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TOM FLETCHER'S new york architecture |
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| Top Ten NYC Architecture | top ten Brooklyn buildings | |||||||||||||||
| For a more complete list, see Brooklyn | ||||||||||||||||
| 1 | Prospect Park | |||||||||||||||
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Prospect Park is a 585 acre (2.4 km²) public park in the New York City borough of Brooklyn located between Park Slope, Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, Kensington, Windsor Terrace and Flatbush Avenue, Grand Army Plaza and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and seven blocks northeast of Green-Wood Cemetery. It is run and operated by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and is part of the Brooklyn-Queens Greenway. The park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux after they completed Manhattan's Central Park. Attractions include the Long Meadow, a 90 acre (36 ha) meadow thought to be the largest meadow in any U.S. park; the Picnic House which houses offices and a hall that can accommodate parties with up to 175 guests; Litchfield Villa, the historic home of the previous owners of the southern part of Park; Prospect Park Zoo; a large nature conservancy; the only urban Audubon Center & a Visitor Center (at the Boathouse); Brooklyn's only lake, covering 60 acres (24 ha); the Prospect Park Bandshell that hosts free outdoor concerts in the summertime; and various sports and fitness activities including seven baseball fields. There is also a private Quaker cemetery on the grounds of the Park in an area known as Quaker Hill. (Actor Montgomery Clift is interred there.) |
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| 2 | Grand Army Plaza | |||||||||||||||
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Olmsted & Vaux designed this monumental oval traffic circle in the spirit of Paris’ Etoile (now the Place Charles de Gaulle), that circular 12-spoked traffic rond point that bears in its central island the Arc de Triomphe, although they opposed an arch here. A masterstroke of city planning, this nexus joins their great Eastern Parkway, and their Prospect Park, with the avenues that preceded it on other geometries. This triumphal arch did not arrive for 22 years: the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch W by John H. Duncan, architect of Grant’s Tomb, was built between 1889 and 1892, commemorating Union forces that perished in the Civil War. The arch provided, as in its Parisian inspiration, an excellent armature for sculpture, planned by Stanford White (McKim, Mead & White. 1894-1901), the most spectacular of which is Frederick MacMonnies’ huge quadriga on top (1898). Inside the arch itself is more subtle work, bas-reliefs of Lincoln (Thomas Eakins) and Grant (William O’Donovan), both installed in 1895. On the south pedestals are two bristling groups representing The Army and The Navy by MacMonnies (1901). A museum within the arch is open to the public. |
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| 3 | Williamsburgh Savings Bank | |||||||||||||||
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The 'Willie' was built by the architectural firm Halsey, McCormack and Helmer from 1927-1929. It is 512 feet tall, and can be seen from Brooklyn housetops as far away as Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights. It is the tallest building in Brooklyn and one of the two tallest buildings on Long Island. Its four-faced clock was the largest in the world in 1929, and held the title until 1962, when it was surpassed by the clocks on the Allen Bradley Building in Milwaukee. The ground-floor banking room boasts a 63-foot ceiling, and windows overlooking Hanson Place are 40 feet high. |
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| 4 | The Montauk Club | |||||||||||||||
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A Venetian Gothic palazzo, whose canal is the narrow lawn separating it from its cast-iron fence. Remember the Ca d’Oro. But here in brownstone, brick, terra-cotta, and verdigris copper. It bears the name of a local tribe, which explains the 8th Avenue friezes at the 3rd and 4th stories, honoring these former local natives. |
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Boys’ High School |
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| 6 | 232 Hancock St | |||||||||||||||
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Bedford-Stuvvesant is the amalgam of two middle-class communities of the old City of Brooklyn: Bedford, the western portion, and Stuyvesant Heights, to the east. Today's BedfordStuyvesant is one of the city's two major black enclaves; the other is its peer, Harlem. Bed-Stuy differs from its Manhattan counterpart in its much larger percentage of home owners, although Harlem is rapidly following its lead in gentriying its own blocks. The southern and western portions comprise masonry row housing of distinguished architectural quality and vigorous churches whose spires contribute to the area's frequently lacy skyline. The northeastern reaches have considerable numbers of wooden tenements, containing some of the nation's worst slums. But on the whole, Bed-Stuy has a reputation that doesn't fit with reality: a stable community with hundreds of blocks of well-kept town houses.Where Bedford-Stuyvesant has distinguished architecture, it is very good. Its facades of brownstones and brickfronts create a magnificent townscape as good as-and sometimes better than-many fashionable areas of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Parts of Chauncey, Decatur, MacDonough, and Macon Streets, and the southern end of Stuyvesant Avenue, are superb. Hancock Street, between Nostrand and Tompkins Avenues, was considered a showplace in its time (why not now too?). Alice and Agate Courts, short cul-de-sacs isolated from the macrocosm of the street system, are particularly special places in the seemingly endless, anonymous grid. Bed-Stuy comprises roughly 2,000 acres and houses 400,000 people, making it among the 30 largest American cities. |
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| 7 | Excellence Charter School | |||||||||||||||
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“The lowest-risk strategy would have been to demolish the charred shell of the building,” said David Saltzman, Executive Director of the Robin Hood Foundation and a trustee of the Excellence Charter School. “It required the extraordinary vision of Robert A.M. Stern Architects to reincarnate this lost treasure as a new charter school.” |
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| 8 | Williamsburg Art and Historical Society | |||||||||||||||
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Bands of smooth and vermiculated Dorchester stone and slender Ionic and Corinthian columns alternate to enliven the exterior of the banking floor of this splendid Second Empire masterpiece. Victorian at its best, even the interior is carefully preserved, the gaslit chandeliers all present (but wired for electricity). Look at the plaited Indian hut in the entry pediment. |
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| 9 | Williamsburgh Savings Bank | |||||||||||||||
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The eclectic Victorian crossbreeding of Renaissance and Roman parts. It is a sharp, hard, gray place reminiscent of the work of Brooklyn's own great architect, Frank Freeman, at the old, long since demolished, Brooklyn Trust Company (below the dome). |
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| 10 | 178 Meserole Street | |||||||||||||||
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Exuberant, painted wood tenements -two of the city's best. "Tenement" is perjorative today; in fact it describes a walk-up apartment house that covers most of its building site. Here the light in the back rooms is minimal, but the visible architecture is magnificent. A quite incredibly rare surviving example of the type of decorative cladding that once adorned all such timber frame buildings in Brooklyn. |
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