New York City preserves itself.

The NYC Landmarks Law turns 50 this week. And this is the story of just one building it saved.

John Jacob Astor III and his wife Charlotte founded The New York City Cancer Hospital in 1884 in a fortress of a building at Central Park West and 106th Street, largely in response to former President Ulysses S. Grant's inoperable throat cancer. It is important to remember how much the entire nation loved Grant for his efforts to bring the North and South together again.

Cancer was thought of as a dirty disease, a disease of bad hygiene and poverty. It ruined people's lives with humiliation, let alone the deadly consequences. Grant's illness brought national attention to cancer.

This building's sumptuous design owed as much to the French gothic as it did to turn of the century advances in hospital care: round rooms to provide cleanliness and ample head space between beds and massive central ventilation shafts to clear the air of germs.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's daughter Rose practiced nursing here.

Because cancer continued to be so deadly, however, the hospital was stigmatized by New Yorkers and even nicknamed The Bastille. It deteriorated from lack of funds. In 1955, it closed its doors as a hospital and moved its services across town to become the new Memorial Sloane-Kettering hospital for Cancer Research.

It suffered a few poor incarnations, abandoned at certain times, jerry-rigged as a nursing home at others, and falling apart as NYC did in the 70s. But fortunately, it was granted landmark status in 1976.

Many developers tried to use the building, but most certainly it would have been torn down if not for this protection. Finally in 2000, it was purchased and developed into condominiums.

After a massive restoration and repurposing which included adding a residential tower behind the original building, today the round rooms are exquisite apartments fetching upwards of seven million dollars a pop.

I'll never get near one of those apartments, but thanks to this law, I get to pass this building several times a week, and I always point out its captured glory to captive and captivated visitors.

The three chapters of the Corbin Building.

The Austin Corbin Building was designed by Francis Kimball and opened on Lower Broadway and John Street in 1888. Only 20-feet across on its Broadway edge, it floats down John Street in a magnificent arcade. For decades, it held the offices of Mr. Corbin's banking interests, offices for steam pipe makers, watch makers and sellers, lighting fixture manufacturers, and, notably, diamond whole sellers.

It fell into dark times, forgotten, neglected and filthy. As the rest of the block was replaced by miserable low buildings in the 1960s, architectural critics noted it looked like a bookend holding up nothing. After 9/11, as plans were drawn up to turn the entire block into an ancillary hub to the new transportation building at the World Trade Center, the fate of the Corbin Building seemed certain: The wrecker's ball.

Fortunately, the ever-heroic New York Historical and Preservation Commission saw the diamond-in-the-rough and successfully lobbied for the building's elevated status as a cultural landmark. They succeeded. And nearly a decade of restoration began.

Look at how the thousands of pieces of applied terra cotta were cleaned and fixed, the brownstone cleaned, the cast iron window bays painted, and perhaps most triumphantly, the pyramid finials in each tower restored giving the building its original flair and pluckiness once more! 

It is a beautiful building, an arcade of Romanesque revivalism and richness, a symphony of materials, and its survival has been protected for many generations to come.

In honor of the ship that never came.

Pier 54 in its heyday, with the RMS Lusitania in port.

All that remains of Pier 54, the iron arch, where New Yorkers once waited to greet the RMS Titanic.

There have been a number of days of great sadness for the people of New York City. But giving a tour yesterday on the 100th Anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic moved me in unexpected ways.

Standing in front of the White Star Offices with my new friends from Washington and California and Kentucky, I could almost taste the desperation of the families storming the building as word trickled in and painfully slowly of those we lost that terrifying night, in the cold, off an iceberg miles from the coast of Newfoundland.

Isidor Strauss, the owner of Macy's Department Store, was found floating lifeless in the frigid waters. His wife, Ida, who had made it on to a lifeboat only to get back on the Titanic when she saw they weren't allowing her husband to go with her, was never seen again. John Jacob Astor IV, the wealthiest man on board, the scion of the oldest monied family in NYC, was also found dead in the water, his face blackened by the coal of one of the famous funnels that had snapped from its tethers and crashed onto those desperately trying to stay afloat. But the great majority of the victims were those third class passengers, the immigrants like our own ancestors, whose hearts were filled with hope of life in a new land where hard work might one day pay off, where their children might one day own a home and have an education. Simple dreams, dashed at sea.

I thought of the people that lined the Hudson River up to the White Star Pier at 14th Street, only to see the SS Carpathia arrive with the small fraction of survivors and a larger hold filled with bodies that did not survive, to be laid out on the floor of the ballroom of the Jane Street Hotel for identification. I thought of the days and weeks of confusion as misinformation gave many false hope, that perhaps the Titanic survived and was being towed to Virginia, a story that gained much traction in the minds of those family members who would do anything to keep their hope afloat.

I thought of the sad fact that there are no more survivors of that terrible, terrifying night alive anymore, those people who lived out their lives with the knowledge that they were somehow lucky beyond lucky, that fate had passed over them for the time being, that their stories would be mangled by newspaper men and The White Star Lines' official version of the events, tainted by a company hoping to avoid prosecution. But this was the end of the fabled White Star story. And the stories of the victims would eventually be heard.

It was also the end of a world as we knew it. The inequities of the class system that caused the disproportionate death of the poor that night would not go unnoticed. It was, perhaps, not a coincidence that this event led to the downfall of the greatest dynasties Europe had ever known, and that we would soon plunge headlong into a War of the World. Systems broke down everywhere, and in many cases, for the better. Most certainly not always, but often. The sinking of the Titanic heralded in a Century of Death and rivers of blood would spill in the hopes of creating a fairer world. Much of that carnage was by design. But it all began with a rather coincidental run-in with a piece of ice that had broken off an ice field eighty miles away on a crystal clear night at the height of man's sense of invulnerability.

We are vulnerable now. We always have been. But it took this titanic event to remind us. And remind us again 100 years later.

The Manahatta Project.

The Manahatta Project

The Manahatta Project (currently under expansion as the Welekia Project) was launched in 2009 in conjunction with the 400th Anniversary of Henry Hudson's historic sail up the river that now bears his name in the rather diminutive but hearty sailing vessel known as the Half Moon.

The Project sought to "re-discover" the Island of Manhattan as Hudson might have encountered it that very first time, a lush verdant hilly landscape, dappled with brooks and ponds, inlets and beaches, cliffs and valleys, and the infamous swamp lands in the middle of the island we now know as Central Park. Anthropological studies were painstakingly researched to determine the vegetation and wildlife of four centuries ago, and after years of data collection, scientific speculation and historical cross-referencing, a map emerged: A map of Manahatta, the Island of Many Hills, the land of the Leni Lenape and Algonquin tribes, part of the Iroquois Nation.

Open the map (it requires Flash Player) and see Manhattan of 2009, the grid of streets and avenues where space seems impossible to find, where buildings abut one another in friendly chaos, where parks are beautiful but designed by the hands of men and carved out of nature, where the bottom half of the island is distinctly "fatter" than it had been after years of nonchalant landfill, broken piers, trash, grounded ships, and, more recently, well thought-out projects like Battery Park City, 90-acres of land added to the southwest corner of Manhattan after the original excavation of the first World Trade Center in 1968.

And underneath this present vision, see the Manahatta of 1609: A very different place, a place where millions upon millions of personal triumphs and tragedies would eventually play out among the diminishing trees and rearranged streams. But this project is not meant to make us weep for the past, but to rearrange our vision of Manhattan in the dawn of a new century.

We are thoroughly committed to our green spaces, and are, for example, in the very midst of a one-million-tree-planting project. We hope to add green spaces to the roofs of almost every building in Manhattan, and as we add bike lanes and widen esplanades, with fewer people in automobiles, we fully expect our city to look much more green again. A canopy of green under which will lie the city that we all love. The best of both maps.

I found this site fascinating and I hope you will as well, with all my best wishes.

Winston Churchill Square

Winston Churchill is an American! An honorary one, but the first of three people ever to be made honorary citizens of the United States. He actually was half-American. In a page from Downton Abbey, his father was the Lord Churchill of the Dukes of Marlborough. But his mother was the Brooklyn-ite Jenny Jerome. Jerome Avenue is named for her father. So, we honor Winston Spencer Churchill here in NYC, in Greenwich Village, in a tiny quiet little grove on Bleecker Street (it sits on Downing Street proper, but most people access it from Bleecker) that is a scant .05 acres of shady paradise.

Churchill had a contentious but hysterical relationship with NYC society. His wit was often aimed at them, if not elsewhere. Here are some of my favorite barbs and delicious bites:

Bessie Braddock: “Sir, you are drunk.” 
Churchill: “Madam, you are ugly. In the morning, I shall be sober.”

Nancy Astor: “Sir, if you were my husband, I would give you poison.”
Churchill: “If I were your husband I would take it.”

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

Once in a while you will stumble upon the truth but most of us manage to pick ourselves up and hurry along as if nothing had happened.

If you are going to go through hell, keep going.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.

A sheep in sheep’s clothing. (On Clement Atlee)

A modest man, who has much to be modest about. (On Clement Atlee)

I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others.

The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.

If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.

Washington Square Park

My thoughts today return to Washington Square Park, home of the triumphal arch commemorating the 100th Anniversary of Washington's Inauguration and designed by Stanford White. To think of the things that happened in this square is to think of the history of this city, and this nation, and in a real sense, of the world in the last two hundred years. Today it sits at the heart of the largest private university in the US, New York University. But think back to the wealthy and elegant families of the 19th Century that lived in that line of town-homes on the northern shore, think of Henry James chronicling their bondage to society in his crushing novel, Washington Square. Think of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in 1911 that brought the city to it's knees in a grief we wouldn't experience again until September 11th, 2001. Look for the "hanging tree" and imagine the last thought of those who swung from it's menacing branch. Then think of happier times, of the glorious music that filled the fountain in the fifties and sixties, the folk explosion that informed a generation of not only musicians but poets and painters and politicos. Look around you at the new lamps and the new flower beds, the new pathways and dog runs, the breath of new life in a park that needed some weeding. On a very personal note, I miss my theatre there, the magnificent Manhattan Theatre Source that brought me to Washington Square more often than I would have gone. Now I'll have to make that special effort to get there unmotivated, except by the centuries of memories that whisper through it's trees and the promise of new memories to come.

My shining friends.

Should I ever become weary of my world, should I forget that a special brand of magic awaits me each morning on these streets at my feet, should I fail to look up at this shining night the way they'll tell you not to in NYC, I'll remember you, my new friends, from Arkansas, from Texas. When I see my city through your wonder-filled wonderful eyes, I'm reminded how much my home means to me, and that it is truly only made special by the people, people like you, indeed, specifically you, who teach me more than I could ever teach you.

To Clarksville, a special thank you for your music all week. I must admit to being head-over-heels in love with talent. So, you've won my heart. I am a shadow in your starlight. In return, a song for all of you. Come back and sing it to me one day:

Junior's Restaurant: Ah, the cheesecake!

Since Jill asked...

There has been a diner on the corner of DeKalb and Flatbush in Brooklyn since 1929. In 1950, owner, Harry Rosen, founded his new restaurant and named it for his sons, Walter and Marvin. Junior's was born. Although a little bit of everything was on the menu, it was the cheesecake that grabbed everyone's gustatory attention. The recipe had been in the Rosen Family for three generations and it well deserves it's nickname, "The World's Most Fabulous Cheesecake."

A fire nearly destroyed Junior's in 1981, and distraught Brooklynites gathered at the catastrophe screaming, "Save the cheesecake! Save the cheesecake!" They couldn't, sadly. But they saved the recipe, and today, Junior's Cheesecake can still be bought at the original location, in Grand Central Terminal, off Times Square, and in the lobby of the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

And, you can buy it right here, on-line (their new Carrot Cheesecake is Jeff's favorite):

http://www.juniorscheesecake.com/juniors_cheesecake/Juniors_Cheesecake_Home/Our_Collections.php

Breanne's Pick at The Met:

Ugolino and His Sons, modeled ca. 1860–61, executed in marble 1865–67

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (French, 1827–1875)

Saint-Béat marble

Ugolino, a traitor to Pisa, was banished to die of starvation with his sons and grandsons. In this haunting, dramatic, gut-wrenching sculpture by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, we see the torment in the father's face and features as his sons plead for him to eat them. Perhaps most disturbing, Ugolino seems to be considering it, so painful is his predicament.

Michaelangelo is all over this piece, as Carpeaux was a great student of the genius' work. Notice the perfect anatomy, the muscles, veins, sinews, all contracting in agony. Notice, too the oversized hands and feet, decidedly and purposely out of proportion as vessels of emotion.

To learn more of Ugolino, read Dante's Inferno.

To learn more about this sculpture, visit The Met's extraordinary website:

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/67.250

New Tork City gone wrong. (As my typo is thematic, I'm keeping it.)

Granted, how do you make a bus terminal look cool, but this is an epic fail. After decades of repurposing and redesigning, we are still left with this eyesore on 42nd Street. The use of windows on the first two floors may have been '70s chic, but they are terminally filthy with 5,000 buses driving on top of them every day. Every time I pass it, which is every day, I think, "Wow, it looks like a crane fell on top of an ugly mall."


Let me add here, it replaces this,

which is about as exciting as a shoebox. They've never been able to get this building quite right, have they?

Jeff's Met Picks: Duccio

Madonna and Child

Duccio di Buoninsegna  (Italian, active by 1278–died 1318 Siena)

The "Duccio," often nicknamed "The Mona Lisa of The Met" is the museum's most expensive acquisition. The previous Director of The Metroploitan Museum of Art, Phillipe de Montebello, made it a personal mission of his to acquire this masterpiece and raised the $4.5 million dollars it took to purchase it. It is a small devotional painting, remarkably small for it's price, and one that for centuries was placed behind votive candles for the intercession of prayer. In fact, one can see scorch marks along the bottom of the frame which is the original. (It is a minor miracle this painting never went up in flames!) Prior to Duccio, one never saw an interaction between Madonna and Child in this type of painting. But that one simple gesture of the Christ-child, gently sweeping away the veil on his Mother's head, turned the entire art world on it's head. God truly brought down to earth in this human gesture of affection. For this innovation, this painting is sometimes christened "the birth of Western Art."

Jeff's Met Picks: de La Tour

The Fortune Teller

Georges de La Tour  (French, Vic-sur-Seille 1593–1653 Lunéville)

There are a number of de La Tour paintings at The Met. And one I like particularly more than this one called THE PENITENT MAGDALENE. But this painting, THE FORTUNE TELLER, always makes me giggle. The fatuous, pompous, skeptical, wealthy, young, doughy, prudish man turns his nose up at the old hag of a fortune teller, not realizing he is being totally ripped-off in a pick-pocketing scam by one of her accomplices. de La Tour was fascinated by light and its properties (as are/have been most painters, of course) but the dramatic lighting of this painting reminds me of the kind of stage lighting I am used to but predates de La Tour by some 250 years.

Jeff's Met Picks: Renoir

Madame Georges Charpentier (née Marguérite-Louise Lemonnier, 1848–1904) and Her Children, Georgette-Berthe (1872–1945) and Paul-Émile-Charles (1875–1895)

Auguste Renoir  (French, Limoges 1841–1919 Cagnes-sur-Mer)

I ALWAYS visit Madame Charpentier. The wife of a wealthy publisher, Renoir knew her husband who asked him to paint this seating. With it's vivid colors, it's forced perspective, the shifting gazes of the porcelain-complected subjects, and the formidable figure of Mme. Charpentier herself dominating the group in black, one's eyes are hurled around this painting in a frenzy of activity and motion, belying the quiet household setting, a loving one, as evidenced by the dog, "Fido" if you will, or the well-known symbol for fidelity in a marriage.

I have Renoir on my mind today. I must confess to having had grown less fond of him, him and his pretty paintings. They were commercially successful with their idealized subjects and doe-eyed models in a time when his contemporaries were struggling to eat. They lack the early signs of abstract expressionism of Cezanne, the primitive force of Gaughin, the ugliness of life in the rising bourgeoisie of Degas, the madness of van Gogh, and eventually, the brutal deconstructionism of Picasso. But he was an utter original, Renoir was. Copied poorly and ad nauseum for a century, I must remind myself that he was the first to apply color as boldly as he did, and, along with Monet, to start to dispense with the realism of his predecessors

Jeff's Met Picks: Brancusi

Bird in Space

Constantin Brancusi  (French (born Romania), Hobita 1876–1957 Paris)

February 19th is Brancusi's birthday. Don't know why I always remember that. His departure from his earlier mentor, Auguste Rodin and Rodin's very classical approach to sculpture, could not be more pronounced than in this sleek, soaring, expressionistic vision of a bird in flight. It is less the bird in flight than it is the very essence of flight itself. Surprisingly simple, it is I think, a masterpiece of both proportion and allegory, sensual and solid, and utterly modern in every good sense of the word. Happy Birthday, Constantin!

Jeff's Met Picks: da Vinci

The Head of the Virgin in Three-Quarter View Facing Right

Leonardo da Vinci  (Italian, Vinci 1452–1519 Clos-Lucé)

The Met's Collection is arguably the most eclectic in the world. Although Italy and France are home to his most famous works, da Vinci is well represented here in a number of studies and drawings like this one in charcoal. That he could achieve such a painterly quality, such realism, evoke such ethereal maternal affection with a piece of chalk is astounding. My favorite left-hander in history, he was equally adept with his right hand, endlessly curious, an inventor of ideas that would eventually dominate our lives 600 years later, an acutely accurate anatomist, a passionate liver of life, he was the very model of what we now call "The Renaissance Man."

Jeff's Met Picks: David

Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794) and His Wife (Marie-Anne-Pierrette Paulze, 1758–1836), 1788

Jacques-Louis David (French, 1748–1825)

Oil on canvas

I see this massive painting every time I go to The Met. It hangs at the crossroads of some of my favorite collections. Painted by David, most famous for his "Death of Marat,"

that hangs in Belgium and is often referred to the painting that started the French Revolution, this painting of his is a masterpiece of portraiture, trompe l'oeil, and neoclassicism. M. Lavoisier, a genius in chemistry (he discovered the chemical composition of water!), went on to lose his head in the Reign of Terror, so it is particularly poignant to see him and his wife, who took all his notes in the workplace, in this moment of quiet, marital equality and happiness.

Jeff's Met Picks: Cristofori's piano et forte

Grand Piano, 1720

Made by Bartolomeo Cristofori (Italian, 1655–1731)

Florence, Italy

Various materials

One of four extant pianos in the world created by the very inventor of the piano (or pianoforte as it was known), Bartolomeo Cristofori. Without this, we would not have has Bach or Mozart or Beethoven or Liszt, or Rachmaninoff or Debussey or ...

Jeff's Met Picks: El Anatsui

Between Earth and Heaven, 2006

El Anatsui (Ghanaian, b. 1944) 

Aluminum, copper wire

A recent acquisition, I pretty much stumbled upon this enormous, undulating work of such tactile intricacy and detail that I found myself that afternoon felled and moved to tears by its impact. I don't often put great stock in titles as good art speaks better for itself, but "Between Earth and Heaven" is as appropriate here as it is evocative, and informed my experience of the work.

Come see NYC with me.

Hi!

My name is Jeff Plunkett. I want to show you NYC through this blog, with pictures, with words, in hopes you'll come tour New York City with me, and keep in touch with me afterwards with comments about your experiences here. These pages will be a tool for us to connect.

I've been giving tours of NYC for fourteen years now. I've met many of you already. But I hope these blog posts will make it clear that every visit to NYC will be different, as every encounter in this city of eight million is ripe with possibility. And in a city that never sleeps, the evolution of the cityscape, its sites, attractions, and treasures, is fast and furious and fun.

Please follow me here. I'd love your suggestions. I'd be happy to make my own should you be planning a visit.

To read the rest of the blog, just click on the "NYC with Jeff" heading.

Best!
Jeff