2010
Open House New York Weekend
Leave the silver cities to all the silver girls, everything means everything
I booked a few tours at Open House New York this weekend, including this one at the Post Office. This is the big one with all the steps across the street from Penn Station and Madison Square Garden, and that leads into the reason for the tour. The inside of this building is about to be hollowed out for a new Amtrak station since the tracks and platforms at Penn run underneath here as well.
Welcome to Daniel Patrick Moynihan Station’s shiny brand new center skylit court, or at least it will become one in the future. All of this will be removed and the floor will drop one level to the height of the current Penn concourse, although it’s unclear how (or even if) it’s going to connect back to the rest of the station complex. Hopefully in the far off future when this is completed late and over budget, it will look a hell of a lot better than this.
My second reserved tour also required a lot of imagination. This is the construction site for the new Louis Kahn designed Franklin D Roosevelt Memorial being built on Roosevelt Island. Designed in 1973 by a guy who died in 1974, it should be done by 2012, with should being the operative word here.
I spent way too much time walking the four mile loop around Roosevelt Island. I headed out in the morning to see AVAC, Roosevelt Island's central garbage tunnel system (I have a soft spot for infrastructure). Unfortunately AVAC was closed today despite published reports to the contrary. I guess there's always next year.
The fine people (I don’t know them personally so calling them fine is an assumption on my part and should not be inferred as legally binding) at Docomomo sponsored an Open House New York tour this year at the Kips Bay Towers. Docomomo stands for the DOcumentation and COnservation of buildings, sites, and neighborhoods of the MOdern MOvement (I had to look that up), so it made sense that they were all about these towers, designed by IM Pei and completed in 1960.
This next site is the East Harlem School by Peter Gluck, on 103rd St east of 2nd Avenue. An interesting (and surprisingly non environmentally friendly) independent private school that had flashes of great design in between areas of not so great design. Interesting tour though and definitely worth the trouble to get that far uptown.
I finally took the tour of the Arsenal- that historic brick castle looking building right near the Central Park Zoo. Inside, on a conference room wall, is the actual submitted Greensward Plan by Fredrick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux. This is the one they drew and submitted for the design competition for Central Park, the one that (in so many ways) changed everything.
The rest of the Arsenal was interesting, the rooftop view was as spectacular as expected, the tour informative and well worth the time.
Here is the actual drawing of the Greensward Plan. So very impressive in person, and quite honestly too impressive to just be hung on the wall in a private conference room if you ask me.
I try not to spend all my time in Manhattan, even though it’s usually a hell of a lot easier to get to and around than most parts of the outer boroughs. That said, I did find time to stop by the Sculpture Center in nearby and easy to get to Long Island City, Queens. Open for Open House New York, it is a building designed by Maya Lin on a side street not all that far from PS1. And in case you are wondering, the sculpture in the second picture is called Two Masters and Her Vile Perfume by Lara Schnitger.
The last pictures from this year’s Open House New York weekend event are from a night lighting tour (at 7:30 PM, not too late) of the brand new Bank of America Tower. The tour touched on the lobby design but then spent most of the rest of the time in Bryant Park, where we learned that all the top floors were fake and just hiding mechanical equipment, but were lit to look like floors. Pretty sneaky if you ask me.
Keep going back in time. Open House New York 2009 is next.
