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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Bouwerie Lane/Flickr

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How’s Business?/Flickr

Tape recorder repairs on Jamaica Avenue in Queens.

Terminal 8 and Robert Sowers’ grand window in the 1960s

American Airlines Terminal 8 at John F. Kennedy International Airport was completed 48 years ago (the airport was still called Idlewild then) and was recently razed to accommodate the airline’s plans for a new mega-terminal on the site. One contentious part of the terminal demolition was what the airline would do with the building’s iconic 317-foot-by-23-foot wall of red, white, and sapphire stained glass. Created by artist Robert Sowers, it was the largest single stained glass window in the world at the time of its construction.

Although funding and a recipient art institution never materialized to take the entire window as one unit, a local salvage company, Olde Good Things, won a contract from American to dismantle the artwork and keep what the airline did not need.

They are now offering the rescued panes for sale at around $95 a square foot in their Chelsea store and have created a special set of red, white, and blue mini-windows from the Terminal 8 glass salvaged from JFK that are now available online.

AA Stained Glass Window Sun Catcher 8×8 inches – $150
AA Stained Glass Window Sun Catcher 12×12 inches – $200