Category Archives: Architecture
Happy 100th Anniversary, Woolworth Building!
Written by Marybeth Kavanagh, Print Room Reference Librarian April 24, 1913, 7:30pm: President Woodrow Wilson presses a telegraphic button in Washington, DC, illuminating eighty thousand bulbs in the newly constructed Woolworth Building at 233 Broadway in New York City, and ushering in the era of the modern skyscraper. Constructed in neo-Gothic style by architect Cass [...]
Enlightenment in the Cemetery: The Adams Memorial and Buddhism in 19th Century America
Even in a city with as many monuments as Washington, D.C., the Adams Memorial is exceptional. Commissioned on the death of his wife by Henry Adams, it is one of the most widely celebrated pieces of American funerary art. Adams’ wife Clover committed suicide in December 1885. The loss so shook Adams that she is [...]
“Freely for games and recreative sports”: New York and the small municipal park
Central and Prospect Park parks dominate New York City park history. While that’s somewhat understandable, it’s time smaller parks got some attention of their own. Despite New York’s long history, small, city-owned public parks didn’t really become a common feature until the waning years of the nineteenth century. It was then that waves of immigration and [...]
“Undesirable edifices generally”: The 1916 Zoning Resolution
The built environment, especially in so eclectic a place as New York City, has a way of hiding history in plain sight. With that in mind, if you have never noticed how many of the profiles of early 20th century buildings in New York retreat incrementally from the sidewalk as the building grows taller, then [...]
Who put the “Williams” in Williamsburgh?
Today uttering Williamsburg is more likely to precede a snarky comment about hipsters than it is to spur thoughts of its namesake. After all, time has heaped layers of meaning onto New York’s place names, and while places like Fort Greene and Fort Tryon require little effort to discover that they were once military installations, other [...]
Clarke and Rapuano, Landscape Architects
April — better known as the month of showers, Frederick Law Olmsted’s birthday, and Earth Day — has also been designated National Landscape Architect month. Aside from Olmsted, however, landscape architects continue to fly largely under the radar. A case in point: Clarke and Rapuano, a firm with enormous impact on New York City’s urban [...]
Blueprints, Then and Now
Written by Geraldine Granahan, Preservation Assistant for the McKim, Mead & White Architectural Record Collection. Recently the staff of the library and conservation department spent a fun afternoon in our conservation laboratory attending a workshop on the process of making cyanotypes, or as they are more commonly known — blueprints (so called because they contain [...]
