OHNY

CONTINUED FROM OPEN BORDERS – OPEN HOUSE NEW YORK 2006 PART 1

I would not have believed that the Octagon would become this magnificent in August 1999.


	NYC photographer extraordinaire Steve Garza takes over the photography this page, and your webmaster tries once again to write a coherent sentence. Some OHNY tourgoers thought they saw a ghost on the Octagon staircase. See what you think...

Paul Rudolph

Those who endure your webmaster's ragings about the new buildings that are wreaking havoc, or threaten to, in Flushing and other locales around town often have the mistaken impression that I despise modern architecture. It's a vicious fallacy: when done right, new designs serve to amplify and accentuate, not detract from, the ones that have come before. My devotion to Frank Lloyd Wright, unrequited in NYC since he rarely built here, is evidence of that.

Steve's photos of the Paul Rudolph House, 246 East 58th Street, capture the work of an uncompromising architect. His Art and Architecure Building at Yale University has been described as unwieldy and cold, but his Manhattan works, all white and glassy surfaces, are playful in their way; from what the pictures of this building and his apartment on Beekman Place show, I wouldn't mind a long-term tenure there (even though I avoid mirrors like Count Dracula avoids garlic).


	The Village Voice: As in his own Beekman Place abode, spaces bleed into each other. The bedrooms overlook the living room—this is not a house for anyone with a small child. Nearly every surface is white, including walls, shag carpeting, and floor-to-ceiling open storage. One treads lightly through a John Soane-like hoard of antiquities (tiny classical statuettes, gold chargers, African masks) that perfectly offset the disco hedonism curling around all that whiteness.

		From Elements of Living Magazine, March 2006: Call it the house of light. Designed and built by architect Paul Rudolph, the Manhattan townhouse at 246 East 58th Street is, from top to bottom, a reflection of the master modernist's lifelong interest in light as a fourth dimension. The top residential floors are a brilliant orchestration of spatial layers and reflective materials that combine to create a series of magical lighting compositions. The bottom floors, meanwhile, serve as both showroom and design laboratory for Modulightor, the lighting company that grew from Rudolph's decades-long friendship with businessman Ernst Wagner...

Chrysler

The Chrysler Building, second tallest in New York City at 1046 feet in height, is hardly Forgotten, but does have its Forgotten aspects (the east side of the building on East 42nd Street is angled along a right of way that limns the path of the old Post Road to Boston, which had been closed about 9 decades before the Chrysler was built, and it is the tallest building in the world built of bricks). During Open House New York, though, its awesome Art Deco lobby is open to gawking urbanophiles who are normally given the bum's rush if they can't prove they work in the building. It is no longer owned by the Chrysler Corporation, which merged with the German powerhouse auto manufacturer Daimler-Benz in 1998.

Great Gridlock: The (notionally, at least) three storeys high, upwards tapering entrance lobby has a triangular form, with entrances from three sides, Lexington Avenue, 42nd and 43rd Streets. The lobby is lavishly decorated with Red Moroccan marble walls, sienna-coloured travertine floor and onyx, blue marble and steel in Art Deco compositions. The ceiling mural, the largest in the world at its completion, was painted by Edward Trumbull and praises the modern-day technical progress -- and of course the building itself and its builders at work. The lobby was refurbished in 1978 by JCS Design Assocs. and Joseph Pell Lombardi.

(LEFT) Part of ceiling mural showing Charles Lindbergh's "Spirit of St. Louis," the plane in which he had successfully made the first airplane flight across the Atlantic Ocean the year before the skyscraper's foundation was laid.

The Chrysler mural celebrates American industry.

Montauk

Most Park Slopers who notice architecture at all know about the Montauk Club on Lincoln Place between 8th Avenue and Plaza Street. The club itself was established in 1889 as a “gentleman’s social club”; a plaque at the front entrance describes its 1891 building at 8th Avenue and Lincoln Place as modeled by architect Francis Kimball after the Ca’ d’Oro in Venice. There is a lengthy frieze above the third floor depicting the “exploits of the Montauk Indians,” as the plaque puts it, in terra cotta. On the second floor arch, you’ll find another frieze showing the club’s founders laying the cornerstone. Stained-glass windows punctuate the three-sided exterior, and arches with quatrefoil, or 4-leaf clover-shaped, spaces. Yet another frieze above the second story depicts a Montauk sachem, Wyandance (who also gave his name to a small town in Suffolk County) deeding property to a Lion Gardner of Easthampton, Long Island, in 1659. The club occupies only the lower two floors, while co-op apartments occupy the others.

Four presidents have visited the Montauk: Cleveland, Hoover, Eisenhower and Kennedy, and Mark Twain gave a short talk at the Montauk on April 27, 1901. The Montauk Club has an open house the first Friday of each month: call (718) 638-0800 or visit www.montaukclub.com for details.



	ABOVE: a look inside the 2nd floor balcony. Notice the detailed columns and arches, topped by intricate spandrels and quatrefoil (4-sided) detail. The balcony permits a view of Prospect Park. Is that an original Tiffany lamp?

Look for Open House New York on the first weekend of every October.

FORGOTTEN NEW YORK HarperCollins
ORDER from Amazon: paperback or hardcover

Thanks Amy Langfield and Steve Garza for their assistance with this page! Photos were taken October 7 and 8, 2006; page completed October 29, 2006.

erpietri@earthlink.net

To send you off here's a look at NYC transportation in 1941 from the Encyclopedia Britannica (likely there are shots from the late 1940s-early 1950s spliced in):