2015
Open House New York Weekend
Every bone of rivet steel, each cornerstone and angle, jenga juts and rusted water tower, pillar, post and sign
We’re starting this year’s Open House New York Weekend on Saturday morning at the Municipal Building in Manhattan where the city has a special display just for us (and by “us” I mean all those other people in the photos too). These are the Randel Maps, an amazing look into a pre-grid Manhattan just as the future grid was being built. Here you can see old farm properties, borders, natural features, and pre-grid roads, all with the future grid drawn on top. It’s a real treat to see in person and one of the reasons that Open House New York Weekend is one of my favorite weekends of the year.
Our next stop is a quick one, where we can see the lobby of the AT&T Long Lines Building, on Sixth Avenue near the Holland Tunnel entrance. The building was designed by Ralph Walker and is massive, but our access was limited to the lobby and that was ok. It was a pretty nice lobby after all.
One of the big five star attractions this year is New York City Hall, which I have seen many times but never been in. The entry lines (with a security check) were crazy long, but luckily I bought my way out of it by buying an Open House New York pass in advance, allowing me to skip most of the line- there were a few other passholders in front of me at its opening when I was there.
So what is it like inside New York City Hall? The short answer is that it’s nice. The long answer is that it’s pretty and historic and honestly feels a little small and not quite as grand as a city like New York probably deserves. After all the building was designed in 1803 when there were only 60,000 people in Manhattan and when Brooklyn and the other boroughs were not even part of the city. For a city of 60,000 people, it’s spacious and grand, but for a city 150 times bigger than that, it feels kind of quaint at best.
New York City hall may feel quaint, but the lobby of the Cunard Building certainly doesn’t. This is where transatlantic passengers would buy their (relatively) expensive tickets to sail to Europe, although this isn’t where you would have gone to buy those (hopefully refundable) Titanic tickets. This is for a few reasons. First off, the Titanic sank before this building was even completed and second it was operated by the White Star Line, which was a completely different company then, even though they merged a few decades later.
This was another strong year for Open House New York and we’re not even halfway through yet. Next up is a visit to Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo’s iconic Ford Foundation Building in Midtown, and this time it was more than just a quick walk through of the atrium gardens, although you could do that too if you wanted. This year we were allowed to go to the top floor to look down, around and outside, great views in every possible direction.
And after the Ford Foundation, you could continue that modern vibe by going inside The Four Seasons, the Philip Johnson designed power lunch restaurant located inside the Seagram Building. A great, historic space and another great site in what very well may be the best Open House New York Weekend ever.
Next up is a stop at Gramercy Park (some of these pictures may be out of chronological order if you care about such things) to get a rare look inside the National Arts Club, where Stanford White and Dale Chihuly are members, although their memberships never overlapped, unless Dale Chihuly is like a hundred years older than I think he is.
Another iconic lobby. This time we’re stopping by the RCA Victor Building designed by Cross and Cross on Lexington Avenue. This building changed ownership to General Electric when RCA moved to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, then that building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza later changed from the RCA to the GE Building when General Electric bought RCA and NBC. Either way it appears that General Electric only wants what RCA already has.
This weekend Shepard Hall (or the Great Hall at Shepard Hall) way, way up at City College was open to see. I had never been up to City College until a few years ago, now it seems I’m up there all the time. Still, this was my first time inside the Great Hall at Shepard Hall, which was beautiful but honestly needs a better name than the tongue tripping Great Hall at Shepard Hall.
We still have three sites to go and they’re honestly all five star attractions, and if even one was open I’d consider it a great Open House New York Weekend. When I head that Eero Saarinen’s terrific TWA Flight Center would be open again, I made it a priority to get out to Queens to see it and, once I got there, I quickly realized that I wasn’t the only one.
Damn there were a lot of people at the TWA Flight Center. I am torn by this fact, as part of me is absolutely thrilled to see this many people care about architecture and good design, while the other part of me is annoyed that I am stuck in human gridlock trying to see that same architecture and good design with what feels like the entire population of a mid sized city. I don’t mind if there are people that I don’t know who get caught in my pictures, a philosophy I adopted early on since waiting for the perfect, strangers free shot not only takes forever (if it’s even possible) but also that it heavily misrepresented my actual experience there. So people everywhere didn’t slow down my non stop picture taking or my love of the building, but it did make me really happy to get the hell out of there and back on the surprisingly annoying JFK Air Train again.
While the TWA Flight Center was packed to capacity, it was wide open at the other five star site in Queens, the New York State Pavilion at Flushing Corona Park, designed by Philip Johnson.
The New York State Pavilion was part of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and one of the few buildings that survived. It originally had a fabric, tent like awning over the center and an observation deck tower. It seems unlikely that the pavilion will ever be restored to its full, final glory, but for the first time in (my) memory, it was restored to be safe enough to allow visitors. It still feels like a ruin, a great big yellow ruin, but sometimes a ruin is all you really need.
This has been a hell of a year at Open House New York. This weekend I had access to so many great iconic buildings, from City Hall to the National Arts Club, Ford Foundation, TWA Flight Center, The Four Seasons and so many more. And finishing things off, we’re taking a 2 train all the way out to Beverly Road and then walking (what kind of feels like) too far to Flatbush Avenue to visit the wonderful, restored Loew’s Wonder Theatre, now just known as the Kings Theatre. The renovation just finished up and it is now absolutely gorgeous. A great way to end the best Open House New York Weekend ever.
Keep going back in time. Open House New York 2014 is next.
