What to do on a crummy day? Head on over to Zabars at 80th and Broadway. Get some yummies. Sneak them into the coffee shop of the Borders (I think) big book store up the road, grab a book and coffee and have a good scoff.
I think the architecture is awesome around the entire area. Just like anywhere in New York pick your grid and walk it. Enjoy.
What a mish-mash streetscape. Shame - I think the building looked better before. The building on the right of it is gorgeous.
One of These UWS Townhouses is Not Like the Others
July 19, 2010, by Joey
(click to enlarge)
Every now and then a townhouse emerges from behind the scaffolding after a lengthy renovation looking nothing like its previous form, or anything else in the neighborhood. We've seen it in Turtle Bay, and now we're seeing it at 252 West 75th Street on the Upper West Side, where a tipster writes:This townhouse, at 252 W 75th Street was empty for years, then stripped to beams, and then rebuilt over an insanely long period of several years. Looks cool, and way out of place on this UWS block (but, in my opinion, in a good way). Scaffolding came off months ago, so what's up? Condo, rental?At one time, yessir, but after a painstaking process this multi-family dwelling has been consolidated into a very modern mansion. Let's review!
The building in its previous form (seen in the photo gallery above) sold in 2005 for $3.925 million, to an LLC. Plans to convert the townhouse to single-family use and expand it to just under 5,800 square feet were filed the next year by architect Michael Zenreich on behalf of the owner, but the plans came under scrutiny. An amendment was later filed to eliminate a curb cut and garage from the plans, "done to lift administrative hold," according to the application. Eventually things were good to go, leading to this new kid on the block.
A Stamford-based lawyer acting as an agent of the anonymous owner has signed off on the deed and permits over the years, and when we dropped by the get some pictures of the house a polite builder told us the owner is a very private person who wouldn't be crazy about us snapping shots, and a peek inside was out of the question. But the outside sure is something to look at on its own, right?
Permits: 252 West 75th Street [DOB]
UPDATE: With apologies to the very private owner, we've snagged some interior renderings of the house from the website of workshop/apd, a firm that worked on the project. They've been added to the gallery.
http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2010/0...the_others.php
The pricks who ruined that townhouse are real schlongs.
How can the wangs who control things in this city let facade genocides like this happen?
Where were all of the schlongs who line up to oppose tall buildings when this crime was being perpetrated? Was it not fashionable to protest this?
These schmucks should be castrated.
Last edited by londonlawyer; August 12th, 2010 at 02:46 AM.
It looks like a very nice new hospital wing.
Second Act for Café des Artistes
By SUMATHI REDDY
The fabled Café des Artistes will reopen under Italian ownership early next year with a new menu and name but the same Old World ambience.
Restaurateur Gianfranco Sorrentino has reached an agreement to rent the space on the ground floor of a landmark co-op, Hotel des Artistes, a year after the abrupt closure of the restaurant due to financial losses and the costs related to having a unionized work force.
Mr. Sorrentino secured the 15-year lease on Friday and aims to open by February or March. He said he intends to retain the charm of the Old World café but shift the cuisine to what he knows best: authentic southern Italian food. "We really care about the quality and the ingredients of our food," Mr. Sorrentino said. "And of course the place is so beautiful, so charming and historic, so we really don't want to change the character. We want a better lighting system for the murals and to update the place, give it a few contemporary touches."
Mr. Sorrentino said the work force will not be unionized and the restaurant's name will change to reflect the southern Italian focus.
Café des Artistes' was known more for its romantic ambience and Parisian flair than its food; its most famous distinction was the six murals of wood nymphs decorating its walls. The naked nymphs were painted in the 1930s by the artist Howard Chandler Christy, a former resident of the co-op.
full story
"Are you lookin' at me?"
Wood nymphs and Southern Italy do not really go together. It's just not wood nymph territory.
iPhone App To Showcase Upper West Side History
By Leslie Albrecht
UPPER WEST SIDE — There's nothing like technology to make history come alive. That's the thinking behind plans to create an iPhone app walking tour of the Upper West Side.
A preservationist group, Landmark West!, is developing the smartphone application, which they believe will be the first of its kind devoted to the Upper West Side.
"We've been looking for ways to embrace technology to spread our message as broadly as possible," said Cristiana Peña, director of community outreach for Landmark West!
The group is also using technology to raise the money they'll need to create the iPhone app. Instead of hitting up its usual donor list for contributions, Landmark West! posted the iPhone app project on Kickstarter, a website that collects donations for creative projects.
Landmark West! wants to raise $3,000 by Sept. 21. The money will pay for professional software developers to create the app.
The group plans to use the voice of preservationist and Columbia University professor Andrew Dolkart for the iPhone app, which will guide users along Central Park West to such sites as The Dakota and the New York Historical Society.
Landmark West! is a 25-year-old nonprofit dedicated to the preservation of the Upper West Side's historic buildings. The group recently led an effort to make West Park Presbyterian Church at West 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue an official landmark.
The group also hosts lectures and school programs to educate people about the Upper West Side's architectural heritage. The iPhone app will help them reach a much wider audience, Peña said.
Traditional walking tours reach 20 or 30 people at a time, while an iPhone app — easily purchased with the touch of a button — can reach anyone who's walking along and gets curious about a building they see, Peña said.
Dolkart, who helped found Landmark West!, leads regular walking tours that are popular with history lovers, she added.
"I'm sure people will like the idea of having Andrew Dolkart in your pocket whenever you want to learn about a building," Peña said.
American Museum of Natural History Launches 'Indoors GPS' App
Walking Tour Journeys into Upper West Side's Hidden Past
Petty-minded.
Memorial Garden Uprooted in Row Between Landlord and Tenant"Think about it. If everybody in Manhattan had a garden like that in front of their building, what it would look like? There would be no oxygen left in the city."
A West 105th Street building owner said a garden planted in part to honor a 9/11 victim was a nuisance.
By Leslie Albrecht
UPPER WEST SIDE — To neighbors, the hydrangeas, basil and strawberries that made up a makeshift 9/11 memorial in front of 319 W. 105th Street was a welcome bit of nature that brightened the city landscape.
To the building's owner, it was a nuisance.
Landlord Joey Franco told tenant Takeo Lee Wong to get rid of the sidewalk garden, which Wong planted to honor a neighbor who died after the World Trade Center attacks.
It flourished over the years into a sprawling collection of more than three dozen planters, window boxes and pots in front of Wong's first-floor apartment.
Franco said the garden, and the soil and shovels that went with it, took up too much space and blocked an entrance to the basement.
"It became overwhelming to the building," Franco said. "It just kept on getting larger and larger.
"Think about it. If everybody in Manhattan had a garden like that in front of their building, what it would look like? There would be no oxygen left in the city."
Wong obeyed his landlord's order Friday by moving his plants across the street to neighbors' stoops and sidewalks.
Now there's a patch of bare concrete where the garden once lived in front of Wong's apartment.
He says he's the victim of an harrassing landlord who cares too much about money and too little about the neighborhood.
Franco said Wong is exaggerating the garden's importance.
"This is the first time I've heard it was a 9/11 memorial, this is the first time I've heard that people love it," Franco said. "It's ridiculous."
Neighbors said Friday they were stunned that anyone would object to the garden.
The mini-farm started with plants that a neighbor gave to Wong when she was sick with cancer thought to be linked to breathing toxic air at the World Trade Center site.
The neighbor died, and Wong kept her memory alive through her plants.
"9/11 really accented the fact that life is very fragile and you could go at any moment," Wong said. "In your final days, one thought comes to your mind: what have I done to leave something good?"
"For me, it will be the magnificence of that," Wong said, gesturing to the garden in its new home across the street.
The leafy menagerie includes purple and gold orchids, sweet potato plants with long green tendrils, Italian parsley, even a baby watermelon the size of a tennis ball.
As the garden grew, it gave neighbors something to talk about and brought people on the block closer together, some said.
On the block on Friday, friends and strangers alike stopped to comment on the disappearance of the garden in front of Wong's building.
"It's a heartbreak," said one man, shaking Wong's hand.
"What happened?" said Bobby Schraud, a building superintendent on West 103rd Street. "Oh my goodness. Why? It was so beautiful."
Schraude told Wong, "It was a joy to pass by this block. I felt like I was in some kind of paradise. Now it's like walking through a desert. It's like something you would see in Hunts Point in the Bronx."
But residents on the side of West 105th Street and Riverside Drive where Wong's garden now lives said they were thrilled by the leafy addition to their stoops and sidewalk.
"Absolutely gorgeous," called out one man walking by.
"This looks beautiful, thank you," said a passing woman.
A woman walking her dog stopped in front of the garden's new home. "Oh my gosh, very nice! Is this for a movie?"
Wong replied, "No, it's real life."
http://dnainfo.com/20100822/upper-we...#ixzz0xWtHGhyC
West End Avenue
Three Apples of Somebody’s Eye
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY
No. 266 West End Avenue, built in 1896, designed by Rudolph Daus
In 1944 a new owner, working with the architect Harry Hurwit,
extended the top floor.
No. 788 West End Avenue was built in 1896
A bit east of West End, No. 233 West 100th Street went up
as a private house in 1889
No. 233 West 100th Street today, shorn of its stores
IN its original incarnation, West End Avenue was a boulevard de la haute bourgeoisie, the West Side’s counterpart to Madison Avenue. The avenue and its flanking streets were lined with architecturally varied row houses and near-mansions. Of the few that remain, three in particular are of interest, bearing distinctive traces of the attentions of recent owners.
The most ambitious town house still standing on West End Avenue is No. 266, between 72nd and 73rd, built in 1896 by Julius Jaros, an importer. It was designed by the Paris-trained Rudolph Daus, who pulled every Beaux-Arts lever he could for the scrumptious French Renaissance limestone mansion — for example, the elaborate door frame and top-floor window dormer in front of the sloping tile roof. Mr. Jaros imported Vin Mariani, a cocaine-infused wine endorsed by Queen Victoria, Sarah Bernhardt, Jules Verne and Pope Leo XIII.
It is sometimes said that Mae West occupied the house for a time with her sister, Beverly, who is indeed listed there in a 1933 directory.
The house was converted to apartments, and in 1944 a new owner, working with the architect Harry Hurwit, extended the top floor to accommodate more units. Usually such alterations have gruesome results, but Mr. Hurwit’s work was remarkably benign. Although he sacrificed the sloping tile roof, he retained almost perfectly the intricate stone dormer.
Sometime before 2000 a later owner removed the top-floor extension, restoring the dormer and the sloping roof, substituting, however, a broad skylight for the tile. Over the last few years the old Jaros house has been dark, the windows blacked out. The current owner, who asked that his name not be used, has been returning it to a single-family dwelling.
Mr. Hurwit’s interior alterations were also unusually sensitive, and remarkable ceiling paintings, molding, trim, wood carving and other details survive. The owner said: “I’m a modernist by nature, but this thing spoke to me; it was like a wounded thing that needed healing.” The house is listed with Sotheby’s for $30 million, and the Web site shows multiple interior views (www.sothebyshomes.com/nyc/sales/0017170).
Up past 98th Street is 788 West End Avenue, a more modest house built in 1896 as part of a long-gone row. The architect, John G. Prague, developed a peculiar bow-fronted design with a recessed mansard roof. The developer and builder, Peter Brennan, lived there with his family into the 1920s.
Like the Jaros house, the Brennan house was converted to apartments, but although the exterior is in good condition, little remains inside. In 1979 it was bought by Hilario Villavicencio, who was living there. Some time later he began an unusual campaign of decoration, picking out existing exterior details in high color and adding others.
Thus, floral ornament and dragon heads are highlighted in brick red, gold and forest green. Mr. Villavicencio also took a woman’s head from a statue and mounted it on the second floor, giving her golden hair, bright red lips and a white hat.
“I try to make something alive, something different, “ Mr. Villavicencio said in a voice resonant of his native Cuba. “But some people they don’t like it; they say it looks like a circus. Hey, you can’t please everyone.”
His artistic efforts blaspheme every commandment in the preservation bible, which is why it is one of the most delicious sights on West End. But he better hurry with his latest project, which is to replace one of his dragon heads — salvaged off a school building — with a whole dragon, holding a shield and also painted, because landmark designation for West End appears to be coming in the near future.
Two blocks away, east of West End, is No. 233 West 100th Street, which went up as a private house in 1889. But it was auctioned in 1894 and became the Red Cross Hospital.
On May 12, 1898, The New York Sun reported that volunteers were packing sulfur powders there for battlefield use in the Spanish-American War; the lecture that afternoon was “Bandaging.”
After the war the house was sold to the Nameoki Club, called the “little wigwam” of Tammany Hall by The New York Times in 1932. Later the ground floor was built out for shopfronts, and by the 1970s the building was occupied only by two stores, the whole a shambling near-wreck. It was soon rescued by John D. Kuhns and his wife, Rosemary, who gradually renovated it for their own residence. Over the last several years further renovation work by a new owner has resulted in a new bell-shape tower, made out of standing seam copper, a striking piece of metal work, although the original roofing was slate.
Back at 266 West End, the owner says, restoration hardware arrived unbidden on his doorstep. Some time ago someone knocked on the door and handed him a brown cardboard box, saying that it was “the wish of a dying man” that the contents be returned, having been stolen years ago.
“It was packed in newspapers from the 1970s,” the owner said, “a wild-looking bronze Neptune head a foot high that was originally on the front door — you can still see the shadow.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/re...apes.html?_r=1
223 West 80th Street
The area around this and the museum is great.
Apparently Borders will no longer be opening a stores at Columbus Square
And of course the Lincoln Center Barnes and Noble is closing in a few months
Here are a couple of my favourites from the comments:
Keep digging! The economy’s down there somewhere!
— Perfect GentlemanWest 82nd Street, 9:15 A.M.Worker #1: “I’d heard of alligators in the sewer, but never whales.”
Worker #2: “Yeah, the pets people flush on the UWS are getting more and more exotic.”
— Bryan
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Caption contest! Write your own in the space below.
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20...m/#more-228069
Institutional Investing, Along Central Park West
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY
Central Park West, looking south from the Dakota Building, 1887.
The impassive neo-Classic facade of the New-York Historical Society at 77th Street and Central Park West is an odd duck on a residential street.
This is the central portion of the society in 1908.
The New-York Historical Society as it appears now.
THE impassive neo-Classic facade of the New-York Historical Society at 77th Street and Central Park West, now covered by construction scaffolding, is an odd duck on a residential street. But the historical society, opened in 1910, is part of Central Park West’s shadow civic history, and the museums and similar structures now there predate almost all of its apartment houses.
The entire area west of Central Park was essentially empty in the early 1870s, when the American Museum of Natural History got its big square site from 77th to 81st Street, fronting on what was then Eighth Avenue. With an initial section completed in 1877, the museum was meant to expand like a flat Tinkertoy, leg after leg forming a giant network and filling up Manhattan Square.
But the museum was as out of place as a glacial erratic, for it at first seemed that the park frontage would be developed with grand single-family houses, a 24-carat mirror image of the golden prestige of Fifth Avenue. The Real Estate Record and Guide reported in 1879 that Edward Clark, then planning his magnificent Dakota, was considering building “a spacious residence” on his park-front property.
He did not, but in the 1880s the journal continued to predict mansions along Central Park West, and began to complain about the lack of restrictions reserving the area for private houses. Certainly few millionaires would have wanted to live next to the 1887 New York Cancer Hospital, on the block front from 105th to 106th Streets. This remarkable red brick and brownstone chateau was among the first cancer hospitals in the United States, with round wards to diminish hiding places for germs. It also had ventilating towers to exhaust contaminated air, which then wafted slowly down over the neighborhood.
Not surprisingly, in 1890 the real estate expert Frank R. Houghton, in The Record and Guide, lamented that the street had become “too public a thoroughfare” for private houses, and in 1892 the New-York Historical Society bought the plot of land just south of the Museum of Natural History. It did not start construction until 1904, and even then the grand, Ionic-style front did not extend to the corners; those were finished in 1938.
There was once a five-story apartmentlike building at Central Park West and 97th Street, built in 1893 with the approval of Louis Pasteur as a center for research on rabies, tetanus and other diseases. The roof of this Pasteur Institute was covered with cages and pens for sacrificial guinea pigs, sheep, dogs and rabbits; the structure was demolished in the 1950s for Park West Village.
In 1894, while the historical society’s project matured, the Women’s Hospital, then on Park Avenue and 50th Street, bought the frontage on Central Park West from 92nd to 93rd Street for a Spanish-style design of six pavilions with numerous open galleries.
The hospital was never built, nor was a new house for the West End Club, projected in 1895 for the northwest corner of 75th Street. By 1900 Central Park West was firmly in the hands of apartment builders.
Even so, in 1902 a group of Cuban investors proposed a huge jai-alai building between 62nd and 63rd Streets — a project that ended in financial disputes within a year. One block north, the New York Society for Ethical Culture built its crisp Beaux-Arts style school in 1903 and then its brooding Art Nouveau meeting hall in 1910.
At the same time, the German-Jewish Progress Club, seeking to increase its membership, moved over from Fifth Avenue to a robust neo-Classic structure at the north corner of 88th Street, which was demolished in the 1980s.
In 1909, one of the most remarkable theaters in the history of the city went up on the jai-alai lot: the high-minded, high-cost New Theater, established by a dozen or more millionaires who wanted to improve the cultural tone of the New York City stage. With philanthropic support, it was meant to be above the needs of commercial theater, and the construction budget of $1.7 million delivered a building comparable in grandeur and finish to the New York Public Library; both were designed by Carrère & Hastings.
However, good intentions can be expensive, and this noble vision lasted only two seasons. Commercial operators, at one time including Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., took over and changed the name to the Century Theater, wiping out the smell of charity.
Central Park West’s final burst of civic confidence erupted in the late 1920s, for the Century site. Irwin S. Chanin, the ebullient architect/developer, proposed Central Park West’s tallest structure, a 65-story “Palais de France,” a combination cultural, trade, government and office structure devoted to French interests. Designed by the Chanin firm, the skyscraper, reaching back to Broadway, was to be in plate glass, treated to produce special lighting effects.
But either high-rise Francophilia was too weak or apartment construction impetus too strong. Mr. Chanin soon changed the project to the twin-towered Century Apartments, one of the series of great apartment structures that today define the boulevard.
Remaining are the historical society, the natural history museum, the Ethical Culture complex and the old cancer hospital, now apartments, to mark this peculiar tangent on this most unusual street.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/re...ref=realestate
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