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A tranquil mid‑summer sunset over the northern end of Lake Cascade in western Idaho, with soft pastels fading behind the distant mountains. The sandy shoreline in the foreground and the small islands of vegetation were completely underwater just weeks earlier, but reappeared as the level of this 30‑mile‑long irrigation reservoir continued to drop through the season.
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© Stephen L. Frazier - All Rights Reserved. Reproduction, printing, publication, or any other use of this image without written permission is prohibited.
As the land breeze drifts down the Yabba Valley in winter, it carries the colder air from the high country. Once it reaches the town of Imbil and the wider alluvial plains, the breeze eases and the fogs form and smother the landscape, in this case, Imbil Island.
Yabba Creek rises on a plateau from which it descends rapidly by way of a major waterfall and cascades to flow in a confined valley before reaching open country, and as it does its meanders become wide sweeps, over geological time these meanders have wide alluvial pockets, that in flood time are scarred by flood channels and scours, while receiving deposits of mud and sand as the floods retreat. This photographed lagoon is permanent, having been scoured below the normal watertable. It is a natural waterhole for grazing cattle and surveyors created a boundary between two properties, hence the fence that crosses the lagoon.
Early winter mornings are frequently foggy, the fog being delivered by the landbreeze that descends from the plateau and flows down the valley until the wide open flats are reached.
Farmers who have owned this fertile farmland either side of the boundary fence include Myers, Kerridge, Stubbins, Hooper, George & Pauline Price, Blair & Kaili Price, Young, Stubbins and Rozynski. Before them in the 19th Century this was part of "Imbil Station" owned by Lawless, then Elworthy and Mellor families.
In a magical corner of a side gorge, the mosses clothe the purple rocks of the Moolayemba Shales. Above the beds of shale tower the precipice sandstone which is pervious to water. As the shales are impervious, the watertable in the sandstone weeps water perpetually sustaining the mosses, tree ferns and trees that make this glade a delicate and beautiful place, in contrast to the massive cliffs of the gorge.
This scene unfolds each year at the northern end of Lake Cascade due to the rhythms of the changing seasons. The spring snow melt in the mountains fills the reservoir to its brim. Then, in late summer and fall, as water is continuously released for irrigation across thousands of acres of farms in Idaho's Payette Valley, the lake's receding northern shoreline exposes submerged sandbars, leaving the water to drain and eventually form a stream before the winter sets in.
Stubborn willows--such as Salix exigua--emerge with the sandbars, a testament to their resilience after months of complete submersion. These plants live in two worlds--submerged beneath the lake's surface, relying on spongy tissues to channel oxygen and a bit of underwater photosynthesis to survive the deep waters, and then suddenly reemerging to thrive in the air and sunlight. Their yearly cycle leaves me to ponder how both nature's rhythms and human needs (irrigation) shape this beautiful landscape, creating habitat for life uniquely adapted to living at the edge.
Oh... and the wildfire in the background? That's the Rock Fire on West Mountain (2025). It threatened the Tamarack Resort. Its ski trail is visible coming down the side of the mountain.
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© Stephen L. Frazier - All Rights Reserved. Reproduction, printing, publication, or any other use of this image without written permission is prohibited.
It's been over a week since she was able to really visit since her whole family has come down with Covid. Danni got it first, almost 2 weeks ago from her daycare, and then Dad, then Mom. Fortunately, Danni only had 1 day of symptoms, but it took a while for her to finally test negative. Her parents are still slogging through. So far, we have managed to steer clear:)
today was a perfect day to play with the water!
Hoggs Hollow
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Hoggs Hollow is an affluent neighbourhood in Toronto, Ontario, Canada which is located in the Don River Valley centred on the intersection of Yonge Street and York Mills Road/Wilson Avenue.
Hoggs Hollow is named after Joseph hogg, a Scotsman who settled in the area in 1824. Hogg operated a whisky distillery and a grist mill, and was viewed as the most successful of all the millers in the valley. The name is usually written without the apostrophe as Hoggs Hollow, but sometimes appears as Hogg's Hollow.
In 1856, John and William Hogg, sons to the late James Hogg, subdivided their father's estate under the name "Hoggs Hollow". The Hoggs Hollow subdivision included one hundred and forty-one lots. With the area full of quick sand, swamps and bogs, only a few houses were actually built at this time, however. the subdivision stood in close proximity to the historic village of York Mills. A school, post office, pottery, blacksmith, livery, stable, store, golf links and clubhouse, hillside cemetery (at Yonge Street and Mill Street) and St. John's Anglican Church served the community, one largely made up of Scottish, Irish and English immigrants.
Subdivision of the present day Hoggs Hollow neighbourhood began in the 1920s with the creation of lots, layout of roads, and design of homes reflecting the aesthetic of the English countryside. In 1925, a two room elementary schoolhouse named the Baron Renfrew School opened to replace an earlier structure at 45 York Mills Road (formerly Mercer Avenue and/or concession road 19) that was destroyed by fire.
The neighbourhood grew in stages and was finally completed in the 1960s. Both St. John's Anglican Church and Baron Renfrew (renamed York Mills Public School) grew in size with various additions added. Agricola Finnish Lutheran Church was built in 1967, serving Toronto and area's Finnish Lutheran community.
Hoggs Hollow was connected to Toronto by the Yonge St. streetcar until it was replaced by the Toronto Transit Commission's Yonge Subway in the early 1970s. Hoggs Hollow is now served by the York Mills subway station.
In 1982, York Mills Public School was decommissioned and renovated as office space for the school board. The historic two room schoolhouse exterior was restored.
Hoggs Hollow was a part of the City of North York until 1998 when that city merged with five other municipalities and a regional government to form the new "City of Toronto".
The Jolly Miller tavern, circa 1857, located at the bottom of Hoggs Hollow Hill, 3885 Yonge Street, was closed for many years, and has just re-opened in 2004 after many battles between developers, the city and groups that wanted to preserve the historical landmark. The George S. Pratt House, circa 1886, located at 17 Mill Street, is another historic landmark in Hoggs Hollow. In need of funds, The York Mills Public School building was sold by the school board and demolished. Many of the original estate homes and modern movement residences of the early to mid-20th century are being demolished in favour of large new homes. With a densely developed business area, many businesses and services are available and while church attendance has diminished at St. John's, other churches and synagogues now serve the people of the area.
On October 15, 1954, the valley was inundated by Hurricane Hazel and many attempts have since been made to manage water in the natural watershed of a valley though many homes are still prone to moisture and flooding from the watertable.
On March 17, 1960, the incident popularly known as the "Hoggs Hollow Disaster" occurred. Five young Italian immigrant workers were killed while constructing a tunnel for a water main at Hoggs Hollow. The details of the accident, where they were trapped 35 feet underground in a cramped, dimly lit tunnel, sparked a public outcry over the lack of safety standards in construction. Ultimately it led to an improvement in working conditions. [1]
Periodically, attempts have been made to connect back portions of the valley with new roads to the higher set neighbourhoods of the ridges above.
Home listing prices range from C$1,200,000 to C$7,000,000 in Hoggs Hollow.
Seventyfive Mile Beach is the surf coast of K'gari (formerly also known as Fraser Island). K'gari is UNESCO Heritage listed, and is the largest sand island in the world. Created during the last Ice Age (when sea level was c 100m lower than present) from the abundance of sand along Australia's east coast, it is maintained by the longshore drift of sand and fixed by the watertable and the vegetation that rises to rainforest with large stands of big timbers including satinay, blackbutt, hoop pine and kauri pine.
Isaias Rodriquez (left) and Sam Wilson (right) move a nearly complete 12” (non-clog) trash handling pump down the assembly line for final assembly at Griffin Pump’s manufacturing plant in Houston, Texas prior to shipment to a municipality in the West Indies. For more information visit: www.griffinpump.com
The crypt of Winchester Cathedral is the setting for Antony Gormley’s sculpture Sound II. In winter when the water table is high the sculpture stands with its feet in water.
This is one I took a few years ago. The cathedral is a great place to visit. Find out about the diver William Walker who saved the cathedral in the early 1900s. Go on a roof tour and see the lead workers marks on the lead sheathing on the roof. In spring see the Peregrines that nest on the cathedral.
Jabiru Swamp is a linear swamp behind the foredunes on the ocean side of K'gari.
The water is fresh water derived from the sand mass that coprises most of the island. Rainfall infiltrates the mass of silica dunes creating a watertable which then seeps to the perimeter of the island, thus feeding this swamp with filtered, pure water. The low levels of nutrient in the groundwater requires vegetation in the swamp to depend on photosythesis (algae) and recycling of decaying plant matter. From the air the patterns in the swamp and in the associated bog are strikingly artistic. In fact, ecologists refer to the bogs as patterned bogs.
The entirety of K'gari / Fraser Island has been declared World Heritage estate by UNESCO and is managed by Parks & Wildlife Service of the Department of Environment and Science, Queensland Government.
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Here is my first published work even though i did it as a freebie its great seeing your work on a web site !
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Here is the flickr set
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Here it finishes the Desert and one can see already some vegetation that will end up in the valley of Aqaba, in the south of the country
Aqui termina o deserto e começa o Vale de Aqaba, no sul da Jordania. Se acumula agua que escorre no deserto nas poucas chuvas existentes e corre para esta area onde forma no subsolo o aquifero de Aqaba. O verde já começa a aparecer.
Aquí termina el desierto de Wadi Rum y empieza el Valle de Aqaba. En esta parte sale el agua de las escasas lluvias q caen en el desierto y las correntadas se acumulan en el subsuelo para formar el Manto Acuifero de Aqaba, en el sur del país.
Petra (Arabic: البتراء, Al-Batrāʾ; Ancient Greek: Πέτρα), originally known to the Nabataeans as Raqmu, is a historical and archaeological city in southern Jordan. The city is famous for its rock-cut architecture and water conduit system. Another name for Petra is the Rose City due to the color of the stone out of which it is carved.
Established possibly as early as 312 BC as the capital city of the Arab Nabataeans, it is a symbol of Jordan, as well as Jordan's most-visited tourist attraction.The Nabateans were nomadic Arabs who benefited from the proximity of Petra to the regional trade routes, in becoming a major trading hub, thus enabling them to gather wealth. The Nabateans are also known for their great ability in constructing efficient water collecting methods in the barren deserts and their talent in carving structures into solid rocks. It lies on the slope of Jebel al-Madhbah (identified by some as the biblical Mount Hor in a basin among the mountains which form the eastern flank of Arabah (Wadi Araba), the large valley running from the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba. Petra has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985.
The site remained unknown to the western world until 1812, when it was introduced by Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. It was described as "a rose-red city half as old as time" in a Newdigate Prize-winning poem by John William Burgon. UNESCO has described it as "one of the most precious cultural properties of man's cultural heritage".Petra was named amongst the New7Wonders of the World in 2007 and was also chosen by the Smithsonian Magazine as one of the "28 Places to See Before You Die". (Wikipedia)
Petra (Árabe: البتراء, Al-Batrāʾ; Grego Antigo: Πέτρα), originalmente conhecida pelos Nabateus como Raqmu, é uma cidade histórica e arqueológica no sul da Jordânia. A cidade é famosa por sua arquitetura esculpida na rocha e seu sistema de condução de água. Outro nome para Petra é "Cidade Rosa", devido à cor da pedra da qual foi esculpida. Estabelecida possivelmente já em 312 a.C. como a capital dos Nabateus Árabes, é um símbolo da Jordânia, bem como sua atração turística mais visitada. Os Nabateus eram Árabes nômades que se beneficiaram da proximidade de Petra com as rotas comerciais regionais, tornando-a um grande centro comercial, o que lhes permitiu acumular riqueza. São também conhecidos por sua grande habilidade em construir métodos eficientes de coleta de água nos desertos áridos e seu talento em esculpir estruturas em rochas sólidas. Está localizada na encosta de Jebel al-Madhbah (identificado por alguns como o bíblico Monte Hor) numa bacia entre as montanhas que formam o flanco leste de Arabah (Wadi Araba), o grande vale que se estende do Mar Morto ao Golfo de Aqaba. Petra é um Patrimônio Mundial da UNESCO desde 1985. O local permaneceu desconhecido do mundo ocidental até 1812, quando foi apresentado pelo explorador suíço Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. Foi descrita como "uma cidade rosa-vermelha quase tão antiga quanto o tempo" em um poema vencedor do Prêmio Newdigate por John William Burgon. A UNESCO a descreveu como "uma das propriedades culturais mais preciosas do patrimônio cultural da humanidade". Petra foi eleita uma das Novas 7 Maravilhas do Mundo em 2007 e também foi escolhida pela Smithsonian Magazine como um dos "28 Lugares para Ver Antes de Morrer".
Petra (Árabe: البتراء, Al-Batrāʾ; Griego Antiguo: Πέτρα), originalmente conocida por los Nabateos como Raqmu, es una ciudad histórica y arqueológica en el sur de Jordania. La ciudad es famosa por su arquitectura tallada en la roca y su sistema de conducción de agua. Otro nombre para Petra es "Ciudad Rosa", debido al color de la piedra en la que fue tallada. Establecida posiblemente tan temprano como el 312 a.C. como la capital de los Nabateos Árabes, es un símbolo de Jordania, así como la atracción turística más visitada del país. Los Nabateos eran Árabes nómadas que se beneficiaron de la proximidad de Petra a las rutas comerciales regionales, convirtiéndola en un importante centro comercial, lo que les permitió acumular riqueza. También son conocidos por su gran habilidad para construir métodos eficientes de recolección de agua en los desiertos áridos y su talento para tallar estructuras en rocas sólidas. Se encuentra en la ladera de Jebel al-Madhbah (identificado por algunos como el bíblico Monte Hor) en una cuenca entre las montañas que forman el flanco oriental de Arabah (Wadi Araba), el gran valle que se extiende desde el Mar Muerto hasta el Golfo de Aqaba. Petra ha sido un Patrimonio de la Humanidad por la UNESCO desde 1985. El sitio permaneció desconocido para el mundo occidental hasta 1812, cuando fue dado a conocer por el explorador suizo Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. Fue descrita como "una ciudad rosa-roja tan antigua como el tiempo" en un poema ganador del Premio Newdigate por John William Burgon. La UNESCO la ha descrito como "una de las propiedades culturales más preciosas del patrimonio cultural del hombre". Petra fue nombrada una de las Nuevas 7 Maravillas del Mundo en 2007 y también fue elegida por la Smithsonian Magazine como uno de los "28 Lugares que Ver Antes de Morir".
Petra (Arabo: البتراء, Al-Batrāʾ; Greco Antico: Πέτρα), originariamente conosciuta dai Nabatei come Raqmu, è una città storica e archeologica nel sud della Giordania. La città è famosa per la sua architettura rupestre e il suo sistema di condutture idriche. Un altro nome per Petra è "Città Rosa", a causa del colore della pietra in cui è stata scolpita. Fondata probabilmente già nel 312 a.C. come capitale dei Nabatei Arabi, è un simbolo della Giordania, nonché la sua attrazione turistica più visitata. I Nabatei erano Arabi nomadi che trassero beneficio dalla vicinanza di Petra alle rotte commerciali regionali, diventando un importante hub commerciale, cosa che permise loro di accumulare ricchezza. Sono anche noti per la loro grande abilità nel costruire efficienti metodi di raccolta dell'acqua negli aridi deserti e il loro talento nello scolpire strutture nella roccia solida. Si trova sul pendio di Jebel al-Madhbah (identificato da alcuni come il biblico Monte Oreb) in un bacino tra le montagne che formano il fianco orientale dell'Arabah (Wadi Araba), la grande valle che si estende dal Mar Morto al Golfo di Aqaba. Petra è un Patrimonio dell'Umanità UNESCO dal 1985. Il sito rimase sconosciuto al mondo occidentale fino al 1812, quando fu portato alla luce dall'esploratore svizzero Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. Fu descritta come "una città rosa-rossa antica quasi quanto il tempo" in una poesia vincitrice del Premio Newdigate di John William Burgon. L'UNESCO l'ha descritta come "una delle più preziose proprietà culturali del patrimonio culturale dell'uomo". Petra è stata eletta una delle Nuove 7 Meraviglie del Mondo nel 2007 ed è stata anche scelta dalla Smithsonian Magazine come uno dei "28 Luoghi da Vedere Prima di Morire".
Pétra (Arabe : البتراء, Al-Batrāʾ ; Grec Ancien : Πέτρα), initialement connue des Nabatéens sous le nom de Raqmu, est une ville historique et archéologique du sud de la Jordanie. La ville est célèbre pour son architecture taillée dans la roche et son système de conduits d'eau. Un autre nom pour Pétra est la « Cité Rose », en raison de la couleur de la pierre dans laquelle elle est sculptée. Établie peut-être dès 312 av. J.-C. comme capitale des Nabatéens Arabes, elle est un symbole de la Jordanie, ainsi que son attraction touristique la plus visitée. Les Nabatéens étaient des Arabes nomades qui ont tiré profit de la proximité de Pétra avec les routes commerciales régionales pour en faire un centre commercial majeur, accumulant ainsi de grandes richesses. Ils sont également réputés pour leur grande capacité à construire des méthodes efficaces de collecte d'eau dans les déserts arides et leur talent pour sculpter des structures dans la roche solide. Elle se trouve sur les pentes du Jebel al-Madhbah (identifié par certains comme le mont Hor biblique) dans un bassin entouré de montagnes qui forment le flanc est de l'Araba (Wadi Araba), la grande vallée s'étendant de la mer Morte au golfe d'Aqaba. Pétra est inscrite sur la liste du patrimoine mondial de l'UNESCO depuis 1985. Le site est resté inconnu du monde occidental jusqu'en 1812, date à laquelle il a été révélé par l'explorateur suisse Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. Elle a été décrite comme « une ville rose-rouge moitié aussi vieille que le temps » dans un poème lauréat du prix Newdigate de John William Burgon. L'UNESCO l'a décrite comme « l'un des biens culturels les plus précieux du patrimoine culturel de l'homme ». Pétra a été désignée comme l'une des Nouvelles 7 Merveilles du Monde en 2007 et a également été choisie par le Smithsonian Magazine comme l'un des « 28 Lieux à Voir Avant de Mourir ».
Petra (Arabisch: البتراء, Al-Batrāʾ; Oud-Grieks: Πέτρα), oorspronkelijk bij de Nabateeërs bekend als Raqmu, is een historische en archeologische stad in Zuid-Jordanië. De stad is beroemd om haar in rotsen uitgehouwen architectuur en haar waterleidingssysteem. Een andere naam voor Petra is de 'Roze Stad', vanwege de kleur van de steen waarin ze is uitgehouwen. Waarschijnlijk al in 312 v.Chr. gesticht als de hoofdstad van de Arabische Nabateeërs, is het een symbool van Jordanië, evenals de meest bezochte toeristische attractie van het land. De Nabateeërs waren nomadische Arabieren die profiteerden van de nabijheid van Petra tot regionale handelsroutes, waardoor het een belangrijk handelsknooppunt werd en zij rijkdom konden vergaren. De Nabateeërs staan ook bekend om hun grote vaardigheid in het construeren van efficiënte waterverzamelingmethoden in de barre woestijnen en hun talent om structuren in massief rotsen uit te houwen. Het ligt op de helling van Jebel al-Madhbah (door sommigen geïdentificeerd als de bijbelse Berg Hor) in een bekken tussen de bergen die de oostelijke flank vormen van de Arabah (Wadi Araba), de grote vallei die loopt van de Dode Zee tot de Golf van Aqaba. Petra staat sinds 1985 op de UNESCO Werelderfgoedlijst. De locatie bleef onbekend voor de westerse wereld tot 1812, toen ze werd geïntroduceerd door de Zwitserse ontdekkingsreiziger Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. Het werd omschreven als "een rozerode stad half zo oud als de tijd" in een met de Newdigate Prize bekroond gedicht van John William Burgon. UNESCO heeft het omschreven als "een van de meest kostbare culturele eigendommen van het culturele erfgoed van de mensheid". Petra werd in 2007 verkozen tot een van de Nieuwe 7 Wereldwonderen en werd ook door Smithsonian Magazine gekozen als een van de "28 Plekken om te Zien Voor Je Sterft".
Petra (Arabisch: البتراء, Al-Batrāʾ; Altgriechisch: Πέτρα), ursprünglich den Nabatäern als Raqmu bekannt, ist eine historische und archäologische Stadt im Süden Jordaniens. Die Stadt ist berühmt für ihre in den Fels gehauene Architektur und ihr Wasserleitungssystem. Ein anderer Name für Petra ist die "Rosarote Stadt", aufgrund der Farbe des Steins, in den sie gemeißelt wurde. Gegründet möglicherweise bereits 312 v. Chr. als Hauptstadt der arabischen Nabatäer, ist sie ein Symbol Jordaniens sowie die meistbesuchte Touristenattraktion des Landes. Die Nabatäer waren nomadische Araber, die von der Nähe Petras zu den regionalen Handelsrouten profitierten, indem sie sie zu einem wichtigen Handelszentrum machten, was ihnen Reichtum einbrachte. Sie sind auch für ihre große Fähigkeit bekannt, effiziente Methoden zur Wassersammlung in den kargen Wüsten zu konstruieren und Strukturen in festen Fels zu hauen. Sie liegt am Hang des Jebel al-Madhbah (von einigen mit dem biblischen Berg Hor identifiziert) in einem Becken zwischen den Bergen, die die östliche Flanke der Araba (Wadi Araba) bilden, dem großen Tal, das vom Toten Meer zum Golf von Aqaba verläuft. Petra ist seit 1985 eine UNESCO-Welterbestätte. Die Stätte blieb der westlichen Welt bis 1812 unbekannt, als sie vom Schweizer Entdecker Johann Ludwig Burckhardt bekannt gemacht wurde. Sie wurde in einem preisgekrönten Newdigate-Gedicht von John William Burgon als "eine rosarote Stadt, halb so alt wie die Zeit" beschrieben. Die UNESCO hat sie als "eines der wertvollsten Kulturgüter des kulturellen Erbes der Menschheit" beschrieben. Petra wurde 2007 zu einem der Neuen 7 Weltwunder gewählt und auch vom Smithsonian Magazine als einer der "28 Orte, die man sehen muss, bevor man stirbt" ausgewählt.
ペトラ（アラビア語: البتراء, アル＝バトラ；古代ギリシャ語: ΠέτRA）は、ナバテア人にはラクムとして知られていた、ヨルダン南部にある歴史的・考古学的な都市です。この都市は、岩を切り出して造られた建築物と水路システムで有名です。切り出された岩石の色から、「バラ色の都市」とも呼ばれています。紀元前312年頃には、アラブ系ナバテア人の首都として確立されていた可能性があり、ヨルダンの象徴であるとともに、同国で最も訪問者の多い観光名所です。ナバテア人は遊牧のアラブ人で、ペトラが地域の交易路に近い利点を活かして主要な交易拠点となり、富を蓄えました。また、不毛な砂漠で効率的な集水方法を構築する卓越した能力と、硬い岩盤に構造物を彫り込む技術でも知られています。ペトラは死海からアカバ湾に至る大きな谷であるアラバ（ワジ・アラバ）の東側を形成する山々に囲まれた盆地に位置するジェベル・アル＝マドバ（一部で聖書のホル山と同定されている）の斜面にあります。ペトラは1985年以来ユネスコ世界遺産です。この遺跡は、1812年にスイス人探検家ヨハン・ルートヴィヒ・ブルクハルトによって紹介されるまで西洋世界に知られていませんでした。ジョン・ウィリアム・バーゴンのニューディゲート賞受賞詩の中で「時間の半分の古さを持つバラ色の都市」と描写され、ユネスコは「人類の文化的遺産の中で最も貴重な文化的財産の一つ」と述べています。ペトラは2007年に新・世界七不思議の一つに選ばれ、また『スミソニアン・マガジン』によって「死ぬ前に見るべき28の場所」の一つにも選ばれています。
佩特拉（阿拉伯语：البتراء，Al-Batrāʾ；古希腊语：ΠέτRA），纳巴泰人最初称之为Raqmu，是位于约旦南部的一座历史和考古城市。该城以其岩石切割建筑和输水系统而闻名。由于雕刻城市的岩石颜色，佩特拉又被称为"玫瑰城"。它可能早在公元前312年就已作为阿拉伯纳巴泰人的首都建立，是约旦的象征，也是该国访问量最大的旅游景点。纳巴泰人是阿拉伯游牧民族，他们利用佩特拉靠近区域贸易路线的优势，使其成为主要贸易中心，从而积累了财富。他们还以在贫瘠沙漠中建造高效集水系统的卓越能力以及在坚硬岩石中雕刻结构的才华而闻名。它坐落于杰贝尔·马德巴（有些人认为就是圣经中的何珥山）的斜坡上，位于阿拉伯谷东侧山脉环绕的盆地中，这条大峡谷从死海一直延伸到亚喀巴湾。佩特拉自1985年以来一直是联合国教科文组织世界遗产地。该遗址一直不为人知，直到1812年由瑞士探险家约翰·路德维希·布尔克哈特介绍给西方世界。约翰·威廉·伯根在一首获得纽迪吉特奖的诗中将其描述为"一座玫瑰红城市，其历史有人类一半古老"。联合国教科文组织将其描述为"人类文化遗产中最宝贵的文化财产之一"。佩特拉于2007年入选世界新七大奇迹，并被《史密森尼》杂志选为"死前必看的28个地方"之一。
البتراء (بالعربية: البتراء، آل-بتْراء؛ باليونانية القديمة: ΠέτRA)، المعروفة أصلاً لدى الأنباط باسم رَقْمُو، هي مدينة تاريخية وأثرية في جنوب الأردن. تشتهر المدينة بهندستها المعمارية المنحوتة في الصخور ونظام قنوات المياه. اسم آخر للبتراء هو "المدينة الوردية" due to the color of the stone out of which it is carved. أُسست possibly as early as 312 BC كعاصمة للأنباط العرب، وهي رمز للأردن، وكذلك الوجهة السياحية الأكثر زيارة في البلاد. كان الأنباط بدواً عرباً استفادوا من قرب البتراء من طرق التجارة الإقليمية، لتصبح محوراً تجارياً رئيسياً، مما مكنهم من جمع الثروة. كما يشتهر الأنباط بقدرتهم الكبيرة على بناء طرق فعالة لجمع المياه في الصحاري القاحلة وموهبتهم في نحت الهياكل في الصخور الصلبة. تقع على منحدر جبل المُذَبَّح (الذي يعرفه البعض بجبل هور التوراتي) في حوض بين الجبال التي تشكل الحافة الشرقية لعاربة (وادي عربة)، الوادي الكبير الممتد من البحر الميت إلى خليج العقبة. البتراء هي موقع تراث عالمي لليونسكو منذ عام 1985. بقي الموقع مجهولاً للعالم الغربي حتى عام 1812، عندما عرَّفه المستكشف السويسري يوهان لودفيغ بوركهارت. وُصفت بأنها "مدينة وردية حمراء نصف قديمة كالزمن" في قصيدة فازت بجائزة نيوديغيت للشاعر جون ويليام بورغون. وقد وصفتها اليونسكو بأنها "واحدة من أثرى الممتلكات الثقافية في التراث الثقافي للإنسان". تم تسمية البتراء among the New7Wonders of the World في 2007 وتم اختيارها أيضاً من قبل مجلة Smithsonian كواحدة من "28 مكاناً يجب أن تراهم قبل أن تموت".
پترا (به عربی: البتراء، آل-بَتراء؛ به یونانی باستان: ΠέτRA) که در ابتدا نزد نَبَطیها با نام رَقْمُو شناخته میشد، یک شهر تاریخی و باستانشناسی در جنوب اردن است. این شهر به خاطر معماری صخرهای و سیستم آبرسانیاش مشهور است. نام دیگر پترا «شهر رز» است که به دلیل رنگ سنگی است که از آن تراشیده شده است. این شهر که احتمالاً در ۳۱۲ سال قبل از میلاد به عنوان پایتخت نبطیهای عرب تأسیس شد، نماد اردن و همچنین پربازدیدترین جاذبهٔ گردشگری این کشور است. نبطیها عربهای بدوی بودند که از مجاورت پترا با routes تجاری منطقه بهره برده و آن را به یک مرکز تجاری بزرگ تبدیل کردند و thus ثروت اندوختند. نبطیها همچنین به دلیل توانایی بزرگشان در ساخت روشهای کارآمد جمعآوری آب در بیابانهای بایر و استعدادشان در کندن سازهها در صخرههای سفت مشهور هستند. این شهر بر روی شیب جبل المُذَبَّح (که برخی آن را با کوه هور کتاب مقدس one میدانند) در حوضهای در میان کوههایی واقع شده که flanks شرقی عَرَبه (وادی عربه) را تشکیل میدهند، درهٔ بزرگی که از دریای مرده تا خلیج عقبه امتداد دارد. پترا از سال ۱۹۸۵ یک میراث جهانی یونسکو بوده است. این مکان تا سال ۱۸۱۲ برای جهان غرب ناشناخته باقی ماند، تا اینکه توسط کاشف سوئیسی یوهان لودویگ بورکهارت معرفی شد. این شهر در شعری برندهٔ جایزهٔ نیودیگیت از جان ویلیام بورگون به عنوان «شهر گُلبهی نیمهقدیمی به قدمت زمان» توصیف شد. یونسکو آن را «یکی از ارزشمندترین داراییهای فرهنگی میراث فرهنگی بشر» توصیف کرده است. پترا در سال ۲۰۰۷ در میان عجایب هفتگانه جدید جهان نام گرفت و همچنین توسط مجلهٔ اسمیتسونین به عنوان یکی از «۲۸ مکان برای دیدن قبل از مرگ» انتخاب شد.
Lost Lake was probably formed by water creating eddies as it rushed over the land, hundreds of feet deep.
As to why there's water in it now, I'm not sure, though it's probably a seep lake created by a high watertable (from the nearby dam). There are no streams up here. The nearest is Crab Creek, about 100 feet lower in elevation.
I don't really understand why there aren't springs and streams flowing from this highland into the Crab Creek valley. But then, I don't really understand hydrology. And it's likely nobody know what I'm talking about anyway, so let's just say that Lost Lake is a bit of a mystery and leave it at that.
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'Slide'
Camera: Mamiya RB67
Lens: Mamiya-Sekor 3.8/90
Film: Kodak Vericolor III; x-04/1996; 25iso
Process: DIY ECN-2
Adams County, Washington
April 2021
The Winston E. Arnow Federal Building is a national historic site located at 100 N. Palafox Street., Pensacola, Florida in Escambia County. Originally built as a courthouse and post office, the building was constructed in 1938 and 1939 and is an example of the Simplified Classical style frequently used for federal buildings in late 1930s and early 1940s. In 2004 it was named for district judge Winston E. Arnow.
It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on July 11, 2014 as the United States Post Office and Court House.
Designed in a simple Mission style, the Winston E. Arnow U.S. Courthouse has a full, partially exposed basement, with three full stories above the basement, plus a fourth level mechanical penthouse.
The first through third levels of the front portion of the building (the west elevation and the two west-most bays of the north and south elevations) are faced with Oolitic limestone resting on a concrete base. Recessed window planes are smooth stucco. Three bands of limestone moldings circle this portion of the building, once at the watertable, with two belt courses between the second and third floor windows. A stone screen hides small first floor windows on the north and south elevations. On the rear portion of the building the walls are stuccoed within a single plane. Flat limestone bands repeat the watertable and beltcourses of the front portion, as well as continuing the eaves line of the roof over the front portion of the building. The parapet wall of the rear portion is also topped by a limestone bed molding, just below the coping. A red clay Mission tile hipped roof covers the front portion of the building, while a flat foam roof covers the rear portion. The mechanical penthouse repeats the stucco walls, stone bed molding, and both tiled, hipped roof and foam covered, flat roof. A shallow balcony, with a handsome wrought-iron railing runs nearly the entire width of the front elevation. Even more elaborate wrought-iron grilles cover the transoms over the main entry doors. Equally handsome wrought-iron fixtures flank the main west entries and the south entry to the basement.
Inside, a variety of marbles, polished bronze, colorful terrazzo, and plaster and wood moldings are just some of the original materials used to finish the spaces. The main public spaces, such as the public lobby and original courtroom and its lobby, retain much of their original character with marble or wood wainscoting, molded plaster cornices, columns and other moldings, molded wood door trim and paneled wood doors, marble stairs with bronze handrails, and patterned asphalt tile or terrazzo floors.
Credit for the data above is given to the following websites:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_E._Arnow_Federal_Building
www.gsa.gov/historic-buildings/winston-e-arnow-us-courtho...
Water Table is a 1968 sculpture by Isamu Noguchi.
Also on display in this photo, Rain Mountain on the left and Entasis of a Pentagonal Helix by the left side of the window. As Trish Mayo pointed out below, the tall steel sculpture on the right is is "Pylon" from 1958.
Here it finishes the Desert and one can see already some vegetation that will end up in the valley of Aqaba, in the south of the country
Aqui termina o deserto e começa o Vale de Aqaba, no sul da Jordania. Se acumula agua que escorre no deserto nas poucas chuvas existentes e corre para esta area onde forma no subsolo o aquifero de Aqaba. O verde já começa a aparecer.
Aquí termina el desierto de Wadi Rum y empieza el Valle de Aqaba. En esta parte sale el agua de las escasas lluvias q caen en el desierto y las correntadas se acumulan en el subsuelo para formar el Manto Acuifero de Aqaba, en el sur del país.
Petra (Arabic: البتراء, Al-Batrāʾ; Ancient Greek: Πέτρα), originally known to the Nabataeans as Raqmu, is a historical and archaeological city in southern Jordan. The city is famous for its rock-cut architecture and water conduit system. Another name for Petra is the Rose City due to the color of the stone out of which it is carved.
Established possibly as early as 312 BC as the capital city of the Arab Nabataeans, it is a symbol of Jordan, as well as Jordan's most-visited tourist attraction.The Nabateans were nomadic Arabs who benefited from the proximity of Petra to the regional trade routes, in becoming a major trading hub, thus enabling them to gather wealth. The Nabateans are also known for their great ability in constructing efficient water collecting methods in the barren deserts and their talent in carving structures into solid rocks. It lies on the slope of Jebel al-Madhbah (identified by some as the biblical Mount Hor in a basin among the mountains which form the eastern flank of Arabah (Wadi Araba), the large valley running from the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba. Petra has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1985.
The site remained unknown to the western world until 1812, when it was introduced by Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. It was described as "a rose-red city half as old as time" in a Newdigate Prize-winning poem by John William Burgon. UNESCO has described it as "one of the most precious cultural properties of man's cultural heritage".Petra was named amongst the New7Wonders of the World in 2007 and was also chosen by the Smithsonian Magazine as one of the "28 Places to See Before You Die". (Wikipedia)
Petra (Árabe: البتراء, Al-Batrāʾ; Grego Antigo: Πέτρα), originalmente conhecida pelos Nabateus como Raqmu, é uma cidade histórica e arqueológica no sul da Jordânia. A cidade é famosa por sua arquitetura esculpida na rocha e seu sistema de condução de água. Outro nome para Petra é "Cidade Rosa", devido à cor da pedra da qual foi esculpida. Estabelecida possivelmente já em 312 a.C. como a capital dos Nabateus Árabes, é um símbolo da Jordânia, bem como sua atração turística mais visitada. Os Nabateus eram Árabes nômades que se beneficiaram da proximidade de Petra com as rotas comerciais regionais, tornando-a um grande centro comercial, o que lhes permitiu acumular riqueza. São também conhecidos por sua grande habilidade em construir métodos eficientes de coleta de água nos desertos áridos e seu talento em esculpir estruturas em rochas sólidas. Está localizada na encosta de Jebel al-Madhbah (identificado por alguns como o bíblico Monte Hor) numa bacia entre as montanhas que formam o flanco leste de Arabah (Wadi Araba), o grande vale que se estende do Mar Morto ao Golfo de Aqaba. Petra é um Patrimônio Mundial da UNESCO desde 1985. O local permaneceu desconhecido do mundo ocidental até 1812, quando foi apresentado pelo explorador suíço Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. Foi descrita como "uma cidade rosa-vermelha quase tão antiga quanto o tempo" em um poema vencedor do Prêmio Newdigate por John William Burgon. A UNESCO a descreveu como "uma das propriedades culturais mais preciosas do patrimônio cultural da humanidade". Petra foi eleita uma das Novas 7 Maravilhas do Mundo em 2007 e também foi escolhida pela Smithsonian Magazine como um dos "28 Lugares para Ver Antes de Morrer".
Petra (Árabe: البتراء, Al-Batrāʾ; Griego Antiguo: Πέτρα), originalmente conocida por los Nabateos como Raqmu, es una ciudad histórica y arqueológica en el sur de Jordania. La ciudad es famosa por su arquitectura tallada en la roca y su sistema de conducción de agua. Otro nombre para Petra es "Ciudad Rosa", debido al color de la piedra en la que fue tallada. Establecida posiblemente tan temprano como el 312 a.C. como la capital de los Nabateos Árabes, es un símbolo de Jordania, así como la atracción turística más visitada del país. Los Nabateos eran Árabes nómadas que se beneficiaron de la proximidad de Petra a las rutas comerciales regionales, convirtiéndola en un importante centro comercial, lo que les permitió acumular riqueza. También son conocidos por su gran habilidad para construir métodos eficientes de recolección de agua en los desiertos áridos y su talento para tallar estructuras en rocas sólidas. Se encuentra en la ladera de Jebel al-Madhbah (identificado por algunos como el bíblico Monte Hor) en una cuenca entre las montañas que forman el flanco oriental de Arabah (Wadi Araba), el gran valle que se extiende desde el Mar Muerto hasta el Golfo de Aqaba. Petra ha sido un Patrimonio de la Humanidad por la UNESCO desde 1985. El sitio permaneció desconocido para el mundo occidental hasta 1812, cuando fue dado a conocer por el explorador suizo Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. Fue descrita como "una ciudad rosa-roja tan antigua como el tiempo" en un poema ganador del Premio Newdigate por John William Burgon. La UNESCO la ha descrito como "una de las propiedades culturales más preciosas del patrimonio cultural del hombre". Petra fue nombrada una de las Nuevas 7 Maravillas del Mundo en 2007 y también fue elegida por la Smithsonian Magazine como uno de los "28 Lugares que Ver Antes de Morir".
Petra (Arabo: البتراء, Al-Batrāʾ; Greco Antico: Πέτρα), originariamente conosciuta dai Nabatei come Raqmu, è una città storica e archeologica nel sud della Giordania. La città è famosa per la sua architettura rupestre e il suo sistema di condutture idriche. Un altro nome per Petra è "Città Rosa", a causa del colore della pietra in cui è stata scolpita. Fondata probabilmente già nel 312 a.C. come capitale dei Nabatei Arabi, è un simbolo della Giordania, nonché la sua attrazione turistica più visitata. I Nabatei erano Arabi nomadi che trassero beneficio dalla vicinanza di Petra alle rotte commerciali regionali, diventando un importante hub commerciale, cosa che permise loro di accumulare ricchezza. Sono anche noti per la loro grande abilità nel costruire efficienti metodi di raccolta dell'acqua negli aridi deserti e il loro talento nello scolpire strutture nella roccia solida. Si trova sul pendio di Jebel al-Madhbah (identificato da alcuni come il biblico Monte Oreb) in un bacino tra le montagne che formano il fianco orientale dell'Arabah (Wadi Araba), la grande valle che si estende dal Mar Morto al Golfo di Aqaba. Petra è un Patrimonio dell'Umanità UNESCO dal 1985. Il sito rimase sconosciuto al mondo occidentale fino al 1812, quando fu portato alla luce dall'esploratore svizzero Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. Fu descritta come "una città rosa-rossa antica quasi quanto il tempo" in una poesia vincitrice del Premio Newdigate di John William Burgon. L'UNESCO l'ha descritta come "una delle più preziose proprietà culturali del patrimonio culturale dell'uomo". Petra è stata eletta una delle Nuove 7 Meraviglie del Mondo nel 2007 ed è stata anche scelta dalla Smithsonian Magazine come uno dei "28 Luoghi da Vedere Prima di Morire".
Pétra (Arabe : البتراء, Al-Batrāʾ ; Grec Ancien : Πέτρα), initialement connue des Nabatéens sous le nom de Raqmu, est une ville historique et archéologique du sud de la Jordanie. La ville est célèbre pour son architecture taillée dans la roche et son système de conduits d'eau. Un autre nom pour Pétra est la « Cité Rose », en raison de la couleur de la pierre dans laquelle elle est sculptée. Établie peut-être dès 312 av. J.-C. comme capitale des Nabatéens Arabes, elle est un symbole de la Jordanie, ainsi que son attraction touristique la plus visitée. Les Nabatéens étaient des Arabes nomades qui ont tiré profit de la proximité de Pétra avec les routes commerciales régionales pour en faire un centre commercial majeur, accumulant ainsi de grandes richesses. Ils sont également réputés pour leur grande capacité à construire des méthodes efficaces de collecte d'eau dans les déserts arides et leur talent pour sculpter des structures dans la roche solide. Elle se trouve sur les pentes du Jebel al-Madhbah (identifié par certains comme le mont Hor biblique) dans un bassin entouré de montagnes qui forment le flanc est de l'Araba (Wadi Araba), la grande vallée s'étendant de la mer Morte au golfe d'Aqaba. Pétra est inscrite sur la liste du patrimoine mondial de l'UNESCO depuis 1985. Le site est resté inconnu du monde occidental jusqu'en 1812, date à laquelle il a été révélé par l'explorateur suisse Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. Elle a été décrite comme « une ville rose-rouge moitié aussi vieille que le temps » dans un poème lauréat du prix Newdigate de John William Burgon. L'UNESCO l'a décrite comme « l'un des biens culturels les plus précieux du patrimoine culturel de l'homme ». Pétra a été désignée comme l'une des Nouvelles 7 Merveilles du Monde en 2007 et a également été choisie par le Smithsonian Magazine comme l'un des « 28 Lieux à Voir Avant de Mourir ».
Petra (Arabisch: البتراء, Al-Batrāʾ; Oud-Grieks: Πέτρα), oorspronkelijk bij de Nabateeërs bekend als Raqmu, is een historische en archeologische stad in Zuid-Jordanië. De stad is beroemd om haar in rotsen uitgehouwen architectuur en haar waterleidingssysteem. Een andere naam voor Petra is de 'Roze Stad', vanwege de kleur van de steen waarin ze is uitgehouwen. Waarschijnlijk al in 312 v.Chr. gesticht als de hoofdstad van de Arabische Nabateeërs, is het een symbool van Jordanië, evenals de meest bezochte toeristische attractie van het land. De Nabateeërs waren nomadische Arabieren die profiteerden van de nabijheid van Petra tot regionale handelsroutes, waardoor het een belangrijk handelsknooppunt werd en zij rijkdom konden vergaren. De Nabateeërs staan ook bekend om hun grote vaardigheid in het construeren van efficiënte waterverzamelingmethoden in de barre woestijnen en hun talent om structuren in massief rotsen uit te houwen. Het ligt op de helling van Jebel al-Madhbah (door sommigen geïdentificeerd als de bijbelse Berg Hor) in een bekken tussen de bergen die de oostelijke flank vormen van de Arabah (Wadi Araba), de grote vallei die loopt van de Dode Zee tot de Golf van Aqaba. Petra staat sinds 1985 op de UNESCO Werelderfgoedlijst. De locatie bleef onbekend voor de westerse wereld tot 1812, toen ze werd geïntroduceerd door de Zwitserse ontdekkingsreiziger Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. Het werd omschreven als "een rozerode stad half zo oud als de tijd" in een met de Newdigate Prize bekroond gedicht van John William Burgon. UNESCO heeft het omschreven als "een van de meest kostbare culturele eigendommen van het culturele erfgoed van de mensheid". Petra werd in 2007 verkozen tot een van de Nieuwe 7 Wereldwonderen en werd ook door Smithsonian Magazine gekozen als een van de "28 Plekken om te Zien Voor Je Sterft".
Petra (Arabisch: البتراء, Al-Batrāʾ; Altgriechisch: Πέτρα), ursprünglich den Nabatäern als Raqmu bekannt, ist eine historische und archäologische Stadt im Süden Jordaniens. Die Stadt ist berühmt für ihre in den Fels gehauene Architektur und ihr Wasserleitungssystem. Ein anderer Name für Petra ist die "Rosarote Stadt", aufgrund der Farbe des Steins, in den sie gemeißelt wurde. Gegründet möglicherweise bereits 312 v. Chr. als Hauptstadt der arabischen Nabatäer, ist sie ein Symbol Jordaniens sowie die meistbesuchte Touristenattraktion des Landes. Die Nabatäer waren nomadische Araber, die von der Nähe Petras zu den regionalen Handelsrouten profitierten, indem sie sie zu einem wichtigen Handelszentrum machten, was ihnen Reichtum einbrachte. Sie sind auch für ihre große Fähigkeit bekannt, effiziente Methoden zur Wassersammlung in den kargen Wüsten zu konstruieren und Strukturen in festen Fels zu hauen. Sie liegt am Hang des Jebel al-Madhbah (von einigen mit dem biblischen Berg Hor identifiziert) in einem Becken zwischen den Bergen, die die östliche Flanke der Araba (Wadi Araba) bilden, dem großen Tal, das vom Toten Meer zum Golf von Aqaba verläuft. Petra ist seit 1985 eine UNESCO-Welterbestätte. Die Stätte blieb der westlichen Welt bis 1812 unbekannt, als sie vom Schweizer Entdecker Johann Ludwig Burckhardt bekannt gemacht wurde. Sie wurde in einem preisgekrönten Newdigate-Gedicht von John William Burgon als "eine rosarote Stadt, halb so alt wie die Zeit" beschrieben. Die UNESCO hat sie als "eines der wertvollsten Kulturgüter des kulturellen Erbes der Menschheit" beschrieben. Petra wurde 2007 zu einem der Neuen 7 Weltwunder gewählt und auch vom Smithsonian Magazine als einer der "28 Orte, die man sehen muss, bevor man stirbt" ausgewählt.
ペトラ（アラビア語: البتراء, アル＝バトラ；古代ギリシャ語: ΠέτRA）は、ナバテア人にはラクムとして知られていた、ヨルダン南部にある歴史的・考古学的な都市です。この都市は、岩を切り出して造られた建築物と水路システムで有名です。切り出された岩石の色から、「バラ色の都市」とも呼ばれています。紀元前312年頃には、アラブ系ナバテア人の首都として確立されていた可能性があり、ヨルダンの象徴であるとともに、同国で最も訪問者の多い観光名所です。ナバテア人は遊牧のアラブ人で、ペトラが地域の交易路に近い利点を活かして主要な交易拠点となり、富を蓄えました。また、不毛な砂漠で効率的な集水方法を構築する卓越した能力と、硬い岩盤に構造物を彫り込む技術でも知られています。ペトラは死海からアカバ湾に至る大きな谷であるアラバ（ワジ・アラバ）の東側を形成する山々に囲まれた盆地に位置するジェベル・アル＝マドバ（一部で聖書のホル山と同定されている）の斜面にあります。ペトラは1985年以来ユネスコ世界遺産です。この遺跡は、1812年にスイス人探検家ヨハン・ルートヴィヒ・ブルクハルトによって紹介されるまで西洋世界に知られていませんでした。ジョン・ウィリアム・バーゴンのニューディゲート賞受賞詩の中で「時間の半分の古さを持つバラ色の都市」と描写され、ユネスコは「人類の文化的遺産の中で最も貴重な文化的財産の一つ」と述べています。ペトラは2007年に新・世界七不思議の一つに選ばれ、また『スミソニアン・マガジン』によって「死ぬ前に見るべき28の場所」の一つにも選ばれています。
佩特拉（阿拉伯语：البتراء，Al-Batrāʾ；古希腊语：ΠέτRA），纳巴泰人最初称之为Raqmu，是位于约旦南部的一座历史和考古城市。该城以其岩石切割建筑和输水系统而闻名。由于雕刻城市的岩石颜色，佩特拉又被称为"玫瑰城"。它可能早在公元前312年就已作为阿拉伯纳巴泰人的首都建立，是约旦的象征，也是该国访问量最大的旅游景点。纳巴泰人是阿拉伯游牧民族，他们利用佩特拉靠近区域贸易路线的优势，使其成为主要贸易中心，从而积累了财富。他们还以在贫瘠沙漠中建造高效集水系统的卓越能力以及在坚硬岩石中雕刻结构的才华而闻名。它坐落于杰贝尔·马德巴（有些人认为就是圣经中的何珥山）的斜坡上，位于阿拉伯谷东侧山脉环绕的盆地中，这条大峡谷从死海一直延伸到亚喀巴湾。佩特拉自1985年以来一直是联合国教科文组织世界遗产地。该遗址一直不为人知，直到1812年由瑞士探险家约翰·路德维希·布尔克哈特介绍给西方世界。约翰·威廉·伯根在一首获得纽迪吉特奖的诗中将其描述为"一座玫瑰红城市，其历史有人类一半古老"。联合国教科文组织将其描述为"人类文化遗产中最宝贵的文化财产之一"。佩特拉于2007年入选世界新七大奇迹，并被《史密森尼》杂志选为"死前必看的28个地方"之一。
البتراء (بالعربية: البتراء، آل-بتْراء؛ باليونانية القديمة: ΠέτRA)، المعروفة أصلاً لدى الأنباط باسم رَقْمُو، هي مدينة تاريخية وأثرية في جنوب الأردن. تشتهر المدينة بهندستها المعمارية المنحوتة في الصخور ونظام قنوات المياه. اسم آخر للبتراء هو "المدينة الوردية" due to the color of the stone out of which it is carved. أُسست possibly as early as 312 BC كعاصمة للأنباط العرب، وهي رمز للأردن، وكذلك الوجهة السياحية الأكثر زيارة في البلاد. كان الأنباط بدواً عرباً استفادوا من قرب البتراء من طرق التجارة الإقليمية، لتصبح محوراً تجارياً رئيسياً، مما مكنهم من جمع الثروة. كما يشتهر الأنباط بقدرتهم الكبيرة على بناء طرق فعالة لجمع المياه في الصحاري القاحلة وموهبتهم في نحت الهياكل في الصخور الصلبة. تقع على منحدر جبل المُذَبَّح (الذي يعرفه البعض بجبل هور التوراتي) في حوض بين الجبال التي تشكل الحافة الشرقية لعاربة (وادي عربة)، الوادي الكبير الممتد من البحر الميت إلى خليج العقبة. البتراء هي موقع تراث عالمي لليونسكو منذ عام 1985. بقي الموقع مجهولاً للعالم الغربي حتى عام 1812، عندما عرَّفه المستكشف السويسري يوهان لودفيغ بوركهارت. وُصفت بأنها "مدينة وردية حمراء نصف قديمة كالزمن" في قصيدة فازت بجائزة نيوديغيت للشاعر جون ويليام بورغون. وقد وصفتها اليونسكو بأنها "واحدة من أثرى الممتلكات الثقافية في التراث الثقافي للإنسان". تم تسمية البتراء among the New7Wonders of the World في 2007 وتم اختيارها أيضاً من قبل مجلة Smithsonian كواحدة من "28 مكاناً يجب أن تراهم قبل أن تموت".
پترا (به عربی: البتراء، آل-بَتراء؛ به یونانی باستان: ΠέτRA) که در ابتدا نزد نَبَطیها با نام رَقْمُو شناخته میشد، یک شهر تاریخی و باستانشناسی در جنوب اردن است. این شهر به خاطر معماری صخرهای و سیستم آبرسانیاش مشهور است. نام دیگر پترا «شهر رز» است که به دلیل رنگ سنگی است که از آن تراشیده شده است. این شهر که احتمالاً در ۳۱۲ سال قبل از میلاد به عنوان پایتخت نبطیهای عرب تأسیس شد، نماد اردن و همچنین پربازدیدترین جاذبهٔ گردشگری این کشور است. نبطیها عربهای بدوی بودند که از مجاورت پترا با routes تجاری منطقه بهره برده و آن را به یک مرکز تجاری بزرگ تبدیل کردند و thus ثروت اندوختند. نبطیها همچنین به دلیل توانایی بزرگشان در ساخت روشهای کارآمد جمعآوری آب در بیابانهای بایر و استعدادشان در کندن سازهها در صخرههای سفت مشهور هستند. این شهر بر روی شیب جبل المُذَبَّح (که برخی آن را با کوه هور کتاب مقدس one میدانند) در حوضهای در میان کوههایی واقع شده که flanks شرقی عَرَبه (وادی عربه) را تشکیل میدهند، درهٔ بزرگی که از دریای مرده تا خلیج عقبه امتداد دارد. پترا از سال ۱۹۸۵ یک میراث جهانی یونسکو بوده است. این مکان تا سال ۱۸۱۲ برای جهان غرب ناشناخته باقی ماند، تا اینکه توسط کاشف سوئیسی یوهان لودویگ بورکهارت معرفی شد. این شهر در شعری برندهٔ جایزهٔ نیودیگیت از جان ویلیام بورگون به عنوان «شهر گُلبهی نیمهقدیمی به قدمت زمان» توصیف شد. یونسکو آن را «یکی از ارزشمندترین داراییهای فرهنگی میراث فرهنگی بشر» توصیف کرده است. پترا در سال ۲۰۰۷ در میان عجایب هفتگانه جدید جهان نام گرفت و همچنین توسط مجلهٔ اسمیتسونین به عنوان یکی از «۲۸ مکان برای دیدن قبل از مرگ» انتخاب شد.
These tall trees planted in Munnar and high ranges in general belong to Grandis-Eucalyptus group. Tea Estates need them for firewood. Ecologists complain that they do a lot of damage by drawing too much of ground-water, lowering the water table.
Excerpt from www.gananoque.ca/sites/gananoque.ca/files/1992-041%20%20%...:
145 Stone Street South
The property has had an interesting history since the second recorded deed transfer in 1835. Dwellings on this lot have housed owners or tenants that shaped not only the town's history, but that of Canada West.
The residence seen today results from a literal architectural merger of early and late Victorian structures. The earlier building can still be seen with a gabled facade on Spruce Alley facing south and, perhaps, the ell parallel to Spruce Alley, facing east. The entrance to this dwelling, however, faced Stone Street, but has been overlapped and swallowed by the later major building phase. This early dwelling is characterized by roof lines of 30° pitch and return eaves. The design of this building was that of the Upper Canada version of the Greek Revival style, and included narrow clapboarding, operable shutters, broad corner boarding, watertable board and drip, and balanced 6/6 double hung sash fenestration.
During the merger, the early house was reclad with coved siding, had major fenestration changes made to its west facade, a second storey bracketed and roofed dormer; a triple window and on the south facade, a first storey rectangular projecting and roofed bay window all in the "new" style. Interestingly however, the second floor windows of the south gabled face were left unaltered, showing their original form with shutters removed but no added embellishment. It was as if the owner wanted to leave a small area of the original building for posterity to see.
The early dwelling portion surviving may date from 1840-42, the time of a sale by John MacDonald for the sum of 1250 pounds in the latter year. The period of later construction and of the major building elements now fronting onto Stone Street is definitely of late Victorian vintage, and the abstract data suggests a date of 1894 + when the property was purchased by Dr. James A. McCammon for $3,400.00. Certainly the design features are commensurate with an 1890's date.
Late Victorian architecture is often difficult to label stylistically, for this was an exuberant, even flamboyant era of eclecticism in residential design. The term "Bastard Victorian" was coined decades ago in an attempt to describe this free mixing of styles. One notices several features in this building which point up its whimsical interplay of styles:
1 The principal facade has elements of the earlier (1840's) Italianate Villa revival style - in the twin projecting full height almost tower-like bays. The north element projects 3' and houses the entrance including a semi-circular portico. The south bay, separated at eave line from the former by only inches, projects only half as much, but matches the north bay in detail and has paired and decorated windows. at first and second storeys.
2 Both projections are surmounted by matching steep mansard gables having hipped rooflets - a nice blending of French and Dutch stylistic elements.
3 The portico is balustraded above and accessed as a balcony by a pair of mannerist doors having three quarter glazed panels with arced corners top and bottom.
4 The main entrance consists of a truly classical 6 paneled door flanked however by sidelights which are lead carved diamond paned, and surmounted by a fanlight paned arched transome light.
5 This entrance composition is framed by two heavily grooved (fluted) engaged pilasters or antae, each sub supported by machine decorated drop but flat "brackets".
6 The fenestration is everywhere achieved to provide charm and delight. This involves eccentric placement (north elevator gabled ell); various sizes used in attic lights and roofed dorter and dormer lights; multiple groupings; projecting oriel lights (semi hexagonal in plan or boxed rectangular), and bay windows.
7 All windows are marked by the use of controlled and matching machine-detailed ornamentation. The design of this labeling and other trim makes constant use of groove lines, striations and counter sunk circular "dotting". This is the ornamentation of the industrial revolution, machined work employing power driven routers; jig, coping and band saws; square corner mortice cutters; drill presses and the like.
8 One can see in the motifs used,vestiges of the earlier Egyptian revival (the curved angel wing motif) of Queen Anne features and Tudor half timbering (notably in corner and band boarding). Some elements such as decorative cornice band boarding of the mansards at soffit junctions anticipate the Adirondack stick style then 20 years into the future. These employ cut out rectilinear relief paneling.
9 An eave window on the north elevation is one of the more elaborate design elements. This feature window pierces the eave line and is set out by heavy full-cheek brackets which are strongly articulated by cope sawing and applied and
incised decoration. A gable complete with returning eaves surmounts this element. A matching window was inserted into the west face of the original building.
10 The most pronounced elements of the new construction occur on the south elevation. One is a two storey projecting oriel, 3-light half hexagonal in plan at first floor and boxed rectangular form bay above. Both elements are crowned by large-scaled coved and oversailing eave soffits at each storey. A hipped roof bay window was added to the original building first storey, south face (below the untouched windows referred to above).
128/365 - We have a water table/sand table combo for the kids...word of advice: don't EVER buy one of these...as you can see from this picture, it's a MUDDY MESS! We just let the boys go to town on it though since it was really the first time we enjoyed our backyard this year...plus it was Mother's Day so part of our tradition is that I don't have to lift a finger all day (which means my husband had to bathe them after, ha ha).
Market Square Park features water fountains in the form of water tables that are like mini-reflecting pools. The stone surfaces feature colored imagery in pleasant hues and evoke associations with French impressionism in themes and style.
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Wallaroo and Wallaroo Mines. We probably all know that Wallaroo is a contraction of two local Narrunga words meaning “wallabies urine.” But why did Robert Miller, a 19th century gentleman do this? Why not call his run Quandong or some other innocuous Narrunga word? Miller soon sold the leasehold on to Walter Watson Hughes. It was one of Hughes’ shepherds, John Boor, who found knobs of green copper in stone by a wombat burrow on the property in December 1859.( Another shepherd Ryan discovered copper at Moonta.) Hughes soon had the Wallaroo Mine operating using miners from the Burra copper mine by mid 1860. But the Wallaroo Mines were actually located at Kadina. Hughes had the mining rights and became the major shareholder of both the Wallaroo and the Moonta mining companies. He increased his fortune many fold over becoming one of the wealthiest men in SA. He was a great benefactor of the University of Adelaide, hence his title of “the Father of the University “.
But the story of Wallaroo, rather than Wallaroo Mines, is about smelting copper rather than mining it. Wallaroo was and still is a major SA port and so it was logical that smelters be established near shipping. The first shipment of copper left Wallaroo in July 1860; the first shipment of smelted copper left Wallaroo in January 1862. The current Hughes smelter chimney left at Wallaroo was one of thirteen smelter stacks built by the mid 1860s. The largest was 120 feet high. Wallaroo smelters are shown in this photograph from the State Archives dated 1870.
The township of Wallaroo emerged adjacent to the smelters as a government town in 1861 with the first Post Office opening in 1863 and the first school in 1861. A Rounsevell coach service linked Wallaroo with Adelaide via a steamer connection from Port Clinton; the Customs House was open for business by 1862; and a desalination plant was operating by 1862 to provide water for the smelters. (Water was also a problem for the Wallaroo Mines as the watertable was high and necessitated a large pump house to pump water from the deep shafts.) Within a few years, Wallaroo was a significant town. Churches, schools, shops and businesses all made this district the major focus of the state. A number of the streets of the town commemorate the names of major investors in the Wallaroo Mining Company or others involved in copper mining names such as Bagot, Hughes, Hay, Stirling, Smith ( from Robert Barr Smith), Elder, Duncan( nephew of Hughes) etc. Other streets reflecting the Cornish mining and Welsh smelting history of the town include Cornish, England, Scotland, and Wales streets.
In 1890 the Wallaroo and Moonta Mines amalgamated. The combined companies employed on average around 1,900 people a year in the mines and smelters. The peak year for employment was 1906 when the company hired 2,700 men. This followed a disastrous fire in 1904 when the large Taylor Shaft and poppet was destroyed by fire at Moonta Mines. There were three main shafts operating at the Wallaroo Mines by 1906, the Boors, Hughes and Office shafts. Between 1860 and 1923 when the mine closed the Wallaroo Mine alone had produced almost £10,000 million worth of copper and the Moonta Mine had produced over £20,000 million worth of copper. But the industrial story of Wallaroo did not cease with the closing of the mines and the smelters.
Once Professor John Custance of the newly founded Roseworthy Agricultural College (1883) discovered the value of superphosphate fertilizer to wheat yields in SA a new fertilizer industry emerged. By the end of the 1890s when usage of super became more widely practised three fertilizer plants were operating in SA, one at Port Adelaide, one at Torrensville and the last at Wallaroo. The copper smelters at Wallaroo produced sulphuric acid as a by product which was mixed with phosphate rock in kilns to form superphosphate. The Wallaroo Phosphate Company began operations in 1899. From 1899 onwards the main imports at the Port of Wallaroo were coal for the copper smelters and phosphate rock for the fertilizer ovens. (The main exports were copper and wheat.) The Wallaroo Phosphate Company merged with the Mt Lyell Fertilizer Company of Tasmania in 1913. When the copper mines closed down in 1923 the fertilizer works was the main industrial employer in Wallaroo. The company had sulphuric acid railed in from Port Pirie where it was a by product of the silver, lead and zinc smelters of BHP there. In 1965 this company became the Adelaide and Wallaroo Fertilizers Company and later the Adelaide Chemical Company. It eventually became Top Brand Fertilizers in 1980 and continued trading for some years but it no longer operates. Phosphate or guano rock was originally imported from Chile to Wallaroo but after 1907 shipments came from Nauru which is basically a phosphate island! Today phosphate rock is mined within Australia at Mt Isa, the infamous Christmas Island and Wonarah in the Northern Territory.
Some of the old buildings passed on our coach tour of Wallaroo for you to inspect more closely over your lunch break are:
•20 Wildman St. House. This was once the home of Caroline Carleton. She wrote the The Song of Australia in 1859 for a poetry competition in Gawler. She got £10. Carl Linger wrote the music to go with it. Caroline moved to Wallaroo in 1870 to live with her daughter Amy who ran a private school in this house. On a trip back from Adelaide in 1874 Caroline Carleton died at Matta House at Kadina which was probably made available for her to live in by the Wallaroo Mining Company. She was buried in the Wallaroo cemetery and a few years later her daughter moved to Western Australia to live. There is a memorial cairn to Caroline Carleton opposite the current Post Office.
•St. Mary’s Anglican Church built in 1864 in Church St. Its pews and altar joinery are in teak.
•The old Police Station (John Tce) was erected by David Bower again in 1862. It closed in 1972. Note the old cells at the back. A newer Police station was built in the 1940s with a tiled roof but neither is used for policing these days.
•The Old Court House built in 1866 by local builder T. Heath. It was used as the local Court until 1972. For years it was the headquarters of the Wallaroo Band. The Court had to be close to the jetty as many cases involved international sailors who had to be dealt with quickly before they were due to sail onwards.
•Kirribilli House (corner Lydia Tce and Hughes St.) This is not to be confused with Kirribilli House in Sydney, the city residence of the Prime Minister! It too was built by David Bower in 1862, but not for a government or a mine official but for himself. At the rear are old stables and outbuildings.
•Sonbern Lodge in John Tce. It was built in 1914 as a Coffee Palace and Guest House (as a result of the Temperance Movement.) It opened to cater for arrivals on the train opposite. It has been a guest house/ motel for many years.
•The Railway Station. This American designed Art Nouveau station was opened in 1914 the same year that identical stations opened in Bordertown, Tailem Bend and Moonta. There had been a train station elsewhere in the railyards that handled passengers from when the railway to Kadina an Adelaide opened in 1878. When passenger trains ceased in 1969 it became a local Arts and Crafts Centre. Since 1985 it has been a conference centre.
•The Wallaroo Town Hall. This fine two storey Edwardian/Classical style building with a clock tower and spire roof was built in 1902. Unfortunately on 27 December 1917 a fire destroyed the building. A fund to rebuild was started and an identical structure re-opened in 1918. It was at this time that the clock tower and spire were added thanks to a local donor, Councillor Richard Tonkin.
•The current Wallaroo Post Office was erected in 1910 by the SA government although the Commonwealth was by then responsible for post offices. It is in a Georgian style and typical of many post offices of this decade. The last SA government built post offices were erected around 1919.
•Cornucopia Hotel. This amazingly large hotel was built and opened in 1862 and is the only hotel in Wallaroo to maintain its original façade. It is evidence of the high prospects expected of the Wallaroo Mines.
•The Customs House, 1862, built by David Bower at the same time as the government declared the international port of Wallaroo. The first Customs Officer was also the Harbourmaster. Used by SA Customs until 1901, then the Commonwealth Customs until 1920 when it became a private residence. There is no customs service today as the port only exports with no imports. This Georgian style building is on the Register of the National Estate and is a private residence.
•The Hughes Smelter 1861, built with 300,000 bricks standing 36.5 metre high. An inscription on the rear says W.W.H. 1861.
•The current National Trust Museum of Wallaroo was the original Post Office of 1865. It was used as a Post Office until 1910 and then the police from across the street took charge of the building for offices and a residence. The National Trust has owned it since 1975. The Museum covers the Wallaroo Smelting Industry; Caroline Carleton; Nautical History of Wallaroo; early telegraph and telephones; and general Wallaroo history. It opens at 2 pm and has an admission fee.
Wallaroo Mines. On the fringes of Kadina are some impressive relics of the copper mining era but unfortunately most of the industrial buildings were de-constructed and the materials salvaged for sale. The huge industrial complex of the mining era disappeared shortly after the mines closed down. But there are solid remains such as the impressive stone Harvey’s Engine House; the wonderful Wallaroo Mines Institute building, the old pioneer cemetery and the site of the former Wallaroo Mines Methodist Church. The Harvey engine to pump water from the shafts was installed in 1876 when the tower block was erected. The Wallaroo Mines Institute was erected and opened in 1902 but a Mechanics Institute was established here earlier in 1862. The 1902 Institute has a classical style façade and a non-regular sloped roof line. When the nearby Methodist Church at Wallaroo Mines was demolished in 1980 this Institute became St. Pirans Methodist Church, which was part of the Uniting Church. St. Piran is the patron saint of Cornwall and the patron saint of tin miners. The church ceased services in 2003. The burials in the Wallaroo Mines cemetery were re-interred in the Kadina cemetery. The Wesleyan Methodist Church here was built in 1867 and demolished in 1980. The parsonage is still behind the church site.
Wallaroo and Wallaroo Mines. We probably all know that Wallaroo is a contraction of two local Narrunga words meaning “wallabies urine.” But why did Robert Miller, a 19th century gentleman do this? Why not call his run Quandong or some other innocuous Narrunga word? Miller soon sold the leasehold on to Walter Watson Hughes. It was one of Hughes’ shepherds, John Boor, who found knobs of green copper in stone by a wombat burrow on the property in December 1859.( Another shepherd Ryan discovered copper at Moonta.) Hughes soon had the Wallaroo Mine operating using miners from the Burra copper mine by mid 1860. But the Wallaroo Mines were actually located at Kadina. Hughes had the mining rights and became the major shareholder of both the Wallaroo and the Moonta mining companies. He increased his fortune many fold over becoming one of the wealthiest men in SA. He was a great benefactor of the University of Adelaide, hence his title of “the Father of the University “.
But the story of Wallaroo, rather than Wallaroo Mines, is about smelting copper rather than mining it. Wallaroo was and still is a major SA port and so it was logical that smelters be established near shipping. The first shipment of copper left Wallaroo in July 1860; the first shipment of smelted copper left Wallaroo in January 1862. The current Hughes smelter chimney left at Wallaroo was one of thirteen smelter stacks built by the mid 1860s. The largest was 120 feet high. Wallaroo smelters are shown in this photograph from the State Archives dated 1870.
The township of Wallaroo emerged adjacent to the smelters as a government town in 1861 with the first Post Office opening in 1863 and the first school in 1861. A Rounsevell coach service linked Wallaroo with Adelaide via a steamer connection from Port Clinton; the Customs House was open for business by 1862; and a desalination plant was operating by 1862 to provide water for the smelters. (Water was also a problem for the Wallaroo Mines as the watertable was high and necessitated a large pump house to pump water from the deep shafts.) Within a few years, Wallaroo was a significant town. Churches, schools, shops and businesses all made this district the major focus of the state. A number of the streets of the town commemorate the names of major investors in the Wallaroo Mining Company or others involved in copper mining names such as Bagot, Hughes, Hay, Stirling, Smith ( from Robert Barr Smith), Elder, Duncan( nephew of Hughes) etc. Other streets reflecting the Cornish mining and Welsh smelting history of the town include Cornish, England, Scotland, and Wales streets.
In 1890 the Wallaroo and Moonta Mines amalgamated. The combined companies employed on average around 1,900 people a year in the mines and smelters. The peak year for employment was 1906 when the company hired 2,700 men. This followed a disastrous fire in 1904 when the large Taylor Shaft and poppet was destroyed by fire at Moonta Mines. There were three main shafts operating at the Wallaroo Mines by 1906, the Boors, Hughes and Office shafts. Between 1860 and 1923 when the mine closed the Wallaroo Mine alone had produced almost £10,000 million worth of copper and the Moonta Mine had produced over £20,000 million worth of copper. But the industrial story of Wallaroo did not cease with the closing of the mines and the smelters.
Once Professor John Custance of the newly founded Roseworthy Agricultural College (1883) discovered the value of superphosphate fertilizer to wheat yields in SA a new fertilizer industry emerged. By the end of the 1890s when usage of super became more widely practised three fertilizer plants were operating in SA, one at Port Adelaide, one at Torrensville and the last at Wallaroo. The copper smelters at Wallaroo produced sulphuric acid as a by product which was mixed with phosphate rock in kilns to form superphosphate. The Wallaroo Phosphate Company began operations in 1899. From 1899 onwards the main imports at the Port of Wallaroo were coal for the copper smelters and phosphate rock for the fertilizer ovens. (The main exports were copper and wheat.) The Wallaroo Phosphate Company merged with the Mt Lyell Fertilizer Company of Tasmania in 1913. When the copper mines closed down in 1923 the fertilizer works was the main industrial employer in Wallaroo. The company had sulphuric acid railed in from Port Pirie where it was a by product of the silver, lead and zinc smelters of BHP there. In 1965 this company became the Adelaide and Wallaroo Fertilizers Company and later the Adelaide Chemical Company. It eventually became Top Brand Fertilizers in 1980 and continued trading for some years but it no longer operates. Phosphate or guano rock was originally imported from Chile to Wallaroo but after 1907 shipments came from Nauru which is basically a phosphate island! Today phosphate rock is mined within Australia at Mt Isa, the infamous Christmas Island and Wonarah in the Northern Territory.
Some of the old buildings passed on our coach tour of Wallaroo for you to inspect more closely over your lunch break are:
•20 Wildman St. House. This was once the home of Caroline Carleton. She wrote the The Song of Australia in 1859 for a poetry competition in Gawler. She got £10. Carl Linger wrote the music to go with it. Caroline moved to Wallaroo in 1870 to live with her daughter Amy who ran a private school in this house. On a trip back from Adelaide in 1874 Caroline Carleton died at Matta House at Kadina which was probably made available for her to live in by the Wallaroo Mining Company. She was buried in the Wallaroo cemetery and a few years later her daughter moved to Western Australia to live. There is a memorial cairn to Caroline Carleton opposite the current Post Office.
•St. Mary’s Anglican Church built in 1864 in Church St. Its pews and altar joinery are in teak.
•The old Police Station (John Tce) was erected by David Bower again in 1862. It closed in 1972. Note the old cells at the back. A newer Police station was built in the 1940s with a tiled roof but neither is used for policing these days.
•The Old Court House built in 1866 by local builder T. Heath. It was used as the local Court until 1972. For years it was the headquarters of the Wallaroo Band. The Court had to be close to the jetty as many cases involved international sailors who had to be dealt with quickly before they were due to sail onwards.
•Kirribilli House (corner Lydia Tce and Hughes St.) This is not to be confused with Kirribilli House in Sydney, the city residence of the Prime Minister! It too was built by David Bower in 1862, but not for a government or a mine official but for himself. At the rear are old stables and outbuildings.
•Sonbern Lodge in John Tce. It was built in 1914 as a Coffee Palace and Guest House (as a result of the Temperance Movement.) It opened to cater for arrivals on the train opposite. It has been a guest house/ motel for many years.
•The Railway Station. This American designed Art Nouveau station was opened in 1914 the same year that identical stations opened in Bordertown, Tailem Bend and Moonta. There had been a train station elsewhere in the railyards that handled passengers from when the railway to Kadina an Adelaide opened in 1878. When passenger trains ceased in 1969 it became a local Arts and Crafts Centre. Since 1985 it has been a conference centre.
•The Wallaroo Town Hall. This fine two storey Edwardian/Classical style building with a clock tower and spire roof was built in 1902. Unfortunately on 27 December 1917 a fire destroyed the building. A fund to rebuild was started and an identical structure re-opened in 1918. It was at this time that the clock tower and spire were added thanks to a local donor, Councillor Richard Tonkin.
•The current Wallaroo Post Office was erected in 1910 by the SA government although the Commonwealth was by then responsible for post offices. It is in a Georgian style and typical of many post offices of this decade. The last SA government built post offices were erected around 1919.
•Cornucopia Hotel. This amazingly large hotel was built and opened in 1862 and is the only hotel in Wallaroo to maintain its original façade. It is evidence of the high prospects expected of the Wallaroo Mines.
•The Customs House, 1862, built by David Bower at the same time as the government declared the international port of Wallaroo. The first Customs Officer was also the Harbourmaster. Used by SA Customs until 1901, then the Commonwealth Customs until 1920 when it became a private residence. There is no customs service today as the port only exports with no imports. This Georgian style building is on the Register of the National Estate and is a private residence.
•The Hughes Smelter 1861, built with 300,000 bricks standing 36.5 metre high. An inscription on the rear says W.W.H. 1861.
•The current National Trust Museum of Wallaroo was the original Post Office of 1865. It was used as a Post Office until 1910 and then the police from across the street took charge of the building for offices and a residence. The National Trust has owned it since 1975. The Museum covers the Wallaroo Smelting Industry; Caroline Carleton; Nautical History of Wallaroo; early telegraph and telephones; and general Wallaroo history. It opens at 2 pm and has an admission fee.
Wallaroo and Wallaroo Mines. We probably all know that Wallaroo is a contraction of two local Narrunga words meaning “wallabies urine.” But why did Robert Miller, a 19th century gentleman do this? Why not call his run Quandong or some other innocuous Narrunga word? Miller soon sold the leasehold on to Walter Watson Hughes. It was one of Hughes’ shepherds, John Boor, who found knobs of green copper in stone by a wombat burrow on the property in December 1859.( Another shepherd Ryan discovered copper at Moonta.) Hughes soon had the Wallaroo Mine operating using miners from the Burra copper mine by mid 1860. But the Wallaroo Mines were actually located at Kadina. Hughes had the mining rights and became the major shareholder of both the Wallaroo and the Moonta mining companies. He increased his fortune many fold over becoming one of the wealthiest men in SA. He was a great benefactor of the University of Adelaide, hence his title of “the Father of the University “.
But the story of Wallaroo, rather than Wallaroo Mines, is about smelting copper rather than mining it. Wallaroo was and still is a major SA port and so it was logical that smelters be established near shipping. The first shipment of copper left Wallaroo in July 1860; the first shipment of smelted copper left Wallaroo in January 1862. The current Hughes smelter chimney left at Wallaroo was one of thirteen smelter stacks built by the mid 1860s. The largest was 120 feet high. Wallaroo smelters are shown in this photograph from the State Archives dated 1870.
The township of Wallaroo emerged adjacent to the smelters as a government town in 1861 with the first Post Office opening in 1863 and the first school in 1861. A Rounsevell coach service linked Wallaroo with Adelaide via a steamer connection from Port Clinton; the Customs House was open for business by 1862; and a desalination plant was operating by 1862 to provide water for the smelters. (Water was also a problem for the Wallaroo Mines as the watertable was high and necessitated a large pump house to pump water from the deep shafts.) Within a few years, Wallaroo was a significant town. Churches, schools, shops and businesses all made this district the major focus of the state. A number of the streets of the town commemorate the names of major investors in the Wallaroo Mining Company or others involved in copper mining names such as Bagot, Hughes, Hay, Stirling, Smith ( from Robert Barr Smith), Elder, Duncan( nephew of Hughes) etc. Other streets reflecting the Cornish mining and Welsh smelting history of the town include Cornish, England, Scotland, and Wales streets.
In 1890 the Wallaroo and Moonta Mines amalgamated. The combined companies employed on average around 1,900 people a year in the mines and smelters. The peak year for employment was 1906 when the company hired 2,700 men. This followed a disastrous fire in 1904 when the large Taylor Shaft and poppet was destroyed by fire at Moonta Mines. There were three main shafts operating at the Wallaroo Mines by 1906, the Boors, Hughes and Office shafts. Between 1860 and 1923 when the mine closed the Wallaroo Mine alone had produced almost £10,000 million worth of copper and the Moonta Mine had produced over £20,000 million worth of copper. But the industrial story of Wallaroo did not cease with the closing of the mines and the smelters.
Once Professor John Custance of the newly founded Roseworthy Agricultural College (1883) discovered the value of superphosphate fertilizer to wheat yields in SA a new fertilizer industry emerged. By the end of the 1890s when usage of super became more widely practised three fertilizer plants were operating in SA, one at Port Adelaide, one at Torrensville and the last at Wallaroo. The copper smelters at Wallaroo produced sulphuric acid as a by product which was mixed with phosphate rock in kilns to form superphosphate. The Wallaroo Phosphate Company began operations in 1899. From 1899 onwards the main imports at the Port of Wallaroo were coal for the copper smelters and phosphate rock for the fertilizer ovens. (The main exports were copper and wheat.) The Wallaroo Phosphate Company merged with the Mt Lyell Fertilizer Company of Tasmania in 1913. When the copper mines closed down in 1923 the fertilizer works was the main industrial employer in Wallaroo. The company had sulphuric acid railed in from Port Pirie where it was a by product of the silver, lead and zinc smelters of BHP there. In 1965 this company became the Adelaide and Wallaroo Fertilizers Company and later the Adelaide Chemical Company. It eventually became Top Brand Fertilizers in 1980 and continued trading for some years but it no longer operates. Phosphate or guano rock was originally imported from Chile to Wallaroo but after 1907 shipments came from Nauru which is basically a phosphate island! Today phosphate rock is mined within Australia at Mt Isa, the infamous Christmas Island and Wonarah in the Northern Territory.
Some of the old buildings passed on our coach tour of Wallaroo for you to inspect more closely over your lunch break are:
•20 Wildman St. House. This was once the home of Caroline Carleton. She wrote the The Song of Australia in 1859 for a poetry competition in Gawler. She got £10. Carl Linger wrote the music to go with it. Caroline moved to Wallaroo in 1870 to live with her daughter Amy who ran a private school in this house. On a trip back from Adelaide in 1874 Caroline Carleton died at Matta House at Kadina which was probably made available for her to live in by the Wallaroo Mining Company. She was buried in the Wallaroo cemetery and a few years later her daughter moved to Western Australia to live. There is a memorial cairn to Caroline Carleton opposite the current Post Office.
•St. Mary’s Anglican Church built in 1864 in Church St. Its pews and altar joinery are in teak.
•The old Police Station (John Tce) was erected by David Bower again in 1862. It closed in 1972. Note the old cells at the back. A newer Police station was built in the 1940s with a tiled roof but neither is used for policing these days.
•The Old Court House built in 1866 by local builder T. Heath. It was used as the local Court until 1972. For years it was the headquarters of the Wallaroo Band. The Court had to be close to the jetty as many cases involved international sailors who had to be dealt with quickly before they were due to sail onwards.
•Kirribilli House (corner Lydia Tce and Hughes St.) This is not to be confused with Kirribilli House in Sydney, the city residence of the Prime Minister! It too was built by David Bower in 1862, but not for a government or a mine official but for himself. At the rear are old stables and outbuildings.
•Sonbern Lodge in John Tce. It was built in 1914 as a Coffee Palace and Guest House (as a result of the Temperance Movement.) It opened to cater for arrivals on the train opposite. It has been a guest house/ motel for many years.
•The Railway Station. This American designed Art Nouveau station was opened in 1914 the same year that identical stations opened in Bordertown, Tailem Bend and Moonta. There had been a train station elsewhere in the railyards that handled passengers from when the railway to Kadina an Adelaide opened in 1878. When passenger trains ceased in 1969 it became a local Arts and Crafts Centre. Since 1985 it has been a conference centre.
•The Wallaroo Town Hall. This fine two storey Edwardian/Classical style building with a clock tower and spire roof was built in 1902. Unfortunately on 27 December 1917 a fire destroyed the building. A fund to rebuild was started and an identical structure re-opened in 1918. It was at this time that the clock tower and spire were added thanks to a local donor, Councillor Richard Tonkin.
•The current Wallaroo Post Office was erected in 1910 by the SA government although the Commonwealth was by then responsible for post offices. It is in a Georgian style and typical of many post offices of this decade. The last SA government built post offices were erected around 1919.
•Cornucopia Hotel. This amazingly large hotel was built and opened in 1862 and is the only hotel in Wallaroo to maintain its original façade. It is evidence of the high prospects expected of the Wallaroo Mines.
•The Customs House, 1862, built by David Bower at the same time as the government declared the international port of Wallaroo. The first Customs Officer was also the Harbourmaster. Used by SA Customs until 1901, then the Commonwealth Customs until 1920 when it became a private residence. There is no customs service today as the port only exports with no imports. This Georgian style building is on the Register of the National Estate and is a private residence.
•The Hughes Smelter 1861, built with 300,000 bricks standing 36.5 metre high. An inscription on the rear says W.W.H. 1861.
•The current National Trust Museum of Wallaroo was the original Post Office of 1865. It was used as a Post Office until 1910 and then the police from across the street took charge of the building for offices and a residence. The National Trust has owned it since 1975. The Museum covers the Wallaroo Smelting Industry; Caroline Carleton; Nautical History of Wallaroo; early telegraph and telephones; and general Wallaroo history. It opens at 2 pm and has an admission fee.
This is what Climate Change looks like in western NSW which is currently in the grip of the worst drought ever recorded. Some towns have run out of water with many more about to run out.
Increasing severity and persistence of drought and high temperatures will increase plant mortality (and the animals dependent on them). Here Coolabah are dieing back. Though present on the floodplain they may have a degree of dependency on the local watertable rather than just flood dependent. Flood flows are also affected by human water allocations as well as a drying catchment.
The old Marion County Jail Marion County Jail was built in 1938-1939. The ail is a simple two-story concrete cube with "Marion County Jail" carved into the parapet and decorative incised banding linking the second floor windows. A beltcourse separates the two floors, and the whole composition is anchored by a watertable. The centrally located entrance is sheltered by a simple cantilevered hood and flanked by original hopper-style windows. (Source: National Register of Historic Places Registration Form No. 97000633)
The structure is located in the Downtown Columbia Historic District listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a contributing property.
Western part of Sarawak on the island of Borneo. Homes are built up on stilts due to the high watertable and the threat of flooding.
11 East 51st Street, Midtown Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States
The residence at 11 East 51 Street was erected in 1904-06 for stone and building contractor John Peirce and was designed by noted architect John H. Duncan. At the time of its construction, Fifth Avenue just south of Central Park was the most prestigious residential area in the city and was known as Vanderbilt Row because of that family's intimate involvement in maintaining the elite character of the neighborhood.
Peirce was born in Frankfort, Maine where his father operated a granite quarry. Peirce succeeded to the family business in 1873 and soon came to control much of the granite industry in Maine. In the early 1880s he decided to move to New York City to oversee the operations of his New York and Maine Granite Paving Block Company and to expand the market for his firm's products. Peirce soon became one of the largest stone contractors in the country, earning the title of "Granite King."
By the 1890s Peirce had expanded the scope of his business to include general building contracting, and he later became involved in a number of large-scale civic infrastructure projects including the construction of New York City's first subway system. Many of the city's most iconic structures were erected with the assistance of Peirce "s firm.
At the apex of his professional and personal life at the turn of the twentieth century, Peirce decided to build a new home for his family in the city's most prestigious residential neighborhood. He commissioned architect John H. Duncan to design a residence along the newly-popular American basement plan, an innovation in row house layout that allowed a more scientific division of space on the interior and which lent itself to a number of exterior architectural styles including the Italian Renaissance used for the Peirce Residence.
The most striking feature of the house is the full rustication of the lower three floors. The upper floors are faced with smooth ashlar stone, with projecting cornices above the third and fifth stories. While generally austere in demeanor, a number of scuptural elements—including the projecting balcony at the second floor and the ornamental stone keystones and wreaths—display a plasticity more typically associated with the lavish Beaux-Arts style.
When completed, the Peirce Residence stood in the middle of a distinguished row of houses overlooking St. Patrick's Cathedral. Within a few years, however, the fortunes of both John Peirce and the neighborhood changed dramatically. Peirce's company went into receivership in 1909 and failed altogether in 1915. He lost his residence to foreclosure in 1914, at a time when many wealthy families were abandoning the neighborhood to commercial and apartment house development.
The building at 11 East 51st Street was subsequently occupied by the Gardner School for Girls and later by a series of businesses. In spite of the changes of use and in the character of the surrounding neighborhood, the Peirce Residence remains nearly perfectly intact and is a significant reminder of the area's history as a prestigious residential district.
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS
Early History and the Development of "Vanderbilt Row"
Far removed from the center of population at the tip of the Manhattan, the area surrounding Fifth Avenue between 42nd Street and the southern end of Central Park remained rural in character well into the first half of the nineteenth century. Most of the territory was originally owned by the City of New York, which had been granted "all the waste, vacant, unpatented, and unappropriated lands" under the Dongan Charter of 1686.
The city maintained possession of these common lands—which once totaled over one-seventh of the acreage on Manhattan—for over a century, only occasionally selling off small parcels to raise funds for the municipality. The city's policy changed after the American War of Independence. In 1785 the Common Council commissioned surveyor Casimir Theodore Goerck to map out five-acre lots to be sold at auction.
A new street called Middle Road, now known as Fifth Avenue, was laid out to provide access to the parcels. A second survey of additional lots was undertaken by Goerck in 1796 and two new roads, now Park and Sixth Avenues, were created.4 Under the city's plan, half of the lots were to be sold outright while the other half were made available under long-term leases of 21 years. Many of the parcels were acquired by wealthy New Yorkers as speculative investments in anticipation of future growth in the area.
James Mason, one-time president of the Chemical National Bank, for example, acquired most of the lots on the east side of Middle Road in the East 50s in 1825. A number public or public-minded institutions also purchased or were granted large plots along the avenue; the Colored Orphan Asylum was located between 43rd and 44th Streets, the Deaf and Dumb Asylum on 50th Street just east of Fifth Avenue, the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum between 51st and 52nd Streets, and St. Luke's Hospital between 54th and 55th Streets.
The rough character of the neighborhood—other tenants at this time included Waltemeir's cattle yard at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 54th Street—persisted into the 1860s, when development pressures finally began to transform the area into a fashionable residential district.
The inexorable northward movement of population and commerce along Manhattan Island picked up momentum during the building boom that followed the Civil War. Four-story brick- and brownstone-faced row houses were constructed on many of the side streets in the area, while larger mansions were erected along Fifth Avenue itself. Pioneers in this development were the sisters Mary Mason Jones and Rebecca Colford Jones, heirs of early Fifth Avenue speculator John Mason and both widows of established Knickerbocker families.
In 1867, Mary Mason Jones commissioned a block-long row of houses, later known as the "Marble Row," on the east side of the avenue between 57th and 58th Streets. Two years later in 1869, her sister hired architect Detlef Lienau to design her own set of lavish residences one block to the south. Having established the area as an acceptable neighborhood for the city's elite, other wealthy New Yorkers soon followed the Jones sisters northward up Fifth Avenue.
The gentrification of the area was further motivated by a number of important civic and institutional building projects initiated in the mid nineteenth century. Most notable was the planning and construction of Central Park in the late 1850s and 1860s; the preeminence of Fifth Avenue as the fashionable approach to the park was later solidified in 1870 when the city created a monumental new entrance at Grand Army Plaza.
A number of ecclesiastical organizations also opened impressive new buildings on the avenue at this time; St. Thomas Episcopal Church at 53rd Street in 1870, the Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church at 48th Street in 1872, the Fifth Avenue
Presbyterian Church at 55th Street in 1875, and the Roman Catholic St. Patrick's Cathedral between 50th and 51st Streets in 1879.
The status of the area as the city's most prestigious residential neighborhood was firmly cemented in 1879 when the Vanderbilt family began a monumental house-building campaign on Fifth Avenue. William Henry Vanderbilt—the family patriarch since the death of his father Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1877—located his own palatial residence on the western block front between 51st and 52nd Streets, while his two eldest sons each erected mansions just to the north.
The scope of the work was so impressive and the influence of the family on the neighborhood so great that the ten blocks of Fifth Avenue south of Central Park came to be known as "Vanderbilt Row." By the turn of the twentieth century, however, the march of business up Fifth Avenue had progressed such that the Vanderbilts were engaged in a constant struggle to protect its enclave from unsympathetic commercial redevelopment.
The situation became particularly pointed when the Roman Catholic Asylum announced plans to vacate its Midtown property—which occupied the entire block front facing directly across Fifth Avenue from William H. Vanderbilt's twin brownstone houses—to move to larger facilities in the Fordham Heights section of the Bronx.
At the close of 1899, a real estate syndicate lead by Charles T. Barney and George R. Sheldon finalized negotiations with the Asylum for the purchase of a large portion of the institution's property stretching between 51st and 52nd Streets from Fifth Avenue to just shy of Madison Avenue. In the ensuing months most of the lots along the side streets had been sold off to individual owners. The deeds for these lots contained a number of restrictive covenants that would have pleased the Vanderbilt family greatly; most important was the stipulation that only single-family houses could be erected on the land for a period of 25 years.
The lots along Fifth Avenue, however, did not find ready purchasers. The parcel at the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 51st Street was eventually taken by the Union Club—not a residential tenant but still in keeping with the exclusive character of the neighborhood. The plots immediately to the north, however, were acquired by Stewart H. Chisolm, who soon announced plans to erect an 18-story hotel on the site.
The Vanderbilt family acted quickly to block the project by directing their New York Realty Corporation to acquire the property. The family subsequently sold the northern lot at 651-653 Fifth Avenue to Morton F. Plant, a Vanderbilt associate, with the understanding that he would erect a first-class private residence.
The mid-block parcel at 645-647 Fifth Avenue was retained by the Vanderbilts, who commissioned architects Hunt & Hunt to design a pair of elegant marble row houses later known as the "Marble Twins" (both the Plant House and the sole survivor of the Marble Twins, 647 Fifth Avenue, are designated New York City Landmarks). With the Fifth Avenue frontage secured and elegant row houses now in construction along the side streets, it appeared that the Vanderbilts had succeeded in their efforts to maintain the residential character of Vanderbilt Row.
John Peirce and 11 East 51st Street
In 1902 William K. Vanderbilt, Jr. and his wife Virginia Vanderbilt acquired three of the former Asylum lots on East 51st Street. They eventually decided not to build a house on the property, moving instead into a mansion at 666 Fifth Avenue, immediately north of William K. Vanderbilt, Sr.'s residence.
The three parcels on East 51st Street were subsequently sold off to individual owners. The middle lot, now known as 11 East 51st Street, was acquired by stone contractor John Peirce and his wife Abby B. Peirce, who soon erected a row house for their own occupancy on the site. Peirce was a rising member of New York society at this time, being— amongst other things—one of the original incorporators of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company and serving on its first board of directors with Cornelius Vanderbilt and the family's associate Morton F. Plant.
John Peirce was born on September 28, 1852 in Frankfort, Maine to George A. and Louise T. Peirce. A year before his birth his father had entered into a partnership with John P. Rowe in opening the Mount Waldo granite quarry. The firm of Peirce and Rowe soon won a number of important contracts and the business grew steadily during subsequent decades.
After the death of his father in 1873, John Peirce and his brother George took over the family operation and formed their own partnership with Rowe under the firm of Peirce, Rowe & Co.18 John Peirce proved to be an astute businessman and the firm's operations expanded substantially in the following years.
In 1877 the company won a major contract to provide stone for the footings of the proposed East River Bridge in New York City, and two years later were commissioned for work on the new State, War and Navy building in Washington D.C. During this period Peirce began accumulating a series of inter-related companies controlling much of the granite production and sales in the state of Maine.
In 1880 he formally incorporated the Mount Waldo Granite Works to manage the Frankfort quarry. Two years later in 1882 he established the New York and Maine Granite Paving Block Company, which helped negotiate a multi-million dollar contract for the quarry to supply paving stones in New York City.
He eventually gained interests in the Hallowell Granite Works and the Bodwell Granite Company in Maine and the Stony Creek Red Granite Company in Connecticut. The acquisition of the Bodwell concern was a particularly important, as it was perhaps the largest and most established operation in state of Maine and controlled a number of quarries on Vinalhaven Island and along the coast.
It was at about this time that John Peirce decided to move to New York City to directly oversee the New York and Maine Granite Paving Block Company and to expand the market for his various companies' products. He soon secured an office in the newly constructed Temple Court building on Beekman Street in Lower Manhattan and began aggressively peddling granite to builders across the city and throughout the country.
An article on the New England granite business from the 1890s noted that Peirce pushed "the stone into new fields, widening old markets, and demonstrating its superiority in point of beauty and durability to most of the material currently used in building.. .it is largely through his efforts, also, that granite has come to be recognized as second to none as an all-round building stone."
Peirce's firm soon grew to be one of the largest granite contractors in the country, earning him the title of "Granite King." Stone from his Maine quarries was used on such notable buildings as the United States Post Office and Court House in Brooklyn (Mifflin E. Bell, 1885-91) and the American Surety Company Building (Bruce Price, 1894-96), the Empire Building (Kimball & Thompson, 189598), and the Germania Bank (Robert Maynicke, 1898-99) in Manhattan, all designated New York City Landmarks.
By the 1890s Peirce had also begun to take on general building contracting projects. One of his firm's most notable commissions was the city's new Hall of Records (now Surrogate's Court-Hall of Records, a designated New York City Landmark), erected in 1899-1907 at 31 Chambers Street. The Board of Estimate awarded Peirce the building contract in 1897 following a competitive bidding process; an article in the New York Times suggests that a sample of Hollowell granite, "which is noted for its whiteness and the durability of its color," helped sway the board in Peirce's favor.
Peirce also secured contracts on a number of other prominent civic building projects at the turn of the twentieth century, including the United States Customs House on Bowling Green (Cass Gilbert, 1899-1907) and the New York Public Library Main Branch on
Fifth Avenue (Carrere & Hastings, 1898-1911), both designated New York City Landmarks.
Peirce also worked on a several important early skyscrapers and other commercial structures, often in collaboration with architect Cass Gilbert. The stone for Gilbert's first commission in New York City, the Broadway-Chambers Building at 277 Broadway (1899-1900), was supplied by Peirce's quarries in Maine.
Peirce had a more direct hand in the erection of Gilbert's West Street Building (1905-07), serving as a primary investor in the West Street Improvement Company that conceived and financed the project, and as general contractor in its construction.
The John Peirce Company also performed general contracting work on Grand Central Terminal (Reed & Stem and Warren & Wetmore, 1903-13, a designated New York City Landmark) and the Interborough Rapid Transit Company Powerhouse (McKim, Mead & White, 1904).
John Peirce was at the apex of his professional success during the first years of the twentieth century. In addition to his stone and general contracting business, he began investing in giant civic infrastructure projects such as the construction of the New York City subway system and the Panama Canal.
He formally incorporated the John Peirce Company in 1905, consolidating his contracting firm with the New York and Main Paving Block Company. Large projects continued to come in.
Peirce's personal life was equally as successful; he was a member of the Metropolitan, Manhattan, and Lawyers Clubs and was very active in the New York Yacht Club. Newspaper coverage of society events frequently linked Peirce to a circle of prominent New Yorkers that included financier August Belmont, Mayor George B. McClellean, and contractor John B. McDonald.
It was at this time that Peirce decided to build a new house for his family in the city's most prestigious residential neighborhood. After acquiring a building plot from the Vanderbilts in 1904, he commissioned architect John H. Duncan to design a five-story dwelling according to the newly-popular American basement plan. Work was commenced in November and Peirce's own firm served as contractor on the project.
The building was complete in August of 1906 and Peirce moved in with his wife Abby and their grown children John Royden, Louise, Mary, Reginald, and Alice.
The Architect: John H. Duncan
John Hemingway Duncan (1855-1929), a founding member of the Architectural League of New York in 1881, had established his own architectural practice by 1886. Shortly thereafter he won the competition to design the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch in Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, dedicated to the men who fought in the Union forces during the Civil War. Built in 1889-92, it is a monumental arch in the Roman Imperial tradition.
In 1890 Duncan won another prestigious competition to design the General Ulysses S. Grant National Memorial, more familiarly known as Grant's Tomb. Built in 1891-97, it too was inspired by the Classical sources of Greek and Roman architecture.
Following his work on the two monuments, Duncan began to acquire a clientele of affluent New Yorkers who commissioned him to design residences in Midtown Manhattan, on the Upper East Side, and on the Upper West Side. For his residential designs, Duncan preferred the French sources promulgated by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and rusticated facade, large-scale ornamental details, and imposing mansard roofs were among his favored motifs.
Examples of the type may be seen in the Philip and Carrie Lehman House at 7 West 54th Street (1899-1900), the Henri Wertheim Residence at 4 East 67th Street (1901), the Thomas J. McLaughlin House at 8 East 62nd Street (1902), and the residence at 11 East 70th Street (190910), all designated New York City Landmarks.
Design of the John Peirce Residence
In the late nineteenth century, the New York City row house began to be transformed by architects and housing developers interested in moving beyond the traditional form to achieve a more "scientific division of space," while at the same time effecting an "artistic disposition" on the interior as well as the exterior.
One of the most notable solutions was what came to be called the American basement plan. According to architectural historian Russell Sturgis, the American basement plan was first introduced around 1880. It gained widespread popularity during the 1890s and first few years of the 1900s, when it was promoted in the architecture and real estate press as a practical, stylistic, and even social improvement over the speculatively built brownstone row houses that had predominated into the latter half of the nineteenth century.
In the traditional row house plan, the main entrance was reached by a tall flight of stairs—the stoop, from the Dutch for "step"—which was set to one side of the fa9ade. The main reception hall shared the first floor with the parlor, beyond which was usually another parlor, a library, or sometimes a dining room. More often the dining room was located in the front of the raised basement, which was entered via a short flight of stairs sunk beneath the stoop; visitors to the house would therefore enter on the level of the family's main living space.
The entrance to an American basement plan row house was instead lowered virtually to street level, and was often centered on the fa9ade. The resulting changes in the interior arrangement of space were quite dramatic; the main entrance hall and stair now occupied the front of the ground story with the kitchen behind, and on the first floor the parlor now occupied the entire building frontage, separated from the rear dining room by a stair hall that functioned as a secondary reception hall.
Moving the entrance to the center of the ground floor created the possibility of a generous foyer leading to a grand main stairway, and a larger, better lit parlor occupying the entire building frontage on the first floor.
Architecture critic Montgomery Schuyler summed up the innovations embodied by the "New New York House," writing in 1906 for Architectural Record that ".there is a practical consensus to the effect that the "American basement," with the full frontage available on the second floor, is the most convenient arrangement, and the most economical in reality in spite of the 'waste' of the entrance hall.
And the narrower the front, the more desirable it is, practically and especially architecturally, that the entrance be at the centre."
The introduction of this new row house type coincided with increased stylistic experimentation by architects and developers seeking to create distinguished fa9ades that would be readily marketable as private, upper-class residences.
Fostered in part by the romantic classical styles used at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, many of the row houses employing the American basement plan were given fa9ades in a variety of architectural styles including Renaissance Revival, Modern French, Beaux-Arts, and Georgian Revival.
In his design for the Peirce Residence, architect John H. Duncan combined many elements of the Italian Renaissance with a few details taken from the French Beaux-Arts. The most striking feature of the house is the full rustication of the lower three floors, which terminates in a severe projecting cornice just below the fourth-story windows.
The upper floors are faced with smooth ashlar stone with a deeply projecting, bracketed cornice above. All of the windows have minimal enframements, giving the house the austere demeanor typical of the Italian Renaissance. The most dramatic elements—the molded entrance enframement with cartouche, the prominent balcony with iron railing at the second story, and the ornamental wreaths at the second and fifth floors—display a plasticity more typically associated with the Beaux-Arts style.
Subsequent History
When completed, John Peirce's residence stood at the middle of a distinguished row of houses overlooking St. Patrick's Cathedral. The collection of buildings displayed a wide range of architectural styles, from the extravagant Beaux-Arts style of 3 East 51st Street to the reserved Federal style at 5 East 51st Street.
Most employed the American basement plan; all were first class. The location must have been ideal for a successful businessman settling into the later phases of his life. The idyllic existence did not last long, however, and within a few years the fortunes of both John Peirce and the neighborhood in which he built his lavish new house changed dramatically.
The first signs of trouble came in 1909, when the John Peirce Company and a number of related firms were placed in receivership.38 It was widely reported that the difficulties stemmed from the inability of the Mount Waldo Granite Works to collect on a number of large contracts, but some speculated that it was actually the result of souring relations between Peirce and the rest of the board of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company.
Peirce was able to recover temporarily—helped in part by a number of large government projects including the stone contract for Manhattan's new Municipal Building (William M. Kendall of McKim, Mead & White, 1907-14, a designated New York City Landmark)—and by 1910 his firms were back on relatively sound financial footing.
The entire granite industry, however, was already in a steep decline. Newer materials such as concrete were increasingly replacing the stone on building projects of all sizes, and the market for Peirce's company was clearly shrinking. At the end of 1915 the company again went into receivership, this time never to recover.
Peirce's final professional downfall was foreshadowed by his personal one. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company initiated foreclosure proceedings against the contractor— who owed over $200,000—in December of 1914. By February of the following year the house at 11 East 51st Street had been taken over by the insurance company. At this time the neighborhood surrounding the residence was in the midst of a major transformation, as the mansions of Fifth Avenue and the lavish houses of the adjacent side streets began to give way to commercial and apartment house development.
Seeking a more exclusive location, wealthy families moved farther north to the Upper East Side. Many of the townhouses that survived were altered for commercial use on the ground floors and divided into apartments above. In this climate it is likely that the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company was unable to find a suitable buyer for the former Peirce Residence.
The restrictive covenants imposed on the property by the Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum were also still in effect, limiting potential redevelopment of the site. The company eventually rented the building to Louise Eltinge and Mary E. Masland, who operated the Gardner School for Girls out of the house for a number of years.
The pair purchased the property outright in 1920, only to lose it in a foreclosure proceeding of their own in 1933. The building has subsequently been used for commercial purposes and is currently owned by the Mercantil C.A. Banco Universal. In spite of the changes of use and in the character of the surrounding neighborhood, the Peirce Residence remains nearly perfectly intact and is a significant reminder of the area's history as the city's most prestigious residential neighborhood.
Description
The Italian Renaissance-style John Peirce Residence has a symmetrical two-bay-wide front fa9ade clad in granite, the first three stories of which are rusticated while the upper floors are of smooth ashlar. It is five and a half stories plus basement in height and just over 27 feet in width. Based on the American basement plan, the building's ground floor is raised slightly above grade and the main entrance is located at the center of the facade and is approached by a low stoop.
The stoop is flanked by granite knee walls projecting from the main facade; bronze railings have been installed on the stoop just inside the knee walls. To the left of the stoop an areaway is enclosed with a short granite knee wall; the level of the areaway has been raised to the top of the knee wall, a metal fence has been installed above the wall, lights have been installed on top of areaway, and a bronze standpipe has been installed in the left face of the wall.
To the right of the stoop a short flight of stairs leads down to the basement entrance, flanked by short granite knee walls; a metal fence has been installed above the walls with a metal gate providing access to the stairs, lights have been installed on top of knee walls, a metal railing has been installed along right side of stair, a recess at the left of the stair has a metal security grille, basement entrance has been tiled and a non-historic entrance door and enframement installed.
The rectangular entrance enframement is embellished with wide stone molding ornamented by an abstracted egg-and-dart motif and is capped by a carved stone wreath wrapped around a plain cartouche. The historic bronze door frame holds a pair of bronze doors—each containing a large single pane of glass covered by a delicately filigreed bronze grille—separated from a single-pane transom light by a egg-and-dart bronze transom bar with a decorative frontispiece.
A single electric light fixture hangs from the soffit of the entrance enframement. Flanking the entrance is a pair of windows crisply recessed into the facade and ornamented with delicately filigreed bronze grilles. Projecting granite sills under the window openings rest flush on the building's tall granite watertable.
A wide band of base molding separates the granite watertable from the rusticated limestone of the main facade. The second story features a pair of round-arched window openings above a projecting balcony.
The window openings are ornamented with a cove molding enframement, keystones embellished with decorative scrolled brackets and wreaths, slightly projecting voussoirs and quoins, and are fitted with casement French windows with five-pane panels and a semi-circular transom light above; single lights have been installed in the soffits of both window openings. Three metal flag poles are installed on the building facade flanking the window openings.
The balcony is supported by scrolled brackets with acanthus leave ornament and is enclosed by a wrought-iron railing with ornamental cast-iron baluster. The third story features a pair of rectangular window openings fitted with triple-hung windows; the lower sash has six panes, upper sashes have two panes each.
A block modillion cornice separates the third and fourth stories; several lights have been installed on top of cornice. The fourth story features a pair of round-arched window openings ornamented with cove-molding enframements and capped with keystones embellished with scrolled brackets.
Window openings are fitted with casement French windows with a semi-circular transom light above. Non-historic, replacement metal railings span the lower section of the window openings.
A stone beltcourse extends the width of the building midway up the windows, with molded frieze panels below. The fifth story features a set of three rectangular window openings fitted with double hung, one-over-one wood windows. The face of the fifth story is slightly recessed from the rest of the facade, while the window enframements remain flush with the lower floors.
A pair of carved stone wreaths flanks the window openings. The cornice above the fifth floor features a molded frieze panel with raised paterae, a dentil course, a course of egg-and-dart molding, and is supported by scrolled modillions. A portion of both the west and east side facades are visible from street level above the rooflines of the neighboring buildings.
Both show the limestone of the main facade tied back into a brick side wall, with a sloping limestone parapet and a limestone chimney above.
- From the 2009 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report
Wallaroo and Wallaroo Mines. We probably all know that Wallaroo is a contraction of two local Narrunga words meaning “wallabies urine.” But why did Robert Miller, a 19th century gentleman do this? Why not call his run Quandong or some other innocuous Narrunga word? Miller soon sold the leasehold on to Walter Watson Hughes. It was one of Hughes’ shepherds, John Boor, who found knobs of green copper in stone by a wombat burrow on the property in December 1859.( Another shepherd Ryan discovered copper at Moonta.) Hughes soon had the Wallaroo Mine operating using miners from the Burra copper mine by mid 1860. But the Wallaroo Mines were actually located at Kadina. Hughes had the mining rights and became the major shareholder of both the Wallaroo and the Moonta mining companies. He increased his fortune many fold over becoming one of the wealthiest men in SA. He was a great benefactor of the University of Adelaide, hence his title of “the Father of the University “.
But the story of Wallaroo, rather than Wallaroo Mines, is about smelting copper rather than mining it. Wallaroo was and still is a major SA port and so it was logical that smelters be established near shipping. The first shipment of copper left Wallaroo in July 1860; the first shipment of smelted copper left Wallaroo in January 1862. The current Hughes smelter chimney left at Wallaroo was one of thirteen smelter stacks built by the mid 1860s. The largest was 120 feet high. Wallaroo smelters are shown in this photograph from the State Archives dated 1870.
The township of Wallaroo emerged adjacent to the smelters as a government town in 1861 with the first Post Office opening in 1863 and the first school in 1861. A Rounsevell coach service linked Wallaroo with Adelaide via a steamer connection from Port Clinton; the Customs House was open for business by 1862; and a desalination plant was operating by 1862 to provide water for the smelters. (Water was also a problem for the Wallaroo Mines as the watertable was high and necessitated a large pump house to pump water from the deep shafts.) Within a few years, Wallaroo was a significant town. Churches, schools, shops and businesses all made this district the major focus of the state. A number of the streets of the town commemorate the names of major investors in the Wallaroo Mining Company or others involved in copper mining names such as Bagot, Hughes, Hay, Stirling, Smith ( from Robert Barr Smith), Elder, Duncan( nephew of Hughes) etc. Other streets reflecting the Cornish mining and Welsh smelting history of the town include Cornish, England, Scotland, and Wales streets.
In 1890 the Wallaroo and Moonta Mines amalgamated. The combined companies employed on average around 1,900 people a year in the mines and smelters. The peak year for employment was 1906 when the company hired 2,700 men. This followed a disastrous fire in 1904 when the large Taylor Shaft and poppet was destroyed by fire at Moonta Mines. There were three main shafts operating at the Wallaroo Mines by 1906, the Boors, Hughes and Office shafts. Between 1860 and 1923 when the mine closed the Wallaroo Mine alone had produced almost £10,000 million worth of copper and the Moonta Mine had produced over £20,000 million worth of copper. But the industrial story of Wallaroo did not cease with the closing of the mines and the smelters.
Once Professor John Custance of the newly founded Roseworthy Agricultural College (1883) discovered the value of superphosphate fertilizer to wheat yields in SA a new fertilizer industry emerged. By the end of the 1890s when usage of super became more widely practised three fertilizer plants were operating in SA, one at Port Adelaide, one at Torrensville and the last at Wallaroo. The copper smelters at Wallaroo produced sulphuric acid as a by product which was mixed with phosphate rock in kilns to form superphosphate. The Wallaroo Phosphate Company began operations in 1899. From 1899 onwards the main imports at the Port of Wallaroo were coal for the copper smelters and phosphate rock for the fertilizer ovens. (The main exports were copper and wheat.) The Wallaroo Phosphate Company merged with the Mt Lyell Fertilizer Company of Tasmania in 1913. When the copper mines closed down in 1923 the fertilizer works was the main industrial employer in Wallaroo. The company had sulphuric acid railed in from Port Pirie where it was a by product of the silver, lead and zinc smelters of BHP there. In 1965 this company became the Adelaide and Wallaroo Fertilizers Company and later the Adelaide Chemical Company. It eventually became Top Brand Fertilizers in 1980 and continued trading for some years but it no longer operates. Phosphate or guano rock was originally imported from Chile to Wallaroo but after 1907 shipments came from Nauru which is basically a phosphate island! Today phosphate rock is mined within Australia at Mt Isa, the infamous Christmas Island and Wonarah in the Northern Territory.
Some of the old buildings passed on our coach tour of Wallaroo for you to inspect more closely over your lunch break are:
•20 Wildman St. House. This was once the home of Caroline Carleton. She wrote the The Song of Australia in 1859 for a poetry competition in Gawler. She got £10. Carl Linger wrote the music to go with it. Caroline moved to Wallaroo in 1870 to live with her daughter Amy who ran a private school in this house. On a trip back from Adelaide in 1874 Caroline Carleton died at Matta House at Kadina which was probably made available for her to live in by the Wallaroo Mining Company. She was buried in the Wallaroo cemetery and a few years later her daughter moved to Western Australia to live. There is a memorial cairn to Caroline Carleton opposite the current Post Office.
•St. Mary’s Anglican Church built in 1864 in Church St. Its pews and altar joinery are in teak.
•The old Police Station (John Tce) was erected by David Bower again in 1862. It closed in 1972. Note the old cells at the back. A newer Police station was built in the 1940s with a tiled roof but neither is used for policing these days.
•The Old Court House built in 1866 by local builder T. Heath. It was used as the local Court until 1972. For years it was the headquarters of the Wallaroo Band. The Court had to be close to the jetty as many cases involved international sailors who had to be dealt with quickly before they were due to sail onwards.
•Kirribilli House (corner Lydia Tce and Hughes St.) This is not to be confused with Kirribilli House in Sydney, the city residence of the Prime Minister! It too was built by David Bower in 1862, but not for a government or a mine official but for himself. At the rear are old stables and outbuildings.
•Sonbern Lodge in John Tce. It was built in 1914 as a Coffee Palace and Guest House (as a result of the Temperance Movement.) It opened to cater for arrivals on the train opposite. It has been a guest house/ motel for many years.
•The Railway Station. This American designed Art Nouveau station was opened in 1914 the same year that identical stations opened in Bordertown, Tailem Bend and Moonta. There had been a train station elsewhere in the railyards that handled passengers from when the railway to Kadina an Adelaide opened in 1878. When passenger trains ceased in 1969 it became a local Arts and Crafts Centre. Since 1985 it has been a conference centre.
•The Wallaroo Town Hall. This fine two storey Edwardian/Classical style building with a clock tower and spire roof was built in 1902. Unfortunately on 27 December 1917 a fire destroyed the building. A fund to rebuild was started and an identical structure re-opened in 1918. It was at this time that the clock tower and spire were added thanks to a local donor, Councillor Richard Tonkin.
•The current Wallaroo Post Office was erected in 1910 by the SA government although the Commonwealth was by then responsible for post offices. It is in a Georgian style and typical of many post offices of this decade. The last SA government built post offices were erected around 1919.
•Cornucopia Hotel. This amazingly large hotel was built and opened in 1862 and is the only hotel in Wallaroo to maintain its original façade. It is evidence of the high prospects expected of the Wallaroo Mines.
•The Customs House, 1862, built by David Bower at the same time as the government declared the international port of Wallaroo. The first Customs Officer was also the Harbourmaster. Used by SA Customs until 1901, then the Commonwealth Customs until 1920 when it became a private residence. There is no customs service today as the port only exports with no imports. This Georgian style building is on the Register of the National Estate and is a private residence.
•The Hughes Smelter 1861, built with 300,000 bricks standing 36.5 metre high. An inscription on the rear says W.W.H. 1861.
•The current National Trust Museum of Wallaroo was the original Post Office of 1865. It was used as a Post Office until 1910 and then the police from across the street took charge of the building for offices and a residence. The National Trust has owned it since 1975. The Museum covers the Wallaroo Smelting Industry; Caroline Carleton; Nautical History of Wallaroo; early telegraph and telephones; and general Wallaroo history. It opens at 2 pm and has an admission fee.
I found out about this residence a year or two ago after downloding and reading many online alberta town documents. This beautiful house was built in 1916 and finished in 1917. The beautiful barn was built in 1918.
History from the Vulcan County Heritage document, is below.
Statement of Integrity
The Miller Residence is in good, near
original condition. The stonework appears
to be in good condition, with few episodes
of cracking or spalling of cobblestones. The
original 9-over-1 single hung windows have
been replaced with aluminum sometime in
the last 20 years. The gable peak has been
re-stuccoed and the original cobblestones in
the stucco covered. Balcony rails have been
added to the balcony. There are areas of
cracked parging at the watertable in various
locations around the house. A flat roof
addition has been added to the rear of the
house but is subtle and sympathetic to the
original design.
Description of Historic Place
The Miller Residence is a handsome one
and one-half storey ornate cobble-stone
residence situated on a farm site northeast
of the Village of Carmangay. Situated
amongst a rural landscape, the Miller
Residence displays Arts and Crafts elements
and is characterized by its front-gabled roof with
gabled wall dormers, wide overhangs,
half-timbering at the gable peaks, and
extensive cobble-stone cladding on the
first storey. The Miller farm site includes a
front-gambrelled barn with diamond paned
windows as the peak and sliding double
doors.
Heritage Value of Historic Place
The Miller Residence, built 1916-1917,
is valued for its unique architectural
expression and is a notable example of local
masonry construction in rural Carmangay.
The use of locally-available cobble-stones
demonstrates the ingenuity on behalf of
its masonry contractors. Large slabs of
local stone were utilized for the building’s
foundation. The walls up to the first storey,
are comprised of squared stones two feet
thick, which were squared directly on site.
Above the first storey, a main stone wall
was built that measures 40 centimeters
thick. Smaller field stones were used for
the veneer of building that give the house a
rustic charm. Echoing trends in architecture
at the time, an Arts and Crafts aesthetic is
reflected in its projecting central verandah
with stone columns and closed balustrade,
half-timbered gables, and the varied use
of textured claddings, such as stucco and
stone.
The MIller Residence is significant for
its association to the Miller family, who
were prominent pioneer farmers in the
Carmangay area. There house is symbolic
of the prosperity of the Miller family and
of Carmangay in the late 1910s. They
constructed this homestead between 1916
and 1917 with their fifth child born shortly
after its completion. Both W.H. Miller and
his wife were prominent local citizens and
were active members of the Carmangay
community. W.H. Miller served as chairman
of the school board for a period of 19
years; additionally he was a member of
the Agricultural Society, and a director
and teacher for the Methodist and United Church. W.H. Miller and his wife retired from farming in
1937 and relocated to Penticton. At this time, the house
was passed on to their son Wallace and his wife Rose, who
occupied the premises for some time.
The Miller Residence is further valued as a historic
farmstead and is a tangible link to the farming industry in
rural Carmangay. During the Edwardian era, Carmangay
and its surrounding area began to attract a number of
wheat farmers. The industry grew steadily due to fertile
soils and the completion of the CPR railway in 1909-11,
which facilitated both the transport of goods and people to
Calgary. The high level of craftsmanship demonstrated in
the Miller Residence is atypical of farming homesteads in
Southern Alberta, and reflects the prosperity of the Miller
family in the Interwar period. The Miller Residence, known
locally as the ‘Stone House’, remains a landmark of the
community today.
Wallaroo and Wallaroo Mines. We probably all know that Wallaroo is a contraction of two local Narrunga words meaning “wallabies urine.” But why did Robert Miller, a 19th century gentleman do this? Why not call his run Quandong or some other innocuous Narrunga word? Miller soon sold the leasehold on to Walter Watson Hughes. It was one of Hughes’ shepherds, John Boor, who found knobs of green copper in stone by a wombat burrow on the property in December 1859.( Another shepherd Ryan discovered copper at Moonta.) Hughes soon had the Wallaroo Mine operating using miners from the Burra copper mine by mid 1860. But the Wallaroo Mines were actually located at Kadina. Hughes had the mining rights and became the major shareholder of both the Wallaroo and the Moonta mining companies. He increased his fortune many fold over becoming one of the wealthiest men in SA. He was a great benefactor of the University of Adelaide, hence his title of “the Father of the University “.
But the story of Wallaroo, rather than Wallaroo Mines, is about smelting copper rather than mining it. Wallaroo was and still is a major SA port and so it was logical that smelters be established near shipping. The first shipment of copper left Wallaroo in July 1860; the first shipment of smelted copper left Wallaroo in January 1862. The current Hughes smelter chimney left at Wallaroo was one of thirteen smelter stacks built by the mid 1860s. The largest was 120 feet high. Wallaroo smelters are shown in this photograph from the State Archives dated 1870.
The township of Wallaroo emerged adjacent to the smelters as a government town in 1861 with the first Post Office opening in 1863 and the first school in 1861. A Rounsevell coach service linked Wallaroo with Adelaide via a steamer connection from Port Clinton; the Customs House was open for business by 1862; and a desalination plant was operating by 1862 to provide water for the smelters. (Water was also a problem for the Wallaroo Mines as the watertable was high and necessitated a large pump house to pump water from the deep shafts.) Within a few years, Wallaroo was a significant town. Churches, schools, shops and businesses all made this district the major focus of the state. A number of the streets of the town commemorate the names of major investors in the Wallaroo Mining Company or others involved in copper mining names such as Bagot, Hughes, Hay, Stirling, Smith ( from Robert Barr Smith), Elder, Duncan( nephew of Hughes) etc. Other streets reflecting the Cornish mining and Welsh smelting history of the town include Cornish, England, Scotland, and Wales streets.
In 1890 the Wallaroo and Moonta Mines amalgamated. The combined companies employed on average around 1,900 people a year in the mines and smelters. The peak year for employment was 1906 when the company hired 2,700 men. This followed a disastrous fire in 1904 when the large Taylor Shaft and poppet was destroyed by fire at Moonta Mines. There were three main shafts operating at the Wallaroo Mines by 1906, the Boors, Hughes and Office shafts. Between 1860 and 1923 when the mine closed the Wallaroo Mine alone had produced almost £10,000 million worth of copper and the Moonta Mine had produced over £20,000 million worth of copper. But the industrial story of Wallaroo did not cease with the closing of the mines and the smelters.
Once Professor John Custance of the newly founded Roseworthy Agricultural College (1883) discovered the value of superphosphate fertilizer to wheat yields in SA a new fertilizer industry emerged. By the end of the 1890s when usage of super became more widely practised three fertilizer plants were operating in SA, one at Port Adelaide, one at Torrensville and the last at Wallaroo. The copper smelters at Wallaroo produced sulphuric acid as a by product which was mixed with phosphate rock in kilns to form superphosphate. The Wallaroo Phosphate Company began operations in 1899. From 1899 onwards the main imports at the Port of Wallaroo were coal for the copper smelters and phosphate rock for the fertilizer ovens. (The main exports were copper and wheat.) The Wallaroo Phosphate Company merged with the Mt Lyell Fertilizer Company of Tasmania in 1913. When the copper mines closed down in 1923 the fertilizer works was the main industrial employer in Wallaroo. The company had sulphuric acid railed in from Port Pirie where it was a by product of the silver, lead and zinc smelters of BHP there. In 1965 this company became the Adelaide and Wallaroo Fertilizers Company and later the Adelaide Chemical Company. It eventually became Top Brand Fertilizers in 1980 and continued trading for some years but it no longer operates. Phosphate or guano rock was originally imported from Chile to Wallaroo but after 1907 shipments came from Nauru which is basically a phosphate island! Today phosphate rock is mined within Australia at Mt Isa, the infamous Christmas Island and Wonarah in the Northern Territory.
Some of the old buildings passed on our coach tour of Wallaroo for you to inspect more closely over your lunch break are:
•20 Wildman St. House. This was once the home of Caroline Carleton. She wrote the The Song of Australia in 1859 for a poetry competition in Gawler. She got £10. Carl Linger wrote the music to go with it. Caroline moved to Wallaroo in 1870 to live with her daughter Amy who ran a private school in this house. On a trip back from Adelaide in 1874 Caroline Carleton died at Matta House at Kadina which was probably made available for her to live in by the Wallaroo Mining Company. She was buried in the Wallaroo cemetery and a few years later her daughter moved to Western Australia to live. There is a memorial cairn to Caroline Carleton opposite the current Post Office.
•St. Mary’s Anglican Church built in 1864 in Church St. Its pews and altar joinery are in teak.
•The old Police Station (John Tce) was erected by David Bower again in 1862. It closed in 1972. Note the old cells at the back. A newer Police station was built in the 1940s with a tiled roof but neither is used for policing these days.
•The Old Court House built in 1866 by local builder T. Heath. It was used as the local Court until 1972. For years it was the headquarters of the Wallaroo Band. The Court had to be close to the jetty as many cases involved international sailors who had to be dealt with quickly before they were due to sail onwards.
•Kirribilli House (corner Lydia Tce and Hughes St.) This is not to be confused with Kirribilli House in Sydney, the city residence of the Prime Minister! It too was built by David Bower in 1862, but not for a government or a mine official but for himself. At the rear are old stables and outbuildings.
•Sonbern Lodge in John Tce. It was built in 1914 as a Coffee Palace and Guest House (as a result of the Temperance Movement.) It opened to cater for arrivals on the train opposite. It has been a guest house/ motel for many years.
•The Railway Station. This American designed Art Nouveau station was opened in 1914 the same year that identical stations opened in Bordertown, Tailem Bend and Moonta. There had been a train station elsewhere in the railyards that handled passengers from when the railway to Kadina an Adelaide opened in 1878. When passenger trains ceased in 1969 it became a local Arts and Crafts Centre. Since 1985 it has been a conference centre.
•The Wallaroo Town Hall. This fine two storey Edwardian/Classical style building with a clock tower and spire roof was built in 1902. Unfortunately on 27 December 1917 a fire destroyed the building. A fund to rebuild was started and an identical structure re-opened in 1918. It was at this time that the clock tower and spire were added thanks to a local donor, Councillor Richard Tonkin.
•The current Wallaroo Post Office was erected in 1910 by the SA government although the Commonwealth was by then responsible for post offices. It is in a Georgian style and typical of many post offices of this decade. The last SA government built post offices were erected around 1919.
•Cornucopia Hotel. This amazingly large hotel was built and opened in 1862 and is the only hotel in Wallaroo to maintain its original façade. It is evidence of the high prospects expected of the Wallaroo Mines.
•The Customs House, 1862, built by David Bower at the same time as the government declared the international port of Wallaroo. The first Customs Officer was also the Harbourmaster. Used by SA Customs until 1901, then the Commonwealth Customs until 1920 when it became a private residence. There is no customs service today as the port only exports with no imports. This Georgian style building is on the Register of the National Estate and is a private residence.
•The Hughes Smelter 1861, built with 300,000 bricks standing 36.5 metre high. An inscription on the rear says W.W.H. 1861.
•The current National Trust Museum of Wallaroo was the original Post Office of 1865. It was used as a Post Office until 1910 and then the police from across the street took charge of the building for offices and a residence. The National Trust has owned it since 1975. The Museum covers the Wallaroo Smelting Industry; Caroline Carleton; Nautical History of Wallaroo; early telegraph and telephones; and general Wallaroo history. It opens at 2 pm and has an admission fee.
A picture of the Antony Gormley sculpture, Sound II, in the crypt of Winchester Cathedral I mean. However, since it is the first time I have visited the crypt, here is my rendering (which I concluded would have been better slightly to the right and lower down)
East Village, Manhattan
One of New York City’s most historically and culturally significant large nineteenth-century assembly halls, Webster Hall was constructed for Charles Goldstein in 1886-87, with an eastern Annex in 1892, to the designs of architect Charles Rentz, Jr.
The Queen Anne style original structure and Renaissance Revival style Annex are clad in red Philadelphia pressed brick with brownstone trim, and effusively ornamented with unglazed red terra cotta, that on the original building was likely produced by the Boston Terra Cotta Co. or Perth Amboy Terra Cotta Co., the leading manufacturers of the day.
The building is terminated by a c. 1911 bracketed pressed metal cornice, and had an elaborate, high dormered mansard roof until it was destroyed by fire in 1930. Though little known, the highly prolific Rentz (18551906) practiced in New York from around 1880 to his death, and was commissioned largely for flats and tenement buildings.
Throughout its history as one of Greenwich Village/East Village’s leading public rental halls and social centers, Webster Hall has been the venue for countless balls, dances, receptions, lectures, meetings, conventions, political and union rallies, military functions, concerts, performances, festivities, and sporting and fundraising events, particularly for the working-class and immigrant populations of the Lower East Side. In the 1910s and 20s, it became famous for its masquerade balls, following the success of a 1913 fund-raiser for the socialist magazine The Masses, first attracting the Village’s bohemian population, which nicknamed it the “Devil’s Playhouse.” The hall was significant as a gathering place for the city’s early twentieth-century lesbian and gay community, who felt welcome to attend the balls in drag, and then sponsored their own events by the 1920s.
Among the many notables who attended events here at this time were artists Charles Demuth, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray, as well as writers Djuna Barnes and Scott Fitzgerald. A favorite venue for progressive, leftist, and union political organizations, the hall was attended by such luminaries as Samuel Gompers, Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, and Dorothy Day, and was the site of the formation of the Progressive Labor Party in 1887, and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in 1914.
From 1953 to 1968, RCA Victor Records operated a notable sound recording studio here, which was famed for its acoustics. Pop vocal, jazz, Latin, folk, and gospel phonograph albums were recorded here by such disparate musical icons as Louis Armstrong, Harry Belafonte, Perry Como, Coleman Hawkins, Lena Horne, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Stan Getz, Sergio Franchi, and Joe Williams. The hall was noted as a venue for Broadway cast recordings, which included Julie Andrews in The Boy Friend, Mary Martin in Peter Pan, Barbara Cook in Show Boat, Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun, Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly!, and Liza Minnelli in Flora, the Red Menace, as well as those of classical artists such as Artur Rubinstein, Marian Anderson, and Beverly Sills in Giulio Cesare. In the 1970s-80s, the building housed Casa Galicia, a meeting and event space, and the rock club The Ritz. It was also the location for a number of movie scenes, such as “Raging Bull” (1980). The name Webster Hall was returned in 1990 with the current club.
DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS
The Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Development and History of (Today’s) East Village Neighborhood
The area of today’s Greenwich Village was, during the eighteenth century, the location of the small rural hamlet of Greenwich, as well as the country seats and summer homes of wealthy downtown aristocrats, merchants, and capitalists. A number of cholera and yellow fever epidemics in lower Manhattan between 1799 and 1822 led to an influx of settlers in the Greenwich area, with the population quadrupling between 1825 and 1840.
Previously undeveloped tracts of land were speculatively subdivided for the construction of town houses and rowhouses. To the east, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant’s farm. St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery Church (1799)2 was built on a higher, dry piece of land, while the area to the east of today’s Second Avenue, known as Stuyvesant Meadows, remained an undeveloped marshy area. In the late eighteenth century, the area east of Second Avenue was the estate of Mangle Minthorn, father-in-law of Daniel Tompkins (1775-1825), governor of New York (1807-17) and U.S. vice president under James Monroe (1817-25). Both Stuyvesant and Minthorn were slave owners.
In 1832, the Common Council created the 15th Ward out of the eastern section of the large 9th Ward, its boundaries being Sixth Avenue, Houston and 14th Streets, and the East River. According to historian Luther Harris, “by 1845, 85 percent of the richest citizens living in the city’s northern wards resided in the Fifteenth.”3 For a brief period beginning in the 1820s-30s, Lafayette Place, including the grand marble Greek Revival style LaGrange Terrace (1832-33, attributed to Seth Geer),4 and Bond, Great Jones, East 4th and Bleecker Streets were among the most fashionable addresses, the latter developed with three block-long rows of houses in 1827.
Both sides of the block of St. Mark’s Place (East 8th Street) between Third and Second Avenues were built in 1831 with grand 3-1/2-story Federal style marble-and-brick-clad town houses by speculative real estate developer Thomas E. Davis.5 In the early 1830s, Davis became involved with the Stuyvesant family in the development of the former farm to the north of St. Mark’s Place as an elite residential neighborhood. Lower Second Avenue and adjacent side streets became fashionable through the 1850s.
Commercial and institutional intrusions and the continual arrival of immigrants ended the fashionable heyday of the wealthier enclaves, such as St. Mark’s Place and Second Avenue, before the Civil War. In the 1850s, Broadway north of Houston Street was transformed from a residential into a significant commercial district. Also beginning in the 1850s, after the political upheavals in Europe of 1848 and the resulting influx of German-speaking immigrants to New York City, the Lower East Side (the area bounded roughly by 18th Street, the East River, the Bowery/Third Avenue, and Catherine Street) became known as Kleindeutschland (“Little Germany”).
Aside from their presence as residents, these immigrants contributed in significant ways to the vibrant commercial and cultural life of the neighborhood and the city at large. The German community was critical to the American socialist movement and the creation of labor unions. By 1880, this neighborhood constituted one-fourth of the city’s population (as one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the world) and was the first major urban foreign-speaking neighborhood in the U.S., as well as the leading German-American center throughout the century. A massive exodus of Jews from Eastern Europe from the 1880s to World War I led to approximately two million Jewish immigrants settling in New York; most lived for a time on the Lower East Side, establishing their own cultural and religious institutions there.
Beginning in the 1850s-60s, the vicinity of 14th Street and Union Square developed into a center of musical and theatrical culture. The Academy of Music (1853-54, Alexander Saeltzer), East 14th Street and Irving Place, an opera house with the world’s largest seating capacity at the time, quickly became the center of musical and social life in New York, presenting such notable performers as Adelina Patti (who made her debut here in 1854), and events such as the grand ball in honor of the Prince of Wales in the autumn of 1860. The building burned down in 1866, and was replaced by a new Academy of Music (1868, Thomas R. Jackson). (The Academy remained fashionable until the construction of the Metropolitan Opera in 1883; the building was converted to a theater in 1887, and was demolished around 1926.) Irving Hall (1860), a ballroom, concert, and lecture hall annex to the Academy, served as the home to the New York Philharmonic in 1861-63.
The Steinway piano company opened Steinway Hall (1866), a combination showroom and recital hall at 109 East 14th Street, which for many years was the foremost concert hall in the country (it closed in 1890). The Tammany political club constructed a new headquarters building (1867-68, Thomas R. Jackson) on East 14th Street next to the Academy of Music. Tammany Hall included a large theater that was site of the National Democratic Convention in 1868, and was subsequently leased (it was demolished around 1928). By the mid-1860s, a number of legitimate theaters were also opening in the vicinity of Union Square, which during the last quarter of the nineteenth century became the center of New York theater. These included Wallack's Theater (1861, Thomas R. Jackson), 728 Broadway at 13th Street, the most prestigious dramatic theater in the country during this period; the Union Square Theater (1870), an adjunct of the former Union Place Hotel; Chickering Hall (1875), Fifth Avenue and 18th Street; and Amberg Theater (1888, Theodore G. Stein; Irving Place Theater after 1893), 11 Irving Place (all demolished). The Germania Theater, which along with the Amberg catered to a specifically German clientele, was located in Tammany Hall in 1874-81, in Wallack’s Theater in 1881-82, and until 1902 in the former Church of St. Ann, East 8th Street near Broadway. Union Square, after the Civil War, became the traditional site for workers’, union, and political protests and rallies.
As wealthier neighborhood residents moved northward, their single-family residences were converted into multiple dwellings or boardinghouses, as well as other uses, such as clubs or community cultural institutions. For instance, of the Federal style houses on the westernmost block of St. Mark’s Place: No. 29 became the Harmonie Club, a German-Jewish singing club (1856-59); Nos. 19-21 housed another German musical club, the Arion Singing Society (1870-87), and these buildings, along with No. 23, became Arlington Hall, a ballroom-community center in 1887; the Children’s Aid Society’s Girls’ Lodging House (by 1871) and its offices (by 1891) were at Nos. 27 and 24; and No. 12 was replaced by the German-American Shooting Society Clubhouse (1888-89, William C. Frohne).6 Most of the remaining houses were demolished for denser development with French flats and tenements between 1874 and 1902.
Hastening the changes in the residential character of this section of the Lower East Side after mid-century were a wide variety of major cultural, religious, commercial, and educational institutions, including the Astor Place Opera House (1847; later Clinton Hall/Mercantile Library; demolished), Astor and Lafayette Places; Astor Library (1849-52 Alexander Saeltzer; 1856-69 Griffith Thomas; 1879-81 Thomas Stent), 425 Lafayette Street; Bible House (1852; demolished), Astor Place and Third Avenue, home of the American Bible Society and other religious organizations; Cooper Union (185358, Frederick A. Petersen), Astor Place and Third Avenue; and Tompkins Market/ 7th Regiment Armory (1855-60, James Bogardus and Marshall Lefferts; demolished), Third Avenue and East 7th Street.7 The New York Free Circulating Library, Ottendorfer Branch, and German Dispensary (188384, William Schickel), 135 and 137 Second Avenue, catered to the German community.8 Assembly halls such as Webster Hall and Annex (1886-87, 1892, Charles Renz, Jr.), 119-125 East 11th Street, and cafes and beer gardens, such as Aaron Ligety’s Orpheum (c. 1905-06), 126 Second Avenue, became important neighborhood social centers. Scattered throughout the area were purpose-built churches and synagogues for wealthier congregations, as well as many religious structures created out of altered rowhouses.
Architect: Charles Rentz, Jr. 9
Despite the prominent, early commission of Webster Hall, little is known about the life and career of Charles Rentz, Jr. (1855-1906). He was born in New York City, the son of Charles Rentz, Sr., a cigar manufacturer born in Wurttemberg, Germany. Rentz, Jr., was listed in an 1879 city directory as a beer dealer, then as an architect in the 1880 New York census, and in city directories as an architect beginning in 1882. A notice in the Real Estate Record & Builders Guide in April 1886 stated that Rentz had formerly been associated with architect William Jose, and was moving his office from Greenwich Avenue to larger quarters in the German Savings Bank Building, Fourth Avenue and East 14th Street (three blocks north of Webster Hall) because “his rapidly increasing business has necessitated the change.”10 The recently deceased Jose (c. 1843-1885), born in Prussia, was listed as an architect in city directories between about 1869 and his death, and was active as a designer of multiple dwellings primarily in the vicinity of today’s Tribeca, SoHo, and Greenwich Village neighborhoods.
Rentz was extraordinarily prolific in the design of flats and tenement buildings in the 1880s. It is unknown how he obtained the Webster Hall commission, which is his most significant known building. He was the partner of Rudolph L. Lange in Rentz & Lange in 1888-90, and of William Kurtzer11 in Kurtzer & Rentz in 1904-06. Rentz apparently died prior to the August 1906 dissolution notice of Kurtzer & Rentz in the New York Times; a 1907 city directory listed Rentz’s wife, Emma, as a widow. (Kurtzer continued to practice in Manhattan and the Bronx until around 1925). Of Rentz’s known works, the majority were flats and tenements, many located on the Lower East Side and in Greenwich Village, but he also designed factories, stables, and utilitarian buildings. Among the more interesting architecturally is the row of flats buildings at Nos. 519-525 Hudson Street (1889, Rentz & Lange).12
Construction, Design, and Ownership of Webster Hall and Annex, 1886-1949 13
The site of Webster Hall, on the north side of East 11th Street, between Fourth and Third Avenues, had once been part of the Stuyvesant farm that was inherited by Peter Gerard Stuyvesant and remained in the Stuyvesant/Rutherfurd family. P.G. Stuyvesant’s house (1845), located at No. 175 Second Avenue (and East 11th Street), was later home to Lewis Morris Rutherfurd, a lawyer and noted astronomer; Rutherfurd’s son, Stuyvesant Rutherfurd (c. 1840-1909), inherited this property after Stuyvesant’s death, under the condition that he change his name to Rutherfurd Stuyvesant.
In July 1886, lot 68 (No. 119-123) was leased by Charles Goldstein from Rutherfurd Stuyvesant for $2000 a year. Goldstein (c. 1856-1898), born in Poland and brought to New York City at the age of three, was raised on the East Side. After learning the trade, he became a cigar manufacturer. He married his Russian/Polish-born wife, Annie (c. 1857- ), in 1873. Goldstein later went into the business of meeting/dance halls, becoming the proprietor around 1879 of Clinton Garden (later Apollo Hall; demolished), 126 Clinton Street. In June 1886, the Real Estate Record & Builders Guide had noted that Charles Rentz was working on plans for “a large ball and concert hall, to be called Webster Hall... It will have a brick front trimmed with brown and Nova Scotia stone and terra cotta. The building will contain a main hall about 40 feet high, also a gallery, private boxes and reception rooms.”14 Though it is unknown how Rentz obtained the commission from Goldstein, it is interesting to note the connection of both men to the cigar manufacturing business. Rentz filed in July for the construction of the 3-story, 70-foot-wide structure, expected to cost $65,000. Work commenced in August 1886.
On the same side of the block were already two institutional buildings by distinguished architects: St. Ann’s R.C. Church’s parochial school (1870, Napoleon LeBrun), 113-117 East 11th Street, and the New York City Dept. of Public Charities and Correction headquarters (1869, James Renwick)(after 1895, the Bureau of Dependent Children; demolished), 66 Third Avenue. The New York Times mentioned in December 1886 that the pastor of St. Ann’s was opposing Goldstein’s application for a liquor license, due to its location next door to its school. The building was said by the paper to have cost $75,000, and was “intended for balls, receptions, Hebrew weddings, and sociables, and not a barroom.”
The Record & Guide in January 1887 noted that it was “now rapidly nearing completion” and “will contain one of the largest assembly halls in the city.”16 The building was completed in February 1887. The interior framing consisted of spruce timbers, as well as iron columns and rolled iron beams on part of the front facade and in the ballroom floor. There was an apartment on the first story, where the Goldstein family lived.
The original symmetrical design of Webster Hall, in an eclectic Queen Anne style, featured three vertical sections flanked by monumental pilasters, large window groups on the third story (round arched in the center), a modillioned cornice, and a complex roofline consisting of sections of mansard roof on each end having elaborate, pedimented and scrolled dormers, and a central mansarded tower rising above a large decorative plaque with a scroll bearing the name “Webster Hall” surmounted by a sunburst pediment.
The structure is clad in red Philadelphia pressed brick with brownstone trim, and effusively ornamented with unglazed red terra cotta, as well as large decorative iron tie-rods above the second story. The source of the terra cotta is unknown, but was likely produced by the Boston Terra Cotta Co. or Perth Amboy Terra Cotta Co., the leading manufacturers of the day (other terra cotta companies selling in New York in 1886 included the recently founded New York Architectural Terra Cotta Co., and the lesser known A. Hall Terra Cotta Co. and Baltimore Terra Cotta Co.).
Webster Hall is a fairly early and significant surviving building to employ exterior architectural terra cotta in its second American phase of the 1870s-80s. While a number of architects had attempted in the 1850s to use architectural ornament of terra cotta in New York,17 it was revived as a significant interior and exterior building material in the United States after the Chicago and Boston fires of 1871-72. Walter Geer later noted that “by these fires it was conclusively demonstrated that fire-proof buildings could not be made of unprotected stone or iron, and that only brick and terracotta walls were practically fire-proof.
This increased use of brick work, and of terra-cotta as a constructive and decorative material in connection with brick work, revived the demand for the manufacture of this material in or near New York.”18 (The term “constructive” in this quote refers to the manner in which the terra cotta was fully integrated into the exterior brick bearing walls). In the late 1870s and early 1880s, architectural terra cotta was often a color that matched stone (commonly brownstone, buff or red) that could be employed in pleasant juxtaposition with brick, or as a substitute for brownstone.
The Record & Guide remarked that during this period “terra cotta is most generally used for the trimming and ornamentation of buildings, taking the form of panels, courses, friezes, small tiles, roofing tiles and paving blocks.”19Among the leaders in the use of exterior terra cotta during this period in New York City were George B. Post in the Long Island Historical Society (187881),20 New York Produce Exchange (1881-84; demolished), and Mills Building (1881-83; demolished); Silliman & Farnsworth in the Morse Building (1878-80),138-142 Nassau Street, and Temple Court Building (1881-83), 3-9 Beekman Street; Kimball & Wisedell in the Casino Theater (1881-82; demolished), an early New York building having highly intricate, exotic terra-cotta ornament; and N.G. Starkweather in the Potter Building (1882-86), 38 Park Row, with terra cotta supplied by the Boston Terra Cotta Co. Webster Hall also employed red Philadelphia pressed brick during the period when leading producers, such as the Peerless Brick Co. of Philadelphia, were pioneers in the improvement of brick-making machines that successfully increased the efficiency and quality of their manufacture, as well as the quality of the brick’s finish and color.
In November 1891, Charles Goldstein leased lot 67 (No. 125 East 11th Street), then occupied by a 3-story dwelling owned by Alfred E. and Eliza J. Goetz, though located on Stuyvesant land. In January 1892, Charles Rentz filed for the construction of a 3-story, 20-foot-wide, $10,000 Annex to Webster Hall, planned for an apartment for the owner’s family in the basement; saloon, restaurant and hat rooms on the first story; ballroom on the second story; and sitting rooms and gallery on the third story. Construction occurred between May and November 1892.
While the design of the Annex is harmonious with the original building, the style is Renaissance Revival, and is dominated by a large round-arched window group on the third story with a molded arched surround with voussoir blocks with bosses, a keystone bearing a head, and decorative spandrel panels with musical references. The Annex was originally terminated by a pedimented gable (it is unclear, based on existing historic photographs, whether it also had a mansard roof).
Charles Goldstein died in November 1898. A foreclosure auction of the original Webster Hall (not Annex) occurred in March 1899, with the property’s lease going to John Stich, a pawnbroker at No. 118 Third Avenue who brought the mortgage action. The leasehold was transferred back to the widow, Annie Goldstein, in April, and Charles Goldstein’s personal estate was auctioned at Webster Hall in May. In 1901 and 1907, the leases for Webster Hall and Annex were renewed. Later newspaper accounts refer to a fire here in 1902. In 1900, Annie Goldstein began to expand her business activities, commissioning Charles Rentz to design a three-story hall at Lexington Avenue and East 101st Street, and purchasing in 1903 the Palm Garden, 150-152 East 58th Street, for private and public entertainments.
Around 1909, she married Russian-born lawyer William H. Weissager, and continued to reside in the Webster Hall Annex. The Times announced in September 1910 that Weissager, “the proprietor of Webster Hall,”21 planned to build the McKinley Square Theater, for vaudeville and a ballroom, in the Bronx. He became financially overextended during this venture, however, and a receiver was appointed in November.22 A 1911 city directory listed his firm as the Weissager Amusement Construction Co. In October 1910, Annie Goldstein Weissager transferred the lease of Webster Hall and Annex to the Wanderman Brothers (Charles, Isidor, and Walter), of the Wanderman Construction Co., who were also the proprietors of Clinton Garden (later Apollo Hall) at No. 126 Clinton Street. Members of the Wanderman family were listed in city directories residing in the Webster Hall Annex. In November 1911, the building suffered the first of a series of four major documented fires; the Times reported that “all the upper floors of the hall were wrecked, with the damage estimated at $20,000.”23 The current bracketed pressed metal cornice appears to date from this period.
The Estate of Rutherfurd Stuyvesant was partitioned in 1911, following his death in 1909. The trustee of the estate, the Bank of New York & Trust Co., transferred the feehold of Webster Hall and Annex in April 1923 to Wand Holding Co., apparently an entity of the Wanderman Brothers. The Times reported the sale at $65,000.24 In November 1925, the property in its entirety was transferred by the Wandermans to the recently-incorporated Webster Enterprises, Inc. (Harris Reiner, president; Aaron Rappaport, vice president). Reiner was listed in city address directories in the building into the 1940s as a caterer; Rappaport was listed in the 1935 directory in the Annex as a dealer in cotton duck. The Annex was sometimes known as “Webster Manor” c. 1928-52. After a 1928 building renovation, at a reported cost of $220,000, Webster Hall had its second major fire, in March 1930. The top two stories and roof were destroyed, with an estimated $200,000 worth of damage; there were four ballrooms in the structure at that time. An alteration, the application for which was filed in May for $75,000 in repairs, apparently eliminated rebuilding the mansard roof, which was replaced by a flat roof fronted by a tan brick parapet.
Webster Enterprises leased the property in September 1932 to Webster Manor, Inc. (Emanuel M. Lebowitz, president), at $22,000 a year, and it was reported that the hall “will be used only for catering, meeting rooms, dance hall and kindred purposes.”25 Webster Manor, Inc. was apparently an associated entity of Webster Enterprises, as Harris Reiner was later the president of both. In February 1938, Webster Hall’s third major fire, lasting three hours, burned out the structure’s interior and killed a watchman and porter working inside; Mayor LaGuardia stopped by to observe the fire. The Times listed the interior layout as rest rooms, kitchen and checkroom in the basement; office and private dining rooms on the first story; dance floor, stage and bar on the second story; and a balcony on the third story. Webster Hall’s fourth major fire, in February 1949, totally burned out the interior and destroyed the roof, with an estimated several hundred thousand dollars worth of damage.
Social and Cultural History of Webster Hall and Annex to World War II 26
Throughout its history as one of Greenwich Village/East Village’s leading public rental halls and social centers, Webster Hall has been the venue for countless balls, dances, receptions, lectures, meetings, conventions, political and union rallies, military functions, concerts, performances, festivities, and sporting and fundraising events, particularly for the working-class and immigrant population of the Lower East Side. As opined by historian Kathy Peiss:
For the working-class population packed into small tenement apartments, large halls that could be rented for dances, weddings, mass meetings, and other gatherings were a requirement of social life. The number of public halls in Manhattan rose substantially in a short period; business directories listed 130 halls in 1895 and 195 in 1910, an increase of 50 percent. While some of these, like Carnegie Hall, were cultural spaces of the privileged, most were located in working-class districts. The largest East Side halls... were always in great demand. 27
The earliest event at Webster Hall reported by the Times, on February 11, 1887, was a ball held by the crew of the cruiser Atlanta, attended by 900 people.28 Other early functions ranged from a benefit for the Grant Monument Fund (April 1887); the formation of the Progressive Labor Party (September 1887); a banquet and ball for the Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian army officers of the ship Hecla (October 1887); to a celebration of the centennial of the French revolution, by 62 French societies in the city (May 1889).
That Webster Hall from the very beginning acquired a reputation as a center of leftist, socialist, anarchist, and union political activity was evidenced by a January 1888 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article:
Webster Hall... is a big, bare, dingy place, where all the year round discontented men meet to discuss their wrongs and sympathize with one another, and where secret societies and political organizations, labor unions and similar associations make a business of pleasure. It is a grimy neighborhood, where the rattle of trade continues all day and leaves poverty to toss itself to sleep at nightfall. There are more children in this section of New York City than live on an area of equal extent in any other part of America.
This was a venue attended by many luminaries, as well as workers, such as labor leader Samuel Gompers, at a meeting of striking brewery workers (April 1888), and social activists like Emma Goldman and Dorothy Day, and was the site of myriad politically-related events, such as the United Clothing Cutters’ ball celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Knights of Labor (November 1889).
Webster Hall continued as a popular venue for a multiplicity of events, including those of the Columbia Athletic Club, Jewish divisions of the Socialist Labor Party, National Association of Naval Veterans, and Volunteers of America, and was a campaign stop for politicians, such as Seth Low in the 1897 mayoral election, and Theodore Roosevelt in the 1898 New York gubernatorial contest.
Among events held here in the 1910s were Hungarian opera performances, conducted by Erno Rapee; the 1912 march, led by birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, bringing the children of striking Lawrence, Mass., millworkers to Webster Hall for a meal, in order to dramatize the plight of the workers; a 1913 “Debate on Socialism,” between John Wesley Hill and Bouck White; the founding of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in 1914, representing about 40,000 workers; and its use in 1916 as the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union’s strike headquarters, and for the Jewelry Workers Union’s meeting to vote on a strike, demanding an 8-hour day; and for meetings of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee (c. 1920).
In the 1910s and 20s, Webster Hall became famous for its masquerade balls, following the success of a 1913 fundraiser for the socialist magazine The Masses, attracting first the Village’s bohemian population, which nicknamed it the “Devil’s Playhouse.” Allen Church, in his book The Improper Bohemians: A Re-Creation of Greenwich Village in Its Heyday (1959), reminisced
Today no name rings more gloriously in the bosoms of those who knew the early and middle periods in Greenwich Village than that of Webster Hall. For in its spacious premises, where boxes overlooked the dance floor, were held fancy dress balls without number, beginning with the Masses balls – the first of which was so successful that others followed – Greenwich Village made Webster Hall its particular place of frolic. So many dances-till-dawn and fancy dress balls were held there that one Villager said of himself and his wife: “We’ve sold our bed. Why sleep when there’s a dance every night at Webster Hall?” 30
The hall became known especially for the “wilder” Pagan Routs, which benefitted the Liberal Club, and Cynthia White’s annual Greenwich Village Ball, featuring competitions for the most exotic or extravagant costumes, often quite risque. Prohibition did not hamper the crucial free flow of liquor at these events at the hall. The Blind Man’s Ball (1917), to protest the Society of Independent Artists’ refusal to accept Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” in its exhibition, was attended by Duchamp, as well as artists Joseph Stella, Man Ray, and Francis Picabia.
Others among the many notables known to have attended events here at this time were artists Charles Demuth and writers Scott Fitzgerald and Djuna Barnes. By the time of the 1923 Greenwich Village Ball, it was reported that “veteran patrons of Greenwich Village dances were moved to lament that things had become more formal than in other years, that the nude had been replaced by the prude in the way of costuming.”
Webster Hall is significant as a favored gathering place for the city’s early twentieth-century lesbian and gay community, who felt welcome to attend the balls in drag, and then sponsored their own events by the 1920s. As pointed out by historian George Chauncey:
The organizers of the balls... welcomed the presence of flamboyant gay men – sometimes making them a part of the pageants they staged – precisely because they knew they enhanced the reputation and appeal of such events. ... By the early 1920s, the presence of gay men and lesbians in the Village was firmly established. No longer were they simply visitors to the Liberal Club’s masquerade balls. They organized their own balls at Webster Hall and appropriated as their own many of the other social spaces created by the bohemians of the 1910s. 32 Political events, as always, continued at a re-built Webster Hall (after the 1938 fire), as evidenced by the February 1940 protest, attended by 2,500, against a Washington grand jury investigation of the New Masses magazine, said by its editor Joseph North to be about the publication’s opposition to the war; and the 1945 convention of the World Congress of Dominated Nations.
Twentieth Century History of the East Village
After a period of decline, Greenwich Village was becoming known, prior to World War I, for its historic and picturesque qualities, its affordable housing, and the diversity of its population and social and political ideas. Many artists and writers, as well as tourists, were attracted to the Village. By the 1910s, property owners and merchants attempted to improve the Village’s economy and rehabilitate its physical condition, with “shrewd realtors beg[inning] to amass their holdings of dilapidated housing.”34 These various factors and the increased desirability of the Village to upper-middle-class professionals lead to a real estate boom – “rents increased during the 1920s by 140 percent and in some cases by as much as 300 percent.”
New York University, particularly after World War II, became a major institutional presence around and to the south and east of Washington Square. During the 1950s, the area south of Washington Square, to Houston Street, was targeted for urban renewal. The surviving historic streets to the west became particularly popular for coffee houses, restaurants, and clubs.
After World War II, the ethnic make-up of the Lower East Side changed again, becoming dominated by Latin American immigrants, especially those from Puerto Rico. Their immigration was encouraged by the government as a source of cheap labor, particularly for the garment trades, hotels, and small manufacturing. The community named itself Loisaida to symbolize the second generation Hispanic roots that had developed in the context of the African-American and Latino movements for social and economic justice, equality, and identity.
The residential and cultural desirability of the neighborhood that came to be known as the “East Village” increased with the removal of the Third Avenue El in 1955. As indicated by Terry Miller, the psychological barrier that had marked the eastern boundary of Greenwich Village was gone. Blocks that once had no prestige were suddenly seen as intriguing, and apartments here were less costly than those in Greenwich Village. ... As artists and writers moved east, the blocks from St. Mark’s Place to Tenth Street were the first to hint that the Lower East Side was being transformed. Realtors began marketing the area as “Village East,” and by 1961 as the “East Village,” a name that stuck. 36
From World War I to the 1940s, Second Avenue between East 14th and Houston Streets had been considered the heart of New York’s Jewish community, known as the “Yiddish Rialto” for its role as the world’s center of Yiddish theater. As Yiddish theater declined, the East Village gave rise in the 1950s to “off-Broadway” theater, including the Phoenix Theater (1953-61) in the former Louis N. Jaffe Art Theater (Yiddish Art Theater) building (1925-26, Harrison G. Wiseman), 181-189 Second Avenue;37 the Orpheum Theater (1958), 126 Second Avenue; and Ellen Stewart’s La Mama Theatre (1962), 321 East 9th Street (after 1969 at 74 East 4th Street). In the 1950s, the East Village also became home to a number of key Beat Generation writers, including Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, and W.H. Auden.
The neighborhood was renowned for its protest art and politics, galleries, poetry and coffee houses, bookstores, clubs, and the East Village Other “underground” newspaper (1965-72). The East Village’s “counterculture” scene centered on St. Mark’s Place. Nos. 19-25 (in part formerly Arlington Hall) had been the Polish National Home (Polski Dom Harodowy) since the 1920s. In the 1960s, “the Dom” was associated with a number of seminal figures of the period, including Timothy Leary and his “psychedelic celebrations,” the counterculture band The Fugs, and Andy Warhol’s “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” featuring his films performed with live music by the Velvet Underground. For a time the Electric Circus disco, this facility became a community center after 1971.
History of Webster Hall and Annex After World War II 38
After, yet again, Webster Hall’s renaissance after the 1949 fire, from 1953 to 1968 RCA Victor Records operated a notable sound recording studio here, which was famed for its acoustics. Pop vocal, jazz, Latin, folk, and gospel phonograph albums were recorded here by such disparate musical icons as Louis Armstrong, Harry Belafonte, Perry Como, Coleman Hawkins, Lena Horne, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Stan Getz, Sergio Franchi, and Joe Williams. The hall was noted as a venue for Broadway cast recordings, which included Julie Andrews in The Boy Friend, Mary Martin in Peter Pan, Barbara Cook in Show Boat, Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun, Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly!, and Liza Minnelli in Flora, the Red Menace, as well as those of classical artists such as Artur Rubinstein, Marian Anderson, and Beverly Sills in Giulio Cesare. [See: Appendix: A Partial Listing of Phonograph Albums Recorded at Webster Hall, 1953-68]
A number of historians of recorded sound have written on the significance of Webster Hall in this period. David Simons, in Studio Stories: How the Great New York Records Were Made (2004), stated that In an effort to keep pace with Columbia’s bustling studio system, in the early 1950s RCA converted the hall into a full-service recording studio, which served as a companion to the label’s main studios on East 24th Street. A popular venue for Broadway-cast and pop-vocal albums, the Webster also turned out scores of jazz classics... 39
RCA producer Jack Pfeiffer recalled that
After the advent of the LP [Long Playing] record, ... thought was again directed at the possibility of a stereophonic record... I was so enthusiastic that I pressed for every opportunity to experiment with live orchestras. The first was on October 6, 1953, with Leopold Stokowski and his Symphony Orchestra in Webster Hall, New York City. Nothing remains of the two-track results of that session... 40
Ashley Kahn, in Kind of Blue (2000), commented that [Columbia’s] 30th Street [Studio] was part of a family of well-known recording facilities in the New York area turning out the music of the 1950s and ‘60s. Today musicians, engineers and producers nostalgically recall 30th Street and other revered studios in and around the city, including Victor’s Webster Hall on the Lower East Side, Vanguard Records’ Masonic Temple in Brooklyn, and the less grand Regent Sound of Fifty-seventh Street. They became the shrines of the age of hi-fi [highfidelity], worshiped for their generous space, curved interiors and wooden walls, all offering a warm, natural reverb. In those hallowed halls, great musical performances were transubstantiated into timeless recordings. 41
Simons, writing on the size of the large recording studios, such as 30th Street, Webster Hall, and the Pythian Temple, noted that
Some of the very best rooms in Manhattan had room to spare – which wasn’t a luxury, but a necessity. Before multi-track technology made it possible for one or two players to sound like a roomful, a roomful of players was required. This was an era of cheap rents and low utilities; when it came to securing studio space, in some instances, the sky was the limit. 42
Producer Creed Taylor remembered that “RCA had the place Monday through Friday for recording sessions. Then they put up a glass booth on the side of this immense dance hall so they could rent the space out on weekends.”43 Jazz historian Nat Hentoff wrote in 1961 that “Webster Hall... occasionally doubles as a site for neighborhood functions but is most often in use for RCA-Victor’s pop recordings. When time is available, a number of independent entrepreneurs... use the hall and generally also employ RCA staff engineers.” Lastly, Jim Cogan and William Clark, in Temples of Sound: Inside the Great Recording Studios (2003), called Webster Hall one of New York’s “legendary studios.”45
A very brief sampling of events, outside of the recording studio, taking place at Webster Hall included a 1952 “Webster Manor” jazz concert, with Red Allen, Jimmy McPartland, Sonny Greer, and Jimmy Rushing; the January 1955 Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America 40th anniversary celebration of its founding at Webster Hall; 1950s folk music “hootenannies;”46 a Lithuanian Independence day celebration in 1964; a 1964 campaign appearance by Robert F. Kennedy, in his bid for the New York Senate seat; and the first New York performance by Jefferson Airplane in 1967.
In 1970, Webster Manor, Inc. (Harris Reiner, president) surrendered its lease and Webster Enterprises (Harris Reiner, president) sold the property (now combined as solely lot 68) to Unity Gallega of the United States, Inc. This Galician Spanish community organization operated Casa Galicia, a meeting and event space, along with a restaurant, until around 1987. Unity Gallega also rented out the facility to other groups, notably the Balkan Arts Center.
A 1978 concert here was said to have “helped spark a major revival of the Jewish folk music known as klezmer.”47 From 1980 to 1989, the building also housed the rock club The Ritz, the site of performances by “Madonna, Prince, Eric Clapton, Tina Turner, Sting, Kiss, and B.B. King,”48 among many others, as well as such events as fashion shows and awards ceremonies. Terry Miller, in Greenwich Village and How It Got That Way (1990), called The Ritz “the first club designed with a video component, setting a style that was later borrowed by other clubs nationwide.”49 A number of movie scenes were filmed here, including Raging Bull (1980) and Big (1988).
In 1990, the property was leased, reportedly for $5 million;50 by Ballingervision, Inc., a corporation of the Ballinger Brothers (Douglas, Stephen, Peter, and Lon), nightclub operators from Toronto. The name Webster Hall was returned in 1990 with the current club, which opened in 1992.
Today, Webster Hall and Annex, notable for its long and distinguished social and cultural history, is one of the few surviving large nineteenth-century assembly halls in New York City, in particular halls that catered largely to the working-class and immigrant population of the Lower East Side.
Description
Webster Hall and Annex consists of the original 1886-87 Queen Anne style Webster Hall (No. 119-123 East 11th Street) and the Renaissance Revival style Annex of 1892 (No. 125 East 11th Street). The building suffered major fires in 1911, 1930, 1938, and 1949, resulting in a number of exterior alterations. The structure is clad in red Philadelphia pressed brick (now painted in parts) with brownstone trim, and effusively ornamented with unglazed red terra cotta (the source of Webster Hall’s terra cotta is unknown, but was likely produced by the Boston Terra Cotta Co. or Perth Amboy Terra Cotta Co.). The building originally had an elaborate, high dormered mansard roof and tower, which were destroyed by the 1930 fire; it is now terminated by a c. 1911 bracketed pressed metal cornice and tan brick parapet (c. 1930), which had a plaque with the letters “Webster Hall” until c. 1990.
Webster Hall has a symmetrical articulation featuring three vertical sections flanked by monumental pilasters. Base: The areaway is covered by metal plates and bordered by c. 1990 wrought-iron railings (that replaced the pre-1913 ones). Two metal boxes on poles are placed in the areaway. Two sets of metal stairs lead to basement entrances with non-historic metal doors, and have metal housings for rolldown gates (c. 1990). The original stone watertable has been heavily parged, covered with tiny mosaic tiles, and painted (pre-1989). Basement windows have been filled with cinderblock and louvers (c. 1990). First Story: The western main entrance has three stone steps with stone cheekwalls on which are set historic iron railings, and non-historic metal double doors.
Over the entrance, the original round-arched fanlight set within an elaborate terra-cotta panel has been partially covered by the heavy metal marquee with side “Webster Hall” signage panels (pre-1928). The original narrow rectangular single-door eastern entrance was altered (pre-1928) with a slightly projecting brick section (that covered the easternmost window), having three stone steps flanked by stone cheek walls on which are set historic iron railings, a molded brownstone round arch over the doorway with a keystone with the initials “WH,” non-historic metal double doors, a round domed copper awning (c. 1990) that replaced a pre-1939 steel marquee, and two griffin sconces (c. 1990). The five rectangular windows, set above foliate terra-cotta panels, were filled with brick (c. 1990), some with louvers and air conditioners (originally there were multi-pane upper wood sash, which were later replaced). There are three small arched niches placed on the three westernmost pilasters. Each vertical section is terminated by an entablature with foliate terra-cotta moldings, the two easternmost supported by foliate terra-cotta corbels. Lighting and security cameras have been placed along the entire facade (c. 1990).
Second Story: Six rectangular windows (originally with one-over-one wood sash) have pre1939 multi-pane metal sash, which were painted (c. 1990), with the easternmost window covered with metal. The stone lintels have been parged. Third Story: There are three large window groups; that in the center is round-arched, with an elaborate terra-cotta surround, while both sides are rectangular with stone lintels (originally with stone mullions and multi-pane transoms), placed above square terracotta panels, which are flanked by four large decorative iron tie-rods. Each window group is surmounted by long horizontal terra-cotta panels with swags. The central window group has a brick structural support that was installed after the 1911 fire. Stone mullions, transoms, and older sash were replaced (pre-1939) with multi-pane metal sash, which were painted (c. 1990); the easternmost window section is partly covered with metal, and the westernmost window section has metal mechanical boxes.
Annex: Base: Windows are painted (c. 1990) and have iron grilles. The original stone watertable has been heavily parged, covered with tiny mosaic tiles, and painted (pre-1989). Metal stairs with pipe railings (c. 1990) lead to the first story; below this is a mesh grille and gate, and a wood platform over the areaway. A basement entrance (c. 1990) has metal stairs and metal door.
First Story: Two rectangular windows, set above terra-cotta panels with a griffin design, were filled with brick, the central one also with a louver (c. 1990), while the westernmost window was altered into a doorway (c. 1990), eliminating the terra-cotta panel, with a metal door and metal panel. The entablature has foliate terra-cotta corbels and foliate terra-cotta molding and supports a balustrade with decorative ironwork. Lighting and security cameras have been placed here (c. 1990).
Second Story: Three rectangular windows have stone lintels (parged) with pre-1939 multi-pane metal sash, which were painted (c. 1990), the central one having a metal panel. Third Story: The large round-arched window group has a molded arched surround with a keystone bearing a head and voussoir blocks with bosses (there are two eras of terra cotta, reflecting an apparent repair after one of the fires). The brick piers within the arch may be replacements (post-1910s) of original mullions. Multi-pane metal sash (pre-1939) were painted (c. 1990), the central one covered with wood. Decorative terra-cotta spandrel panels have musical references.
- From the 2008 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report
Established in 1869 as Hann's Hotel, changed name to the Imperial in 1871. The building was demolished in 1960.
"A rather curious accident happened in King William Street on Thursday morning. A lad named Chittle was driving a horse and baker's cart belonging to Mr. Menz, and when near the corner of Flinders-street the animal became restive in consequence of the harness being disarranged. The driver was pulling the animal up when it began to kick, and he was thrown to the ground. The beast then bolted along the pavement, passed the Government Offices, and under the portico of the Town Hall, galloped along the flags, barely escaping a ladder on which a man was standing against Messrs. D. and W. Murray's shop, knocked some splinters off Mr. Duryea's verandah post, and immediately afterwards struck a post in front of the Imperial Hotel with such force that the trap was thrown completely across the pavement into the watertable. Mr. Borten's son had a narrow escape, as he was standing close to the post when the wheel struck it. The trap was considerably damaged, but the brute continued its career along King William-street, apparently none the worse for the fall. The noise had frightened a horse attached to a buggy in front of the Town Hall, and this animal dashed into Waymouth street, when it was pluckily stopped by Mr. Felix Goodfellow, who jumped up behind and caught the reins."
South Australian Advertiser, Friday 27 September 1872, p2
See: www.flickr.com/photos/state_library_south_australia/86371... and www.flickr.com/photos/state_library_south_australia/15532...
Visit the State Library of South Australia to view more photos of South Australia.
New York Botanical Garden, Fordham, The Bronx, New York City, New York, United States
The grand neo-Renaissance style New York Botanical Garden Museum Building, along with the Fountain of Life and Tulip Tree Allee, form a distinguished and monumental Beaux-Arts civic space within the largest and most renowned botanical garden in the country. Founded in 1891 and located within Bronx Park, the Botanical Garden showcases one of the world’s great collections of plants and serves as an educational center for gardening and horticulture.
The Museum (now Library) Building, designed in 1896 by architect Robert W. Gibson and constructed in 1898-1901, originally housed the Garden’s preserved botanical specimens and was the first American museum devoted solely to botany. The long four-story structure, clad in greyish-buff brick and buff terra cotta, features a symmetrical design and classically-inspired ornament characteristic of Beaux-Arts civic buildings at the turn of the century, with a rusticated and pedimented central pavilion with monumental columns and copper-clad saucer dome, flanked by sections and end pavilions with monumental pilasters. The energetic bronze sculptural group of the Fountain of Life (1903-05), designed by Carl (Charles) E. Tefft for Gibson’s marble plinth and basins, depicts a cherub astride a dolphin atop a globe and two web-footed plunging horses being restrained by a female and a boy, surprising a merman and mermaid in the basin below. The fountain was restored in 2005. The Tulip Tree Allee, consisting of trees lining both sides of the drives leading to the fountain, was planted in 1903-11 at the direction of Nathaniel Lord Britton, first director of the Garden.
New York Botanical Garden in Bronx Park
As early as 1888, the Torrey Botanical Club, the largest such American society, took on the mission of establishing a great botanical garden for New York City. The club was reportedly inspired by the description of Elizabeth Gertrude Knight Britton, and her husband, Nathaniel Lord Britton, both academics and botanists, of a recent visit to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, England. A committee of the club, and the Brittons, in particular, promoted the idea, gaining the support of newspapers and influential New Yorkers. By the following year, club members had selected Bronx Park in the Bronx as a favorable location; the park land had been acquired by New York City in 1884 in anticipation of Consolidation. This was part of the vast former land holdings (beginning in 1792 until 1870) of the Lorillard family of tobacco fortune fame. According to the censuses of 1800 and 1810, Peter Lorillard owned one slave. It is unknown whether or not slaves were used in their Bronx operations, but tobacco production in the South would have been based on slave labor.
After an act was drawn up by Addison Brown and Charles Daly, two federal judges with botanical/horticultural interests, the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) was established by the New York State Legislature in 1891 (with an amendment in 1894) for
the purpose of establishing and maintaining a botanical garden and museum and arboretum therein, for the collection and culture of plants, flowers, shrubs and trees, the advancement of botanical science and knowledge and the prosecution of original researches therein and in kindred subjects, for affording instruction in the same, for the prosecution and exhibition of ornamental and decorative horticulture and gardening, and for the entertainment, recreation and instruction of the people.
NYBG was to be managed by a Board of Directors, consisting of the president of Columbia College, and its professors of botany, geology, and chemistry; the president of the Torrey Botanical Club; the president of the New York City Board of Education; the mayor; and the president of the Board of Commissioners of the Dept. of Public Parks; along with nine elected members. The legislation stipulated that when sufficient funds (not less than $250,000) were raised within five years of its passage, the Board was authorized to appropriate a portion of Bronx Park, not to exceed 250 acres, as well as to construct “a suitable fireproof building for such botanical museum and herbarium, with lecture rooms and laboratories for instruction”4 and other necessary structures. The City was then to issue bonds for $500,000.
In June 1895, it was announced that the $250,000 goal had been met, with major contributions from such titans as Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, J.D. Rockefeller, and Cornelius Vanderbilt II (president of the Board). At that time it was noted that “the scientific Directors have appointed a committee to confer with the experts of the Park Board in regard to the location to be chosen for the garden in Bronx Park.”5 The Board of Directors thus referred the question of site selection to Calvert Vaux, one of the city’s most eminent landscape architects since his first collaboration with Frederick Law Olmsted in Central Park (1858), and Samuel Bowne Parsons, Jr., Superintendent of Parks and Vaux’s partner.
It was reported in the New York Times that “after full examination both agreed in recommending that the northern end of Bronx Park be selected, and after some delay the Park Board appropriated it accordingly.”6 By August 1895, plans were made for an accurate topographical survey of the tract. Due to the location of the Bronx River on the site, with its adjacent marshy ground, drainage on the property was a significant early consideration. The Board hoped to “retain as much as possible the natural scenery of the place, which in beauty far exceeds that of any existing botanic garden,”7 and approved Vaux’s preliminary plan in October. Vaux, however, drowned in November 1895, presumably a suicide.
After the topographical survey was completed by March 1896, the New York Times reported that
the plans of the garden have been formulated by Cornelius Vanderbilt, President of the garden; President Seth Low of Columbia College, William E. Dodge, Judge Addison Brown, and Prof. N.L. Britton, and preparations to carry them into effect have been completed. ... A building with three stories and a basement and having a total floor space of 90,000 square feet, is to be erected near the entrance to the garden for use as a museum. It will also contain rooms for a library, an economic museum, herbaria, laboratories, and also apartments where students may study special subjects. 8
This was intended as the first American museum devoted solely to botany.
In May 1896, Dr. Nathaniel Lord Britton (1859-1934), professor of botany at Columbia and the secretary of the Board, was named Director in Chief of NYBG (in which position he served until 1929). Britton had become an instructor of botany at Columbia in 1886, an adjunct professor in 1890, and a professor in 1891, and was known for his rearrangement and reclassification of Columbia’s herbarium and botanical library. The actual master plan for the Garden was drawn up by a commission consisting of John R. Brinley, landscape engineer; Samuel Henshaw, landscape gardener; Lucien Underwood, a professor on the Board of Scientific Directors; architect Robert W. Gibson; and Lincoln
Pierson, of the firm of Lord & Burnham, preeminent conservatory builders; along with Britton and Parsons. Since the Garden’s location as part of Bronx Park was on city-owned land, the Dept. of Public Parks had jurisdiction over the maintenance of buildings and grounds, as well as construction of roads and pathways. Columbia College was closely associated with NYBG, with arrangements made for the college’s herbarium and botanical library to be placed in the Museum Building, and for NYBG facilities to be used by Columbia faculty and students. NYBG became one of the largest such gardens in the world.
Botanical Museum 9
An elevated site for the Botanical Museum, about 1,000 feet east of the Bedford Park Railroad Station, was chosen by the Board in March 1896 due to its proximity to the station and its “very commanding position.”10 An architectural competition was announced for the museum building, and among those who submitted designs were some of the city’s most eminent architects: Ernest Flagg, N[apoleon]. Le Brun & Sons, Clinton & Russell, William Appleton Potter, and Parish & Schroeder. Robert W. Gibson was selected, and he filed plans in November 1896 for a structure expected to cost $250,000. Construction on the museum was delayed due to appropriations being withheld by the City after a public debate developed over the location and design of the building (and the planned Conservatory), as well as general plans for NYBG, including its mission as a great scientific institution versus the park as an unspoiled landscape.
In September 1897, the Board of Estimate & Apportionment finally appropriated construction funds. Bids were received from twelve contractors in October; the lowest, for $354,000, was accepted from the John H. Parker Co. The City’s Corporation Council, however, deemed the bidding process invalid, and seven new bids were
received; John H. Parker Co. was again selected in November, for $347,000 (also to include construction of a powerhouse and stable).
On December 31, 1897, the ceremonial groundbreaking for the Botanical Museum took place. After foundation work, the first bricks of the walls were laid in May 1898. American Gardening reported in September that
the Museum building... is rapidly taking shape now after a series of vexatious delays, chafing to the energetic spirit of the ever active director in chief, Dr. N.L. Britton. Huge masses of iron, stacks of brick, terra cotta pieces, and shaped stone lying about in a bewildering profusion are not picturesque in detail; they await their proper combination to yield New York and America a botanical museum that shall be worthy of both.... Beautifully designed, tastefully set, nobly planned, and easy of access, it will be a great addition to the educational buildings of the City. 12
The Times also then reported that three-quarters of the steel framing had been completed, along with exterior walls to the second story; and that “the outside of the building is of brick and terra cotta, giving a soft, warm gray effect, which has been chosen as the best to blend with the landscape and not stand out too vividly in either Winter or Summer.”13
In November 1898, another $200,000 in city bonds was authorized towards museum construction. A supplementary contract of $12,875 was awarded in July 1899 to the John H. Parker Co. for building the “Front Central Portico,” which was completed in October 1899. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle mentioned in March 1900 that the museum building “has just been completed, [and] is said to be the largest, most elegant, best illuminated and for its purposes the best adapted of any similar edifice in the world.”14 The John H. Parker Co. contract was officially terminated in April, at a reported cost of $348,000, close to the original bid.15 NYBG indicated that “plans prepared by Mr. Gibson for some further ornamentation of the end pavilions of the Museum have been accepted by the Board of Managers... but he has concluded that it will be advantageous to defer this work for the present.”16 In April 1901, a contract for a planned fountain in front of the museum and approaches to it [see below] was entered into with the Wilson & Baillie Manufacturing Co., a Brooklyn firm; this contract also referred to “cornice and roof ornaments on Botanical Museum.”17 Gibson’s “additional ornamental terra cotta work for the pavilions” was delivered, but installation was delayed during the winter of 1901. New ornamentation included acroteria and pediments.
The grand neo-Renaissance style Botanical Museum Building, with a front facade over 300 feet in width and the central pavilion surmounted by a copper-clad saucer dome, was constructed with steel framing and concrete floors, and clad in light greyish-buff brick, with extensive buff terra cotta ornament. The terra cotta was manufactured by the New York Architectural Terra Cotta Co., which had been established in 1886 by Orlando B. Potter (with Asahel Clarke Geer) after his experience in the construction of his Potter Building (1883-86, Norris G. Starkweather), 35-38 Park Row, which used extensive architectural terra cotta.
The only major architectural terra cotta firm in New York City, it became one of the largest such American manufacturers, producing ornament for such notable structures as Carnegie Hall (1889-91, William B. Tuthill); Montauk Club (1889-91, Francis H. Kimball); West End Collegiate Church and School (1892-93, Robert W. Gibson); Ansonia Hotel (1899-1904, Paul E.M. Duboy); and Plaza Hotel (1905-07, Henry Hardenbergh).20 The company, with its factory located in Long Island City, lasted until bankruptcy in 1932. Gibson’s design for the Museum received much notice, being shown at the 1898 exhibition of the Architectural League of New York, and featured a number of times in the contemporary architectural press: The Brickbuilder (August 1898), Architecture & Building (October 1898), American Architect & Building News (April 1900), and The Brickbuilder (June 1900).
Within the Botanical Museum Building originally were: a lecture hall in the ground-story level; a museum of economic botany (with plants used in the arts, industry, and sciences) on the first story; a general museum, with exhibits on the families of plants on the second story; a library, with the reading room under the dome, and a stack room to the rear on the third-story center wing; plant embryology laboratories in the northern third-story wing; and taxonomy laboratories and herbaria, including Columbia University’s herbarium, in the southern third-story wing. When it was completed, this was considered the largest botanical museum in the world, with the largest botanical library in the United States. It also served as NYBG’s administration building.
Architect: Robert W. Gibson
Robert Williams Gibson (1854-1927), born in Essex, England, graduated in 1879 from the Royal Academy of Arts, London (winning the Soane Medallion) and spent a year traveling on scholarship in Italy, France and Spain. After immigrating to the United States in 1881, Gibson established an architectural practice in Albany, N.Y., where he soon entered the competition for the design of the Cathedral of All Saints (Episcopal). His Gothic Revival style design was selected in 1883 over the only other submission, that of the preeminent Romanesque Revival master, Henry Hobson Richardson; the building was constructed in 1884-88 and 1902-04.
Gibson also designed the Romanesque Revival style National Commercial Bank (1887), Albany. In 1888, Gibson moved to New York City, where he established a successful practice, specializing in ecclesiastical and commercial buildings. Two early commissions that were Romanesque-inspired were the U.S. Trust Co. Building (1888-89, demolished), 45 Wall Street, and the New York Ear & Eye Infirmary (188894), Second Avenue and 13th Street.
Gibson was responsible for the design of many churches, especially Episcopal, in New York State and region, mostly in the Gothic Revival style, including : Christ Mission (1886), Gloversville, N.Y.; Christ Church (1888-89), Herkimer, N.Y.; the 1888-89 interior of St. Paul’s Cathedral (186061, Richard Upjohn), Buffalo, N.Y.; St. Stephen’s Church (1888-89), Olean, N.Y.; Christ Church (1886-94), Rochester, N.Y.; St. Michael’s Church (1890-91), Amsterdam Avenue and West 99th Street; Trinity Church (1891), Ossining, N.Y.; St. John’s Church (1892), Northampton, Mass.; Grace Church (1892), Plainfield, N.J.; Christ Church (1893), Corning, N.Y.; and St. Luke’s Church (189798), Mechanicsville, N.Y. West End Collegiate Church and School (1892-93), West End Avenue and West 77th Street, a designated New York City Landmark, is a distinctive essay in the Dutch Renaissance Revival style, while the Church Missions House (1892-94, with Edward J.N. Stent), 281 Park Avenue South, a designated New York City Landmark, was inspired by a medieval Flemish guildhall. The Randall Memorial Chapel and Music Hall (1890-92; chapel demolished), Sailors’ Snug Harbor, Staten Island, signaled a turn in the latter part of Gibson’s career to classically-inspired styles.
Among his notable commercial and institutional projects are the Fifth Avenue Bank (1890, demolished), 530 Fifth Avenue; Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club (1891-93), Oyster Bay, N.Y.; Greenwich Savings Bank (1892, demolished), 246 Sixth Avenue; Bank of Buffalo (1895), Buffalo, N.Y.; New York Coffee Exchange (1895, demolished), 110 Pearl Street; New York Clearing House Exchange Building (1896, demolished), 77 Cedar Street; New York Botanical Garden Museum Building (1896-1901), Bronx; Women’s (later Martha Washington) Hotel (1901-03), 29 East 29th Street; and Merchants and Mechanics Bank (1902), Scranton, Pa. The Morton F. and Nellie Plant House (1903-05), 651 Fifth Avenue, Cartier’s since 1917, is a designated New York City Landmark.
Gibson built a summer home in Oyster Bay in 1899 that he continued to enlarge in subsequent years. He was a director of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects and a president of the New York Architectural League. By 1909, his career was in decline and personal problems, including the death of his son and his wife’s increasing breakdowns, led him to rent his home in Oyster Bay; he moved to Aveley Farm in Woodbury, N.Y., where he died in 1927.
Later History of the Botanical Museum Building 22
Due to the growth of both the library and the herbarium, an addition to the Botanical Museum Building was contemplated as early as 1926. Nothing was accomplished except for internal remodeling and expansion until a library wing was planned in 1958 by architects Eggers & Higgins. The original rear central wing of the Museum Building was demolished, and the Harriet Barnes Pratt Library Wing was built in 1964-65, but not occupied until 1966. In 1960-61, the balustrades, cheek walls, and steps in front of the museum were replaced with new granite steps and brick walls with bluestone and concrete coping. The Jeannette Kittredge Watson Science and Education Building, for education and environmental units, administrative offices, and experimental greenhouse, was constructed behind the Museum Building’s southern wing in 1969-72 (William and Geoffrey Platt, architect).
An Annex to house specimens from the herbarium collection was built in 1993-94 (Coe Lee Robinson Roesch, Inc., architect) to the south of the Museum Building. The International Plant Science Center was constructed behind the Museum Building’s northern wing in 1998 (Polshek Partnership, architect), containing the William and Linda Steere Herbarium, LuEsther T. Mertz Library, and Arthur and Janet Ross Gallery and Lecture Hall. All of these additions to the original Museum Building are excluded from this designation.
Description: Museum (now Library) Building (excluding the International Plant Science Center, Harriet Barnes Pratt Library Wing, Jeannette Kittredge Watson Science and Education Building, and Annex)
Front Facade: The long four-story neo-Renaissance style structure, clad in greyish-buff brick and buff terra cotta (manufactured by the New York Architectural Terra Cotta Co.), is articulated horizontally with a rusticated and pedimented central pavilion with four monumental Corinthian columns and copper-clad saucer dome, flanked by intermediate sections and end pavilions with monumental Corinthian pilasters. The rusticated ground story serves as the base of the building, while the entrance on the first story is approached by wide stairs, and the third story is a mansard roof (clad in standing-seam metal, with segmental dormers) on the intermediate sections, between the full-story pedimented pavilions (with pilasters and molded copper cornices). Fenestration is rectangular, except on the second story, which is round-arched with voussoirs and keystones. Balustrades are located at the base of the second-story windows. In 1959-61, “swivel type” windows were replaced with double-hung sash. The cornice above the second story is modillioned on the central pavilion and denticulated on the rest of the building, and ornamented with swags on the pavilions.
A pierced parapet originally extended atop the entire second-story cornice; today only that on the central pavilion survives. Anthemion ornament acroteria, placed in 1901 at the corners of the roof of each pavilion, were removed by 1950. Flagpoles originally located atop each of the three pavilions have been removed. Central Pavilion: There are three entrances, each with double wood-and-glass doors and double transoms. The central main entrance has a surround with brick Doric columns that support an entablature which is surmounted by a seal of New York City, flanked by scrolls and in turn surmounted by a segmental pediment. The flanking entrances are surmounted by smaller segmentally-pedimented seals of the United States and New York State. A cartouche with the seal of NYBG, flanked by scrolls and edged with a cornucopia, is located in the center of the third story. Front Steps/Approach: In 1960-61, the original curved balustrade along the drive in front of the Museum Building and the front steps were replaced with new brick walls (now painted) with concrete coping and curved ends, and new granite steps with brick cheek walls with bluestone coping.
A metal lamppost with three globes has been placed on either side of the steps atop the cheek walls, and the steps have metal railings. A handicap-accessible lift has been placed to the north of the northern cheek wall. There are steps to the ground story flanked by a brick cheek wall, to the south of the main steps. End Pavilions: Each pavilion has a ground-story pedimented and arched entrance with double wood-and-glass doors and arched transoms. The northern pavilion has a service entrance to the north, with double wood doors, flanking brick cheek walls, and bluestone paving. The southern pavilion has flanking brick cheek walls and bluestone paving in front of the entrance. Intermediate Sections: An entrance is located on the ground story to the north of the Central Pavilion, having double wood-and-glass doors and double transoms, and is flanked by one brick and bluestone cheek wall and approached by bluestone steps. A ground-story entrance to the south of the Central Pavilion is partially filled in with brick, and is flanked by one brick and bluestone cheek wall and approached by bluestone steps.
Rear (East) Facade: Three portions of the original Museum Building are visible on the rear facade: a section south of the Jeannette Kittredge Watson Science and Education Building; the central dome, visible above the Harriet Barnes Pratt Library Wing; and a northern section between the Pratt Library Wing and the International Plant Science Center. The visible southern four-bay portion has a three-bay southern pavilion and is articulated with rustication. The watertable has been parged. The southernmost windows on each story have been filled with brick, as have the northernmost two bays of the ground story. The third story is a mansard roof, having a molded and denticulated cornice and three segmental dormers on the pavilion (the southernmost window is filled in) and two rectangular dormers to the north. The visible four-bay northern section is articulated with rustication and has an angled polygonal entrance with wood-and-glass doors and transom, flanked by small rectangular openings with louvers. To the south of this entrance is a light well with a window, and to the north a basement entrance with a metal door. The third story is a mansard roof, having a molded and denticulated cornice and four rectangular dormers.
South Facade: The five-bay south facade is articulated with a rusticated ground story and monumental Corinthian pilasters on the first and second stories. The ground story had a pedimented and arched entrance, which is now connected to the Annex, with the upper portion of the arch filled in. The eastern portion of the watertable has been parged. The windows on each story of the easternmost bay have been filled with brick. The westernmost three bays of the third story are full-height, while the rest of the story is a mansard roof, with an easternmost segmental dormer.
North Facade: The only remaining visible portion of the north facade of the original five-bay Museum Building is the three westernmost bays, articulated with a rusticated ground story and monumental Corinthian pilasters on the first and second stories, and a small adjacent portion also having a pilaster on the first and second stories, as well as a small portion of the mansard roof. The ground story bays were altered (east to west) with: a louver and a painted window; metal doors; and louvers.
Botanical Garden Fountain: Fountain of Life 23
The original plan of NYBG included a fountain in front of the Botanical Museum, and after the building’s substantial completion in 1900, “the marble basins, whose position had been established by the general plan in 1897, were constructed at the time that the path approaches and marble seats, garden fountain and drinking fountain were built on the driveway [at the western end of the museum approach drives], leaving only the character of the bronze fountain itself to be determined, and its construction secured.”24 The Dept. of Public Parks’ Annual Report of 1900 noted that “specifications have been prepared for the improvement of grounds adjacent to the Botanical Museum Building... estimated to cost $40,000,” while the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in March 1900 indicated that “considerable work remains to be done on the surroundings, such as grading and constructing a driveway and path approaches to the front central portico, the building of a fountain designed to occupy the space within the outer curved retaining wall of the front approach, and of a parapet retaining wall around the terrace which surrounds the building.”
At that time, NYBG announced that “the Board of Managers have also authorized a sculptors’ competition for designs for the fountain planned for construction in front of the Museum Building, and arrangements for such competition have been made by a committee of the Managers and the architect.”
Gibson envisioned the fountain as the focus of the vista looking toward the Museum, and as having upper and lower water basins, the flowing “water element” giving “distinctive character both as a landscape feature and as a botanical exhibit.” Atop the Gibson-designed rusticated marble plinth and basins was to be a bronze sculptural fountain group, to be designed through this competition.
None of the submitted fountain designs were considered acceptable, and two additional designs were procured, but also rejected. In April 1901, a contract for $33,575 was awarded by the Dept. of Public Parks to the Wilson & Baillie Manufacturing Co., for “grading grounds, constructing, regulating, grading and paving walks and roads, furnishing and laying iron water pipes, constructing basin for statuary fountain, erecting garden fountain and drinking fountain, constructing stone seats, etc., in front of the Museum building.”
This contract was completed at the end of 1902. During that year, NYBG requested assistance in finding a sculptor from the National Sculpture Society, which appointed a committee composed of leading sculptors Karl Bitter and Daniel Chester French, and architect Charles C. Haight. A new open competition for the NYBG fountain was held in January-March 1903, with the jury composed of sculptors French, John Quincy Adams Ward, Charles Grafly, and Herbert Adams, and architect George B. Post. Fifteen sculptors submitted designs, and in April that of Carl (Charles) E. Tefft was selected, subject to his submitting a model for the committee’s approval.
In November 1903, it was reported that “the model is an admirable piece of work, giving abundant proof of the sculptor’s ability to carry out intelligently and artistically the design recommended to the Board.”
Tefft’s fountain design was also approved by the NYBG Board and John E. Eustis, Commissioner of Parks. Tefft completed the full plaster model in September 1904, and a $7,500 contract for casting and setting the bronze was granted in December to the Roman Bronze Works in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The Art Commission approved the design in January 1905. Cast in the Cire-Perdue process, the fountain was completed in May, purchased for $20,000, and installed by the City in June 1905, becoming fully operational in July. The Art Commission described the theme of the energetic fountain sculpture:
This is a bronze group, heroic size, of the head and shoulders of two rearing horses with webbed forefeet. A nude female figure of hilarious mien is astride the one at the left, which she guides with her right hand, while she swings her left hand backward in, merry gesture. A nude boy tries to control the horse at the right, and in his right hand holds a fish by the tail. Above the horses, a nude boy sits on the back of a dolphin on a large globe. Water flows from beneath the plinth into a large basin below, in the left side of which is a bronze merman looking up in a startled manner at the plunging animals and in the right side of the basin a bronze mermaid turns partly round to look at the group above her as she hurries to get out of their way.
Tefft’s creation of the horses’ webbed feet was considered novel. Preeminent sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens praised the work, while writer Frank Owen Payne opined that Tefft has created a most brilliant work. No other fountain of the city of New York is so admirably located. With the imposing facade of the great Botanic Museum behind it, and with its superb setting of fine shrubbery, this fountain is indeed a thing of rare beauty. ... The sculptor has called this the Fountain of Life, typifying, as it were, the great life principle of “Struggle for Existence” and “Survival of the Fittest.” The marvellous [sic] vivacity and motion displayed in this unique group certainly give force to the idea.
Sculptor: Carl (Charles) E. Tefft
One of the leading American public sculptors of the early 20th century (though not well-known today outside of Maine), Charles (later Carl) Eugene Tefft (1874-1951) was born in Brewer, Maine; both his mother and grandmother were designers. He began to study sculpture as a teenager, and after high school, moved to New York City in 1893 to attend the New-York Institute for Artist-Artisans (founded 1888) on a scholarship. Tefft apprenticed with sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward, and in 1898 became a professor of sculptural modeling at the Institute.
Around 1913 he established a studio and lived in Tompkinsville, Staten Island, using the name Carl professionally. During World War I, Tefft served in the 9th Coast Artillery. He was appointed director of sculpture at the New York Industrial Institute of Art around 1918, and later became director of sculpture for the Sesquicentennial International Exposition (1925), Philadelphia. After his wife’s death in 1936, Tefft divided his time between New York, Washington, and Maine, where he died in Presque Isle.
Among Tefft’s most notable public sculptures are: Lake Superior, Pan-American Exposition (1901), Buffalo, N.Y.; Osceola, Charleston (S.C.) Exposition (1901-02); Iowa and Renaissance Art, Louisiana Purchase Exposition (1904), St. Louis, Mo.; Revolutionary War Monument (1908), Ft. Lee, N.J.; Peace Monument (“Victory”) (1922), Belleville, N.J.; Spanish-American War (Battleship Maine) Memorial (1922), Bangor, Maine; Luther H. Peirce Memorial (“The Last Drive”) (1925-26), Bangor; Hannibal Hamlin (1927), Bangor, depicting Lincoln’s first Vice President (a 1933 copy was placed in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol); William Henry Maxwell Memorial (1928), American Museum of Natural History, commemorating New York City’s Superintendent of Schools, 18981918; and Veterans of Foreign Wars Memorial (1939), Bangor.
Later History: Fountain of Life
In 1960-61, the original balustrade that curved behind the fountain (on which lampposts were placed) was replaced by a brick wall (now painted) with concrete coping and curved ends. Two steel flagpoles, donated by Edward D. Adams (by 1920) were re-installed on the curved ends. Around this time, the western side of the circular drive around the fountain was reconfigured as a path (now paved with asphalt and flanked at each end by a lamppost). In 1968, the fountain’s bronze figures were cleaned by the Parks Dept. At that time, cracking was observed in the marble plinth and basin, and plans were made to reset the supporting bronze mermaid and merman figures “that were removed some years ago” (two adjacent crab claws were also missing).
The fountain was restored for a reported $2 million in 2005 by the A. Ottavino Corp. and Building Conservation Associates. New mermaid, merman, and crab claw figures were sculpted in bronze by Glenn and Diane Hines according to historic photographs, including those of Tefft’s original model. The fountain was named after philanthropist donor Lillian Goldman, and a new bronze book (by sculptor Stephen Doyle) was placed on the edge of the lower marble basin.
Tulip Tree Allee
The contract between the Dept. of Public Parks and the Wilson & Baillie Manufacturing Co., to grade the grounds, construct and pave walks and roads, etc., in front of the Museum Building [see above] was executed between April 1901 and the end of 1902. This contract also included, at the western end of the Museum drives, the installation of a seating area and drinking fountain (no longer extant), described by Gibson as:
[a] set of stone seats with a drinking fountain – a little architectural structure of Corinthian order about 16 feet high with a bronze cluster of water symbols. ... From this point looking toward the Museum the main avenue will give a delightful vista toward its principal entrance with the terrace and ramps leading up to the grand portico. 36
In 1903, Carolina poplars were planted along the approach to the museum.37 By the beginning of 1904, the driveway was re-graded after completion of the main fountain’s basins, as well as the seating area and drinking fountain (the latter in operation in June 1903), and the paths leading to the museum were completed. Tulip trees were planted between the poplars in 1905.38 By 1911, the poplar trees were removed, leaving the tulip trees.39 The seating area/drinking fountain at the west end of the allee was removed c. 1954-56 when a laboratory building was constructed nearby. Today, the allee is formed by 25 trees. The drives are currently paved with asphalt with concrete curbs, and are lined with benches. Asphalt and concrete sidewalks alongside the drive lead to the front steps of the Museum Building, and asphalt paths lead from the drive to the west of the northern and southern pavilions of the front facade.
- From the 2009 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report
Wallaroo and Wallaroo Mines. We probably all know that Wallaroo is a contraction of two local Narrunga words meaning “wallabies urine.” But why did Robert Miller, a 19th century gentleman do this? Why not call his run Quandong or some other innocuous Narrunga word? Miller soon sold the leasehold on to Walter Watson Hughes. It was one of Hughes’ shepherds, John Boor, who found knobs of green copper in stone by a wombat burrow on the property in December 1859.( Another shepherd Ryan discovered copper at Moonta.) Hughes soon had the Wallaroo Mine operating using miners from the Burra copper mine by mid 1860. But the Wallaroo Mines were actually located at Kadina. Hughes had the mining rights and became the major shareholder of both the Wallaroo and the Moonta mining companies. He increased his fortune many fold over becoming one of the wealthiest men in SA. He was a great benefactor of the University of Adelaide, hence his title of “the Father of the University “.
But the story of Wallaroo, rather than Wallaroo Mines, is about smelting copper rather than mining it. Wallaroo was and still is a major SA port and so it was logical that smelters be established near shipping. The first shipment of copper left Wallaroo in July 1860; the first shipment of smelted copper left Wallaroo in January 1862. The current Hughes smelter chimney left at Wallaroo was one of thirteen smelter stacks built by the mid 1860s. The largest was 120 feet high. Wallaroo smelters are shown in this photograph from the State Archives dated 1870.
The township of Wallaroo emerged adjacent to the smelters as a government town in 1861 with the first Post Office opening in 1863 and the first school in 1861. A Rounsevell coach service linked Wallaroo with Adelaide via a steamer connection from Port Clinton; the Customs House was open for business by 1862; and a desalination plant was operating by 1862 to provide water for the smelters. (Water was also a problem for the Wallaroo Mines as the watertable was high and necessitated a large pump house to pump water from the deep shafts.) Within a few years, Wallaroo was a significant town. Churches, schools, shops and businesses all made this district the major focus of the state. A number of the streets of the town commemorate the names of major investors in the Wallaroo Mining Company or others involved in copper mining names such as Bagot, Hughes, Hay, Stirling, Smith ( from Robert Barr Smith), Elder, Duncan( nephew of Hughes) etc. Other streets reflecting the Cornish mining and Welsh smelting history of the town include Cornish, England, Scotland, and Wales streets.
In 1890 the Wallaroo and Moonta Mines amalgamated. The combined companies employed on average around 1,900 people a year in the mines and smelters. The peak year for employment was 1906 when the company hired 2,700 men. This followed a disastrous fire in 1904 when the large Taylor Shaft and poppet was destroyed by fire at Moonta Mines. There were three main shafts operating at the Wallaroo Mines by 1906, the Boors, Hughes and Office shafts. Between 1860 and 1923 when the mine closed the Wallaroo Mine alone had produced almost £10,000 million worth of copper and the Moonta Mine had produced over £20,000 million worth of copper. But the industrial story of Wallaroo did not cease with the closing of the mines and the smelters.
Once Professor John Custance of the newly founded Roseworthy Agricultural College (1883) discovered the value of superphosphate fertilizer to wheat yields in SA a new fertilizer industry emerged. By the end of the 1890s when usage of super became more widely practised three fertilizer plants were operating in SA, one at Port Adelaide, one at Torrensville and the last at Wallaroo. The copper smelters at Wallaroo produced sulphuric acid as a by product which was mixed with phosphate rock in kilns to form superphosphate. The Wallaroo Phosphate Company began operations in 1899. From 1899 onwards the main imports at the Port of Wallaroo were coal for the copper smelters and phosphate rock for the fertilizer ovens. (The main exports were copper and wheat.) The Wallaroo Phosphate Company merged with the Mt Lyell Fertilizer Company of Tasmania in 1913. When the copper mines closed down in 1923 the fertilizer works was the main industrial employer in Wallaroo. The company had sulphuric acid railed in from Port Pirie where it was a by product of the silver, lead and zinc smelters of BHP there. In 1965 this company became the Adelaide and Wallaroo Fertilizers Company and later the Adelaide Chemical Company. It eventually became Top Brand Fertilizers in 1980 and continued trading for some years but it no longer operates. Phosphate or guano rock was originally imported from Chile to Wallaroo but after 1907 shipments came from Nauru which is basically a phosphate island! Today phosphate rock is mined within Australia at Mt Isa, the infamous Christmas Island and Wonarah in the Northern Territory.
Some of the old buildings passed on our coach tour of Wallaroo for you to inspect more closely over your lunch break are:
•20 Wildman St. House. This was once the home of Caroline Carleton. She wrote the The Song of Australia in 1859 for a poetry competition in Gawler. She got £10. Carl Linger wrote the music to go with it. Caroline moved to Wallaroo in 1870 to live with her daughter Amy who ran a private school in this house. On a trip back from Adelaide in 1874 Caroline Carleton died at Matta House at Kadina which was probably made available for her to live in by the Wallaroo Mining Company. She was buried in the Wallaroo cemetery and a few years later her daughter moved to Western Australia to live. There is a memorial cairn to Caroline Carleton opposite the current Post Office.
•St. Mary’s Anglican Church built in 1864 in Church St. Its pews and altar joinery are in teak.
•The old Police Station (John Tce) was erected by David Bower again in 1862. It closed in 1972. Note the old cells at the back. A newer Police station was built in the 1940s with a tiled roof but neither is used for policing these days.
•The Old Court House built in 1866 by local builder T. Heath. It was used as the local Court until 1972. For years it was the headquarters of the Wallaroo Band. The Court had to be close to the jetty as many cases involved international sailors who had to be dealt with quickly before they were due to sail onwards.
•Kirribilli House (corner Lydia Tce and Hughes St.) This is not to be confused with Kirribilli House in Sydney, the city residence of the Prime Minister! It too was built by David Bower in 1862, but not for a government or a mine official but for himself. At the rear are old stables and outbuildings.
•Sonbern Lodge in John Tce. It was built in 1914 as a Coffee Palace and Guest House (as a result of the Temperance Movement.) It opened to cater for arrivals on the train opposite. It has been a guest house/ motel for many years.
•The Railway Station. This American designed Art Nouveau station was opened in 1914 the same year that identical stations opened in Bordertown, Tailem Bend and Moonta. There had been a train station elsewhere in the railyards that handled passengers from when the railway to Kadina an Adelaide opened in 1878. When passenger trains ceased in 1969 it became a local Arts and Crafts Centre. Since 1985 it has been a conference centre.
•The Wallaroo Town Hall. This fine two storey Edwardian/Classical style building with a clock tower and spire roof was built in 1902. Unfortunately on 27 December 1917 a fire destroyed the building. A fund to rebuild was started and an identical structure re-opened in 1918. It was at this time that the clock tower and spire were added thanks to a local donor, Councillor Richard Tonkin.
•The current Wallaroo Post Office was erected in 1910 by the SA government although the Commonwealth was by then responsible for post offices. It is in a Georgian style and typical of many post offices of this decade. The last SA government built post offices were erected around 1919.
•Cornucopia Hotel. This amazingly large hotel was built and opened in 1862 and is the only hotel in Wallaroo to maintain its original façade. It is evidence of the high prospects expected of the Wallaroo Mines.
•The Customs House, 1862, built by David Bower at the same time as the government declared the international port of Wallaroo. The first Customs Officer was also the Harbourmaster. Used by SA Customs until 1901, then the Commonwealth Customs until 1920 when it became a private residence. There is no customs service today as the port only exports with no imports. This Georgian style building is on the Register of the National Estate and is a private residence.
•The Hughes Smelter 1861, built with 300,000 bricks standing 36.5 metre high. An inscription on the rear says W.W.H. 1861.
•The current National Trust Museum of Wallaroo was the original Post Office of 1865. It was used as a Post Office until 1910 and then the police from across the street took charge of the building for offices and a residence. The National Trust has owned it since 1975. The Museum covers the Wallaroo Smelting Industry; Caroline Carleton; Nautical History of Wallaroo; early telegraph and telephones; and general Wallaroo history. It opens at 2 pm and has an admission fee.