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Posts in Built Environment
The Gateway to the Nation: The New York Custom House
The Gateway to the Nation: The New York Custom House

The Gateway to the Nation: The New York Custom House

By Alexander Wood

The reign of Beaux-Arts architecture reshaped the landscape of the city at the turn of the century with grand public buildings that projected a new found sense of national power. The architects who embraced this style emphasized classicism, monumentality, and embellishment in their work, and were skilled at adapting historical precedents for modern building types. Following this mission to create civic symbols, Cass Gilbert conceived the custom house as a gateway to the nation. From its triumphal arched entry, and honorific statuary, to the heraldic imagery on its facade, it was expressly designed to evoke a passageway into a walled city. The allusion to a gate reflected a desire to proclaim the identity of the nation to the world, but it also suggested a point of controlled access through a border. It thus offered a suggestive precedent for the headquarters of the most important district of the federal customs service, which served as the guardian of the nation’s chief port of entry.

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Built Environment, Manhattan, Progressive Era, Urban PlanningGuest UserComment
The Earliest Sculptures in Central Park
The Earliest Sculptures in Central Park

The Earliest Sculptures in Central Park

By Dianne Durante

In Olmsted and Vaux’s Greensward Plan, the only sculpture was one atop the fountain at the center of Bethesda Terrace. The commission for the sculpture was given in 1863 to Emma Stebbins (1815-1882), an American-born sculptor working in Rome who happened to be the sister of a member of the Board of Commissioners of Central Park.

This post is an excerpt from the author's new book, Central Park: The Early Years.

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Built Environment, Urban Planning, Gilded Age, Manhattan, Nature & Environment, ExcerptsGuest UserComment
Schlep in the City: Walking Broadway
Schlep in the City: Walking Broadway

Schlep in the City: Walking Broadway

By Katie Uva

New York City can be overwhelming in its vastness — more than 300 square miles, more than 8.5 million people, and so many distinct neighborhoods and languages spoken here that the number of neighborhoods and languages aren’t even fully agreed upon. New York City’s streets are the nervous system binding this far flung place and giant population together and their idiosyncrasies seem fitting for this metropolis — ​Edgar Street and Mill Lane in Manhattan vie for shortest street, while my childhood in Queens was punctuated by persistent confusion about whether I lived on 68th Road, Drive, or Avenue. Each borough has a Main Street, and Waverly Place has the distinction of being the only street in New York that actually crosses itself.

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Built Environment, Contemporary Era, ManhattanGuest UserSchlep in the City Comment
Fred Trump Slays the King of Cooperative Housing
Fred Trump Slays the King of Cooperative Housing

Fred Trump Slays the King of Cooperative Housing

By Gwenda Blair

Nearly two decades after Friedrich Trump came to America and a year before his first son, Fred, was born, another boy landed at New York Harbor. He was fifteen, a year younger than Friedrich had been upon his arrival. Like Friedrich, he had traveled alone and left behind his family, his homeland, and his obligation to enter into his country’s military service. And he, too, did not intend to return. His name was Abraham Eli Kazan, and the country he left was Russia. In the coming decades, he, like Fred Trump, would become a real estate developer in New York, building apartments in a city with a desperate need for housing. In the late 1950s the two men each sought to build on the same stretch of Coney Island, a long and bitter struggle that eventually entangled the highest levels of city government. But it was more than a battle between two well-connected businessmen. Trump and Kazan were leaders in two separate movements battling for effective control of the way the city would grow — and because New York City was a bellwether for the rest of the nation, the way that cities all over the country would grow. Ultimately, on this patch of Coney Island, not far from the famous amusement rides, Fred Trump helped carve America's urban future.

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Built Environment, Housing & Realty, Urban Planning, Postwar New York, Politics, Great Depression & New DealGuest User Comments
Mapping Urban Renewal, Then and Now: An interview with Jakob Winkler
Mapping Urban Renewal, Then and Now: An interview with Jakob Winkler

Mapping Urban Renewal, Then and Now: An interview with Jakob Winkler

​Today on Gotham, editor Katie Uva interviews Jakob Winkler about his Atlas of Urban Renewal, which blends historical research and critical cartography to challenge assumptions about urban renewal and empower communities resisting its impacts today.

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Built Environment, Urban Planning, Contemporary Era, Interviews, Postwar New YorkGuest UserComment
Jeremiah Moss's Vanishing New York
Jeremiah Moss's Vanishing New York

Jeremiah Moss's Vanishing New York

By Seth Kamil

I first arrived in Manhattan in the summer of 1989, but it was very much a homecoming. With deep family roots in New York, I felt more comfortable here than almost anywhere else in the world. My parents were born here. All four grandparents spent most of their lives in the City and its suburbs. My fondest memories involved driving across the 59th Street Bridge in my grandfather’s Lincoln Continental. We would hit the Horn & Hardart Automat on 42nd Street & 2nd Avenue (or, if “Poppy” was flush, Katz’s Deli) and then drive or walk around Manhattan. See Times Square. Visit his sister who lived in the Amalgamated Houses in Chelsea. The day often ended with egg cream sodas at Moishe’s on the corner of Bowery & Grand Street. Having struggled his whole life economically, my grandfather always had a kind word and some pocket change for the homeless who gathered there. But, only a child, I remembered the men who tried to wash our car windows, the grime, and graffiti, as somewhat scary. This was the mid-1970s.

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Arts & Culture, Built Environment, Contemporary Era, Reviews, Urban PlanningGuest UserComment
Myth #8: Static Manhattan, Part II
Myth #8: Static Manhattan, Part II

Myth #8: Static Manhattan, Part II

By Gerard Koeppel and Jason M. Barr

Today, the image of Manhattan is as a vertical city — a place that, as E. B. White saw it, “has been compelled to expand skyward because of the absence of any other direction in which to grow.” With our eyes focused skyward, we think little of the city’s horizontal expansion, as the grid plan seemingly set Manhattan in stone, literally and figuratively.

This is the final installment of the authors' series The Manhattan Street Grid: Misconceptions and Corrections.

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Built Environment, Early Republic, Manhattan, Urban PlanningGuest UserComment
Myth #6: The Grid Plan Caused Too Much Density and Rampant Land Speculation
Myth #6: The Grid Plan Caused Too Much Density and Rampant Land Speculation

Myth #6: The Grid Plan Caused Too Much Density and Rampant Land Speculation

By Jason M. Barr with Gerard Koeppel

In the two centuries since its creation, the grid plan has had no shortage of critics. Many, for example, have bemoaned its relentless monotony, its disregard for Manhattan’s topography and its lack of grand boulevards. In many respects, the grid has become a kind of Rorschach blot for the failures of 19th century New York to provide a cleaner, more efficient, and greener city. Detractors often see the plan as the cause or catalyst of the larger problems that New York confronted from rapid economic growth, massive immigration and poverty, and a municipal government that was, more or less, unable and unwilling to effectively handle these issues.

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Urban Planning, Built Environment, Housing & Realty, Metropolitan RegionGuest UserComment