The Parkchester housing development in the Bronx was built by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company–the same insurance giant that originally developed Stuyvesant Town, Peter Cooper Village, and Riverton Houses in Manhattan. Constructed from 1938 to 1942, this “city within a city” still thrives today and contains many artistic flourishes that distinguish it from its Manhattan cousins, including fanciful sculptures that adorn all the buildings.

“His life and his whole persona is just outsize and almost mythic. It’s perfect for portrayal in musical theater…I try to portray the inner man…It’s not black and white — it’s nuanced…His life is just so full of ‘On this hand…but on the other hand…’”

That’s how New York composer Gary Fagin described the musical he’s writing about the life of New York City master builder Robert Moses. The work will be titled “Robert Moses Astride New York.” Although Fagin ultimately hopes to create a Broadway-worthy show complete with story and characters like Fiorello LaGuardia and Jane Jacobs, a small portion of what he’s got down so far will be performed on January 15th at the World Financial Center Winter Garden stage. You’ve got to wonder what rhymes best with ‘Cross-Bronx Expressway’?

From the 1930s to the 1960s, Robert Moses deftly wove together city, state, and federal powers and funds to make himself head of a public works empire–all without actually being elected to public office. He was the driving force behind nearly all of the city’s mid-20th century bridges and tunnels (and the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority), it’s expressways and parkways (and the people displaced by them), many parks and playgrounds, urban renewal projects like Lincoln Center and numerous housing developments, the United Nations site, and the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs.

The live performance of Mr. Fagin’s work on the 15th will be backed by the Knickerbocker Chamber Orchestra and will feature Rinde Eckert as Moses. It will highlight three moments in the life of Moses–first in 1930, laying out his vision for the city to civic leaders; second in 1956, when he begins to first encounter organized opposition (in this case to pave over a small section of Central Park for a Tavern on the Green parking lot); and third in 1970, when Governor Rockefeller had wrested away most of Moses’ titles, Moses is invited to the dedication of a single park bench in Flushing Meadows Park.

In an interview with DNAinfo, Fagin (who wrote the music and stage direction) noted that “the style is contemporary American, with traces of Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein.”

Saturday, January 15
7:00 P.M.
Free and open to the public
World Financial Center Winter Garden
Event Site
The Knickerbocker Chamber Orchestra Site

Tonight the Gotham Center at the CUNY Graduate Center will host a panel discussion, “Ed Koch and the Remaking of New York,” to discuss the mayoralty and legacy of Ed Koch. It will feature author Jonathan Soffer of NYU Polytechnic, who recently released a new biography of Koch, Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York.  He will be joined by Josh Freeman (CUNY Grad Center), Kim Phillips-Fein (NYU), Ronal Menschel (former Chief of Staff and Deputy Mayor), and Stanley Brezenoff (CEO and President, Continuum Health Partners, former Deputy Mayor). Book signing will follow.

CUNY Graduate Center
Elebash Recital Hall – 365 5th Avenue at 34th Street.
December 7, 2010
6:30 PM – 8:30 PM
Tickets $8, Members $6.
(212) 868-4444

Read a New York Press interview with Jonathan Soffer about his new book here.

The Elmhurst branch of the former Jamaica Savings Bank is a modern gem that shines across the gray, exhaust-ridden expanse of Queens Boulevard. In its 1967 review of the new building, the New York Times noted that “motorists on Queens Boulevard are doing double-takes as they go through the Elmhurst section near Woodhaven Boulevard,” and over forty years later, you can bet that they still do. Catch a glimpse of the twisting glass pyramid today and you’ll think you’ve stumbled upon some forgotten early work of Eero Saarinen. Could it be some permutation of his Kresge Auditorium or an early stab at the concrete wings of the TWA terminal at JFK?

Alas, the building sprang from humbler architectural origins at a later time, but this fact in no way diminishes its dynamic presence along the boulevard. It’s both a quirky roadside attraction that begs you to pull over (and open an account while you’re at it), and a 1960s Modernist glass and concrete institutional outpost that could be sharing a Midtown corner with Lever House or the Seagram Building. The structure no longer houses the Jamaica Savings Bank, but rather a Capital One Bank branch—the product of a couple of mergers and renamings, with which New Yorkers are all to familiar (to this day Chemical Bank coin wrappers still seem to surface in the kitchen junk drawer).

The Jamaica Savings Bank was founded in 1866 to support the growing southeast Queens community of Jamaica. Unlike the globalized behemoths of today, Jamaica Savings kept its sights local, and supported retail banking and neighborhood development in Queens. In 1966 the bank was celebrating its centennial, and it commissioned the William F. Cann Company to create a new branch office in Elmhurst at 56^th Avenue and Queens Boulevard. The site was chosen to try and take advantage of the new shoppers drawn to the nearby Skidmore Owings and Merrill-designed Macy’s (the circular Queens Place Mall at 56^th Avenue) and Alexander’s (now the Rego Park Center at 63^rd Road) department store, as well as the growing population of the large LeFrak City housing development.

William Cann and his team were charged with planning a dynamic bank building that could hold its own amongst the boldly geometric forms of the nearby retail developments, and build it on an irregular diamond-shaped plot with no right-angled corners (see image at right). Cann’s elegant solution came in the form of a dynamic glass structure, with two large marble-clad concrete piers that support a sweeping hyperbolic paraboloid roof. The undulating reinforced concrete roof is clad with green copper panels and seems to float above the bronze-tinted quarter-inch thick plate-glass walls set with silver and bronze mullions. The column-free banking floor is grand, but human-scaled at only 43 feet at its tallest point. To help Queens Boulevard drivers identify the purpose of the oddly-shaped building, a tall vertical cylinder was erected in the parking lot that featured the bank’s name.

Despite over forty years in continuous use as a retail-banking establishment, the integrity of the design has remained with only minor alterations. In 2005 the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission voted to designate the building a landmark, but had its decision revoked by the City Council. Despite the lack of formal protection, the building retains it’s googie meets gray-flannel charm and Queens is better off for it.

View the Jamaica Savings Bank Flickr photo-set here.

Well, it’s taken a bit longer than planned, but AllWaysNY is back!

Early plans from 1957 for Pan Am’s flying saucer-shaped JFK Terminal 3 (now used by Delta) initially included a whopping nine gate positions.

From Beijing to Madrid, cutting-edge designs and innovations are transforming the ways we experience the world’s airports and air travel. How is New York’s airport system, which remains the busiest in the country, responding to pressing economic and design demands while serving a growing number of passengers? Is an overhaul of the city’s airports feasible?

David Plavin, consultant and former president, Airports Council International-North America, will discuss the challenges and creative potential for New York’s aviation system with leading airport experts including Richard Smyth, V.P., Jet Blue, who is in charge of the new JFK Jet Blue terminal that incorporates the landmark Eero Saarinen building; Charles Van Cook, P.E., V.P., PB World, who plans airports all over the world; William DeCota, Dir. of Aviation, Port Authority; and Jeff Zupan, Senior Fellow for Transportation, Regional Plan Association. Co-sponsored by the NY Building Congress, and the RPA.

New York Infrastructure: Are New York’s Airports Obsolete?
30 July 2008, 6:30 P.M.
Museum of the City of New York
1220 5th Avenue at 103rd Street
New York, NY 10029
(212) 534-1672, ext. 3395
www.mcny.org

Reservations Required
$9 General admission
$5 Museum members, seniors, and students

LaGuardia Airport terminal redevelopment rendering, 1957.

Pictured above is not High Line version 1.0, but a bold solution to a growing congestion problem on Broadway circa 1873. When Alfred Speer, a wine merchant and inventor from Passaic opened a store on Broadway near City Hall, he found pedestrians, delivery carts, and omnibus traffic all chaotically jockeying for position on the crowded thoroughfare. Although streetcar companies were allowed to lay rails north of 14th Street, pressure from local property owners and the omnibus operators, who held a monopoly on mass transit downtown, kept more efficient mass transit methods out.

As the ideas for elevated trains and Alfred Beach’s underground pneumatic subway were just developing and being tested (construction on the current subway system was still thirty years away), Speer devised the concept of an elevated moving sidewalk to help ease congestion. As described in Rebecca Read Shanor’s book The City That Never Was, in 1871 Speer patented the Endless Traveling or Railway Sidewalk (pictured above), which would make a loop up and down Broadway and free up space on the street for local traffic and deliveries. He planned to have the moving sidewalk run from dawn until 1:00 A.M., pulled along by a constantly moving cable at a brisk 12 miles per hour. In order for passengers to reach the large moving inner section, a series of smaller cable cars moving around an outer ring would stop at stations, pick up passengers and their five-cent fares, and accelerate to the inner ring speed and deposit them.

Heated smoking rooms for men and ladies’ drawing rooms for women located on the inner ring would provide shelter during rain and warmth during the winter. The steam powered cable system would provide a quiet and clean alternative to the locomotives in use for elevated rail lines, which spewed smoke, ash, and grease into the air and onto the street below.

Speer got as far as proposing his system to the New York State legislature (1873 price tag: $3,722,400) and even won approval from lawmakers. However, New York Governor John Dix objected to the fact that the elevated line intruded on street-level sidewalks. After Speer altered the plans and again won approval from the legislature, Dix again rejected the plan because the elevated loop system would have to cross Broadway twice. By 1874 it was clear that Speer’s vision would not be accepted by the governor in any form, and the hopes for the project were quashed. Speer would again try to sell his idea for an elevated sidewalk in the developing New Jersey towns along the Hudson River bank, and even formed the American Rapid Transit Company to sell stock, but the plan eventually fizzled. Today, New Yorkers are left with the moving sidewalk’s vertical cousin the escalator, and are also most likely to use the nineteen century sidewalk’s descendant hurrying through an airport to catch that great twentieth century innovation, the jet airliner.

Fort Totten in Queens/Flickr

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