Former Blackpool 'streamlined' Burlingham bodied Leyland PD2, No246 was one of the many preserved buses that was to be seen at the former St Helens CT bus garage, which was operated by the North West Transport Museum (NWTM). Such was the demand for parking spaces that buses where literally 'shoe-horned' in, making access to some of them almost impossible.

 

From 1991, the collection was opened to the public for occasional viewing, but the old bus garage was quickly falling into disrepair and the roof became damaged. In 1994 the museum was closed to the public on the grounds of safety. The NWTM then began a campaign to save the building and to get it repaired. Combined with the backing and support of St.Helens Council, the Museum secured funding, enabling it to be renovated and turned into a proper exhibition hall. The NWTM re-open its doors to the public in late 2006.

 

For more information about the NWTM please go to:

 

www.hallstreetdepot.info/index.html

 

During the period when the building was being renovated, many of the buses parked inside had to be moved out. Clearly, when the Museum reopened, it could not be crowded out with buses in the way it used to be, so a great many of the vehicles left the museum for good, finding homes elsewhere. 246, was one of those vehicles.

 

The bus had been new to Blackpool Corporation in 1949, and remained in passenger service until 1967, when it was passed to Blackpool's Permanent Ways Department for use as a mobile office and workshop. In 1969 she was sold to Lister of Bolton, who used the vehicle as an office, but being an enthusiast himself, the bus was later placed under cover at St Helens. In 2004 the bus passed to the Lancashire Transport Trust (LTT) for continued preservation, and awaits restoration.

 

Photo: 27th February 1994.

 

For more information about 246 and the LTT, please go to:

 

www.ltt.org.uk/ourbuses/blackpool_246.html

 

(The diesel-electric train)

tThe Aerotrain was a streamlined trainset introduced by General Motors Electro Motive Division in the mid-1950s. Like all of GM's body designs of this mid-century era, this train was first brought to life in GM's Styling Section. Chuck Jordan was in charge of designing the Aerotrain as Chief Designer of Special Projects. It utilized the experimental EMD LWT12 locomotive, coupled to a set of modified GM Truck & Coach divission 40-seat intercity highway bus bodies. The cars each rode on two axles with an air suppension system, which was intended to give a smooth ride, but had the opposite effect.

The two Aerotrain demonstrator sets logged over 600,000 miles (970,000 km) and saw service on the following railroads: the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway; the New York Central Railroad; the Pennsylvania Railroad; and the Union Pacific Railroad.

Starting in February 1956 the Pennsylvania Railroad ran the Pennsy Aerotrain between New York City and Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, leaving New York at 0755; the round trip was scheduled 7 hr 30 min each way. From June 1956 to June 1957 it ran between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

In 1956 Aerotrain No. 2 was leased as a demonstrator to the New York Central, and ran between Cleveland and Chicago.

In March 1956 the Aerotrain made experimental runs for theSatchison Topeka & Santa Fe Railway in California as the San Diegan between Los Angeles and San Diego. Its use ended because the trainset had to be turned after each trip and it needed helper locomotives on the Sorrento Grade north of San Diego.

 

Starting December 1956 Union Pacific ran the ex-New York Central Aerotrain as the City of Las Vegas between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The train was eventually relegated to Chicago commuter service on the Chicago & Rock Island Railroad.

 

GM's "lightweight with a heavyweight future" was introduced at a time when US passenger train revenues were declining due to competition from airlines and private automobile travel. Although it featured a streamlined design, the Aerotrain failed to capture the imagination of the American public. The cars, based on GM's bus designs and using an air cushioning system, were rough riding and uncomfortable. The design of the locomotive section rendered routine maintenance difficult, and it was underpowered. Both trainsets were retired in 1966 after a decade's use. The Museum of Tranportation in St. Louis, Missouri and the National Railroad Museum in Green Bay, Wisconsin each have one of the locomotives, and two of the cars.

 

(The steam engine)

Southern Pacific 4460 is the only surviving GS-6 Class steam locomotive. The GS-6 is a semi-streamlined 4-8-4 Northern type steam locomotive. GS stands for "General Services". The locomotive was built by the Lima Locomotive Works for the Southern Pacific in 1943. The GS-6 lacked side skirting and red and orange "Daylight" paint found on previous locomotives of the GS class, and were painted black and silver instead. This was because the US government controlled locomotive manufacturers during World War II and had turned down Southern Pacific's order of fourteen new Daylight locomotives. Southern Pacific re-designed the engine for general service and it was finally approved, but the government took four of them and gave them to the smaller and power-starved Western Pacific Railorad Their smaller size when compared to previous GS class locomotives and the fact that they were built during WWII earned them the nicknames of "War Babies" and "Baby Daylights".

4460 is famous for pulling what was to be the final movement of steam on the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1958. Following the final excursion, 4460 was donated to the Museum of Transportation in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 16, 1959, where the engine has since sat along with many other historic steam and diesel locomotives from around the country. The 4460 is sometimes called the "Forgotten Daylight", referring to its only surviving sibling, Southern Pacific 4449.

  

(This info was taken from Wkipedia and edited by me.)

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

 

A collaborative project of the Federal Public Works Administration and the newly established New York City Housing Authority, the Williamsburg Houses are notable as one of the earliest housing developments in the United States to reflect the ideas of the modern movement in architecture. In the 1920s Williamsburg was one of the most densely populated sections of Brooklyn and nearly six hundred, mostly frame, structures were demolished to create the 23.3 acre site. Proposed in 1934, this residential complex was skillfully designed by the Williamsburg Associated Architects during 1935 and most units were occupied by 1938.

 

The partnership included Richmond H. Shreve, of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, the architects of the Empire State Building, and William Lescaze, the Swiss-born architect who helped introduce the “International” style on the eastern seaboard. Lescaze was responsible for the design, which includes twenty 4-story structures on four “super” blocks turned at 15 degree angles to the street grid. Oriented to the sun and prevailing winds, this unusual layout produced a series of large and small courts, many of which flow into a large public space at the center of each block. A light-colored palette distinguishes the facades, executed in tan brick and exposed concrete.

 

Among the most prominent features are the entrances, marked by blue tile and projecting stainless steel canopies, and the handsome streamlined storefronts. The complex was widely discussed by contemporary critics and more than 25,000 New Yorkers applied for 1,622 apartments. During the mid-1990s, the buildings underwent an extensive restoration which included the replacement of all exterior materials. Sponsored by the Housing Authority, in consultation with the Landmarks Preservation Commission, these alterations were remarkably sensitive and in the 4th edition of the AIA Guide to New York City the “revivified” complex was called “the best public housing project ever built in New York.”

 

DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS

 

Housing the Masses

 

From the rowhouse to the apartment building, New York City has been a laboratory for innovative housing. Beginning after the Civil War, apartments, variously known as French Flats and tenements, were built to house the city’s surging population. Immigrants, for the most part, crowded into unregulated tenements, structures that maximized profits for developers while providing few amenities that we take for granted today, such as light, air, and private bathrooms.

 

Despite government efforts to legislate minimum standards in 1867 and 1879, initially private individuals took the most significant steps to make decent housing affordable to all. Several pioneering examples were located close to the Brooklyn waterfront, including the Home and Tower Buildings (William Field and Son, 1876-78), the Astral Apartments (Lamb & Rich, 1885-87) and Riverside (William Field and Son, 1890). The later complex surrounded a large tree-shaded courtyard incorporating a music pavilion and areas for drying laundry. Despite these, and a few innovative Manhattan developments, the majority of New Yorkers continued to live in substandard conditions.

 

The passage of the New Tenement Law in 1901 improved the situation, requiring that multiple dwellings be built on significantly larger lots, with fire escapes and separate “privies” for each family. After World War I, the garden apartment came into vogue. While most were built for the middle class, especially in Jackson Heights, a significant group were sponsored by unions and cooperative organizations that wished to provide members with inexpensive apartments. Significant examples include the Amalgamated Houses (Springsteen & Goldhammer, 1930) on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and the “Coops” built in the Bronx by the United Workers Cooperative Association (Springsteen & Goldhammer, 1925-27; Herman Jessor, 1927-29).

 

The first significant act of government intervention occurred in 1926 with the passage of the New York State Housing Law. Promoted by Governor Alfred E. Smith to encourage construction through the formation of local authorities that would sell bonds or seek federal funds, it had little impact until 1934 when the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) was established. The authority’s first project, aptly called the First Houses (Frederick L. Ackerman, 1934-36), was located in Manhattan’s East Village. Begun as a rehabilitation program involving the demolition of every third structure, due to structural problems the eight brick buildings were entirely rebuilt.

 

Throughout the early Depression, government-subsidized housing remained a controversial issue. Consequently, it was first promoted as worker relief, organized to create jobs but not compete with the commercial market. The first federal agency to involve itself with housing was the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) which was created in 1932 to provide low-interest loans to limited-dividend housing corporations. Of the two loans it made, one was toward the construction of Knickerbocker Village (John S. Van Wart & Frederick L. Ackerman, 1933). Built for the Fred F. French Company, this Chinatown-area development consists of two 12-story buildings, both enclosing an interior courtyard.

 

In mid-1933, as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Housing Division of the Public Works Administration (PWA) was established. What made this agency different from its predecessor, the RFC, was that it would be directly involved in the planning and construction of low-income housing. The program was a great success and over the next three and half years it collaborated on the design and construction of 51 projects in 36 cities, including the Harlem River Houses and the Williamsburg Houses.

 

The passage of the Wagner-Steagall Bill (aka U.S. Housing Bill) by the United States Congress in September 1937, strengthened the federal government’s commitment to housing, but shifted greater control to local authorities. The first New York City housing project to be financed under this program was the Red Hook Houses (Electus Litchfied, chief designer, 1938-39) in Brooklyn. Future construction, which would amount to more than half a million low-rental units nationwide by 1957, would be funded primarily through low-interest loans.

 

Site

 

The Williamsburg Houses are located in northwestern Brooklyn, approximately one mile east of the Williamsburg Bridge and two blocks south of Grand Street, a lively commercial thoroughfare. Founded as part of the town of Bushwick in the mid17th century, Williamsburg was incorporated as a village in 1827. The community prospered and by 1852 it was the 20th largest city in the nation. Three years later, Williamsburg became part of Brooklyn and was commonly referred to as the Eastern District. Although ferry service was important to the area’s development, it was the planning and construction of a second East River crossing, the Williamsburg Bridge, that caused the most dramatic growth.

 

Proposed in 1883, the bridge was completed with much fanfare in 1903, serving pedestrians, bicycles and horse-drawn vehicles. In subsequent decades, Williamsburg rivaled the Lower East Side in population and density. The Brooklyn Eagle claimed in 1920 that the bridge was part of the busiest traffic center in the nation and that a single block north of it was the most crowded in the world. Conditions in the neighborhood continued to deteriorate throughout the decade, so much so that the population began to decline.

 

In October 1933, the Federal Works Administration (PWA) established a slum clearance committee to study conditions throughout New York City. Richmond H. Shreve, who would later serve as chief architect of the Williamsburg Houses, was named director. Based on the committee’s recommendations, $25 million was set aside for a housing program in New York City. Under the direction of the NYCHA, a more comprehensive study was undertaken in 1934, focusing on fourteen neighborhoods, including Williamsburg. The PWA reported:

 

When the study was completed the blighted slum area of the Williamsburg section stood out as the best example where the most good could be done in wholesale clearance work.

 

Of 93 blocks studied, a grid of 12 was identified for redevelopment in Williamsburg. These blocks were chosen because property values were relatively low and the owners were willing to sell. Most of buildings were mixed-use, incorporating retail spaces at ground level and apartments above. Each lot was carefully documented: 90% of the structures were at least forty years old, 70% were built of wood, 78% had no central heating, and 67% had no private toilets. Such statistics were used to paint an extremely bleak picture of life there:

 

But the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, according to official surveys, is unique in that its slums bear the stamp of dull listlessness and despair . . . Laissez faire, exploitation, and land speculation have robbed the community of its natural potentialities for development and orderly urban life.

 

Public amenities were also in short supply; there were few schools and there were almost no parks.

 

Architects

 

Five architects were appointed to the NYCHA’s architectural board in May 1934: Richmond H. Shreve (1877-1946) of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, Matthew W. Del Gaudio (1889-1960), William Lescaze (1899-1969), Arthur C. Holden (18901993), and James F. Bly. As members of the board, their initial role was advisory. They would act as the authority’s chief architect, overseeing the design and construction of municipal housing citywide.

 

In June 1934 an open competition was held to choose the architects who would work on the Williamsburg Houses and other NYCHA projects. The program guidelines did not specify the location, but the grid chosen closely resembled the long blocks where the Williamsburg Houses would be built. Of 278 architects who participated, 5 of the 22 selected were assigned to the Brooklyn project: Samuel Gardstein, of Holmgren, Volz & Gardstein, G. Harmon Gurney (b. 1896), of Gurney & Clavan, John W. Ingle Jr., Paul Trapani (1887-1974), and Harry Leslie Walker (1877-1954).

 

In June 1935, a contract was signed with the Williamsburg Associated Architects. The partnership consisted of ten men: the five architects selected by jury, as well as the five members of the architectural board. Among them, Shreve had the most experience with large projects, having worked on a succession of major Manhattan skyscrapers, most notably, the Empire State Building (Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, 1931).

 

A graduate of the College of Architecture at Cornell University (1902), he began his career as a member of the school’s faculty and later joined the firm of Carrére & Hastings in New York City where he distinguished himself as having a “genius for the solution of operational and administrative problems.” Whereas prior to the Depression he mainly worked on office buildings, in his later years Shreve was associated with residential developments, most notably the Vladeck Houses (1940) on the Lower East Side, and Parkchester (1938-42), a development with more than twelve thousand apartments in the Bronx. During the late 1930s, he also served as a member of the board of design for the New York World’s Fair.

 

Design

 

Of the three initial projects built by the NYCHA and the PWA, the Williamsburg Houses were the most innovative. Shreve appointed Lescaze as the chief designer, responsible for the plan and elevations. In the 1930s, he was at the height of his career, profiled in publications read by professionals and the layman. Born near Geneva, Switzerland, in 1896, he studied in Zurich with the architect Karl Moser in 1915-19 and for a brief period worked in Paris with Henri Sauvage, an important designer of apartment buildings. Lescaze moved to the United States in 1920 and after working in Cleveland and New York City, formed a partnership with George Howe, a Philadelphia architect, in 1929.

 

Their association lasted four years and produced one architectural masterpiece, the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society building, completed in 1932. During the mid-1930s, he was extremely active, working on unrealized plans for the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, as well as building three of the earliest modern-style townhouses in Manhattan, his own house and studio, completed in 1934, as well as the Raymond C. and Mildred Kramer (1934-5) and Edward and Dorothy Norman (1940) houses. He also designed, with Albert Frey, the Chrystie-Forsyth Houses. Planned in 1931, this unrealized proposal was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s so-called “International Style” exhibition of 1932.

 

One of the most unique aspects of the Williamsburg Houses is the plan. To create the 23.3 acre complex, twelve blocks were acquired by the city, and the two east-west streets (Stagg and Ten Eyck) were closed to traffic to create four “super” blocks. All but one extend three full blocks from north to south, except part of the block between Manhattan and Graham Avenues that was set aside for a new junior high school and play area.

 

The development of New York City was closely tied to its gridiron. Introduced in 1811, it resulted in a city of predictable intersecting streets and avenues. In 1835, a similar plan was approved for Brooklyn and by the early 1850s the streets that cross through the site of the Williamsburg Houses had opened.

 

Most were named for area residents, such as Daniel Maujer, a lawyer and alderman, John and James Lorimer Graham, land jobbers, and James Scholes, a local land owner. The impact of this approach is visible throughout New York City, establishing blocks and lots of equal size and dimensions. Residential developers benefitted immensely, commissioning rowhouse and tenement designs that could be repeated without regard to location.

 

By the end of the 19th century, there was relatively little open space in Manhattan and Brooklyn. As part of the City Beautiful movement, various attempts were made to loosen the grid’s hold, first through the passage of the Small Parks Act in 1887, which focused on tenement neighborhoods, and later, by situating major civic structures in plazas. Similar ideas shaped the development of garden apartments which came into vogue after 1910. One of the primary characteristics of this type of multiple dwelling was reduced site coverage.

 

In most cases, such as in the Jackson Heights Historic District, the buildings were set around the perimeter of each block, enclosing large private gardens, but in other situations, such as at the Harlem River Houses, a “crankshaft” arrangement was adopted, creating a mixture of interior and exterior courts.

 

Lescaze borrowed freely from both the garden apartment tradition and architects associated with European modernism. In his earliest design, each block incorporated six U-shaped structures arranged around a narrow central court. A later design was considerably more irregular. Turned at an angle to the street, there were fewer but larger buildings.

 

Many aspects of this proposal were integrated into the final design. The Williamsburg Houses are configured in three ways, with footprints suggesting a capital “H,” small “h,” and “T.” All have small spurs and extensions, resembling crossbars. By adding this feature the number of courtyards was significantly increased. Within each block are six buildings (except north of the school); at the north and south are the “H” and “h” configurations, and in the middle, the “T”s.

 

The decision to turn the buildings at a 15 degree angle to the street grid proved controversial. PWA accounts described it in functional terms, explaining that the orientation would provide tenants with more sun and take advantage of the prevailing northwest breezes. During the previous decade, many architects and planners experimented with similar ideas. One of the earliest built examples “to deviate from the geometry of the New York gridiron” was the Mesa Verde apartments (1926) in Jackson Heights. Designed by Henry Atterbury Smith and based on an earlier proposal from 1917, the development featured two rows of six “closed L buildings” set at 45 degree angle to the surrounding streets.

 

Lescaze, however, was more likely to have been influenced by European sources. During the 1920s, he frequently returned to Europe, a period when leading architects were involved in the design of social housing. Many favored the “tower in the park” approach in which free-standing high-rise structures stood in continuous open space. Writing in English in 1935, Walter Gropius concluded that apartment blocks should “command a clear view of the sky, over broad expanses of grass and trees which separate the blocks and serve as playgrounds.”

 

Another source of inspiration might have been Ernst May who oversaw the design and construction of many low-rise housing estates in Frankfurt. In his Bruchfeldstrasse development of 1926-27, designed with C. K. Rudloff, one section was arranged in an overlapping zig-zag configuration. As in Williamsburg, each unit had corner windows, providing tenants with uninterrupted views of a central garden.

 

Many writers were skeptical about the benefits of Lescaze’s plan. Hamlin argued that the layout would convert the courts “into perfect channels for Project for a group of factories. our most vicious northwest winds.” He was told that

 

the arrangement had, in fact, been chosen for aesthetic reasons, to “break up the street facades” and “allow the feeling of space to weave in and out on the street fronts. This goal was definitely achieved, producing an environment that was new and distinctive. The flowing spaces that Lescaze planned are less monumental and more intimate than those experienced in most housing projects, juxtaposing wedge-shaped lawns with semi-enclosed courtyards and large open plazas. As originally built, no fences interrupted the spaces and the areas adjoining the curving concrete walks were paved with cobblestone.

 

The Elevations

 

Equally modern were the elevations. Lescaze was attracted to the expressive and aesthetic qualities of modern materials. Particularly unusual was the decision to use a light-colored palette. Built from reinforced concrete, the walls were originally enclosed with a sand-cast brick that was variously described by observers as bright tan, yellowish, pinkish, and grayish warm pink. One of the most notable features was the exposed concrete floor plates which express the structure and division between the floors while giving the complex a strong horizontal appearance. Talbot Hamlin observed:

 

The effectiveness of the buildings is undoubted. The striping of brick and concrete and the contrast of the light walls which front the stair towers make a vivid picture . . .

 

Prior to the mid-1930s, red brick was the most frequently used material in housing developments, used throughout Jackson Heights and in the First Houses and Harlem River Houses. The proposal to break with this tradition generated considerable debate. While the general scheme was approved in June 1935, it was not until October that specific materials were selected. Presumably, the PWA wished to standardize the building process and reduce costs. Frederick Ackerman, technical director of the NYCHA, defended Lescaze’s proposal. He wrote the authority’s chairman, Langdon W. Post:

 

. . . the “effect” of the Project will depend very largely upon the texture and quality of the exterior wall. Unless the exterior wall possesses a greater intrinsic interest than one made of common brick then the resultant effect is certain to be a bleak, barren and unusually forbidding mass of building:

 

One might readily mistake the At Williamsburg, the buildings stand as freestanding objects, finished on all sides and approachable from multiple directions. No facade dominates and the apartment entrances face both the streets and courtyards. For those unfamiliar with the layout, the angled plan may have been somewhat disorienting. To make it easier to navigate, signs were installed throughout the complex and Lescaze skillfully designed the entrances, making dramatic use of color and form. Like Le Corbusier, he was an “accomplished” painter and frequently used color, especially blue, to enliven wall surfaces. Another possible model was May’s housing development at Praunheim (1926-29) where contrasting colors were used to give the projecting stair towers a distinctive appearance.

 

Within the courtyards are as many as five entrances. Each is sheltered by a small cantilevered aluminum marquee and is flanked by square blue terra-cotta tiles. The entrances that are located at the far end of the larger courtyards are set at a angle. In these instances, the tiles spread onto the adjoining walls and extend above the parapet to the stair bulkhead. Other tile treatments project slightly forward, or are recessed above the doors to the roof. An entrance is also located in the covered breezeway. Reached by a short flight of stairs connecting both the street and courtyard, the more public street facade had an asymmetrical character, incorporating projecting blue tiles to one side and a wide aluminum marquee.

 

Construction

 

To prepare the site for construction, 568 buildings were demolished on 349 lots and approximately 5,400 people were relocated. A 1935 report described the population as divided equally between American born, Italian born, and other nationalities. Most were semi-skilled workers, employed in manufacturing, or as clerks, truck drivers, and construction workers.

 

Demolition commenced in June 1935 as PWA supervisor Elizabeth Ross dug a crowbar into the facade of 197 Manhattan Avenue, near Ten Eyck Street. In the months that followed:

 

Steam shovels and picks played a tune to rival that of the pipes of the Pied Piper of Hamlin. From every dank basement and crumbling wall rats fled in droves. Backyards disgorged an assortment of rusted cans, trash, filth and litter that would have discouraged the most voracious goat.

 

Ground was broken on January 3, 1936. Following a brief ceremony in the rain, public officials addressed an audience of five hundred at Public School 196. During April 1936, the first foundations were poured at the southwest corner of Manhattan Avenue and Stagg Street. Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia was in attendance, followed by “a few hundred interested onlookers and an army of schoolboys.”

 

As the foundations neared completion, the PWA solicited bids for construction. Starrett Brothers & Eken was awarded the $7. 5 million contract for the first 18 buildings in October 1936. A subsequent contract, for construction of buildings No. 5 and 18, was signed in late April 1937.

 

Founded by Paul Starrett (1866-1957) and William Aiken Starrett (1877-1932) and Andrew J. Eken (1882-1965) in 1922, the firm was responsible for such high-profile buildings as the New York Life Insurance Company Building (1925), Bank of Manhattan Building (1929-30), McGraw-Hill Building (1930-31), and Empire State Building (1930-31, all are designated New York City Landmarks). The Starrett Brothers worked closely with Shreve on the Empire State Building and it is likely that this relationship helped secure the contract for the Williamsburg Houses. William Starrett acknowledged the importance and complexity of this issue when he said:

 

It is the hope of people who are discussing this (slum) problem that those same brains that put together the great skyscrapers . . . will turn toward this.

 

Starrett Brothers & Eken later built Parkchester (Richmond H. Shreve, chairman of the board of design, 1938-42), Stuyvesant Town (Irwin Clavan and Gilmore Clarke, 1943-49) and Peter Cooper Village (Irwin Clavan and Gilmore D. Clarke, 1947) for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.

 

The cornerstone was laid in October 1936. It contained an aerial view of the site, a copy of the federal act creating the PWA, as well as an autographed copy of Jacob Riis’s timeless account of slum conditions, How the Other Half Lives, donated by his widow. Construction progressed rapidly, and aside from minor walk-outs by metalworkers and painters, the first six buildings were ready for occupancy with a year, in September

 

Publicity

 

The Williamsburg Houses was the largest and costliest project built by the PWA. With 1,622 apartments, it was more than twice the size of the Harlem River Houses. The approximate cost was $12.8 million. It was described by the PWA as part of “demonstration program” and numerous public events were held. In a letter to Post, Shreve stated:

 

As this project is the beginning of what, in a way, is a housing community experiment and as the public attitude toward housing will be largely controlled by the success or failure of such an experiment, it is of importance that every effort be made to make the first experiment successful.

 

In this context, how the project was perceived was of the utmost importance. Once the design had been approved, a scale model was built by the PWA and exhibited at banks in Brooklyn Heights and Williamsburg during late 1935 and 1936. This presentation was accompanied by a series of posters documenting the site, including photographs of earlier buildings and their demolition, as well as projected floor plans. The New York Times reported the model:

 

. . . throws into graphic relief the application of the new principle of multiple housing, providing more air, sunlight and recreational facilities and involving a departure from the solid-block construction.

 

The idea of using public funds to create low-income housing was relatively new and much of the language used in speeches and press releases heralded it as a major advance. At the site, signs were posted, calling Williamsburg the “Largest Low Rental Development in the USA.” At the ground-breaking, public officials evoked the memory of Alfred T. White, whose Brooklyn developments were among the first attempts to improve low-income housing in the nation.

 

Mayor LaGuardia thanked the President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for his support, as did Harold L. Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, who described slums as a “vicious project of that old order whose passing, we hope, is at hand.” While some critics equated the federal housing program with socialism, most speakers saw it as a defense of democracy.

 

In November 1935, Post had contacted the PWA, requesting that the complex be called the “Ten Eyck” Houses. No explanation was given, but it is likely that the request was made to distinguish the new development from the larger surrounding neighborhood.

 

Ten Eyck Street was one of two east-west streets closed to create the site and it was probably named for the Dutch family whose Brooklyn lineage extended back to at least the 18th century. In the immediate area also lived William Ten Eyck, who during the mid-19th century served as the deacon of the Reformed Church of South Bushwick (1853, a designated New York City Landmark). Post’s request was quickly approved. The new name, however, was not widely used and a 1938 PWA publication refers to the development as the Williamsburg Houses.

 

On October 28, 1936, the construction site was briefly visited by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt. According to the New York Times, ten thousand school children and five thousand adults “cheered the President’s passage through the streets bordering the housing project.”

 

Three “model” apartments were opened for public view in July through August 1937. Furnished with loans from various Brooklyn department stores, they were presented at 180 Maujer Street. Post was an early visitor and he described the apartments as a “demonstration of what can be done, this is the most valuable contribution to social progress that the New Deal has made.” An average of 1,200 persons a day visited. In September 1937, a second group of apartments opened at 176 Maujer Street, including one decorated entirely with “reconditioned furniture.” In a related development, during April and May 1938, the WPA created an exhibit in a storefront office at 212 Graham Avenue. Organized by William Friedman of the art teaching division, the display was changed periodically to demonstrate different apartment layouts and decoration. Nine experts spent five months preparing the exhibit, hoping that it would influence local residents and provide a model for future public housing developments. A music branch, at 176 Maujer Street, also provided lessons in theory, voice, and various instruments.

 

Tenants

 

According to the Brooklyn Eagle, the Williamsburg Houses were “one of the most perfect home sites in the word . . . an eagerly sought spot to live.” Income and need formed the basis of selection and no tenant could earn more than five times the annual rent. Preference was also given to former residents of the site.

 

The first tenants began to occupy their apartments on September 30, 1937. The New York Times devoted at least two articles to “Moving Day,” as did the Brooklyn Eagle. As part of the operation, each tenant’s belongings were moved to a fumigation plant for sterilization near the intersection of Bushwick Avenue at Scholes Street.

 

This procedure was described as a “wise precaution against the spread of disease.” Bessie and Louis Grabkowitz were recognized by the NYCHA as the first official tenants. A week’s rent, of less than seven dollars, was paid and they were given keys to their new apartment. Two to five rooms in size, units featured steam heat, hot and cold water, as well as electric stoves and refrigerators. Residents praised their new homes, commenting on the appliances and abundant sunlight.

 

By the end of 1937, most apartments were occupied. A community newspaper, the Projector, began publishing on a semi-monthly basis in December 1937. In April 1938, the complex was completed. In addition to the twenty residential buildings, there were retail spaces, facing the north-south streets. The PWA reported:

 

To insure efficient, sanitary commercial services, 49 stores and shops within the project, distributing drugs, groceries, appliances, and general merchandise, have been leased to private individuals.

 

The storefronts were executed in a sleek Moderne style. To the north and south, they curved away from the street, recalling the streamlined designs of Erich Mendelsohn, as well as J. J. P. Oud’s Kiefhoek development of 1925. The prominent metal parapets were blue, matching the color of the apartment entrances. Despite their polished design, a significant number failed to attract and retain tenants. Consequently, in 1945 ten unleased spaces, near the corners of Maujer and Leonard Streets, and Scholes Street and Bushwick Avenue, were converted to apartments.

 

Tenants enjoyed a variety of useful services. At the center of the complex, on Graham Avenue stood the stripped classical-style William J. Gaynor Junior High School (1936-37), and opposite it, Building No. 11 housed a nursery school. Incorporated into the building’s south court and featuring a large play terrace, Hamlin described its glass-fronted design as “pleasant” and “delightful.” In addition, a new Moderne-style health center was built directly across from the complex, on Maujer Street.

 

Throughout the development were “social and craft rooms.” These basement spaces were originally used for classes, clubs, and meetings and many were decorated with large colorful murals. In contrast to the majority of WPA murals that were executed in style of social realism, the Williamsburg murals were non-objective. Lescaze favored “abstract and stimulating patterns” and Burgoyne Diller who headed the Federal Art Project, wrote that:

 

The decision to place abstract murals in these rooms [of the Williamsburg Housing Project] was made because the areas were intended to provide a place of relaxation and entertainment . . . The more arbitrary the color, possible when not determined by the description of objects, enables the artist to place an emphasis on its psychological potential to stimulate relaxation.

 

Of twelve murals commissioned, at least five were installed. In the early 1990s, the deteriorated canvases were restored and moved to the Brooklyn Museum of Art. They include works by the American painters Ilya Bolotowsky, Paul Kelpe, and Balcomb Greene.

  

Critical Reception

 

The opening of the Williamsburg Houses was treated as major news and writers used the event to analyze the project and express their own views about the role of public housing and the importance of modern architecture. Some of the earliest comments came from the architect Walter Gropius, former director of the Bauhaus in Germany. On a visit to New York City in April 1937 he was interviewed by H.I. Brock in the New York Times. They traveled together throughout the city, visiting both new skyscrapers and the nearly-complete Brooklyn development. Gropius was impressed and praised the unusual plan, saying that Lescaze:

 

. . . seems to have solved the problem of space and light very successfully and economically, and it has the great advantage of being spread over enough land to make it worthwhile as a sample of planned development.

 

Lewis Mumford was the first critic to publish a substantial review in February 1938. As a persistent advocate for public housing, he used the opportunity to evaluate the “outlines of the new order of building.” He praised the PWA for eschewing “overpriced building lots” and instead assembling large sites in quieter areas where streets could be closed to traffic to create gardens and playgrounds. Considerable attention was paid to the slanted orientation. Although he described it as “a bit queer,” he liked the way it separated the residences from the street and that it gave the appearance that the architects were concerned about providing tenants with ample sunlight.

 

Talbot Hamlin published the most-detailed analysis. In this review, he addressed both PWA projects, calling them “a new vision of democracy ... they are better than the most expensive apartments on Park Avenue.” Despite such praise, he expressed mixed feelings. While he found the buildings “fresh and inventive and alive,” he was disturbed by the “shockingly low” standards of construction. He also admired the “imaginative and carefully studied detailing,” but criticized the landscaping as little more than adequate. The WPA Guide to New York City, published in 1939, shared similar views, quoting Hamlin’s review, and praising the design of the individual buildings.

 

In the years since completion, the Williamsburg Houses have been a frequent subject for architectural historians. Many, starting with the Museum of Modern Art in 1939, have placed the development within the context of European modernism. In an exhibition celebrating the museum’s 10th anniversary and the opening of its new building, it was the only architectural work represented that was located in New York City. In a brief essay on housing, the curators highlighted the “triple-size superblocks,” that form an “oasis of open space,” but criticized the adjoining school building as a lost opportunity to create a “truly important work.” Photographs of the complex were also included in Forms and Functions of Twentieth-Century Architecture (1952), in sections devoted to city planning and concrete construction.

 

G. Holmes Perkins wrote in the city planning section that despite faults, the complex “may be held up as patterns for tomorrow.” Richard Pommer, in one of the most insightful discussions of Depression-era housing in the United States, criticized the angled plan, calling Lescaze a “versatile pasticheur” who used visual effects without logic or relation to function. Robert A. M. Stern shared this view, writing in 1980 that it “seems overrated.” Richard Plunz, in A History of Housing in New York City, credited the project as the start of a “brief but intense struggle” to determine the aesthetic direction government-built housing would take. All four editions of the AIA Guide to New York City have praised the Williamsburg Houses. The 1968 edition called it a “very successful solution to the problem of low-rent subsidized housing,” and in 2000 “the best public housing project ever built in New York.”

 

Subsequent History

 

Conveyed by the federal government to the NYCHA in 1957, the Williamsburg Houses continue to serve their original purpose, housing more than three thousand New Yorkers. Major alterations were first proposed in 1980 and significant work took place during 1985-91. At this time, the original casement windows were replaced with bronze-colored aluminum sash and the blue terra cotta that surrounded the entrances, with tan “Morocco” glazed brick.

 

In a remarkable turnaround, during the mid1990s, the facades were restored. What began as continued maintenance, soon evolved into a major architectural project, requiring an outside contractor and consultation with the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Under the supervision of Neil Cohen of the NYCHA, the elevations were completely reskinned, the parapets replaced, as well as the chimneys, railings, and terra-cotta banding. In addition, new canopies, doors, lighting fixtures, and signage were fabricated.

 

The approximately $70 million project was executed with great sensitivity; there was an article in the real estate section of the New York Times and the NYCHA was the recipient of the Lucy G. Moses Preservation Award from the New York Landmarks Conservancy (1999), which praised the participants for restoring the complex to “better-than-new condition.” Restoration of the storefronts, except along Bushwick Avenue, was completed in 2002.

 

The high standards set by the design of the Williamsburg Houses have rarely been matched. Innovative in terms of scale, plan, and aesthetics, it remains one of the most pleasant and architecturally-distinguished housing developments in New York City.

 

Description

 

There are twenty walk-up buildings in the 23.3acre Williamsburg complex and a total of 1,620 apartments. These buildings are numbered from 1 to 20 and each entrance has its own street address, for instance, “112 Maujer Street.” Stainless steel signs, with pin-mounted numbers and letters, identify each entrance.

 

The site extends four blocks east to west, from Bushwick Avenue to Leonard Street, and three blocks north to south, from Maujer to Scholes Streets. The principal north-south artery is Graham Avenue. Between Maujer and Scholes Streets, Ten Eyck Street and Stagg Street are closed to vehicles. These winding east-west paths are called Ten Eyck Walk and Stagg Walk. They are identified by large pin-mounted stainless steel letters attached to the building facades and are visible along the north-south streets. Throughout the complex are wall-mounted cantilevered lighting fixtures. These glass and aluminum fixtures are reproductions of the originals.

 

Three of the four blocks have a tree-shaded open space at center. At present, non-historic benches, play equipment, and basketball courts are located here. Most lawns are enclosed by low iron fences. Though not original, these fences pre-date the 1990s. Pole-mounted lighting fixtures are occasionally used to illuminate these areas.

 

All buildings materials are non-historic. Each structure is four stories tall and clad in ochre-colored brick. Exterior concrete spandrel beams are exposed at each floor. To disguise patches to the concrete, the beams are coated with a grey-colored water repellency finish. The entrances are flanked by blue structural glazed facing tiles that are approximately 12 by 12 inches. Blue mortar was used to minimize the joint lines. A canopy projects in front of each entrance (except on one side of the breezeways). Made of stainless steel, they incorporate recessed down lights. Some canopies are supported by a single pipe column. The entrance doors and sidelights are made of stainless steel.

 

Each door has a grid of four small square windows. Breezeways serve a dual purpose: reached by two sets of stairs, they provide an additional north-south passage, as well as entry to apartments. Most of the stairs are flanked by stainless steel railings. The bronze anodized aluminum windows, installed in the 1980s, are all one-over-one. Arranged as single windows or in pairs, they have concrete sills and meet the concrete spandrels above. The smaller windows light the bathrooms. Single windows and pairs are located where the facades meet, often creating triple-width openings at the cantilevered corners.

 

There are three general building configurations. All are original to the complex. They include eight buildings with “H” shaped floor plans, six with floor plans that suggest a small letter “h,” and six buildings with “T” shaped floor plans. While the “H” and “h” types alternate along Maujer and Scholes Streets (except next to the school where both are “H” shaped), the “T” shaped buildings are located only between Ten Eyck Walk and Stagg Walk.

 

The “H” buildings (Nos. 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 14, 15, and 20) are nearly symmetrical, with almost identical north and south courtyards. At the center of each court is either a projecting center section or breezeway. The apartments are reached by four distinct entrances, each with a different tile treatment. They include: corner, wide, recessed between the door and the roof, and incorporated within a breezeway. Each entrance leads to interior stairs. The windows that light the stairs are arranged in horizontal grids of six and eight panes. Except for the recessed variant, the tiles project slightly and rise above the parapet to the stair bulkhead. The opposite side of the breezeway has no tilework. Reached by stairs, each breezeway incorporates two concrete columns and a metal door. The “h” buildings (Nos. 2, 5, 19, 13, 16 and 19) are similar to the “H” buildings, except one court is partially enclosed.

 

The “T” buildings (Nos. 3, 4, 11, 12, 17, 18) have shallow courts. The top of the ‘T” has three entrances, each framed with blue tiles. A pair of entrances are also found facing each other in one of the side courts, and occasionally on the opposite side, as well. Building No. 11, located on the east side of Graham Avenue, is unique due to the presence of a nursery school at the wider south end. To accommodate this function, the entrances were moved and the court at the south end was enclosed. The south wall of school is clad with glass blocks, many of which are original. A concrete shed, at the center of the wall, is not historic and there are plans for removal. From the south facade extends a raised play area that is enclosed by a fence. Along the east side of the building, facing Graham Avenue, a non-historic ramp with metal railings has been constructed.

 

Commercial storefronts parallel the streets and adjoin the apartment buildings in various locations. The materials are non-historic, but the new elevations closely resemble the originals. The largest storefronts are located on either side of Graham Avenue, between Maujer Street and Ten Eyck Walk (Nos. 8 and 9). Smaller retail spaces are located along Graham Avenue (near Scholes Street, No. 13); on Leonard Street (near Maujer Street, No. 1); and on Bushwick Avenue (between Maujer and Stagg Walk, No. 16). They have a stream-lined character and curve away from the street at both ends. One story tall, they have granite bases and are clad with stainless steel and metal that has a baked-on blue porcelain finish. Above the storefronts runs the blue metal parapet, crowned by a stainless steel roof rail. Lighting was added above the storefronts, and security gates, when the stores are open, roll up and are neatly hidden within the facades. Large glass blocks or plate glass are used throughout. Along Bushwick Avenue, the modifications are less sympathetic and a vertical grid of older decorative concrete block occasionally interrupts the facade.

 

- From the 2003 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report

Minke whale in Nova Scotia

The LMS Princess Coronation Class 6229 Duchess of Hamilton was built in 1938 at Crewe as the tenth member of its class and the last in the second batch of five red streamliners.

In 1939 no. 6229 swapped identities with the first of the class 6220 Coronation and was sent to North America with a specially-constructed Coronation Scot train to appear at the 1939 New York World's Fair.

The locomotive was shipped back from the States in 1942 after the outbreak of the Second World War, and the identities of the locomotives were swapped back in 1943.

 

6229 was painted wartime black livery in November 1944. Her streamlined casing was removed for maintenance-efficiency reasons in December 1947 and she was then given the LMS 1946 black livery.

In 1948 she passed into BR ownership. BR added 40000 to her number to become 46229 on 15 April 1948.

46229 was saved from the scrap yard along with classmate 6233 Duchess of Sutherland as a result of Sir Billy Butlin's efforts to place these locomotives as children's playground exhibits at his holiday camps. Duchess of Hamilton survived at Minehead Holiday Camp and it returned to steam on the main line under the auspices of the Friends of the National Railway Museum.

 

Credit and thanks to Wikipedia for the Duchess of Hamilton information.

Built circa 1931 on a long wheelbase AEC Mandator chassis with an early use of a fully floating rear axle.

 

favcars.com

Albatros D.Va at the NASM, Washington DC.

 

In 1916, Albatros Werke produced the remarkably advanced Albatros D.I. It featured a streamlined semi-monocoque fuselage, with an almost fully-enclosed 160-horsepower in-line Mercedes engine, and the propeller spinner neatly contoured into the nose of the fuselage. A sesquiplane version with narrow-chord lower wings, designated the D-III, was introduced early in 1917, and served with great success. The Albatros D.V model was fitted with a more powerful 180-horsepower engine, but was plagued by a rash of upper-wing failures. The wings were strengthened, resulting in a re-designation, the D.Va. Unfortunately, the necessary strengthening increased the weight and negated the performance advantage of the new engine.

 

Approximately 4,800 Albatros fighters of all types were built during World War I. They were used extensively by the German Air Service throughout 1917, and remained in action in considerable numbers until the end of the war. Many of the highest-scoring German aces achieved the majority of their victories while flying Albatros fighters.

The early history of the NASM Albatros is very sketchy. During the restoration of the airplane by NASM, the serial number D.7161/17 was discovered under several layers of paint on the fin. This places it in the final batch of 550 D.Vas built by the Albatros factory during the war. The last of these aircraft reached the front in April 1918. It is apparent, however, that the airplane is comprised of components from more than one Albatros. The individual wings show evidence of workmanship of different quality, suggesting that they were not produced at the same time and at the same place. Further, before restoration, there were straight crosses as well as the earlier Iron Cross national insignia on different components of the airplane.

 

Another clue to the history of the NASM Albatros was revealed during restoration. The original layer of paint showed green and yellow stripes on the tail. This was the marking for the German squadron Jasta 46. This unit was formed at Graudenz on December 17, 1917, as part of Germany's Amerika Program, an effort to build up German strength rapidly and deliver a decisive blow to the West before American resources could be brought to bear for the Allies. Under the program, the number of German fighter units doubled. The inferred production date from the serial number of the NASM Albatros fits with the creation and equipping of Jasta 46 with Albatros fighters. Evidence that the NASM Albatros did see combat is damage from a bullet that passed through the right machine gun mount, penetrated the emergency fuel tank, and then lodged in the right magneto. The airplane was unlikely to have flown again as the fuel tank had not been repaired.

 

The distinctive personal marking of "Stropp" on the fuselage side remains a mystery. Some have suggested that stropp can be interpreted to mean a precocious or mischievous boy, but no record confirming this, or even with whom the marking was associated, has been found.

 

The history of the airplane for the remainder and immediate aftermath of the war remains unknown. The first record of the NASM Albatros in the United States is the presentation of the airplane to the De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco on July 13, 1919, by Congressman Julius Kahn. It is unclear how Congressman Kahn became associated with the Albatros, but a label placed with the airplane at that time credited it as a gift from the French government. Some years later, NASM curator Paul Garber learned of the Albatros at the De Young Memorial Museum. On a trip to California in January 1947, he located the airplane and approached the museum about donating it to the Smithsonian. Garber was informed that it had recently been sold at auction for $500.00 to George K. Whitney, who planned to display it at Playland near Cliff House, a local San Francisco tourist stop. After Garber explained the importance of the historic aircraft to Whitney, he agreed to donate it to the Smithsonian, with the condition that the museum pay the packing and transportation costs. After a lengthy delay until funds were available, the Albatros was moved to the museum's temporary storage facility in Park Ridge, Illinois, in August 1949. It was brought to Washington, D.C., in 1952 and remained in storage until restoration began in January 1977. The complex and meticulous rebuilding of the NASM Albatros D.Va was completed in February 1979.

  

LMS Princess Coronation class pacific Duchess of Hamilton, recently re-streamlined at Tyseley, as the centrepiece of an exhibition at the National Railway Museum on the subject of thirties streamline design. I never thought I'd ever see one of these because they were all de-streamlined before I was born. Beautiful.

The history of the base ZIL-111 started in 1956. ZIL-111D with a body "convertible" is a modified ZIL-111G with a body "limousine" produced since 1962, which in turn was a modification of the basic model ZIL-111.

 

The first car to receive the (still unofficial) this index was constructed in 1948, the ZIS-110M number 5. He is the only five cars in this series had a streamlined body with a single pontoon sidewalls, similar in appearance to the body "Packard Clipper" in 1947. Second ZIS-111 "Moscow" appeared in the early 1950s, he was a creation of designer Valentin zilovskogo sprout. It was built only two or three copies, one of which was shown at the Exhibition of Economic Achievements. At the exhibition visitors, this car did not cause great pride in the domestic auto industry. Frankly American car-like "Buick" of the late 1940s, nothing but a big bird on the hood, did not attract attention, and generally looked mediocre.

 

In the early 1950s in the American automotive industry has arisen a tendency to change the annual lineup. As a rule, these changes were only the exterior and interior, chassis remained the same for several years. Keep up with such a rapid fashion could not even Europe, not to mention the Soviet Union with its planned economy. Indeed, the car just did, put on the conveyor belt - and the next year to change all the seals, snap-in, spend millions of rubles for the sake of fashion. The only solution here was to create a machine progressive enough to "margin of safety" was enough for a few years.

 

Knowing this and seeing that the plant itself could not find a worthy replacement for veteran ZIS-110 ZIS leadership decided to hold a competition to create a project perspective the car - ZIS-111 new generation. Among a number of proposals liderovali two projects already built by ZIS-111 "Moscow" sprout and experienced car with the outline of "Packard" 1955 model year, a young designer from the LM Yeremeyev.

 

It was a clash of different schools, different approaches: a, zilovskogo, and another, dared to revise established views of the plant. Battles have been hot. ZIS sprout had already been built and almost ready to launch into production, but the option Eremeeva turned much more fresh and sovremennym.V finally won Yeremeyev. After the germ left the factory.

 

In 1956, a design project Yeremeyev was embodied in the life-size clay. In 1957, a new car under the name of ZIL-111 was released (in 1956, died IA Likhachev, and the plant was renamed in his honor). In a metal machine was a beautiful, yet rigorous. The front part was like at the same time, "Packard" and "Mercury" 1955-1956 period, while at the same time, comparing favorably to both of them. A much more elegant than the "Packard", and more representative than the "Mercury", he became the personification of the Soviet Union period, thaw. Large glass area and a panoramic windshield missed a lot of light into the cabin. Located on the side molding and sagittal "gill slits" are copied from the "Imperial" in 1956 (on a batch molding ZIL-111 was replaced by a figure known to us gulls). The rear portion was done in the style of "Packard." Large vertical lights, covered wings, reminiscent of the arches of Gothic cathedrals.

 

In 1958, with some modifications ZIL-111 went into the series. The designs of the ZIL-111 was not just a step forward compared to the ZIS-110, it was a real breakthrough. ZIS-110 was a design in 1941 and ZIL-111 is fully consistent with the requirements of 1955. During this period the automobile world of America has replaced three basic models, and by 1955 in the technological sense of the early machines of the 1940s has disappeared. New ZIL, like its predecessor, remained framed machine, this is probably where the similarities end there. New gasoline V-shaped eight-cylinder engine with a cast iron block and aluminum cylinder heads weighed 350 kg and gave 200 hp (ZIS-110 - 140 hp).

 

For the first time on a serial domestic car was installed two-speed automatic transmission with push-button control. The car was much lower. Due to the increased width of the bodywork and interior remodeling space in the car became more, respectively, the passengers could accommodate much more comfortable than its predecessor.

 

In 1959, the series went to changed ZIL-111 with the installation of domestic air-conditioning, called ZIL-111A. Cooled air conditioning and reduced humidity in the cabin when the outdoor temperature exceeds 18 ° C. The engine ZIL-111A also has an index, "111A" - it was connected with the installation of the compressor and some changes in the design of the drive components. Externally, ZIL-111A can be distinguished on the back nepanoramnomu glass, it was done in conjunction with the installation of the sides of the rear window air conditioner.

 

In 1960 appeared convertible ZIL-111V: big seven-seater had a canvas awning and 4 side lifting windows in chrome frames. The rise of the windows, as well as the rise of the curtain, implementation-lyalsya through a hydraulic drive. Tent, as in chaise ZIS-110B, in the folded position is covered by a decorative leather cover, and additional seating - straponteny - had double back with equal halves. Special gray convertible ZIL-111V changed carriages at parades ZIS-110B. Convertibles "111V" issued three years before putting on stream next modification ZIL-111G.

 

There is a version that the next change in the appearance of the vehicle was conducted at the request of Khrushchev, who noticed that the car is head of state (ZIL-111) does not differ from machine chairman executive committee (GAZ-13 "The Seagull"). In 1961 he was a prototype car, which is similar in form to the "Cadillac", but for unknown reasons, the series did not go. In the same year the car has undergone yet another facelift, and took its final form. The car went into production in 1962 and was called ZIL-111G. In fact, this is the same, "111A" with air conditioning, but with modified external forms. Starting with the ZIL-111G, air-conditioning became standard equipment and is not designated as a separate model of the plant. Externally, ZIL-111G is not copied any particular car, and was fully established factory designers, albeit with an eye to the American automotive industry trends. At the "111G" was used chetyrehfarnaya lighting system front and rear. And two round rear lights have been borrowed from the ZIL-118, "Youth". The front and rear of the car have been completely changed. The central part is the same, except for the outer door panels, stylized in accordance with other external changes. The sidewall of the machine reappeared sagittal molding that goes from the big corrugated lining behind the rear wheel arches. Uppercase words "one hundred and eleven Zeal" on the rear wing gave way to a laconic "ZIL-111." On the radiator grille has disappeared with bas-relief image of a seagull Yuri Dolgoruky, but instead of a shield, stylized medieval tower with an inscription at the top - "ZIL", and at the bottom - "111" there was a simple inscription "111" with diverging rays. In the back of the emblem in the form of the same shield with radiating been replaced individually mounted letters "W", "U", "L". Due to the changes required a new bumper jack: the old captured the special eyelets in the bumper, the new well was placed under the vehicle frame. Instead of manually screw jack ZIL-111 was designed and built pedal mechanical folding type jack 2E111G jack "Cadillac" of 1961. The same jack, with minor modifications, all future manned cars ZIL.

 

ZIL-111D appeared in 1964 as a modification of the ZIL-111V with the forms of ZIL-111G. The first automobile ZIL-111D chassis number 82 was collected in July 1964. It was installed upgraded brakes. The awning was a soft top ply fabric stretched over the arches and lateral levels of the framework. Each tent is individually adjustable frame units to ensure trouble-free operation. Fabric awning was attached with nails to the cardboard inserts front bar, rear arches and rear side belt body. To shape and further stretch an awning had padded jackets side. Inside the transverse arch were closed to them suspended upholstery, has a longitudinal rubber bands, which protects the fabric from sagging during raising and lowering the canopy. In the back of the tent was provided a window of a flexible plastic film, which was attached to an awning on three sides with zips. The window could detach and drop down. Tent rose and fell with elektrogidravliche-ray drive. The whole process of raising and lowering the canopy occupied 7-7.5 seconds. To fix the canopy in the raised position had lever locks and latches. Lever locks your brackets to the front awning bar and catch on the corresponding recesses in the bracket is fastened to the top of the wind frame. On rack locks were locking pins, which when lifting the tent included in the special slot in the bracket, fixed to the wind frame. Pins, clips were used to prevent lateral displacement of the tent. When folded tent fit into the slot and the closed cover, which is fastened to the outside of the body with the buttons, and the inside of the pawned between the awning and the rear seat and fasten to the inner sidewalls buttons. To shape the bags under his tent folded stacked lightweight bag, made of porous plastic. In the raised position canopy cover was removed and stacked in a special envelope, and the pillow and contracts evolved a special belt. Pillows and envelope stored in the trunk.

 

In electrical ZIL-111D match predecessor, ZIL-111V. The differences could be traced, perhaps, only in radio. On ZIL-111, 111G and 111V was a radio-13M, kabrioletny version of which was different from the basic lack of remote control, instead using the volume control the rear speakers. Was different device antennas. On ZIL-111V was two antennas, two telescopic, located on the hind wings. They were nominated by hand, and the reception was possible only if nominated by the antennas, which caused some discomfort. At buggy ZIL-111D designers installed a new radio AR-61-2-A and improved antenna, leaving one with the electric lift telescopic. It was situated in the rear left wing and worked in both the raised and lowered in the state, but with a smaller number of programs adopted and the sound volume.

 

Cars ZIL-111D was carried out in 1964-1967, respectively. During this period, was made about eight cars. Three of them were used for the parade and had a complete set of additional radio equipment, special handles and a set of flagpoles. Others were used as a government gigs for special trips. Compare convertible ZIL-111D with any foreign counterparts is difficult, because the ZIL was the only plant that as the base car did notchback limousine, sedan and wagon were made based on it. Seven-seater convertible, which is stored in the Club cabriolets and roadsters in Moscow, is made as a whole, that is not longer "stretch" as the wedding in Lincoln, a model for a whole frame of its own configuration. Similarly, a car with a big stretch to be called "Lincoln Continental" 1961 model year. Based on this gig with the swinging doors of specialized bodywork company was established long gig. Unfortunately, this car after the murder of President Kennedy got him notorious, and the release of the model was discontinued. However, here we compare ZIL-111D with a "Lincoln" would be incorrect, as "Lincoln" also "stretch" to the same unit, built by special order.

 

ZIL-111D, owned by the Club now cabriolets and roadsters, was once presented to the General Secretary of the CPSU Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, leader Eric Honecker of East Germany - everyone remembers the "political kiss" between the two politicians, who was depicted on the Berlin Wall. It is on this car in 1974, met with Fidel Castro and Brezhnev, who came to East Germany with a visit of friendship, love a fast ride in a convertible with Comrade Honecker. Typically, the ZIL-111D softly and gravely walked in a motorcade escorted by motorcyclists and "thirteen", "Gull". After German unification and the removal from power Honecker some of its cars sold under the hammer. At the international exhibition in Brussels car was awarded the honorary diploma. Subsequent cars: ZIL-114-117 (1967-1976 years)

 

ZIL-111 all models was unquestionably reliable, stable on the road, with a great resource units, but the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution, he prepared a replacement - a new limousine ZIL-114. Drawn as a ruler, this machine represented the rational plane style of the late 60s. Engine with aluminum cylinder block was lighter and more compact than the ZIL-111, with a working volume increased from 6 to 7 liters, and power - from 200 to 300 liters. with. And the device ZIL-114 was a lot of unusual for the then Soviet vehicles: all-wheel disc brakes, height-adjustable steering column, front suspension besshkvornevaya on torsion bars. Equipment cabin was selected individually to taste this or that leader. In the early 70's at ZIL-114 appeared modification - Five sedan ZIL-117, along with almost the same, "Chaika" GAZ-13. Long ZIL-114 was the basis for universal emergency medical care, and "short" ZIL-117 - for a two-door convertible parade.

 

[Text from Blog "Russioan Traditions" - ZiL 111 - A Government Car]

 

russki-ya.blogspot.com.au/2011/11/history-of-base-zil-111...

 

This Lego miniland scale ZiL-111 Limousine (1958) has been created for Flickr LUGNuts' 96th Build Challenge - The 8th Birthday, titled - 'Happy Crazy Eight Birthday, LUGNuts' - where all previous build challenges are available to build to. This model is built to the LUGNuts 66th Build Challenge, - "Behind the Iron Curtain" - a challenge to build a vehicle from countries with Communist Governements.

 

A cluster of cars outside Tubby’s auto repair and restoration workshop that represent the well-rounded look of the late 1930s/early 1940s. The 2-door Ford at the left is an early post-World War II offering, while the yellow Chevy alongside is shamelessly streamlined in its styling.

Hamilton Heights, Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States

 

Summary

 

The Jackie Robinson Play Center is one of a group of eleven immense outdoor swimming pools opened in the summer of 1936 in a series of grand ceremonies presided over by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and Park Commissioner Robert Moses. All of the pools were constructed largely with funding provided by the Works Progress Administration , one of many New Deal agencies created in the 1930s to address the Great Depression. Designed to accommodate a total of 49,000 users simultaneously at locations scattered throughout New York City’s five boroughs, the new pool complexes quickly gained recognition as being among the most remarkable public facilities constructed in the country. The pools were completed just two and a half years after the LaGuardia administration took office, and all but one survives relatively intact today.

 

While each of the 1936 swimming pool complexes is especially notable for its distinctive and unique design, the eleven facilities shared many of the same basic components. The complexes generally employed low-cost building materials, principally brick and cast-concrete, and often utilized the streamlined and curvilinear forms of the popular 1930s Art Moderne style. Sited in existing older parks or built on other city-owned land, the grounds surrounding the pool complexes were executed on a similarly grand scale, and included additional recreation areas, connecting pathway systems, and comfort stations. The team of designers, landscape architects and engineers assembled to execute the new pool complexes was comprised largely of staff members and consultants who had earlier worked for Moses at other governmental agencies, including architect Aymar Embury II, landscape architects Gilmore D. Clarke and Allyn R. Jennings, and civil engineers W. Earle Andrews and William H. Latham. Surviving documents also indicate that Moses, himself a long-time swimming enthusiast, gave detailed attention to the designs for the new pool complexes.

 

The Jackie Robinson Play Center was the only one of the WPA-era pools sited in a predominantly minority neighborhood. Formally opened on August 8, 1936, the Play Center was built on a narrow hillside site acquired by the City of New York and developed as Colonial Park soon after the turn of the 20th century. The uniquely monumental two-story design of the Center’s bath house is an ingenious response to the topography of the park. A rocky cliff drops off sharply from Edgecombe Avenue to the west, and the terrain then continues in a gentler downward slope to level ground along Bradhurst Avenue to the east. The locker rooms are located on the upper floor in order to provide direct access to the swimming and diving pools located above the grade of Bradhurst Avenue. The unusual dimensions of the swimming pool and the oddly shaped diving pool are accommodations to the narrowness of the site and the presence of the stone cliffs.

 

The fortress-like design of the Bradhurst Avenue elevation of the bath house capitalizes on its two-story height. Recessed bays which employ both rounded and slightly pointed arches are demarcated by giant rounded attached buttresses. Large round towers rise above the roof line at the ends of the building and flank the entrance. Rounded and curvilinear forms also characterize the design of the bandshell terrace to the north of the pool complex, as well as its perimeter walls and the elevated pathway continuing northward from the terrace, all which date to the same time period. The wading pool complex located between 152nd and 153rd Street also includes an attractive and contemporary comfort station which repeats the curvilinear forms employed elsewhere.

 

DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS

 

History of the Jackie Robinson Play Center Site

 

The Jackie Robinson Play Center is set within a 12.8 acre, narrow hillside site acquired by the City of New York between 1894 and 1899. The acquisition of parkland during this time was part of a larger nation-wide reform effort to increase the availability of organized play areas in inner cities, made possible by the Small Parks Act of 1887, which authorized the creation of parks south of 155th Street as deemed necessary for the public welfare. The New York Times noted at the time of the acquisition that the Colonial Park site already “had much of the character of a park,” but needed to be preserved for park purposes before land values increased to the point that it would become impossible. Formed by retreating glaciers some 20,000 to 50,000 years ago, the parklands were particularly notable for having varied topography, a picturesque appearance, and trees providing ample shade. Colonial Park officially opened as a playground on August 12, 1911. Site interventions from this era included the addition of a comfort station, drinking fountains, and children’s playgrounds.

 

A variety of names have been given to the area in which Jackie Robinson Park is located. Known as Harlem Heights to Dutch and English settlers in the 1700s, by 1870 the neighborhood was referred to as Washington Heights, in commemoration of Revolutionary War battles that took place nearby, as well as to set it apart from neighboring working-class areas. By the turn of the century, both upper-middle class white professionals and recent immigrants from Italy, Ireland, and Germany were living in Harlem’s many neighborhoods. When African Americans began moving into the area after 1920, the elevated residential enclave just west of Colonial Park became known as “Sugar Hill,” one of the choicest neighborhoods in Harlem, tenanted by some of the area’s most successful black citizens. By the 1930s, however, much of Harlem was suffering under the combined effects of racism and the Great Depression. Colonial Park was noted at this time for being a welcome relief from the crowded conditions of the tenements and rooming houses that surrounded it.

 

Under the auspices of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and his legendary Park Commissioner, Robert Moses, major improvements to Colonial Park were made in the 1930s. By August 1935, the Parks Department had broken ground on the Colonial Park Play Center, a complex which would include new swimming and diving pools and an elaborate bath house. Other additions planned for the park were a new wading pool area, comfort station, bandshell and dance floor terrace, in addition to recreational areas for adults and a children’s playground. Overall enhancements were also planned for the surrounding park grounds. Funding for the various improvements was largely made possible by the Works Progress Administration , one of the many public works programs created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the United States Congress during the Great Depression.

 

In 1978, under a local law introduced by Councilmember Fred Samuel and signed by Mayor Edward I. Koch, Colonial Park and the Colonial Park Play Center were renamed for Jackie Robinson, the first black professional baseball player in the major leagues. A bronze bust of Jackie Robinson by Inge Hardison was installed inside the bath house lobby in 1981.

 

Fiorello LaGuardia, Robert Moses and the New Deal

 

Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected President of the United States in 1932 in the middle of the Great Depression that followed the stock market crash of 1929. Roosevelt promised to rebuild confidence in American capitalism and to improve the nation’s standard of living by creating the New Deal economic program of unprecedented public spending on social programs and construction projects.

 

New York City had been especially hard hit by the economic downturn, and its citizens, hoping for change, elected Fiorello H. LaGuardia to the mayoralty of New York City in 1933 as an anti-Tammany Hall reform candidate. A maverick Republican and a five-term congressman from East Harlem, LaGuardia won the mayoral election on the “Fusion” ticket after losing the 1929 mayoral race on the Republican line. The Fusion Conference Committee at first considered running Robert Moses, another Republican, who was appointed Chairman of the New York State Council of Parks in 1924 by his political mentor, Governor Alfred E. Smith, a Tammany Hall Democrat from New York City. However, the committee decided against Moses because of his association with Smith, and chose LaGuardia instead. At the time, Moses was a popular public figure with a reputation as a progressive and as the builder of great parks and parkways like Jones Beach and the Northern State Parkway on Long Island. His endorsement of LaGuardia during the campaign was considered instrumental in securing a victory for LaGuardia. Within a week of the election, LaGuardia chose Moses, a champion of reform politics, as New York City’s new Park Commissioner.

 

Moses accepted the position of Commissioner of Parks in the LaGuardia administration on the condition that the five existing independent Parks Departments would be consolidated into a single department with himself as the sole Commissioner, with authority extending also over the City’s parkways. Moses also demanded to be appointed the Chief Executive Officer of the Triborough Bridge Authority, which was then building the bridge of that name, and that a new agency, the Marine Parkway Authority, which would build a bridge to the Rockaways, be created with himself at the helm. Already in charge of the Long Island State Park Commission, the New York City Council of Parks, the Jones Beach State Park Authority, and the Bethpage State Park Authority, Moses would then be in control of all existing and proposed parks and parkways in the New York metropolitan region, with the exception of areas outside of New York State.

 

In the 1920s, Moses was at the forefront of the national recreation movement that began in the first decade of the twentieth century, led by such men as President Theodore Roosevelt and the lesser-known George D. Butler of the National Recreation Association. The movement gained momentum under the administration of President Calvin Coolidge with the organization of the National Conference on Outdoor Recreation in 1924. The Depression of the 1930s further amplified the need to provide more, or improve existing, outdoor recreational opportunities, especially in urban areas. Fortunately, such goals fit nicely into FDR’s New Deal economic programs. Mayor LaGuardia’s success in securing a lion’s share of monies made available by the federal Works Progress Administration , and Moses’ management skills and his ability to attract talented designers and engineers to his staff, resulted in profound physical changes to the environment of New York City. The construction and renovation of neighborhood recreation areas, such as pools and play grounds, were some of the most ambitious and successful programs undertaken by Moses with funds largely provided by the WPA.

 

Moses began to assess the state of the City’s parks and to plan for their future as soon as LaGuardia announced his intention to appoint Moses as Park Commissioner. According to one source: “Immediately after the election he wrote out, on a single piece of paper, a plan for putting 80,000 men to work on 1,700 relief projects.” Moses hired a consulting engineer and three assistant engineers to survey every park and parkway in the City. The survey was completed by the time he took office in mid-January 1934.

 

When Moses took over the Parks Department, it was already employing 69,000 relief workers funded mainly by the federal Civil Works Administration and the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration . However, Moses found the men to be ill-equipped and inadequately supervised, and considered many of the construction projects to have been poorly designed. He immediately began to revamp the entire operation of the Parks Department and established a Division of Design, located at the Arsenal in Central Park. The staff was to be headed up by experienced professionals drawn mainly from his State agencies. Some of his talented staff of young architects, landscape architects and engineers had worked on the designs for Long Island’s highly acclaimed parks, including Jones Beach, which his considered one of Moses’ greatest accomplishments. His staff also included a number of well-known and accomplished designers, among them architects Aymar Embury II and John M. Hatton, and the landscape architect and civil engineer Gilmore D. Clarke. Other top members of Moses’ staff were the landscape architect Allyn R. Jennings, and civil engineers W. Earle Andrews and William H. Latham.

 

The Parks Department’s Division of Design was organized in the following manner: a topographical unit of about 400 surveyors and draftsmen, a landscape architecture unit of about sixty people, an architecture unit made up of sixty architects and draftsmen, and an engineering unit of about fifty. Smaller units included an Arboricultural Department and an Inspection Department. All the work in the Division of Design was under the direct supervision of the Park Engineer, who was aided and advised by a Consulting Architect, a Consulting Landscape Architect, and a Consulting Engineer. All new projects began in the topographical unit, where a complete survey of the land was prepared. It then moved on to the landscaping unit, where the basic concept for the design was developed. Next, the three units: landscape, architecture, and engineering, collaborated to produce the final design and all the necessary construction documents. The Park Engineer and his aides had to approve all of the plans. Moses himself sometimes stepped in to revise or overrule a design, especially on the larger, more visible projects.

 

Moses' superior management ability and political savvy allowed him to move projects along very quickly and to produce concrete results, gaining for him much public admiration. However, Moses’ personal demeanor was notoriously stubborn and arrogant, and he was known, at times, to disregard the legitimate authority of other governmental agencies. Once, when the Department of Plant and Structures refused to suspend a ferry service that used a terminal in the path of constructing the Triborough Bridge approach road, Moses had his men demolish the terminal while the boat was on the other side of the river. He feuded with President Franklin D. Roosevelt for years, even while Washington was pouring millions of dollars into Moses' own Parks Department. His later battles with and subsequent triumphs over community groups opposed to the routing of the Gowanus and the Cross-Bronx Expressways through their neighborhoods are now legendary. Moses was also known to have been insensitive to people of color, and reputedly tried to restrict access to many of his recreational facilities, including the WPA-era pools.

 

To many, Robert Moses was a master builder; to others he was a spoiled bully who seemingly always had his way. In the summer of 1934, however, Moses was a hero. Hundreds of projects, covering virtually every neighborhood in the city, had been completed. Structures were repainted, tennis courts resurfaced, and lawns reseeded. Hundreds of new construction projects were either already underway in the process of being designed. Among them was the Jackie Robinson Play Center in Harlem.

 

Subsequent History

 

The Jackie Robinson Play Center officially opened on August 8, 1936, the tenth of the eleven pools to open. Despite its inauguration on this date, the pool complex was not entirely complete - most notably, only half of the bath house was open to the public at the pool’s opening. Many of the drawings on file at the Parks Department archives in Queens are dated as approved well after the official inauguration date. Revisions for the bath house were still being approved as late November 1936, for the bandshell and dance floor terrace in December 1936, and for grading and other park improvements as late as April 1937. There were very few alterations in the years immediately following the completion of the pool complex, although some minor work to the park grounds was done in the mid-1940s, including plantings, fencing, and reconstructive work on existing stairways. Subsequent changes to the Play Center complex include the filling-in of the diving pool to create a “water play” area and the filling-in of the wading pool for use as a children’s playground, although it is unclear when either change took place. Upgrades to the playground equipment and active recreational facilities found throughout the park have also been made.

 

In 1978, Colonial Park was renamed Jackie Robinson Park after the first black professional baseball player in the major leagues. Born in Georgia in 1919 and raised in California, Robinson was the first UCLA student to earn letters in four sports: baseball, basketball, football and track. Robinson served in the U.S. army in World War II, played baseball in the Negro Leagues, and signed to the Brooklyn Dodgers top farm team, the Montreal Royals, in August 1945. On April 15, 1947, Robinson made history as the first African-American to play in a major league baseball game, paving the way for generations of black athletes to compete in the sport, which did not become fully integrated until 1959. As second baseman, Robinson led the Dodgers to six World Series, and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of fame in 1962. Robinson later became involved in a number of business enterprises, including several black-owned community businesses, and was active in the NAACP. He also served as a special assistant to Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller before dying of heart disease at the age of 53 . In 1981, a bronze bust of Jackie Robinson by Inge Hardison was installed inside the pool and recreation center lobby at West 147th Street. A mural of Jackie Robinson was more recently painted inside of the bandshell in 2006, designed by artist Michael Young, and painted by the Junior League of New York.

 

By the late 1970s, many of the WPA-era pools, Jackie Robinson included, had become badly run down, partially the result of the fiscal crisis of the 1970s which hit the Parks Department particularly hard. By March 1981, the Parks Department workforce had dwindled to a record low of 2,900 employees, mostly unskilled and temporary, as compared to the 30,000 parks employees on staff during the Moses administration. The strain on Parks Department resources was evident in the deplorable conditions of many of its facilities. To address the rapid deterioration of its recreational facilities, in 1977 the Parks Department began a major capital construction program involving more than 500 projects, expected to total more than $180 million, partly in Federal funds – the first such projects undertaken by the parks system since the fiscal crisis halted such work in 1975, and arguably the most ambitious program to improve the parks since the 1940s. Among the projects planned was a $10 million plan to preserve Prospect Park, a $1 million renovation of the Coney Island Boardwalk, and a $2.6 million rehabilitation of the Jackie Robinson Play Center. Several of the other WPA-era pools, including Sunset Park and Betsy Head, underwent restoration under the same program.

 

Closed since 1978, the newly renovated Jackie Robinson Play Center was re-opened on July 14, 1980, to the great relief of neighborhood residents. Much like LaGuardia and Moses before him, the administration of Mayor Ed Koch had been plagued by accusations of insensitivity towards minorities. In an effort to disprove such allegations, Mayor Koch was sure to attend the re-opening of the pool, where “an enthusiastic crowd of children plunged happily into the water at the Mayor’s signal.” Also present at the opening was Mrs. Jackie Robinson. The Parks Department called the renovations of the WPA-era pools “an essential part of the revitalization [of] the entire public recreational infrastructure of the city,” helping transform the aging pools back into modern recreational facilities.

 

The WPA-era pools faced a new set of challenges beginning in the mid-1980s, with pools like the Crotona Play Center in the Bronx becoming infamous for vandalism and walkways littered with broken glass. In 1991, Mayor David Dinkins proposed closing the pools as part of a package of budget cuts. Only a donation of $2 million from a private donor, real estate magnate Sol Goldman, guaranteed the pools would be kept open for at least a portion of that summer; an additional $1.8 million was still needed to cover the entire nine-week long swimming season. In the mid-1990s, a menacing ritual known as “whirlpooling” had become common throughout the pool system, a practice characterized by groups of teenage boys locking arms and shoulders, churning the water and disrupting the activities of other swimmers, particularly women who often found themselves unwilling fondled. Several more serious complaints of sexual assault were recorded throughout the pool system in the summer of 1994. With improvements in security staffing and increased vigilance on the part of patrons, many of the problems of the 1990s did eventually dissipate, and by 2003, the pools were once again touted as both extremely safe, and a welcome alternative on a hot summer day.

 

The Architecture and Site of the Jackie Robinson Play Center

 

The New Deal construction projects within New York City, such as the Jackie Robinson Play Center, were a part of a national trend that included similar projects undertaken by various governmental agencies, ranging from the vast Tennessee Valley Authority to small cities and towns. Urban projects built with WPA funding often possessed similar qualities from region to region, partly because the difficult economic climate dictated the use of inexpensive building materials, but also because the programs provided employment opportunities for a generation of young architects and engineers, many of whom were committed to modernism. For example, the bath house and waterfront facilities at Aquatic Park in San Francisco are similar in plan and appearance to the public pool and beachfront projects being built at about the same time in New York City. The California facility, with its streamlined, concrete facade and steel-framed windows, bears a striking resemblance to the facade added in 1936 with WPA funds to the bath house at Jacob Riis Park in Queens. The original and creative use made of these modest materials by Moses' talented design teams and the careful siting of each project makes every one of them a distinguished, individual design, as much related to their specific environment and needs as to one another.

 

The Jackie Robinson Play Center was built on a narrow hillside site acquired by the City of New York and developed as Colonial Park soon after the turn of the 20th century. The uniquely monumental two-story design of the Center’s bath house is an ingenious response to the topography of the park. A rocky cliff drops off sharply from Edgecombe Avenue to the west, and the terrain then continues in a gentler downward slope to level ground along Bradhurst Avenue to the east. The locker rooms are located on the upper floor in order to provide direct access to the swimming and diving pools located above the grade of Bradhurst Avenue. The unusual dimensions of the swimming pool and the oddly shaped diving pool are accommodations to the narrowness of the site and the presence of the stone cliffs.

 

The fortress-like design of the Bradhurst Avenue elevation of the bath house capitalizes on its two-story height. Recessed bays which employ both rounded and slightly pointed arches are demarcated by giant rounded attached buttresses. Large round towers rise above the roof line at the ends of the building and flank the entrance. Rounded and curvilinear forms also characterize the design of the bandshell terrace to the north of the pool complex, as well as its perimeter walls and the elevated pathway continuing northward from the terrace, all which date to the same time period. The wading pool complex located between 152nd and 153rd Street also includes an attractive and contemporary comfort station which repeats the curvilinear forms employed elsewhere.

 

Description

 

Plan and Circulation

 

Jackie Robinson Park is bounded by West 145th Street to the south, West 155th Street to the north, Edgecombe Avenue to the west, and Bradhurst Avenue to the east. Due to the steep difference in elevation between Edgecombe Avenue and Bradhurst Avenue, the park is mainly accessible along Bradhurst Avenue. Additional entry points can be found at the southwest corner of the park, as well as along Edgecombe Avenue, all of them via stairway.

 

The Jackie Robinson Play Center is located towards the southern boundary of Jackie Robinson Park. The Play Center can be approached from either the north or the south along Bradhurst Avenue. The two entrance doorways to the Play Center bath house are found just north of the intersection of Bradhurst Avenue and West 146th Street, beneath the imposing brick arches of the structure’s front facade. Upon entering the bath house building, patrons will find themselves in the vaulted, Gothic-inspired entrance lobby. Admission to the pool must first be purchased here at the ticket booth, a projecting, oblong, glass-enclosed structure. The ticket booth structure is vaguely reminiscent of the prow of a ship, and is located between the two entrance doorways. A modern, unenclosed extension of the original ticket booth structure was added in recent years.

 

After purchasing an admission ticket, patrons walk up one of two cascading stairways at the rear of the entrance lobby, to either the men’s or women’s locker rooms. From the locker rooms, access to the pool deck area, located west of the bath house structure, was provided by doors at the respective ends of the men’s and women’s sides of the rear facade, and only after patrons had passed first through the mandatory shower and foot baths. Today, access to the pools is available directly from the top of the two stairways, making it possible to circumvent the entirely redesigned men’s and women’s locker areas on the way to the pool deck. The two pools found here, the main swimming and former diving pools, are surrounded by a narrow promenade, an accommodation to the restrictive dimensions of the play center site. Concrete bleachers run the length of the main swimming pool to the west, while smaller concrete bleachers can be found north of the former diving pool. An additional service entrance is located at the southern boundary of the pool area.

 

The main entrance to the bandshell, dance floor terrace and extension, located between West 147th Street and West 150th Streets, is found at the intersection of Bradhurst Avenue and West 148th Street, and may be approached from either the north or the south. After ascending the stairway located here, patrons will find the open-air bandshell and dance floor terrace directly accessible to the south. To the north extends an expansive promenade lined by an undulating brick wall featuring concrete seating niches to the west, and modern park benches to the east. The promenade terminates at the intersection of Bradhurst Avenue and West 150th Street, and provides an alternative entry point to the bandshell and dance floor areas. An additional elevated pedestrian pathway links the dance floor terrace to the northern extent of the promenade, accessible via stairways at either end. This pathway provides an additional exit onto Edgecombe Avenue via an L-shaped stairway at its approximate midpoint.

 

The former wading pool and comfort station are located towards the northern boundary of Jackie Robinson Park. This area of the park has only one entry point which is roughly in line with the intersection of Bradhurst Avenue and West 152nd Street. This entrance may be accessed either off of Bradhurst Avenue, or via an additional elevated pedestrian pathway beginning at the northwest corner of the park at Edgecombe Avenue and West 155th Street, continuing parallel to Edgecombe Avenue, and terminating in a succession of concrete stairways near the intersection of Bradhurst Avenue and West 152nd Street. The remaining play areas, including children’s playgrounds, tennis courts, baseball fields, and handball courts, are all accessible along Bradhurst Avenue.

 

The Bath House

 

The Jackie Robinson Play Center bath house is built partially into the slope of Jackie Robinson Park, a response to the narrowness of the hillside site and the presence of stone cliffs, resulting in a two-story facade in the front, and a single-story facade to the rear. The fortress-like design of the front facade capitalizes on the building’s two-story height, giving the structure an imposing presence along Bradhurst Avenue.

 

The Play Center bath house is essentially an elongated rectangle, with its two longer sides running parallel to Bradhurst and Edgecombe Avenues, and its shorter sides parallel to West 145th and West 155th Streets. Each of the building’s four facades is constructed of brick laid in a common bond, with a brick soldier course at ground level. Fourteen recessed bays characterize the front facade, employing both rounded and slightly pointed brick relieving arches that are demarcated by giant rounded attached buttresses. Simple rectangular limestone corbels accent the arches of the southern half of the bath house facade, which features an asymmetrical combination of slightly-pointed and rounded arches. The more robust northern half of the facade is characterized by a series of full-height buttresses separating three bays of paired arches; the paired arches, one slightly-pointed, the other rounded, meet at substantial limestone corbels, with the central bay featuring also a stepped brick corbelling pattern.

 

Large round towers, capped by brick crenellations and cast-stone coping, rise above the roof line at the ends of the building and flank the two central bays. Smaller round towers are paired with the larger ones at the building’s center, and are capped by inverted, stepped cast-stone cones. Each of the two central bays is further defined by an enormous round brick arch, with two elongated niches punctuating the recessed areas beneath. The two arches of the central bays meet at a full-height attached buttress. Each bay also contains a single bas-relief panel, set within an arched niche featuring rounded reveals and a projecting brick sill, depicting a swimming-related scene. The two entrance doorways to the Play Center are also found beneath the arches of the central bays, one on either side of the full-height buttress, and are characterized by segmental brick relieving arches and rounded brick reveals. The doorways are noticeably small in scale, particularly as compared to the overall monumentality of the bath house facade. A second brick relieving arch is embedded in the facade just left of the southern of the two entrance doorways; the two relieving arches meet at a simple limestone corbel. The faint outlines of the words “Colonial Park” and “Play Center” are still barely visible above the central bay arches, where original park lettering once hung. A limestone panel found at the base of the full-height buttress between the two entrance doorways, originally displaying the date of the Play Center’s construction, currently displays only the letters “AD”.

 

The recessed areas beneath the arches of the north and south wings of the bath house feature a range of fenestration, designed to match the needs of the services provided in the interior spaces behind. For example, enormous clerestory windows can be found beneath the arches of both the northern and southern wings of the bath house facade – some paired, some curved, others slightly pointed, depending on the shape and size of the arch under which the window is found. These windows in turn draw natural light into the locker room and gymnasium areas beyond. At ground level, a series of service doors, windows, and louvered vents are all disguised as arched windows of varying size and shape, with limestone blocks flanking the upper corners of the window openings and projecting limestone sills. Additional service doors are located at the base of the large towers flanking the central bays, while elongated rectangular windows, capped by oversized, segmental brick relieving arches, can be found on the towers that flank the ends of the building. A parapet featuring a cast-stone balustrade spans the distance between the four main towers of the front facade. This same balustrade is repeated on the parapets spanning the north and south facades, as well as the area behind the former diving pool bleachers.

 

The south facade of the bath house is a simple brick wall featuring only three narrow arched window openings. In contrast, the north facade, which comprises the same narrow dimension, repeats the paired arch motif of the northern half of the front facade – though there is room for only two arches. A small circular tower flanks the north facade at its western end, capped by the same inverted, stepped cast-stone cone found elsewhere. The southern facade is painted red in patches, while the lower half of the northern facade is painted entirely.

 

The rear facade of the bath house building is a single-story, simplified version of the front facade, located level with the second-story of the bath house due to the slope of the site. Featuring protruding brick buttresses with simple cast-stone caps, the rear facade is divided into fourteen regularized bays. The roofline of the rear facade is enlivened by alternating header, stretcher and angled brick courses, as well as cast-stone coping. A mixture of doorways and large arched clerestory windows characterize this facade. A non-historic guardrail currently lines the roof.

 

The Pool and Deck Area

 

The enclosed pool area, located west of the Play Center bath house, forms an irregular shape in response to the unusual topography of the pool complex site. Within this enclosed pool area can be found the main swimming pool, a basically rectangular form with one semi-circular end, as well as the former diving pool, arranged in a linear fashion. The vaguely trapezoidal shape of the former diving pool is an accommodation to the natural rock outcropping that nearly spills over into the pool deck area. Once paved in brick, the deck area surrounding the pools has since been replaced by concrete. A series of historic lampposts have also been removed.

 

Concrete bleachers line the inner side of the western perimeter wall of the pool area, running parallel to the main swimming pool, while a smaller set of comparable bleachers can be found north of the diving pool, lining the inner side of the wall shared with the dance floor terrace to the north. Rectangular brick piers capped with cast-stone flank the ends of the main swimming pool bleachers, while the perimeter wall is topped by potentially historic wrought iron fencing. Several historic lampposts that used to sit on small concrete piers along the fourth riser of the main swimming pool bleachers have been replaced by modern lighting fixtures. An additional non-historic lamppost is located along the promenade between the main swimming and former diving pools. A cast-stone balustrade, similar to the parapet found along the north, south and east facades of the bath house, runs behind the former diving pool bleachers, which is flanked to the east by the rear elevation of the bath house, and to the west by two piers belonging to the dance floor perimeter wall.

 

The former diving pool is currently used as an active “water play” area for children, replete with a range of colorful water-emitting apparatuses, as well as some standard playground equipment. A non-permanent, plywood mural featuring an aquatic theme and completed by a local community group, currently lines the northeast corner of the pool area. Non-historic fencing currently separates the main swimming pool from the former diving pool area, while the original flagpole still stands just in front of the former diving pool bleachers. A service entry can be found at the south end of the pool area, consisting of a wrought-iron gate and iron fencing spanning tall, free-standing brick posts with cast-stone coping. The piers lining the southern boundary of the pool deck area have been painted in patches.

 

Bandshell, Dance Floor Terrace and Extension

 

The recently renovated bandshell, dance floor terrace and extension, are located between West 147th Street and West 150th Street. The main entry to this area is via a broad concrete staircase located at the intersection of Bradhurst Avenue and West 148th Street. Like the Play Center bath house, rounded and curvilinear forms characterize the design of the bandshell, dance floor terrace and extension, which also date to the WPA-era. The eastern wall of the dance floor terrace undulates between West 147th Street and West 148th Street along Bradhurst Avenue, abutting the bath house to the south. This wall is characterized by curved segments featuring semi-circular ached brickwork and cast-stone coping, that span between round brick piers, also capped with cast-stone. The wall turns sharply westward at the southern end of the West 148th Street staircase, forming part of the northern boundary of the dance floor terrace.

 

The dance floor terrace is lined to the west by an undulating retaining wall of curved brick segments spanning between round brick piers and capped by cast-stone coping. The bandshell, a brick and concrete structure , faces west onto the dance floor terrace, with the ashlar retaining wall and apartment buildings along the elevated Edgecombe Avenue providing a striking backdrop. The bandshell is located at the approximate center of this wall, dividing it into three curved wall segments below, and three above. Each of the curved wall segments doubles as a seating niche and features a concrete bench. At the southern boundary of the dance floor terrace, the piers of the western boundary wall are shared with the pool deck area and are capped by the same inverted, stepped cast-stone cones found elsewhere. The western boundary wall continues past the northern boundary of the dance floor terrace, becoming the western boundary wall of the promenade extension. A pattern of singular curved wall segments with seating niches, paired curved segments with seating niches, and flat segments, is repeated from West 148th Street until West 150th Street. The eastern boundary wall of the extension features flat brick wall segments with iron railings, spanning larger distances between brick piers, laid non-linearly. Planting beds line both the eastern and western walls of the promenade, while non-historic park benches can also be found lining the wall to the east.

 

The bandshell originally featured backstage dressing rooms, accessible via doorways on, as well as flanking, the stage. These doorways have since been permanently closed off. A mural of Jackie Robinson designed by artist Michael Young and painted by the Junior League of New York in 2006 lines the interior of the bandshell. The hexagonal block paving of the dance floor terrace and extension is another notable feature of this area. Although replaced by new material between 2006 and 2007, hexagonal block paving did originally line the perimeter of the dance floor terrace as well as the extension. At the center of the dance floor terrace, however, was originally a multi-colored granolithic dance floor laid in a geometric pattern of red, green and gray, now paved with new hexagonal blocks. It is not clear when this original floor was removed. Cobblestone planting beds containing trees can still be found in their original locations on the dance floor terrace, while new benches appear to be modeled on historic benches once found towards the rear of this area. All walls and cast-stone coping lining the bandshell, dance floor terrace and extension have been painted.

 

Comfort Station and Former Wading Pool Area

 

The former wading pool area, located between West 152nd and West 153rd Streets, has long since been turned into a sunken children’s playground. The shape of the former wading pool area, which would have included the elliptical wading pool and the surrounding deck area, vaguely mirrors the shape of the Play Center pool deck area to the south, only at a smaller scale. The comfort station, a single-story, four-sided structure, is located at the center of a curved perimeter curb that chamfers the southwest corner of the former wading pool area. The building is turned at a 45-degree angle to the streets that line the park. Mimicking the tower and arch design of the main bath house, the comfort station features giant rounded piers at each of its four corners, with segmental brick relieving arches spanning the distance across each of the four facades. Rectangular window openings can also be found at each of the four corner piers, featuring brick sills and slightly arched brick lintels. Entrances to the girl’s and boy’s toilets punctuate the recessed area beneath the arch on the northeast facade. The windows punctuating the remaining facades have since been filled in so that only small, horizontal openings currently remain. Construction is brick laid in a common bond, which has been painted in recent years. Non-historic security grilles have also been added to each of the windows. A service staircase runs beneath grade along the northwest wall of the comfort station, leading to the former boiler room and utility areas. Extensive, non-historic security fencing surrounds this stairway. The hipped roof of the comfort station features a brick cupola with metal louvers and a cast-stone chimney cap. The most notable change to this roof is the replacement of the original slate roofing with corrugated metal.

 

It is unclear when the wading pool area was filled in, however, a drawing dating to 1946 indicates this area as merely a “playground,” and not a wading pool. This former wading pool complex is currently used as a children’s playground. The jagged outline of where the wading pool once was is partially delineated by a crack in the modern asphalt surface.

 

The Surrounding Park including the Playgrounds

 

Two children’s playgrounds are located between West 148th Street and West 150th Street, to the east of the dance floor terrace extension, running parallel to Bradhurst Avenue. These playgrounds, in addition to the active recreational areas to the north , are in the same locations as laid out by Robert Moses in the WPA-era, but feature modern equipment, paving, fencing, lighting, and signage. A small rectangular comfort station can be found between the two children’s playgrounds, located at the intersection of Bradhurst Avenue and West 149th Street. This brick structure, which apparently pre-dates the WPA-era improvements, features a simple pitched roof with projecting wooden eaves, entrances to men’s and women’s toilets on the north facade, and fenestration on the three remaining sides. A service staircase runs beneath grade along the western facade of the structure. The comfort station has been painted.

 

The portions of Jackie Robinson that are part of the landmark site also include two elevated pedestrian pathways that run parallel with, but below the grade of Edgecombe Avenue. While the existence of these linking pathways predate the construction of the Jackie Robinson Play Center complex, they were reconstructed during the WPA-era, and were originally paved with the same hexagonal blocks found elsewhere. Numerous other pedestrian paths were removed from the park during this time to make room for the new recreational facilities. The hexagonal paving blocks are also found at the circular plaza located south of the service entry to the Play Center pool deck, which is accessible along Bradhurst Avenue between West 145th Street and West 146th Street, as well as via the concrete stairway that begins at the intersection of Edgecombe Avenue and West 145th Street.

 

The landings of this stairway are also paved with the hexagonal blocks. Lining the park along West 145th Street are seven brick piers with cast stone coping, alternating between round and rectangular, which are spanned by historic iron fencing. Three additional piers can be found along Bradhurst Avenue, terminating at the southern edge of the Bradhurst Avenue entrance to the circular plaza, with two additional piers to the north. The features of this area, which comprises the southern boundary of Jackie Robinson Park, date to the WPA-era. All the piers and their cast-stone coping have been painted. Non-historic lighting and signage is also found throughout.

 

- From the 2007 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report

N&W 611 backs out of the Strasburg Station, taking her next group of riders down the line. It's really something to see, smell, hear and feel this beast rumble past you! I've never been next to a running steamer this large before, so it was flat-out awesome to see her in person.

Frisco RR Kansas City Special passenger train pulled by a Frisco 4-6-4 streamlined passenger locomotive #1062Birmingham, Nov. 1940. Photographer unknown

Streamlined, Poema Utrecht, 28-05-2010. Sorry for the week delay before uploading the set(s). Maar het was een zwaar weekend zo, met 2 top-trance parties. Friday: 28/05: Streamlined, het laatste trancefeest in de Poema :( En zaterdag 29/05 mijn verjaardag om 00.00 uur in de Westerunie tijdens de Armada Night. Van dat feest 2 sets, 1 van gastfotograaf Paul en een van mij. Vanavond ook online hier. Het was weer fun, en een erg mooi weekend al met al. Jammer van de (te) lage opkomst bij Streamlined!

 

Line-up Streamlined: partyflock.nl/party/174584:Streamlined.html

 

Dank allen! En tot snel!

 

Je foto(s) van: Streamlined, nabestellen voor maar 1 Euro? Geef het/de fotonummer(s) door. Stuur een mail naar: dutchpartypics@yahoo.com. Daarna volgen de details en stuur ik je via e-mail de high res. foto(s) zonder logo toe!

 

Check ook eens mijn showgallery: www.dutchphotogallery.net/ (online m.i.v. 01-06-2010). Check also my YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/user/dutchpartypics

 

© Dutchpartypics | Korsjan Punt 2010. Powered by Nikon D50/D80/D3000 DSLR; Lenses: Nikon AF 50 mm, f 1.8; Nikon AF-S 18 - 105 mm VR, f: 3.5 - 5.6; Nikon AF-S 55 - 200 mm VR, f 4.0 - 5.6; Nikon AF 70 - 300 mm, f 4.0 - 5.6; Tamron SP XR DiII 17 - 50 mm, f 2.8; Tamron XR Di 28 - 75 mm, f: 2.8; Sigma Super Wide II 24 mm, f 2.8; Sigma EX DC-HSM 10 - 20 mm, f 4.0 - 5.6 and Sigma EX DC Macro 105 mm, f 2.8. Flash: Nikon Speedlight SB600 (Nikon D80) | Sunpak PZ42X (Nikon D3000) | Sunpak PF30X (Nikon D50), all including Stofen omnibounce. Compact: Nikon Coolpix L110 and Panasonic Lumix FX500

 

NIKON: At the heart of the image! & DUTCHPARTYPICS: Power of Imagination, for Pounding, Vivid Pictures! Make your photos come alive! And... ! Relive your most intense moments, over again!

+++ DISCLAIMER +++

Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based historical facts. BEWARE!

  

Some background:

The Kawasaki Ki-100 was a fighter aircraft used by the Imperial Japanese Army in World War II. The Japanese Army designation was "Type 5 Fighter". The emergency measure of adapting a Ki-61-II-KAI fighter to carry a Mitsubishi radial engine resulted in one of the best interceptors used by the Army during the entire war. It combined excellent power and maneuverability and, although its high-altitude performance against the USAAF Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers was limited by the lack of an efficient supercharger, it performed better than most other IJAAF fighters.

Operational missions began in March 1945. From the first engagements, the Ki-100 performed well against the B-29 and showed itself to be equally effective against U.S. Navy carrier fighters. But the development did not stop, because the B-29 bombers still presented a serious threat, and even higher altitudes of the intruders were expected. As a desperate measure to improve high altitude performance, a radical further step was taken, which eventually led to the Ki-100-II with a turbocharged radial and the Ki-100-III with a modified airframe and a license-built German engine.

 

In late 1944, Japanese engineers had become aware of the Jumo 213's use in the German Fw 190 airframe that became the Fw 190 D-9. They had also become aware that an aircraft of even better high altitude potential, the Ta 152 H with a Jumo 213E, was about to enter service - exactly what the IJA needed on short notice.

 

Germany would not share Ta 152 blueprints or other construction details, and the production of a totally new aircraft type in Japan would have delayed trials and production by several months. But the delivery of five complete Jumo 213E engines including the typical annular radiator and German, wooden high altitude propeller with three large and deep blades could be negotiated, as well as an option for license production, under the local designation Kawasaki Ha-213.

 

In the meantime in Japan, three Ki-61-II-KAI airframes sans engine had been modified for dedicated high altitude operations, based on the German experience with the Fw 190 D and the Ta 152. These considerable changes included increased wing and rudder areas, as well as a pressurized cockpit, fed by bleed air from the engine, double glazing for the canopy with warm air blown between the glass layers to prevent icing. These airframes were to take the imported German engines for trials in early 1945. The engine packages arrived safely on board of a merchant submarine in January 1945 and were immediately mounted into what was now called the Ki-100-III.

 

Trials started almost immediately. The army general staff was amazed by the flight characteristics of the plane, which surpassed the Hien '​s in all but maximum speed (degraded by a maximum of 29 km/h[18 mph] by the larger area of the new engine's front cowling), and the model was ordered to be put into immediate production. All of the Ki-100 III airframes were, like the Ki-100-I and -II with their radial engines, remanufactured from Ki-61-II Kai and Ki-61-III airframes.

 

The prototypes kept the original radiator and the three-bladed wooden propeller. However, since the production of these propellers proved to be difficult (two disintegrated in flight!) and the Jumo 213E suffered from overheating problems especially on the ground and at low speed, the Ki-100-III KAI was launched in April 1945. Ki-100-III KAI machines featured an indigenous four blade metal propeller and a small support fan for the radiator was added, which was driven by the propeller shaft and rotated at 1.6 times its speed. The alternative Ki-100-II never progressed beyond three prototypes, since the complex engine kept suffering from teething troubles.

 

Due to Allied raids, production of the Ki-100 III KAI was limited. Less than 50 airframes were completed/converted until Japan's capitulation at the Ichinomiya aircraft plant, while some early Ki-100 IIIs were upgraded to the KAI standard with the new propeller and the additional fan installation. Probably only thirty operational machines entered service with homeland defense units, primarily for the defense of Tokyo.

Since American crews did not identify the Ki-100-III KAI as a variant of the Ki-61 design, it received a separate code name, “Lorne”. The Ki-100-I was handled under the Ki-61’s code name “Tony”, though.

 

In contrast to the Ki-100-III, the first 271 Ki-100-Ia aircraft, still with the raised "razorback" rear fuselage of the Ki-61, were rolled out of the factory between March and June 1945. A further 118 Ki-100-Ib were built with a cut-down rear fuselage and new rear-view canopy from May through to the end of July 1945.

 

Nevertheless, the Ki-100-III KAI proved to be very effective at altitudes of 12.000 m and more, and the machines' original armament of only two wing-mounted 20 mm Ho-5 cannons was quickly augmented in the field by another pair of these guns in streamlined pods on the underwing hardpoints.

 

General characteristics:

Crew: 1

Length: 10.29 m (33 ft 9 in)

Wingspan: 14.25 m (46 ft 8 in)

Height: 4.17 m (13 ft 8 in)

Wing area: 20 m² (215 ft²)

Empty weight: 2,525 kg (5,567 lb)

Loaded weight: 3,495 kg (7,705 lb)

Powerplant:

1× Kawasaki Ha-213 (a license-built variant of the German Jumo 213E) liquid-cooled

inverted V-12, delivering 1,287 kW (1,750 PS) and temporary 2,050 PS with

MW-50 injection at low altitudes

 

Performance:

Maximum speed: 759 km/h (472 mph) at 12,500 m (41,000 ft) using GM-1 boost

Range: 2,000 km (1,240 mi)

Service ceiling: 15,100 m using GM-1 boost (49,540 ft using GM-1 boost)

Rate of climb: 20 m/s to 25.4 m/s (3,937 ft/min at maximum weight of 5,217 kg

to ~5,000+ ft/min at 4,727 kg)

Wing loading: 196.8 kg/m² (41.38 lb/ft²)

Power/mass: 0.276 kW/kg (0.167 hp/lb)

 

Armament:

2× 20 mm Ho-5 cannons, mounted in the wings outside of the propeller arc.

Two underwing hardpoints for 94 gal. drop tanks or bombs of up to 250 kg caliber,

frequently occupied by two further Ho-5 cannons in external pods

  

The kit and its assembly:

This project was inspired by a very similar build that I found recently while browsing the WWW. I liked the idea of a Ki-61 with a German Jumo 213 from the Ta 152 high altitude fighter - would make sense, and there was actually a technology exchange between Japan an Germany, so that the combo appears plausible. The engine appears very suitable for a Japanese emergency high altitude fighter, because it was operational in 1945 and did not rely on a huge turbo-supercharger with complex plumbing, rather on a combined injection system for extra performance.

 

The basis is the vintage Ki-100 I kit from Aoshima from the early 70ies. It's simple, with raised details and a retractable landing gear(!). Anyway, it was cheap, I did not want to slice up a more modern (and much more expensive) kit of this aircraft. The Ki-100 was chosen because it already features the late, lowered spine, and the radial fitted to the streamlined Ki-61 fuselage would hopefully create a wider intersection to take the Jumo 213 more easily and with less body work.

 

The latter comes from the (also seriously vintage) Ta 152 from FROG, in this case in a recent Revell re-boxing. With its annular radiator, the engine looks almost like a radial, and it is pretty long. So I tried to put the new engine as close as possible to the cockpit. The respective fuselage cut was made at the wings' leading edge. Fitting the new engine to the narrow Ki-100 fuselage still proved to be trickier than expected, though. I had to take out wedges from both of the rather round Ta 152 engine section halves to narrow it down far enough that it would roughly match the oval Ki-100 fuselage. The round annular radiator was kept, though. The nose shape is a bit odd now, but the plausible result of mating things that were not originally intended for each other…

 

I also found the German propeller to be very massive an the slender Ki-100, so I replaced it with an alternative from an AZ Model Spitfire Mk. IX. The radiator fan (from a BMW 801) was added, because the FROG Ta 152 radiator just features a gaping ring hole. And instead of implanting a structure I rather hid the weak spot behind the fan... Odd arrangement, yes, but it works.

 

As a high altitude fighter, I increased wingspan and rudder area. The additional wing tips are actually parts from an Airfix B-26 elevator, after LOTS of carving and sculpting... The original fixed part of the fin was retained but a deeper rudder with a more square shape, somewhat matching the new wing tips, was implanted, scratched/carved from a leftover tail of a PM Model Ta 183. The cannon pods under the wings come from a Hobby Boss Bf 109 kit.

In order to compensate for the bigger span and longer nose I finally implanted a 1cm fuselage plug in front of the tail – very similar to the Fw 190 D/Ta 152 arrangement. This was sculpted from massive 2C putty.

 

Inside, a complete cockpit was implanted, taken from an Italerl Fw 190 D. The landing gear was slightly upgraded, too. The rather massive struts are OOB, but new wheels, from a Hobby Boss Bf 109, were used. A bulkhead was added in the main gear wells, blocking sight into the fuselage. The original fixed tail wheel was replaced by a retractable alternative (also from a Spitfire) with new covers.

  

Painting and markings:

This went a bit wrong, but I kept the result. I originally wanted to paint the machine all over light green-grey, a bit like Sky "S". But I decided to mix a color instead of taking a stock paint - I mixed Humbrol 28 (FS 36622) with a little Humbrol 155 (FS 34087), and the result was not a pale green but rather a dull beige, almost like British Hemp with an olive hue. The tone looked interesting, though, so I stuck with it.

 

Anyway, the engine received covers in bare steel and aluminum, and I painted the radiator section as well as an anti-glare panel in front of the cockpit in black, which turned the Ki-100 II into a kind of IJN aircraft, reminiscent of early WWII A6M 'Zero' fighters of the IJN?

 

That changed after weathering and panel shading, when I applied decals, especially the white home defense bars under the Hinomaru and the yellow ID stripes on the wings (all stripes were cut from generic decal sheet from TL Modellbau). Still, the livery is a little confusing?

 

All interior surfaces were painted with Chrome Yellow primer (Humbrol 81, mixed with 94).

The squadron markings comes from a vintage MicroScale decal sheet, the blue fuselage stripe is a personal addition that underlines the aircraft’s 4th Sentai affiliation.

 

After some soot stains around guns and exhaust pipes the kit received a coat of matt acrylic varnish.

  

An interesting build, and quite a challenge. Even though most of the original Ki-100 was kept, the larger wing span and the different engine change the look considerably. At first glance, this one really reminds of the Ta 152 in Japanese colors, but except for the engine (which was modified, too) nothing actually comes from the German aircraft! On the other side, this conversion shows how ‘natural’ the way from the Fw 190 to the Ta 152 H must have been, since I went through similar modifications in order to get to this high altitude version?

 

Tatra's chief designer, Hand Ledwinka's characteristic rear fin is clearly seen here in the streamlined four cylinder T-97. This is a 1938 car, and is really a sort of scaled-down version of the much larger V8 engined T-87.

 

Camera: Nikon F5

Lens: Nikkor 28-80mm zoom

Film: Kodak Ektar 100

the upgraded version of my Empire State Express loco. Largely identical to the first version, but the lead trucks have been changed so they can turn better under the pistons. A few other details were added too.

The streamlines of the Class 390 Pendolino are apparent in this shot of 390119 arriving at Crewe with a train from London Euston to Liverpool Lime Street

Built in 1935-1939, this Modern house, an example of Organic Architecture, was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for the family of department store owner Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr. to serve as a weekend retreat. The house was a catalyst for the revitalization of Frank Lloyd Wright’s career, who was in his mid-60s at the time, along with two other commissions around the same time, the Johnson Wax Headquarters and the Jacobs House I, which were critically acclaimed and explored a bold new direction of organic architecture that was heavily inspired from their natural surroundings, and were streamlined, dropping most of the ornamental pretenses of his earlier work. The house was built for department store owner Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr., his wife, Liliane Kaufmann, and their only son, Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., to serve as the family’s weekend retreat, with room to accommodate a small staff and guests alongside the family. The Kaufmann family became acquainted with the work of Wright through Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., who read Frank Lloyd Wright’s autobiography in 1934, and was so impressed that he decided to intern at the Taliesin Fellowship, where Edgar, Sr. and Liliane first met Wright while visiting Edgar, Jr. The family, at the time, resided in a traditional-style mansion in Fox Chapel, near Pittsburgh, and had a small rustic cabin overlooking the waterfall at the Fallingwater site. The cabins were falling into disrepair in the mid-1930s, which prompted the Kaufmann family to contact Wright to design a replacement structure. Wright visited and surveyed the area around Bear Run in 1934, but shelved the project while pursuing other work for the next few months, thinking through the design, before being surprised by a visit from Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr. in September 1935, which prompted Wright to quickly draw a concept for a house at Bear Run, producing the initial design drawings in two hours. Edgar, Sr., upon seeing the plans, was surprised to see the house soaring above the waterfall, as he had expected it to sit below the falls in order to view them from a distance, but Wright’s charisma convinced a skeptical Kaufmann to buy into the concept.

 

The house was designed by Wright with input from structural engineers Mendel Glickman and William Wesley Peters to feature large cantilevers, which allowed it to embrace the waterfall and topography below, while providing ample outdoor space and the desired number of bedrooms and living spaces within. A second wing was constructed above the main house, linked to it via a covered breezeway, which houses a carport, servants quarters, and a guest suite. The stone utilized in the house’s construction was quarried on the site, and it utilized reinforced concrete in its construction, a building technique with which Wright was inexperienced, but which the design would be impossible to implement without utilizing. Kaufmann was skeptical of Wright’s experience with the technique, as well as the cantilevered forms of the structure, and commissioned an engineering report, compiled by an engineering firm, which caused Wright to threaten to walk away from the incomplete project. Kaufmann relented in the face of Wright’s ultimatum, and had the documents buried. However, the contractor, feeling uneasy about the strength of Wright’s design, added extra reinforcement in secret, which was revealed during the building’s restoration. Other changes were made due to skepticism of the cantilevered design, but many of these were reversed, which proved the resiliency and strength of the design. The house came in far over budget, but despite these cost overruns and complications with the design, the Kaufmann family enjoyed it as a weekend retreat between 1937 and 1963. Liliane Kaufmann died in 1952, and Edgar Kaufmann, Sr. died in 1955, leaving the house to their son, Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., who continued to utilize the house as a weekend retreat, with his life partner, Paul Mayén, becoming a regular visitor to the house as well. In 1963, Edgar, Jr. donated the property to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, along with the surrounding property, which was converted into a nature reserve, and the house was opened for public tours.

 

The house features multiple reinforced concrete cantilevers, wrap-around windows facing the falls and Bear Run, open, transparent corners on the side of the building facing the creek, stone cladding on the more opaque portions of the facade, large terraces on the cantilevered portions of the building, open tread staircases inside and outside the building, red metal trim, a suspended concrete canopy over the breezeway connecting the guest wing and carport with the main house, a swimming pool on the terrace outside the guest wing, rocks embedded into the floors of the interior of the house, a staircase from the living room down to Bear Run below, and red concrete floors inside. A driveway, following Bear Run, crosses a bridge next to the main wing of the house before following a narrow corridor between the main wing and an adjacent stone outcropping, before turning and arriving at the upper wing, which originally housed a four-bay carport on the lower floor. The interior of the house is very open to the exterior, with low furnishings that allow for maximization of the views out of the windows, and is home to art that was collected by Liliane, books collected by Edgar, Jr. and Paul, and furnishings collected by Edgar, Sr. The house’s kitchen features yellow-painted metal cabinets and appliances, and chrome handles, the living room features a fireplace with a spherical beverage warmer that is designed to swing over to the fireplace from its storage location next to the fireplace and coffered ceilings, and horizontal bands of trim, and various portions of the house feature built-in desks, cabinets, wooden slat screens, and bookshelves, simple beds featuring wooden headboards and nightstands in the bedrooms, and bathrooms with cork tiles, sunken bathtubs, ceiling-mounted shower heads, and toilets with wall-embedded tanks. The upper wing of the house has a carport and guest suite on the lower floor, with servants quarters above, and the main house features a living room, dining room, kitchen, terraces and lounge on the first floor, a primary suite and secondary bedroom and bathroom with large terraces on the second floor, and a suite intended for Edgar, Jr. on the third floor, which was later partially converted into an office. The house is very broad in the direction parallel to Bear Run and has a living room that cantilevers over the creek, but it is very thin, being rather thin, with primary interior spaces featuring windows that look out onto Bear Run below. The house, despite its size appearing massive due to its spatial arrangement, has only a small interior square footage, but the space is efficiently designed to offer maximum utility to the occupants, and allow a close connection with nature.

 

The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. It was designated as part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, in 2019. A visitor center was constructed on the property in 1977-1979, designed by Paul Mayen. The most visible modification to the house since it was opened to the public were the enclosure of three carport bays to house a museum and presentation space for visitors. The house underwent major alterations to its structural systems in 1995-2002, involving analyzing the performance of the cantilevers over time since the house’s construction, as the bold cantilevered forms had insufficient reinforcement and had deflected substantially, nearing their failure points. Additional steel supports and post-tensioning in the form of steel cables were added to the building to support the cantilevers, which has halted the progression of the deflection of the structure, though it is monitored by the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in order to detect any further movement of the structure. The house today sees over one-hundred thousand visitors annually, and is one of the most well-known works of Wright, as well as being one of the best-known houses in the United States.

Sava Railways Hudson class (4-6-4) streamlined locomotive #7244 (stickers forthcoming)

 

#7244 is based off of the iconic streamlining of the New York Central's 20th Century Limited designed by Henry Dreyfuss. While it's relatively true to the design, the color scheme is not.

Seen at Showbus 2016, we have this superb exhibition of ex-Kingston-Upon-Hull City Transport vehicles.

 

The majority in the classic KHCT 'streamlined' , and a Metrobus in the equally classic layered livery, before the arrival of the dreaded Stagecoach stripes in the mid-late 1990's.

Midtown Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States

 

The 21-story Look Building dates to 1948-50, when the minimalist aesthetics of European Modernism first began to transform the character of “setback” office buildings. Located on the west side of Madison Avenue, between 51st and 52nd Streets, this handsome mid-20th century modern structure combines tiers of ribbon-like windows with tightly-rounded corners and setbacks faced with white brick to create a unique and memorable silhouette.

 

Two second-generation, family-run, businesses were responsible for its construction: Uris Brothers, developers, and Emery Roth & Sons, architects. Though they first began to collaborate in the mid-1920s, it wasn’t until the death of each firm’s founder in the mid1940s, that the sons Percy and Harold D. Uris and Julian and Richard Roth, began to focus on commercial development. This informal partnership, which lasted until the 1970s, produced a great number of large Manhattan office buildings. Richard Roth, who attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, served as lead architect. Planned to be stylish and profitable, the building closely followed the requirements of the 1916 zoning code to maximize the square footage while using industrial materials to create sleek, streamlined elevations that suggest the influence of not only the German Expressionist architect Erich Mendelsohn, but also the 1931 Starrett-Lehigh Building and the 1947 Universal Pictures Building in Manhattan.

 

The new structure was named for Look magazine, which was part of the Cowles media empire. With a strong emphasis on photography, Look became one of the most widely-read magazines in the United States and it remained at this location until ceasing publication in 1971. Other prominent tenants included Esquire Magazine; Pocket Books; the music publisher Witmark & Sons, where singer-songwriter Bob Dylan made some of his earliest studio recordings; the industrial designer Raymond Loewy, and the building’s architects. During the late 1990s, a major and sympathetic restoration of the facade was undertaken by the architects Hardy Holzman & Pfeiffer Associates. At this time, the steel windows were replaced with similar aluminum frames and a new entrance portico was created. The Look Building was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2004 and the facade is subject to a conservation easement filed with the Trust for Architectural Easements.

 

DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS

 

Building Site

 

The Look Building, at 488 Madison Avenue, stands directly north of the St. Patrick’s Cathedral complex and the Villard Houses . Prior to the First World War, this section of midtown Manhattan was primarily residential, with a mix of free-standing mansions, brownstone row houses, and a growing number of hotels.

 

Transit improvements, including the extension of the subway north along Lexington Avenue in 1918, as well as on Sixth Avenue in the 1930s, would attract commercial development to the area. While some elegant Fifth Avenue residences, including houses owned by George W. Vanderbilt , Morton & Nellie Plant , and Edward & Frances Holbrook , were converted to new uses around 1917, many structures were demolished and replaced by retail stores and office buildings. Rockefeller Center , which grew out of plans for a large performing arts center, was midtown’s most ambitious commercial ensemble, incorporating stores, offices, and entertainment venues.

 

In the vicinity of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Roman Catholic diocese of New York owned several structures, including the rectory and cardinal’s residence that flank the Lady Chapel on Madison Avenue, as well as the Villard Houses. It also owned the block on the west side of Madison Avenue, between 51st and 52nd Streets, where the Look Building would later be erected. This site was originally part of the Roman Catholic Asylum and in 1893 a three-andhalf-story Gothic Revival-style structure was erected to serve as a trade school for boys.

 

When much of the asylum’s property from Fifth Avenue to Park Avenue was sold in 1902, the structure became Cathedral College, a preparatory seminary to train men for careers in the priesthood. The New York Times called it “a midtown landmark which for two generations had offered a haven for quiet study and religious activities.” In 1942, the school moved to “modern facilities” on West End Avenue and 87th Street and the building was temporarily used by Catholic chaplains serving in the Second World War.

 

On East 51st Street, the Look Building stands beside a group of low-rise structures, including the former residence of contractor John Pierce . Designed by the prominent architect John Duncan, this five-story neo-Renaissance structure is clad with light-grey granite and was converted to commercial use after 1933. On East 52nd Street, the site adjoins 16 East 52nd Street , a 15-story brownish brick building with limestone details, designed by Schwartz & Gross.

 

Uris Brothers

 

Uris Brothers, acting as Neprock Realty, Inc., negotiated the purchase of the L-shaped site from St. Joseph’s Seminary & College in October 1948 for $2.6 million. The demand for office space in midtown Manhattan was growing and this market became their primary focus. Percy Uris and Harold D. Uris were the sons of Harris H. Uris , a Russian immigrant from Latvia, who arrived in New York City in 1892. By the first decade of the 20th century, he and his brothers operated a large iron foundry at 525 West 26th Street where a workforce of about 160 produced ornamental ironwork for the New York City subway system and other clients.

 

Percy Uris attended Columbia University, graduating with a degree in business administration in 1920. He and his father became commercial developers in the early 1920s, specializing in the construction of hotels and apartment buildings. Harold, who trained as a civil engineer at Cornell University, joined them in 1925. Together, they built numerous Manhattan structures, including the Court Square Building at 2 Lafayette Street, 1 University Place at the corner of Waverly Place, and the Hotel St. Moritz on Central Park South. They experienced great success but, like many of their contemporaries, struggled during the early years of the Depression and lost some of their best-known properties. In the late 1930s, they reentered the real estate field, hiring Emery Roth to design apartment buildings at 2 Sutton Place South and 930 Fifth Avenue . Roth also designed 880 Fifth Avenue, their last residential project, in 1946-48.

 

Few of Manhattan’s leading builders of the 1920s remained active following the Second World War. The New York Times described the Urises as being, along with the Tishmans, the “only builders . . . who are descended from the leaders of the Nineteen Twenties boom.” Percy and Harold Uris would accomplish this by focusing almost entirely on office building construction. The forecast for this type of real estate was particularly optimistic and using the skills they learned with their father, they would, over the next three decades, create more than 13 million square feet of new office space. Time magazine reported in 1954 that they:

 

. . . made a fortune out of conforming to the latest taste in office buildings. Their recent constructions in Manhattan have been compared both to wedding cakes and to Assyrian ziggurats, and have more layers than the former, more bulk than the latter and about as much esthetic merit as both combined. Says Percy Uris: “We’re not building in a vacuum. We’re building in a market.”

 

The company’s productivity was a remarkable accomplishment, one that transformed the midtown skyline and streetscape. Harold Uris recalled:

 

We had a policy of creating the greatest amount of space for the lowest cost . . . We bought better and built faster than anyone else . . . Efficiency was the key to our success.

 

In terms of architectural aesthetics, however, their ambitions were modest. They produced a portfolio of buildings that were modern but hardly radical, fresh but conventional. In 1972, Uris explained:

 

I happen to believe that the interior of a building is more important that the exterior. None of the architectural people agree with me. But you build for those who occupy it, not for those who stand across the street and look at it. We have always built good buildings. I won’t say I am not a perfectionist. I can’t help it if people think every building should be the Taj Mahal.

 

In 1960, Uris Brothers issued stock to finance future projects which resulted in such colossal structures as the New York Hilton , the Uris Building at 1633 Broadway , and 55 Water Street , which was at the time of completion the world’s largest office building. Shortly after the stock offering was made they began a series of major gifts to Columbia University which financed construction of a new building for the School of Business, called Uris Hall . They also made significant contributions to Cornell University, Lenox Hill Hospital, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Following the death of Percy, Harold sold his stock in the Uris Buildings Corporation to the National Kinney Corporation in 1973.

 

Emery Roth & Sons

 

Both before and after the Second World War, the Urises turned to architect Emery Roth with great frequency to produce buildings that were stylish and profitable. Emery Roth, the firm’s founder, was born in Hungary in 1871 and came to the United States around 1884. His talent as a draftsman was quickly recognized and in the decade that followed he worked in Chicago with the architects Burnham & Root, and in New York City with Richard Morris Hunt and Ogden Codman, Jr.

 

In 1895 he opened his own office and later purchased the practice that would initially be known as Stein, Cohen & Roth. Many of New York City’s finest residential structures were designed by him, such as the Bellclaire Hotel , Ritz Tower , the Beresford , the San Remo , the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights, and the Normandy Apartments . Though his early works display rich and inventive exterior ornamentation, the character of his later buildings is more restrained, reflecting the growing popularity of the Art Deco and Moderne styles.

 

Roth first collaborated with the Uris family in 1924, designing the Buckingham Apartments, at the northwest corner of Sixth Avenue and 57th Street. It was during this decade that Roth’s sons, Julian and Richard, joined the firm. Julian Roth attended Columbia University and may have been a classmate of Percy Uris. Though not licensed as an architect, he “specialized in building materials, construction methods, cost estimates and the technology of curtain walls.” Richard Roth graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1928 and after briefly working with Allen & Collens in Boston, entered his father’s practice, which was renamed Emery Roth & Sons in 1938. Steven Ruttenbaum, author of Mansions in the Clouds: The Skyscraper Palazzi of Emery Roth, claimed this change had little impact on the firm’s operations and the elder Roth remained “the man who made the decisions, who maintained client contact, and set the fees. He shared the responsibilities of overseeing design development with no one.”

 

In the 1940s, however, ill health caused Emery Roth to relinquish control of the office. One of his last commissions was 300 East 57th Street, an 18-story tan brick apartment house. Built for developer Samuel Rudin in 1944-48, it featured unusual recessed terraces that were probably added by Richard who became the firm’s chief designer. This sleek project received a medal from the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects as one of the city’s best new residential structures. His next project was 505 Park Avenue , a 21story tan brick office building. Located at the northeast corner of 57th Street, the elevations had a strong horizontal orientation, with a “continuous glass front . . . to give a maximum amount of natural light.” This was the first of many buildings Richard designed for Uris Brothers, followed by 4 West 58th Street , incorporating the Paris Theater, and 575 Madison Avenue , between 56th and 57th Streets. Begun in January 1948, the latter building shares many features with the Look Building, such as a two-story base, white brick elevations, and continuous windows that “run entirely around the structure above the second floor level, providing maximum flexibility in the arrangement and subdivision of offices.”

 

These family-run businesses would remain closely aligned for several decades. Julian Roth later recalled:

 

Percy Uris would call me and say, Julian, I’ve just bought a plot of land. How soon can Richard have the plans ready?”

 

Emery Roth & Sons became one of New York City’s most prolific firms. As architect, or architect of record, they were involved in at least 150 structures after the Second World War. In 1967, reporter Thomas Ennis said that Roth has “earned most of the praise – or blame – for the way Manhattan’s business district looks today.” The firm developed a reputation for superior efficiency, employing mostly predictable formulas that maximized square footage and speed of construction. In addition, they collaborated on such high-profile projects as the Pan Am Building , the World Trade Center , and the Citicorp Building . One writer observed: “It seems unlikely any firm in history has been responsible for so many tall buildings within such a short span of time.”

 

Designing the Look Building

 

Richard Roth began to prepare his scheme in late 1948 and the final drawings were completed in July 1949. Built on speculation, the Look Building needed to be fashionable, practical, and profitable. Throughout his career, Richard pursued a pragmatic approach to design. Not only did he try to maximize the square footage in buildings but he believed this type of plan created the kind of interior space favored by prospective tenants. When he addressed the Real Estate Board of New York in 1952, Richard urged architects entering the field to develop “a working knowledge of the various codes, laws, regulations, and ruling affecting buildings.” Though he acknowledged that slender towers could be dramatic and beautiful, he believed the market for offices on the smaller, upper floors was limited.

 

While higher rents may be obtained from tower floors, he said there are fewer good tenants for 5,000 square feet of space than there are for 15,000 square feet to 20,000 square feet.

 

The 1940s proved to be a transitional period in office building design and the Look Building combines characteristics associated with Streamlined Modernism, sometimes referred to as Art Moderne, and the International Style. In terms of massing, its shape was determined by the 1916 zoning resolution, which was conceived to protect access to light and air in Manhattan’s most crowded districts. To accomplish this, commercial buildings were required to set back at a certain height, which was determined by location and street width. Bulk was regulated and diminished in stages, creating wedding-cake-like silhouettes in which the uppermost floors could cover only 25 per cent of the lot. Slender towers, consequently, were discouraged on all-but-thelargest of properties.

 

While Roth’s setback massing was fairly conventional, stepping back at every other floor above the 12th story, the treatment of the elevations was somewhat new. Faced with industrial materials, the facade has a strong horizontal emphasis. The building’s developer, Percy Uris, defended this trend toward simplicity, saying:

 

The new facade, with its horizontal lines and absence of ornamentation is generally admired, but there are some who consider the modern exterior too severe. Actually, if a building has good lines, its simplicity will add to its beauty.

 

The Look Building has bands of ribbon-like windows that alternate with white brick spandrels. Roth was most likely influenced by two local projects: the Starrett-Lehigh Building and the Universal Pictures Building . Both structures feature continuous bands of fenestration that reflect contemporary interest in functional aesthetics and possibly the work of the German Expressionist architect Erich Mendelsohn, who immigrated to the United States in 1941. Many of his works had a distinctive streamlined appearance, such as the Rudolf Petersdorf Department Store in Breslau, which was illustrated in the New York Times in March 1931 under the headline “German Architecture Goes Modern.”

 

Of probable greater importance was the Universal Pictures Building, 445 Park Avenue, completed in 1947. Designed by Kahn & Jacobs, the project architect was Elsa Gidoni, who trained in Berlin and was later described as “highly attuned to the International Style work of Erich Mendelsohn.” Built on a comparable block-long site, this 21-story office building has similar bulk and massing, ribbon-like windows, terraces, and air conditioning. It was a great success and entirely rented prior to completion. Developer Paul Tishman asserted these amenities would increase “working efficiency” and “make it possible for tenants to obtain maximum use of space on each floor . . . there just won’t be any unusable areas.”

 

For the Look Building, Roth fine tuned many of these ideas. While the number of floors and massing is similar, the curved corners allow the windows and spandrels to flow without interruption. According to Percy Uris, this type of fenestration had various benefits. Not only did it provide better lighting and a sense of openness, but he believed it was part of:

 

. . . a real step forward in office planning. Where the space is used as a large open general office, the effect is light and cheerful. These windows also make for easy subdivision into smaller rooms with more flexibility than formerly possible when masonry and columns more or less determined individual office spaces.

 

Roth claimed that this approach would satisfy “status conscious tenants . . . because it permitted an even distribution of window space for executive offices, a matter of considerable importance to corporate tenants.”

 

The stacked, multiple curves give the elevations an organic, almost biomorphic quality. Marv Rothenstein, who worked for Uris Brothers, later wrote:

 

Everything about them was special, starting with the curved structural steel,

 

followed by curved concrete forms, curved bricks, curved window frames, and

 

curved glass.

 

The corners have a three-and-a-half foot radius and are faced with radial brick. In New York City, buildings with rounded corners are found in Lower Manhattan, where irregularly-shaped parcels provided architects with opportunities to emphasize specific vistas, facades, and entrances. Though concave and convex facades gained greater popularity in the late 1930s and were present in various pavilions at the New York World’s Fair, such features were rarely used in office buildings. It was, however, used to great advantage at the Starrett-Lehigh Building, as well as in Roth’s much simpler design for 505 Park Avenue. These streamlined buildings, however, have much wider curves and were erected with less costly “straight segments.”

 

Above the 12th story, the Look Building’s setbacks function as private terraces. These unbroken, wrap-around spaces were part of the original design, and appear in the blueprints at Avery Library, Columbia University, with glass doors and metal railings.

 

In contrast to Rockefeller Center, which had common landscaped gardens on the rooftops, these shallow outdoor spaces seem closer in spirit to residential terraces and, like the upper floors of the Cities Service Building , 70 Pine Street in lower Manhattan, and the Universal Pictures Building, were reached from inside offices. Such amenities were also part of a broader trend after the Second World War to blur the boundaries between interior and exterior space.

 

To give the Look Building a stylish, modern appearance, Roth faced it with white brick. This material was introduced in the first decade of the 20th century but did not become popular until construction of Manhattan House . Built by the architects Skidmore Owings & Merrill on East 66th Street in 1947-51, this 21-story structure is considered Manhattan’s earliest white brick apartment house, influencing the design of numerous imitators and possibly Richard Roth. Though some explained the popularity of this brick in practical terms, saying it was self-washing and would reflect light into the surrounding area, white was also strongly associated with the European avant-garde, particularly the early minimalist works of Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto.

 

Construction

 

Plans for construction of a $6 million structure at 488 Madison Avenue were filed with the Department of Buildings in November 1948. Several months later, during February 1949, D.

 

E. H. Demolition began tearing down the former home of Cathedral College and excavation of the site began. The Harris Structural Steel Company began to deliver the steel components in June 1949 and by the end of August 1949 the framework was “topped” out. The New York Times reported that this was “considered a postwar record for steel erection.” According to Marv Rothstein, as many as seven four-men riveting teams were involved in the process. The concrete floors were finished in early September 1949, and shortly after, the white brick elevations. About four floors were enclosed each week. As this task progressed, the steel casement windows were installed. Once this job was completed, the interior plastering began. Tenants began to occupy the air-conditioned structure in early 1950.

 

Tenants

 

With Cross & Brown as the building’s rental agent, all of the office floors were leased by November 1949 – several months before construction was complete – and all of the retail space by May 1, 1950. This section of midtown Manhattan was a lively hub of media activity, especially around Rockefeller Center. Several magazines were early tenants, including Look, Esquire, and Seventeen. Look was launched by Gardner “Mike” Cowles, Jr., in Des Moines, Iowa, in January 1937. He consolidated the editorial offices at 522 Fifth Avenue, where it remained for a decade. Modeled on European picture magazines, it became a significant rival to Life magazine, which was based in Rockefeller Center, and by 1948 the magazine had a paid circulation of three million. Look would become the largest tenant, with offices on the 10th, 11th and 12th floors.

 

Uris Brothers agreed to name the building for Look in early 1950. Esquire, which claimed it was “embarrassed by the “new look,” took legal action to stop this, arguing that the change would “convey the false impression” that Esquire was “published or sponsored by the publishers of Look.” No action, however, was taken by the courts and until 1980 large capital letters spelled out “Look Building” on the mechanical tower’s south side. The 1950s would be heyday of Look’s popularity, reaching an estimated 21 per cent of all U.S. adults in 1961. It was the third most popular magazine in the nation and in 1963 it would sign a new lease, almost doubling its office space to more than 200,000 square feet. The New York Times Company purchased the Cowles Media Company in 1971, which included Family Circle and various regional newspapers.

 

Pocket Books, Inc., a division of Simon & Shuster, which published popular best sellers, was also an original tenant, as was the Music Publishers Holding Company, with such subsidiaries as Harms, Inc., Remick Music, New World Music, Advances Music, and Witmark & Sons. In Witmark’s fifth floor studio, a young Bob Dylan produced a series of important early demo recordings during 1962 and 1963.

 

Emery Roth & Sons joined the prestigious roster of tenants in April 1950. The New York Times reported that it was only the firm’s “fourth move” in fifty years and they occupied part of the 18th floor until the late 1950s. Three floors above, on the 21st floor, was Raymond Loewy, one of the 20th century’s most significant industrial designers, who appeared on the cover of Time magazine in October 1949 and would design the interiors of Lever House , completed nearby at 390 Park Avenue in 1952. Later tenants have included the Institutional Investor and Abbeville Press.

 

Subsequent History

 

In April 1953, the property was sold to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Several months later, in August 1953, the building was leased back to Uris Brothers. Since the 1970s, it has been owned by the 488 Madison Avenue Associates and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

 

The two-story retail base was remodeled with tinted black glass and new shop entrances in the 1980s. Horowitz Immerman Architects were responsible for these alterations. The rest of the exterior was renovated with great sensitivity by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates in 1998. Architect Malcolm Holzman was the partner in charge of the project. He said that his main objective was to “keep the building as it is and not make it into something it will never be.” At the time, the original steel windows were replaced by similar aluminum frames and the glazed brick was cleaned. Additionally, about 20 per cent of the brick was replaced, as well as the original slate windowsills.

 

Interest in mid-20th century modern architecture was growing in the 1990s and the building’s careful restoration was described in a New York Times article, as well as in a small exhibition, New Life for a Modern Monument: A Salute to 488 Madison Avenue, organized by the Municipal Art Society in autumn 1998. The brochure’s text praised the owners and architects, commenting “The Look Building’s restoration shows how successfully the best postwar buildings can be updated, rewarding investors and delighting passerby.” In 2004, the Look Building was added to the National Register of Historic Places and the facade is subject to a conservation easement filed with the Trust of Architectural Easements.

 

Description

 

The Look Building stands on the west side of Madison Avenue, between 51st and 52nd Streets. It occupies an L-shaped lot, measuring 200 feet on Madison Avenue, 140 feet on 51st Street, and 75 feet on 52nd Street. Above the second story, the facade is mainly white brick. Continuous non-historic aluminum windows , three horizontal panes tall, extend continuously around the facade, starting at the west ends of the north and south facades. The center panes are operable and open out from the bottom. Above the 12-story base, every second floor sets back, climaxing with a mostly windowless tower, which incorporates horizontal louvers on the east front.

 

The two-story retail base is non-historic and dates to the late 1980s. It is divided from the third story on all facades by what appears to be charcoal-colored cast-stone panels, crowned by a curved aluminum molding. The two stories of glass panels are transparent or tinted black and the water table may be granite. The main entrance is at the center of the sloping Madison Avenue facade. There is a recessed passage that leads to a single revolving glass entrance door, flanked by conventional glass doors. The entrance passage is paved with contrasting light and dark gray granite. The exterior panels that face the street are polished black granite and the walls that flank the passage are light brown-and-black marble.

 

There is a ribbed aluminum ceiling with recessed lighting fixtures, as well as square service panel near center. Above the entrance passage is a wide non-historic aluminum marquee with curved corners and free-standing numerals that identify the address. To the left are three storefronts with recessed entrances. The one closest to the entrance has a horizontal aluminum sign with white lettering. At the corner of 51st Street is a revolving door with dark tinted glass. Directly to the right of this door is a conventional recessed store entrance. To the right of the main entrance is a single storefront with clear glass windows. This storefront incorporates several horizontal aluminum signs with white lettering: on Madison Avenue, at the corner of 52nd Street, and on 52nd Street.

 

The Fifty-First street facade has four non-historic storefronts, at 19, 21 and 23 East 51st Street. The last address has two entrances. Most of the first-story businesses are identified above the storefronts with metal letters against black glass panels. Though most of the glass on the second story is tinted black, the windows nearest Madison Avenue are transparent. At the west end of the facade, a vertical banner is strung between two horizontal brass poles. A significant number of glass panels toward the west end of the second story have been replaced with horizontal metal louvers. Near the top of the 11th story, at center, a white horizontal box projects out from the facade. In addition, there are four vertical boxes attached at the corner above the third story. There is a fan-like security gate at the west edge of the 7th story.

 

Fifty-Second Street has a single storefront that extends around the corner from Madison Avenue. To the west of the last window is a single vertical panel of horizontal louvers. At the corner, above the aluminum sign, are two small black boxes with visible wires. The service entrance, with two metal doors that open outward, is located at the west end of the first story. At the middle of the 4th story, two of the upper windows have been replaced with horizontal louvers. Fan-like security gates have been installed at the west end of two of the uppermost floors.

 

- From the 2010 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report

Built in 1935-1939, this Modern house, an example of Organic Architecture, was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for the family of department store owner Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr. to serve as a weekend retreat. The house was a catalyst for the revitalization of Frank Lloyd Wright’s career, who was in his mid-60s at the time, along with two other commissions around the same time, the Johnson Wax Headquarters and the Jacobs House I, which were critically acclaimed and explored a bold new direction of organic architecture that was heavily inspired from their natural surroundings, and were streamlined, dropping most of the ornamental pretenses of his earlier work. The house was built for department store owner Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr., his wife, Liliane Kaufmann, and their only son, Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., to serve as the family’s weekend retreat, with room to accommodate a small staff and guests alongside the family. The Kaufmann family became acquainted with the work of Wright through Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., who read Frank Lloyd Wright’s autobiography in 1934, and was so impressed that he decided to intern at the Taliesin Fellowship, where Edgar, Sr. and Liliane first met Wright while visiting Edgar, Jr. The family, at the time, resided in a traditional-style mansion in Fox Chapel, near Pittsburgh, and had a small rustic cabin overlooking the waterfall at the Fallingwater site. The cabins were falling into disrepair in the mid-1930s, which prompted the Kaufmann family to contact Wright to design a replacement structure. Wright visited and surveyed the area around Bear Run in 1934, but shelved the project while pursuing other work for the next few months, thinking through the design, before being surprised by a visit from Edgar J. Kaufmann, Sr. in September 1935, which prompted Wright to quickly draw a concept for a house at Bear Run, producing the initial design drawings in two hours. Edgar, Sr., upon seeing the plans, was surprised to see the house soaring above the waterfall, as he had expected it to sit below the falls in order to view them from a distance, but Wright’s charisma convinced a skeptical Kaufmann to buy into the concept.

 

The house was designed by Wright with input from structural engineers Mendel Glickman and William Wesley Peters to feature large cantilevers, which allowed it to embrace the waterfall and topography below, while providing ample outdoor space and the desired number of bedrooms and living spaces within. A second wing was constructed above the main house, linked to it via a covered breezeway, which houses a carport, servants quarters, and a guest suite. The stone utilized in the house’s construction was quarried on the site, and it utilized reinforced concrete in its construction, a building technique with which Wright was inexperienced, but which the design would be impossible to implement without utilizing. Kaufmann was skeptical of Wright’s experience with the technique, as well as the cantilevered forms of the structure, and commissioned an engineering report, compiled by an engineering firm, which caused Wright to threaten to walk away from the incomplete project. Kaufmann relented in the face of Wright’s ultimatum, and had the documents buried. However, the contractor, feeling uneasy about the strength of Wright’s design, added extra reinforcement in secret, which was revealed during the building’s restoration. Other changes were made due to skepticism of the cantilevered design, but many of these were reversed, which proved the resiliency and strength of the design. The house came in far over budget, but despite these cost overruns and complications with the design, the Kaufmann family enjoyed it as a weekend retreat between 1937 and 1963. Liliane Kaufmann died in 1952, and Edgar Kaufmann, Sr. died in 1955, leaving the house to their son, Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., who continued to utilize the house as a weekend retreat, with his life partner, Paul Mayén, becoming a regular visitor to the house as well. In 1963, Edgar, Jr. donated the property to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, along with the surrounding property, which was converted into a nature reserve, and the house was opened for public tours.

 

The house features multiple reinforced concrete cantilevers, wrap-around windows facing the falls and Bear Run, open, transparent corners on the side of the building facing the creek, stone cladding on the more opaque portions of the facade, large terraces on the cantilevered portions of the building, open tread staircases inside and outside the building, red metal trim, a suspended concrete canopy over the breezeway connecting the guest wing and carport with the main house, a swimming pool on the terrace outside the guest wing, rocks embedded into the floors of the interior of the house, a staircase from the living room down to Bear Run below, and red concrete floors inside. A driveway, following Bear Run, crosses a bridge next to the main wing of the house before following a narrow corridor between the main wing and an adjacent stone outcropping, before turning and arriving at the upper wing, which originally housed a four-bay carport on the lower floor. The interior of the house is very open to the exterior, with low furnishings that allow for maximization of the views out of the windows, and is home to art that was collected by Liliane, books collected by Edgar, Jr. and Paul, and furnishings collected by Edgar, Sr. The house’s kitchen features yellow-painted metal cabinets and appliances, and chrome handles, the living room features a fireplace with a spherical beverage warmer that is designed to swing over to the fireplace from its storage location next to the fireplace and coffered ceilings, and horizontal bands of trim, and various portions of the house feature built-in desks, cabinets, wooden slat screens, and bookshelves, simple beds featuring wooden headboards and nightstands in the bedrooms, and bathrooms with cork tiles, sunken bathtubs, ceiling-mounted shower heads, and toilets with wall-embedded tanks. The upper wing of the house has a carport and guest suite on the lower floor, with servants quarters above, and the main house features a living room, dining room, kitchen, terraces and lounge on the first floor, a primary suite and secondary bedroom and bathroom with large terraces on the second floor, and a suite intended for Edgar, Jr. on the third floor, which was later partially converted into an office. The house is very broad in the direction parallel to Bear Run and has a living room that cantilevers over the creek, but it is very thin, being rather thin, with primary interior spaces featuring windows that look out onto Bear Run below. The house, despite its size appearing massive due to its spatial arrangement, has only a small interior square footage, but the space is efficiently designed to offer maximum utility to the occupants, and allow a close connection with nature.

 

The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. It was designated as part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, in 2019. A visitor center was constructed on the property in 1977-1979, designed by Paul Mayen. The most visible modification to the house since it was opened to the public were the enclosure of three carport bays to house a museum and presentation space for visitors. The house underwent major alterations to its structural systems in 1995-2002, involving analyzing the performance of the cantilevers over time since the house’s construction, as the bold cantilevered forms had insufficient reinforcement and had deflected substantially, nearing their failure points. Additional steel supports and post-tensioning in the form of steel cables were added to the building to support the cantilevers, which has halted the progression of the deflection of the structure, though it is monitored by the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in order to detect any further movement of the structure. The house today sees over one-hundred thousand visitors annually, and is one of the most well-known works of Wright, as well as being one of the best-known houses in the United States.

This wonderfully Art Deco streamlined six piece jade green Bakelite, chrome and glass travelling dressing table set, consisting of brush, comb, powder pots and a perfume bottle, was made in England by the Halex Company (1897 - 1971) of Highams Park (which is a district in the London). The set, which comes with its own travelling case of green dyed leather to match with a salmon coloured satin lining also has one original powder puff in apricot, one in pale pink and one in primrose yellow. There is also a nail file and set of tweezers in metal as well as a removable mirror.

 

When acquired from a local auctioneers, the set was also found to include a little red Bakelite pot with the letter L embossed on its lid. It is in fact a pot of "mandarin" Leichner Cosmetics (1878 - present) rouge, which still contains its original sponge, a mirror on the inside of the lid, and most of the contents, which are a wonderful shade of vermilion.

 

Private collection.

A Streamlined era stop on the NYC! This station exudes the Art-Deco genre in all of it's glory!

 

This vintage Buffalo Central Terminal postcard looks like it's from the 30s or 40s. The color of the bus, and the identification of the cars could pinpoint the date.

As a bonus the reverse features the "TERMINAL RPO" postmark displayed.

DRG Class 05 streamlined 4-6-4T No.05 001 (Borsig No.14552 of 1935) in its beautiful deep red livery at the DB Museum, Nurnberg, 10 May 2016. Two Class 05's were built by Borsig (Berlin-Tegel works) in 1935 and one cab-forward version in 1937 by Borsig (Hennigsdorf works). They had 7'6.5" wheels. No.05 002 attained the world speed record in 1935 at 119.1 mph and again in 1936 at 124.5 mph, with an output of 3,400 ihp. This loco also holds the non-stop record for steam when it did 70.1 mls (Wittenberge - Berlin Spandau) in 48 mins at an average speed of 86.66 mph. Krauss-Maffei rebuilt them in 1950-51 without streamlining and they hauled the 'Hanseat' and 'Domspatz' on the Hamburg - Koln - Frankfurt service of 703 km (436.8 miles), the longest German steam hauled service. There is an 'urban myth' that at the end of WWII British troops found DR documents which revealed that, on the eve of the war, one of the Class 05's built Mallard's world speed record but that was never publicised because of the immediate break out of war. In order to retain Mallard's record, the troops - which included some railway enthusiasts - allegedly destroyed the records! How true this is will never be known but the abilities of the 05's should not be underestinated. And after 05 002's high speed runs, it was in normal service the next day.

Streamlined juveniles on Laminaria hyperborea frond, orientated with prow-like anteriors probably facing from whence wave or current impact comes. The width of the blue lines remains fairly constant at 0.1mm to 0.2mm at all growth stages. These juveniles also have a variable number of red-brown rays interspersed between the blue ones, but this is a more frequent feature on adults in holdfasts; Graham & Fretter (1947) only found red-brown rays on a juvenile once in a study of 684 shells. Radula marks on the frond suggest that the limpets swing their heads in an arc as they feed.

A dark chestnut band on the distal face of the horseshoe-shaped pedal-retractor muscle can be seen through the translucent shells of four of these juveniles.

 

Concise Key id. features: 1Pp flic.kr/p/Z4FxDe

Part 1, SHELL FORMS: 2Pp flic.kr/p/Z4FxAi

Part 2, BODY & ANATOMY, BELOW.

Part, 3 HABITS & ECOLOGY: 4Pp flic.kr/p/Z4Fx9M

Sets of OTHER SPECIES: www.flickr.com/photos/56388191@N08/collections/

PDF available at www.researchgate.net/publication/346673416_Patella_pelluc...

 

GLOSSARY below.

Body description (Features visible on live animal.)

The main flesh colour is white or yellowish white. A horseshoe-shaped series of strong muscle bundles make up the pedal-retractor muscle 53Pp flic.kr/p/Z6REoG & 54Pp flic.kr/p/C3widA . Juveniles have a distinct, longitudinal, dark chestnut band on the distal face of the pedal-retractor muscle that can often be seen through the translucent juvenile shell 3Pp flic.kr/p/Z4FxtK , 4Pp flic.kr/p/Z4Fx9M & 5Pp flic.kr/p/YNrZYJ or by dissection 55Pp flic.kr/p/Z6RDUW . The chestnut band fades on adults inside holdfasts 56Pp flic.kr/p/Y8tL5H . Some of the adults on fronds retain a strongly pigmented band 57Pp flic.kr/p/Z6RDtf & 22Pp flic.kr/p/Z51FP4 , but others lose it 58Pp flic.kr/p/C3wgX9 . Although the band fades on holdfast dwellers, the anterior dorsal surface of the foot, below the head, usually becomes yellowish with brown creases. This colouration may extend faintly over more of the foot dorsally 53Pp flic.kr/p/Z6REoG . The head has short stout snout occupied by a large mouth surrounded by thick, white, wrinkled outer lips 59Pp flic.kr/p/Z6RCRd which extend the snout when protruded 60Pp flic.kr/p/Y8tJDM . A pink, internal odontophore and buccal mass can be seen through the translucent, white head 61Pp flic.kr/p/Z6RCAJ . The odontophore is separated from the outer lips by dull orange inner lips that open laterally and close to a vertical line 62Pp flic.kr/p/Z6RCAJ . When they open, the radula with rust-coloured, iron-rich teeth is protruded through the arch of the opaque white jaw 60Pp flic.kr/p/Y8tJDM . The tapered, translucent white cephalic tentacles each have a black eye with a tiny opening on the dorsum of the slightly swollen tentacle-base 61Pp flic.kr/p/Z6RCAJ . The opening is at the apex of an internal cone of black pigment that, because visible through the translucent flesh, gives the false impression of a larger opening. Some or all of the black may be pigmented retinal cells. The eye can probably differentiate light from shade, and detect the direction of the light source, but cannot discern shapes. The mantle-skirt is translucent whitish, often showing the colour of underlying shell when viewed ventrally 63Pp flic.kr/p/Y4Rjnb . The mantle cavity consists of a nuchal cavity over the head 64Pp flic.kr/p/C3wfCW and a groove, containing pallial gills, around the periphery of foot but, unlike other British Patellidae, not around the anterior of the head 65Pp flic.kr/p/Y8tH2Z . The gill-less anterior gap appears (small sample) to be proportionally of greatest extent on juveniles 66Pp flic.kr/p/C3wf4Q . A red (vestigial?) osphradium is located within the nuchal cavity next to each terminal bundle of the pedal-retractor muscle Pp53 flic.kr/p/Z6REoG . The efferent pallial vessel, less whitish than the rest of the mantle skirt, runs around the entire animal at the base of the pallial gills 65Pp flic.kr/p/Y8tH2Z and in front of the head to a point left of the head where its two ends unite in a trunk 64Pp flic.kr/p/C3wfCW that passes through the roof of the nuchal cavity to the heart. The mantle skirt is fringed with translucent, white pallial tentacles that can protrude beyond the rim of the shell when the mantle is fully extended 67Pp flic.kr/p/Y8tGwv . Along the whole length of each side of the dorsal surface of the foot there is a lateral glandular streak 53Pp flic.kr/p/Z6REoG with an overhanging upper lip. The lip has lobe-like retractile tentacles 68Pp flic.kr/p/Z6RA7A and is usually paler than the rest of the foot when the latter is tinted yellowish.

58Pp flic.kr/p/C3wgX9 . The sole is pure white on juveniles and early adults on fronds, often becoming yellowish, especially at the anterior, on frond dwelling, large adults 69Pp flic.kr/p/Y8tEYF . Adults in holdfasts have white soles even when the dorsal surface of the foot is yellowish with brown creases 65Pp flic.kr/p/Y8tH2Z

The intensity of colour on coloured soles is diminished when the sole is expanded laterally 70Pp flic.kr/p/Z9Bf6x . The anterior of the foot is bilaminate with the dorsal lamina extending beyond the sole 59Pp flic.kr/p/Z6RCRd . The anterior-pedal mucous gland is between the laminae. As with other patellids, there is no penis as fertilization is external.

 

Internal functional anatomy

When the body is removed from the shell the entire mantle is visible. The peripheral mantle-skirt is white translucent and may reveal the white foot below 71Pp flic.kr/p/Zjfznw . The rest of the mantle is semi-transparent with a fine spray of black pigment of varying intensity. Many features of the viscera can be discerned through it.

Blood circulation and respiration

Image 72Pp flic.kr/p/YhjbgA illustrates paragraph 1.

After it has oxygenated organs in the visceral mass, the colourless blood, depleted of oxygen, collects in visceral sinuses. It then passes in vessels through gaps in the pedal-retractor muscle into an afferent branchial vessel that runs through the mantle skirt around the edge of the distal face of the muscle . The afferent branchial vessel distributes blood to all the gill leaflets which re-oxygenate it as it passes through them. The oxygenated blood passes into a large efferent pallial vessel (a.k.a. efferent branchial vessel) and passes forwards on both right and left sides of the animal. The

flow of blood in the efferent pallial vessel (e.p.v.) on the right continues round the front of the head to join the left of the e.p.v. in a trunk that enters the left side of the nuchal cavity to connect with the heart in the pericardial cavity behind the left of the nuchal cavity 55Pp flic.kr/p/Z6RDUW & 73Pp flic.kr/p/Zjfz8y . The heart consists of three parallel chambers; the auricle, ventricle and bulbous aorta. Blood is pumped out via the bulbous aorta to oxygenate organs in the head and visceral hump before returning to the visceral sinuses to recommence the cycle.

The gills consist of a large number of leaflets, alternating large and small, hanging from the roof of the pallial groove 74Pp flic.kr/p/YhjaWs . The leaflets vary in shape with free ends that can be rounded, flat or pointed, but all narrow where they attach to the roof of the pallial groove and have a deep and densely ciliated groove around the rim 75Pp flic.kr/p/YhjaS9 . The respiratory inhalant water current is created by the motion of cilia on each leaflet of the gills drawing water in all around the shell, except at the gill-less anterior (X5000 scanning electron microscope images of cilia on a chiton at flic.kr/p/qQB5zj ). Sediment entering with the water is trapped by mucus from the lateral glandular streak 53Pp flic.kr/p/Z6REoG and carried forwards and out by the exhalant current along the pallial groove. The oxygen-bearing water is drawn across the surface of the leaflets in the opposite direction to the blood flow within, so creating a counter current-system (Fretter and Graham, 1994). The dense cilia in the rim-groove are reported (Fretter and Graham, 1994) to propel debris particles caught on the leaflet surface to the free end where they drop off, but this would seem unlikely for those in holdfasts feeding upside down into the core of the stipe. After passing the leaflets, the current, now exhalant, is propelled by cilia forwards along the pallial groove to exit the gill-less anterior on the right of the animal 76Pp flic.kr/p/ZjfytY & 77Pp flic.kr/p/YhjaDJ . It is unlikely that the red features referred to as the osphradia 53Pp flic.kr/p/Z6REoG have the usually attributed function of water-quality testing as there are no associated ctenidia to forwarn, and they are located in the path of the exhalant water after it has flowed over the pallial gills and shortly before it exits the anterior of the shell. There are anatomical signs that they may be vestiges of a lost double osphradium-ctenidium complex like that still found in Diodora graeca flic.kr/p/neENxW (Spengel, 1881, in Fretter & Graham, 1962, p314). Graham & Fretter (1947) had a 'suspicion' that the leaflets on frond-dwellers are smaller than those on holdfast-dwellers, and that this can be correlated with the greater exposure to water movement of frond dwellers. This seems to be supported by some images 78Pp flic.kr/p/Zjfyby that show large leaflets projecting from the shell of holdfast dwellers, but no leaflets projecting from the shell of frond dwellers. But, measurement of live, expanded, gill area is difficult, and individuals can extend or retract the mantle and gills.

 

Alimentary and excretory features .

The inner lips of the mouth, described above, open into the buccal cavity. The anterior wall of the cavity is reinforced by a pliable, white, chitinous, antero-dorsal plate, called the “jaw” though it is not articulated and does not bite 60Pp flic.kr/p/Y8tJDM . It serves as an attachment for several muscles and has two lateral wings that meet dorsally at an angle and form an anterior shield for the inner lips when they are open. Within the buccal cavity there is a pink odontophore 61Pp flic.kr/p/Z6RCAJ & 79Pp flic.kr/p/Zjfxp3 consisting of a right and left bolster which is covered in thick cuticle. Much of a bolster is made of strong cartilage-like material. The odontophore occupies a large amount of the body, 25% of its length. There is a black mark within its anterior half that is visible through the dorsal surfaces of it 80Pp flic.kr/p/ZjfxcQ , the epithelium of the head and the overlying mantle 81Pp flic.kr/p/ZjfwMb , and, on many translucent shells, it underlies and adds to the intensity of a patch of black pigment on the anterior of the shell's interior 82Pp flic.kr/p/ZjfwtL .

The radula is created in a semi-translucent sac 83Pp flic.kr/p/ZjfwgS . Its exposed anterior, widened into a hyaline shield 84Pp flic.kr/p/Zjfwaj , rests on the dorsum of the odontophore 85Pp flic.kr/p/Zjfw5u . The strong, iron-impregnated, unarticulated teeth are firmly fixed in a backwardly inclined position on the radula 86Pp flic.kr/p/ZjfvYC , but the anterior tip of the radula bends over the front of the odontophore so that the front rows of four teeth are inclined forwards like a chisel 85Pp flic.kr/p/Zjfw5u . To feed, the strong muscles of the large odontophore thrust it forwards against the front of the buccal cavity which, reinforced by the jaw, restrains the odontophore but allows the front teeth to project strongly from the narrow vertex of the gap between the wings of the jaw 60Pp flic.kr/p/Y8tJDM . When applied to Laminaria, the teeth effectively chisel into the tough frond or stipe, and the curve of the withdrawing teeth acts as a scoop to lift particles back to the oesophagus in the buccal cavity. The action is surrounded by the outer lips which prevent the escape of loosened food fragments 60Pp flic.kr/p/Y8tJDM . Like other limpets and some sea snails that graze rock surfaces, P. pellucida has a long, powerful radula, but it is shorter than most, being about 75% the length of the shell 37Pp flic.kr/p/XQh5nv , requiring only a single fold to fit it inside the body 87Pp flic.kr/p/ZjfvNs which is about the same length as it 80Pp flic.kr/p/ZjfxcQ . Other British patellids have radulae between about 100% and 250% of shell length (Fretter & Graham, 1962). The cause of the correlation between length and rock grazing is uncertain. It may be that a lengthy process is needed for the teeth to acquire the required hardening mineralization, so less length/time would be needed to form a radula for grazing alga that is tough, but not as hard as rock. Tooth creation starts at the slightly bifid, white, inner end of the radular sac 83Pp flic.kr/p/ZjfwgS with secretion of colourless transparent cuticular material by odontoblast cells. As each new tooth commences, the previous one is pushed forwards along the sac. Cells along the roof of the sac make incremental additions, including the hardening salts of iron and silicon, to the teeth as they travel along the sac, with a progressive change from colourless through darkening shades of yellow/orange visible through the translucent sac walls. Creation is complete by the time the tooth reaches the buccal cavity, where the radula emerges from the sac onto the odontophore 85Pp flic.kr/p/Zjfw5u .

The yellow digestive gland 55Pp flic.kr/p/Z6RDUW & 81Pp flic.kr/p/ZjfwMb composed of a mass of tubules is usually the most obvious organ on the surface of the visceral mass when the shell is removed. Digestive cells in the tubules ingest particulate food to digest it intracellularly (Fretter & Graham, 1994, p. 219). The tubules extend into the blood filling the haemocoel, and their very thin covering of connective tissue allows the passage of nutrients into the blood. Food material passes along the long coiled intestine which is usually white like the consumed white inner parts of Laminaria 81Pp flic.kr/p/ZjfwMb & 87Pp flic.kr/p/ZjfvNs . Faecal boluses pass through the rectum 81Pp flic.kr/p/ZjfwMb and are compressed and bound with mucus to emerge as faecal rods 88Pp flic.kr/p/ZjfvsN from the anus at the rear right of the nuchal cavity 87Pp flic.kr/p/ZjfvNs and are conveyed to, and expelled from, the right anterior of the shell by cilia and the flow of exhalant water 77Pp flic.kr/p/YhjaDJ . Compression of faeces assists removal without fouling the gills. Excreta from the nephridipores by the anus are expelled by the same route. Particulate matter removed by cilia on the gill leaflets, and sediment caught in mucus from the lateral glandular streak, are conveyed along the pallial groove by cilia and exhalant water, to join the anterior expulsion.

 

Reproductive organs

The gonads are situated between the viscera and foot. During the breeding season, they may spread over much of the viscera 87Pp flic.kr/p/ZjfvNs & 89Pp flic.kr/p/Zjfvq3 , but on juveniles , and on adults out of breeding condition, they are usually hidden or nearly so 55Pp flic.kr/p/Z6RDUW & 82Pp flic.kr/p/ZjfwtL , on an animal removed from the shell. Female ovaries are granular, and male testes have numerous interconnected tubules. Fertilization is external, so the male has no penis. Gametes leave both sexes through the right nephridium (kidney) via its nephridipore at the rear right of the nuchal cavity, and carried from the shell by cilia and the forward flowing exhalant current.

 

GLOSSARY

 

afferent (adj. of vessel) = carrying blood etc. towards an organ.

aperture = mouth of gastropod shell; outlet for head and foot.

apex (definition for this account) = position of the larval protoconch (see summit).

branchial (adj.) = of or relating to gills (branchiae).

cephalic = (adj.) of or on the head.

cnidocytes = explosive stinging cells of hydroids, jellyfish, sea anemones etc. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cnidocyte

ctenidium = comb-like molluscan gill; usually an axis with a row of filaments either side.

 

efferent (adj. of vessel) = carrying blood etc. away from an organ.

ELWS = extreme low water spring tide (usually near March and September equinoxes).

  

epizoic (of a plant or animal) = growing or living non-parasitically on the exterior of a living animal.

 

GS1, GS2 etc. = Growth Stage 1 (planktonic veliger larva), Growth Stage 2 (newly settled juvenile) etc.

 

GS5f = Growth Stage 5 (late adult) living on Laminaria frond.

GS5h = Growth Stage 5 (late adult) living in Laminaria holdfast.

GS5s= Growth Stage 5 (late adult) living on Laminaria stipe.

 

haemocoel = system of interconnected spaces (sinuses) containing blood within body of a mollusc.

 

holdfast = rootlike in appearance, but not in function, tendrils attaching seaweed to the substrate. (a.k.a. hapteron).

mantle = sheet of tissue that secretes the shell and forms a cavity for the gill in most marine molluscs.

 

MLWS = mean low water spring tide level (mean level reached by lowest low tides for a few days every fortnight; Laminaria or Coralline zone on rocky coasts).

 

osphradium (pl. osphradia) = organ for testing water quality (chemical and/or for particles) usually near approach of inhalant current to ctenidium or pallial gills. Structure varied; including comblike, papillate or ribbing.

 

pallial (adj.) = of, relating to, or produced by the mantle (pallium).

periostracum = thin horny layer of chitinous material often coating shells.

phylogenetic (of development) = of change due to genetic make up.

resorb = absorb again that which was previously produced.

resorption = the process of absorbing again that which was previously produced.

 

stipe = stem of some brown seaweeds that supports the fronds and may contain a core of cells that transports sugars and nutrients within the alga.

 

summit (definition for this account) = highest point of the shell above the substrate (see apex).

 

trochophore = spherical or pear-shaped larva that moves with aid of girdle of cilia that beat to cause rotation. Stage preceding veliger, passed within gastropod egg in most spp. but free in plankton for patellid limpets, most Trochidae and Tricolia pullus, and, with no veliger, chitons.

 

veliger = shelled larva of marine gastropod or bivalve mollusc which feeds and swims by beating cilia of a velum (small on P. pellucida).

 

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

 

A collaborative project of the Federal Public Works Administration and the newly established New York City Housing Authority, the Williamsburg Houses are notable as one of the earliest housing developments in the United States to reflect the ideas of the modern movement in architecture. In the 1920s Williamsburg was one of the most densely populated sections of Brooklyn and nearly six hundred, mostly frame, structures were demolished to create the 23.3 acre site. Proposed in 1934, this residential complex was skillfully designed by the Williamsburg Associated Architects during 1935 and most units were occupied by 1938.

 

The partnership included Richmond H. Shreve, of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, the architects of the Empire State Building, and William Lescaze, the Swiss-born architect who helped introduce the “International” style on the eastern seaboard. Lescaze was responsible for the design, which includes twenty 4-story structures on four “super” blocks turned at 15 degree angles to the street grid. Oriented to the sun and prevailing winds, this unusual layout produced a series of large and small courts, many of which flow into a large public space at the center of each block. A light-colored palette distinguishes the facades, executed in tan brick and exposed concrete.

 

Among the most prominent features are the entrances, marked by blue tile and projecting stainless steel canopies, and the handsome streamlined storefronts. The complex was widely discussed by contemporary critics and more than 25,000 New Yorkers applied for 1,622 apartments. During the mid-1990s, the buildings underwent an extensive restoration which included the replacement of all exterior materials. Sponsored by the Housing Authority, in consultation with the Landmarks Preservation Commission, these alterations were remarkably sensitive and in the 4th edition of the AIA Guide to New York City the “revivified” complex was called “the best public housing project ever built in New York.”

 

DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS

 

Housing the Masses

 

From the rowhouse to the apartment building, New York City has been a laboratory for innovative housing. Beginning after the Civil War, apartments, variously known as French Flats and tenements, were built to house the city’s surging population. Immigrants, for the most part, crowded into unregulated tenements, structures that maximized profits for developers while providing few amenities that we take for granted today, such as light, air, and private bathrooms.

 

Despite government efforts to legislate minimum standards in 1867 and 1879, initially private individuals took the most significant steps to make decent housing affordable to all. Several pioneering examples were located close to the Brooklyn waterfront, including the Home and Tower Buildings (William Field and Son, 1876-78), the Astral Apartments (Lamb & Rich, 1885-87) and Riverside (William Field and Son, 1890). The later complex surrounded a large tree-shaded courtyard incorporating a music pavilion and areas for drying laundry. Despite these, and a few innovative Manhattan developments, the majority of New Yorkers continued to live in substandard conditions.

 

The passage of the New Tenement Law in 1901 improved the situation, requiring that multiple dwellings be built on significantly larger lots, with fire escapes and separate “privies” for each family. After World War I, the garden apartment came into vogue. While most were built for the middle class, especially in Jackson Heights, a significant group were sponsored by unions and cooperative organizations that wished to provide members with inexpensive apartments. Significant examples include the Amalgamated Houses (Springsteen & Goldhammer, 1930) on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and the “Coops” built in the Bronx by the United Workers Cooperative Association (Springsteen & Goldhammer, 1925-27; Herman Jessor, 1927-29).

 

The first significant act of government intervention occurred in 1926 with the passage of the New York State Housing Law. Promoted by Governor Alfred E. Smith to encourage construction through the formation of local authorities that would sell bonds or seek federal funds, it had little impact until 1934 when the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) was established. The authority’s first project, aptly called the First Houses (Frederick L. Ackerman, 1934-36), was located in Manhattan’s East Village. Begun as a rehabilitation program involving the demolition of every third structure, due to structural problems the eight brick buildings were entirely rebuilt.

 

Throughout the early Depression, government-subsidized housing remained a controversial issue. Consequently, it was first promoted as worker relief, organized to create jobs but not compete with the commercial market. The first federal agency to involve itself with housing was the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) which was created in 1932 to provide low-interest loans to limited-dividend housing corporations. Of the two loans it made, one was toward the construction of Knickerbocker Village (John S. Van Wart & Frederick L. Ackerman, 1933). Built for the Fred F. French Company, this Chinatown-area development consists of two 12-story buildings, both enclosing an interior courtyard.

 

In mid-1933, as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Housing Division of the Public Works Administration (PWA) was established. What made this agency different from its predecessor, the RFC, was that it would be directly involved in the planning and construction of low-income housing. The program was a great success and over the next three and half years it collaborated on the design and construction of 51 projects in 36 cities, including the Harlem River Houses and the Williamsburg Houses.

 

The passage of the Wagner-Steagall Bill (aka U.S. Housing Bill) by the United States Congress in September 1937, strengthened the federal government’s commitment to housing, but shifted greater control to local authorities. The first New York City housing project to be financed under this program was the Red Hook Houses (Electus Litchfied, chief designer, 1938-39) in Brooklyn. Future construction, which would amount to more than half a million low-rental units nationwide by 1957, would be funded primarily through low-interest loans.

 

Site

 

The Williamsburg Houses are located in northwestern Brooklyn, approximately one mile east of the Williamsburg Bridge and two blocks south of Grand Street, a lively commercial thoroughfare. Founded as part of the town of Bushwick in the mid17th century, Williamsburg was incorporated as a village in 1827. The community prospered and by 1852 it was the 20th largest city in the nation. Three years later, Williamsburg became part of Brooklyn and was commonly referred to as the Eastern District. Although ferry service was important to the area’s development, it was the planning and construction of a second East River crossing, the Williamsburg Bridge, that caused the most dramatic growth.

 

Proposed in 1883, the bridge was completed with much fanfare in 1903, serving pedestrians, bicycles and horse-drawn vehicles. In subsequent decades, Williamsburg rivaled the Lower East Side in population and density. The Brooklyn Eagle claimed in 1920 that the bridge was part of the busiest traffic center in the nation and that a single block north of it was the most crowded in the world. Conditions in the neighborhood continued to deteriorate throughout the decade, so much so that the population began to decline.

 

In October 1933, the Federal Works Administration (PWA) established a slum clearance committee to study conditions throughout New York City. Richmond H. Shreve, who would later serve as chief architect of the Williamsburg Houses, was named director. Based on the committee’s recommendations, $25 million was set aside for a housing program in New York City. Under the direction of the NYCHA, a more comprehensive study was undertaken in 1934, focusing on fourteen neighborhoods, including Williamsburg. The PWA reported:

 

When the study was completed the blighted slum area of the Williamsburg section stood out as the best example where the most good could be done in wholesale clearance work.

 

Of 93 blocks studied, a grid of 12 was identified for redevelopment in Williamsburg. These blocks were chosen because property values were relatively low and the owners were willing to sell. Most of buildings were mixed-use, incorporating retail spaces at ground level and apartments above. Each lot was carefully documented: 90% of the structures were at least forty years old, 70% were built of wood, 78% had no central heating, and 67% had no private toilets. Such statistics were used to paint an extremely bleak picture of life there:

 

But the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, according to official surveys, is unique in that its slums bear the stamp of dull listlessness and despair . . . Laissez faire, exploitation, and land speculation have robbed the community of its natural potentialities for development and orderly urban life.

 

Public amenities were also in short supply; there were few schools and there were almost no parks.

 

Architects

 

Five architects were appointed to the NYCHA’s architectural board in May 1934: Richmond H. Shreve (1877-1946) of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, Matthew W. Del Gaudio (1889-1960), William Lescaze (1899-1969), Arthur C. Holden (18901993), and James F. Bly. As members of the board, their initial role was advisory. They would act as the authority’s chief architect, overseeing the design and construction of municipal housing citywide.

 

In June 1934 an open competition was held to choose the architects who would work on the Williamsburg Houses and other NYCHA projects. The program guidelines did not specify the location, but the grid chosen closely resembled the long blocks where the Williamsburg Houses would be built. Of 278 architects who participated, 5 of the 22 selected were assigned to the Brooklyn project: Samuel Gardstein, of Holmgren, Volz & Gardstein, G. Harmon Gurney (b. 1896), of Gurney & Clavan, John W. Ingle Jr., Paul Trapani (1887-1974), and Harry Leslie Walker (1877-1954).

 

In June 1935, a contract was signed with the Williamsburg Associated Architects. The partnership consisted of ten men: the five architects selected by jury, as well as the five members of the architectural board. Among them, Shreve had the most experience with large projects, having worked on a succession of major Manhattan skyscrapers, most notably, the Empire State Building (Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, 1931).

 

A graduate of the College of Architecture at Cornell University (1902), he began his career as a member of the school’s faculty and later joined the firm of Carrére & Hastings in New York City where he distinguished himself as having a “genius for the solution of operational and administrative problems.” Whereas prior to the Depression he mainly worked on office buildings, in his later years Shreve was associated with residential developments, most notably the Vladeck Houses (1940) on the Lower East Side, and Parkchester (1938-42), a development with more than twelve thousand apartments in the Bronx. During the late 1930s, he also served as a member of the board of design for the New York World’s Fair.

 

Design

 

Of the three initial projects built by the NYCHA and the PWA, the Williamsburg Houses were the most innovative. Shreve appointed Lescaze as the chief designer, responsible for the plan and elevations. In the 1930s, he was at the height of his career, profiled in publications read by professionals and the layman. Born near Geneva, Switzerland, in 1896, he studied in Zurich with the architect Karl Moser in 1915-19 and for a brief period worked in Paris with Henri Sauvage, an important designer of apartment buildings. Lescaze moved to the United States in 1920 and after working in Cleveland and New York City, formed a partnership with George Howe, a Philadelphia architect, in 1929.

 

Their association lasted four years and produced one architectural masterpiece, the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society building, completed in 1932. During the mid-1930s, he was extremely active, working on unrealized plans for the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, as well as building three of the earliest modern-style townhouses in Manhattan, his own house and studio, completed in 1934, as well as the Raymond C. and Mildred Kramer (1934-5) and Edward and Dorothy Norman (1940) houses. He also designed, with Albert Frey, the Chrystie-Forsyth Houses. Planned in 1931, this unrealized proposal was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s so-called “International Style” exhibition of 1932.

 

One of the most unique aspects of the Williamsburg Houses is the plan. To create the 23.3 acre complex, twelve blocks were acquired by the city, and the two east-west streets (Stagg and Ten Eyck) were closed to traffic to create four “super” blocks. All but one extend three full blocks from north to south, except part of the block between Manhattan and Graham Avenues that was set aside for a new junior high school and play area.

 

The development of New York City was closely tied to its gridiron. Introduced in 1811, it resulted in a city of predictable intersecting streets and avenues. In 1835, a similar plan was approved for Brooklyn and by the early 1850s the streets that cross through the site of the Williamsburg Houses had opened.

 

Most were named for area residents, such as Daniel Maujer, a lawyer and alderman, John and James Lorimer Graham, land jobbers, and James Scholes, a local land owner. The impact of this approach is visible throughout New York City, establishing blocks and lots of equal size and dimensions. Residential developers benefitted immensely, commissioning rowhouse and tenement designs that could be repeated without regard to location.

 

By the end of the 19th century, there was relatively little open space in Manhattan and Brooklyn. As part of the City Beautiful movement, various attempts were made to loosen the grid’s hold, first through the passage of the Small Parks Act in 1887, which focused on tenement neighborhoods, and later, by situating major civic structures in plazas. Similar ideas shaped the development of garden apartments which came into vogue after 1910. One of the primary characteristics of this type of multiple dwelling was reduced site coverage.

 

In most cases, such as in the Jackson Heights Historic District, the buildings were set around the perimeter of each block, enclosing large private gardens, but in other situations, such as at the Harlem River Houses, a “crankshaft” arrangement was adopted, creating a mixture of interior and exterior courts.

 

Lescaze borrowed freely from both the garden apartment tradition and architects associated with European modernism. In his earliest design, each block incorporated six U-shaped structures arranged around a narrow central court. A later design was considerably more irregular. Turned at an angle to the street, there were fewer but larger buildings.

 

Many aspects of this proposal were integrated into the final design. The Williamsburg Houses are configured in three ways, with footprints suggesting a capital “H,” small “h,” and “T.” All have small spurs and extensions, resembling crossbars. By adding this feature the number of courtyards was significantly increased. Within each block are six buildings (except north of the school); at the north and south are the “H” and “h” configurations, and in the middle, the “T”s.

 

The decision to turn the buildings at a 15 degree angle to the street grid proved controversial. PWA accounts described it in functional terms, explaining that the orientation would provide tenants with more sun and take advantage of the prevailing northwest breezes. During the previous decade, many architects and planners experimented with similar ideas. One of the earliest built examples “to deviate from the geometry of the New York gridiron” was the Mesa Verde apartments (1926) in Jackson Heights. Designed by Henry Atterbury Smith and based on an earlier proposal from 1917, the development featured two rows of six “closed L buildings” set at 45 degree angle to the surrounding streets.

 

Lescaze, however, was more likely to have been influenced by European sources. During the 1920s, he frequently returned to Europe, a period when leading architects were involved in the design of social housing. Many favored the “tower in the park” approach in which free-standing high-rise structures stood in continuous open space. Writing in English in 1935, Walter Gropius concluded that apartment blocks should “command a clear view of the sky, over broad expanses of grass and trees which separate the blocks and serve as playgrounds.”

 

Another source of inspiration might have been Ernst May who oversaw the design and construction of many low-rise housing estates in Frankfurt. In his Bruchfeldstrasse development of 1926-27, designed with C. K. Rudloff, one section was arranged in an overlapping zig-zag configuration. As in Williamsburg, each unit had corner windows, providing tenants with uninterrupted views of a central garden.

 

Many writers were skeptical about the benefits of Lescaze’s plan. Hamlin argued that the layout would convert the courts “into perfect channels for Project for a group of factories. our most vicious northwest winds.” He was told that

 

the arrangement had, in fact, been chosen for aesthetic reasons, to “break up the street facades” and “allow the feeling of space to weave in and out on the street fronts. This goal was definitely achieved, producing an environment that was new and distinctive. The flowing spaces that Lescaze planned are less monumental and more intimate than those experienced in most housing projects, juxtaposing wedge-shaped lawns with semi-enclosed courtyards and large open plazas. As originally built, no fences interrupted the spaces and the areas adjoining the curving concrete walks were paved with cobblestone.

 

The Elevations

 

Equally modern were the elevations. Lescaze was attracted to the expressive and aesthetic qualities of modern materials. Particularly unusual was the decision to use a light-colored palette. Built from reinforced concrete, the walls were originally enclosed with a sand-cast brick that was variously described by observers as bright tan, yellowish, pinkish, and grayish warm pink. One of the most notable features was the exposed concrete floor plates which express the structure and division between the floors while giving the complex a strong horizontal appearance. Talbot Hamlin observed:

 

The effectiveness of the buildings is undoubted. The striping of brick and concrete and the contrast of the light walls which front the stair towers make a vivid picture . . .

 

Prior to the mid-1930s, red brick was the most frequently used material in housing developments, used throughout Jackson Heights and in the First Houses and Harlem River Houses. The proposal to break with this tradition generated considerable debate. While the general scheme was approved in June 1935, it was not until October that specific materials were selected. Presumably, the PWA wished to standardize the building process and reduce costs. Frederick Ackerman, technical director of the NYCHA, defended Lescaze’s proposal. He wrote the authority’s chairman, Langdon W. Post:

 

. . . the “effect” of the Project will depend very largely upon the texture and quality of the exterior wall. Unless the exterior wall possesses a greater intrinsic interest than one made of common brick then the resultant effect is certain to be a bleak, barren and unusually forbidding mass of building:

 

One might readily mistake the At Williamsburg, the buildings stand as freestanding objects, finished on all sides and approachable from multiple directions. No facade dominates and the apartment entrances face both the streets and courtyards. For those unfamiliar with the layout, the angled plan may have been somewhat disorienting. To make it easier to navigate, signs were installed throughout the complex and Lescaze skillfully designed the entrances, making dramatic use of color and form. Like Le Corbusier, he was an “accomplished” painter and frequently used color, especially blue, to enliven wall surfaces. Another possible model was May’s housing development at Praunheim (1926-29) where contrasting colors were used to give the projecting stair towers a distinctive appearance.

 

Within the courtyards are as many as five entrances. Each is sheltered by a small cantilevered aluminum marquee and is flanked by square blue terra-cotta tiles. The entrances that are located at the far end of the larger courtyards are set at a angle. In these instances, the tiles spread onto the adjoining walls and extend above the parapet to the stair bulkhead. Other tile treatments project slightly forward, or are recessed above the doors to the roof. An entrance is also located in the covered breezeway. Reached by a short flight of stairs connecting both the street and courtyard, the more public street facade had an asymmetrical character, incorporating projecting blue tiles to one side and a wide aluminum marquee.

 

Construction

 

To prepare the site for construction, 568 buildings were demolished on 349 lots and approximately 5,400 people were relocated. A 1935 report described the population as divided equally between American born, Italian born, and other nationalities. Most were semi-skilled workers, employed in manufacturing, or as clerks, truck drivers, and construction workers.

 

Demolition commenced in June 1935 as PWA supervisor Elizabeth Ross dug a crowbar into the facade of 197 Manhattan Avenue, near Ten Eyck Street. In the months that followed:

 

Steam shovels and picks played a tune to rival that of the pipes of the Pied Piper of Hamlin. From every dank basement and crumbling wall rats fled in droves. Backyards disgorged an assortment of rusted cans, trash, filth and litter that would have discouraged the most voracious goat.

 

Ground was broken on January 3, 1936. Following a brief ceremony in the rain, public officials addressed an audience of five hundred at Public School 196. During April 1936, the first foundations were poured at the southwest corner of Manhattan Avenue and Stagg Street. Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia was in attendance, followed by “a few hundred interested onlookers and an army of schoolboys.”

 

As the foundations neared completion, the PWA solicited bids for construction. Starrett Brothers & Eken was awarded the $7. 5 million contract for the first 18 buildings in October 1936. A subsequent contract, for construction of buildings No. 5 and 18, was signed in late April 1937.

 

Founded by Paul Starrett (1866-1957) and William Aiken Starrett (1877-1932) and Andrew J. Eken (1882-1965) in 1922, the firm was responsible for such high-profile buildings as the New York Life Insurance Company Building (1925), Bank of Manhattan Building (1929-30), McGraw-Hill Building (1930-31), and Empire State Building (1930-31, all are designated New York City Landmarks). The Starrett Brothers worked closely with Shreve on the Empire State Building and it is likely that this relationship helped secure the contract for the Williamsburg Houses. William Starrett acknowledged the importance and complexity of this issue when he said:

 

It is the hope of people who are discussing this (slum) problem that those same brains that put together the great skyscrapers . . . will turn toward this.

 

Starrett Brothers & Eken later built Parkchester (Richmond H. Shreve, chairman of the board of design, 1938-42), Stuyvesant Town (Irwin Clavan and Gilmore Clarke, 1943-49) and Peter Cooper Village (Irwin Clavan and Gilmore D. Clarke, 1947) for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.

 

The cornerstone was laid in October 1936. It contained an aerial view of the site, a copy of the federal act creating the PWA, as well as an autographed copy of Jacob Riis’s timeless account of slum conditions, How the Other Half Lives, donated by his widow. Construction progressed rapidly, and aside from minor walk-outs by metalworkers and painters, the first six buildings were ready for occupancy with a year, in September

 

Publicity

 

The Williamsburg Houses was the largest and costliest project built by the PWA. With 1,622 apartments, it was more than twice the size of the Harlem River Houses. The approximate cost was $12.8 million. It was described by the PWA as part of “demonstration program” and numerous public events were held. In a letter to Post, Shreve stated:

 

As this project is the beginning of what, in a way, is a housing community experiment and as the public attitude toward housing will be largely controlled by the success or failure of such an experiment, it is of importance that every effort be made to make the first experiment successful.

 

In this context, how the project was perceived was of the utmost importance. Once the design had been approved, a scale model was built by the PWA and exhibited at banks in Brooklyn Heights and Williamsburg during late 1935 and 1936. This presentation was accompanied by a series of posters documenting the site, including photographs of earlier buildings and their demolition, as well as projected floor plans. The New York Times reported the model:

 

. . . throws into graphic relief the application of the new principle of multiple housing, providing more air, sunlight and recreational facilities and involving a departure from the solid-block construction.

 

The idea of using public funds to create low-income housing was relatively new and much of the language used in speeches and press releases heralded it as a major advance. At the site, signs were posted, calling Williamsburg the “Largest Low Rental Development in the USA.” At the ground-breaking, public officials evoked the memory of Alfred T. White, whose Brooklyn developments were among the first attempts to improve low-income housing in the nation.

 

Mayor LaGuardia thanked the President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for his support, as did Harold L. Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, who described slums as a “vicious project of that old order whose passing, we hope, is at hand.” While some critics equated the federal housing program with socialism, most speakers saw it as a defense of democracy.

 

In November 1935, Post had contacted the PWA, requesting that the complex be called the “Ten Eyck” Houses. No explanation was given, but it is likely that the request was made to distinguish the new development from the larger surrounding neighborhood.

 

Ten Eyck Street was one of two east-west streets closed to create the site and it was probably named for the Dutch family whose Brooklyn lineage extended back to at least the 18th century. In the immediate area also lived William Ten Eyck, who during the mid-19th century served as the deacon of the Reformed Church of South Bushwick (1853, a designated New York City Landmark). Post’s request was quickly approved. The new name, however, was not widely used and a 1938 PWA publication refers to the development as the Williamsburg Houses.

 

On October 28, 1936, the construction site was briefly visited by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt. According to the New York Times, ten thousand school children and five thousand adults “cheered the President’s passage through the streets bordering the housing project.”

 

Three “model” apartments were opened for public view in July through August 1937. Furnished with loans from various Brooklyn department stores, they were presented at 180 Maujer Street. Post was an early visitor and he described the apartments as a “demonstration of what can be done, this is the most valuable contribution to social progress that the New Deal has made.” An average of 1,200 persons a day visited. In September 1937, a second group of apartments opened at 176 Maujer Street, including one decorated entirely with “reconditioned furniture.” In a related development, during April and May 1938, the WPA created an exhibit in a storefront office at 212 Graham Avenue. Organized by William Friedman of the art teaching division, the display was changed periodically to demonstrate different apartment layouts and decoration. Nine experts spent five months preparing the exhibit, hoping that it would influence local residents and provide a model for future public housing developments. A music branch, at 176 Maujer Street, also provided lessons in theory, voice, and various instruments.

 

Tenants

 

According to the Brooklyn Eagle, the Williamsburg Houses were “one of the most perfect home sites in the word . . . an eagerly sought spot to live.” Income and need formed the basis of selection and no tenant could earn more than five times the annual rent. Preference was also given to former residents of the site.

 

The first tenants began to occupy their apartments on September 30, 1937. The New York Times devoted at least two articles to “Moving Day,” as did the Brooklyn Eagle. As part of the operation, each tenant’s belongings were moved to a fumigation plant for sterilization near the intersection of Bushwick Avenue at Scholes Street.

 

This procedure was described as a “wise precaution against the spread of disease.” Bessie and Louis Grabkowitz were recognized by the NYCHA as the first official tenants. A week’s rent, of less than seven dollars, was paid and they were given keys to their new apartment. Two to five rooms in size, units featured steam heat, hot and cold water, as well as electric stoves and refrigerators. Residents praised their new homes, commenting on the appliances and abundant sunlight.

 

By the end of 1937, most apartments were occupied. A community newspaper, the Projector, began publishing on a semi-monthly basis in December 1937. In April 1938, the complex was completed. In addition to the twenty residential buildings, there were retail spaces, facing the north-south streets. The PWA reported:

 

To insure efficient, sanitary commercial services, 49 stores and shops within the project, distributing drugs, groceries, appliances, and general merchandise, have been leased to private individuals.

 

The storefronts were executed in a sleek Moderne style. To the north and south, they curved away from the street, recalling the streamlined designs of Erich Mendelsohn, as well as J. J. P. Oud’s Kiefhoek development of 1925. The prominent metal parapets were blue, matching the color of the apartment entrances. Despite their polished design, a significant number failed to attract and retain tenants. Consequently, in 1945 ten unleased spaces, near the corners of Maujer and Leonard Streets, and Scholes Street and Bushwick Avenue, were converted to apartments.

 

Tenants enjoyed a variety of useful services. At the center of the complex, on Graham Avenue stood the stripped classical-style William J. Gaynor Junior High School (1936-37), and opposite it, Building No. 11 housed a nursery school. Incorporated into the building’s south court and featuring a large play terrace, Hamlin described its glass-fronted design as “pleasant” and “delightful.” In addition, a new Moderne-style health center was built directly across from the complex, on Maujer Street.

 

Throughout the development were “social and craft rooms.” These basement spaces were originally used for classes, clubs, and meetings and many were decorated with large colorful murals. In contrast to the majority of WPA murals that were executed in style of social realism, the Williamsburg murals were non-objective. Lescaze favored “abstract and stimulating patterns” and Burgoyne Diller who headed the Federal Art Project, wrote that:

 

The decision to place abstract murals in these rooms [of the Williamsburg Housing Project] was made because the areas were intended to provide a place of relaxation and entertainment . . . The more arbitrary the color, possible when not determined by the description of objects, enables the artist to place an emphasis on its psychological potential to stimulate relaxation.

 

Of twelve murals commissioned, at least five were installed. In the early 1990s, the deteriorated canvases were restored and moved to the Brooklyn Museum of Art. They include works by the American painters Ilya Bolotowsky, Paul Kelpe, and Balcomb Greene.

  

Critical Reception

 

The opening of the Williamsburg Houses was treated as major news and writers used the event to analyze the project and express their own views about the role of public housing and the importance of modern architecture. Some of the earliest comments came from the architect Walter Gropius, former director of the Bauhaus in Germany. On a visit to New York City in April 1937 he was interviewed by H.I. Brock in the New York Times. They traveled together throughout the city, visiting both new skyscrapers and the nearly-complete Brooklyn development. Gropius was impressed and praised the unusual plan, saying that Lescaze:

 

. . . seems to have solved the problem of space and light very successfully and economically, and it has the great advantage of being spread over enough land to make it worthwhile as a sample of planned development.

 

Lewis Mumford was the first critic to publish a substantial review in February 1938. As a persistent advocate for public housing, he used the opportunity to evaluate the “outlines of the new order of building.” He praised the PWA for eschewing “overpriced building lots” and instead assembling large sites in quieter areas where streets could be closed to traffic to create gardens and playgrounds. Considerable attention was paid to the slanted orientation. Although he described it as “a bit queer,” he liked the way it separated the residences from the street and that it gave the appearance that the architects were concerned about providing tenants with ample sunlight.

 

Talbot Hamlin published the most-detailed analysis. In this review, he addressed both PWA projects, calling them “a new vision of democracy ... they are better than the most expensive apartments on Park Avenue.” Despite such praise, he expressed mixed feelings. While he found the buildings “fresh and inventive and alive,” he was disturbed by the “shockingly low” standards of construction. He also admired the “imaginative and carefully studied detailing,” but criticized the landscaping as little more than adequate. The WPA Guide to New York City, published in 1939, shared similar views, quoting Hamlin’s review, and praising the design of the individual buildings.

 

In the years since completion, the Williamsburg Houses have been a frequent subject for architectural historians. Many, starting with the Museum of Modern Art in 1939, have placed the development within the context of European modernism. In an exhibition celebrating the museum’s 10th anniversary and the opening of its new building, it was the only architectural work represented that was located in New York City. In a brief essay on housing, the curators highlighted the “triple-size superblocks,” that form an “oasis of open space,” but criticized the adjoining school building as a lost opportunity to create a “truly important work.” Photographs of the complex were also included in Forms and Functions of Twentieth-Century Architecture (1952), in sections devoted to city planning and concrete construction.

 

G. Holmes Perkins wrote in the city planning section that despite faults, the complex “may be held up as patterns for tomorrow.” Richard Pommer, in one of the most insightful discussions of Depression-era housing in the United States, criticized the angled plan, calling Lescaze a “versatile pasticheur” who used visual effects without logic or relation to function. Robert A. M. Stern shared this view, writing in 1980 that it “seems overrated.” Richard Plunz, in A History of Housing in New York City, credited the project as the start of a “brief but intense struggle” to determine the aesthetic direction government-built housing would take. All four editions of the AIA Guide to New York City have praised the Williamsburg Houses. The 1968 edition called it a “very successful solution to the problem of low-rent subsidized housing,” and in 2000 “the best public housing project ever built in New York.”

 

Subsequent History

 

Conveyed by the federal government to the NYCHA in 1957, the Williamsburg Houses continue to serve their original purpose, housing more than three thousand New Yorkers. Major alterations were first proposed in 1980 and significant work took place during 1985-91. At this time, the original casement windows were replaced with bronze-colored aluminum sash and the blue terra cotta that surrounded the entrances, with tan “Morocco” glazed brick.

 

In a remarkable turnaround, during the mid1990s, the facades were restored. What began as continued maintenance, soon evolved into a major architectural project, requiring an outside contractor and consultation with the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Under the supervision of Neil Cohen of the NYCHA, the elevations were completely reskinned, the parapets replaced, as well as the chimneys, railings, and terra-cotta banding. In addition, new canopies, doors, lighting fixtures, and signage were fabricated.

 

The approximately $70 million project was executed with great sensitivity; there was an article in the real estate section of the New York Times and the NYCHA was the recipient of the Lucy G. Moses Preservation Award from the New York Landmarks Conservancy (1999), which praised the participants for restoring the complex to “better-than-new condition.” Restoration of the storefronts, except along Bushwick Avenue, was completed in 2002.

 

The high standards set by the design of the Williamsburg Houses have rarely been matched. Innovative in terms of scale, plan, and aesthetics, it remains one of the most pleasant and architecturally-distinguished housing developments in New York City.

 

Description

 

There are twenty walk-up buildings in the 23.3acre Williamsburg complex and a total of 1,620 apartments. These buildings are numbered from 1 to 20 and each entrance has its own street address, for instance, “112 Maujer Street.” Stainless steel signs, with pin-mounted numbers and letters, identify each entrance.

 

The site extends four blocks east to west, from Bushwick Avenue to Leonard Street, and three blocks north to south, from Maujer to Scholes Streets. The principal north-south artery is Graham Avenue. Between Maujer and Scholes Streets, Ten Eyck Street and Stagg Street are closed to vehicles. These winding east-west paths are called Ten Eyck Walk and Stagg Walk. They are identified by large pin-mounted stainless steel letters attached to the building facades and are visible along the north-south streets. Throughout the complex are wall-mounted cantilevered lighting fixtures. These glass and aluminum fixtures are reproductions of the originals.

 

Three of the four blocks have a tree-shaded open space at center. At present, non-historic benches, play equipment, and basketball courts are located here. Most lawns are enclosed by low iron fences. Though not original, these fences pre-date the 1990s. Pole-mounted lighting fixtures are occasionally used to illuminate these areas.

 

All buildings materials are non-historic. Each structure is four stories tall and clad in ochre-colored brick. Exterior concrete spandrel beams are exposed at each floor. To disguise patches to the concrete, the beams are coated with a grey-colored water repellency finish. The entrances are flanked by blue structural glazed facing tiles that are approximately 12 by 12 inches. Blue mortar was used to minimize the joint lines. A canopy projects in front of each entrance (except on one side of the breezeways). Made of stainless steel, they incorporate recessed down lights. Some canopies are supported by a single pipe column. The entrance doors and sidelights are made of stainless steel.

 

Each door has a grid of four small square windows. Breezeways serve a dual purpose: reached by two sets of stairs, they provide an additional north-south passage, as well as entry to apartments. Most of the stairs are flanked by stainless steel railings. The bronze anodized aluminum windows, installed in the 1980s, are all one-over-one. Arranged as single windows or in pairs, they have concrete sills and meet the concrete spandrels above. The smaller windows light the bathrooms. Single windows and pairs are located where the facades meet, often creating triple-width openings at the cantilevered corners.

 

There are three general building configurations. All are original to the complex. They include eight buildings with “H” shaped floor plans, six with floor plans that suggest a small letter “h,” and six buildings with “T” shaped floor plans. While the “H” and “h” types alternate along Maujer and Scholes Streets (except next to the school where both are “H” shaped), the “T” shaped buildings are located only between Ten Eyck Walk and Stagg Walk.

 

The “H” buildings (Nos. 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 14, 15, and 20) are nearly symmetrical, with almost identical north and south courtyards. At the center of each court is either a projecting center section or breezeway. The apartments are reached by four distinct entrances, each with a different tile treatment. They include: corner, wide, recessed between the door and the roof, and incorporated within a breezeway. Each entrance leads to interior stairs. The windows that light the stairs are arranged in horizontal grids of six and eight panes. Except for the recessed variant, the tiles project slightly and rise above the parapet to the stair bulkhead. The opposite side of the breezeway has no tilework. Reached by stairs, each breezeway incorporates two concrete columns and a metal door. The “h” buildings (Nos. 2, 5, 19, 13, 16 and 19) are similar to the “H” buildings, except one court is partially enclosed.

 

The “T” buildings (Nos. 3, 4, 11, 12, 17, 18) have shallow courts. The top of the ‘T” has three entrances, each framed with blue tiles. A pair of entrances are also found facing each other in one of the side courts, and occasionally on the opposite side, as well. Building No. 11, located on the east side of Graham Avenue, is unique due to the presence of a nursery school at the wider south end. To accommodate this function, the entrances were moved and the court at the south end was enclosed. The south wall of school is clad with glass blocks, many of which are original. A concrete shed, at the center of the wall, is not historic and there are plans for removal. From the south facade extends a raised play area that is enclosed by a fence. Along the east side of the building, facing Graham Avenue, a non-historic ramp with metal railings has been constructed.

 

Commercial storefronts parallel the streets and adjoin the apartment buildings in various locations. The materials are non-historic, but the new elevations closely resemble the originals. The largest storefronts are located on either side of Graham Avenue, between Maujer Street and Ten Eyck Walk (Nos. 8 and 9). Smaller retail spaces are located along Graham Avenue (near Scholes Street, No. 13); on Leonard Street (near Maujer Street, No. 1); and on Bushwick Avenue (between Maujer and Stagg Walk, No. 16). They have a stream-lined character and curve away from the street at both ends. One story tall, they have granite bases and are clad with stainless steel and metal that has a baked-on blue porcelain finish. Above the storefronts runs the blue metal parapet, crowned by a stainless steel roof rail. Lighting was added above the storefronts, and security gates, when the stores are open, roll up and are neatly hidden within the facades. Large glass blocks or plate glass are used throughout. Along Bushwick Avenue, the modifications are less sympathetic and a vertical grid of older decorative concrete block occasionally interrupts the facade.

 

- From the 2003 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report

Preset Style = Streamlined

Format = 8" (Large)

Format Margin = Small

Format Border = Sm. Rounded

Drawing = Technical Pen

Drawing Weight = Medium

Drawing Detail = Lower

Paint = Natural

Paint Lightness = Darker

Paint Intensity = Normal

Water = Tap Water

Water Edges = Medium

Water Bleed = Minimal

Brush = Natural Detail

Brush Focus = Everything

Brush Spacing = Wide

Paper = Plain

Paper Texture = Medium

Paper Shading = Light

Options Faces = Enhance Faces

This streamlined Wabash caboose model is based off one at the Museum of Transportation in Saint Louis, Missouri. I don't have many details about the real world 1952-built caboose's service history... All I know it was that, after being retired by the railroad, caboose 2847 was eventually bought by a suburban homeowner and stored on his property for almost 20 years. It was donated to the Museum in 2013, where it still resides today.

This 4-8-2 Mountain type engine is numbered 6093 and is owned by the Ohio Pacific Railroad. There never was a Ohio Pacific railroad in the real world, but in my fictional universe, it never made it to the California coast, just to Denver, Colorado at it's western-most terminal with New York City being it's eastern-most point. As such, this locomotive is entirely fictional, with the paint scheme for the coaches inspired the real-world Missouri Pacific.

 

The train features the streamlined locomotive + tender, baggage car, three coaches and an observation car at the rear.

A streamlined headlamp on the National Railway Museum’s former London Midland & Scottish Railway Company Stanier 7P 4-6-2 ‘Coronation’ class locomotive number 6229 DUCHESS OF HAMILTON. Monday 1st June 2009

 

Ref no Canon EOS50D 1st series IMG_0250

The Stellar Zephyr transports Nexus Force personnel as a very high-speed, high-security ground transport between the northern-most city of St. Nicklaus and north-pole-hugging outpost of Ice Station Odyssey, around 500 miles away. (this all takes places on the ice-bound planet of Beta Polaris, which orbits what we here call the North Star, far away from Earth.)

 

Unlike the slower Earth trains, the Stellar Zephyr type of space-train is super-streamlined, and can go up to speeds of up to 110 MPH (135 is the loco's top possible speed) on it's special track, with super-elevated curves and long straight-away's over hundreds of miles, all while using Positive Train Control (PTC) on the the mostly double-track mainline, where all vehicle crossings are flyovers and switches virtually non-existent once out of St. Nicklaus city limits.

 

This train runs along with nine other identical versions of this train (10 total trains in all) on the route with up to seven in running order on the route and at least two in the maintenance shed / in emergency backup storage at any one time.

Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York City, New York, United States

 

The McCarren Play Center is one of a group of eleven immense outdoor swimming pools opened in the summer of 1936 in a series of grand ceremonies presided over by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and Park Commissioner Robert Moses. All of the pools were constructed largely with funding provided by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), one of many New Deal agencies created in the 1930s to address the Great Depression. Designed to accommodate a total of 49,000 users simultaneously at locations scattered throughout

 

New York City’s five boroughs, the new pool complexes quickly gained recognition as being among the most remarkable public facilities constructed in the country. The pools were completed just two and a half years after the LaGuardia administration took office, and all but one survives relatively intact today.

 

While each of the 1936 swimming pool complexes is especially notable for its distinctive and unique design, the eleven facilities shared many of the same basic components. The complexes generally employed low-cost building materials, principally brick and cast concrete, and often utilized the streamlined and curvilinear forms of the popular 1930s Art Moderne style. Sited in existing older parks or built on other city- owned land, the grounds surrounding the pool complexes were executed on a similarly grand scale, and included additional recreation areas, connecting pathway systems, and comfort stations.

 

The team of designers, landscape architects and engineers assembled to execute the new pool complexes was comprised largely of staff members and consultants who had earlier worked for Moses at other governmental agencies, including architect Aymar Embury II, landscape architects Gilmore D. Clarke and Allyn R. Jennings, and civil engineers W. Earle Andrews and William H. Latham. Surviving documents also indicate that Moses, himself a long-time swimming enthusiast, gave detailed attention to the designs for the new pool complexes.

 

The size of the swimming pool at the McCarren Play Center (165’ x 330’), dedicated on July 31, 1936, is matched only by two of the other 1936 play center pools: Astoria and Betsy Head. Semi-circular diving and wading pools flank the swimming pool, an arrangement duplicated at both Sunset Play Center and Astoria Play Center. Contemporary sources indicated, however, that the capacity of the McCarren Play Center bath house exceeds by a few hundred that of the other ten play centers, including Astoria. The immense scale of the McCarren Play Center is powerfully expressed in the monumental forms of the main entryway, a massive cubic block topped by a set-back gallery. Giant arches emphasized by decorative brick patterning span the openings giving onto the street and swimming pool, while the smooth light-colored walls in the upper portion of the open courtyard reflect the light entering from above and add to the dramatic character of this space.

 

Other notable features of the entryway include the Art Moderne ticket booth, the rounded jambs of the entrances into the locker rooms, and the decorative metal work in their transoms. Wide arches duplicated at a smaller scale than those of the main entryway link the separate comfort stations to the north and south ends of the bath house structure, further enhancing its monumentality. The landscaped setting, including linking pathways, additional play areas and plantings, was contemporary with the construction of the McCarren Play Center.

 

Although the McCarren Play Center was last open in the summer of 1983, the Parks Department, with the support of local elected officials and community groups, is committed to renovating, restoring and reopening the pool and bath house/recreation building. Meanwhile, since 2005, the pool and deck of the McCarren Play Center have been used for concerts, film screenings, performances, and other public events, which have greatly increased the visibility of the pool and have catalyzed interim improvements.

 

DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS

 

History of the McCarren Play Center Site

 

The McCarren Play Center is set within the 35.71-acre McCarren Park, in the southern portion of the Brooklyn neighborhood known as Greenpoint. Sited near the Greenpoint-Williamsburg border, McCarren Park serves both neighborhoods and features ball fields, playgrounds, a running track, and large, grassy areas for picnicking and sunbathing.

 

Located in the northernmost portion of Brooklyn, Greenpoint is historically one of New York City’s industrial centers. Prior to the nineteenth century, Greenpoint remained relatively isolated due to its geography; it is surrounded by water on three sides—the East River on the western shore and Newton Creek to the north and east. Historically a small creek separated Greenpoint from Williamsburg at its southern boundary, further isolating the area. This creek, which was called Bushwick Creek, was later filled and was located approximately where McCarren Park now sits.

 

Initially a small farming village, the Greenpoint-Williamsburg area grew exponentially with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. Until about 1830 the shipbuilding industry had been located on the eastern shores of Manhattan from about Grand Street north to East 14th Street. In 1832 Neziah Bliss and Eliphalet Nott, owners of the New York shipbuilding factory Novelty Iron Works, purchased thirty acres of farmland in Greenpoint along the East River.

 

Novelty became one of the nineteenth century’s premier producers of marine engines, and by mid-century nearly all steamboats produced in the area were equipped with Novelty engines. As land in Manhattan became more and more precious for residential development, other firms followed suit. Over a dozen shipbuilding firms moved across the river to Greenpoint, turning it into one of the major areas for shipbuilding in the country.

 

Other industries to locate in Greenpoint in the mid-nineteenth century included porcelain and pottery works, brass and iron foundries, breweries, sugar plants and oil refineries. The large amount of industry created thousands of jobs, and immigrants flooded the area to work in the factories, creating a need for housing. The first wave of immigrants in the Greenpoint-Williamsburg area included Germans, Irish and Austrians, and later, towards the turn of the century, Poles, Russians and Italians.

 

Williamsburg had a black population as early as 1820, when more than 20 of the area’s 58 black residents were enslaved. With the abolition of slavery in New York in 1827, Williamsburg’s African-American population increased exponentially; by 1855, its 1,147 black residents represented the second largest black community in Kings County. However, as the Greenpoint-Williamsburg area’s white population increased at the end of the nineteenth century, the overall percentage of African Americans decreased to 1.2 percent.

 

By the early part of the twentieth century, with the population of Greenpoint-Williamsburg at nearly a quarter of a million people, the area had some of the oldest, most dilapidated housing in Brooklyn. As thousands of new middle- and upper-class apartment buildings were built across New York City in the years following World War I, many residents of Greenpoint-Williamsburg left for more adequate housing, causing a population decline for the first time in over a century. According to urban planner Helen Logan, residents of the area in the 1940s tended to move out because of “bad housing conditions, lack of parks, and poor transit,” and the WPA Guide to New York City called Williamsburg a “virtually unrelieved slum.” Following World War II, the Greenpoint-Williamsburg area faced another major shift in the population, with an influx of Puerto Ricans, Hispanics, African Americans and Eastern European Jews. While the area had a predominantly white, first- and second-generation immigrant population at the turn of the century, the percentage of African Americans and Hispanics increased during the mid- and post-war years.

 

Not only was the Greenpoint-Williamsburg area notorious for its poor housing conditions, it was also underserved in the ways of public recreation facilities. The enormous Greenpoint Park (later McCarren Park) was intended to alleviate this need; in 1906, the park officially opened to the public. In 1909, the Board of Alderman voted to rename the park for Patrick Henry McCarren (1847-1909).

 

McCarren, who rose through the ranks of the Brooklyn Democratic Party to eventually serve as New York State Senator for 18 years, spent his childhood in Williamsburg and worked in the sugar refineries along the Greenpoint waterfront. Robert Moses chose McCarren Park as the location for one of the WPA pools based on the availability of parkland and the needs of the area’s population. Residents of both Williamsburg and Greenpoint lobbied for the construction of pools in their respective neighborhoods; Moses responded by building the largest of the WPA pools in McCarren Park, which was located near the boundary of the two neighborhoods.

 

The Design and Construction of the McCarren Pool

 

Along with the other WPA-era pools, the McCarren Play Center was opened in the summer of 1936 in a series of grand ceremonies presided over by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and Parks Commissioner Robert Moses. All of the pools were constructed largely with public funding provided by the WPA. Designed to accommodate a total of 49,000 users simultaneously at locations scattered throughout New York City’s five boroughs, the new pool complexes quickly gained recognition as being among the most remarkable public facilities ever constructed in the country.

 

The city’s pool construction program was reported to have been the most expensive in terms of total cost. Robert Moses, an avid swimmer who had a home near the ocean in Babylon, Long Island, was known to have taken a special interest in the design and construction of bathing and swimming facilities, such as Jones Beach, Orchard Beach and Riis Park, as well as the neighborhood swimming pools. As a result of his special attention, along with that of Aymar Embury II and Gilmore D. Clarke, the design and execution of New York City’s aquatic facilities in the 1930s were a cut above most other park projects at the time.

 

At the start, the Parks Department adopted a list of shared guidelines for the entire pool project in order to enhance the efficiency of the design effort, to unify the operations of each complex, and to meet the various local and federal requirements of the relief programs. For example, each pool complex was to have separate swimming, diving and wading pools, and a large bath house, the locker room sections of which doubled as gymnasiums during non-swimming months.

 

The bath houses, which would serve as the centerpieces of each complex, would be distinctive pavilions that would establish the design motif of each facility. Concrete bleachers at the perimeter of the pools would furnish spectator viewing areas to be augmented at some sites with rooftop promenades and galleries. There would be a minimum width for the decks to provide enough room for sunbathing and circulation.

 

There had to be underwater lighting for night swimming, and at least one dimension of each swimming pool would have to be a multiple of fifty-five yards to allow swimming competitions to be held at standard distances in either English or metric systems. Plus, the complexes had to share low-cost building materials, principally brick and cast concrete, as required by the federal government as per the terms of the WPA funding.

 

To satisfy federal stipulations on low-cost materials, it appears that the design team for the pools determined that the streamlined and curvilinear forms of the Art Moderne and Modern Classical styles would best meet the low-cost needs and still permit pleasing aesthetics. As a group, the pools were also distinguished by the innovative mechanical systems required to heat, filter and circulate the vast amounts of water they used.

 

Many of these innovations set new standards for swimming pool construction, such as scum gutters that allowed in enough sunlight to naturally kill off bacteria and a series of footbaths filled with foot cleaning solution through which bathers were forced to pass upon entering the pool areas from the locker room.

 

Sited on existing older parks or built on other city-owned land subsequently developed as parks and playgrounds, the huge pool complexes were provided with landscaped settings that included additional recreational areas, connecting pathway systems, and comfort stations. Despite the fact that the basic components were essentially the same and that the WPA required that only the cheapest materials be used, each of these swimming pool complexes is especially notable for its distinctive and unique setting, appearance and character.

 

Articles announcing a new pool at McCarren Park in Brooklyn began appearing in local newspapers as early as 1930. The park had undergone major reconstruction early that decade, and a new playground at the site was opened in September 1934. By October of the same year, the Parks Department announced the start of excavations and site work for several of the new pools. Plans for the McCarren Play Center bath house, with its monumental arched entryway at Lorimer Street and its accommodations for 6,800 bathers, were filed in August 1935; plans for the one-story filter house and lifeguard station were also filed at that time.

 

The year 1936 was known as “the swimming pool year,” since ten of the eleven pools were opened that summer, one per week for ten weeks. Each opening day was a memorable event for its neighborhood. The day-long events featured parades, blessings of the waters, swimming races, diving competitions, appearances by Olympic stars, and performances by swimming clowns.

 

Mayor LaGuardia attended every opening to perform the ribbon cutting. Festivities continued until well after dusk with LaGuardia pulling the switch to turn on each pool’s spectacular underwater lighting to the “oooohs” of the crowds. The McCarren Play Center opened on July 31, 1936, the eighth of the WPA pools to open that summer. The main swimming pool measured 330 by 165 feet—larger than four Olympic sized pools combined—with a small hemispherical pool at either end, one for wading and one for diving. The wading pool, which had been opened the prior fall, was separated from the rest of the pool complex by a brick wall and was free to the public at all times.

 

Some 75,000 people attended the opening ceremony of McCarren Play Center, making it the largest public gathering of the eleven pool dedications. Mayor LaGuardia, Robert Moses, City Comptroller Frank J. Taylor, Works Progress Administrator Victor Ridder, King’s County Sheriff Peter J. McGuinness, and Greenpoint Chamber of Commerce President Dr. Ignatius P.A. Byrne made remarks at the ceremony.

 

After turning on the pool’s underwater lights, Mayor LaGuardia proclaimed, “the garden spot has truly flowered,” adding, “I have been opening quite a few of these pools lately, and it is a pleasure to note on this occasion that no pool anywhere has been so much appreciated by the people as this one.” More than 200 policemen maintained order as amplifiers broadcast the ceremony to the thousands of people gathered in the streets and on neighboring rooftops.

 

From the moment of its opening through the decades that followed, the McCarren Play Center was the centerpiece of McCarren Park and one of the social centers of the Greenpoint-Williamsburg area. Even after facing gradual physical decline in the latter part of the twentieth century, the Play Center continues to inspire awe in the monumentality of its bold, modern forms. Together with the other WPA-era park improvements, it is one of the major achievements of the New Deal in New York City.

 

Subsequent History

 

The McCarren Play Center appears to have been mostly completed by the date of its dedication on July 31, 1936, with the exception of some of the finishing details; drawings for the large bronze clocks, the iron gates and the bronze signage were not approved until October 1936. However, it appears that the Play Center was entirely complete by the opening of the 1937 season, and few alterations were made to the complex in the years immediately following the opening.

 

By the late 1970s, many of the WPA-era pools, McCarren Play Center included, had become badly run down, partially the result of the fiscal crisis of the 1970s which hit the Parks Department particularly hard.

 

By March 1981, the Parks workforce had dwindled to a record low of 2,900 employees, mostly unskilled and temporary, as compared to the 30,000 parks employees on staff during the Moses administration. The strain on Parks Department resources was evident in the deplorable conditions of many of its facilities. In the summer of 1976, the city’s pools opened a week later than normal, and water safety staff was reduced more than fifty percent; the decimation of able staff as well as the lack of funding for general maintenance contributed to the steady decline of the pools.

 

To address the rapid deterioration of its recreational facilities, in 1977 the Parks Department began a major capital construction program involving more than 500 projects, expected to total more than $180 million, partly in Federal funds—the first such projects undertaken by the parks system since the fiscal crisis halted such work in 1975, and arguably the most ambitious program to improve the parks since the 1940s.

 

Among the projects planned was a $10 million plan to preserve Prospect Park, a $1 million renovation of the Coney Island Boardwalk, and several millions dedicated to the rehabilitation of many of the WPA-era pools—including the McCarren Play Center.

 

This restoration, however, would never take place. By the early 1980s, the McCarren Play Center had become, according to the New York Times, “overrun by thousands of teen-agers and . a haven for drug dealers and prostitutes.” Some residents of the neighborhood, many of whom had beloved childhood memories of swimming in McCarren pool, saw it as a magnet for degenerate behavior and wanted it closed for good.

 

Local resident Larry Smith was quoted in the local newspaper as saying that as the 1970s rolled by, “each year the pool got a little worse. Gangs would come to the pool and intimidate the lifeguards. The pool became unsanitary with pampers and candy wrappers in the water.” The reputation of being unsafe, as well as reports of children developing rashes after swimming in the pool, led to the Play Center’s closing at the end of the 1983 season. When contractors showed up to begin the restoration of the complex in the summer of 1984, a group of protestors had chained themselves to the entrance gates, demanding that the project be reconsidered.

 

The 1980s and 90s saw the gradual rehabilitation of the other WPA-era pools, while the McCarren Play Center sat, vacant and crumbling, at the center of a community debate regarding its future. After more than a year of study, the local community board adopted a plan to turn the pool complex into a year-round recreational center.

 

The plan included the demolition of the bathhouse wings, the construction of a gymnasium and community center, and the reduction of the pool to Olympic size—decreasing its capacity from 6,800 to 2,000. Many community members were outraged by the proposed reduction in the size of the pool, asserting that it was a racist ploy to “keep out black and Hispanic youths from neighboring Williamsburg and other nearby sections.”

 

Supporters disputed this claim with the argument that a smaller pool would be easier to patrol; they felt that in the 1990s, as opposed to 1936, a pool full of more than six thousand people would likely result in chaos. The inability of all parties to find a resolution regarding the future of the complex resulted in a stalemate, and the Play Center suffered under years of continued neglect.

 

Roof failure led to exposure and accelerated severe structural decay. Vandals breeched the Play Center’s walls and stripped the buildings of their fixtures and covered their walls with graffiti. The large bronze eagles that once flanked the stairs were recovered by a Parks Department employee as they were being wheeled down Houston Street to an architectural salvage store; at one point, a car was driven into the pool.

 

In 2005, with a resolution for the McCarren Play Center still in flux, local choreographer Noemie LaFrance requested permission to stage a large site-specific dance performance in McCarren pool. Sensing an opportunity to increase the visibility of the Play Center and bring the question of its restoration back into the forefront, the City allocated funds to clean up the space and stabilize the bath house enough for a public event.

 

Together with money supplied by neighborhood-based Ron Delsener Presents and Sens Productions, the funding provided for “moderate clean-up of the site, which included clearing an access path off Leonard Street and installing a new double gate, clearing the pool deck and floor drains, applying new stucco to the inside of the arch, and clearing some of the excess vegetation.

 

The Mayor’s Graffiti Task Force sent two paint crews to cover the graffiti on the bathhouse and accessory buildings.” Additionally, a low rail was installed around the pool, perimeter fencing was installed or repaired, various steps and trip hazards cemented, the ticket booth cleaned, and the perimeter relandscaped. The performance, titled “Agora,” took place from September 13 through October 1, and the McCarren Play Center was seen by the general public for the first time in more than 21 years.

 

The overwhelming popularity and immense amount of news coverage surrounding LaFrance’s performance brought new identity to the McCarren Play Center as performance space. Today, the pool hosts a variety of summer events, including movie screenings, concerts, “Pool Parties,” and other public happenings.

 

The Parks Department, with the support of local elected officials and community groups, is committed to renovating, restoring and reopening the pool and bath house/recreation building. In 2007, as part of Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC initiative, nearly $50 million was allocated to the rehabilitation of the McCarren Play Center as a state-of-the-art recreational space. Conceptual plans for reconstruction have been produced by Robert A.M. Stern, Vollmer Associates, and others, as well as by the in-house staff of the Parks Department.

 

In the interim, the Parks Department is seeking to further stabilize the Play Center for continued use as a performance space, and is exploring the possibility of installing a temporary ice skating rink and skateboarding park on the premises for use before the capital project ensues.

 

The Architecture and Site of the McCarren Play Center

 

The New Deal construction projects within New York City, such as the McCarren Play Center, were a part of a national trend that included similar projects undertaken by various governmental agencies, ranging from the vast Tennessee Valley Authority to small cities and towns. Urban projects built with WPA funding often possessed similar qualities from region to region, partly because the difficult economic climate dictated the use of inexpensive building materials, but also because the programs provided employment opportunities for a generation of young architects and engineers, many of whom were committed to modernism.

 

For example, the bath house and waterfront facilities at Aquatic Park in San Francisco are similar in plan and appearance to the public pool and beachfront projects being built at about the same time New York City. The California facility, with its streamlined, concrete façade and steel-framed windows, bears a striking resemblance to the façade added in 1936 with WPA funds to the bath house at Jacob Riis Park in Queens. The original and creative use made of these modest materials by Moses’ talented design teams and the careful siting of each project makes every one of them a distinguished, individual design, as much related to their specific environment and needs as to one another.

 

The implementation of a modern aesthetic in the design of the WPA pools stands as a testament to the influence of the young designers on Moses’ team; Aymar Embury II, who oversaw the design of the eleven neighborhood pools, was generally a traditionalist with little patience for modernism. In a 1938 interview, Embury was quoted as having said:

 

If an architect has any function, it is to coordinate units so that they do a required job and at the same time create a pleasant emotion. Modernists believe that the essence of their work is to do something that has never been done before. They leave off all ornamentation because, they say, the ornaments do not aid the structure to do its job. I suppose some of these architects do not use neckties or buttons when they dress.

 

Considering the collaborative nature of the design process of the WPA Play Centers, it is fitting that the design of the McCarren Play Center, like that of the other neighborhood pools, relied on classical forms while employing a modern vocabulary. The McCarren Play Center’s dominant feature is the arched entrance to the bath house, which is visible from a distance as one approaches McCarren Park, and has become a iconic symbol of the Greenpoint/Williamsburg area.

 

The immense scale of the McCarren Play Center is powerfully expressed in the monumental forms of the main entryway, a massive cubic block topped by a set-back gallery. The designers relied on the material of the building itself to relate ornament; giant arches emphasized by decorative brick patterning span the openings onto the street and swimming pool, while the smooth light- colored walls in the upper portion of the open courtyard reflect the light entering from above.

 

Other notable features of the entryway include the Art Moderne ticket booth, the rounded jambs of the entrances into the locker rooms, and the decorative metal work in their transoms. Wide arches duplicated at a smaller scale those of the main entryway link the separate comfort stations to the north and south ends of the bath house structure, further enhancing its monumentality.

 

The McCarren Play Center historically had bronze details that enhanced the massive brick structure. Large bronze eagles once stood at either side of the entrance stairs, serving as bases to the tall flag poles. Large bronze letters spelling out “McCarren Play Center” adorned the exterior of the building, and smaller lettering indicated the women and men’s entrances to the bath house. Large bronze clocks were once located at the interior and exterior of the bath house, and small bronze reliefs of marine creatures once embellished the lower panels of the ticket booth. These bronze features, most of which were removed by vandals, no longer exist at the McCarren Play Center site.

 

Description

 

Plan and Circulation

 

McCarren Park covers approximately 36 acres and is divided into four blocks by city streets. The park is irregular in shape, and is bordered roughly by North 12th Street to the southwest, Bayard Street to the southeast, Nassau Avenue to the west and north and Lorimer and Leonard Streets to the east. The McCarren Play Center encompasses nearly an entire city block and is located at the eastern portion of McCarren Park.

 

It is bounded by Bayard Street to the south, Lorimer Street to the west, and Leonard Street to the east. The north boundary of the lot is irregular, and is bounded by Driggs and Manhattan Avenues. The Vincent V. Abate Playground is located in the northernmost portion of the block and is not part of the landmark site. The landmark site includes the former wading pool, which is currently the McCarren Water Park and is open to the public. Entry to the former wading pool is located at Driggs Avenue; one must pass through the Vincent V. Abate Playground for access. It is not accessible from the McCarren Play Center and is separated from the rest of the landmark site by a historic brick and iron fence.

 

The McCarren Play Center bath house is a long, rectangular building that stretches north to south, along Lorimer Street. There are two public comfort stations at either end of this bath house building, connected to its north and south-facing elevations by brick double archways. The pool and deck areas are located just beyond the bath house, to the east.

 

There is a large, rectangular pool with a smaller, semicircular pool at either end (to the north and south). On the opposite side of the pools is the filter house complex, which also houses the lifeguard station, control room and bleacher area. The complex is connected by a series of interconnecting pedestrian pathways and iron-and-brick walls. The plan of the entire Play Center is generally symmetrical on an east-west axis.

 

The McCarren Play Center can be approached from the west at Lorimer Street, or from the east at Leonard Street. Historically, the main entrance was located at Lorimer Street, slightly south of center of the block. There are two rear entrances to the Play Center at Leonard Street, to the east. Swimmers would enter the Play Center by climbing the wide steps at the Lorimer Street entrance and entering the open pavilion beneath the massive arch. A ticket for admission would be purchased here at the ticket booth, which is a freestanding structure located at the center of the open pavilion.

 

After purchasing an admission ticket, patrons would enter the bathhouse through one of two entrances; men would enter to the north and women to the south. From the locker rooms, access to the pool deck area was provided by doors at the respective ends of the men’s and women’s sides of the rear (east) facade, and only after patrons had passed through the mandatory shower and foot baths. Today, access to the pool area is available directly past the ticket booth and through the arch of the bathhouse pavilion. The open pavilion historically had iron gates prohibiting patrons from passing directly through the second archway to the pool area.

 

The former wading pool, which is accessed from the north, is semicircular in plan and surrounded on all sides by an ample promenade lined with trees and benches. The filled-in wading pool area is currently used as a children’s water park. This area is totally separate from the rest of the Play Center and is the only part of the complex still open to the public. The northern public comfort station, which included boys’ and girls’ restrooms as well as areas for storage, was located to the west of the wading pool; this is no longer in use today and is blocked by a chain link fence. An additional small, square-shaped brick building is located to the west of the wading pool.

 

The McCarren Play Center is completely surrounded by chain link fences and the historic brick and iron walls. A pedestrian pathway follows the perimeter of the Play Center, on the opposite side of the fencing, and is accessible to the public today. This pathway extends north around the perimeter of the Vincent V. Abate Playground, outside of the landmark site. The former wading pool area has a pedestrian pathway around its perimeter; however, this pathway does not connect to the larger continuous pathway that follows the perimeter of the Play Center.

 

The Bath House and Viewing Platforms

 

The two-story bath house employs a long, rectangular plan and is constructed of concrete, English- bond brick (now entirely painted and, in many places, covered with graffiti), and stucco. The plan is centered around a large open-air entrance pavilion, with wings stretching in either direction. These wings historically housed the men’s locker room (to the north) and the women’s locker room (to the south). Located at each end of the rectangular building are the former public comfort stations; these comfort stations are connected to the

bath house building by brick archways. The building’s height varies to accommodate the central pavilion and the viewing platforms. The complex is symmetrical on an east-west axis.

 

The west, or main, facade of the bath house faces Lorimer Street. The massive entrance pavilion is located at the center of this façade and features a large, open archway with decorative brick voussoirs. There are two towers at either side of the archway, and the grouping is topped by a set-back gallery with a flat roof.

 

The gallery terrace surrounds a windowless wall that separates it from the open courtyard below. There are two, tall windows at the first floor of the flanking towers. These windows, which were topped by splayed lintels, historically had steel-casement sashes with three panes each. Today, they are covered with metal panels. The second story of the flanking towers each featured a tall, thin window with copper louvers for ventilation. These louvers have been removed, but the window openings remain. The gallery above the archway has concrete posts supporting a concrete lintel, and above, the flat roof of the building. The gallery has a historic metal handrail at all sides. Two brick chimneys rise above the flat roof of the central pavilion, one at the north side and the other at the south side.

 

The central entrance arch is fronted by a granite staircase, which provides entry to the bath house. A non-historic wood handicap-access ramp has been placed at the southern portion of this staircase. The archway was historically marked with the words “MCCARREN PLAY CENTER” in bronze lettering (this signage has been removed). The first seven risers of the staircase extend beyond, and turn at a 90-degree angle to meet, the cast-granite sidewalls of the entry. These sidewalls culminate into two cast granite plinths that flank the stairs to the main entrance. A granite landing composed of large blocks with a decorative diamond-shaped pattern in the middle meets patrons at the eighth riser; from this landing one can either continue through the arch to the ticket booth, or instead walk to the right or left up another series of granite steps that lead to the mezzanine, viewing platforms at the side wings and set-back gallery above the arched pavilion. Historically, there was wrought iron fencing prohibiting access to the upper floors; this fencing has been replaced with a solid brick wall on both sides.

 

To either side of the central pavilion are located the wings that housed the locker room areas. The wings, which stretch to the north and to the south, are each nine bays wide and one story high at this façade. They have a flat roof topped with cast-stone coping that steps up gradually towards the central pavilion. Each wing historically featured nine identical multi-paned steel casement windows. Each window consisted of six casement sashes; the center two sashes were six panes each, while the flanking sashes were three panes each. The comfort stations, which are located at the outermost end of the wings, each featured one window at the west façade. These windows had two steel casement sashes, each with four panes. All windows have been covered with metal panels. Today, creeping ivy covers much of the west façade of the north and south wings.

 

The interior plan of the entrance pavilion works around a symmetrical bi-axial plan: at the west and east elevations are two identical large open archways; at the north and south elevations are two identical enclosed archways, which have smaller entrances to the flanking wings of the bath house. The floor of the pavilion consists of granite and red brick laid in large, geometric patterns.

 

The interior walls are brick; the walls above the arches are clad with stucco. The arches have simple brick voussoir surrounds at the interior. The pavilion’s interior walls are topped with a denticulated brick cornice with cast stone coping. The north and south interior walls are identical. They each feature two central doorways with segmental arched openings and rounded jambs.

 

These entrances led to the north and south wings of the bath house. These entrances historically featured metal double-doors with decorative wrought iron transoms. The transoms exist today; however, the doors have been replaced with metal panels. A third, smaller entrance topped with a splayed lintel is located at the eastern portion of the wall, at both the north and south elevations.

 

This entrance also historically featured a single metal door; currently, it is covered with a metal panel. According to the original drawings, each of the north and south interior elevation walls featured bronze lettering that read “men” and “women” (respectively), bronze sconce light fixtures centered over each of the two main entrances and a bronze clock on each wall. None of these features exist today. There are six cast concrete benches in the pavilion—three at the north wall and three at the south wall.

 

The ticket booth sits at approximately the center of the floor in the interior of the pavilion. It is a multi-sided Art Moderne structure measuring approximately 8 x 17 feet with a wide, overhanging copper roof. According to the original plans, the ticket booth featured a bronze base and a steel frame, and was clad with marble panels below window-level. The upper half of the structure featured windows all the way around, with openings for communication and dispensing tickets.

 

The ticket booth featured bronze moldings and bronze relief sculptures in the shapes of marine-themed creatures mounted to the marble panels. A bronze fascia sat above the windows, beneath the roof. The roof, which was clad with copper and had eaves with a nearly four- foot projecting overhang, had copper louvers for ventilation. Today, the building exists in skeletal form. The underlying structure is exposed and has been reinforced with steel beams, and most of the marble, bronze and copper has been removed. What remains has been painted the same brick-red color as the rest of the bath house.

 

The east façade of the bath house mimics somewhat the west façade; due to the similar nature of these two façades, the east façade will only be described as it differs to the west façade. The north and south wings are more elaborate at this façade, rising two stories with the second story stepped back to provide space for viewing platforms on the roof of the first story. Historically, there were two glazed metal bays on either side of the central arch; the northern bay provided entrance to the first aid facility, and the southern bay provided entrance to the Play Center office.

 

All that remains of these glazed bays are remnants of copper flashing of the bays’ conical roofs on the façade of the bath house. Other than the bay configuration, the east façade of the central pavilion of the bath house is nearly identical to the west façade. A non-historic light fixture hangs from a metal chain that has been attached to the arch of the pavilion. Historically, a large bronze clock was mounted to the façade at the second story of the southern tower.

 

The east facades of the north and south wings of the bath house are 16 bays wide at the first story. The facades of the wings are generally symmetrical. The first bays (counting away from the central arch) consist of a recessed entrance with an arched opening. The arched opening has a simple brick voussoir surround and projecting brick cheek walls. Historically, the entry consisted of flush metal double doors and was fronted by a foot bath (these doors provided entrance back into the locker rooms).

 

Today, these doors have been covered with metal panels. The concave footbaths remain. Secondary entrances existed at the outermost bays; three at the south end and two at the north end. A brick cheek wall extends out and in front of these entrances, and the concave foot baths exist within the spaces between the cheek walls and the building’s façade. Fenestration at the first story of the wings historically consisted of steel casement, multi-paned hopper windows, with either three or four panes apiece and stacked two sashes high. These windows had simple cast-stone sills and splayed brick lintels. Today, they have been covered with metal panels.

 

The east facades of the north and south wings of the bath house are 25 bays wide at the second story. This story is set back and fronted by a terrace that was used as a viewing platform. The platform floor has been clad with asphalt sheets. The facades of the wings are symmetrical. The first bays (counting away from the central arch) have open arched passageways allowing access to the viewing platforms from the west side of the building, via stairways.

 

A second set of stairways (leading to the open gallery space above the arch in the central pavilion) flank these open archways. These steps are composed of granite, and have stepped brick handrails. The stepped handrails appear to have been repaired and, while the northern stairway is still stepped, it is not stepped in the original configuration. Fenestration at the second story consists of windows in groups of threes, with engaged brick piers spaced intermittently between them. These windows contained metal louver sashes; today, they are covered with metal panels. A continuous cast stone sill course runs beneath these windows, broken only by the engaged piers. Historically, there were cast stone and bronze lamps at the foot of the stairs leading to the open gallery.

 

These lamps no longer exist. The roof of the second story is flat and topped with cast-stone coping.

 

A comfort station, containing a women’s and men’s restroom facility, is located at either end of the bath house building. They are attached to the bath house by a pair of arches. The comfort station at the north end is separated from the Play Center pool and deck area by a brick and iron wall. Each comfort station featured two entrances: one at the north or south façade, and one at the east façade. These entrances historically consisted of single metal glazed doors; today they are covered with metal panels. Signage indicating the “Girls” and “Boys” entrances still exists. All windows at the comfort stations have been covered with metal panels.

 

Generally, the bath house building has suffered a significant amount of damage, with much of the brickwork in disrepair. All windows and entrances have been enclosed with metal panels, and the entire building has been painted a brick red color. The painting of the building’s exterior occurred in the years after the Play Center had been closed to the public, and today, much of the accessible surfaces have been covered with graffiti.

 

- From the 2007 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report

Streamlined art deco van. This design is a slightly modified version of Flickr user snaillad's van, which you can find in his photostream. The delivery man seems to like it, so I guess it's not too bad. First created in MLCad, then built with real bricks.

Tweaked the design so it now uses less pieces and is smaller than the previous version. The caveat is this design creates a gap between modules when joined via the fascias

Lincoln Zephyr (1937)

* Designer: John Tjaarda

* Displacement: 4380 cc

* Power: 110 CV

* Top-speed: 130 km/h

 

Henry Ford's sun Edsel, who was in charge of the company's LINCOLN division, was the first to introduce a marketable, mass-produced streamlined automobile: the 1936 Lincoln Zephyr.

Sweeping the market like a storm, the aerodynamic design suddenly turned into an international fashion trend.

 

Zeithaus Museum

Autostadt Wolfsburg

17 February 2014

Nikon D90/AF Nikkor 1:3.5-4.5 28-105 mm

Streamlined Sundays: Cars in the Park

WHEN: July 8, 2018 @ 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm

40 classic sports cars from 1967 and earlier will line the Park Blocks outside the Museum for this month’s Streamlined Sunday, a program of The Shape of Speed. Ranging from 1930’s Alfa Romeos to competition Ferraris from the 1960s, Cars in the Park is the kickoff for Keith Martin’s Sports Car Market 30th Anniversary Tour.

Midtown Manhattan, Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States

 

Rising 43 stories in height and completed in 1931, 275 Madison Avenue is an outstanding Art Deco skyscraper dating from the end of New York’s 1920s and early-1930s skyscraper boom. Designed by noted architect Kenneth Franzheim, the building features a striking polished-granite base; three stories high with tall rectangular openings, it was treated by Franzheim as a “stage setting” with a compelling black-and-silver color scheme and rich abstract ornament. Rising above the base is a dramatically massed, slab-form tower that steps back repeatedly before narrowing to a nearly square plan at its upper floors.

 

Like the nearby Daily News Building completed the year before, 275 Madison is best described as a transitional work, bridging the exuberant, “modernistic” Art Deco style and the spare, sculptural qualities of the International Style. Franzheim’s “exclusion of obstructive ornament” was promoted as making the building’s interiors “virtually shadowless,” but it also adds to the tower’s streamlined effect and the vertical emphasis created by its alternating white-brick stripes and dark window bands.

 

No. 275 Madison Avenue was developed by Houston Properties, a New York-based firm founded by Jesse H. Jones, who built nearly all of the skyscrapers constructed in Houston, Tex. during the first half of the twentieth century. A nationally known figure, Jones also served as Secretary of Commerce and Chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a position in which he was “probably the most powerful financial baron in the nation.” This building is one of a handful completed in New York City by Franzheim, an accomplished, versatile, and innovative architect who was a prominent designer of theaters, department stores, apartment houses, and office buildings. Famed photographer Berenice Abbott photographed 275 Madison as part of her “Changing New York” series, and it remains, to this day, one of the finer skyscrapers of the period.

 

DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS

 

Murray Hill

 

Completed in 1931 at the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and East 40th Street, the building now known as 275 Madison Avenue stands at the northern edge of Murray Hill—one of Manhattan’s most prestigious old residential neighborhoods—where it meets the vibrant commercial district to its north formerly known as the “Grand Central Zone.” Generally extending from East 34th to East 40th Streets, and from Madison to Third Avenues, Murray Hill’s historic core lies several blocks south of 40th Street, on lands that formed the eighteenth-century country estate of Robert Murray and his wife, Mary. Roughly bounded on the south and north by present-day East 33rd and East 38th Streets, the Murray estate reached from the old Middle Road—near present-day Madison Avenue—to the Eastern Post Road, an old route to Boston located close to present-day Lexington Avenue.

 

Murray Hill’s development as a premier residential district was intimately connected with the construction of the New York & Harlem Railroad, which began in 1831. Prohibited from operating steam locomotives south of 14th Street, the New York & Harlem constructed a depot just south of Murray Hill, where passengers could transfer between steam trains and the horsecars that operated farther downtown. In 1851, the Harlem Railroad—together with the New York & New Haven Railroad, which ran along the same right-of-way—began converting their open railroad cut, completed through Murray Hill in the 1830s, into a tunnel. Covenants instituted in the 1830s and 1840s limited development on the former Murray estate to brick and stone dwellings, churches, and private stables, and prohibited uses that could present fire hazards, generate noxious odors, or draw crowds of strangers to the neighborhood.

 

Murray Hill’s residential development began in earnest in 1851-53, when three members of the Phelps family erected elegant and luxurious mansions on the east side of Madison Avenue between East 36th and East 37th Streets. By 1858, much of the area had been transformed, with most of its new houses purchased by merchants who owned businesses in Lower Manhattan and commuted to work via the Harlem Railroad or the Third Avenue horsecars. At the end of the nineteenth century, the neighborhood was home to members of New York’s most prominent families, including the Belmonts, Delanos, Rhinelanders, and Tiffanys. Today, Murray Hill retains much of its nineteenth-century character; most of the area bounded by East 35th and East 38th Streets, and by Park and Lexington Avenues, was designated a New York City Historic District in 2002, with a district extension following two years later.

 

The “Grand Central Zone”

 

By the late 1910s, strong commercial pressure was pushing down on Murray Hill from the intersection of Park Avenue and 42nd Street, where the mammoth and bustling new Grand Central Terminal had been completed in 1913. So great were the expectations for the area surrounding the terminal as a commercial district and “notable center of artistic structures” that the area was christened the “Grand Central Terminal Zone” a year before Grand Central opened. By 1917, “the blocks immediately north and south of 42nd Street in the terminal zone [composed] one of the liveliest commercial quarters of the city,” and four years later, 100 million people—equal to the entire population of the United States—were passing through the terminal each year.

 

The Grand Central Zone emerged in the late 1920s as one of the city’s great skyscraper districts. As developer Irwin Chanin explained in 1929—the year in which his firm completed its namesake 56-story building at 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue—the area possessed many advantages over the older Lower Manhattan business district from which it was drawing tenants. Compared with the Wall Street area, which had become “widely separated from railway terminals, hotels, clubs, theaters, and such important centers as the garment, fur, furniture, millinery, and jewelry industries,” the Grand Central area was much more convenient for “our typical big businessman [who] now lives in the Park Avenue district, in Westchester County, or on Long Island.” Skyscraper construction boomed in the Grand Central Zone in 1929; eight new skyscrapers totaling 249 stories were being readied for occupancy that year, including Warren & Wetmore’s 34-story New York Central Building , the Chanin Building, and the 44-story office building at 10 East 40th Street designed by Ludlow & Peabody and constructed by Houston Properties, the developer of 275 Madison Avenue. Five skyscrapers totaling 220 stories were being readied for 1930 occupancy.

 

Following the October 1929 stock market crash and the subsequent Depression, office building construction slowed to a crawl in the Grand Central Zone, as it did throughout the city; No. 275 Madison Avenue was among the few skyscrapers begun in the Grand Central district in the crash’s aftermath. For a period of about fifteen years between the early 1930s and late 1940s, no new major office buildings were completed in the Grand Central Zone.

 

New York’s Art Deco Skyscrapers

 

America’s involvement in World War I, followed by a recession in the early 1920s, caused a construction lull in New York City, as in other parts of the country. By the mid 1920s, the economy had bounced back, and demand for new and larger commercial buildings was booming. Fifteen new office skyscrapers were erected in New York in 1925, and 1926 saw the construction of 30 more, an annual number that still had not been equaled 50 years later. This building frenzy lasted through the 1929 stock market crash, as construction went forward in the early 1930s on buildings that had already been planned and financed; although largely finished by 1932, the boom left behind a “rich array of towers,” many of them executed in what is known today as the Art Deco style. Indeed, several of New York’s most spectacular skyscrapers from this period—including the Chanin Building, the Chrysler Building , the Empire State Building and the General Electric Building , all designated New York City Landmarks, are among the country’s most significant examples of Art Deco design.

 

Into the 1910s, no limits on building height or bulk existed in New York City. In 1916, New York implemented the nation’s first zoning regulations, which permitted unrestricted height on one-quarter of a building site, but required skyscrapers to taper as they rose to allow light and air to reach the street. Six years later, architect and critic Harvey Wiley Corbett and architectural delineator Hugh Ferriss first published a group of dramatic renderings that explored zoning’s impact on the shape of tall buildings. Presented as a series of illustrations progressing from the abstract, pyramidal shape of the zoning envelope to a stepped-back practicable building form, these drawings were profoundly influential, catalyzing a trend in which “buildings endeavored to take on the feeling of sculpted mountains, their shape suddenly more important than their historical detail or even their style.” So pervasive were the new stepped-back skyscrapers that by the mid-1920s, architects and critics spoke of an emerging “setback style”; these buildings “helped to popularize an aesthetic of simple, sculptural mass that became the benchmark of progressive design.”

 

Another important influence on 1920s skyscraper design was Eliel Saarinen’s 1922 competition entry for the Chicago Tribune’s new tower. With its straightforward shape, vertical emphasis, and limited ornament, Saarinen’s ahistorical design was “taken to be style-less and was thought in the twenties to have freed architects from what seemed the inevitable alternatives in skyscraper design, Gothic solutions on the one hand and vertically stretched Classicism on the other.”

 

During this period, the issue of what constituted “modern” design was expounded upon in the press and occupied the thoughts of many architects, who sought an appropriate means of expressing the societal changes brought about by new technology and manufacturing processes. A dichotomy existed, according to Ada Louise Huxtable, between the “modern” architecture of Europe and the “modernistic” new skyscrapers of New York:

 

‘Modern’ was radical, reductive, and reformist; ‘modernistic’ was richly decorative and attached to conservative and hedonistic values. ‘Modern’ was the austere, abstract, elite, avant-garde work of … [Walter] Gropius, Mies [van der Rohe], and Le Corbusier, united in its early days under the rubric of the International Style.

 

‘Modernistic’ was neither pure nor revolutionary; it fused the ornamental and the exotic for what was really the last great decorative style.

 

Only a handful of International Style skyscrapers were constructed in the United States before World War II. Far more popular was the “modernistic” style, which was later termed “Art Deco” based on its debt to the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes. Flamboyant, dynamic, and dazzling to the eye, Art Deco’s primary characteristic was its “sumptuous ornament, and the lush textures and colors achieved by combining several materials, such as stone, brick, terra cotta, and metal.” Gilding and shiny materials were frequently used, and favorite decorative motifs, drawn from the natural world and geometric forms, included “spirals, sunflowers, steps, zigzags, triangles, double triangles, hexagons, fragmented circles, and seashells.” Inspirations included the products of the machine age—the gargoyles of the Chrysler Building, based on automotive radiator caps, are one example—as well as ancient and pre-industrial cultures; Art Deco representations of animals, fish, and humans reflected Cubist and folk-art influences. Frequently, facades were given a woven fabric treatment, in buildings including One Wall Street and the 21 West Street Building . Wall surfaces read as thin decorative veneers, as “stage sets” to a public infatuated with movies and the theater. Some architects made literal the theatricality of the Art Deco style, including Joseph Urban, whose Ziegfeld Theater imitated a stage on its facade, complete with proscenium and raised curtain.

 

The Art Deco skyscraper married the style’s exuberant, showy ornament to the tall building forms inspired by the 1916 zoning law and the Chicago Tribune competition. Like the movie palaces of the time, Art Deco skyscrapers had an accessible, comprehensible grandeur and were essentially conservative works; they maintained the conventions of past commercial skyscrapers. Ornament continued to be concentrated at the base and the crown, where brightly colored terra cotta ornament, highly polished stone, lighting effects, gilding, and other features attracted attention from near and afar.

 

As Art Deco was conquering New York, a new skyscraper form, the slab, emerged. Into the 1920s, the city’s tallest skyscrapers were typically constructed on enormous lots. These sites were big enough, as with the Chrysler Building, to allow for “geometrically pure” square, needle-like towers that broke free of their bases and pierced the sky. But as large lots became rarer and developers sought to construct tall office buildings on narrow lots, this approach became unfeasible; the square tower, if made too small, lost too much of its internal space to elevators. As a result, new skyscrapers on narrower lots took on a slab-like form, their long and rectangular upper stories seemingly extruded from their bases. The pioneering slab skyscraper was H. Douglas Ives’ and Sloan & Robertson’s 38story Fred F. French Building at Fifth Avenue and 45th Street, which was constructed on a relatively small lot. But the master of the slab at the end of the 1920s was Raymond Hood, whose Daily News Building marked the most radical departure of any tall building from previous skyscraper form. Despite the rich Art Deco bas-relief over its main entrance, Hood’s building, with its artfully planned setbacks and flat, unornamented roofline, came closer to abstract sculpture than any skyscraper before; falling, in style, “between modern and modernistic,” it forsook the decorated crown of the Art Deco skyscraper and approached the purity of the International Style. Hood built upon his experience with the Daily News Building in designing another of the city’s great slab skyscrapers, the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center , which was completed in 1933. But with the Depression remaining entrenched and money for office buildings drying up, few Art Deco skyscrapers were completed in New York after Rockefeller Center, and the style, increasingly employed for government and institutional buildings, became considerably more restrained.

 

Jesse H. Jones and the Houston Properties Corporation

 

The builder of 275 Madison Avenue, Jesse Holman Jones was a towering figure in Houston, Tex. and Washington, D.C. during the first half of the twentieth century. Houston’s preeminent real estate developer, builder, and banker from the 1910s into the 1950s, Jones ensured the financial solvency of the Democratic Party in the 1920s, served under President Franklin D. Roosevelt as Chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and Secretary of Commerce, and amassed a fortune of a quarter billion dollars, most of which he left to charity.

 

Kenneth Franzheim

 

The versatile architect of 275 Madison Avenue, Kenneth Franzheim was a prominent designer of theaters, department stores, auditoriums, and office buildings.

 

History of 275 Madison Avenue

 

Before its acquisition for the construction of the 275 Madison Avenue Building, the site at the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and East 40th Street was of the same exclusive residential character as the rest of Murray Hill. Although it was vacant in the early 1850s, three attached rowhouses—273, 275, and 277 Madison Avenue—each slightly less than 25 feet in width, were built there by 1862; they went on to serve, for decades, as “the homes of many distinguished citizens of New York.”

 

With the area just to the north developing into one of the city’s great commercial centers, business had infiltrated the row by 1920. In the 1920s, the area below Grand Central was evolving “into the city’s second most important financial center,” and in 1922, the New York Trust Company purchased, and opened an office in, the corner rowhouse at 277 Madison Avenue. In 1929, New York Trust purchased the lot at 275 Madison, giving it the adjacent parcel to its “uptown branch”; in April of 1930, Jesse Jones was negotiating with the bank and the owner of 273 Madison with the goal of “assembling … a site for a tall office building at the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and 40th Street.” Within a month, Jones had acquired the entire 74’-by-150’ corner parcel—which included two stable buildings at 24 and 26 East 40th Street constructed before 1910—and created the 277 Madison Avenue Corporation to undertake the building’s financing and construction. This move followed Jones’ standard practice, as he once explained, of creating new corporations to construct each of his buildings “so that if one building got into trouble, it would not involve any other.”

 

Plans were soon in place to construct the skyscraper originally marketed as 22 East 40th Street, but called, by the end of the 1930s by its current name, 275 Madison Avenue. In May of 1930, New York Trust received approval from state banking authorities to move its branch across Madison Avenue until the new building was completed, and in June, Kenneth Franzheim filed plans for the building, which had a projected construction cost of $1.25 million. In July of 1930, Houston Properties announced its plans for the new 505-foot structure. The building’s construction proceeded quickly, with excavation taking about a month, and structural steel completed in about three months, between early September and the middle of December. Leasing was also underway, with the American Bankers’ Association taking two floors in the new building. New York Trust would occupy almost all of the ground floor and mezzanine—its banking hall designed by Walker & Gillette—and the top three floors were leased by Kenneth Franzheim, along with two engineering firms. Franzheim maintained his office in the building while living at 1158 Fifth Avenue.

 

Perhaps because of the city’s gloomy economic climate, the Times repeatedly reported on 275 Madison as its construction progressed. At the end of July, the newspaper published Franzheim’s rendering of the building, and at the end of December, it ran a detailed article on this new “mammoth structure” in the Grand Central district. The Times ran additional short pieces when the American Bankers’ Association and New York Trust Company moved into the completed building in April and June of 1931, but Cross & Brown, the building’s agent, clearly faced a tough market, promoting not only the building’s location in the “Uptown Wall Street district” but also its value. In one advertisement, Cross & Brown explained how the skyscraper’s “superior floor arrangements” permitted one tenant to save money by renting a smaller space than it otherwise would have needed, and another advertisement promoted “the finest offices in the district at the price.”

 

Design of 275 Madison Avenue

 

Franzheim’s completed building is a distinguished example of Art Deco design. Considered one of the city’s notable skyscrapers of its time, it was described in one contemporary account as being “of novel aspect” and would be photographed in 1936 by Berenice Abbott as part of her famous “Changing New York” series, which chronicled the evolution of the city’s streetscape during the 1930s. Like many Art Deco skyscrapers, 275 Madison Avenue has a strikingly ornamented base; three stories high with tall rectangular openings, it was treated by Franzheim “as a sort of stage setting … related to the street.” With a compelling black-and-silver color scheme similar to those of the Fuller Building and Bloomingdale’s Lexington Avenue building , the base’s taut, polished granite skin is set off by bright metal door moldings, window frames, and faceted mullions. The motifs within its ground-floor windowsills, the stepped and starburst elements within the spandrels between the ground-floor and mezzanine windows, and the zigzagging molding around the Madison Avenue entrance to the first-floor banking hall reflect Art Deco’s affinity for abstract geometric forms. Unusual abstract ornament in contrasting unpolished granite also fills the space between the third-floor windows, implying a cornice; resembling folded fabric and reminiscent of Urban’s “raised curtain” on the proscenium-like façade of the Ziegfeld Theater, this motif reads as a valence or curtain over the “stage” of the base, particularly over the main, 40th Street entrance. At that entrance, lights concealed by angular shell-like sconces dramatically illuminate the bright metal ornament over the doors.

 

Rising above the base is 275 Madison Avenue’s dramatically massed slab-form tower, its vertical white-brick stripes likely inspired by Hood’s streamlined Daily News Building, which bridged Art Deco and the emerging International Style when it opened in 1930. As with Daily News—where Hood sought to conceal the windows to avoid the effect of a wall “shot full of holes”—these stripes alternate with dark window bands, which emphasize the building’s vertical ascent. The spandrels of 275 Madison are composed of grids of black terra-cotta tiles, and together with the windows, they form unified, mesh-like bands that were particularly visually effective with the building’s original multipane sashes. Above its base, 275 Madison Avenue is virtually free of ornament, except for simple black geometric motifs on and near its setbacks and crown; the “exclusion of obstructive ornament” around its flush-mounted windows and of “entablatures, architraves, pediments, cornices, and other conventional ornamental devices” reflected the emerging functionalism of the early 1930s and was promoted by Franzheim as making the interiors “virtually shadowless,” although it may also have been a cost-saving measure. Berenice Abbott likely saw the building’s clean, streamlined form as representative of modern New York City, juxtaposing it, in one photograph, against the fussy iron balconies and ornate ornament of the old Murray Hill Hotel.

 

Above the twelfth floor, the slab begins to step back from the streetwall. With fewer setbacks on its east façade than the west, the building’s main facade is asymmetrical, although this is barely noticeable from East 40th Street. Above the setbacks, the slab narrows considerably to a nearly square plan, which is largely a product of the 1916 zoning law and the building’s small site; unlike larger buildings’ square towers with their central service cores, this building’s elevators are grouped at the tower’s south end, making the most economical use, like most slab skyscrapers, of a narrow floor plate. Reflecting the increasing influence of the International Style, 275 Madison originally terminated with a sparely ornamented, flat crown, marked by little more than austere striped ornament, corbelled piers, and notches at its four corners.

 

Later History

 

Despite difficult economic conditions, Cross & Brown succeeded in attracting tenants to the building; in 1933, the Johns-Manville Corporation, then a major producer of asbestos-based building products, leased fourteen floors. Nevertheless, the Depression rapidly caught up with 275 Madison Avenue. It was clear that the Midtown office market had crashed by November of 1931, when the Times reported that three proposed skyscrapers in the Grand Central Zone—including a 65-story office tower planned by Houston Properties on Madison Avenue between 38th and 39th Streets—had recently been canceled. By July of 1932, Houston Properties’ building at 10 East 40th Street was in default, as was 275 Madison, which also had substantial unpaid taxes. In 1933, New York Trust took title to the building, but it remained “in arrears” in the following year.

 

Better times followed, as in 1943, 275 Madison was purchased by an investment group. In a transaction that was seen as a sign of a reviving Midtown real estate market, American Home Products, which was among the building’s investors, took a long-term lease on most of its top 23 floors and based its headquarters there. Eight years later, AHP sold the building to Tishman Realty & Construction, but it leased back its space—comprising all of seventeen floors and parts of seven others—from Tishman. At that time, 275 Madison had several major corporate tenants, including Procter & Gamble and Babcock & Wilcox, a large boiler-making concern; New York Trust and Johns-Manville also remained in the building. In 1961, American Home Products left the building for its own office tower, and its space was leased to other firms. In 1998, RFR Holdings , a subsidiary of RFR Frankfurt of Germany, purchased the building’s 98-year lease, and today, under the continued ownership of RFR, the 275 Madison Avenue Building remains an outstanding example of Art Deco architecture dating from the end of New York’s skyscraper boom of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

 

Description

 

No. 275 Madison Avenue is a 43-story skyscraper composed of a three-story, black polished-granite base supporting a 40-story slab-form, setback tower faced in white brick and black terra-cotta tiles. The tower, which has both upper and lower portions, is topped by a non-historic penthouse. With a footprint of approximately 74’-by-150’, the building has two main facades, on Madison Avenue and East 40th Street. Although the building’s base has always had a black-and silver color scheme, the materials of the base’s silver-colored ornament—primarily, its window frames, mullions, door surrounds, and decorative spandrel panels—is difficult to determine because they are painted with silver-colored paint. Examination of one of the first-floor windowsills on the Madison Avenue façade, where paint has flaked off of the surface, indicates that the base’s metal ornament may be painted zinc.

 

Several changes were made to the building beginning in 2004. This work included the installation of a translucent green-glass panel and supporting metal framework over the main, 40th Street entrance, as well as minor alterations to the storefronts and storefront entrances east of the main entrance. The biggest change on the Madison Avenue façade was the removal of the historic, recessed Madison Avenue building entrance—which contained a wide transom bar crowned by two shell-like sconces that were likely identical to those at the 40th Street entrance—and the incorporation of the entrance recess into the adjacent storefront. Also at that time, the opening just to the north of this entrance was altered, with the removal of half of its decorative sill and the installation of a swinging door for a new automatic teller machine vestibule; pin-mounted stainless steel numerals reading “275” were installed at the northwest corner of the building, on both the Madison and 40th Street facades. A window-replacement campaign begun in 2008 resulted in the replacement of most of the sashes on the building’s tower with one-over-one, double-hung sashes.

 

All elements included below should be considered historic, unless described otherwise.

 

Base: East 40th Street Façade

 

This asymmetrical façade contains the building’s main entrance. It is eight bays in width, with the main entrance recess at the fifth bay in from Madison Avenue. The main entrance door set, consisting of metal-and-glass revolving and swinging doors, is not original to the building. Above the doors is a black metal transom bar, probably original, containing gold-colored letters, likely non-historic, reading “275 MADISON AVENUE.” This sign band is crowned by a large transom opening containing a window divided into five parts horizontally and four parts vertically. The lowest and highest quarters of the transom contain plain panels, possibly lighted from behind; the third quarter of the transom from the bottom contains five single-pane sashes. The second quarter of the transom from the bottom contains four identical decorative spandrel panels; each of these is fabricated of metal and contains abstract ornament resembling a skyscraper crowned by a starburst. The black “skyscraper” within each of these panels is executed in a contrasting ribbed material, possibly painted metal. Five abstract, angular sconces resembling seashells sit on the transom bar; the four flanking the central seashell contain partially concealed, non-historic light fixtures that project light upward. The transom also has four identical, faceted mullions that curve outward at their bases and extend from the transom’s base halfway up its length; two identical pieces flank the window, forming a partial surround. A larger, but similar faceted vertical piece at the center of the window is attached to a curving, prow-like projection and steps back twice near its peak. Metal grilles composed of rectangular geometric elements made up of thin metal members are attached to the lowest and highest quarters of the transom window. Five square, non-historic light fixtures are attached to the soffit of the main-entrance recess.

 

Flanking the main entrance on each side and attached to the main-entrance reveal is a recessed, rectangular light panel. Each panel is covered with a metal grille composed of rectangular geometric elements made up of thin metal members, with hinges, and a crowning star and keystone. The west reveal has a rectangular door opening containing a metal door with its historic handle. To the right of the door is a non-historic “no smoking” sign; below this sign are metal, individually mounted letters reading “22 EAST FORTIETH.” The east reveal contains a non-historic “no smoking sign,” a non-historic door buzzer panel, and a non-historic “for handicapped service” sign. Non-historic bright, reflective metal covers the corners of the main-entrance recess, where it meets the building’s front wall. A non-historic translucent panel composed of two pieces of green glass and metal attachments is installed slightly outward from the front building wall, and covers approximately the top half of the main entrance recess. It is attached to the metal-covered corners of the main-entrance recess with two non-historic metal rods and eight large non-historic metal brackets. Attached to the front of the glass are non-historic metal numerals reading “275.”

 

The base of 275 Madison Avenue is essentially flat, except for a slight, sill-like projection that extends the width of the façade. West of the main entrance are four tall openings. Each of these openings contains an identical metal window, each with an angled, non-projecting sill containing raised ornament in a simple geometric pattern; the raised portions of these sills are painted silver, and the recessed portions black. Each of these windows is split into three vertical parts, consisting of a ground-floor portion, a mezzanine portion, and decorative spandrels, identical to the “skyscraper” ornament of the main-entrance transom, separating the two. At the ground floor, the window is tripartite, containing a large central pane flanked by two slightly shorter panes; each of the shorter panes is headed by an almost-square, single-pane sash. The mezzanine portion of each window comprises five single rectangular panes. Projecting, faceted mullions extend from the sills to a point just above the spandrels; shorter but similar faceted projections begin above the central first-floor pane and separate the central three spandrel panels from each other. Although signage for the bank occupying the ground-floor space is visible through the windows, it is set several inches back, except for decals reading “Valley National Bank” that are affixed to the inside of the glass. Two non-historic signs reading “Valley National Bank” are also present at the ground floor west of the main entrance, as is a siamese connection. Above the westernmost window are non-original metal numerals reading “275.”

 

The spandrel and mezzanine portions of the three windows east of the main entrance are identical to those west of the entrance, except at the central of the three windows, where the central spandrel panel is wider than the others, and of a slightly different design. Other portions of these windows and their openings appear to have been altered, although the extent of this alteration is unclear, as no historic photographs of this portion of the base have been found. The central opening of the three windows contains, at its ground floor, a recessed entrance with polished black granite reveal, paved with non-historic beige ceramic tile and containing two non-historic metal swinging doors with sidelights and single-pane transoms. These doors are separated by a black metal pier; each is set at an angle and serves a different storefront. The soffit of this entrance recess is of black metal, with a non-historic single-tube fluorescent light fixture; the east reveal has an outlet box and lock box, both with conduit. Over the entrance is a non-historic metal box containing a security gate. Between this box and the spandrel panels is a split sash, its eastern half containing a single pane, and its western half containing a metal louver. The metal faceted surround of this window appears to be original to the building, although its sill, just above the security gate box, does not. Two non-historic metal blade signs reading “KODAK” and “food merchants” flank the central opening. An outlet box with conduit is attached to the façade just east of the entrance recess.

 

Within the easternmost opening, the portion of the window below the spandrel panels is split into two large single-pane sashes, with a non-historic metal bar separating them. Although the original faceted window surround remains, it may have been extended with additional metalwork to a non-historic metal sill. The opening two bays to its west appears to have undergone similar treatment, although the portion of its window just below the spandrel panels is split into two parts by a vertical bar. It is presumed that at least two of the openings east of the main entrance had decorative, angled sills identical to those west of the main entrance. A siamese connection is installed between the main-entrance recess and the third-easternmost opening; also between this opening and the main entrance are the ghosts of pin-mounted letters once identifying 275 Madison Avenue as the Johns-Manville Building.

 

A band of rectangular window openings—six to the east of the main entrance, and twelve to its west—exists at the third floor. Seventeen of these openings are filled exclusively with one-overone, double-hung sashes, which appear to be non-historic. The third-floor opening immediately to the east of the main entrance contains a one-over-one, double-hung window and a short metal louver, neither of which is likely historic. Contrasting, light gray abstract geometric ornament in unpolished granite, possibly painted with silver-colored paint, fills the space between these windows and forms a band over the main entrance. The East 40th Street façade of the base is crowned by two flagpoles, which extend at an angle from their attachment points on the top of the base’s parapet, and flank the main entrance.

 

Base: Madison Avenue Façade

 

The Madison Avenue façade of the base is similar to the East 40th Street façade. Asymmetrical and four bays in width, its second-northernmost bay contains a stepped-back, recessed main entrance to the building’s ground-floor banking hall. Among the features of this entrance are a metal revolving door with sidelights, probably non-original; a high, single-pane transom window; and a black transom bar with metal enframement separating the two. These are set within a historic surround comprising a thick metal molding with a zigzag pattern; a transom covered with an apparently non-historic black panel; and an enframement composed of faceted black metal panels within a silver-colored metal frame. The surround is crowned by a historic octagonal clock set within a stepped surround. Above the main-entrance surround is a four-part metal window containing four single-pane sashes.

 

The openings flanking the entrance are of identical width and contain spandrel panels that are identical to those on the East 40th Street façade. They are narrower, however, containing only three panels and three mezzanine-level sashes. The northernmost opening on the Madison Avenue facade appears to be in original condition, containing a large single-pane sash and retaining its original sill and faceted window surround. A decal advertising Valley National Bank is affixed to the inside of the window, near the sill. The opening immediately south of the banking-hall entrance has been altered, with half of the sill removed and an entrance to an ATM vestibule installed. Above the vestibule entrance and its adjacent single-pane sash, which has a decal advertising Valley National Bank attached to its inside, near the sill, is a large single-pane sash. Although an illuminated box sign is visible through this upper sash, it is set back from the window. The southernmost opening is similar in its upper half to the others; seven spandrel panels in width, it retains its projecting, faceted window surround and one of its faceted mullions, as well as the faceted vertical elements separating each of the spandrel panels. Metal louvers installed above the spandrel panels are likely non-historic. This opening contains additional non-historic infill, including a pair of non-historic glass doors with single-pane sidelights, crowned by a large, frameless, single-pane transom. Although this opening’s historic sill only extends across a portion of the opening, this may be the opening’s historic condition. South and north of this opening are two non-historic blade signs. Two non-historic signs reading “Valley National Bank” are attached to the façade.

 

As on the East 40th Street façade, a band of rectangular window openings—eight in all—exist at the third floor. The northernmost and fifth-northernmost of these openings contain paired one-overone, double-hung windows, and the other openings contain single one-over-one, double-hung windows, all of which appear non-original. Contrasting, light gray abstract geometric ornament in unpolished granite, possibly painted with silver-colored paint, fills the space between these windows. Above the northernmost window are non-original metal numerals reading “275.”

 

Tower

 

The three-story base of 275 Madison Avenue is topped by a slab-form tower that brings the building to a height of 43 stories, not including its non-original, two-story penthouse. The building’s white vertical stripes are composed of white brick; these alternate with dark window bands that have spandrels composed of grids of black terra-cotta tiles. Its window openings originally contained threeover-three, double-hung sashes; while a few of these remain, most have been replaced by single or paired, one-over-one double-hung windows. Some of the existing window openings contain non-historic metal louvers. The lower portion of the tower—approximately the fourth through 23rd floors—rises in a series of setbacks, different on each façade, to a narrow, nearly square upper tower, which comprises approximately the 24th through 43rd floors. Both the lower and upper towers are sparely ornamented, except for simple abstract geometric ornament in contrasting white brick and black brick or terra cotta within some of the spandrels and at some lintels. The entire tower has seen few alterations, except for the construction of the penthouse and the replacement of some brick with new white brick, particularly at the corners.

 

Lower Tower

 

On the main, East 40th Street façade, the lower portion of the tower is fourteen bays wide at the fourth floor, the first floor above the base. Its openings contain paired one-over-one, double-hung windows. A recessed six-bay-wide central portion is flanked, on each side, by four bays, forming a light well. The central portion proceeds up to the 21st floor, after stepping back at its uppermost four stories to form a two-bay-wide peak. Simple, abstract geometric white-brick ornament decorates the black spandrels of the central portion on its stepped-back floors, and projecting white piers flanked by bands of black brick or terra cotta crown the two uppermost windows. The bays flanking the central portion of the main façade step back above the twelfth floor, and again two floors above. Two bays of windows face into the light well up to the twelfth floor, with one of these bays continuing to the fourteenth floor. The twelfth-floor spandrels and lintels of the flanking bays are decorated with simple black-and-white geometric ornament; black lintel bands are present at the setback floors above.

 

The Madison Avenue façade is six bays wide at the fourth through twelfth floors. Above the twelfth floor, it steps back in a series of setbacks to the upper tower. Above the first setback, the windows change from paired one-over-one, double-hung sashes to single one-over-one, double-hung sashes. Seven south-facing windows exist on the setbacks, overlooking the adjacent building at 271 Madison Avenue. Ornament on this façade is similar to that of the main façade.

 

The partially visible east façade is flat, faced in white brick, and virtually free of ornament. It has several window openings containing one-over-one, double-hung sashes. This façade steps back from East 40th Street above the twelfth, fourteenth, seventeenth, and twentieth floors. Above the 23rd floor, the entire façade steps back from the east plane of the building to meet the upper tower.

 

Upper Tower

 

The upper portion of the tower of 275 Madison Avenue is much narrower than the lower, slab-like portion of the tower. It is six bays wide on the East 40th Street façade, and five bays wide on the Madison Avenue and east facades. On the Madison Avenue façade, the openings of the two southernmost bays are filled with black panels. The south façade is eight bays wide, with window openings containing non-historic one-over-one, double-hung sashes within its three easternmost bays and an exposed vertical pipe set back from black, horizontal beams within the second-westernmost bay. The westernmost and third-, fourth-, and fifth-westernmost bays are composed of black vertical stripes. Some brick on the lower portion of the south façade of the upper tower is discolored, possibly by exhaust from the adjacent building to the south. All facades of the upper tower feature limited, abstract geometric ornament in white brick and contrasting black brick or terra cotta similar to that of the lower tower.

 

The upper tower originally rose to a symmetrical flat crown marked by notched corners and a parapet ornamented with black-and-white, chevron-like decoration and simple corbelled, projecting white brick piers. The roof has been altered with the construction of a two-story penthouse, which is primarily visible over the east and south façades. This glass-and-steel addition, featuring ribbon windows and chamfered corners, is topped by two levels of rooftop terraces with metal pipe railings. A vertical exhaust pipe is also visible over the east façade. Changes visible to the roof over the south façade include the removal of the tower’s southwest notch with the installation of a two-story-high white-brick addition, and the removal of ornament over the three window openings at the top of the south façade. Portions of the glass-and-steel addition are also visible over the easternmost portion of the south façade.

 

- From the 2009 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report

Midtown Manhattan, Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States

 

Rising 43 stories in height and completed in 1931, 275 Madison Avenue is an outstanding Art Deco skyscraper dating from the end of New York’s 1920s and early-1930s skyscraper boom. Designed by noted architect Kenneth Franzheim, the building features a striking polished-granite base; three stories high with tall rectangular openings, it was treated by Franzheim as a “stage setting” with a compelling black-and-silver color scheme and rich abstract ornament. Rising above the base is a dramatically massed, slab-form tower that steps back repeatedly before narrowing to a nearly square plan at its upper floors.

 

Like the nearby Daily News Building completed the year before, 275 Madison is best described as a transitional work, bridging the exuberant, “modernistic” Art Deco style and the spare, sculptural qualities of the International Style. Franzheim’s “exclusion of obstructive ornament” was promoted as making the building’s interiors “virtually shadowless,” but it also adds to the tower’s streamlined effect and the vertical emphasis created by its alternating white-brick stripes and dark window bands.

 

No. 275 Madison Avenue was developed by Houston Properties, a New York-based firm founded by Jesse H. Jones, who built nearly all of the skyscrapers constructed in Houston, Tex. during the first half of the twentieth century. A nationally known figure, Jones also served as Secretary of Commerce and Chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a position in which he was “probably the most powerful financial baron in the nation.” This building is one of a handful completed in New York City by Franzheim, an accomplished, versatile, and innovative architect who was a prominent designer of theaters, department stores, apartment houses, and office buildings. Famed photographer Berenice Abbott photographed 275 Madison as part of her “Changing New York” series, and it remains, to this day, one of the finer skyscrapers of the period.

 

DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS

 

Murray Hill

 

Completed in 1931 at the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and East 40th Street, the building now known as 275 Madison Avenue stands at the northern edge of Murray Hill—one of Manhattan’s most prestigious old residential neighborhoods—where it meets the vibrant commercial district to its north formerly known as the “Grand Central Zone.” Generally extending from East 34th to East 40th Streets, and from Madison to Third Avenues, Murray Hill’s historic core lies several blocks south of 40th Street, on lands that formed the eighteenth-century country estate of Robert Murray and his wife, Mary. Roughly bounded on the south and north by present-day East 33rd and East 38th Streets, the Murray estate reached from the old Middle Road—near present-day Madison Avenue—to the Eastern Post Road, an old route to Boston located close to present-day Lexington Avenue.

 

Murray Hill’s development as a premier residential district was intimately connected with the construction of the New York & Harlem Railroad, which began in 1831. Prohibited from operating steam locomotives south of 14th Street, the New York & Harlem constructed a depot just south of Murray Hill, where passengers could transfer between steam trains and the horsecars that operated farther downtown. In 1851, the Harlem Railroad—together with the New York & New Haven Railroad, which ran along the same right-of-way—began converting their open railroad cut, completed through Murray Hill in the 1830s, into a tunnel. Covenants instituted in the 1830s and 1840s limited development on the former Murray estate to brick and stone dwellings, churches, and private stables, and prohibited uses that could present fire hazards, generate noxious odors, or draw crowds of strangers to the neighborhood.

 

Murray Hill’s residential development began in earnest in 1851-53, when three members of the Phelps family erected elegant and luxurious mansions on the east side of Madison Avenue between East 36th and East 37th Streets. By 1858, much of the area had been transformed, with most of its new houses purchased by merchants who owned businesses in Lower Manhattan and commuted to work via the Harlem Railroad or the Third Avenue horsecars. At the end of the nineteenth century, the neighborhood was home to members of New York’s most prominent families, including the Belmonts, Delanos, Rhinelanders, and Tiffanys. Today, Murray Hill retains much of its nineteenth-century character; most of the area bounded by East 35th and East 38th Streets, and by Park and Lexington Avenues, was designated a New York City Historic District in 2002, with a district extension following two years later.

 

The “Grand Central Zone”

 

By the late 1910s, strong commercial pressure was pushing down on Murray Hill from the intersection of Park Avenue and 42nd Street, where the mammoth and bustling new Grand Central Terminal had been completed in 1913. So great were the expectations for the area surrounding the terminal as a commercial district and “notable center of artistic structures” that the area was christened the “Grand Central Terminal Zone” a year before Grand Central opened. By 1917, “the blocks immediately north and south of 42nd Street in the terminal zone [composed] one of the liveliest commercial quarters of the city,” and four years later, 100 million people—equal to the entire population of the United States—were passing through the terminal each year.

 

The Grand Central Zone emerged in the late 1920s as one of the city’s great skyscraper districts. As developer Irwin Chanin explained in 1929—the year in which his firm completed its namesake 56-story building at 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue—the area possessed many advantages over the older Lower Manhattan business district from which it was drawing tenants. Compared with the Wall Street area, which had become “widely separated from railway terminals, hotels, clubs, theaters, and such important centers as the garment, fur, furniture, millinery, and jewelry industries,” the Grand Central area was much more convenient for “our typical big businessman [who] now lives in the Park Avenue district, in Westchester County, or on Long Island.” Skyscraper construction boomed in the Grand Central Zone in 1929; eight new skyscrapers totaling 249 stories were being readied for occupancy that year, including Warren & Wetmore’s 34-story New York Central Building , the Chanin Building, and the 44-story office building at 10 East 40th Street designed by Ludlow & Peabody and constructed by Houston Properties, the developer of 275 Madison Avenue. Five skyscrapers totaling 220 stories were being readied for 1930 occupancy.

 

Following the October 1929 stock market crash and the subsequent Depression, office building construction slowed to a crawl in the Grand Central Zone, as it did throughout the city; No. 275 Madison Avenue was among the few skyscrapers begun in the Grand Central district in the crash’s aftermath. For a period of about fifteen years between the early 1930s and late 1940s, no new major office buildings were completed in the Grand Central Zone.

 

New York’s Art Deco Skyscrapers

 

America’s involvement in World War I, followed by a recession in the early 1920s, caused a construction lull in New York City, as in other parts of the country. By the mid 1920s, the economy had bounced back, and demand for new and larger commercial buildings was booming. Fifteen new office skyscrapers were erected in New York in 1925, and 1926 saw the construction of 30 more, an annual number that still had not been equaled 50 years later. This building frenzy lasted through the 1929 stock market crash, as construction went forward in the early 1930s on buildings that had already been planned and financed; although largely finished by 1932, the boom left behind a “rich array of towers,” many of them executed in what is known today as the Art Deco style. Indeed, several of New York’s most spectacular skyscrapers from this period—including the Chanin Building, the Chrysler Building , the Empire State Building and the General Electric Building , all designated New York City Landmarks, are among the country’s most significant examples of Art Deco design.

 

Into the 1910s, no limits on building height or bulk existed in New York City. In 1916, New York implemented the nation’s first zoning regulations, which permitted unrestricted height on one-quarter of a building site, but required skyscrapers to taper as they rose to allow light and air to reach the street. Six years later, architect and critic Harvey Wiley Corbett and architectural delineator Hugh Ferriss first published a group of dramatic renderings that explored zoning’s impact on the shape of tall buildings. Presented as a series of illustrations progressing from the abstract, pyramidal shape of the zoning envelope to a stepped-back practicable building form, these drawings were profoundly influential, catalyzing a trend in which “buildings endeavored to take on the feeling of sculpted mountains, their shape suddenly more important than their historical detail or even their style.” So pervasive were the new stepped-back skyscrapers that by the mid-1920s, architects and critics spoke of an emerging “setback style”; these buildings “helped to popularize an aesthetic of simple, sculptural mass that became the benchmark of progressive design.”

 

Another important influence on 1920s skyscraper design was Eliel Saarinen’s 1922 competition entry for the Chicago Tribune’s new tower. With its straightforward shape, vertical emphasis, and limited ornament, Saarinen’s ahistorical design was “taken to be style-less and was thought in the twenties to have freed architects from what seemed the inevitable alternatives in skyscraper design, Gothic solutions on the one hand and vertically stretched Classicism on the other.”

 

During this period, the issue of what constituted “modern” design was expounded upon in the press and occupied the thoughts of many architects, who sought an appropriate means of expressing the societal changes brought about by new technology and manufacturing processes. A dichotomy existed, according to Ada Louise Huxtable, between the “modern” architecture of Europe and the “modernistic” new skyscrapers of New York:

 

‘Modern’ was radical, reductive, and reformist; ‘modernistic’ was richly decorative and attached to conservative and hedonistic values. ‘Modern’ was the austere, abstract, elite, avant-garde work of … [Walter] Gropius, Mies [van der Rohe], and Le Corbusier, united in its early days under the rubric of the International Style.

 

‘Modernistic’ was neither pure nor revolutionary; it fused the ornamental and the exotic for what was really the last great decorative style.

 

Only a handful of International Style skyscrapers were constructed in the United States before World War II. Far more popular was the “modernistic” style, which was later termed “Art Deco” based on its debt to the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes. Flamboyant, dynamic, and dazzling to the eye, Art Deco’s primary characteristic was its “sumptuous ornament, and the lush textures and colors achieved by combining several materials, such as stone, brick, terra cotta, and metal.” Gilding and shiny materials were frequently used, and favorite decorative motifs, drawn from the natural world and geometric forms, included “spirals, sunflowers, steps, zigzags, triangles, double triangles, hexagons, fragmented circles, and seashells.” Inspirations included the products of the machine age—the gargoyles of the Chrysler Building, based on automotive radiator caps, are one example—as well as ancient and pre-industrial cultures; Art Deco representations of animals, fish, and humans reflected Cubist and folk-art influences. Frequently, facades were given a woven fabric treatment, in buildings including One Wall Street and the 21 West Street Building . Wall surfaces read as thin decorative veneers, as “stage sets” to a public infatuated with movies and the theater. Some architects made literal the theatricality of the Art Deco style, including Joseph Urban, whose Ziegfeld Theater imitated a stage on its facade, complete with proscenium and raised curtain.

 

The Art Deco skyscraper married the style’s exuberant, showy ornament to the tall building forms inspired by the 1916 zoning law and the Chicago Tribune competition. Like the movie palaces of the time, Art Deco skyscrapers had an accessible, comprehensible grandeur and were essentially conservative works; they maintained the conventions of past commercial skyscrapers. Ornament continued to be concentrated at the base and the crown, where brightly colored terra cotta ornament, highly polished stone, lighting effects, gilding, and other features attracted attention from near and afar.

 

As Art Deco was conquering New York, a new skyscraper form, the slab, emerged. Into the 1920s, the city’s tallest skyscrapers were typically constructed on enormous lots. These sites were big enough, as with the Chrysler Building, to allow for “geometrically pure” square, needle-like towers that broke free of their bases and pierced the sky. But as large lots became rarer and developers sought to construct tall office buildings on narrow lots, this approach became unfeasible; the square tower, if made too small, lost too much of its internal space to elevators. As a result, new skyscrapers on narrower lots took on a slab-like form, their long and rectangular upper stories seemingly extruded from their bases. The pioneering slab skyscraper was H. Douglas Ives’ and Sloan & Robertson’s 38story Fred F. French Building at Fifth Avenue and 45th Street, which was constructed on a relatively small lot. But the master of the slab at the end of the 1920s was Raymond Hood, whose Daily News Building marked the most radical departure of any tall building from previous skyscraper form. Despite the rich Art Deco bas-relief over its main entrance, Hood’s building, with its artfully planned setbacks and flat, unornamented roofline, came closer to abstract sculpture than any skyscraper before; falling, in style, “between modern and modernistic,” it forsook the decorated crown of the Art Deco skyscraper and approached the purity of the International Style. Hood built upon his experience with the Daily News Building in designing another of the city’s great slab skyscrapers, the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center , which was completed in 1933. But with the Depression remaining entrenched and money for office buildings drying up, few Art Deco skyscrapers were completed in New York after Rockefeller Center, and the style, increasingly employed for government and institutional buildings, became considerably more restrained.

 

Jesse H. Jones and the Houston Properties Corporation

 

The builder of 275 Madison Avenue, Jesse Holman Jones was a towering figure in Houston, Tex. and Washington, D.C. during the first half of the twentieth century. Houston’s preeminent real estate developer, builder, and banker from the 1910s into the 1950s, Jones ensured the financial solvency of the Democratic Party in the 1920s, served under President Franklin D. Roosevelt as Chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and Secretary of Commerce, and amassed a fortune of a quarter billion dollars, most of which he left to charity.

 

Kenneth Franzheim

 

The versatile architect of 275 Madison Avenue, Kenneth Franzheim was a prominent designer of theaters, department stores, auditoriums, and office buildings.

 

History of 275 Madison Avenue

 

Before its acquisition for the construction of the 275 Madison Avenue Building, the site at the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and East 40th Street was of the same exclusive residential character as the rest of Murray Hill. Although it was vacant in the early 1850s, three attached rowhouses—273, 275, and 277 Madison Avenue—each slightly less than 25 feet in width, were built there by 1862; they went on to serve, for decades, as “the homes of many distinguished citizens of New York.”

 

With the area just to the north developing into one of the city’s great commercial centers, business had infiltrated the row by 1920. In the 1920s, the area below Grand Central was evolving “into the city’s second most important financial center,” and in 1922, the New York Trust Company purchased, and opened an office in, the corner rowhouse at 277 Madison Avenue. In 1929, New York Trust purchased the lot at 275 Madison, giving it the adjacent parcel to its “uptown branch”; in April of 1930, Jesse Jones was negotiating with the bank and the owner of 273 Madison with the goal of “assembling … a site for a tall office building at the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and 40th Street.” Within a month, Jones had acquired the entire 74’-by-150’ corner parcel—which included two stable buildings at 24 and 26 East 40th Street constructed before 1910—and created the 277 Madison Avenue Corporation to undertake the building’s financing and construction. This move followed Jones’ standard practice, as he once explained, of creating new corporations to construct each of his buildings “so that if one building got into trouble, it would not involve any other.”

 

Plans were soon in place to construct the skyscraper originally marketed as 22 East 40th Street, but called, by the end of the 1930s by its current name, 275 Madison Avenue. In May of 1930, New York Trust received approval from state banking authorities to move its branch across Madison Avenue until the new building was completed, and in June, Kenneth Franzheim filed plans for the building, which had a projected construction cost of $1.25 million. In July of 1930, Houston Properties announced its plans for the new 505-foot structure. The building’s construction proceeded quickly, with excavation taking about a month, and structural steel completed in about three months, between early September and the middle of December. Leasing was also underway, with the American Bankers’ Association taking two floors in the new building. New York Trust would occupy almost all of the ground floor and mezzanine—its banking hall designed by Walker & Gillette—and the top three floors were leased by Kenneth Franzheim, along with two engineering firms. Franzheim maintained his office in the building while living at 1158 Fifth Avenue.

 

Perhaps because of the city’s gloomy economic climate, the Times repeatedly reported on 275 Madison as its construction progressed. At the end of July, the newspaper published Franzheim’s rendering of the building, and at the end of December, it ran a detailed article on this new “mammoth structure” in the Grand Central district. The Times ran additional short pieces when the American Bankers’ Association and New York Trust Company moved into the completed building in April and June of 1931, but Cross & Brown, the building’s agent, clearly faced a tough market, promoting not only the building’s location in the “Uptown Wall Street district” but also its value. In one advertisement, Cross & Brown explained how the skyscraper’s “superior floor arrangements” permitted one tenant to save money by renting a smaller space than it otherwise would have needed, and another advertisement promoted “the finest offices in the district at the price.”

 

Design of 275 Madison Avenue

 

Franzheim’s completed building is a distinguished example of Art Deco design. Considered one of the city’s notable skyscrapers of its time, it was described in one contemporary account as being “of novel aspect” and would be photographed in 1936 by Berenice Abbott as part of her famous “Changing New York” series, which chronicled the evolution of the city’s streetscape during the 1930s. Like many Art Deco skyscrapers, 275 Madison Avenue has a strikingly ornamented base; three stories high with tall rectangular openings, it was treated by Franzheim “as a sort of stage setting … related to the street.” With a compelling black-and-silver color scheme similar to those of the Fuller Building and Bloomingdale’s Lexington Avenue building , the base’s taut, polished granite skin is set off by bright metal door moldings, window frames, and faceted mullions. The motifs within its ground-floor windowsills, the stepped and starburst elements within the spandrels between the ground-floor and mezzanine windows, and the zigzagging molding around the Madison Avenue entrance to the first-floor banking hall reflect Art Deco’s affinity for abstract geometric forms. Unusual abstract ornament in contrasting unpolished granite also fills the space between the third-floor windows, implying a cornice; resembling folded fabric and reminiscent of Urban’s “raised curtain” on the proscenium-like façade of the Ziegfeld Theater, this motif reads as a valence or curtain over the “stage” of the base, particularly over the main, 40th Street entrance. At that entrance, lights concealed by angular shell-like sconces dramatically illuminate the bright metal ornament over the doors.

 

Rising above the base is 275 Madison Avenue’s dramatically massed slab-form tower, its vertical white-brick stripes likely inspired by Hood’s streamlined Daily News Building, which bridged Art Deco and the emerging International Style when it opened in 1930. As with Daily News—where Hood sought to conceal the windows to avoid the effect of a wall “shot full of holes”—these stripes alternate with dark window bands, which emphasize the building’s vertical ascent. The spandrels of 275 Madison are composed of grids of black terra-cotta tiles, and together with the windows, they form unified, mesh-like bands that were particularly visually effective with the building’s original multipane sashes. Above its base, 275 Madison Avenue is virtually free of ornament, except for simple black geometric motifs on and near its setbacks and crown; the “exclusion of obstructive ornament” around its flush-mounted windows and of “entablatures, architraves, pediments, cornices, and other conventional ornamental devices” reflected the emerging functionalism of the early 1930s and was promoted by Franzheim as making the interiors “virtually shadowless,” although it may also have been a cost-saving measure. Berenice Abbott likely saw the building’s clean, streamlined form as representative of modern New York City, juxtaposing it, in one photograph, against the fussy iron balconies and ornate ornament of the old Murray Hill Hotel.

 

Above the twelfth floor, the slab begins to step back from the streetwall. With fewer setbacks on its east façade than the west, the building’s main facade is asymmetrical, although this is barely noticeable from East 40th Street. Above the setbacks, the slab narrows considerably to a nearly square plan, which is largely a product of the 1916 zoning law and the building’s small site; unlike larger buildings’ square towers with their central service cores, this building’s elevators are grouped at the tower’s south end, making the most economical use, like most slab skyscrapers, of a narrow floor plate. Reflecting the increasing influence of the International Style, 275 Madison originally terminated with a sparely ornamented, flat crown, marked by little more than austere striped ornament, corbelled piers, and notches at its four corners.

 

Later History

 

Despite difficult economic conditions, Cross & Brown succeeded in attracting tenants to the building; in 1933, the Johns-Manville Corporation, then a major producer of asbestos-based building products, leased fourteen floors. Nevertheless, the Depression rapidly caught up with 275 Madison Avenue. It was clear that the Midtown office market had crashed by November of 1931, when the Times reported that three proposed skyscrapers in the Grand Central Zone—including a 65-story office tower planned by Houston Properties on Madison Avenue between 38th and 39th Streets—had recently been canceled. By July of 1932, Houston Properties’ building at 10 East 40th Street was in default, as was 275 Madison, which also had substantial unpaid taxes. In 1933, New York Trust took title to the building, but it remained “in arrears” in the following year.

 

Better times followed, as in 1943, 275 Madison was purchased by an investment group. In a transaction that was seen as a sign of a reviving Midtown real estate market, American Home Products, which was among the building’s investors, took a long-term lease on most of its top 23 floors and based its headquarters there. Eight years later, AHP sold the building to Tishman Realty & Construction, but it leased back its space—comprising all of seventeen floors and parts of seven others—from Tishman. At that time, 275 Madison had several major corporate tenants, including Procter & Gamble and Babcock & Wilcox, a large boiler-making concern; New York Trust and Johns-Manville also remained in the building. In 1961, American Home Products left the building for its own office tower, and its space was leased to other firms. In 1998, RFR Holdings , a subsidiary of RFR Frankfurt of Germany, purchased the building’s 98-year lease, and today, under the continued ownership of RFR, the 275 Madison Avenue Building remains an outstanding example of Art Deco architecture dating from the end of New York’s skyscraper boom of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

 

Description

 

No. 275 Madison Avenue is a 43-story skyscraper composed of a three-story, black polished-granite base supporting a 40-story slab-form, setback tower faced in white brick and black terra-cotta tiles. The tower, which has both upper and lower portions, is topped by a non-historic penthouse. With a footprint of approximately 74’-by-150’, the building has two main facades, on Madison Avenue and East 40th Street. Although the building’s base has always had a black-and silver color scheme, the materials of the base’s silver-colored ornament—primarily, its window frames, mullions, door surrounds, and decorative spandrel panels—is difficult to determine because they are painted with silver-colored paint. Examination of one of the first-floor windowsills on the Madison Avenue façade, where paint has flaked off of the surface, indicates that the base’s metal ornament may be painted zinc.

 

Several changes were made to the building beginning in 2004. This work included the installation of a translucent green-glass panel and supporting metal framework over the main, 40th Street entrance, as well as minor alterations to the storefronts and storefront entrances east of the main entrance. The biggest change on the Madison Avenue façade was the removal of the historic, recessed Madison Avenue building entrance—which contained a wide transom bar crowned by two shell-like sconces that were likely identical to those at the 40th Street entrance—and the incorporation of the entrance recess into the adjacent storefront. Also at that time, the opening just to the north of this entrance was altered, with the removal of half of its decorative sill and the installation of a swinging door for a new automatic teller machine vestibule; pin-mounted stainless steel numerals reading “275” were installed at the northwest corner of the building, on both the Madison and 40th Street facades. A window-replacement campaign begun in 2008 resulted in the replacement of most of the sashes on the building’s tower with one-over-one, double-hung sashes.

 

All elements included below should be considered historic, unless described otherwise.

 

Base: East 40th Street Façade

 

This asymmetrical façade contains the building’s main entrance. It is eight bays in width, with the main entrance recess at the fifth bay in from Madison Avenue. The main entrance door set, consisting of metal-and-glass revolving and swinging doors, is not original to the building. Above the doors is a black metal transom bar, probably original, containing gold-colored letters, likely non-historic, reading “275 MADISON AVENUE.” This sign band is crowned by a large transom opening containing a window divided into five parts horizontally and four parts vertically. The lowest and highest quarters of the transom contain plain panels, possibly lighted from behind; the third quarter of the transom from the bottom contains five single-pane sashes. The second quarter of the transom from the bottom contains four identical decorative spandrel panels; each of these is fabricated of metal and contains abstract ornament resembling a skyscraper crowned by a starburst. The black “skyscraper” within each of these panels is executed in a contrasting ribbed material, possibly painted metal. Five abstract, angular sconces resembling seashells sit on the transom bar; the four flanking the central seashell contain partially concealed, non-historic light fixtures that project light upward. The transom also has four identical, faceted mullions that curve outward at their bases and extend from the transom’s base halfway up its length; two identical pieces flank the window, forming a partial surround. A larger, but similar faceted vertical piece at the center of the window is attached to a curving, prow-like projection and steps back twice near its peak. Metal grilles composed of rectangular geometric elements made up of thin metal members are attached to the lowest and highest quarters of the transom window. Five square, non-historic light fixtures are attached to the soffit of the main-entrance recess.

 

Flanking the main entrance on each side and attached to the main-entrance reveal is a recessed, rectangular light panel. Each panel is covered with a metal grille composed of rectangular geometric elements made up of thin metal members, with hinges, and a crowning star and keystone. The west reveal has a rectangular door opening containing a metal door with its historic handle. To the right of the door is a non-historic “no smoking” sign; below this sign are metal, individually mounted letters reading “22 EAST FORTIETH.” The east reveal contains a non-historic “no smoking sign,” a non-historic door buzzer panel, and a non-historic “for handicapped service” sign. Non-historic bright, reflective metal covers the corners of the main-entrance recess, where it meets the building’s front wall. A non-historic translucent panel composed of two pieces of green glass and metal attachments is installed slightly outward from the front building wall, and covers approximately the top half of the main entrance recess. It is attached to the metal-covered corners of the main-entrance recess with two non-historic metal rods and eight large non-historic metal brackets. Attached to the front of the glass are non-historic metal numerals reading “275.”

 

The base of 275 Madison Avenue is essentially flat, except for a slight, sill-like projection that extends the width of the façade. West of the main entrance are four tall openings. Each of these openings contains an identical metal window, each with an angled, non-projecting sill containing raised ornament in a simple geometric pattern; the raised portions of these sills are painted silver, and the recessed portions black. Each of these windows is split into three vertical parts, consisting of a ground-floor portion, a mezzanine portion, and decorative spandrels, identical to the “skyscraper” ornament of the main-entrance transom, separating the two. At the ground floor, the window is tripartite, containing a large central pane flanked by two slightly shorter panes; each of the shorter panes is headed by an almost-square, single-pane sash. The mezzanine portion of each window comprises five single rectangular panes. Projecting, faceted mullions extend from the sills to a point just above the spandrels; shorter but similar faceted projections begin above the central first-floor pane and separate the central three spandrel panels from each other. Although signage for the bank occupying the ground-floor space is visible through the windows, it is set several inches back, except for decals reading “Valley National Bank” that are affixed to the inside of the glass. Two non-historic signs reading “Valley National Bank” are also present at the ground floor west of the main entrance, as is a siamese connection. Above the westernmost window are non-original metal numerals reading “275.”

 

The spandrel and mezzanine portions of the three windows east of the main entrance are identical to those west of the entrance, except at the central of the three windows, where the central spandrel panel is wider than the others, and of a slightly different design. Other portions of these windows and their openings appear to have been altered, although the extent of this alteration is unclear, as no historic photographs of this portion of the base have been found. The central opening of the three windows contains, at its ground floor, a recessed entrance with polished black granite reveal, paved with non-historic beige ceramic tile and containing two non-historic metal swinging doors with sidelights and single-pane transoms. These doors are separated by a black metal pier; each is set at an angle and serves a different storefront. The soffit of this entrance recess is of black metal, with a non-historic single-tube fluorescent light fixture; the east reveal has an outlet box and lock box, both with conduit. Over the entrance is a non-historic metal box containing a security gate. Between this box and the spandrel panels is a split sash, its eastern half containing a single pane, and its western half containing a metal louver. The metal faceted surround of this window appears to be original to the building, although its sill, just above the security gate box, does not. Two non-historic metal blade signs reading “KODAK” and “food merchants” flank the central opening. An outlet box with conduit is attached to the façade just east of the entrance recess.

 

Within the easternmost opening, the portion of the window below the spandrel panels is split into two large single-pane sashes, with a non-historic metal bar separating them. Although the original faceted window surround remains, it may have been extended with additional metalwork to a non-historic metal sill. The opening two bays to its west appears to have undergone similar treatment, although the portion of its window just below the spandrel panels is split into two parts by a vertical bar. It is presumed that at least two of the openings east of the main entrance had decorative, angled sills identical to those west of the main entrance. A siamese connection is installed between the main-entrance recess and the third-easternmost opening; also between this opening and the main entrance are the ghosts of pin-mounted letters once identifying 275 Madison Avenue as the Johns-Manville Building.

 

A band of rectangular window openings—six to the east of the main entrance, and twelve to its west—exists at the third floor. Seventeen of these openings are filled exclusively with one-overone, double-hung sashes, which appear to be non-historic. The third-floor opening immediately to the east of the main entrance contains a one-over-one, double-hung window and a short metal louver, neither of which is likely historic. Contrasting, light gray abstract geometric ornament in unpolished granite, possibly painted with silver-colored paint, fills the space between these windows and forms a band over the main entrance. The East 40th Street façade of the base is crowned by two flagpoles, which extend at an angle from their attachment points on the top of the base’s parapet, and flank the main entrance.

 

Base: Madison Avenue Façade

 

The Madison Avenue façade of the base is similar to the East 40th Street façade. Asymmetrical and four bays in width, its second-northernmost bay contains a stepped-back, recessed main entrance to the building’s ground-floor banking hall. Among the features of this entrance are a metal revolving door with sidelights, probably non-original; a high, single-pane transom window; and a black transom bar with metal enframement separating the two. These are set within a historic surround comprising a thick metal molding with a zigzag pattern; a transom covered with an apparently non-historic black panel; and an enframement composed of faceted black metal panels within a silver-colored metal frame. The surround is crowned by a historic octagonal clock set within a stepped surround. Above the main-entrance surround is a four-part metal window containing four single-pane sashes.

 

The openings flanking the entrance are of identical width and contain spandrel panels that are identical to those on the East 40th Street façade. They are narrower, however, containing only three panels and three mezzanine-level sashes. The northernmost opening on the Madison Avenue facade appears to be in original condition, containing a large single-pane sash and retaining its original sill and faceted window surround. A decal advertising Valley National Bank is affixed to the inside of the window, near the sill. The opening immediately south of the banking-hall entrance has been altered, with half of the sill removed and an entrance to an ATM vestibule installed. Above the vestibule entrance and its adjacent single-pane sash, which has a decal advertising Valley National Bank attached to its inside, near the sill, is a large single-pane sash. Although an illuminated box sign is visible through this upper sash, it is set back from the window. The southernmost opening is similar in its upper half to the others; seven spandrel panels in width, it retains its projecting, faceted window surround and one of its faceted mullions, as well as the faceted vertical elements separating each of the spandrel panels. Metal louvers installed above the spandrel panels are likely non-historic. This opening contains additional non-historic infill, including a pair of non-historic glass doors with single-pane sidelights, crowned by a large, frameless, single-pane transom. Although this opening’s historic sill only extends across a portion of the opening, this may be the opening’s historic condition. South and north of this opening are two non-historic blade signs. Two non-historic signs reading “Valley National Bank” are attached to the façade.

 

As on the East 40th Street façade, a band of rectangular window openings—eight in all—exist at the third floor. The northernmost and fifth-northernmost of these openings contain paired one-overone, double-hung windows, and the other openings contain single one-over-one, double-hung windows, all of which appear non-original. Contrasting, light gray abstract geometric ornament in unpolished granite, possibly painted with silver-colored paint, fills the space between these windows. Above the northernmost window are non-original metal numerals reading “275.”

 

Tower

 

The three-story base of 275 Madison Avenue is topped by a slab-form tower that brings the building to a height of 43 stories, not including its non-original, two-story penthouse. The building’s white vertical stripes are composed of white brick; these alternate with dark window bands that have spandrels composed of grids of black terra-cotta tiles. Its window openings originally contained threeover-three, double-hung sashes; while a few of these remain, most have been replaced by single or paired, one-over-one double-hung windows. Some of the existing window openings contain non-historic metal louvers. The lower portion of the tower—approximately the fourth through 23rd floors—rises in a series of setbacks, different on each façade, to a narrow, nearly square upper tower, which comprises approximately the 24th through 43rd floors. Both the lower and upper towers are sparely ornamented, except for simple abstract geometric ornament in contrasting white brick and black brick or terra cotta within some of the spandrels and at some lintels. The entire tower has seen few alterations, except for the construction of the penthouse and the replacement of some brick with new white brick, particularly at the corners.

 

Lower Tower

 

On the main, East 40th Street façade, the lower portion of the tower is fourteen bays wide at the fourth floor, the first floor above the base. Its openings contain paired one-over-one, double-hung windows. A recessed six-bay-wide central portion is flanked, on each side, by four bays, forming a light well. The central portion proceeds up to the 21st floor, after stepping back at its uppermost four stories to form a two-bay-wide peak. Simple, abstract geometric white-brick ornament decorates the black spandrels of the central portion on its stepped-back floors, and projecting white piers flanked by bands of black brick or terra cotta crown the two uppermost windows. The bays flanking the central portion of the main façade step back above the twelfth floor, and again two floors above. Two bays of windows face into the light well up to the twelfth floor, with one of these bays continuing to the fourteenth floor. The twelfth-floor spandrels and lintels of the flanking bays are decorated with simple black-and-white geometric ornament; black lintel bands are present at the setback floors above.

 

The Madison Avenue façade is six bays wide at the fourth through twelfth floors. Above the twelfth floor, it steps back in a series of setbacks to the upper tower. Above the first setback, the windows change from paired one-over-one, double-hung sashes to single one-over-one, double-hung sashes. Seven south-facing windows exist on the setbacks, overlooking the adjacent building at 271 Madison Avenue. Ornament on this façade is similar to that of the main façade.

 

The partially visible east façade is flat, faced in white brick, and virtually free of ornament. It has several window openings containing one-over-one, double-hung sashes. This façade steps back from East 40th Street above the twelfth, fourteenth, seventeenth, and twentieth floors. Above the 23rd floor, the entire façade steps back from the east plane of the building to meet the upper tower.

 

Upper Tower

 

The upper portion of the tower of 275 Madison Avenue is much narrower than the lower, slab-like portion of the tower. It is six bays wide on the East 40th Street façade, and five bays wide on the Madison Avenue and east facades. On the Madison Avenue façade, the openings of the two southernmost bays are filled with black panels. The south façade is eight bays wide, with window openings containing non-historic one-over-one, double-hung sashes within its three easternmost bays and an exposed vertical pipe set back from black, horizontal beams within the second-westernmost bay. The westernmost and third-, fourth-, and fifth-westernmost bays are composed of black vertical stripes. Some brick on the lower portion of the south façade of the upper tower is discolored, possibly by exhaust from the adjacent building to the south. All facades of the upper tower feature limited, abstract geometric ornament in white brick and contrasting black brick or terra cotta similar to that of the lower tower.

 

The upper tower originally rose to a symmetrical flat crown marked by notched corners and a parapet ornamented with black-and-white, chevron-like decoration and simple corbelled, projecting white brick piers. The roof has been altered with the construction of a two-story penthouse, which is primarily visible over the east and south façades. This glass-and-steel addition, featuring ribbon windows and chamfered corners, is topped by two levels of rooftop terraces with metal pipe railings. A vertical exhaust pipe is also visible over the east façade. Changes visible to the roof over the south façade include the removal of the tower’s southwest notch with the installation of a two-story-high white-brick addition, and the removal of ornament over the three window openings at the top of the south façade. Portions of the glass-and-steel addition are also visible over the easternmost portion of the south façade.

 

- From the 2009 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report

These are a few Streamlined and Semi-streamlined steam locomotives in HO scale. All are brass, except the two British LNER locomotives. Pennsylvania RR (PRR) 4-6-4-4 Q-1 Streamlined Locomotive by Daiyoung Korea for NJ Custom Brass.

Midtown Manhattan, Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States

 

Rising 43 stories in height and completed in 1931, 275 Madison Avenue is an outstanding Art Deco skyscraper dating from the end of New York’s 1920s and early-1930s skyscraper boom. Designed by noted architect Kenneth Franzheim, the building features a striking polished-granite base; three stories high with tall rectangular openings, it was treated by Franzheim as a “stage setting” with a compelling black-and-silver color scheme and rich abstract ornament. Rising above the base is a dramatically massed, slab-form tower that steps back repeatedly before narrowing to a nearly square plan at its upper floors.

 

Like the nearby Daily News Building completed the year before, 275 Madison is best described as a transitional work, bridging the exuberant, “modernistic” Art Deco style and the spare, sculptural qualities of the International Style. Franzheim’s “exclusion of obstructive ornament” was promoted as making the building’s interiors “virtually shadowless,” but it also adds to the tower’s streamlined effect and the vertical emphasis created by its alternating white-brick stripes and dark window bands.

 

No. 275 Madison Avenue was developed by Houston Properties, a New York-based firm founded by Jesse H. Jones, who built nearly all of the skyscrapers constructed in Houston, Tex. during the first half of the twentieth century. A nationally known figure, Jones also served as Secretary of Commerce and Chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a position in which he was “probably the most powerful financial baron in the nation.” This building is one of a handful completed in New York City by Franzheim, an accomplished, versatile, and innovative architect who was a prominent designer of theaters, department stores, apartment houses, and office buildings. Famed photographer Berenice Abbott photographed 275 Madison as part of her “Changing New York” series, and it remains, to this day, one of the finer skyscrapers of the period.

 

DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS

 

Murray Hill

 

Completed in 1931 at the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and East 40th Street, the building now known as 275 Madison Avenue stands at the northern edge of Murray Hill—one of Manhattan’s most prestigious old residential neighborhoods—where it meets the vibrant commercial district to its north formerly known as the “Grand Central Zone.” Generally extending from East 34th to East 40th Streets, and from Madison to Third Avenues, Murray Hill’s historic core lies several blocks south of 40th Street, on lands that formed the eighteenth-century country estate of Robert Murray and his wife, Mary. Roughly bounded on the south and north by present-day East 33rd and East 38th Streets, the Murray estate reached from the old Middle Road—near present-day Madison Avenue—to the Eastern Post Road, an old route to Boston located close to present-day Lexington Avenue.

 

Murray Hill’s development as a premier residential district was intimately connected with the construction of the New York & Harlem Railroad, which began in 1831. Prohibited from operating steam locomotives south of 14th Street, the New York & Harlem constructed a depot just south of Murray Hill, where passengers could transfer between steam trains and the horsecars that operated farther downtown. In 1851, the Harlem Railroad—together with the New York & New Haven Railroad, which ran along the same right-of-way—began converting their open railroad cut, completed through Murray Hill in the 1830s, into a tunnel. Covenants instituted in the 1830s and 1840s limited development on the former Murray estate to brick and stone dwellings, churches, and private stables, and prohibited uses that could present fire hazards, generate noxious odors, or draw crowds of strangers to the neighborhood.

 

Murray Hill’s residential development began in earnest in 1851-53, when three members of the Phelps family erected elegant and luxurious mansions on the east side of Madison Avenue between East 36th and East 37th Streets. By 1858, much of the area had been transformed, with most of its new houses purchased by merchants who owned businesses in Lower Manhattan and commuted to work via the Harlem Railroad or the Third Avenue horsecars. At the end of the nineteenth century, the neighborhood was home to members of New York’s most prominent families, including the Belmonts, Delanos, Rhinelanders, and Tiffanys. Today, Murray Hill retains much of its nineteenth-century character; most of the area bounded by East 35th and East 38th Streets, and by Park and Lexington Avenues, was designated a New York City Historic District in 2002, with a district extension following two years later.

 

The “Grand Central Zone”

 

By the late 1910s, strong commercial pressure was pushing down on Murray Hill from the intersection of Park Avenue and 42nd Street, where the mammoth and bustling new Grand Central Terminal had been completed in 1913. So great were the expectations for the area surrounding the terminal as a commercial district and “notable center of artistic structures” that the area was christened the “Grand Central Terminal Zone” a year before Grand Central opened. By 1917, “the blocks immediately north and south of 42nd Street in the terminal zone [composed] one of the liveliest commercial quarters of the city,” and four years later, 100 million people—equal to the entire population of the United States—were passing through the terminal each year.

 

The Grand Central Zone emerged in the late 1920s as one of the city’s great skyscraper districts. As developer Irwin Chanin explained in 1929—the year in which his firm completed its namesake 56-story building at 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue—the area possessed many advantages over the older Lower Manhattan business district from which it was drawing tenants. Compared with the Wall Street area, which had become “widely separated from railway terminals, hotels, clubs, theaters, and such important centers as the garment, fur, furniture, millinery, and jewelry industries,” the Grand Central area was much more convenient for “our typical big businessman [who] now lives in the Park Avenue district, in Westchester County, or on Long Island.” Skyscraper construction boomed in the Grand Central Zone in 1929; eight new skyscrapers totaling 249 stories were being readied for occupancy that year, including Warren & Wetmore’s 34-story New York Central Building , the Chanin Building, and the 44-story office building at 10 East 40th Street designed by Ludlow & Peabody and constructed by Houston Properties, the developer of 275 Madison Avenue. Five skyscrapers totaling 220 stories were being readied for 1930 occupancy.

 

Following the October 1929 stock market crash and the subsequent Depression, office building construction slowed to a crawl in the Grand Central Zone, as it did throughout the city; No. 275 Madison Avenue was among the few skyscrapers begun in the Grand Central district in the crash’s aftermath. For a period of about fifteen years between the early 1930s and late 1940s, no new major office buildings were completed in the Grand Central Zone.

 

New York’s Art Deco Skyscrapers

 

America’s involvement in World War I, followed by a recession in the early 1920s, caused a construction lull in New York City, as in other parts of the country. By the mid 1920s, the economy had bounced back, and demand for new and larger commercial buildings was booming. Fifteen new office skyscrapers were erected in New York in 1925, and 1926 saw the construction of 30 more, an annual number that still had not been equaled 50 years later. This building frenzy lasted through the 1929 stock market crash, as construction went forward in the early 1930s on buildings that had already been planned and financed; although largely finished by 1932, the boom left behind a “rich array of towers,” many of them executed in what is known today as the Art Deco style. Indeed, several of New York’s most spectacular skyscrapers from this period—including the Chanin Building, the Chrysler Building , the Empire State Building and the General Electric Building , all designated New York City Landmarks, are among the country’s most significant examples of Art Deco design.

 

Into the 1910s, no limits on building height or bulk existed in New York City. In 1916, New York implemented the nation’s first zoning regulations, which permitted unrestricted height on one-quarter of a building site, but required skyscrapers to taper as they rose to allow light and air to reach the street. Six years later, architect and critic Harvey Wiley Corbett and architectural delineator Hugh Ferriss first published a group of dramatic renderings that explored zoning’s impact on the shape of tall buildings. Presented as a series of illustrations progressing from the abstract, pyramidal shape of the zoning envelope to a stepped-back practicable building form, these drawings were profoundly influential, catalyzing a trend in which “buildings endeavored to take on the feeling of sculpted mountains, their shape suddenly more important than their historical detail or even their style.” So pervasive were the new stepped-back skyscrapers that by the mid-1920s, architects and critics spoke of an emerging “setback style”; these buildings “helped to popularize an aesthetic of simple, sculptural mass that became the benchmark of progressive design.”

 

Another important influence on 1920s skyscraper design was Eliel Saarinen’s 1922 competition entry for the Chicago Tribune’s new tower. With its straightforward shape, vertical emphasis, and limited ornament, Saarinen’s ahistorical design was “taken to be style-less and was thought in the twenties to have freed architects from what seemed the inevitable alternatives in skyscraper design, Gothic solutions on the one hand and vertically stretched Classicism on the other.”

 

During this period, the issue of what constituted “modern” design was expounded upon in the press and occupied the thoughts of many architects, who sought an appropriate means of expressing the societal changes brought about by new technology and manufacturing processes. A dichotomy existed, according to Ada Louise Huxtable, between the “modern” architecture of Europe and the “modernistic” new skyscrapers of New York:

 

‘Modern’ was radical, reductive, and reformist; ‘modernistic’ was richly decorative and attached to conservative and hedonistic values. ‘Modern’ was the austere, abstract, elite, avant-garde work of … [Walter] Gropius, Mies [van der Rohe], and Le Corbusier, united in its early days under the rubric of the International Style.

 

‘Modernistic’ was neither pure nor revolutionary; it fused the ornamental and the exotic for what was really the last great decorative style.

 

Only a handful of International Style skyscrapers were constructed in the United States before World War II. Far more popular was the “modernistic” style, which was later termed “Art Deco” based on its debt to the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes. Flamboyant, dynamic, and dazzling to the eye, Art Deco’s primary characteristic was its “sumptuous ornament, and the lush textures and colors achieved by combining several materials, such as stone, brick, terra cotta, and metal.” Gilding and shiny materials were frequently used, and favorite decorative motifs, drawn from the natural world and geometric forms, included “spirals, sunflowers, steps, zigzags, triangles, double triangles, hexagons, fragmented circles, and seashells.” Inspirations included the products of the machine age—the gargoyles of the Chrysler Building, based on automotive radiator caps, are one example—as well as ancient and pre-industrial cultures; Art Deco representations of animals, fish, and humans reflected Cubist and folk-art influences. Frequently, facades were given a woven fabric treatment, in buildings including One Wall Street and the 21 West Street Building . Wall surfaces read as thin decorative veneers, as “stage sets” to a public infatuated with movies and the theater. Some architects made literal the theatricality of the Art Deco style, including Joseph Urban, whose Ziegfeld Theater imitated a stage on its facade, complete with proscenium and raised curtain.

 

The Art Deco skyscraper married the style’s exuberant, showy ornament to the tall building forms inspired by the 1916 zoning law and the Chicago Tribune competition. Like the movie palaces of the time, Art Deco skyscrapers had an accessible, comprehensible grandeur and were essentially conservative works; they maintained the conventions of past commercial skyscrapers. Ornament continued to be concentrated at the base and the crown, where brightly colored terra cotta ornament, highly polished stone, lighting effects, gilding, and other features attracted attention from near and afar.

 

As Art Deco was conquering New York, a new skyscraper form, the slab, emerged. Into the 1920s, the city’s tallest skyscrapers were typically constructed on enormous lots. These sites were big enough, as with the Chrysler Building, to allow for “geometrically pure” square, needle-like towers that broke free of their bases and pierced the sky. But as large lots became rarer and developers sought to construct tall office buildings on narrow lots, this approach became unfeasible; the square tower, if made too small, lost too much of its internal space to elevators. As a result, new skyscrapers on narrower lots took on a slab-like form, their long and rectangular upper stories seemingly extruded from their bases. The pioneering slab skyscraper was H. Douglas Ives’ and Sloan & Robertson’s 38story Fred F. French Building at Fifth Avenue and 45th Street, which was constructed on a relatively small lot. But the master of the slab at the end of the 1920s was Raymond Hood, whose Daily News Building marked the most radical departure of any tall building from previous skyscraper form. Despite the rich Art Deco bas-relief over its main entrance, Hood’s building, with its artfully planned setbacks and flat, unornamented roofline, came closer to abstract sculpture than any skyscraper before; falling, in style, “between modern and modernistic,” it forsook the decorated crown of the Art Deco skyscraper and approached the purity of the International Style. Hood built upon his experience with the Daily News Building in designing another of the city’s great slab skyscrapers, the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center , which was completed in 1933. But with the Depression remaining entrenched and money for office buildings drying up, few Art Deco skyscrapers were completed in New York after Rockefeller Center, and the style, increasingly employed for government and institutional buildings, became considerably more restrained.

 

Jesse H. Jones and the Houston Properties Corporation

 

The builder of 275 Madison Avenue, Jesse Holman Jones was a towering figure in Houston, Tex. and Washington, D.C. during the first half of the twentieth century. Houston’s preeminent real estate developer, builder, and banker from the 1910s into the 1950s, Jones ensured the financial solvency of the Democratic Party in the 1920s, served under President Franklin D. Roosevelt as Chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and Secretary of Commerce, and amassed a fortune of a quarter billion dollars, most of which he left to charity.

 

Kenneth Franzheim

 

The versatile architect of 275 Madison Avenue, Kenneth Franzheim was a prominent designer of theaters, department stores, auditoriums, and office buildings.

 

History of 275 Madison Avenue

 

Before its acquisition for the construction of the 275 Madison Avenue Building, the site at the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and East 40th Street was of the same exclusive residential character as the rest of Murray Hill. Although it was vacant in the early 1850s, three attached rowhouses—273, 275, and 277 Madison Avenue—each slightly less than 25 feet in width, were built there by 1862; they went on to serve, for decades, as “the homes of many distinguished citizens of New York.”

 

With the area just to the north developing into one of the city’s great commercial centers, business had infiltrated the row by 1920. In the 1920s, the area below Grand Central was evolving “into the city’s second most important financial center,” and in 1922, the New York Trust Company purchased, and opened an office in, the corner rowhouse at 277 Madison Avenue. In 1929, New York Trust purchased the lot at 275 Madison, giving it the adjacent parcel to its “uptown branch”; in April of 1930, Jesse Jones was negotiating with the bank and the owner of 273 Madison with the goal of “assembling … a site for a tall office building at the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and 40th Street.” Within a month, Jones had acquired the entire 74’-by-150’ corner parcel—which included two stable buildings at 24 and 26 East 40th Street constructed before 1910—and created the 277 Madison Avenue Corporation to undertake the building’s financing and construction. This move followed Jones’ standard practice, as he once explained, of creating new corporations to construct each of his buildings “so that if one building got into trouble, it would not involve any other.”

 

Plans were soon in place to construct the skyscraper originally marketed as 22 East 40th Street, but called, by the end of the 1930s by its current name, 275 Madison Avenue. In May of 1930, New York Trust received approval from state banking authorities to move its branch across Madison Avenue until the new building was completed, and in June, Kenneth Franzheim filed plans for the building, which had a projected construction cost of $1.25 million. In July of 1930, Houston Properties announced its plans for the new 505-foot structure. The building’s construction proceeded quickly, with excavation taking about a month, and structural steel completed in about three months, between early September and the middle of December. Leasing was also underway, with the American Bankers’ Association taking two floors in the new building. New York Trust would occupy almost all of the ground floor and mezzanine—its banking hall designed by Walker & Gillette—and the top three floors were leased by Kenneth Franzheim, along with two engineering firms. Franzheim maintained his office in the building while living at 1158 Fifth Avenue.

 

Perhaps because of the city’s gloomy economic climate, the Times repeatedly reported on 275 Madison as its construction progressed. At the end of July, the newspaper published Franzheim’s rendering of the building, and at the end of December, it ran a detailed article on this new “mammoth structure” in the Grand Central district. The Times ran additional short pieces when the American Bankers’ Association and New York Trust Company moved into the completed building in April and June of 1931, but Cross & Brown, the building’s agent, clearly faced a tough market, promoting not only the building’s location in the “Uptown Wall Street district” but also its value. In one advertisement, Cross & Brown explained how the skyscraper’s “superior floor arrangements” permitted one tenant to save money by renting a smaller space than it otherwise would have needed, and another advertisement promoted “the finest offices in the district at the price.”

 

Design of 275 Madison Avenue

 

Franzheim’s completed building is a distinguished example of Art Deco design. Considered one of the city’s notable skyscrapers of its time, it was described in one contemporary account as being “of novel aspect” and would be photographed in 1936 by Berenice Abbott as part of her famous “Changing New York” series, which chronicled the evolution of the city’s streetscape during the 1930s. Like many Art Deco skyscrapers, 275 Madison Avenue has a strikingly ornamented base; three stories high with tall rectangular openings, it was treated by Franzheim “as a sort of stage setting … related to the street.” With a compelling black-and-silver color scheme similar to those of the Fuller Building and Bloomingdale’s Lexington Avenue building , the base’s taut, polished granite skin is set off by bright metal door moldings, window frames, and faceted mullions. The motifs within its ground-floor windowsills, the stepped and starburst elements within the spandrels between the ground-floor and mezzanine windows, and the zigzagging molding around the Madison Avenue entrance to the first-floor banking hall reflect Art Deco’s affinity for abstract geometric forms. Unusual abstract ornament in contrasting unpolished granite also fills the space between the third-floor windows, implying a cornice; resembling folded fabric and reminiscent of Urban’s “raised curtain” on the proscenium-like façade of the Ziegfeld Theater, this motif reads as a valence or curtain over the “stage” of the base, particularly over the main, 40th Street entrance. At that entrance, lights concealed by angular shell-like sconces dramatically illuminate the bright metal ornament over the doors.

 

Rising above the base is 275 Madison Avenue’s dramatically massed slab-form tower, its vertical white-brick stripes likely inspired by Hood’s streamlined Daily News Building, which bridged Art Deco and the emerging International Style when it opened in 1930. As with Daily News—where Hood sought to conceal the windows to avoid the effect of a wall “shot full of holes”—these stripes alternate with dark window bands, which emphasize the building’s vertical ascent. The spandrels of 275 Madison are composed of grids of black terra-cotta tiles, and together with the windows, they form unified, mesh-like bands that were particularly visually effective with the building’s original multipane sashes. Above its base, 275 Madison Avenue is virtually free of ornament, except for simple black geometric motifs on and near its setbacks and crown; the “exclusion of obstructive ornament” around its flush-mounted windows and of “entablatures, architraves, pediments, cornices, and other conventional ornamental devices” reflected the emerging functionalism of the early 1930s and was promoted by Franzheim as making the interiors “virtually shadowless,” although it may also have been a cost-saving measure. Berenice Abbott likely saw the building’s clean, streamlined form as representative of modern New York City, juxtaposing it, in one photograph, against the fussy iron balconies and ornate ornament of the old Murray Hill Hotel.

 

Above the twelfth floor, the slab begins to step back from the streetwall. With fewer setbacks on its east façade than the west, the building’s main facade is asymmetrical, although this is barely noticeable from East 40th Street. Above the setbacks, the slab narrows considerably to a nearly square plan, which is largely a product of the 1916 zoning law and the building’s small site; unlike larger buildings’ square towers with their central service cores, this building’s elevators are grouped at the tower’s south end, making the most economical use, like most slab skyscrapers, of a narrow floor plate. Reflecting the increasing influence of the International Style, 275 Madison originally terminated with a sparely ornamented, flat crown, marked by little more than austere striped ornament, corbelled piers, and notches at its four corners.

 

Later History

 

Despite difficult economic conditions, Cross & Brown succeeded in attracting tenants to the building; in 1933, the Johns-Manville Corporation, then a major producer of asbestos-based building products, leased fourteen floors. Nevertheless, the Depression rapidly caught up with 275 Madison Avenue. It was clear that the Midtown office market had crashed by November of 1931, when the Times reported that three proposed skyscrapers in the Grand Central Zone—including a 65-story office tower planned by Houston Properties on Madison Avenue between 38th and 39th Streets—had recently been canceled. By July of 1932, Houston Properties’ building at 10 East 40th Street was in default, as was 275 Madison, which also had substantial unpaid taxes. In 1933, New York Trust took title to the building, but it remained “in arrears” in the following year.

 

Better times followed, as in 1943, 275 Madison was purchased by an investment group. In a transaction that was seen as a sign of a reviving Midtown real estate market, American Home Products, which was among the building’s investors, took a long-term lease on most of its top 23 floors and based its headquarters there. Eight years later, AHP sold the building to Tishman Realty & Construction, but it leased back its space—comprising all of seventeen floors and parts of seven others—from Tishman. At that time, 275 Madison had several major corporate tenants, including Procter & Gamble and Babcock & Wilcox, a large boiler-making concern; New York Trust and Johns-Manville also remained in the building. In 1961, American Home Products left the building for its own office tower, and its space was leased to other firms. In 1998, RFR Holdings , a subsidiary of RFR Frankfurt of Germany, purchased the building’s 98-year lease, and today, under the continued ownership of RFR, the 275 Madison Avenue Building remains an outstanding example of Art Deco architecture dating from the end of New York’s skyscraper boom of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

 

Description

 

No. 275 Madison Avenue is a 43-story skyscraper composed of a three-story, black polished-granite base supporting a 40-story slab-form, setback tower faced in white brick and black terra-cotta tiles. The tower, which has both upper and lower portions, is topped by a non-historic penthouse. With a footprint of approximately 74’-by-150’, the building has two main facades, on Madison Avenue and East 40th Street. Although the building’s base has always had a black-and silver color scheme, the materials of the base’s silver-colored ornament—primarily, its window frames, mullions, door surrounds, and decorative spandrel panels—is difficult to determine because they are painted with silver-colored paint. Examination of one of the first-floor windowsills on the Madison Avenue façade, where paint has flaked off of the surface, indicates that the base’s metal ornament may be painted zinc.

 

Several changes were made to the building beginning in 2004. This work included the installation of a translucent green-glass panel and supporting metal framework over the main, 40th Street entrance, as well as minor alterations to the storefronts and storefront entrances east of the main entrance. The biggest change on the Madison Avenue façade was the removal of the historic, recessed Madison Avenue building entrance—which contained a wide transom bar crowned by two shell-like sconces that were likely identical to those at the 40th Street entrance—and the incorporation of the entrance recess into the adjacent storefront. Also at that time, the opening just to the north of this entrance was altered, with the removal of half of its decorative sill and the installation of a swinging door for a new automatic teller machine vestibule; pin-mounted stainless steel numerals reading “275” were installed at the northwest corner of the building, on both the Madison and 40th Street facades. A window-replacement campaign begun in 2008 resulted in the replacement of most of the sashes on the building’s tower with one-over-one, double-hung sashes.

 

All elements included below should be considered historic, unless described otherwise.

 

Base: East 40th Street Façade

 

This asymmetrical façade contains the building’s main entrance. It is eight bays in width, with the main entrance recess at the fifth bay in from Madison Avenue. The main entrance door set, consisting of metal-and-glass revolving and swinging doors, is not original to the building. Above the doors is a black metal transom bar, probably original, containing gold-colored letters, likely non-historic, reading “275 MADISON AVENUE.” This sign band is crowned by a large transom opening containing a window divided into five parts horizontally and four parts vertically. The lowest and highest quarters of the transom contain plain panels, possibly lighted from behind; the third quarter of the transom from the bottom contains five single-pane sashes. The second quarter of the transom from the bottom contains four identical decorative spandrel panels; each of these is fabricated of metal and contains abstract ornament resembling a skyscraper crowned by a starburst. The black “skyscraper” within each of these panels is executed in a contrasting ribbed material, possibly painted metal. Five abstract, angular sconces resembling seashells sit on the transom bar; the four flanking the central seashell contain partially concealed, non-historic light fixtures that project light upward. The transom also has four identical, faceted mullions that curve outward at their bases and extend from the transom’s base halfway up its length; two identical pieces flank the window, forming a partial surround. A larger, but similar faceted vertical piece at the center of the window is attached to a curving, prow-like projection and steps back twice near its peak. Metal grilles composed of rectangular geometric elements made up of thin metal members are attached to the lowest and highest quarters of the transom window. Five square, non-historic light fixtures are attached to the soffit of the main-entrance recess.

 

Flanking the main entrance on each side and attached to the main-entrance reveal is a recessed, rectangular light panel. Each panel is covered with a metal grille composed of rectangular geometric elements made up of thin metal members, with hinges, and a crowning star and keystone. The west reveal has a rectangular door opening containing a metal door with its historic handle. To the right of the door is a non-historic “no smoking” sign; below this sign are metal, individually mounted letters reading “22 EAST FORTIETH.” The east reveal contains a non-historic “no smoking sign,” a non-historic door buzzer panel, and a non-historic “for handicapped service” sign. Non-historic bright, reflective metal covers the corners of the main-entrance recess, where it meets the building’s front wall. A non-historic translucent panel composed of two pieces of green glass and metal attachments is installed slightly outward from the front building wall, and covers approximately the top half of the main entrance recess. It is attached to the metal-covered corners of the main-entrance recess with two non-historic metal rods and eight large non-historic metal brackets. Attached to the front of the glass are non-historic metal numerals reading “275.”

 

The base of 275 Madison Avenue is essentially flat, except for a slight, sill-like projection that extends the width of the façade. West of the main entrance are four tall openings. Each of these openings contains an identical metal window, each with an angled, non-projecting sill containing raised ornament in a simple geometric pattern; the raised portions of these sills are painted silver, and the recessed portions black. Each of these windows is split into three vertical parts, consisting of a ground-floor portion, a mezzanine portion, and decorative spandrels, identical to the “skyscraper” ornament of the main-entrance transom, separating the two. At the ground floor, the window is tripartite, containing a large central pane flanked by two slightly shorter panes; each of the shorter panes is headed by an almost-square, single-pane sash. The mezzanine portion of each window comprises five single rectangular panes. Projecting, faceted mullions extend from the sills to a point just above the spandrels; shorter but similar faceted projections begin above the central first-floor pane and separate the central three spandrel panels from each other. Although signage for the bank occupying the ground-floor space is visible through the windows, it is set several inches back, except for decals reading “Valley National Bank” that are affixed to the inside of the glass. Two non-historic signs reading “Valley National Bank” are also present at the ground floor west of the main entrance, as is a siamese connection. Above the westernmost window are non-original metal numerals reading “275.”

 

The spandrel and mezzanine portions of the three windows east of the main entrance are identical to those west of the entrance, except at the central of the three windows, where the central spandrel panel is wider than the others, and of a slightly different design. Other portions of these windows and their openings appear to have been altered, although the extent of this alteration is unclear, as no historic photographs of this portion of the base have been found. The central opening of the three windows contains, at its ground floor, a recessed entrance with polished black granite reveal, paved with non-historic beige ceramic tile and containing two non-historic metal swinging doors with sidelights and single-pane transoms. These doors are separated by a black metal pier; each is set at an angle and serves a different storefront. The soffit of this entrance recess is of black metal, with a non-historic single-tube fluorescent light fixture; the east reveal has an outlet box and lock box, both with conduit. Over the entrance is a non-historic metal box containing a security gate. Between this box and the spandrel panels is a split sash, its eastern half containing a single pane, and its western half containing a metal louver. The metal faceted surround of this window appears to be original to the building, although its sill, just above the security gate box, does not. Two non-historic metal blade signs reading “KODAK” and “food merchants” flank the central opening. An outlet box with conduit is attached to the façade just east of the entrance recess.

 

Within the easternmost opening, the portion of the window below the spandrel panels is split into two large single-pane sashes, with a non-historic metal bar separating them. Although the original faceted window surround remains, it may have been extended with additional metalwork to a non-historic metal sill. The opening two bays to its west appears to have undergone similar treatment, although the portion of its window just below the spandrel panels is split into two parts by a vertical bar. It is presumed that at least two of the openings east of the main entrance had decorative, angled sills identical to those west of the main entrance. A siamese connection is installed between the main-entrance recess and the third-easternmost opening; also between this opening and the main entrance are the ghosts of pin-mounted letters once identifying 275 Madison Avenue as the Johns-Manville Building.

 

A band of rectangular window openings—six to the east of the main entrance, and twelve to its west—exists at the third floor. Seventeen of these openings are filled exclusively with one-overone, double-hung sashes, which appear to be non-historic. The third-floor opening immediately to the east of the main entrance contains a one-over-one, double-hung window and a short metal louver, neither of which is likely historic. Contrasting, light gray abstract geometric ornament in unpolished granite, possibly painted with silver-colored paint, fills the space between these windows and forms a band over the main entrance. The East 40th Street façade of the base is crowned by two flagpoles, which extend at an angle from their attachment points on the top of the base’s parapet, and flank the main entrance.

 

Base: Madison Avenue Façade

 

The Madison Avenue façade of the base is similar to the East 40th Street façade. Asymmetrical and four bays in width, its second-northernmost bay contains a stepped-back, recessed main entrance to the building’s ground-floor banking hall. Among the features of this entrance are a metal revolving door with sidelights, probably non-original; a high, single-pane transom window; and a black transom bar with metal enframement separating the two. These are set within a historic surround comprising a thick metal molding with a zigzag pattern; a transom covered with an apparently non-historic black panel; and an enframement composed of faceted black metal panels within a silver-colored metal frame. The surround is crowned by a historic octagonal clock set within a stepped surround. Above the main-entrance surround is a four-part metal window containing four single-pane sashes.

 

The openings flanking the entrance are of identical width and contain spandrel panels that are identical to those on the East 40th Street façade. They are narrower, however, containing only three panels and three mezzanine-level sashes. The northernmost opening on the Madison Avenue facade appears to be in original condition, containing a large single-pane sash and retaining its original sill and faceted window surround. A decal advertising Valley National Bank is affixed to the inside of the window, near the sill. The opening immediately south of the banking-hall entrance has been altered, with half of the sill removed and an entrance to an ATM vestibule installed. Above the vestibule entrance and its adjacent single-pane sash, which has a decal advertising Valley National Bank attached to its inside, near the sill, is a large single-pane sash. Although an illuminated box sign is visible through this upper sash, it is set back from the window. The southernmost opening is similar in its upper half to the others; seven spandrel panels in width, it retains its projecting, faceted window surround and one of its faceted mullions, as well as the faceted vertical elements separating each of the spandrel panels. Metal louvers installed above the spandrel panels are likely non-historic. This opening contains additional non-historic infill, including a pair of non-historic glass doors with single-pane sidelights, crowned by a large, frameless, single-pane transom. Although this opening’s historic sill only extends across a portion of the opening, this may be the opening’s historic condition. South and north of this opening are two non-historic blade signs. Two non-historic signs reading “Valley National Bank” are attached to the façade.

 

As on the East 40th Street façade, a band of rectangular window openings—eight in all—exist at the third floor. The northernmost and fifth-northernmost of these openings contain paired one-overone, double-hung windows, and the other openings contain single one-over-one, double-hung windows, all of which appear non-original. Contrasting, light gray abstract geometric ornament in unpolished granite, possibly painted with silver-colored paint, fills the space between these windows. Above the northernmost window are non-original metal numerals reading “275.”

 

Tower

 

The three-story base of 275 Madison Avenue is topped by a slab-form tower that brings the building to a height of 43 stories, not including its non-original, two-story penthouse. The building’s white vertical stripes are composed of white brick; these alternate with dark window bands that have spandrels composed of grids of black terra-cotta tiles. Its window openings originally contained threeover-three, double-hung sashes; while a few of these remain, most have been replaced by single or paired, one-over-one double-hung windows. Some of the existing window openings contain non-historic metal louvers. The lower portion of the tower—approximately the fourth through 23rd floors—rises in a series of setbacks, different on each façade, to a narrow, nearly square upper tower, which comprises approximately the 24th through 43rd floors. Both the lower and upper towers are sparely ornamented, except for simple abstract geometric ornament in contrasting white brick and black brick or terra cotta within some of the spandrels and at some lintels. The entire tower has seen few alterations, except for the construction of the penthouse and the replacement of some brick with new white brick, particularly at the corners.

 

Lower Tower

 

On the main, East 40th Street façade, the lower portion of the tower is fourteen bays wide at the fourth floor, the first floor above the base. Its openings contain paired one-over-one, double-hung windows. A recessed six-bay-wide central portion is flanked, on each side, by four bays, forming a light well. The central portion proceeds up to the 21st floor, after stepping back at its uppermost four stories to form a two-bay-wide peak. Simple, abstract geometric white-brick ornament decorates the black spandrels of the central portion on its stepped-back floors, and projecting white piers flanked by bands of black brick or terra cotta crown the two uppermost windows. The bays flanking the central portion of the main façade step back above the twelfth floor, and again two floors above. Two bays of windows face into the light well up to the twelfth floor, with one of these bays continuing to the fourteenth floor. The twelfth-floor spandrels and lintels of the flanking bays are decorated with simple black-and-white geometric ornament; black lintel bands are present at the setback floors above.

 

The Madison Avenue façade is six bays wide at the fourth through twelfth floors. Above the twelfth floor, it steps back in a series of setbacks to the upper tower. Above the first setback, the windows change from paired one-over-one, double-hung sashes to single one-over-one, double-hung sashes. Seven south-facing windows exist on the setbacks, overlooking the adjacent building at 271 Madison Avenue. Ornament on this façade is similar to that of the main façade.

 

The partially visible east façade is flat, faced in white brick, and virtually free of ornament. It has several window openings containing one-over-one, double-hung sashes. This façade steps back from East 40th Street above the twelfth, fourteenth, seventeenth, and twentieth floors. Above the 23rd floor, the entire façade steps back from the east plane of the building to meet the upper tower.

 

Upper Tower

 

The upper portion of the tower of 275 Madison Avenue is much narrower than the lower, slab-like portion of the tower. It is six bays wide on the East 40th Street façade, and five bays wide on the Madison Avenue and east facades. On the Madison Avenue façade, the openings of the two southernmost bays are filled with black panels. The south façade is eight bays wide, with window openings containing non-historic one-over-one, double-hung sashes within its three easternmost bays and an exposed vertical pipe set back from black, horizontal beams within the second-westernmost bay. The westernmost and third-, fourth-, and fifth-westernmost bays are composed of black vertical stripes. Some brick on the lower portion of the south façade of the upper tower is discolored, possibly by exhaust from the adjacent building to the south. All facades of the upper tower feature limited, abstract geometric ornament in white brick and contrasting black brick or terra cotta similar to that of the lower tower.

 

The upper tower originally rose to a symmetrical flat crown marked by notched corners and a parapet ornamented with black-and-white, chevron-like decoration and simple corbelled, projecting white brick piers. The roof has been altered with the construction of a two-story penthouse, which is primarily visible over the east and south façades. This glass-and-steel addition, featuring ribbon windows and chamfered corners, is topped by two levels of rooftop terraces with metal pipe railings. A vertical exhaust pipe is also visible over the east façade. Changes visible to the roof over the south façade include the removal of the tower’s southwest notch with the installation of a two-story-high white-brick addition, and the removal of ornament over the three window openings at the top of the south façade. Portions of the glass-and-steel addition are also visible over the easternmost portion of the south façade.

 

- From the 2009 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report

Huelight E-M5 camera profile. Lightroom, Photomatrix, Nik Collection. Olympus OM-D E-M5 & M.Zuiko 25mm f1.8. Circular polarising filter.

 

Kingston upon Thames.

 

I was trying to get a very sleek, shiny and smooth, almost liquid, appearance to the boats in this shot thus the title streamlined.

Join me on my journey of ONLINE RESEARCH:

 

• The Elkhart County government says the building was erected in 1967. That seems reasonable for the end portions but not the central portion with the rounded corner. Hardly anybody was spending money on rounded corners in the late 1960s.

 

• Plus there's this postcard for sale which shows the building as the "Indiana Associated Telephone Corporation." The postcard looks like it's from before the 1960s. Moreover, a 1962 newspaper article reprinted at this blog asserts that the Indiana Associated Telephone Corporation changed its name to General Telephone Company of Indiana, Inc., in 1952.

 

• According to my online review of Polk city directories of the city of Elkhart at the library edition of Ancestry.com, a funeral home was located at this site in 1945, and the Indiana Associated Telephone Corporation was located here in 1947.

 

• Therefore I hereby assert that the central portion of this building was probably erected sometime between 1945 and 1947; and that at least one of the wings was probably added in 1967. Voilà!

 

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In downtown Elkhart, Indiana, on May 30th, 2020, at the northwest corner of South 2nd Street and West Lexington Avenue.

 

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Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names terms:

• Elkhart (2031713)

• Elkhart (county) (1002353)

 

Art & Architecture Thesaurus terms:

• additions (general components) (300055458)

• corners (attribute or configuration) (300404760)

• curved (300010305)

• dimension stone (300070045)

• intersections (300003871)

• panels (surface elements) (300069079)

• polishing (300053867)

• Streamlined Moderne (300253564)

• telephone exchanges (300005416)

• traffic signals (300003915)

• veneer (material) (300012855)

 

Wikidata items:

• 30 May 2020 (Q57396761)

• 1940s in architecture (Q60996001)

• 1960s in architecture (Q11185676)

• 1967 in architecture (Q2812453)

• Elkhart–Goshen metropolitan area (Q6173931)

• Frontier Communications (Q2974454)

• May 30 (Q2590)

• May 2020 (Q55019753)

• Michiana (Q1769502)

• Northern Indiana (Q7058433)

• signalized intersection (Q2940218)

• stone veneer (Q2470272)

• streetcorner (Q17106091)

• Treaty of Chicago (Q928799)

 

Library of Congress Subject Headings:

• Telephone stations (sh85133431)

4468 Mallard is a London and North Eastern Railway Class A4 4-6-2 Pacific steam locomotive built at Doncaster, England in 1938. While in other respects a relatively typical member of its class, it is historically significant for being the holder of the official world speed record for steam locomotives.

Mallard was designed by Sir Nigel Gresley as an express locomotive to power high-speed streamlined trains. Its wind-tunnel-tested,[1] aerodynamic body and high power allowed it to reach speeds of over 100 miles per hour (160 km/h), though in everyday service it was relatively uncommon for any steam hauled service to reach even 90mph, much less 100. Mallard was in service until 1963, when it was retired, having covered almost one and a half million miles (2.4 million km).

It was restored to working order in the 1980s, but has not operated since, apart from hauling some specials between York and Scarborough in July 1986 and a couple of runs between York and Harrogate/Leeds around Easter 1987. Mallard is now part of the National Collection at the United Kingdom's National Railway Museum in York. On the weekend of 5 July 2008, Mallard was taken outside for the first time in years and displayed alongside her A4 sisters, thus reuniting all four A4s extant in the UK for the first time since preservation. She departed the museum for Locomotion, the NRM's outbase at Shildon on the 23 June 2010, where she was a static exhibit, until she was hauled back to York on 19 July 2011 and put back on display in its original location in the Great Hall.

The locomotive is 70 ft (21 m) long and weighs 165 tons, including the tender. It is painted LNER garter blue with red wheels and steel rims.

 

Mallard is the holder of the official world speed record for steam locomotives at 125.88 mph (202.58 km/h). The record was achieved on 3 July 1938 on the slight downward grade of Stoke Bank south of Grantham on the East Coast Main Line, and the highest speed was recorded at milepost 90¼, between Little Bytham and Essendine. It broke the German (DRG Class 05) 002's 1936 record of 124.5 mph (200.4 km/h).

Mallard was the perfect vehicle for such an endeavour; one of the A4 class of streamlined locomotives designed for sustained 100+ mph (160+ km/h) running, it was one of a small number built with a double chimney and double Kylchap blastpipe, which made for improved draughting and better exhaust flow at speed; the remainder of the class were retro-fitted in the late 1950s. The A4's three-cylinder design made for stability at speed, and the large 6 ft 8 in (2.03 m) driving wheels meant that the maximum revolutions per minute was within the capabilities of the technology of the day. Mallard was five months old, meaning that it was sufficiently broken-in to run freely, but not overly worn. Selected to crew the locomotive on its record attempt were driver Joseph Duddington (a man renowned within the LNER for taking calculated risks) and fireman Thomas Bray.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNER_Class_A4_4468_Mallard

Claude Nahum FORD GT40 - 1968

Chrome and leather drawer pulls sitting on a vaulted base with a raised lip back edge. Jacked with style for a modest piece, and how about that effin' lamp.

Streamlined Diesel Railcar No. 4.

In 1933 the GWR introduced the first of what was to become a very successful series of railcars, which survived in regular use into the 1960s, when they were replaced with the new British Rail "first generation" type diesel multiple units.

Vehicle no W4W, builder Park Royal, 1934.

 

Looks like Miss Marple!

 

www.steam-museum.org.uk

V12 White truck engine

replaced after 250000miles by a 300hp Cummins 6 cyl diesel in 1953

5th wheel permanently attached 10000 lb trailer

 

Ultra streamlined. Petersen Automotive Museum, Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, USA

 

The Peterson Museum’s Aerocar was originally constructed for Dr. Hubert Eaton, the owner of Los Angeles’ Forrest Lawn Memorial Park and its exhibit featured the following description:

 

“Eaton Reo/Aerocar Rig

 

“This ultra-streamline Reo tractor was specially built to tow a Curtiss Aerocar, on one of the earliest production fifth-wheel trailers. Custom built for Dr. Hubert Eaton of the Forest Lawn Memorial Parks, its innovative cab-forward aluminum and leatherette body was constructed by Standard Carriage Works of Low Angeles, a coachbuilder that specialized in bodies for trucks and other commercial vehicles. It featured a large storage area, sleeping quarters for the driver, and a separate four-cylinder engine for auxiliary power. A Williams air-brake and dual rear-wheels accommodate the permanently attached 10,000 pound trailer. First equipped with a flat-12 White truck engine, the Reo tractor was fitted with a 300-horsepower Cummins 6-cylinder diesel in 1953 when the original engine wore out after more than 250,000 miles of use.

 

“The luxurious and expensive Aerocar trailer was built by Curtiss of Coral Gables, Florida, a firm also known for motorcycles and pioneering aircraft. Nicknamed ‘Vagabond’ by Dr. Eaton, it was outfitted for hunting excursions and to transport company executives on trips to inspect various real-estate holdings. Special features include a self-contained restroom and kitchen, comfortable seating for eight, cup holders, and an observation deck equipped with a speedometer, compass, and intercom for communication with the driver. Though currently set up for day travel, the interior can be modified to sleep up to six passengers. The dramatically styled rig was in regular use until retired by Forest Lawn Memorial Parks in 1991.”

For my video; youtu.be/KquPTwf3WoA