Old Stones

We are no Rome, but New York is a town full of old stones as this view of West 92nd Street can attest to. And like the sacking of Rome by the Vandals or Visigoths, or whoever it was, the city is always being torn at by their descendants in destruction, the Developers.

Mind you, not everything in NY is worth saving, but many attractive old buildings are torn down every year. Often the projects are a success for the builder, the city and the neighborhood. Other times, a small, fine old building is torn down to make way for something much larger in a neighborhood that can ill accommodate it. Under the zoning laws south of 96th Street, you could possibly put a 20 story structure where a four story brownstone sits.

Generally, little thought is given to neighborhood context, which on the Upper West Side would be it's pre-World War One character. The worst example of this is the Ariel East on Broadway and 100th Street. It is a spindly glass box out of context with its surroundings situated mid-block and dwarfing not only the buildings on either side of it, but also everything in a ten block radius except, perhaps, its sister building across the street.

Penn Station was destroyed in the 1960s to build Madison Square Garden and the city has never recovered from it.
In that transaction the city exchanged a monolith of urban progress and civility for a harvest gold, pin cushion shaped arena that is best entered from underground. After that event, a landmark law was enacted, but it is weak and one look at the map of landmarked buildings in the city shows the strong influence of political players other than preservationists.

Pulling Your Weight

Pedicabs first started showing up in Midtown in 2002. Recalling Mao's ban on rickshaws as undignified, they made me uneasy at first, but they were being driven by wholesome looking young guys who had found a way of avoiding the onset of the great Manhattan career track. In the beginning, they pretty much kept to the flatter streets around Times Square and Sixth Avenue. These days you see them more in Central Park. Dozens of them. They seem to be competing successfully with the horse drawn carriages of Central Park South both for tourist fares and space on the crowded road. Their ranks have changed, too. Now, some are pedaled by women and there are a lot of new drivers from eastern Europe and Africa. They stop often to point out landmarks, but more probably it's to rest after pulling a couple of heavy Midwesterners up a hill. You'll just as often overhear them misidentifying landmarks around the park like calling the Beresford the Dakota. I did a double take one day when I thought I heard a driver telling his bored looking fares about a former ships' grave in the middle of the park before I realized he was pointing at the Sheep's Meadow where once sheep grazed.

Spring Arriving in NY Ever So Slowly

Th St. Urban at 89th and Central Park West is rare in that its return wall, the back wall that does not face the street, but can be seen from the street, is actually decorated. Most builders don't bother with such niceties.

Air Rights Insanity

Developers sometimes buy the air rights of neighboring properties to increase the bulk or height of their new buildings, but this is the first time I have ever seen a development literally occupying the air over another building. It is on West 78th Street near Broadway. From a five story base, they have cantilevered a steel truss out over the building next door that houses Stand UP NY , a comedy club. Looks a little shaky to me.

I don't know how many more floors of this they are going to construct. The contractor, Marson, whose website shows a number of other interesting projects around the city, has nothing posted on this site. Nor could I find the architect's name at the building site. I am not sure I would want my name on it, either.
This is an example of the craziness that happens in an irrationally priced property market in a city controlled by developers. The rush to cash in leads to extraordinary engineering projects like adding multiple floors to occupied buildings or putting whole neighborhoods on platforms over rail yards, while reserving little space for public needs and leaving institutions like St Vincent's Hospital fighting to develop a new building on a little postage stamp in the Village.

Down In The Dumps

West 91st Street: Another quiet afternoon in the 'hood.

Verse Reverse

In February I saw the play Grace, starring Lynn Redgrave at the Lucille Lortel Theater. It's a scalding emotional drama (Redgrave was amazing) about how a mother with a public reputation as an atheist reacts to her son's announcement that he is becoming an Anglican priest. In an interesting twist in the story, the son's fiancée recites the poem This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin. I have always liked that poem. It's ostensibly about what breeding does to human beings, but I think it's really about the twisted psychological manipulations parents resort to to stay sane and in control around their children. The child eventually grows up to view its parent as the cause of their own fuckings-up. Since I got over my Oedipal/Electra complexes, I have thought Larkin's poem is unfair to parents, in most cases, and here is my retort.

This Be The Reverse

They’re not so bad, your mum and dad,

For having made someone like you.

They did their best with what they had,

Despite the hell you put them through.

And in their turn they may have sworn

At their old folks as you now do.

Those whom in silence they now mourn

And say you bear resemblance to.

We make our misery day by day

And blame our parent's mental health

Get to a church and start to pray

Your own kids don’t become yourself

Water tanks

There are two companies left in the city that build and maintain water towers, Rosenwach and Iseek Brothers. I guess they don't exist in other cities but here you see them everywhere.

From my roof, I can see about twenty of them standing silently over the city. They are used to deliver water to the upper floors of buildings that are too tall to use regular city water, which is only under enough pressure to go up five or six stories. (Picture a broken fire hydrant.) Buildings pump city water to the roof and it flows down again under force of gravity.

The tanks are basically large barrels made of wood. You have to have them inspected and cleaned once a year and it's probably worth it. A crew climbs up and cleans it out and inspects the seams. The roof keeps dirt and birds out, though I have heard there are sometimes dead pigeons inside, probably one those myths like alligators in the sewers.