WINTER - SPRING 2008
Every year, I do half-a-dozen public Art Deco tours for the Municipal Art Society. The tours rotate among five itineraries. Once or twice a year I also do a walking tour for the Art Deco Society of New York, and sometimes teach a five-session course on the subject.
2008
Upper Crust Deco: Deco on the Upper East Side
Easter Sunday, March 23rd, December 2nd, 10:00 a.m. Meet at Fifth Avenue and E.84th Street, by Central Park.
Sponsored by the Municipal Art Society. No reservations necessary.Join us for an Art Deco walk on Manhattan's Upper East Side. We see some of the city's earliest Deco apartment houses, including two by Blum & Blum, and the only apartment building designed by Raymond Hood (better known for the Daily News Building and Rockefeller Center). But it's not just apartment buildings. We will also see the legendary Hotel Carlyle, and one of Manhattan's very few Art Deco town houses, designed by Harry Allen Jacobs - an architect who used to preside over informal debates at the Architectural League between what he called "the three little Napoleons of modern architecture, Raymond M. Hood, Ralph Walker and Ely Kahn," and the "classicists." The tour closes with those fabulous East Side Deco emporia, Bloomingdale's and Tiffany's.
Deco Fashion: The Garment District
Sunday, June 1st, 2:00 p.m. Meeting place to be announced.Sponsored by the Art Deco Society of New York. For further information call (212) 679-DECO
New York's Garment District - stretching roughly from Penn Station to Times Square, Sixth to Ninth avenues - is almost entirely the creation of architectural and urban forces of the 1920s and early 1930s, in particular the country's first zoning ordinance (1916) which mandated the setbacks we associate with Art Deco skyscrapers.. Styles in the district range from the typical eclecticism of the 1920s through the Art Deco and Moderne. The district is particularly rich in the works of French-trained George and Edward Blum and modernist master Ely Jacques Kahn, but also includes such delights as a former Bickford's luncheonette (Stuckert & Co., 1929), a branch of the National City Bank (Walker & Gillette, 1929-30), the Hotel New Yorker (Sugarman & Berger, 1928-29), and the Navarre Building (Sugarman & Berger, 1928-30).
February-March 2008
Urban Genealogy: An Introduction to Researching Buildings in New York City
Four Evening Lectures, Feb 20, 27, March 5 and 12, 6:00 – 7:30 p.m. plus one weekday field trip from 9 – 11:00 a.m.
Sponsored by the Municipal Art Society. Call (212) 935-3960 for further information.Learn how to unearth detailed information about New York City buildings. We learn how to conduct research on: 1) The Building - an introduction to the records of the Department of Buildings; 2) The Client - weaving your way through deeds, directories, obituaries, Who’s Who, and local histories; 3) The Architect - using standard texts, guidebooks, periodicals, the Avery Index, and Committee for the Preservation of Architectural Records publications; 4) Miscellaneous Sources – use of photograph collections, maps, New York City archives, libraries and historical society. We also learn about on-line resources. We conclude with afield trip to the Manhattan Department of Buildings, New York City Conveyance Records, the Municipal Archives and the Municipal Reference Library. For more information on this subject, please visit the Urban Genealogy web site.
April-May 2008Midtown Manhattan: A City in Transition
Five Sunday morning walks, April 6, 13, May 4, 11 and 18, 10:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.Sponsored by New York University's School of Continuing and Professional Education. For more information, or to enroll on-line, click here.
New York is a case study for the modern city in transition. In this course, we explore the evolution of four areas of Midtown Manhattan, plus a set of planned privately-owned public spaces. We look at the Garment District, Times Square, Fifth Avenue, and Park Avenue, all of which have undergone major transformations in the past century. And we consider the outdoor spaces at Rockefeller Center, the Villard Houses, and Green Acre Park, planned without any City intervention, as compared to the enclosed publicly-accessible atriums at IBM and AT&T, created in response to City Planning requirements.