Well Heeled Gothic

On Fifth Avenue at 53rd, around the corner from MoMA, is the Saint Thomas Presbyterian Church, once, if not still, among the richest congregations in the country. In many of the online descriptions (but not the Daytonian one I linked) it is described as designed in the French High Gothic style, aka flamboyant. I believe that this is because of the ornamented stained glass rose window that is similar in treatment to the one on the Rheims Cathedral, and also because of the stunning reredos that you can see in the shot of the altar, at the top of this post. But the interior, to me, is more akin to early gothic: The heavy columns remind me of Notre Dame of Paris.

Rheims Cathedral

St. Thomas Church

As you can see, the pillars are plain cylinders, not articulated into the multiple small columns, bunched together, that you see in late gothic. And the English stained glass is beautiful!

Sea Level Rise in New York

Hangin’ Out Near Highbridge

Walking south, I took this shot of my favorite apartment buildings, although you can see only one in this picture.  I like to call it The Sentinel.

The Harlem River is off to the left of this image, looking north from the Highbridge promenade.  A nice view of some premier NYC highway spaghetti.

Yep, NYC sure is beautiful!

Looking south over The Deegan Expressway and the Harlem RIver, with Manhattan to the right and in the distance.

Roosevelt Island Jaunt

I took the aerial tram to Roosevelt Island today, the first time I’ve ridden on that thing, and a bad day to do it.  Saturday, good weather, crowds, one car out of service, subway not running…  Once you get there, the views from the island are pretty unusual for New York  City.

The romantic one below is looking east to the new apartments in the Long Island City area of Queens.

Strolling around the island is pleasant once you leave behind the apartments and the new Cornell University hi-tech campus.  The old Renwick shell of a small pox hospital is carefully preserved.

Something went wrong with my HDR shot here – it would help to use a tripod – so I call it “Good Vibrations.”

The southern end of the island is now the finally completed Louis Kahn park dedicated to FDR’s Four Freedoms.  It is shockingly abstract in form – a real jolt to the senses.  That’s saying a lot since it is just a baseball hit away from the dense Manhattan skyline, which isn’t exactly an English garden landscape.  It’s the austerity of the design, I suppose…

 

Not sure what he was doing there, but he had a retinue of photo-tech people, so I guess he wasn’t fighting super criminals.

Rising Tides – Festival of Doom

There is a festival of doom in the Sunday New York Times today, with multiple articles on the threat to coastal cities in the USA posed by rising sea levels.  It includes a mournful, fatalistic essay by James Atlas, and a suite of interactive graphics that allow users to see just “what could disappear.”

This quote from one article pretty much sums up the message:

According to Dr. Schaeffer’s study, immediate and extreme pollution cuts — measures well beyond any discussion now under way — could limit sea level rise to five feet over 300 years. If we stay on our current path, the oceans could rise five feet by the first half of next century, then continue rising even faster. If instead we make moderate shifts in energy and industry — using the kinds of targets that nations have contemplated in international talks but have failed to pursue — sea level could still climb past 12 feet just after 2300. It is hard to imagine what measures might allow many of our great coastal cities to survive a 12-foot increase.

A few things to note here:

• This paragraph assumes that the predictions based on models are all correct, and that the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) hypothesis is proven, “settled science.”  It’s not really that certain.  Or rather, the models themselves display tremendous uncertainty.
• Also taken pretty much for granted is the fact that humans are not going to give their economy a thoroughgoing overhaul into the world of Green, so we might as well get ready!
• Unmentioned is the fact that in many places, e.g. NYC, sea level has been rising steadily for centuries.  In NYC, it has been at a rate of about 1-foot per 100 years.
• The word ‘could’  is used many times:  this paragraph is a worst-case scenario.

I had a professor of Ancient Art once who liked to say, “Civilizations come: Civilizations go…”  In archaeology, ‘civilization’ is synonymous with ‘city’.  Many cities have seen their harbors silt up, their water supplies disappear, their precincts inundated with lava or sea water.  It’s part of history.  Many other cities have survived for millenia by adjusting and changing.  When the writer says “It is hard to imagine what measures might allow many of our great coastal cities to survive a 12-foot increase,”  he is displaying a lack of insight and imagination.  Yes, it would be hard to imagine how our cities could survive direct hits by meteorites either, but that’s not likely to happen.

I would suggest the following scenario as likely:  The climate will change, but most likely not in the drastic way some scientists predict.  Seas will continue to rise where they are rising now, and perhaps in other places as well, perhaps a bit faster, but slowly, over centuries.  Unlike Holland, where inundation brings national catastrophe approaching eradication, most places can adapt slowly, and they will adapt.  People will make decisions, slowly, haltingly, stupidly or with foresight, about when and where it is worth rebuilding.  Change happens even in NYC – most skyscrapers are not built for the ages. Lower floors can be abandoned or ‘repurposed.’  It all takes time, and we have time, plenty of it.  Things will change.  The only impossibility is keeping them just as they are now.

There is a bright side to all of this.  Think of the economic stimulus potential of a huge program to raise local airports and critical infrastructure above the flood level – the greatest ‘shovel-ready‘ public works program in history!

Another Landmark

Another downtown favorite, just around the block from the Corbin Building.  This is the Keuffel & Esser Building, built for the firm of K & E, maker of pens, drafting supplies, and slide-rules (Anyone ever use one of those?  Before my time!)  Now completely obscured by scaffolding, but soon to be revealed in all its glory. 

This is the NYC Landmarks Commission report.

Corbin Revived!

click for more info

I had noticed this building pre-9/11, and wondered about it. It was black with soot, but there was something of interest there.  It is The Corbin Building, by Francis Kimball, considered one of New York City’s first skyscrapers, although it is only eight stories high!  Now the exterior has been lovingly restored as part of the  rebuilding, and improvement, of the hideous Fulton Street subway stop. (Many a wretched hour I have spent at that stop, trekking futilely from hall, to stair, to platform, in search of the proper train.  So far, I have seen a vast improvement.)

The restored building will include the pyramidal towers seen in this old photo, which have been missing for decades.  The restoration brings to light the beautiful tones of the cleaned stone, which contrast with the ornate, Moorish terracotta designs, and the Victorian cast-iron relief of the bay windows.

It was pretty hard to get a view of this narrow building on a narrow street, clogged with traffic, pedestrians, and massive construction scaffolding works, but here’s what I managed.

Calatrava White Elephant?

I am a civil engineer, so I cannot help but be thrilled at the sight of the Calatrava PATH terminal taking shape (the elliptical foundation in the middle of the photo) beneath my window at World Trade Center site – it will be amazing!  And the memorial park itself is pretty nice too – I visited it for the first time last week.

Of course, the base of the Freedom Tower looks disturbingly like Godzilla’s foot stamping on Bambi, but no matter.  They’ll fancy it up…a bit.

In the end, as I gaze down at the massive construction site, with more people and money moving in and out of it than some entire countries no doubt, I wonder about that PATH building:  let’s forget the money-losing tower for now.  What is it for?  Penn Station handles more than seven times the number of passengers, and this terminal will do nothing to increase capacity.  It will simply look fantastic.  Is it worth $3.5 billion, and counting?  That would buy a lot of nitty-gritty upgrades for the cars and tracks that actually move people around the city.

I have to conclude that it’s a colossal waste of money, what used to be known in architectural circles as a ‘folly’.  All those bridge and train tolls gonna rise…$3.5 billion and counting.  We will pay for the megalomania of the PA NYNJ directors.  From the Wiki article:

A large transit station was not part of the 2003 Memory Foundations master plan for the site by Daniel Libeskind, which called for a smaller station along the lines of the original subterranean station that existed beneath the World Trade Center. Libeskind’s design called for the space to be left open, forming a “Wedge of Light” so that sun rays around the autumnal equinox would hit the World Trade Center footprints each September.

In early 2004, the Port Authority, which owns the land, modified the Libeskind plan to include a world-class transportation station downtown that was intended to rival Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal.

For a little perspective, consider that Grand Central, completed in 1913 for $80 million, $1.9 billion today, has 44 platforms, on two levels, and 67 tracks.  It was built with private money, and marked a tremendous advance in the design of complicated rail terminals, besides being a Beaux Arts monument.  The PATH terminal will have, uh…four tracks?

If I go back to using the PATH, I will go from Hoboken, left and center, to NYC, at the right, in the photos below.

State of the Police

News on the incredible case of Adrian Schoolcraft, who was thrown into a mental hospital for six days to try to cover up his documenting of NYPD abuses.  What with periodic shootings of young black men, subsequently found to be unarmed, and things like this, it’s hard to feel trusting towards New York’s Finest.

He’s not so crazy after all.

An NYPD report supports the claims made by Officer Adrian Schoolcraft, the Brooklyn cop who accused the NYPD of throwing him into a mental hospital because he complained supervisors were cooking the books to make the crime rate seem lower.

The 95-page report was completed in June 2010 but never released. Jon Norinsberg, Schoolcraft’s lawyer, called it “a very strong vindication” of Schoolcraft’s claims.

“It’s unfortunate that this has not been disclosed to the public,” Norinsberg said. “But it will all come out when this goes to trial.”