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During the recent fight over the much-hated design for the new buildings in Tribeca East Historic District at 100 Franklin Street, Jamie Gordon circulated a petition asking Tribeans to object to the design (a picture of which is above). She later gave it to us to study. The petition gathered just over 1200 signatures, […]
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15 Mar '14I have been spending a lot of time at the Municipal Archives with the Tribeca Trust interns at 31 Chambers Street. The archives are in the Surrogates Court Building, a Beaux-Arts pile that is an official NYC Landmark. According to Wikipedia “the building was designed by John R. Thomas and built between 1899 and 1907. […]
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15 Mar '14
The future of a wonderful fortress, the warehouse of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (the A&P) at the southern corner of Vestry and West Streets is in now in doubt. No demolition permit has yet been granted, but the real estate press is talking as if destruction as a real possibility. Have a […]
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Before Domino’s Sugar, there was Stuart’s Sugar in Tribeca You are looking at before and after images made from the same spot, some 214 years apart. The top image is T. Pollock’s engraving of the magnificent Stuart Steam Sugar Company’s Refinery. The Stuart refinery was in two buildings that stretched from Reade to Chambers along […]
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This is Tribeca’s Tipping Point What you see in this image is before and after photographs of 43 Park Place (Block 126, Lot 8). It is the north side of Park Place. The photo on the left was taken in the late 1880’s. It showcases the final business home of the wholesale operations of the […]
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Policy Issues Related to 100 Franklin Street Copy of Testimony presented to Community Board 1 in December, 2013 Tribeca Trust 1. When new buildings arise inside historic districts, there are three possible design strategies. 2. The best would be “fully contextual” design. This means rigorous use of the existing architectural languages of the historic district, […]
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16 Feb '14
Tribeca Before and After: 3 North Moore Street and 240 West Broadway The top photo is obviously the “before” photo. It is of 3 North Moore in the early 1960’s and can be found in Ada Louise Huxtable’s book “Classic New York: Georgian Gentility to Greek Elegance” (Anchor Books, 1964). Huxtable died last year. She […]
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14 Feb '14
PBS is airing a new documentary Feb 28 about the rise and fall of the great Penn Station. You can see a preview at www.pbs.org/americanexperience. Gothamist also posted a moving, short video at this link: https://vimeo.com/86349549 But here is a six-minute video that is just as good, a slice of the older documentary that Ric […]
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14 Feb '14
This video of a trolley car moving through lower Manhattan (posted on youtube) made me realize that such streetcars make more sense than cars. So why did they get ripped out? Such a waste of a infrastructure that was obviously a big project to install. I am sure the story of that destruction is not […]
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Great American Vernacular Architecture “The Gibbes Building” 66 West Broadway, NYC Block 132 Lot 1 NB 975-95 Prologue Rumors always fly in Tribeca. One that resurfaced recently (via a parking lot attendant) was this: the Gibbes building would be torn down and replaced with a 60-story modernist hotel. Panic all around of course. It was […]
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