I had to wake up insanely early for this shot a couple of years ago—in July, the sun rises at 5:30 a.m. over New York.
I couldn’t believe how clear and haze-free the sky was that morning: just like a cold winter day.
I found a quiet bench where someone had left a pair of sunglasses, and popped them on to watch the show.
It wasn’t an innocent time, but the world felt less constricting then, and for a moment at least it was a little easier to catch my breath and find some optimism.
There will be more golden days ahead, but I’m steeling myself for the long, hard slog to reach them.
This is, after all, what I was built for.
There’s something to be said for a little restraint, as demonstrated by this tasteful 5-story townhouse in the Lenox Hill neighborhood of New York’s Upper East Side.
The home is officially credited to Charles McKim of McKim, Mead & White, but was primarily the work of his assistant, William M. Kendall, who began assuming design duties as McKim’s health deteriorated.1
Although the plan was first conceived in 1906,2 McKim died in 1909, three years before the project was completed in 1912.
Neo-Federal in style, the Pyne residence balances a simple composition with refined touches, including a richly ornamented cornice, finely detailed corbels, an entrance portico with an elaborate frieze, and a series of blind arch windows on the second floor, one of them filled with marble and topped by a sculpted garland in its lunette.
Yeah, I’m pulling out all the pretentious architectural terms.
My favorite part of the home’s design is the set of three dormers across the front roof — one of these things is not like the others.
It’s New York, so a Sesame Street reference felt appropriate.
The stately Pyne Residence looks more like something you’d find in Washington, D.C., and easily blends into the background if you’re rushing down Park Avenue (and who isn’t?). Only on close inspection does the home’s subtle elegance reveal itself.
When McKim, Mead & White’s successors planned the Oliver D. Filley Residence next door in 1926, they wisely continued the same scale and design.
The Cable Building is one of my favorite New York structures, mostly because I have fond memories associated with it, including the quiet Thanksgiving morning when I took the picture shown above.
Completed around late 1893, this 8-story steel-framed building1 includes a full basement and fronts on Broadway, Houston, and Mercer Streets on the border of Greenwich Village and NoHo.
The Cable Building was designed for the Broadway & Seventh Avenue Railway Company by Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White,2 and is a very early example of the Beaux-Arts style.
The building’s exterior was originally faced with Indiana limestone on the first and second floors, and the upper floors are covered in yellow brick and striking ornamental terracotta,3 topped by an elaborate copper cornice.
Each floor encompasses nearly 20,000 square feet4 and encircles a central light court of more than 3,000 square feet.5 6 At its opening, the building’s first floor was designated for retail use, with the top three floors designed for offices and the middle floors reserved for warehouse space.7
My favorite part of the exterior is the classically-inspired sculpture of two robed women guarding the portico on the east facade, designed by J. Massey Rhind.8
With that being said, the building’s overall design isn’t White’s best: the chamfered corners temper the appearance of bulkiness and provide interesting focal points, but the many large windows on every side of the structure clutter the composition, making it look messy and overwrought.
What makes the Cable Building impressive, however, is that it was designed to conceal a power plant for the street railway company, effectively creating “a building within a building”.9
Reaching 46 feet below the street surface,10 the building’s basement originally housed 550 tons of machinery that powered the company’s cable cars, including wheels measuring 32 feet in diameter and weighing 50 tons each.11
The machinery has long since been removed, and today the Cable Building’s deep bowels house the Angelika Film Center, where there’s a chance you may find me some late evening, watching an indie flick as nearby subway trains rumble past.
The only thing that makes this home’s exterior truly interesting is its unique butterfly shape, designed to conform to its site overlooking Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle.
Otherwise, it’s fairly standard for Stanford White‘s later work, with an overwrought mishmash of Renaissance-inspired details that appears fitful and fussy, akin to the cluttered walls of an old art gallery.
However, the marble and limestone construction is quite exquisite on close observation.
White claimed the design had a “light and rather joyous character.”2
I’m not sure about “joyous,” but I can go along with “light,” as the abundance of windows in the structure gives it an airy feel, particularly when the sun hits all five sides of the facade.
The home was built at the same time as White’s partner, Charles F. McKim, was designing the nearby East Wing of the White House, which…is no longer with us.
The Patterson Mansion is currently occupied by short-term rental units, and I hope to stay in one at some point in the future— preferably when D.C. is no longer occupied by madmen.
God knows when that may be.
You’d be forgiven for thinking these two homes overlooking Central Park are actually one. Stanford White (or his assistants, more like it) designed the residences simultaneously, cladding the exteriors in elegant white Vermont granite and matching them with the same stacked Classical orders.1
They aren’t my favorite projects by McKim, Mead & White: the firm’s work had become quite derivative by 1907, and the designs here feel overprocessed, as if sketched and refined by too many different hands. It doesn’t help that White was murdered before the homes were completed.
What makes this pair of structures important, though, is that they are among the handful of old mansions that survive in New York. Built too late for the Gilded Age, they were nonetheless conceived in its shadow—remnants of an era that will never return.
I first learned about Paley Park in William H. Whyte‘s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, an inspiring and formative little book that I stumbled upon years ago and still occasionally thumb through and read.
Paley Park was at the top of my list when I first visited New York, and I’ve returned many times since.
Just 4,200 square feet in size,1 it’s a perfect little slice of nature in Midtown Manhattan, with a waterfall, trees, and plenty of tables and chairs.
The park is packed every time I visit, whether on a beautiful spring afternoon or a freezing January day.
