of these houses were planned by speculative developers who purchased the land, hired an architect, and erected fashionable houses that could be rapidly and profitably sold to affluent households.
Since speculative building was, as its name suggests, a risky business, it was important that the new homes be provided with the design and infrastructure amenities that affluent buyers demanded. Thus, most of the row houses in the Hamilton Heights/Sugar Hill Northwest Historic District are on lots of a relatively generous size. They are faced with high-quality face brick, or with brownstone or limestone, and are ornamented with stone or terra cotta. Inside, the houses were provided with up-to-date features such as ornate woodwork, often featuring different woods in each room, patterned parquet floors, handsome fireplace mantles, and modem plumbing, lighting, and heating. The Real Estate Record described the row at 43-57 St. Nicholas Place in 1895:
These houses are built on the excellent American basement plan, with dimensions of from 17 to 22 feet by 50 to 55 feet, on lots 65 to 75 feet.
They are designed, while affording the necessary comforts and conveniences, to meet different views and wishes as to the sizes of houses desired. The fronts are a very elegant design in light pressed brick and limestone, and the interiors are variously arranged and fitted. The general plan embraces servants’ and family entrances, reception rooms, kitchens and laundries on the ground floor; parlor, foyer, dining-room and butler's pantry on the first floor, and bedrooms, dressing-rooms, bath-rooms, and servants-quarters, closets, etc., on the two floors above. The arrangement of rooms is perfect and satisfactory. The trim and fittings are varied in detail, thoroughly modem andfirst-class in every respect. These houses are carefully and substantially built, and impress the visitor, not only with the conscientiousness bestowed on them in this matter, but also in the care exercised to produce a house perfect in artistic as well as practical details.
Row houses in the district were designed in a succession of popular revival styles. The earliest row in the historic district, 450-460 West 153rd Street, was designed in the Neo-Grec style, which, at the time the row was constructed, in 1881, was just beginning to lose popularity. These six houses, two with brownstone facades and four with brick facades, are ornamented with the angular forms and incised detail that characterizes the style. Some of the finest houses erected in the historic district in the 1880s were designed in the newly-fashionable Queen Anne style. The three row houses at 462-466 West 153rd Street and the adjoining apartment building at 468 West 153rd Street, all designed in 1886, exemplify the finest characteristics of Queen Anne design. This quirky row is asymmetrically massed, with richly textured facades of deep red brick, rock-faced and smooth brownstone, highlighted with terra-cotta ornament; stained-glass windows; complex, multi-paneled wood doors; and pressed-metal cornices.
By the 1890s, the Queen Anne style had been supplanted in popularity by row houses with Neo-Renaissance or Beaux-Arts style facades. The Neo-Renaissance row houses, such as 846-854 St. Nicholas Avenue, are faced either in brownstone or limestone, arranged in symmetrical rows, and ornamented with Renaissance-inspired carved detail. This carving is often extremely elaborate, featuring foliage, animals, human heads, and monsters. The detail on most of these houses is loosely based on Italian Renaissance precedents, although one row, Clarence True’s eight houses at 43-57 St. Nicholas Place, adapt Northern Renaissance features to the requirements of late nineteenth-century New York row houses. Most of the more sculptural Beaux-Arts row houses, such as 869- 875 St. Nicholas Avenue and 402-414 West 154th Street, are faced in limestone, and feature elaborate carved detail including three-dimensional cartouches, shields, and shells.
The row houses in the historic district were erected just before rising land values and increasing costs made row house development prohibitively expensive. Thus, they are representative of the last generation of single-family row houses erected in Manhattan. Many of the row houses in the district represent the traditional New York form, with a high stoop and raised basement. These houses have their main entrance on the parlor floor and a service entrance tucked beneath the stoop. The windows of the basement, set at or just below the level of the sidewalk, are always protected by iron window guards. The facade at the entrance and parlor level is generally more ornate than the upper levels and is often articulated by windows that are taller or more highly decorated than those above.
Development in the historic district occurred during a period when architects and developers were beginning to experiment with the design of row houses without high stoops. Thus, several rows in the district, notably those designed by Clarence True at 43-57 St. Nicholas Place and 842- 844 St. Nicholas Avenue, are examples of the American basement plan; True was an active proponent of this type of plan. On these houses, the main entrance is in the center of the facade, at or just above the sidewalk. This entrance leads to an interior stair hall with the stair leading up to the parlor floor. To the side of the main entrance is a narrow service entrance that opens into a passage leading to the kitchen and service areas of the house, located to the rear.
Many of the architects who worked in the historic district in the late nineteenth century specialized in speculative row house design. Little is known about architects such as Julius Boekell, John C. Bume, Henri Fouchaux, W. H. C. Homum, Neville & Bagge, and James Stroud, but they probably had little formal training; rather, they probably trained in the offices of established practitioners, before setting up their own offices. Yet, these architects were proficient in providing well-planned dwellings at the reasonable costs expected by developers. Some of these architects, including Neville & Bagge, Fouchaux, and Hauser, had offices in northern Manhattan, convenient to the developing residential neighborhoods. A few were better known and better trained, notably the Ecole des Beaux-Arts trained C. P. H. Gilbert, who designed a row of three houses in 1890 on West 152nd Street, a decade before he became a favored architect of New York’s social and financial elite, and Clarence True, who, as an architect and a developer, was responsible for some of the finest row houses on the Upper West Side. The architects who designed the row houses in this historic district not only worked in the Sugar Hill area, but also were responsible for many rows in Harlem, on the Upper West Side, and in other late nineteenth century row house neighborhoods.
There are thirty-three apartment buildings in the historic district. The first apartment building appeared surprisingly early in the area’s history. It was erected in 1886, at 468 West 153rd Street, as a companion to three adjoining row houses, and was planned with a single apartment on each floor. It was not until 1895, with the opening of the 155th Street Viaduct and its connection to the elevated station, that other apartment buildings were erected. The early apartment buildings, including three erected in 1895 and eight in 1897, were all five-story walkup structures. These early buildings are examples of French flats, a type of middle-class apartment house erected in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Unlike tenements, with their inadequate plumbing and lighting, tiny toilets that were often located off of the public hall, and their plans with rooms adjoining one another without private interior halls, the modestly-scaled apartments of French flats had up-to-date plumbing, private toilets, and private halls.
An indicator of the economic class of the early occupants of these buildings is the fact that most of the residents of French flats, such as those at 828, 830, and 832 St. Nicholas Avenue, employed a single live-in servant. The French flats erected in the late 1890s have ornate Renaissance-inspired facades of brick with limestone bases and terracotta trim. Apartment house construction in the historic district continued into the first decades of the twentieth century, with most developers choosing to erect five-story walk-up buildings. In fact, of the thirty-three apartment houses in the district, over two thirds are walkups. The first elevator apartment buildings were 849, 853, and 855 St. Nicholas Avenue, erected in 1898. Half of the apartment buildings in the district, including all of the largest buildings, were erected after the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) Company’s subway line opened beneath Broadway, a block west of the historic district, in 1904. The opening of this subway provided a more rapid connection between Washington Heights/Sugar Hill and Downtown business areas than the elevated line.
Stylistically, the twentieth-century apartment buildings are an eclectic group, with boldly- ornamented Beaux-Arts style buildings, including 849-853 and 889 St. Nicholas Avenue and 480, 482, and 486 Convent Avenue; Colonial Revival style structures with red brick facades and eighteenth-century detail, such as 820-824 St. Nicholas Avenue, 464 West 152nd Street, and 465 West 152nd Street; and Neo-Gothic style structures, with their pointed-arch detail, such as the apartment house at 429 West 154th Street.
The architects commissioned to design the apartment houses in the historic district were, like the row house architects, generally men who specialized in this type of speculative design. In fact, two of the apartment house architects, Janes & Leo and Neville & Bagge, were also prominent row house designers (Neville & Bagge designed rows on West 153 and 154 Streets, in this district). Work by architects such as Henry Andersen, Moore & Landsiedel, Gross & Kleinberger, Janes & Leo, and John Hauser can be found in other Manhattan neighborhoods.
The three architects responsible for the largest number of early twentieth-century apartment houses in Manhattan, George Pelham and the firms of Neville & Bagge and Schwartz & Gross, are all represented in the district. The final apartment house erected in the district, the 1922 building at 881 St. Nicholas Avenue, is a modest design by Rosario Candela, one of the most prominent apartment house designers in the city. As with the architects who specialized in row house construction, the apartment house specialists also lacked the most sophisticated training, but they were of extraordinary importance in the creation of the visual character of the city’s residential neighborhoods.
The developers of many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century apartment houses chose to give their buildings names at the time of their construction. These included romantic-sounding Indian names (Iroquois and Osceola); elegant-sounding English names (Pembroke, Roxbury, and Kinghaven); and geographically appropriate names (Grand View). The names, sometimes carved onto the facades, but often forgotten today, were chosen as marketing tools that would attract potential renters to the building. Many of these builders did not retain ownership of the buildings for long. Instead they sold the buildings, almost as soon as they were completed, to what the real estate community referred to as “investors.” These investors sought to profit over the long term by collecting rents.
The final building erected in the historic district is the district’s only institutional structure, the William McKinley Masonic Lodge, now the Prince Hall Masonic Lodge, erected in 1924-25. This austere Classical Revival style structure is a reflection of the fact that as residential neighborhoods developed, the institutions that served area residents generally followed.
Residents of the Historic District
Since the initial development of the historic district, the row houses and apartment buildings have seen a succession of residents of varying backgrounds. As was typical of the city’s late nineteenth-century row house neighborhoods, the row houses in the Hamilton Heights/Sugar Hill Northwest Historic District generally were home to upper middle-class business and professional families — stock brokers, builders, manufacturers, doctors, lawyers, editors, insurance dealers, etc. Most of these residents owned their homes, although a few were rented. Residents who were American bom were in the majority. Among the foreign-bom heads of household were successful emigrants from Germany, Austria, Ireland, and Scotland. All of the homeowners and renters were white. Households ranged in size, with many quite large, including children, parents, and other relatives, and at least one and up to three servants in almost each home. The servants, almost all young women, were generally emigrants, including those from Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Switzerland, and Sweden.
The only African-American residents of the district in 1900 were a few women who were live-in servants. Most of these women had moved to New York from Virginia, Maryland, and other states in the upper south; a few were emigrants from the West Indies. Typical households are those of Louis Rosenfeld, a New York-born leather merchant of German parentage, who lived at 887 St. Nicholas Avenue with his wife (also bom in New York to Germ an-emigrant parents), four sons (two in the export business and two students), and two Irish-emigrant servants, age 20 and 23; Charles Brahe (or Brake), the manager of a clock company, who was bom in New York to German parents and lived at 464 West 153rd Street with his wife, two sons, daughter, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and a thirty-five year old African-American servant who was bom in Pennsylvania to parents from Maryland; and New York bom developer Charles Judson, who lived at 842 St. Nicholas Avenue, one of a pair of houses that he had built in 1894-95, with his wife, two young daughters, and two servants from Ireland. Only a few of the row house residents rented rooms to boarders. The residents of the early apartment houses in the district were from similar, if less wealthy backgrounds and many of them also had a single live-in servant.
By the 1920s, lower Washington Heights had become a less well-to-do neighborhood, as many of the affluent early residents followed the migration of the upper middle-class to the suburbs. The 1925 New York State census records show that many of the row houses remained single family residences, however, more residents, in both the row houses and apartment buildings, rented rooms to lodgers and that a number of the row houses had been subdivided into apartments. For example, 450 West 153rd Street had become a two-family house, while at 462 West 153rd Street, head-of- household Susannah Rennison (an English emigrant), shared the row house with her two daughters, son-in-law, grandson, and six lodgers. In 1925, adult residents were more likely to be immigrants than in 1900 and there were fewer households with servants.
Almost all of those residing in the historic district in 1925 were white. However, the demographics of the neighborhood were changing. In 1925 the census records the first building in the district with African-American residents. This was the apartment building at 853 St. Nicholas Avenue between West 152nd and West 153rd Streets. The census records fourteen households - twelve black and two white. Since an integrated apartment building was extremely rare in New York City in the early decades of the twentieth century, it is probable that this was a building in transition. Thus, as the black population of Harlem and Sugar Hill increased, the racial composition of tenants in a building could completely change over the course of a year.
The census also records the diversity of the city’s African-American population in 1925. While four of the black households at 853 were headed by a man or woman bom in the United States, seven were headed by emigrants from the British West Indies, and one by an emigrant from Panama. This provides a strong indication of the increasing prominence of West Indians in New York City in the years after World War I. The apartments in this building were not especially large, yet households often consisted of many people - including extended family and lodgers (there were twenty lodgers divided among seven of the apartments).
Several apartments housed only three or four people, but there were many with from five to eight residents, and one with eleven people and another with twelve. Among the male heads of household were those employed as an accountant, a fireman, a real estate dealer, and a minister; however, most of the residents were employed in more menial jobs, reflecting the discriminatory nature of the job market in New York. Male residents were employed as painter, porter, elevator operator, bell boy, garage worker, chauffeur, shipping clerk, street cleaner, and counterman, while women who worked outside of the home were employed as servant, stock girl, dressmaker, and machine operator.
The arrival of the first African-American residents to a building within the historic district is a reflection of a larger change that was occurring in the population of lower Washington Heights, as it became a primarily black neighborhood known as West Harlem or, more popularly, as Sugar Hill. According to the Encyclopedia of New York City, the name “Sugar Hill” was in use by 1919, a time when few African-Americans actually lived in the area. For those inhabiting crowded tenements and high-priced rooming houses on the Harlem plain, the elevated residential area to the northwest took on a mythic character and, by the 1940s, the area was synonymous with the life of city’s and the nation’s black elite.
Ebony magazine reported “Sugar Hill, the green bluff... is so high that all Harlem looks up it, would rather live in its canopied apartments than any place in America. Sugar Hill was perceived as a place where life was sweet, where its residents enjoyed prosperous and comfortable lives. The phrase became part of American culture and in 1931 a musical comedy of the same name opened on Broadway. It represented Sugar Hill “to be the cream - or at least the cafe au lait - of the Harlem residential district.” In later years, “Duke” Ellington and Billy Strayhom, both Sugar Hill residents, celebrated the neighborhood, in “Take the A Train,” (1940) where lyrics urge listeners to “... take the A train ... to go to Sugar Hill,” and in “Sugar Hill Penthouse,” the closing section of “Black, Brown and Beige.” This last piece, which Ellington debuted at Carnegie Hall in January 1944, told the history of the “American Negro” from slavery to modem times.
As early as 1922, African-Americans were living on Edgecombe Avenue, to the southeast of the Hamilton Heights/Sugar Hill Northwest Historic District. The New York Amsterdam News, a weekly newspaper popular with black readers, featured advertisements for Sugar Hill buildings in which the neighborhood was promoted as “the Finest and Most Exclusive Section in Harlem.” Everything, however, was not sweet on Sugar Hill. As Claude McKay noted in 1940, “Sugar Hill has the reputation of being the romping ground of the fashionable set. The houses on the hill are more modem, but the rents are exorbitant. . . .Sugar Hill is vinegar sour to many of its residents pinching themselves to meet the high rent.” This may account for the fact that so many Sugar Hill residents leased space in their apartments to lodgers.
In 1930, James Weldon Johnson, the noted black writer and educator, described the neighborhood’s changed character. In Black Manhattan he observed:
At any rate, there is no longer any apparent feeling against the occupancy of Harlem by Negroes... It has spread to the west and occupies the heights of Coogan’s Bluff overlooking Colonial Park. And to the east and west of this solid Negro area, there is a fringe where the population is mixed, white and coloured. This expansion over the past five years has taken place without any physical opposition, or even any considerable outbreak of antagonistic public sentiment.
Johnson’s observation is borne out by the 1930 United States census. By that year almost all of the apartment houses along St. Nicholas Avenue and Convent Avenue had seen their tenant rosters transformed from all white to all black (only three apartment buildings continued to have white tenants). There were, however, no black residents in the buildings to the west of St. Nicholas Avenue and Convent Avenue, and the row houses on St. Nicholas Avenue also retained their white tenancy. On St. Nicholas Place, the easternmost street in the district, four of the seven row houses recorded in the census had black residents. This division along St. Nicholas Avenue between white and black residents may be the reason why the Encyclopedia of New York City records that the western boundary of Sugar Hill was St. Nicholas Avenue.
As was already evident in the single building with a black population recorded in the New York State census of 1925, the 1930 census indicates the diversity of New York City’s black community. The buildings along St. Nicholas Avenue, Convent Avenue, and St. Nicholas Place housed black tenants from the British and Dutch West Indies, as well as many American-born residents. Few of the American-born tenants were native to New York City; rather, most had migrated north as part of the great migration from southern states. Jobs continued to be menial, including many railroad workers, elevator operators, and taxi drivers, as well as a number of postal workers (the postal service was one of the first government bureaucracies to employ substantial numbers of black workers). Changes were also occurring in buildings with white tenants. Many more of the row houses had been subdivided into small apartments. For example, all four of the row houses at 869-875 St. Nicholas Avenue, between West 153rd and West 154th Streets had been subdivided by 1930, apparently into studio and one-bedroom units. Although many of the side street row houses remained owner-occupied, single-family residences, others became boarding houses, such as 456 West 152nd Street where the German-born Emma Schneider lived with her daughter and thirteen lodgers, or 454 West 153rd Street, where the Welsh emigrant Evan Morgan shared his home with his wife, daughter, and four lodgers.
The change in the character of the historic district’s population may also be a result of the construction of the Independent Line (IND) subway through Sugar Hill. The Independent Subway had a tremendous impact on the area. Approved by the Board of Transportation in 1924, the city- owned transit system included a route with tracks beneath St. Nicholas Avenue. Excavations for this subway began in 1925. Life along the avenue was significantly disrupted by construction and many residents relocated. This may have been one of the reasons why the tenancy of so many buildings changed between 1925 and 1930. Service on the subway line began in September 1932, with an express stop at 145th Street and a local stop at 155th Street. A pair of cast-iron subway entrances is located on the southwest comer of St. Nicholas Avenue and 155th Street, within the boundaries of the historic district. By the 1940s and 1950s, the buildings to the west of St. Nicholas Avenue also opened to black owners and tenants and they too became part of this center of African-American residential life. In fact, between the 1930s and 1950s, several significant figures within New York’s black community moved to houses or apartments within the historic district, including lawyer and political leader Lamar Perkins (889 St. Nicholas Avenue), engineer Leroy Frederic Florant (848 St. Nicholas Avenue), and journalist Thelma Berlock Boozer (479 West 152nd Street).
Most of the buildings in the historic district have retained their architectural character to a surprisingly high degree. With its distinguished rows of single-family houses and fine apartment buildings the Hamilton Heights/Sugar Hill Northwest Historic District has remained, for more than a century, one of New York City’s most architecturally distinguished and culturally significant neighborhoods.
App Quest 3.0 Developer Day held at NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress in Downtown Brooklyn on Sat., November 22, 2014. Sponsored by the MTA and AT&T, the event challenged developers to design apps using open source data that could be used to assist public transportation customers. Three teams received prizes of $500.
Photo: Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit
After studies have been conducted on the specific group of users, it’s switched right into a profile or user persona that imitates a genuine customer. Basically, a persona is personified data produced from user behaviours, attitudes, discomfort points, as well as their wants and needs inside a particular product. Instead of tailoring an software developer to meet the requirements of the generic group, a persona was created having a specific number of users in your mind.
Personas illustrate the goals and behaviors of users while areas examine patterns in census for example age, location, sex, salary, and so forth. Both of them are essential however, personas offer lots of advantages throughout the development process.
1. Promote User-Focused Outcomes
Frequently, an application can morph in to the desires from the designer as opposed to the user. To avert this, the expansion process must focus on a person-focused goal all actions should be created using the consumer in your mind. With this to happen, they must adopt the outlook during the finish user to create an application that resonates using its users. Personas ought to be used through the development process and never as just one phase. Reinforcing the consumer persona through the entire process will be sure that the entire team remains centered on their primary goal. Without having done this, the end result from the final software developer might not match the users’ wants.
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2. Establishes Consensus During Development
Raw information is frequently hard to interpret however, a persona encapsulates the study and communicates the trends to other people in a manner that they are able to understand and visualize. Inside a team of developers, you will find usually individuals with different skills and expertise that could cause a positive change of opinions. A person persona is a superb tool to prevent confusion and miscommunications through the development process. The persona communicates ideas and ideas using the team of developers, stakeholders, and users. Effectively, it helps to ensure that everybody is on a single page and understands who the prospective audience is.
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3. Validates All Decisions
An application idea is made, but could it be really exactly what the user needs and wants? While it’s important to determine who the application will target, it’s more essential to understand the consumer particularly desires. Without validation, the end result won’t deliver just what the finish user needs and can ultimately be pointless. All decisions and actions which are made throughout the development process must have a person-focused reasoning. When the development process starts to stray from concentrating on meeting the users’ needs, the application will likely fail.
User personas are valuable for everybody throughout the development process to be able to boost the quality and efficiency of the work. A persona increases product quality since it directly addresses the finish users discomfort points and fixes issues that software developer presently experience. Understanding and meeting a particular categories of users’ needs will be sure that the application is really a success. Narrowing in on the specific group of users will yield greater download rates and most importantly, it'll keep up with the engagement from the users.
129 East 19th Street, NYC
by navema
East 19th Street, between Irving Place and Third Avenue, is known as the Block Beautiful for its notable row houses of East 19th Street. The block was an informal colony for artists and writers in the 1920s and 1930s, such as author Ida Tarbell, painter Cecilia Beaux, and the sculptor Zolnay. Music critic and novelist Carl Van Vechten, lived at 151 East 19th Street and with his neighbors, painters George Bellows and Robert Chanler, threw wild parties, about which Ethyl Barrymore commented, "I went there in the evening a young girl and came away in the morning an old woman."
Frederick J. Sterner, the architect credited with starting the revival of the block in the early 20th century, lived at No. 139, which he coated with stucco and decorated with colored tiles. A few other houses on the block have similar stucco, and some have unusual artistic touches like the pair of jockey statues at No. 141 and the nuzzling giraffes above the door at No. 149.
One of Manhattan's most interesting landmarks is the picturesque stable-studio at 129 East 19th Street. Charles Moran, an importer, built a town house at 24 Gramercy Park in 1847 on a lot stretching back to the north side of 19th Street between Irving Place and Third Avenue. Moran still had not built on the 19th Street side of the lot when he sold the house in 1855 to James Couper Lord. It was Lord, an iron merchant and philanthropist, who built the two-story stable at 129 East 19th Street in 1861.
A later account stated that the building never was used as a stable, and census records for the Lords and neighboring families show no coachmen or stablemen living on their properties. There is no record of the Lord stable's appearance in the 19th century.
The first account of its 19th-century occupancy is a 1903 article in The New York Times, which attributed its diamond-paned leaded glass windows to an unidentified glass worker who occupied it for some time in the 1890's. Indeed, classified directories show that Craig F. R. Drake, "stained-glass maker," leased and occupied the building for a year, in 1899.
In 1903, a new lessee, F. Berkeley Smith, filed plans to convert what was described as a studio into a residence. Smith was trained as an architect but was apparently independently wealthy -- he summered in Paris and wrote "The Real Latin Quarter," "How Paris Amuses Itself" and other books. He had worked with the architect R.H. Robertson, and a Robertson employee, August Pauli, designed extensive interior alterations for the 19th Street house.
Smith installed fireplaces for heat -- a Bohemian touch in a time when a furnace was considered civilized -- two bedrooms, a boudoir for Mrs. Smith and a trunk room, all furnished with wooden wainscotting, antique metal lamps, furniture and art work.
A photograph taken by Joseph Byron in 1904 shows a brick stable with neo-Gothic trim, window moldings, bottle-end stained glass and other artistic touches. In 1903, The Times wrote that there was "no more picturesque exterior" in the whole city, "none so riotously gay in color" with window boxes of geraniums, evergreen shrubs, bright brass hardware, green painted brick and white trim, "an exterior that attracts the attention of the least observant passerby."
ABOUT THE BLOCK BEAUTIFUL
The picturesque little ''block beautiful' is a mixed bag of houses on 19th Street between Irving Place and Third Avenue. A variety of owners there are making changes that reflect multiple attitudes toward the individual buildings and even the block as a whole. Brick and brownstone rowhouses went up on 19th Street in the 1840's and 1850's, especially after the establishment of Gramercy Park in 1845. Although conceived as upper-class accommodations, half a century later they were simply aging housing, especially as newer districts with newer houses opened up farther north.
The usual pattern for such districts was a gentle slide into middle- and working-class housing -- Victorian gentry showed a distinct distaste for settling in anything but virgin territory. It took Frederick Sterner to reverse this trend. Born in London in the 1860's, Sterner emigrated to the United States in 1882 and practiced architecture in Colorado before coming to New York in 1906. He took an office on Fifth Avenue near 19th Street and rented space in an old house at 23 West 20th Street.
Casting about for a place to build his own house, Sterner was discouraged by high land prices in more desirable areas farther north, and then determined to make over a house to his own taste closer to the business section of town. He bought an old brick house at 139 East 19th Street and gave it what became his signature touch -- a coat of tinted stucco, shutters, decorative ironwork and a projecting tile roof. Sterner carefully used old brick and polychromed tile panels to give his design an informal, handmade character -- the direct opposite of the showy limestone town houses that were still in favor farther uptown.
On a block of aging brick and brownstone, the effect was dazzling, something like Bob Dylan's shift from scruffy folk music to electric guitar in the 1960's. Sterner used inventive and brilliantly colored tile work around the doorway of 139 East 19th Street -- even the tiled planters are still miraculously intact. Sterner's example attracted others interested in a slightly bohemian location, among them Joseph B. Thomas, a banker and polo player, who had the architect redo 135 East 19th Street into a picturesque Gothic house.
But Sterner bought more houses on the block and, also working with other owners, gradually spread his delicate Mediterranean style to at least eight of them, enough so that the Sterner style quickly became the dominant character and was even imitated by other designers. In 1911 House Beautiful praised Sterner's work and added, ''Why does anyone build a city house when a remodeled one can be made so fascinating?''
Harriet Gillespie, writing in American Homes and Gardens in 1914, described 19th Street as a ''block beautiful,'' a term that had been in general use since the turn of the century, when reformers first considered how to stabilize aging neighborhoods.
Working for Thomas, Sterner also designed the dramatic half-timbered apartment house at 132 East 19th Street. Completed in 1911, it was soon home to the muckraking author Ida Tarbell, the society painter Cecilia Beaux and the stockbroker Chester Dale, who was then beginning to assemble his great art collection. The architect's brother, the painter Albert Sterner, also lived at No. 132.
THE painter George Bellows took over an old house at 146 East 19th Street, adding an attic studio, and the painter-muralist Robert Winthrop Chanler had a studio at No. 147; perhaps it was he who added the surprising colored panel over the doorway of two giraffes, with necks intertwined.
Writing in The New York Times in 1921, Helen Lowrey, a reporter, firmly credited Sterner with the idea of the picturesque ''Italian'' front and the entire idea of reviving older neighborhoods for upper-class occupancy. By that time developments at Turtle Bay, Sutton Place and other areas had spread Sterner's ideas widely.
In 1914 Sterner moved up to 63d Street between Lexington and Third Avenues and repeated the block beautiful process there, finally building his own magnificent house at the southwest corner of 65th Street and Lexington. In 1925 he moved to London, and never practiced again in New York; he died in Rome in 1931.
Gradually East 19th Street between Irving and Third became the block beautiful, as other efforts faded away, and it was included in the Landmarks Preservation Commission's Gramercy Park Historic District, designated in 1966. Many minor changes have been made to the houses, both before and after landmark designation. The Thomas residence, now owned by Oleg Cassini, is unchanged, but the stucco-front Sterner houses have lost many of their distinctive elements -- in some cases shutters have been removed, in others the pastel colors have been toned down. Some previous owner destroyed Sterner's distinctive tile and brick entryway at 145 East 19th Street, and in 1992 Lee Ann Jaffee, working with the architect Richard Ayotte, decided to substitute a nominally Greek revival doorway, but the effect does not reverse the earlier dilution of the house's character.
Next door, at 147 East 19th Street, someone has chopped away at the two giraffes to put in an electrical conduit.
At 143 East 19th Street Lynn Wagenknecht has one of the few intact mid-century houses, and her architect, Thomas Tsue, has been restoring that building to its original character.
On the south side of the block other architects are more in evidence. In 1924 the architect Frank Forster stripped the mid-19th-century brownstone at 142 and gave it a neat Dutch door and supremely intelligent ironwork. Despite an extensive interior alteration, the front has been left lovingly unrestored by the new owners. Cicognani Kalla Architects designed the recent alteration, and Pietro Cicognani says ''there's some beauty in being anonymous.'' And at 128 East 19th Street, an unidentified designer put some trim Art Moderne ironwork up on the house of the late Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder of the New York City Ballet, probably after Kirstein bought it in 1953.
At the apartment house at 132 East 19th Street, now a co-op, the board has just finished replacing the four stone spheres on the pillars in front, and Jonathan Foster, the board president, says that they are gradually restoring the entire front to Sterner's original designs.
ABOUT GRAMERCY PARK
The area which is now Gramercy Park was once in the middle of a swamp. In 1831 Samuel B. Ruggles, a developer and advocate of open space, proposed the idea for the park due to the northward growth of Manhattan. He bought the property, which was then a farm called "Gramercy Farm", from James Duane, a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant. Ruggles developed the property: he landscaped it, drainied the swamp, and caused about a million horsecart loads of earth to be moved. He then laid out "Gramercy Square", deeding possession of the square to the owners of the 60 parcels of land he had plotted to surround it, and sought tax-exempt status for the park, which the Board of Alderman granted in 1832. It was the second private square created in the city, after Hudson Square, also known as St. John's Park, which was laid out by the parish of Trinity Church. Numbering of the lots began at #1 on the northwest corner, on Gramercy Park West, and continued counter-clockwise: south down Gramercy Park West, then west to east along Gramercy Park South (East 20th Street), north up Gramercy Park East, and finally east to west along Gramercy Park North (East 21st Street). Landscaping and construction of Gramcery Park occured between 1833 and 1844.
At #34 and #36 Gramercy Park (East) are two of New York's first apartment buildings, designed in 1883 and 1905. Elsewhere in the neighborhood, nineteenth century brownstones and carriage houses abound, though the 1920s brought the onset of tenant apartments and skyscrapers to the area.
On September 20, 1966, a part of the Gramercy Park neighborhood was designated an historic district, and extended in 1988. The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.
Notable residents:
*James Harper – #4: an original resident, 1847-1869, Mayor of New York from 1844–1845 and one of the founders of the Harper publishing firm.
*Samuel J. Tilden – #15: New York Governor and 1876 Presidential Candidate whose house (a Victorian Gothic mansion), a National Historic Landmark, is now the National Arts Club.
Edwin Booth – #16: famed Shakespearean actor, founded the Players Club. The brother of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. In the center of Gramercy Park is a statue in his honor.
John Barrymore – #36: star of stage and screen.
Daniel Chester French – #36: sculptor responsible for the seated figure of Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Alfred Ringling – #36: who founded the Ringling Brothers Circus.
Stanford White – an architect, who renovated The Players Club, lived where the Gramercy Park Hotel is now located.
James Cagney – the actor once lived in one of the buildings on Gramercy Park South (East 20th Street).
Sandy lives and works in South Central Los Angeles. In this clip she considers jobs that will be available at the stadium and health impacts of its construction.
Part of Site of Impact: Interviews with residents living near the proposed Los Angeles NFL stadium site