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A comparison of four different common 3D-print layer heights.
• 0.34 mm/layer - Low (340 microns)
• 0.27 mm/layer - Medium (270 microns)
• 0.1 mm/layer - High (100 microns)
• 0.05 mm/layer - Super fine (50 microns)
These models where 3D printed with blue 1.75 mm PLA plastic filament on a MakerBot Replicator 2 3D printer.
The sample 3D model for this print is MorenaP's popular tree frog: www.thingiverse.com/derivative:34468
3D-printer: makerbot.creativetools.se
Laser-cut plate: www.thingiverse.com/thing:69351
Christian Dior couture opens Sydney CBD store...
Australia is now home to yet another exclusive luxury brand.
Christian Dior couture chief executive Sidney Toledano is delighted to have cracked the competitive Sydney market.
Today marks the opening its first flagship boutique in Australia in Sydney. The multi-level store is designed to replicate Dior’s renowned boutique on Paris’s Avenue Montaigne.
The boutique is located in the former Louis Vuitton store on the corner of King and Castlereagh streets.
In recent months, Chanel, Canali, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Miu Miu, Salvatore Ferragamo, Gucci and Bottega Veneta have either set up for the first time in Australia, opened in more locations, or revamped existing stores.
The brand's CEO Mr Toledano appeared unfazed by recent reports of China’s economic slowdown.
“The world has changed over the last three or four years and the centre of gravity of the global economy is moving towards Asia . . . We are developing our business in this part of the world,” he said.
In December, Dior reported that sales for the half year to October 31 were up 18 per cent at £632 million ($954 million) and said margins had improved.
The luxury French label’s history in Australia goes back to 1947, when David Jones reproduced four garments designed by Christian Dior as part of its “Paris fashion for all” line.
Since 1999, Dior has opened small boutiques in DFS Galleria in The Rocks as well as David Jones in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne.
The bottom level of the store stocks Dior’s complete range of bags and accessories while the first floor houses ready-to-wear clothing by creative director Raf Simons, as well as an array of shoes, jewellery and watches.
There is a salon on the third floor, accessible only by lift, for VIPS looking for a more exclusive shopping experience.
Men have access to a dedicated Dior Homme boutique, which has a dedicated entry off King Street. Suits, sportswear, denim, leather goods, accessories and footwear are spread across two levels.
“There is a big demand in the world for very high quality, innovative product and brands with real history. The new generation, and in this part of the world I notice even more, they want to know what the history of the company is,” Mr Toledano said.
“They go to the store and want to see it, feel it, understand it ... We want every member of our staff to know all the information so the customer understands what we do. This is our global, long-term strategy.”
Advertised celebrity list included:
ISABEL LUCAS, TINA ARENA, MEGAN GALE, COLLETTE DINNIGAN, GEOFF AND SARA HEUGILL, ZACH & JORDAN STENMARK, MATTHEW MITCHAM AND DIOR’S NEW “FACE”, AUSTRALIAN MODEL NICOLE POLLARD, WHO IS BEING FLOWN IN FROM PARIS TO ATTEND THE EVENT.
Websites
Christian Dior
Eva Rinaldi Photography
Neuroscience Prof. Anil Seth argues that conscious human intelligence is tightly coupled to our living, biological substrate, not replicable or simulatable in silicon. Here are some of my reactions to his thought-provoking piece:
If human intelligence and consciousness is substrate dependent, as asserted, even down to individual neurons being irreplaceable by silicon substrates, then some precise and strong claims emerge: uploading human consciousness to a new substrate (as referenced in the article) would not be possible, and the BCI companies should not be able to augment the core of human intelligence. This would have profound implications on the possibility of “humanity” going along for the ride of exponential progress in AI.
(As an aside, it’s far more likely that our biology is left behind, and building an AI that exceeds human intelligence will likely happen before we fully understand the brains we have. It’s easier to build a new one than reverse engineer the complex product of an iterative algorithm like evolution, cortical pruning, or neural net development. The locus of learning shifts to the process, not the product of development.)
Let me lend further evidence to the article’s claim that neural complexity vastly exceeds the neural net abstractions of current AI, and that human intelligence may be substrate dependent. At the high level of the connectome, the average adult has 1000 input synapses to each neuron, and a newborn baby has 10,000. Silicon chips do not have enough metal layers to implement this level of fan-in per gate. And these connections are dynamic; 90% are pruned in childhood development, and neurons that fire together wire together in a dynamic and ongoing remapping over time. Pure, detailed biomimicry of the brain in mainstream CMOS silicon may be impossible, for now and the foreseeable future. Dynamic interconnect is the issue, and it may require a fully 3D, fluid, low power substrate. Like the brain. And it might take some of the special chemical properties of carbon to capture the richness (I wondered about this in 2005)
On the other end of the spectrum, the complexity of the neuron vastly exceeds a simple sigmoid voting circuit or digital gate abstraction. Ion channels activate like a bucket brigade down each synapse. HIV-like particles and endogenous cannabinoids may play a role in nearest neighbor interactions outside the synapse. The extra-cellular matrix, like the potting soil outside the neuron, relaxes in a long series of critical periods of childhood development, and under the influence of psychedelics, changing the neuroplasticity for interconnect changes. And the neuron types may be vastly more varied that the observable phenotypic buckets (pyramidal, mirror neurons, etc.). MIT’s Ed Boyden believes that the gene expression of each neuron is unique — literally billions of different neuron types.
But, even if human intelligence and consciousness are fully substrate dependent, it does not follow that human-level intelligence is impossible with a different substrate. We may have only one existence proof from biological evolution, but that does not imply exclusivity in the space of possibilities. The substrate of our brains is not very different from less intelligent animals; our unique advancement came from layering on more self-similar cortex — not a better substrate but more of it.
There is much of our substrate that is unique from its evolutionary origins and as a way to make the most of it – it’s quite a miracle that meat can think at all… and do math and compute, even if we choose not to. We can imagine a certain percentage of our substrate is for basic metabolic support and garbage collection and not fundamentally essential for the thinking at hand, when abstracted at the right level. It’s like the power supply implementation of a computer not being essential to the computation architecture itself. Some portion of the genetic code in each neuron is a vestigial passenger from viral transposons of the past.
It’s safe to say that some fraction of our substrate is critical to the architecture of intelligence, and the critical exercise of biomimicry is to figure out the right level of abstraction, the right level of detail, if we wish to follow a similar path in a different substrate.
The critique of current AI approaches as falling short with an over-simplistic simplification may be correct, but not insurmountable. Or the shortcomings could be a vestige of the architecture and process of training the LLMs of today. A number of the AI advances of the past decade were focused on Reinforcement Learning. It was Deep Mind’s initial focus. There has been a revival of late, with some like Yann LeCun arguing that LLMs will never get us there… but RL will. We have believed for many years that the future of AI compute will be analog in-memory compute, as implemented in Mythic chips, and the brain. Some believe it will require an embodied intelligence interacting with the world of physical AI. Jeff Hawkins is working on a memory prediction architecture arguing that the brain is not a computer at all (and perhaps the qualia of consciousness is the merely the retrospective sensemaking of predictions occurring continuously at all layers of the cortex). Perhaps we will need a coincidence detector for asynchronous circuits to mimic the fire-together/wire-together paradigm (perhaps with reversible-computing resonators). Perhaps a neurosymbolic hybrid will bear fruit in mimicking different brain regions distinctly. Perhaps we will need a series of critical periods, like human children, with a path dependence on the sequencing of neural net training. There are many possibilities and exciting work to come, a Cambrian explosion of sorts, exploring different abstractions of architecture and processes of training.
While we humans want to feel special, unique, and central to the future, it does not make it so. One day, we will have a more advanced non-human intelligence that is conscious. That will happen quite simply by considering the next million years of continued biological evolution, with a selection function that rewards intelligence. To argue otherwise is to argue that homo sapiens are somehow the endpoint of evolution. Evolution does not suddenly end, even if we wish it to. The biological substrate of our successor species will likely be similar to ours, as the primary vector of evolutionary progress operates most rapidly at the highest level of abstraction. The open question is whether non-biological evolutionary algorithms will usher in non-biological intelligence that is superhuman and conscious in a handful of years if we are pursuing the right level of abstraction for conscious intelligence or maybe decades if we need to explore radically different analogs to our analog meat minds.
— Anil Seth is the director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex. Here is his article in Noema
The MakerBot Digitizer 3D-scanned Laser Cat model was used in this test of different layer thicknesses. The cat was scaled down to 50 mm in height and then 3D printed at the following layer heights:
- 0.40 mm (400 microns)
- 0.30 mm (300 microns)
- 0.20 mm (200 microns)
- 0.10 mm (100 microns) - Average width of a strand of human hair
- 0.05 mm (50 microns)
- 0.02 mm (20 microns)
All six cats where 3D printed on a MakerBot Replicator 2 with TRUE BLUE PLA plastic at 230 degrees C.
All layers where 3D printed with MakerWare's standard values as follows:
(400 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 90 mm/s
(300 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 90 mm/s
(200 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 90 mm/s
(100 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 90 mm/s
(50 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 60 mm/s
(20 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 40 mm/s
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The 3D scanner: bit.ly/1a7y8hG
The 3D printer: makerbot.creativetools.se
The 3D model: www.thingiverse.com/thing:146265
#3DBenchy printed on a MakerBot Replicator Desktop 5th Generation 3D printer.
The 3D-model: 3dbenchy.com/download
The 3D-printer: www.creativetools.se/index.php?route=product/search&f...
#3DBenchy printed on a MakerBot Replicator Desktop 5th Generation 3D printer.
The 3D-model: 3dbenchy.com/download
The 3D-printer: www.creativetools.se/index.php?route=product/search&f...
The entire roof, ceiling and plasterwork were replicated in their entirety to replace that lost in the fire. The new roof is an all-timber construction based on traditional mortise and tenon joints using queen post-trusses for its basic structure and finished with Blue-Bangor slates each measuring 600mm x 900mm. Below that, a barrel vault ceiling was also installed, constructed of timber and overlaid with riven chestnut lathes to which the base plaster was applied. Plastering was carried out by George O’Malley Plastering Ltd and the work supervised by master-plasterer George O’Malley, who has many years expertise in restoring and creating decorative plasterwork. Traditional methods using lime plaster mixed with goat-hair/horsehair to reproduce as far as possible the original designs as well as new moulds. There were also the 28 plaster angels originally produced by local plasterer Terence Farrell (1787-1876) for the sum of £150. All were damaged in the fire and 26 angels were recoverable which were restored by George O’Malley, the remaining two were reproduced. These were hung back in their original positions above the free-standing limestone columns.
This photo shows the northern part of the nave and above are semicircular Diocletian windows containing leaded stained glass by James Scanlon. Those opposite on the southern side have art-glass windows by Kim en Joong, a Dominican priest based in Paris.
St Mel’s of Longford town is the cathedral church for the diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise. Ambitious plans for a fine church building in Longford began to take form after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 and became a reality when sufficient funds had been collected. Construction began in 1840 with the laying of the foundation stone which was taken from the original cathedral of St. Mel at Ardagh, only a few miles from Longford. The main body of the new cathedral was completed in 1856 to a neo-classical design by the architect Joseph Benjamin Keane, work having been delayed during the period of the Great Famine (1846 and recommenced 1853). After Joseph’s death in 1849, work was continued after by his assistant John Bourke (d.1871) who was also responsible for the belfry tower completed in 1860, but with major alterations to its original design. The neo-classical portico was designed by George Coppinger Ashlin (1837-1921) and completed in 1889 with its pediment and sculpted tympanum depicting the enthronement of St. Mel as Bishop of Ardagh along with three statues above the pediment. By this time, the cathedral building has taken on its definitive form with no further major alterations until its refurbishment after the devastating fire of 2009.
On 25th December 2009, the entire building was gutted by a fire which accidently started within the boiler chimney flue at the rear and quickly spread. The alarm was raised just after 5am but fire-fighting attempts were hampered by frozen pipes as the country was in the grip of one of its worst and prolonged periods of freezing temperatures for decades. By daylight, the entire building had been reduced to a burnt-out shell with the loss of all its furnishing, fittings and diocesan museum. The museum contained many priceless artefacts that included the Crozier of Saint Mel and the book-shrine of St. Caillin (1536), the latter damaged beyond restoration but it may be possible to conserve some of the remnants. The 28 supporting columns were also damaged beyond repair and had to replaced anew. Very little was recoverable that survived the worst of the 1,000 deg.C fire and even these suffered some degree of fire damage such as The Bell of Fenagh which is undergoing conservation treatment at the National Museum of Ireland and the original baptismal font with its brass fittings and surrounding mosaic floor. But the most puzzling of all and described by many as nothing short of a miracle was the survival of the Holy Family painting in the northern transept and the undamaged Eucharistic Host still inside the fire damaged tabernacle. The Holy Family oil painting on a cotton-based canvas should have readily gone up in flames due to its highly combustible materials but somehow survived relatively unscathed despite the intense fire around it. This painting was of Italian origins by an unknown artist and is now back on display requiring little more than a cleaning!
After five years of work by many expert disciplines using traditional methods, the cathedral building has been totally refurbished and which included quarried blue-limestone for 28 columns with hand-carved capitals that support the roof. Both Harry Clarke Studio windows were salvaged from the transepts and restored to their former glory by Abbey Stained Glass Ltd of Dublin, a company with much experience in the restoration of stained glass windows. Other replacements such as the wooden pews, alter, stained glass, Stations of the Cross tablets, pipe-organ, fixtures and fitting were all made in a modern style to the best materials and craftsmanship available. It is also planned to open a diocesan museum in the cathedral’s new crypts. The total cost of refurbishment and fitting out came to around €30 million, funded mostly from the insurance cover and after five years of hard work the cathedral was reopened for services at Christmas 2014.
Photos taken Thursday 22nd January 2015.
References:
www.facebook.com/StMelsRestoration (St Mel’s Cathedral restoration – Facebook page).
www.rte.ie/news/special-reports/2014/1215/667007-longford... (RTE News article about TV program The Longford Phoenix).
www.longfordtourism.ie/event/st-mels-cathedral-rise-from-...
irishcatholic.ie/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/... (Sculptor Ken Thompson working on one of his Stations of the Cross panels).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mel%27s_cathedral,_Longford
l7.alamy.com/zooms/5e9904767cdb4317b39e15ee189488c3/shrin... (Image of St. Caillin book shrine created in 1536 before it was damaged beyond repair in the 2009 fire at St. Mel’s cathedral).
www.alamy.com/stock-photo-st-mels-crozier-longford-cathed... (Image of the 10th century St. Mel’s Crozier and sadly, completely destroyed in the cathedral fire of 2009).
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVb7TQy4QAM (Engineers Ireland presentation titled Recreating the Historical Roof of St. Mel's Cathedral).
LUGNuts' founder Lino Martins has graciously given me permission to replicate his series of automotive illustrations based on various mixed alcoholic drinks.
The next in this series is a Lego -model replication of Moscow Mule' - Zil-130 Truck.
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In Lino's own words:
"I’m aware that designing vehicles based on mixed drinks is a fairly irresponsible thing to be doing. I have friends who are in recovery or simply choose not to drink and for them I have something cool in mind that will finish out this series. My friend Buell Richardson had a couple of suggestions that I felt rather uneasy about drawing in these rather sensitive times so instead I have rendered the Moscow Mule in hopes that he can still appreciate my design choices in doing so. I went with a custom Soviet ZIL-130 pickup truck in olive green. The Moscow Mule drink itself is not that visually interesting but it is usually served in a copper mug. This got me thinking to adorn the truck with hammered copper gas tanks, rims and other accessories. Buell enjoys painting gaming miniatures and does it quite well so I incorporated a base for the truck that makes it look like it could be one of his painted miniatures. The background is a faded sunburst in colors reminiscent of old Soviet propaganda art. I couldn’t resist finishing off the piece with a red star and hammer and sickle design on the side of the truck. The end result is something I like quite a bit and I hope that you all do too. Stay tuned as I draw more of your suggestions and remember always drink responsibly and never drink and drive."
This pipe’s design is replicated on both halves of the bowl and features a Maid of Erin harp beneath a Royal Crown along with sprays of shamrock. Both nationalist emblems of harp and shamrock were usually associated together within Ireland from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. The Maid of Erin on this pipe is not winged and shown subordinated to the Crown.
The use of shamrock in Ireland associated with St. Patrick (Ireland’s patron saint) originated in the 17th century and by the end of the 18th century it began to be adopted as a nationalist emblem. The use of the shamrock as a national emblem to show one’s patriotism became widely popular in the latter half of the 19th century along with the Maid of Erin harp.
The Maid of Erin harp is depicted with an allegorical female figure of Erin affixed to the outer body of the harp. The Maid of Erin is usually depicted as winged but sometimes without the wings. The earliest appearance of the Maid of Erin harp was on the Royal Standard of King James I of England (c.1603) and its first appearance on the Irish coinage was on the St. Patrick’s halfpenny (c.1674). Thereafter, the Maid of Erin was commonly used as an emblem of Ireland into the 20th century.
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References:
niarchive.org/CulturalFusions/portals/a1b3a25b-b7fe-4bef-...(WEB).pdf (Emblems of Ireland – covers both the shamrock and the Maid of Erin harp).
www.coinweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/st_pat_thumb.jpg (Image of a St. Patrick’s halfpenny (1670’s) which was the first Irish coin to depict the Maid of Erin harp).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamrock (The shamrock as an Irish emblem).
Coins & Tokens of Ireland by Seaby’s Numismatic Publishing Ltd, 1970.
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Height: 2 1/8” (54mm)
Widest width: 1 1/8” (28mm)
Length: 1 7/8” including stem (47mm)
Inside diameter: ¾” (19mm)
Find location: Mullingar, County Westmeath.
This exhibit replicates another one of Georgia's natural habitats, the Blackwater Swamp. This habitat is home to white catfish, fliers, bluegill and redbreast sunfish.
3D model made by Swedish 3D artist Måns Larsson
- 3D-modell sliced with Skeinforge 50
- Printed with ReplicatorG on a standard MakerBot Replicator FDM 3D-printer
The size of the Makerbot Replicator prints is a game changer - this baby is 15x15x10 cm. And no, the Ritz cracker wasn't 3D printed.
Here's the kid brother: Horn0016
Concrete pillboxes built to replicate Nazi bunkers rest on an old cattle farm now an area of critical environmental concern managed by the BLM in southwest Oregon, Sept. 25, 2018. BLM photo: Matt Christenson
A quiet oak savanna in southwest Oregon has a World War II story to tell.
It was the summer of 1942 when thousands of young American troops started arriving in Oregon to prepare for battle.
Only months prior, immediately after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into WWII, the U.S. Army broke ground on Camp White, a massively ambitious training ground for troops north of Medford.
The national war effort was ramping up, and from the rationing at home to the drill sergeants yelling at new draftees, the task at hand was unified: Get America prepared for war as fast as possible.
At Camp White, in the heart of the Rogue River Valley, it got loud very quick.
Construction crews worked 24 hours a day until the base, consisting of 1,300 structures, was complete. Barracks, mess halls, a railroad, full electrical grid and sewer system were all built in six months.
And then the troops arrived.
The newly reinstated 91st Division went on 91-mile-long hikes.
They fired bazookas, mortars and tanks.
And they attacked concrete pillboxes built to replicate Nazi bunkers.
Despite creating what was then Oregon’s second most populous city at 40,000 people, there are now only a few lasting structures proving Camp White ever existed. Sadly, there are even fewer first-hand memories.
The pillboxes are still standing, though. They simultaneously represent a mostly forgotten military legacy and since 2013, an opportunity for historic preservation.
After decades of private cattle farming, Camp White’s pillboxes now rest on public land.
Read the full story about the Camp White pillboxes that rest on the northeast side of Upper Table Rock, an area of critical environmental concern for the BLM: www.facebook.com/notes/blm-oregon-washington/the-wwii-leg...
Insect Pokemon:
Insect pokemon are proving to be the most difficult to accurately replicate. Photos of insects and insect like creatures tend to be out of focus and the body parts are so small and fragile that they tend to not fit the shapes of the pokemon. Improvisation and interpretation are required.
About The Series:
Real Life Pokemon (RLP) is an exercise in the continued effort for me as an artist to develop a style within the realm of photo-manipulation. With this and the ones soon to come, I attempt to create a hybrid accurate-realistic approach, somewhere between the actual game/anime characters and realistic animals.
Perhaps more interestingly, this series was originally going to be much more violent, pitting Pokemon against Pokemon in what I envisioned as "Michael Vick's Pokefights." Pokemon seems, after all, a lot more like fantasy dog fighting than bug collecting, but that joke is getting old now.
About The Artist:
I am a freelance graphic designer and illustrator living in Burlington Vermont. While working primarily in apparel design, I also do painted and photographic works (as evidenced above). Contact me at
stevenlefcourt [at] tastypaints [dot] com
The 3D model: www.thingiverse.com/thing:69491
The 3D printer: makerbot.creativetools.se
For more information creative-tools.com
Concrete pillboxes built to replicate Nazi bunkers rest on an old cattle farm now an area of critical environmental concern managed by the BLM in southwest Oregon, Sept. 26, 2018. BLM photo: Matt Christenson
A quiet oak savanna in southwest Oregon has a World War II story to tell.
It was the summer of 1942 when thousands of young American troops started arriving in Oregon to prepare for battle.
Only months prior, immediately after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into WWII, the U.S. Army broke ground on Camp White, a massively ambitious training ground for troops north of Medford.
The national war effort was ramping up, and from the rationing at home to the drill sergeants yelling at new draftees, the task at hand was unified: Get America prepared for war as fast as possible.
At Camp White, in the heart of the Rogue River Valley, it got loud very quick.
Construction crews worked 24 hours a day until the base, consisting of 1,300 structures, was complete. Barracks, mess halls, a railroad, full electrical grid and sewer system were all built in six months.
And then the troops arrived.
The newly reinstated 91st Division went on 91-mile-long hikes.
They fired bazookas, mortars and tanks.
And they attacked concrete pillboxes built to replicate Nazi bunkers.
Despite creating what was then Oregon’s second most populous city at 40,000 people, there are now only a few lasting structures proving Camp White ever existed. Sadly, there are even fewer first-hand memories.
The pillboxes are still standing, though. They simultaneously represent a mostly forgotten military legacy and since 2013, an opportunity for historic preservation.
After decades of private cattle farming, Camp White’s pillboxes now rest on public land.
Read the full story about the Camp White pillboxes that rest on the northeast side of Upper Table Rock, an area of critical environmental concern for the BLM: www.facebook.com/notes/blm-oregon-washington/the-wwii-leg...
1140 Franklin Avenue, Morrisania, Bronx, New York City, New York, United States
The Second Battery Armory, the first permanent armory located in The Bronx, was built in 1908-11 to the design of Charles C Haight, a former member of the New York State militia and a prominent architect known for his institutional buildings. Prominently situated on a sloping site, the armory is notable for its bold massing, expressive brick forms, picturesque asymmetry, and restrained Gothic vocabulary; the design of the structure retains references to the tradition of medieval imagery in earlier New York armory buildings, but bears a marked relationship to Collegiate Gothic institutions.
Having a large drill shed and an administrative building to the side, anchored by a corner tower, the armory was critically praised for its rational structural expression. Haight was awarded the commission, following a design competition, by the New York City Armory Board, the agency then authorized to construct new armories in the city.
The armory originally housed the Second Battery, a field artillery unit of the National Guard whose history dated to the Washington Gray Troop of 1833; units which were successors to the Second Battery remained in the building until the 1980s. Its location in the Morrisania section of The Bronx reflects the rapid growth of the borough at the turn of the century and the accompanying expansion of public services. A one-story addition to the armory (c. 1928), by architect Benjamin W. Levitan, along much of its Franklin Avenue frontage, modified Haight's original design through a skillful near-replication of its features. The Second Battery Armory remains one of the most distinctive public buildings in The Bronx.
The National Guard and Armories
The Second Battery Armory was built for a unit of the National Guard of the State of New York, long the largest and most active state militia in the country. The tradition of state militias remained strong in America from the Revolution through the nineteenth century; in 1792 Congress passed an act that established uniformity among the various state militias.
While the volunteer militia provided a large portion of the fighting forces in the nineteenth century, during the Civil War (at which time the name "National Guard" came into common usage) the readiness of the militia for warfare and its relationship to the standing army were called into question.
The New York Armory Law of 1862 attempted to address these issues by spurring the creation of regiments and armories, but met with little success in the aftermath of the war. With changes in American society in the second half of the nineteenth century - increasing industrialization, urbanization, labor union activity, and immigration - the role of the National Guard was affected, leading to its resurgence.
In the midst of a severe economic depression, the first nationwide general strike over working conditions occurred after a railroad strike in 1877; the National Guard was called to support police and federal troops against strikers and their supporters in dozens of American cities. Although units had been called previously to quell civil unrest, after 1877 the role of the National Guard was largely to control urban workers in strikes and "riots," and a wave of armory building began nationally.
The term "armory" refers to an American building type that developed in the nineteenth century to house volunteer state militias, providing space for drills, stables, storage, and administrative and social functions.
Aside from their military and police function, units of the National Guard were in large part social organizations; some, like the prestigious Seventh Regiment (first to adopt the term "national guard"), drew members from the social elite, while many others recruited primarily from local ethnic groups.
The earliest quarters for New York militia units were often inadequate rented spaces. The first regimental armory built in the city was the Tompkins Market Armory (1857-60), the result of a collaboration between the Seventh Regiment and the local butchers, in which a drill hall was above a market.
The Seventh Regiment later constructed its own armory (1877-79, Charles W. Clinton, 643 Park Avenue, a designated New York City Landmark), which had national influence in establishing the armory as a distinct building type while stimulating other New York units to build their own armories.
The Seventh Regiment Armory, modelled in plan after such nineteenth-century railroad stations as the first Grand Central Station, features a fortress-like administrative "headhouse" building with a central tower, connected to a drill shed which utilizes iron trusses to span a large space.
In 1884 the New York State Legislature created an Armory Board in New York City. The Board was charged with making the arrangements to condemn land for, to allocate funds for, and to authorize and oversee the construction, furnishing, and maintenance of, armories for National Guard units in the city; these buildings were owned by the City.
The Armory Board consisted originally of the Mayor, the senior officer of the local National Guard, and the Commissioner of Public Works, but was expanded in 1886 to include the second senior officer of the local National Guard and the President of the Board of Taxes and Assessments; its jurisdiction also included Brooklyn and Queens after consolidation of the boroughs into New York City in 1898.
Before 1900, six armories had been built in Manhattan through the Board, while two structures were built independently in Brooklyn. After 1900 the Board generally employed competitions for the design of new armories. Between 1900 and 1911 the Board authorized construction of three more armories (and one replacement) in Manhattan, three (plus an extension) in Brooklyn, and the Second Battery Armory in The Bronx, while New York State and Kings County built an additional six in Brooklyn and Queens.
By the time of the construction of the Kingsbridge Armory (1912-17, Pilcher & Tachau, 29 West Kingsbridge Road, a designated New York City Landmark), the second permanent armory in The Bronx and one of the largest in the United States, there were twenty-some actively functioning armories in New York City, and the great era of armory building in the city drew to a close.
While there were no formal standards for the plan and design of armories, and while various units had somewhat different needs, nearly all New York armories of this period shared the functional features of the Seventh Regiment Armory model.
A general consensus was reached about the appropriateness of the architectural imagery of the medieval fortress or castle for the armory's exterior appearance. Observers mentioned fortified towns in southern France and Mexico, and English, Scottish, and Norman castles, of the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, among others, as stylistic prototypes for New York City armories.
The medieval appearance helped to signify the armory as a distinct building type, connoted its military function, as well as the concepts of power and control, and assisted functionally in the military defense of the building, if necessary (most armories had such fortress features as turrets, towers, crenellated parapets, slit windows, impenetrable doors, window grilles, etc., which could be used by troops with guns or to thwart uninvited entry).
In the design of several New York armories of the early twentieth century, however, the picturesque medieval imagery, as well as the central towered plan of the Seventh Regiment Armory was rejected or modified.
The Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory (1904-06, Hunt & Hunt, 68 Lexington Avenue, a designated New York City Landmark) has a classically-inspired design, though still military in aspect. In the Troop C Armory (1904-08, Lewis F. Pilcher, 1569 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn), designed with classical and Art Nouveau motifs, the tower was placed near the corner, and the drill shed became an equally dominant feature. The Second Battery Armory also represented a change architecturally from the medieval model.
The Second Battery Armory
The unit which eventually became the Second Battery was established in 1833 as the Washington Gray Troop, Horse Artillery, part of the Third Regiment, New York State Artillery; in 1847 the designation was changed to Company I, Eighth Regiment. This troop, which formed part of a battalion of cavalry in 1867, was reorganized in 1879 as Battery E.
In 1881 the unit became known as the Second Battery, one of two artillery batteries in New York City. Since its founding the unit served during a number of major New York strikes and "riots,"5 as well as in the Civil and Spanish-American Wars, and either leased space or shared quarters in other units* armories. A fire in February, 1902, destroyed the 71st Regiment Armory, at Park Avenue and 33rd Street, which
then also housed the Second Battery; this provided the Battery "an opportunity to move northward, where we could secure larger and more commodious quarters for our organization."
Desiring a permanent location in The Bronx, the Second Battery moved in October, 1902, to a temporary armory (still extant; designed by architect John E. Kerby) at 1891 Bathgate Avenue, south of East Tremont Avenue.
The New York City Armory Board in 1903 selected a site for a new permanent armory for the Second Battery at the northeast corner of Franklin Avenue and East 166th Street, one block from the Third Avenue elevated station in the Morrisania section of The Bronx. The large lot, approximately 200 by 300 feet, was prominently located on a rocky slope and was the site of a small wooded estate, with a freestanding frame house known as the Allendorf Residence.
Across Franklin Avenue is a walled ridge of parkland, where the 166th Street roadbed terminates and leads to a stairway. The Commissioners of the Sinking Fund appropriated $86,430 for the purchase of the site in September, 1905. In November, 1906, the Armory Board authorized 5450,000 for the construction of the armory, and had accepted the "plans of Charles C Haight, as modified," for which he was paid $3500.
Haight, selected through a design competition among six New York firms,9 also acted as superintendent of construction on the project10 Construction contracts were awarded in 1907, including: Charles Schneider, site excavation ($23,750); Guidone & Galardi, general contractors (5398,500); Ravitch Brothers, ornamental ironwork; and White Fireproof Construction Co., concrete floor arches. Construction began in September of 1908, after Buildings Department objections, pertaining to footings and fireproof floor arches, were settled.
The Armory Board appropriated an additional 59444 for completion of the armory in November, 1909, "in accordance with certain changes in the contract and specifications of the Guidone & Galardi Co., made by the architect,"11 and provided over 548,000 for equipment and furnishings in 1910-11. The Second Battery moved into its new armory in June of 1910, though official completion of the building did not occur until the end of January of 1911.
The Second Battery Armory was the first permanent armory built in the Borough of The Bronx, and was one of the first New York armories built following a reorganization of the National Guard, which again changed its role, to that primarily of a reserve force for the army. As the fears of domestic insurrection had waned, the Dick Act was passed in 1903 (amended in 1908), which provided that Guard personnel and equipment conform to U.S. Army standards and that Guard units could be called into federal service during wartime even while still under state jurisdiction.
In February, 1908, the First Battalion, Field Artillery, was organized from the First, Second, and Third Batteries; the First Battalion headquarters, as well as the Second Battery, were soon located in the new Second Battery Armory.
Charles C. Haight
Charles Coolidge Haight (1841-1917) [fig. D], architect of the Second Battery Armory, was born in New York City and graduated from Columbia College in 1861. He enlisted in the prestigious Seventh Regiment, and was commissioned as First Lieutenant/Adjutant, and later Captain, in the 31st and 39th New York Volunteers between 1862 and 1863; wounded at the Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia in May of 1864, he retired from the military.
Haight then studied architecture and worked with New York architect Emlen T. Littell, a friend from the Seventh Regiment. Opening his own office in New York in 1867, Haight's career was advanced through his family and its connections with the Episcopal Church - his father, the Rev. Benjamin I. Haight, was the assistant rector of Trinity Church.
In the 1870s he was appointed architect for the Trinity Church Corporation; between 1882 and 1886 he designed for the Corporation a number of buildings downtown, including a library, apartment house, and vestry offices (none of which survives). Haight also designed warehouses in the Tribeca area between 1882 and 1912 for both the Corporation and its subsidiary, the Protestant Episcopal Society of the State of New York for the Promotion of Religion and Learning.
Haight's early buildings were churches and residences in the Victorian Gothic and English Tudor styles, though he later gained recognition for his public institutional buildings, many in the English Collegiate Gothic style. Haight's designs for educational institutions include buildings for Columbia's midtown campus (1874-84, demolished), the General Theological Seminary (1883-1901, now included within the Chelsea Historic District), eleven buildings at Yale University (1894-1914), and Trinity School (1893-94, 139-147 West 91st Street, a designated New York City Landmark). Haight designed a number of hospital buildings, including the Manhattan Eye & Ear Hospital (1880), the New York Cancer Hospital (1884-90, 2 West 106th Street, a designated New York City Landmark), the Orthopoedic Hospital (1896), and the Hospital for the Ruptured & Crippled (1897).
The Second Battery Armory, designed in 1906-08 and built in 1908-11, was a late example of Haight's public institutions, employing a "restrained" and "uncomplicated"™ Gothic vocabulary, bold massing and siting, and expressive use of brick and stone.
Morrisania
The Second Battery Armory is located in the section of The Bronx known as Morrisania, after the prominent Morris family, local landowners and politicians through several generations from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Morrisania became one of the twenty-one townships of Westchester County in 1788, and was annexed to the Town of Westchester in 1791.
The construction of the Harlem and Hudson River Railroads, beginning in 1842, resulted in the start of development and an increase in population, particularly an influx of German and Irish immigrants. Morrisania became part of the new township of West Farms in 1846, was the most populous section of Westchester County by 1855, and was chartered as a separate town in 1864.
When Morrisania was formally annexed to New York City in 1874, along with the western section of The Bronx, it had a population of over 19,000. By the late nineteenth century Morrisania had a predominantly German population, with its own local brewing industry. Expansion of the elevated railroad lines along Third Avenue, beginning in the mid-1880s, and later, the IRT subway system, reaching the area in 1904, helped spur a vast real estate boom.
Between 1874 and the completion of the Armory in 1911, the population of the annexed section of The Bronx grew by some 1300%, the majority of which had occurred after the annexation of the rest of The Bronx in 1895. The Bronx at that time would have been the seventh largest city in the United States. Starting in the
1930s, the ethnic composition of the area's population changed as the earlier groups moved and African-American and Puerto Rican families came to the neighborhood.
The immediate neighborhood of the Armory was known in the mid-nineteenth century as Eltona after Robert H. Elton, who had purchased property from Gouverneur Morris, built his home near Boston Road and 166th Street, and began subdivision of the land in the 1850s. Thomas Rogers, a prominent Wall Street financier, built a home on part of this land around 1872; the Rogers estate was divided for sale around 1900, the largest portion going to the City for the construction of Morris High School (1901-1904, CBJ. Snyder), the borough's first.
The remaining portion of the estate was developed with rowhouses in 1900-06; today these buildings constitute the Morris High School Historic District. Morris High School is one-half block to the east of the armory. Another structure, St Augustine's R.C. Church (1894, Louis H. Giele, 1183 Franklin Avenue), is one-half block to the north of the armory. Together these three buildings form an impressive architectural grouping, prominently sited on the hill.
The decision to locate the Second Battery Armory in The Bronx represents the growth of the borough at the turn of the century and the accompanying expansion of public services.
Design of the Second Battery Armory
In plan, the vast majority of the site of the Second Battery Armory is covered by the drill shed, with the administrative building or "headhouse" (here on the side rather than at the end of the drill shed) reduced to a narrow (30-foot deep) strip along the Franklin Avenue frontage. The drill shed was constructed with iron roof trusses which span 167 feet.
The drill (riding) hall is located on the main (first) floor. Below the drill hall, in the basement, were the stables (along 166th Street), a rifle range, a gun room, and a ramp to the first floor, and there were storage spaces along Franklin Avenue. Offices and reception and meeting rooms were located on the first floor of the administrative building. In the rest of the administrative building, were quarters and more reception rooms, as well as spectators galleries for the drill hall, on the second floor; a squad room, gymnasium, and general reception room on the third floor; and officers' rooms and maintenance and communication facilities in the upper stories of the tower. The spaces on the third floor required a larger width (38 feet), so the floors were partially cantilevered over the roof of the drill shed.
The exterior design of the armory [figs. F & GJ is a picturesque, asymmetrical composition which takes the maximum benefit of its prominent location on a sloping site on a hill, through its use of a corner tower, bold massing, and expressive brick forms.
While Haight's design kept several references to the tradition of medieval imagery in armories, such as the crenellated parapet and corbelled balcony, his use here of a restrained Gothic vocabulary is related more to the Collegiate Gothic style of his educational institutions. Haight's expressive and dramatic intentions in the armory design were clearly visible in the early, brooding sketch for the building published in The Brickbuilder in 1908.
The facade along 166th Street, virtually a brick curtain wall masking the end of the drill shed, has in appearance a nearly ecclesiastical aspect; a difference in height of twelve feet at each end due to the slope allowed for direct entrances to the drill hall and basement stables. The long Franklin Avenue facade of the administrative building was architecturally organized by end towers and intermediate pairs of buttresses and pilasters, which are expressive, structurally, of their placement at the side of the drill shed, with its trusses within.
The Second Battery Armory received favorable comment even before its completion. J. Hollis Wells, a lieutenant-colonel and member of the architectural firm of Clinton & Russell who was an authority on armories, wrote in 1908:
The site suggested the effectiveness of vertical masses, and these with a carefully studied sky-line gave the expression desired. Wide piers where strength was needed and a multiplicity of windows in the curtain walls between, the armory became an idealized type of 'mill construction'.... The silhouette against the sky, prominent through the building's high situation, has been perhaps the most carefully studied element of the facade, and on it the success of the exterior in a great measure depends. In short, its merit is in the composition of its masses of dark red brick with little or no ornament and a sparing use of sandstone.
Architecture in 1910 praised the armory as "probably the best in the City of New York.
The architecture is of a curious and fascinating style; powerful without being brutal, original without being bizarre. The military thought is at once apparent., but the windows are of ample size and as many as are needed to properly light the rooms within, not cut down to mere arrow slits as has been so often done.
The composition is exceedingly picturesque and has not been carried to a point which entails a sacrifice of the dignity so essential in a public building. . . . The complete disregard for symmetry displayed throughout the building is of much interest... . The mass of the tower looms up splendidly as seen from nearby points... . The interesting features are so many and the spirit of the design so complex that a cursory examination fails to impress one as does a more careful and thorough study. It is a building of the very highest interest and originality; quite the best as was before said, of our New York armories, and well worthy of its position as one of the city's monuments.
And noted critic Montgomery Schuyler, in Architectural Record in 1917, considered the armory virtually the best building in the entire borough of The Bronx. After scathing comments on the quality of buildings there, he went on to extoll the virtues of the armory:
The dimensions of the building would alone suffice to make it conspicuous. ... A flanking wall of 300 feet in extent cannot fail of making an impression, whatever its treatment... [Here] the walls have visibly sufficient depth, a depth which becomes most impressive and powerful where, as in the arched entrances, the whole thickness of the wall can be... 'revealed.' Moreover, there are three pairs of massive buttresses at intervals... the abutments of the huge roof trusses necessary for such a span.
Not only is the stability of the long wall put far beyond doubt by these devices, but the brute expanse becomes an ordered mass, an architectural design. ... In material... being common brick, though apparently chosen for color, and at any rate very lucky in its color - ... laid with wide red joints, and relieved in the right places... by a sparing introduction of brownstone the whole arrangement is expressive, rational, significant... The wall is most effectively framed between the terminal masses... . [At] the front., a series of crenellated serrations of the skyline, rising towards the centre... [indicates] the large and low curve of the actual roof. ... The suggestions of 'military Gothic' are not overdone, as they are so apt to be in similar erections.
They are confined to the crenellations of the parapets... and the corbelling of the balcony over the archway of the side... . These touches of tradition, denoting the purpose of the building are perfectly compatible with the fact that the detail throughout is simply straightforward structural modeling which might have taken the same forms if the designer had never heard of a Gothic castle, and is the logical expression of the materials and the construction employed. The photographs show how admirably consistent, restrained, and effective the architecture of the armory is, and what an effect it produces with utmost simplicity and unpretendingness of material.
Haight's expressive design was successful not only in providing a different architectural direction for armories while making references to armory tradition, but also in reflecting the building's function and structural composition.
The Armory Addition
At the request of the New York City Armory Board, architect Benjamin W. Levitan was hired in 1926 to draw plans "for the erection of an additional story providing adequate storage space" at the Second Battery Armory. Levitan's additional story, along the entire Franklin Avenue frontage of the armory north of the corner tower, was skillfully integrated with Haight's original design. Levi tan virtually replicated the features of Haight's top story, with the addition of a taller parapet and some brick patterning on the parapet and spandrels.
Benjamin W. Levitan (1878-1941), born in New York City and educated at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, was a prolific architect, active in New York City from 1900 to 1940. Upon his return to New York from Europe, he worked in the prominent firm of Warren & Wetmore, before establishing an independent practice in 1907. He developed a diverse expertise and was credited with the design of "hundreds of apartment houses, banks, factories, theatres, stadiums, schools, [and] gymnasiums."
He also obtained patents for "cell-block construction," a type of comfort station, and long-span construction for hangar sheds. His known commissions include the Central Jewish Institute (1922) on East 85th Street, the Women's House of Detention (1929, in association with Sloan & Robertson, 2-16 Greenwich Street, demolished), and a portion of Bloomingdale's Department Store. Levi tan was a member of the 22nd Regiment Engineers, New York National Guard, and his obituary mentioned his work at the Second Battery (then the "105th Field Artillery") Armory.
Description
The Second Battery Armory is a large (over 200 by 300 feet) red brick building consisting mostly of a drill shed, but also having a narrow administrative "headhouse" portion on the side of the drill shed. The brick is laid in Flemish double-stretcher bond while the watertable, coping, and trim are brownstone.
The two designed facades, three to five stories, are asymmetrically composed overall, although some sections are symmetrical; a massive, taller tower, rising up to six stories, is at the southwest corner of the building. The armory was originally constructed in 1908-11; an addition at the fifth story level was built along much of the Franklin Avenue facade c. 1928.
The long Franklin Avenue facade of the administrative building is anchored on the south by the corner tower (a smaller tower at the north end was incorporated into the addition). The design of the addition modified the facade by nearly replicating the original fourth-story features on the new fifth story. The overall facade is articulated by pairs of vertical buttresses which rise above the crenellated parapet, as well as intermediate pilasters on the third and fourth stories.
The corner tower features groupings of round-, segmental-, and pointed-arched windows of varying sizes, the latter expressed as a two-story arcade and having molded surrounds and decorative stone spandrels. Some of the windows in the bay just north of the tower are now blind; this section also has intermediate level spandrels.
The rest of the facade employs rectangular, and segmental- and round-arched window groupings of varying sizes. On the fifth story, and at the entrances at both ends, large pointed arches which are terminated by buttresses on the sides, before the imposts, are employed; those at the fifth story have recessed window arcades set within.
The northern end entrance has its original wood panelled doors and transoms. Surmounting the main corner entrance, with non-historic doors below the original panelled transoms, is a corbelled balcony with a flagpole. Doors lead onto the balcony, and the areas above are partially filled with brick.
A small window to the right of the entrance has an original decorative wrought-iron grille. The parapet and many of the spandrels of the upper two stories have decorative brickwork (dating from c. 1928). Ground-story windows have vertical-bar iron grilles.
The shorter 166th Street facade is arranged with the corner tower of the administrative building abutted by three three-story pavilions at the end of the drill shed, which are symmetrically composed and more planar; the sloping site creates a difference in height of twelve feet from end to end.
The tower has windows generally similar to those on its other facade, a small pedestrian entrance, with a non-historic door and stone stoop, surmounted by a double arched window with original cusped sash, and a small window to the left of the entrance with an original decorative wrought-iron grille.
The central drill shed pavilion has a two-story arcade of tall, narrow, molded pointed-arched openings which are now blind, above a plain stone panel; a double pointed-arched pedestrian entrance with original panelled doors and transoms and stone stoop and area way, and a stepped and crenellated parapet The central pavilion is flanked by two recessed sections, with four arched windows each on the second story, now half-filled with brick, and one louver each inserted on the ground story, and by two small tower-like pavilions which also employ the device at the large entrances and upper stoiy of pointed arches which are terminated by buttresses on the sides, before the imposts; those at the upper stoiy also have recessed window arcades set within.
The eastern (troop) entrance, with a non-historic rolldown gate, leads to the drill hall, while the western (troop) entrance, with non-historic doors and transoms, leads to the basement Ground-story windows have vertical-bar iron grilles.
The eastern side of the armory, which is now visible, including a three-story wing beside the drill shed, is unarticulated, with a combination of exposed brick and parging. The large roof monitors (probably added c. 1928) of the drill shed are also now visible along the east side. The windows of the building, mostly one-over-one double-hung wood sash with transoms are replacements of 1953-54. Exterior masonry repointing occurred in 1964.
Subsequent History
Following the completion of the armory in 1911, the Second Battery received a variety of different designations due to reorganizations within the National Guard.
In August of 1911 the First Battalion was reorganized, now with the Second, Third, and Sixth Batteries, which became known as Batteries A, B, and C In May of 1912, the First Battalion was reorganized within the Second Regiment, Field Artillery, but the regiment was reduced to the First Battalion again in October, and was transferred to the First Regiment, F.A.; in December Battery A was detached from that regiment, redesignated Battery B, and was assigned to the Second Battalion, F.A. The following month the Second Regiment was reconstituted, with the Second Battalion, Batteries D, E, and F, listed as located in the armory (Battery D was the successor to the Second Battery).
In 1916-17 this unit served in the New York State Artillery Brigade of the Sixth Division of the National Guard in U.S. service in Mexico, and during World War I served overseas in the 52nd F.A. Brigade, 27th Division. Around 1920, the unit was designated the 105th Field Artillery, Second Battalion, 52nd Brigade, 27th Division of the National Guard of the State of New York.
The U.S. War Department converted it to a "motorized unit" in 1934, and the basement stables of the armory were subsequently changed into garages. By the mid-1980s many of the Guard units were consolidated, and in 1988 the New York State Division of Military & Naval Affairs ended its jurisdiction over the building.
It is in City use today, administered by the Human Resources Administration, as a shelter for homeless New Yorkers. The building survives as a powerful architectural presence in the Bronx, and as one of eighteen historic armory buildings still remaining in the city.
- From the 1992 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report
This 3D printed part is made with a MakerBot standard Replicator (first version) FDM 3D printer. The layer height in ReplicatorG is set at 0.1 mm. The material is yellow PLA 1.75 mm plastic filament.
Download 3D-model for 3D print from www.thingiverse.com/thing:11882
The MakerBot Digitizer 3D-scanned Laser Cat model was used in this test of different layer thicknesses. The cat was scaled down to 50 mm in height and then 3D printed at the following layer heights:
- 0.40 mm (400 microns)
- 0.30 mm (300 microns)
- 0.20 mm (200 microns)
- 0.10 mm (100 microns) - Average width of a strand of human hair
- 0.05 mm (50 microns)
- 0.02 mm (20 microns)
All six cats where 3D printed on a MakerBot Replicator 2 with TRUE BLUE PLA plastic at 230 degrees C.
All layers where 3D printed with MakerWare's standard values as follows:
(400 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 90 mm/s
(300 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 90 mm/s
(200 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 90 mm/s
(100 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 90 mm/s
(50 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 60 mm/s
(20 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 40 mm/s
---
The 3D scanner: bit.ly/1a7y8hG
The 3D printer: makerbot.creativetools.se
The 3D model: www.thingiverse.com/thing:146265
Replicating my interpretation of the '35mm film look' using Lightroom. Let me know via a comment or mail what you think of it. More images to follow.
chromosomes: the middle one is mine, one is Cate's and one is Dauvit's. Thank you for Karola for the pin steel!
The MakerBot Digitizer 3D-scanned Laser Cat model was used in this test of different layer thicknesses. The cat was scaled down to 50 mm in height and then 3D printed at the following layer heights:
- 0.40 mm (400 microns)
- 0.30 mm (300 microns)
- 0.20 mm (200 microns)
- 0.10 mm (100 microns) - Average width of a strand of human hair
- 0.05 mm (50 microns)
- 0.02 mm (20 microns)
All six cats where 3D printed on a MakerBot Replicator 2 with TRUE BLUE PLA plastic at 230 degrees C.
All layers where 3D printed with MakerWare's standard values as follows:
(400 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 90 mm/s
(300 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 90 mm/s
(200 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 90 mm/s
(100 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 90 mm/s
(50 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 60 mm/s
(20 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 40 mm/s
---
The 3D scanner: bit.ly/1a7y8hG
The 3D printer: makerbot.creativetools.se
The 3D model: www.thingiverse.com/thing:146265
3D printer filament spool holder for MakerBot Replicator
Made on a makerbot.creativetools.se
Download the file for free from: www.thingiverse.com/thing:72746
Replicated from this image in the JR James Collection: www.flickr.com/photos/jrjamesarchive/9496121190/in/photos...
Posing with my para car a couple of years ago..
Now trying a similar pose with my car!!
Not quite the same!! 😅
But taken at almost the same spot in Loxley Sheffield..
So now time for a bit more NHS/YAS stuff again!!
Been retired a year and a bit, so been there and done that!!
CFR-ing is a volunteer roll, no dosh.
Have to use own car, (can claim milage) no blue lights or speeding either!!
www.yas.nhs.uk/get-involved/volunteer-with-us/community-f...
Our Community First Responder (CFR) scheme is a life-saving partnership with local communities. As authorised volunteers CFRs form teams across Yorkshire to help reduce the number of pre-hospital deaths.
Our CFRs are trained to provide life-saving treatment to patients in the vital first few minutes of an emergency until our ambulance crew arrives. If effective treatment is provided quickly, lives can be saved and disability reduced. This is especially true for heart attacks and medical conditions which have caused someone to lose consciousness.
When a 999 call is received in our Emergency Operations Centre (EOC), an ambulance response is dispatched. At the same time, a CFR on-call in the area can be alerted and asked to attend the incident to ensure that help reaches the patient as quickly as possible.
It will be some time before we see
“slime, protoplasm, &c.” generating
a new animal. But I have long
regretted that I truckled to public
opinion, and used the Pentateuchal
term of creation, by which I really
meant “appeared” by some wholly
unknown process. It is mere rubbish,
thinking at present of the origin of
life; one might as well think of the
origin of matter.
Charles Darwin to James D.Hooker,
March 29, 1863
Relax, there’s nothing wrong with the
transposition paper. People aren’t
ready for this yet. I stopped publishing
in refereed journals in 1965 because
there was no interest in the maize
controlling elements.
Barbara McClintock to Mel Green, 1969
-----------
Sometimes my students and others have asked me: “what was first in evolution – retroviruses or retrotransposons?” Since Howard Temin proposed that retroviruses evolved from retrotransposons (Temin 1980; Temin et al.1995) the other alternative that retroviruses emerged first and were the predecessors of LTR-retrotransposons has since been a controversial issue (Terzian et al., this BOOK). While DNA-transposons could not have existed in an ancestral RNA world by definition, sure enough, some arguments definitely point towards a pre-DNA world scenario in which retroelements were the direct descendants of the earliest replicators representing the emergence of life. First, these replicators likely catalyzed their own or other’s replication cycles via the catalytic properties of RNA molecules. After translation had emerged some replicators possibly encoded an RNA polymerase first. This later evolved into reverse transcriptase (RT), i.e. the most prominent key-factor at the transition into the DNA world. Simultaneously, replicators could also have encoded membrane protein-genes such as the env gene of recent DNA-proviruses. Membranes were likely present much earlier as prebiotic oily films that supported the evolution of a prebiotic-protometabolism (Dyson 1999; Griffiths 2007). However, how these promiscuous communities of ancestral molecules and protocells interacted, and how the exact branching chronology of earliest events in molecular evolution led to the emergence of replicators, membrane slicks, obcells (Cavalier-Smith2001) still remains a mystery. It still underscores CharlesDarwin’s statement cited top, while Barbara McClintock’s remark more than 100 years later (cited top), represents the spirit for not giving up these most fundamental topics. One scenario is very likely: from the geochemically dominated times of the early planet earth, prebiotic promiscuous communities including membranes, proto-peptides, metabolites, and replicators represented the ingredients of Darwin’s “wholly unknown process.” From these, we now think, life emerged in conformity with a dual definition of life based on genetics and metabolism. The platform for transposon-research is simple. Besides “genes,” transposable elements evolved as indwelling entities within all cellular genomes. Thereby, they exhibited both a parasitic as well as a symbiotic double-feature that may date back to the very beginnings of life itself. Celebrating Charles Darwin’s bicentenary this year, we certainly do well to honor the fact that Darwin’s concept of gemmules directly led to our present day term“genes” (Gould 2002; Lankenau 2007b). How pleased would Darwin have been to see this idea brought onto the right track, e.g. through the works of Mendel, Weismann, deVries, or McClintock. How pleased would he have been to know how close we come today to his grand challenge: “The Origin of Species.” Darwin, in fact even came as close as he could to humanities deepest concern formulating his famous statement:
“It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.”
(Charles Darwin, 1871).
This statement also perfectly highlights our current technical hitches – but some have been overcome, and transposable elements have their share in approaching the solution of the grand enigma. How pleased would Darwin have been if he could have shared our modern insights into transposon-biology – as we now understand some of the inner workings of transposon activities and of analogous selfish genetic elements that triggered molecular, coevolutionary chases through sequence space and the emergence of driver systems resulting in “molecular peacock’s tails” such as “autosome killer-chromosomes,” “selfish sex chromosomes,” and “genomic imprinting machineries.” Despite his surmise that present day metabolism would devour or absorb all ancient metabolic systems, we now understand that a great deal of ancient bits of information survived inside the chromosomes of all organisms in the form of sequence relicts. A lot of these ancient molecular relicts belong to the stunning, endogenous survival machines that always represented the major engines of evolution since the times of the genetic takeover–in a sense they form the pillars of life, capable of shaping the evolution of genomes and opportunistically altering genome structure and dynamics: transposable elements and viruses as their extracellular satellites, that fill our world’s oceans with an unimaginable number of 1031 entities, or else, 107 virions per ml of surface seawater (Bergh et al.1989; Williamson et al., 2008).
In fact, life began as and is driven by an emergent self-organizing property. Transposable elements seem to have played a significant role as executors of Gould’s / Eldgredge’s Punctuated Equilibrium. How are transposable elements defined and why are they important?Transposable elements are specific segments of genomic DNA or RNA that exhibit extraordinary recombinational versatility. Treating a transposable element as an individual biological entity, it is best defined as a natural, endogenous, genetic toolbox of recombination. This entity also overlaps with a wider definition of the term gene. A transposable element is typically flanked by non-coding, direct, or inverted repeat sequences of limited length (less than 2 kb) often with promoter- and recombinational functions. These repeats flank a central core sequence, which among few other genes encodes a transposase/integrase and/or reverse transcriptase (RT). Transposable elements are the universal components of living entities that appear to come closest in resembling the presumed earliest replicators (including autocatalytic ribozymes) at the seed crystal level of the origins of life. Stuart Kauffman realized that Darwinian theory must be expanded to recognize other sources and rules of order based on the internal numeric, genetic, and developmental constraints of organisms and on the structural limits and contingencies of physico-chemical laws (Kauffman 1993). While Kauffman’s approach is a step toward a deep theory of homeostasis, it is smart to define the starting point of life as the catalytic closure of two elementary systems intrinsic to all forms of cellular life:(1) prebiotic protometabolism and (2) genetic inheritance encompassing transposon-like replicators. Both (1) and (2) formed a duality at the emergence of life. As forNewton’s second law of motion (F = ma) the couplet of terms metabolism and inheritance is defined in a circle; each (gene and biotic metabolism) requires the other. Infact, this circularity lay behind Poincaré’s conception of fundamental laws as definitional conventions (Kauffman 1993). Further, the logical separation of the two is technical only and for argumentational, experimental purposes it is useful. On the primordial earth, ordered prebiotic proto-metabolism (Dyson1999) likely congregated in the vicinity of geochemically formed membrane surfaces or within hemi cells or obcells as Cavalier-Smith called them (Cavalier-Smith 2001; Griffiths 2007). Such earliest metabolically ordered environments perhaps were too dynamic to establish long chained replicators such as RNA. At present it appears more realistic to assume the origin and growth of long RNA molecules in sea ice (Trinks et al. 2005). Freeman Dyson unfolded a possible series of evolutionary steps establishing the modern genetic apparatus, with the evolutionary predecessors of transposable elements (i.e. replicators) at the heart of this process, establishing the modern genetic apparatus. Let us assume that the origin of life “took place” when a hemicell contained an ordered, homeostatically stable metabolic machinery (compare the similar ideas of Cavalier-Smith 2001). This system maintained itself in a stable homeostatic equilibrium. The major transition, establishing life was the integration of RNA as a self-reproducing cellular “parasite”but not yet performing a symbiotic genetic function for the hemicell. This transitional state must have been in place before the evolution of the elaborate translation apparatus linking the two systems could begin (Dyson1999). The first replicators were not yet what we call transposable elements sensu stricto. They still had to evolve genes for proteins such as integrase and reverse transcriptase (RT). This transitional state of merging metabolism and replication represented the first of life’s punctuated equilibria (Gould2002) resulting in the inseparable affiliation of parasitic/symbiotic interactions of metabolites and replicators. The inseparable affiliation of symbiotic/parasitic features is the most typical characteristic of transposable elements active within modern genomes. After the genetic code and translation had been invented, and when the first retroelements evolved RT from some sort of RNA replicase, transposable elements (i.e. retroelements) triggered yet another punctuated equilibrium, i.e. the transition from the RNA world to an RNA/DNA world. Amazingly, the deep window into earth’s most ancient past is still reflected by the vivid actions of transposable elements and viruses within all present-day genomes–it also includes the significant chimerical feature of parasitic versus symbiotic interdependencies. From time to time – typically, as evolution is tinkering (Jacob 1977) – transposable element sequences that usually evolve under the law sof selfish and parasitic reproductive constraints became domesticated as useful integral parts of cellular genomes. One of the most forceful examples is the repeated domestication of sequence fragments from an endogenous provirus reprogramming human salivary and pancreatic salivary glands during primate evolution (Samuelsonetal.1990). The other prominent example of transposon domestication is the evolution of V(D)J recombination from the “RAG-transposon” crucial for the working of our immune system (Agrawal etal. 1998). The above considerations force us to discern the historic rootage of transposable elements in geological deep time. The following chapters will serve sketching some of the enduring consequences of the emergence of transposable elements as inseparable constituents of modern genomes –as indwelling forces of species, populations and cells, recent and throughout evolution. The first two chapters establish key aspects of the significance of transposon dynamics as major engines of evolution on the level of genomes, populations, and species. The first chapter summarizes general theoretical approaches to transposon dynamics applicable to prokaryotes, as well as eukaryotes, with emphasis onthe parasitic nature of transposable elements. Arnaud Le Rouzic and Pierre Capy point out that the evolution of a novel transposon insertion is similar to the dynamics of a single locus gene exposed to natural selection, mutations, and genetic drift. Different “alleles” can coexist at each insertion locus, e.g., a “void” allele without any insertion, a complete insertion, and multiple variants of deleted defective, inactivated alleles progressively accumulating through mutational erosion. Even though not mentioned in this context, the first chapter nicely approaches the NK model of Stuart Kauffman that forms the conceptual backbone of his grand opus the “Origins of Order” (Kauffman 1993, pp. 40–43). In the NK model N is the number of distinct genes in a haploid genome while K is the average number of other genes which epistatically influence the fitness contribution of each gene. Le Rouzic and Capy address the problem of a stable equilibrium. This, perhaps in the future promises to become congruent with Kauffman’s prediction that many properties of the fitness-landscapes created with the NK model appear to be surprisingly robust and depend almost exclusively upon N and K alone (Kauffman 1993, p. 44). The second chapter merges historical aspects of transposable element dynamics at the infra- and trans-specific populational level with modern approaches at the epigenetic level. While transposable elements were first discovered by Barbara Mc Clintock in maize, Christina Vieira etal. focus and underscore the importance of Drosophila as a model organism in transposon research and populational studies. The third chapter by Agnès Dettai and Jean-Nicolas Volff exemplifies the SINE6 retroelements as a model system of real novel insertions of transposable elements within variable chromosomal sites. SINES are shown as key examples for the powerful mode of evolutionary genome dynamics. Novel insertions not only create new fitness landscapes on which selection can act but if established within all germline genomes of a species they become powerful molecular morphological markers that are employed for cladistic analysis identifying unambiguous branching points in phylogenetic trees. This chapter truly represents the legacy of Willi Hennig’s phylogenetic systematics (Hennig 1966; Hennig 1969) on a modern molecular platform. The chapter also lists a number of software tools making whole genome analysis feasible. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on transposable elements, and on the origin and regulation by means of double-stranded RNA and RNA interference (RNAi), another key-factor with evolutionary significance. While King Jordan and Wolfgang Miller review the control of transposable elements by regulatory RNAs and summarize general aspects of genome defense Christophe Terzian et al. in Chapter 5 present insights into the most interesting and the first example of an insect retrovirus, i.e. the endogenous gypsy retrotransposon of Drosophila. This retrovirus indeed represents an unmatched model system for multiple aspects of the biology of endogenous retroviruses as well as of an active retrotransposon. The gypsy provirus had been studied previously in connection with the host encoded Zn-finger protein Suppressor of Hairy Wing [Su(Hw)]. This protein turned out to be a chromatin insulator regulating chromatin boundaries and controlling enhancer-driven promoter activities. Its repetitive binding site within the gypsy provirus must have evolved within the gypsy retroelement by means of transposon evolution, perhaps in a quasi species-like way. It is one of the most impressive examples demonstrating the emergence of the potential power of novel regulatory functions within host genomes (Gdula et al. 1996;Gerasimova and Corces 1998; Gerasimova et al. 1995). Terzian et al. (Chapter 5) advance our understanding and broaden our insights of gypsy driven by piRNA control mechanisms located within the heterochromatic flamenco locus. They further review recent findings as to the role of the envelope (Env) membrane protein serving as a model for retroviral horizontal and vertical genome transfer. Another spectacular evolutionary example is presented in Chapter 6 by Walisko et al. It is the story of the revitalization of an ancient inactive DNA transposable element called Sleeping Beauty. It was reconstructed based on conserved genomic sequence-information only in the laboratory. The story is like Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park scenario, where dinosaurs were reconstructed from DNA in mosquito blood fossilized in amber. While Crichton’s experiments were fiction, Sleeping Beauty is a real, reanimated “transposon-dinosaur.” It existed for millions of years as an eroded, defective molecular fossil within a fish genome and was reactivated to study host-cell interactions in experimentally transfected human cells. Last but not least, the final chapter by Izsvák et al. describes the interactions of transposable elements with the cellular DNA repair machinery. Barbara McClintock first recognized the interdependence of chromosome breaks and transposition inher famous breakage fusion-bridge cycle (McClintock 1992 (reprinted)). In the early 1990s Bill Engels and co-workers discovered the fundamental, prominent double-strand break repair mechanism they called Synthesis-Dependent Strand Annealing (SDSA) as the underlying molecular mechanism repairing P-transposable element induced double-strand breaks. This mechanism of homologous recombination is now widely recognized and its role in genome dynamics is interwoven into many volume chapters of this book series. As regards content Chapter 7 therefore closes the cycle and links this fourth book volume of the series to the first volume integrating multiple aspects of genome integrity (Lankenau 2007a). Altogether, this book gives insight and a future perspective regarding the significance of transposable elements as selfish molecular drivers and universal features of life that exhibit in the words of Burt and Trivers“ a truly subterranean world of sociogenetic interactions usually hidden completely from sight” (Burt and Trivers, 2006). I most cordially thank all chapter authors for contributing to this volume on genome dynamics and transposable elements. Most importantly, I am deeply grateful to all the referees whose names must be kept in anonymity. At least two for each chapter were involved in commenting, shaping, and struggling with the individual scripts – I really, greatly appreciate their efforts! I thank Jean Nicolas Volff for organizing the transposable element meeting at Wittenberg some time ago and helping to invite some of the authors. I also thank the editorial staff at Springer who have always been patient with the editors and authors alike and have provided much help. I especially thank the managing editor Sabine Schwarz at Springer Life Sciences (Heidelberg) and the desk editor Ursula Gramm (Springer, Heidelberg) for their enduring assistance. I would also like to mention that le-tex publishing services oHG, Leipzig did a good job in production editing and preparing the manuscripts for print.
Ladenburg, April 2009
Dirk-Henner Lankenau
A seminal badge as it represents the pioneering days of the 'permanent' Holiday Camp. It graphically illustrates a single timber framed holiday hut and replicates the type of dewlling holidaymakers would have stayed in at the start of the 1920s, at Potter's Camp, Hopton-On-Sea, near Great Yarmouth, Norfolk.
While the badge shows a holiday hut in isolation, the structures were laid out, next to one another, in a series of rows. Early Potter's Camp brochures proudly advertised that all huts were detached, had sea views, electric light and tiled roofs. Known as 'Sleeping Huts' for either single, double or three bed occupancy, they were described as 'conveniently furnished with beds fitted with spring-mattresses, dressing table with swing mirror and a liberal supply of books'. The Camp's social scene involved....'the nightly dance after supper and special concerts and fancy dress dances with orchestral music'. Its activities included, billiards, table tennis, outdoor tennis, putting green and bathing off the Camp's private beach.
Meals were served in a large communal 'Dining Hut' and the Camp prided itself on its 'unfettered open-air life, good fellowship, and entire absence of conventional fuss. In delightful ease one can knock about in flannels from morning to night. What more delightful holiday can there be? It brings one closer to nature; creates new memories, and sends one home sturdier, brighter and happier'.
Herbert Potter, a solicitor's clerk from Norwich, founded Potter's camp in 1920. Inspired by the camaraderie experienced at nearby Caister 'canvas' camp, Potter's vision was to create a resort with the same friendly ambience but with 'permanent' timber based structures instead of canvas. Potter's achievement was, in effect, the forerunner of the quintessentially British Holiday Camp experience which Billy Butlin replicated, first of all in Skegness in 1936 and at his many other camps throughout the Britain and Ireland.
So what happened to Potter's Camp? Still owned by the Potter family, it grew from strength to strength and adjusted its business by targeting the luxury end of the 'resort' complex market. Today it operates as Potters Leisure Resort and in 2002 the English Tourist Council classed the complex as Britain’s first five-star holiday village. The Resort also sponsors and hosts the World Indoor Bowls Championships.
Photography, layout and design: Argy58
(This image also exists as a high resolution jpeg and tiff - ideal for a
variety of print sizes e.g. A4, A3, A2 and A1. The current uploaded
format is for screen based viewing only: 72pi)
Acrylic marker and ink on paper 9.85" x 13.85" May 8, 2025. www.saatchiart.com/en-jp/art/Drawing-Self-replicating-Sur...
3D printer filament spool holder for MakerBot Replicator
Made on a makerbot.creativetools.se
Download the file for free from: www.thingiverse.com/thing:72746
The MakerBot Digitizer 3D-scanned Laser Cat model was used in this test of different layer thicknesses. The cat was scaled down to 50 mm in height and then 3D printed at the following layer heights:
- 0.40 mm (400 microns)
- 0.30 mm (300 microns)
- 0.20 mm (200 microns)
- 0.10 mm (100 microns) - Average width of a strand of human hair
- 0.05 mm (50 microns)
- 0.02 mm (20 microns)
All six cats where 3D printed on a MakerBot Replicator 2 with TRUE BLUE PLA plastic at 230 degrees C.
All layers where 3D printed with MakerWare's standard values as follows:
(400 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 90 mm/s
(300 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 90 mm/s
(200 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 90 mm/s
(100 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 90 mm/s
(50 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 60 mm/s
(20 microns) - 15% infill - perimeters 2 - speed 40 mm/s
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The 3D scanner: bit.ly/1a7y8hG
The 3D printer: makerbot.creativetools.se
The 3D model: www.thingiverse.com/thing:146265
Frankie Foster MUST BE BANNED Frankie Foster yells, screams, makes freaky spikey eyelashes and triangular eyes replicating that mean scary looking grumpy face with the freaky spikey eyelashes and triangular eyes and razor blade forehead wrinkles they used to have on Gordon in the old live action model version of Thomas and Friends and meanly gnashing her teeth when she gets mad which is mean-spirited because it is okay to get mad but it is not okay to yell, scream, make freaky spikey eyelashes triangular eyes, aim guns, destroy people's toys and belongings or any other mean spirited things when getting mad whereas Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy MUST BE KEPT FOREVER because Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy are kind-hearted, caring, respectful, helpful and other kind-spirited stuff just like the Disney Character Pinocchio which makes Raggedy Ann, Raggedy Andy, and the Disney Character Pinocchio extremely school appropriate because media does have to be kind-spirited like Walt Disney's animated films Snow White and Pinocchio, Corduroy The Bear with two buttons on his overalls, Blue's Clues, and Raggedy Ann and Andy and other kind-spirited media in order for it to be school appropriate not with mean inappropriate anger with freaky spikey eyelashes and triangular eyes etc replicating that mean scary looking grumpy face with the freaky spikey eyelashes and triangular eyes and razor blade forehead wrinkles they used have on Gordon in the old live action model version of Thomas and Friends like Frankie Foster does in Forster's Home for Imaginary Friends. Mean teachers getting students arrested for having autism or other disabilities MUST BE BANNED because that is very mean and hurtful and causes trauma to students with autism and other disabilities especially in modern Simpsons (The Simpsons seasons 19 and later) Chief Wiggums was getting people arrested for having autism and other disabilities is why modern Simpsons MUST END IMMEDIATELLY and that Nelvana's version of Corduroy the Bear MUST BE REVIVED with the premiere of Two Buttons again and Forever IMMEDIATELY and a lot of big schools with Bogen Multicom 2000 also have mean teachers getting students arrested for having autism or other disabilities is another reason why Bogen Multicom 2000 is a very mean-spirited PA System along their bell tones not sounding like a bell at all especially the in this picture of a mean teacher getting a boy arrested for having autism is in a school with a Bogen Multicom 2000 and allowing mean spirited stuff and allowing an ice cream truck to keep the bad old outdated red trapezoid children slow crossing warning blades that word IF-SAFE STOP THEN-GO is why I am dead furious with Bogen Communications and Fox Broadcasting and getting students arrested for having autism or other disabilities is one of the extremely bad impact modern Simpsons (The Simpsons seasons 19 and later) has gave us along with reusing bad things they used to make in the past and how to be mean and scary which are extremely bad. So this is why all broadcasts of The Simpsons MUST BE BY LAW MANDATED to be ONLY reruns of classic Simpsons (first 18 seasons of The Simpsons). This is why all schools MUST BE BY LAW MANDATED to be set up like Middleborough, Hilltop School from Timothy Goes to School, and or my DeVry building in North Brunswick, NJ and all with green chalkboards, electric mechanical wall bells, and Corbeil school buses and other school buses with electric stop arms, and only kind-spirited stuff like Disney Snow White and Pinocchio stuff and Corduroy the Bear with two buttons on his green corduroy overalls and Steve Notebooks etc, and no mean-spirited stuff like Bogen Multicom 2000 and that mean scary looking grumpy face with the freaky spikey eyelashes and triangular eyes and razor blade forehead wrinkles they used to have on Gordon in the old live action model version of Thomas and Friends and no processed foods in the school lunches. This is why McDonald's restaurants MUST BE BY LAW MANDATED to be McEyebrows with the yellow and orange striped awnings, arch wedge the new aluminum exterior I have created, or the original 1970s version of the iconic double sloped mansard roof and better and safe updated indoor PlayPlaces with low and safe steps and slides and green chalkboards and or just the dining room option (no playplace), This is why all ice cream trucks MUST BE BY LAW MANDATED to be all updated to the current updated yellow trapezoid children slow crossing warning blades that word CHILDREN SLOW CROSSING and or school bus stop signs and that all ice cream trucks MUST BE BY LAW MANDEDTED TO GET RID of the bad old outdated red trapezoid children slow crossing warning blades that word IF-SAFE STOP THEN-GO for good, This is why Crayola Crayon boxes MUST BE BY LAW MANDATED to be new modern 1997 boxes. This is why school PA systems MUST BE BY LAW MANDATED to be Rauland Telecenter or PA systems with no bell tones. And this is why Nelvana and Hanna-Barbera MUST TAKE OVER Warner Bros. Animation and Fuzzy Door Productions. And from now on the only childrens' books from the McDonald's double-sloped mansard era people MUST reuse in schools, republish, restore, reprint, and re-create are ONLY little golden books with the classic character train back cover template with Tootle pulling the long train of characters and Donald duck waving the flag saying "The World of Little Golden Books" not any of those old Thomas books with pictures from the old live action model version of Thomas and Friends so we will never ever have to deal with that mean scary looking grumpy face with the freaky spikey eyelashes and triangular eyes and razor blade forehead wrinkles they used to have on Gordon in the old live action model version of Thomas and Friends ever again. That mean scary looking grumpy face with the freaky spikey eyelashes, triangular eyes, and razor blade forehead wrinkles they used to have on Gordon in the old live action model version of Thomas and Friends is the worst mean spirited anger imagery because the way how that face is modeled was depicting Gordon the Big engine about to kill people by running over them and about to come out of the TV and kill the viewers of the show by running over them which is very bad and murding is the worst crime. Original photo credited to TrustaMann on Deviantart.com. Parents and Teachers being mean to them and destroying their kid's toys and belongings and yelling "GOD DAM HELL" and "GOD IN HELL" as a punishments MUST BE BANNED AND ILLEGAL EVERYWHERE FOREVER!!!!!!!! because Parents and Teachers taking away and destroying kid's toys and stuff as a punishment is being mean to kids and hurts their feelings real bad and cry which is extremely bad and parents and teachers use scary inappropriate behaviors like yelling "GOD DAM HELL" and meanly yell I'm so god dam cross with you whey they take away kid's toys and stuff needs to stop forever. And at Holly Springs school in my 5th grade school year there were mean teachers that got mean and super mad at me and took away my Steve notebook and forced me to see the freaky spikey eyelashes, razor blade forehead wrinkles, and triangular eyes they used to had on Gordon's grumpy face in the old model version of Thomas and Friends which scared me and other kids real bad when they meanly called me bad just because I made one bad choice and I am a good boy and always try to be kind and respectful. And in the old model version of Thomas and Friends, Gordon looked like an evil man with a gun when he gets grumpy is why I hate the old model version of Thomas and Friends and say that the old model version of Thomas and Friends MUST BE BANNED and good thing I the kind and respectful teachers gave me back my Steve Notebook. Also in my 5th grade year at Holly Springs there was a preschool class with a secondary teachers being mean and got super mad at the little kid and took away his toys and stuff and destroyed them and made the little kid sit in the hallway and and forced and made the little kid to see the freaky spikey eyelashes, razor blade forehead wrinkles, and triangular eyes they used to had on Gordon's grumpy face in the old model version of Thomas and Friends and the little kid cried real hard and I felt bad for the little kid but at least Santa mended the little kids destroyed toys back together at his workshop and gave the toys back to the little kid and at also it is a good thing Thomas and Friends moved to from live action models to CGI animations which is better and friendlier and made Gordon have a more accurate grumpy face similar to Homer Simpson in classic Simpsons episodes. This is why Bogen Multicom 2000 systems MUST BE BANNED from schools and that Bogen Communications MUST SHUT DOWN FOREVER. Especially, that mean scary looking grumpy face with the freaky spikey eyelashes, triangular eyes, and razor blade forehead wrinkles they used to have on Gordon in the old live action model version of Thomas and Friends is the worst mean spirited anger imagery because the way how that face is modeled was depicting Gordon the Big engine about to kill people by running over them and about to come out of the TV and kill the viewers of the show by running over them which is very bad and murding is the worst crime. Eventhough I am not worried about the mean teachers at Holly Springs school anymore, I still occasionally have nightmares about the mean teachers at Holly Springs school, one night I had 2 nightmares of the mean teachers at Holly Springs school and the first nightmare was in Mrs. Monic's room with the mean teachers at Holly Springs threatening to give me a punishment day by destroying my Steve notebook and forcing me to see that mean scary looking grumpy face with the freaky spikey eyelashes and triangular eyes and razor blade forehead wrinkles they used to have on Gordon in the old live action model version of Thomas and Friends and the mean then the mean teachers told me to shut up in a slow monster voice with teeth sticking together and then I woke up and realized it was only a dream and the second nightmare with the mean teachers at Holly Springs school the mean teachers were forbidding me to revive Nelvana's version of Corduroy the Bear with the premiere of Two Buttons again and Forever fixing Betty Quan's upsetting mistake for good and the mean teachers then were calling me a bad boy and then destroyed my Steve notebook and had Gordon in the old live action model version of Thomas and Friends kill me by running me over with that mean scary looking grumpy face with the freaky spikey eyelashes and triangular eyes and razor blade forehead wrinkles they used to have on Gordon in the old live action model version of Thomas and Friends and sending my soul to where the devil lives but good thing God came and angrily confronted the mean teachers at Holly Springs school and angrily destroyed that mean scary looking grumpy face with the freaky spikey eyelashes and triangular eyes and razor blade forehead wrinkles they used to have on Gordon in the old live action model version of Thomas and Friends and angrily put a grinning smile face on the live action model version of Gordon the Big engine and made the live action model version of Gordon the Big engine inanimate forever as his punishment and revived me and mended my Steve notebook back together and God told me that I am not a bad boy and then allowed me to revive Nelvana's version of Corduroy the Bear with the premiere of Two Buttons again and Forever fixing Betty Quan's upsetting mistake showing that they did get Corduroy's button out of the storm drain and put Corduroy's button back on Corduroy the Bear's green corduroy overalls and Corduroy the Bear does have two buttons on his green corduroy overalls forever. Especially when I was in 5th grade at Holly Springs, my anxiety had in my head of the mean teachers making evil magic giant steel crates to lock kids in with slamming lift doors forcing kids to see that mean scary looking grumpy face with the freaky spikey eyelashes and triangular eyes and razor blade forehead wrinkles they used to have on Gordon in the old live action model version of Thomas and Friends and the mean teachers having live action model version of Gordon the Big engine shoot a gun at the kids in the steel crate with that mean scary looking grumpy face with the freaky spikey eyelashes and triangular eyes they used to have on Gordon in the old live action model version of Thomas and Friends and the mean teachers having the live action model version of Gordon the Big engine kill the kids in the steel crate by running them over with that mean scary looking grumpy face with the freaky spikey eyelashes and triangular eyes and razor blade forehead wrinkles they used to have on Gordon in the old live action model version of Thomas and Friends and I had been having this scary thought since 5th grade at Holly Springs when the mean secondary teachers from Mrs. Monic's room was giving a little kid a punishment day in the hall and was giving me the idea of killing myself by setting my own body on fire I had this bottled up since 5th grade at Holly Springs school. This is why I am collaborating to make everything great again as when I revive Nelvana's version of Corduroy the Bear with the premiere of Two Buttons again and Forever fixing Betty Quan's upsetting mistake for good by showing that they did get Corduroy's button out of the storm drain and put Corduroy's button back on Corduroy the Bear's green corduroy overalls and Corduroy the Bear does have two buttons on his green corduroy overalls forever. This is why Bogen Multicom 2000 systems MUST BE BANNED from schools and that Bogen Communications MUST SHUT DOWN FOREVER. Especially, that mean scary looking grumpy face with the freaky spikey eyelashes, triangular eyes, and razor blade forehead wrinkles they used to have on Gordon in the old live action model version of Thomas and Friends is the worst mean spirited anger imagery because the way how that face is modeled was depicting Gordon the Big engine about to kill people by running over them and about to come out of the TV and kill the viewers of the show by running over them which is very bad and murding is the worst crime. And parents and teachers being mean to kids and destroying their kid's toys and belongings as punishments was giving me the idea of killing myself by setting my own body on fire.
Replicated from this image in the JR James Collection: www.flickr.com/photos/jrjamesarchive/9502223524
Playing with the endlessly reflected chandelier in the ballroom of the Escher in het Paleis museum in the Hague, Netherlands
1140 Franklin Avenue, Morrisania, Bronx, New York City, New York, United States
The Second Battery Armory, the first permanent armory located in The Bronx, was built in 1908-11 to the design of Charles C Haight, a former member of the New York State militia and a prominent architect known for his institutional buildings. Prominently situated on a sloping site, the armory is notable for its bold massing, expressive brick forms, picturesque asymmetry, and restrained Gothic vocabulary; the design of the structure retains references to the tradition of medieval imagery in earlier New York armory buildings, but bears a marked relationship to Collegiate Gothic institutions.
Having a large drill shed and an administrative building to the side, anchored by a corner tower, the armory was critically praised for its rational structural expression. Haight was awarded the commission, following a design competition, by the New York City Armory Board, the agency then authorized to construct new armories in the city.
The armory originally housed the Second Battery, a field artillery unit of the National Guard whose history dated to the Washington Gray Troop of 1833; units which were successors to the Second Battery remained in the building until the 1980s. Its location in the Morrisania section of The Bronx reflects the rapid growth of the borough at the turn of the century and the accompanying expansion of public services. A one-story addition to the armory (c. 1928), by architect Benjamin W. Levitan, along much of its Franklin Avenue frontage, modified Haight's original design through a skillful near-replication of its features. The Second Battery Armory remains one of the most distinctive public buildings in The Bronx.
The National Guard and Armories
The Second Battery Armory was built for a unit of the National Guard of the State of New York, long the largest and most active state militia in the country. The tradition of state militias remained strong in America from the Revolution through the nineteenth century; in 1792 Congress passed an act that established uniformity among the various state militias.
While the volunteer militia provided a large portion of the fighting forces in the nineteenth century, during the Civil War (at which time the name "National Guard" came into common usage) the readiness of the militia for warfare and its relationship to the standing army were called into question.
The New York Armory Law of 1862 attempted to address these issues by spurring the creation of regiments and armories, but met with little success in the aftermath of the war. With changes in American society in the second half of the nineteenth century - increasing industrialization, urbanization, labor union activity, and immigration - the role of the National Guard was affected, leading to its resurgence.
In the midst of a severe economic depression, the first nationwide general strike over working conditions occurred after a railroad strike in 1877; the National Guard was called to support police and federal troops against strikers and their supporters in dozens of American cities. Although units had been called previously to quell civil unrest, after 1877 the role of the National Guard was largely to control urban workers in strikes and "riots," and a wave of armory building began nationally.
The term "armory" refers to an American building type that developed in the nineteenth century to house volunteer state militias, providing space for drills, stables, storage, and administrative and social functions.
Aside from their military and police function, units of the National Guard were in large part social organizations; some, like the prestigious Seventh Regiment (first to adopt the term "national guard"), drew members from the social elite, while many others recruited primarily from local ethnic groups.
The earliest quarters for New York militia units were often inadequate rented spaces. The first regimental armory built in the city was the Tompkins Market Armory (1857-60), the result of a collaboration between the Seventh Regiment and the local butchers, in which a drill hall was above a market.
The Seventh Regiment later constructed its own armory (1877-79, Charles W. Clinton, 643 Park Avenue, a designated New York City Landmark), which had national influence in establishing the armory as a distinct building type while stimulating other New York units to build their own armories.
The Seventh Regiment Armory, modelled in plan after such nineteenth-century railroad stations as the first Grand Central Station, features a fortress-like administrative "headhouse" building with a central tower, connected to a drill shed which utilizes iron trusses to span a large space.
In 1884 the New York State Legislature created an Armory Board in New York City. The Board was charged with making the arrangements to condemn land for, to allocate funds for, and to authorize and oversee the construction, furnishing, and maintenance of, armories for National Guard units in the city; these buildings were owned by the City.
The Armory Board consisted originally of the Mayor, the senior officer of the local National Guard, and the Commissioner of Public Works, but was expanded in 1886 to include the second senior officer of the local National Guard and the President of the Board of Taxes and Assessments; its jurisdiction also included Brooklyn and Queens after consolidation of the boroughs into New York City in 1898.
Before 1900, six armories had been built in Manhattan through the Board, while two structures were built independently in Brooklyn. After 1900 the Board generally employed competitions for the design of new armories. Between 1900 and 1911 the Board authorized construction of three more armories (and one replacement) in Manhattan, three (plus an extension) in Brooklyn, and the Second Battery Armory in The Bronx, while New York State and Kings County built an additional six in Brooklyn and Queens.
By the time of the construction of the Kingsbridge Armory (1912-17, Pilcher & Tachau, 29 West Kingsbridge Road, a designated New York City Landmark), the second permanent armory in The Bronx and one of the largest in the United States, there were twenty-some actively functioning armories in New York City, and the great era of armory building in the city drew to a close.
While there were no formal standards for the plan and design of armories, and while various units had somewhat different needs, nearly all New York armories of this period shared the functional features of the Seventh Regiment Armory model.
A general consensus was reached about the appropriateness of the architectural imagery of the medieval fortress or castle for the armory's exterior appearance. Observers mentioned fortified towns in southern France and Mexico, and English, Scottish, and Norman castles, of the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, among others, as stylistic prototypes for New York City armories.
The medieval appearance helped to signify the armory as a distinct building type, connoted its military function, as well as the concepts of power and control, and assisted functionally in the military defense of the building, if necessary (most armories had such fortress features as turrets, towers, crenellated parapets, slit windows, impenetrable doors, window grilles, etc., which could be used by troops with guns or to thwart uninvited entry).
In the design of several New York armories of the early twentieth century, however, the picturesque medieval imagery, as well as the central towered plan of the Seventh Regiment Armory was rejected or modified.
The Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory (1904-06, Hunt & Hunt, 68 Lexington Avenue, a designated New York City Landmark) has a classically-inspired design, though still military in aspect. In the Troop C Armory (1904-08, Lewis F. Pilcher, 1569 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn), designed with classical and Art Nouveau motifs, the tower was placed near the corner, and the drill shed became an equally dominant feature. The Second Battery Armory also represented a change architecturally from the medieval model.
The Second Battery Armory
The unit which eventually became the Second Battery was established in 1833 as the Washington Gray Troop, Horse Artillery, part of the Third Regiment, New York State Artillery; in 1847 the designation was changed to Company I, Eighth Regiment. This troop, which formed part of a battalion of cavalry in 1867, was reorganized in 1879 as Battery E.
In 1881 the unit became known as the Second Battery, one of two artillery batteries in New York City. Since its founding the unit served during a number of major New York strikes and "riots,"5 as well as in the Civil and Spanish-American Wars, and either leased space or shared quarters in other units* armories. A fire in February, 1902, destroyed the 71st Regiment Armory, at Park Avenue and 33rd Street, which
then also housed the Second Battery; this provided the Battery "an opportunity to move northward, where we could secure larger and more commodious quarters for our organization."
Desiring a permanent location in The Bronx, the Second Battery moved in October, 1902, to a temporary armory (still extant; designed by architect John E. Kerby) at 1891 Bathgate Avenue, south of East Tremont Avenue.
The New York City Armory Board in 1903 selected a site for a new permanent armory for the Second Battery at the northeast corner of Franklin Avenue and East 166th Street, one block from the Third Avenue elevated station in the Morrisania section of The Bronx. The large lot, approximately 200 by 300 feet, was prominently located on a rocky slope and was the site of a small wooded estate, with a freestanding frame house known as the Allendorf Residence.
Across Franklin Avenue is a walled ridge of parkland, where the 166th Street roadbed terminates and leads to a stairway. The Commissioners of the Sinking Fund appropriated $86,430 for the purchase of the site in September, 1905. In November, 1906, the Armory Board authorized 5450,000 for the construction of the armory, and had accepted the "plans of Charles C Haight, as modified," for which he was paid $3500.
Haight, selected through a design competition among six New York firms,9 also acted as superintendent of construction on the project10 Construction contracts were awarded in 1907, including: Charles Schneider, site excavation ($23,750); Guidone & Galardi, general contractors (5398,500); Ravitch Brothers, ornamental ironwork; and White Fireproof Construction Co., concrete floor arches. Construction began in September of 1908, after Buildings Department objections, pertaining to footings and fireproof floor arches, were settled.
The Armory Board appropriated an additional 59444 for completion of the armory in November, 1909, "in accordance with certain changes in the contract and specifications of the Guidone & Galardi Co., made by the architect,"11 and provided over 548,000 for equipment and furnishings in 1910-11. The Second Battery moved into its new armory in June of 1910, though official completion of the building did not occur until the end of January of 1911.
The Second Battery Armory was the first permanent armory built in the Borough of The Bronx, and was one of the first New York armories built following a reorganization of the National Guard, which again changed its role, to that primarily of a reserve force for the army. As the fears of domestic insurrection had waned, the Dick Act was passed in 1903 (amended in 1908), which provided that Guard personnel and equipment conform to U.S. Army standards and that Guard units could be called into federal service during wartime even while still under state jurisdiction.
In February, 1908, the First Battalion, Field Artillery, was organized from the First, Second, and Third Batteries; the First Battalion headquarters, as well as the Second Battery, were soon located in the new Second Battery Armory.
Charles C. Haight
Charles Coolidge Haight (1841-1917) [fig. D], architect of the Second Battery Armory, was born in New York City and graduated from Columbia College in 1861. He enlisted in the prestigious Seventh Regiment, and was commissioned as First Lieutenant/Adjutant, and later Captain, in the 31st and 39th New York Volunteers between 1862 and 1863; wounded at the Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia in May of 1864, he retired from the military.
Haight then studied architecture and worked with New York architect Emlen T. Littell, a friend from the Seventh Regiment. Opening his own office in New York in 1867, Haight's career was advanced through his family and its connections with the Episcopal Church - his father, the Rev. Benjamin I. Haight, was the assistant rector of Trinity Church.
In the 1870s he was appointed architect for the Trinity Church Corporation; between 1882 and 1886 he designed for the Corporation a number of buildings downtown, including a library, apartment house, and vestry offices (none of which survives). Haight also designed warehouses in the Tribeca area between 1882 and 1912 for both the Corporation and its subsidiary, the Protestant Episcopal Society of the State of New York for the Promotion of Religion and Learning.
Haight's early buildings were churches and residences in the Victorian Gothic and English Tudor styles, though he later gained recognition for his public institutional buildings, many in the English Collegiate Gothic style. Haight's designs for educational institutions include buildings for Columbia's midtown campus (1874-84, demolished), the General Theological Seminary (1883-1901, now included within the Chelsea Historic District), eleven buildings at Yale University (1894-1914), and Trinity School (1893-94, 139-147 West 91st Street, a designated New York City Landmark). Haight designed a number of hospital buildings, including the Manhattan Eye & Ear Hospital (1880), the New York Cancer Hospital (1884-90, 2 West 106th Street, a designated New York City Landmark), the Orthopoedic Hospital (1896), and the Hospital for the Ruptured & Crippled (1897).
The Second Battery Armory, designed in 1906-08 and built in 1908-11, was a late example of Haight's public institutions, employing a "restrained" and "uncomplicated"™ Gothic vocabulary, bold massing and siting, and expressive use of brick and stone.
Morrisania
The Second Battery Armory is located in the section of The Bronx known as Morrisania, after the prominent Morris family, local landowners and politicians through several generations from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Morrisania became one of the twenty-one townships of Westchester County in 1788, and was annexed to the Town of Westchester in 1791.
The construction of the Harlem and Hudson River Railroads, beginning in 1842, resulted in the start of development and an increase in population, particularly an influx of German and Irish immigrants. Morrisania became part of the new township of West Farms in 1846, was the most populous section of Westchester County by 1855, and was chartered as a separate town in 1864.
When Morrisania was formally annexed to New York City in 1874, along with the western section of The Bronx, it had a population of over 19,000. By the late nineteenth century Morrisania had a predominantly German population, with its own local brewing industry. Expansion of the elevated railroad lines along Third Avenue, beginning in the mid-1880s, and later, the IRT subway system, reaching the area in 1904, helped spur a vast real estate boom.
Between 1874 and the completion of the Armory in 1911, the population of the annexed section of The Bronx grew by some 1300%, the majority of which had occurred after the annexation of the rest of The Bronx in 1895. The Bronx at that time would have been the seventh largest city in the United States. Starting in the
1930s, the ethnic composition of the area's population changed as the earlier groups moved and African-American and Puerto Rican families came to the neighborhood.
The immediate neighborhood of the Armory was known in the mid-nineteenth century as Eltona after Robert H. Elton, who had purchased property from Gouverneur Morris, built his home near Boston Road and 166th Street, and began subdivision of the land in the 1850s. Thomas Rogers, a prominent Wall Street financier, built a home on part of this land around 1872; the Rogers estate was divided for sale around 1900, the largest portion going to the City for the construction of Morris High School (1901-1904, CBJ. Snyder), the borough's first.
The remaining portion of the estate was developed with rowhouses in 1900-06; today these buildings constitute the Morris High School Historic District. Morris High School is one-half block to the east of the armory. Another structure, St Augustine's R.C. Church (1894, Louis H. Giele, 1183 Franklin Avenue), is one-half block to the north of the armory. Together these three buildings form an impressive architectural grouping, prominently sited on the hill.
The decision to locate the Second Battery Armory in The Bronx represents the growth of the borough at the turn of the century and the accompanying expansion of public services.
Design of the Second Battery Armory
In plan, the vast majority of the site of the Second Battery Armory is covered by the drill shed, with the administrative building or "headhouse" (here on the side rather than at the end of the drill shed) reduced to a narrow (30-foot deep) strip along the Franklin Avenue frontage. The drill shed was constructed with iron roof trusses which span 167 feet.
The drill (riding) hall is located on the main (first) floor. Below the drill hall, in the basement, were the stables (along 166th Street), a rifle range, a gun room, and a ramp to the first floor, and there were storage spaces along Franklin Avenue. Offices and reception and meeting rooms were located on the first floor of the administrative building. In the rest of the administrative building, were quarters and more reception rooms, as well as spectators galleries for the drill hall, on the second floor; a squad room, gymnasium, and general reception room on the third floor; and officers' rooms and maintenance and communication facilities in the upper stories of the tower. The spaces on the third floor required a larger width (38 feet), so the floors were partially cantilevered over the roof of the drill shed.
The exterior design of the armory [figs. F & GJ is a picturesque, asymmetrical composition which takes the maximum benefit of its prominent location on a sloping site on a hill, through its use of a corner tower, bold massing, and expressive brick forms.
While Haight's design kept several references to the tradition of medieval imagery in armories, such as the crenellated parapet and corbelled balcony, his use here of a restrained Gothic vocabulary is related more to the Collegiate Gothic style of his educational institutions. Haight's expressive and dramatic intentions in the armory design were clearly visible in the early, brooding sketch for the building published in The Brickbuilder in 1908.
The facade along 166th Street, virtually a brick curtain wall masking the end of the drill shed, has in appearance a nearly ecclesiastical aspect; a difference in height of twelve feet at each end due to the slope allowed for direct entrances to the drill hall and basement stables. The long Franklin Avenue facade of the administrative building was architecturally organized by end towers and intermediate pairs of buttresses and pilasters, which are expressive, structurally, of their placement at the side of the drill shed, with its trusses within.
The Second Battery Armory received favorable comment even before its completion. J. Hollis Wells, a lieutenant-colonel and member of the architectural firm of Clinton & Russell who was an authority on armories, wrote in 1908:
The site suggested the effectiveness of vertical masses, and these with a carefully studied sky-line gave the expression desired. Wide piers where strength was needed and a multiplicity of windows in the curtain walls between, the armory became an idealized type of 'mill construction'.... The silhouette against the sky, prominent through the building's high situation, has been perhaps the most carefully studied element of the facade, and on it the success of the exterior in a great measure depends. In short, its merit is in the composition of its masses of dark red brick with little or no ornament and a sparing use of sandstone.
Architecture in 1910 praised the armory as "probably the best in the City of New York.
The architecture is of a curious and fascinating style; powerful without being brutal, original without being bizarre. The military thought is at once apparent., but the windows are of ample size and as many as are needed to properly light the rooms within, not cut down to mere arrow slits as has been so often done.
The composition is exceedingly picturesque and has not been carried to a point which entails a sacrifice of the dignity so essential in a public building. . . . The complete disregard for symmetry displayed throughout the building is of much interest... . The mass of the tower looms up splendidly as seen from nearby points... . The interesting features are so many and the spirit of the design so complex that a cursory examination fails to impress one as does a more careful and thorough study. It is a building of the very highest interest and originality; quite the best as was before said, of our New York armories, and well worthy of its position as one of the city's monuments.
And noted critic Montgomery Schuyler, in Architectural Record in 1917, considered the armory virtually the best building in the entire borough of The Bronx. After scathing comments on the quality of buildings there, he went on to extoll the virtues of the armory:
The dimensions of the building would alone suffice to make it conspicuous. ... A flanking wall of 300 feet in extent cannot fail of making an impression, whatever its treatment... [Here] the walls have visibly sufficient depth, a depth which becomes most impressive and powerful where, as in the arched entrances, the whole thickness of the wall can be... 'revealed.' Moreover, there are three pairs of massive buttresses at intervals... the abutments of the huge roof trusses necessary for such a span.
Not only is the stability of the long wall put far beyond doubt by these devices, but the brute expanse becomes an ordered mass, an architectural design. ... In material... being common brick, though apparently chosen for color, and at any rate very lucky in its color - ... laid with wide red joints, and relieved in the right places... by a sparing introduction of brownstone the whole arrangement is expressive, rational, significant... The wall is most effectively framed between the terminal masses... . [At] the front., a series of crenellated serrations of the skyline, rising towards the centre... [indicates] the large and low curve of the actual roof. ... The suggestions of 'military Gothic' are not overdone, as they are so apt to be in similar erections.
They are confined to the crenellations of the parapets... and the corbelling of the balcony over the archway of the side... . These touches of tradition, denoting the purpose of the building are perfectly compatible with the fact that the detail throughout is simply straightforward structural modeling which might have taken the same forms if the designer had never heard of a Gothic castle, and is the logical expression of the materials and the construction employed. The photographs show how admirably consistent, restrained, and effective the architecture of the armory is, and what an effect it produces with utmost simplicity and unpretendingness of material.
Haight's expressive design was successful not only in providing a different architectural direction for armories while making references to armory tradition, but also in reflecting the building's function and structural composition.
The Armory Addition
At the request of the New York City Armory Board, architect Benjamin W. Levitan was hired in 1926 to draw plans "for the erection of an additional story providing adequate storage space" at the Second Battery Armory. Levitan's additional story, along the entire Franklin Avenue frontage of the armory north of the corner tower, was skillfully integrated with Haight's original design. Levi tan virtually replicated the features of Haight's top story, with the addition of a taller parapet and some brick patterning on the parapet and spandrels.
Benjamin W. Levitan (1878-1941), born in New York City and educated at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, was a prolific architect, active in New York City from 1900 to 1940. Upon his return to New York from Europe, he worked in the prominent firm of Warren & Wetmore, before establishing an independent practice in 1907. He developed a diverse expertise and was credited with the design of "hundreds of apartment houses, banks, factories, theatres, stadiums, schools, [and] gymnasiums."
He also obtained patents for "cell-block construction," a type of comfort station, and long-span construction for hangar sheds. His known commissions include the Central Jewish Institute (1922) on East 85th Street, the Women's House of Detention (1929, in association with Sloan & Robertson, 2-16 Greenwich Street, demolished), and a portion of Bloomingdale's Department Store. Levi tan was a member of the 22nd Regiment Engineers, New York National Guard, and his obituary mentioned his work at the Second Battery (then the "105th Field Artillery") Armory.
Description
The Second Battery Armory is a large (over 200 by 300 feet) red brick building consisting mostly of a drill shed, but also having a narrow administrative "headhouse" portion on the side of the drill shed. The brick is laid in Flemish double-stretcher bond while the watertable, coping, and trim are brownstone.
The two designed facades, three to five stories, are asymmetrically composed overall, although some sections are symmetrical; a massive, taller tower, rising up to six stories, is at the southwest corner of the building. The armory was originally constructed in 1908-11; an addition at the fifth story level was built along much of the Franklin Avenue facade c. 1928.
The long Franklin Avenue facade of the administrative building is anchored on the south by the corner tower (a smaller tower at the north end was incorporated into the addition). The design of the addition modified the facade by nearly replicating the original fourth-story features on the new fifth story. The overall facade is articulated by pairs of vertical buttresses which rise above the crenellated parapet, as well as intermediate pilasters on the third and fourth stories.
The corner tower features groupings of round-, segmental-, and pointed-arched windows of varying sizes, the latter expressed as a two-story arcade and having molded surrounds and decorative stone spandrels. Some of the windows in the bay just north of the tower are now blind; this section also has intermediate level spandrels.
The rest of the facade employs rectangular, and segmental- and round-arched window groupings of varying sizes. On the fifth story, and at the entrances at both ends, large pointed arches which are terminated by buttresses on the sides, before the imposts, are employed; those at the fifth story have recessed window arcades set within.
The northern end entrance has its original wood panelled doors and transoms. Surmounting the main corner entrance, with non-historic doors below the original panelled transoms, is a corbelled balcony with a flagpole. Doors lead onto the balcony, and the areas above are partially filled with brick.
A small window to the right of the entrance has an original decorative wrought-iron grille. The parapet and many of the spandrels of the upper two stories have decorative brickwork (dating from c. 1928). Ground-story windows have vertical-bar iron grilles.
The shorter 166th Street facade is arranged with the corner tower of the administrative building abutted by three three-story pavilions at the end of the drill shed, which are symmetrically composed and more planar; the sloping site creates a difference in height of twelve feet from end to end.
The tower has windows generally similar to those on its other facade, a small pedestrian entrance, with a non-historic door and stone stoop, surmounted by a double arched window with original cusped sash, and a small window to the left of the entrance with an original decorative wrought-iron grille.
The central drill shed pavilion has a two-story arcade of tall, narrow, molded pointed-arched openings which are now blind, above a plain stone panel; a double pointed-arched pedestrian entrance with original panelled doors and transoms and stone stoop and area way, and a stepped and crenellated parapet The central pavilion is flanked by two recessed sections, with four arched windows each on the second story, now half-filled with brick, and one louver each inserted on the ground story, and by two small tower-like pavilions which also employ the device at the large entrances and upper stoiy of pointed arches which are terminated by buttresses on the sides, before the imposts; those at the upper stoiy also have recessed window arcades set within.
The eastern (troop) entrance, with a non-historic rolldown gate, leads to the drill hall, while the western (troop) entrance, with non-historic doors and transoms, leads to the basement Ground-story windows have vertical-bar iron grilles.
The eastern side of the armory, which is now visible, including a three-story wing beside the drill shed, is unarticulated, with a combination of exposed brick and parging. The large roof monitors (probably added c. 1928) of the drill shed are also now visible along the east side. The windows of the building, mostly one-over-one double-hung wood sash with transoms are replacements of 1953-54. Exterior masonry repointing occurred in 1964.
Subsequent History
Following the completion of the armory in 1911, the Second Battery received a variety of different designations due to reorganizations within the National Guard.
In August of 1911 the First Battalion was reorganized, now with the Second, Third, and Sixth Batteries, which became known as Batteries A, B, and C In May of 1912, the First Battalion was reorganized within the Second Regiment, Field Artillery, but the regiment was reduced to the First Battalion again in October, and was transferred to the First Regiment, F.A.; in December Battery A was detached from that regiment, redesignated Battery B, and was assigned to the Second Battalion, F.A. The following month the Second Regiment was reconstituted, with the Second Battalion, Batteries D, E, and F, listed as located in the armory (Battery D was the successor to the Second Battery).
In 1916-17 this unit served in the New York State Artillery Brigade of the Sixth Division of the National Guard in U.S. service in Mexico, and during World War I served overseas in the 52nd F.A. Brigade, 27th Division. Around 1920, the unit was designated the 105th Field Artillery, Second Battalion, 52nd Brigade, 27th Division of the National Guard of the State of New York.
The U.S. War Department converted it to a "motorized unit" in 1934, and the basement stables of the armory were subsequently changed into garages. By the mid-1980s many of the Guard units were consolidated, and in 1988 the New York State Division of Military & Naval Affairs ended its jurisdiction over the building.
It is in City use today, administered by the Human Resources Administration, as a shelter for homeless New Yorkers. The building survives as a powerful architectural presence in the Bronx, and as one of eighteen historic armory buildings still remaining in the city.
- From the 1992 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report
A comparison of four different common 3D-print layer heights.
• 0.34 mm/layer - Low (340 microns)
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• 0.05 mm/layer - Super fine (50 microns)
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