A few brave voices contest Columbia University’s contention that, their Harlem expansion plans will be universally beneficial. "It's nothing but rubbish" says distinguished and scholarly architectural historian Robin Middleton, who formerly taught at Cambridge before joining the faculty at Columbia.
"Columbia's plans are simply monstrous, like an Orwellian or Stalinist campus of factories. No one touting how much they cherish "design excellence", could possibly approve of that, unless of course if it were their job to do so. And, it is, isn't it?"
It was around the connected issues of Harlem being up-zoned, and observing Amanda Burden much more closely, that I began to see who she really is. Did it help the homeless to provide for ever-more $900-thousand-condos, in a community where the average yearly wage is only $36 thousand? Is it beneficial to small local merchants, allowing for 25-storey towers, where 19th-century buildings with just six floors now prevail? What's the point of confiscating thriving businesses that want to be a part of a new revitalized Harlem? Why were they 'compensated' at a rate pegged to the value of property prior to the zoning change allowing greater density? Why clear 17 acres, solely for Columbia's use and leave only two of dozens of historic structures? Ought not the sole Planning Commission vote against this ill-conceived venture, cast by Karen Philips, who lives in West Harlem, to have influenced the chair who said, "The community is not going to buy in, unless it reflects their culture."?
Failure to grasp how imperative these quandaries are, renders all Amanda's beauty, her charm the graciousness, into mere forced elements of empty 'good form'. Highly and widely praised, even her best attributes are as artificial and without meaning as her compassionate-seeming concern.
Despite being listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the Scheffield Farms Pure Milk bottling plant stable was demolished for Columbia University's Manhattanville expansion.
St. Mary's Protestant Episcopal Church Manhattanville.
Ca. 1870: Manhattan Street, today's West 125th Street.
Ca 1870: St. Mary's Church and Sheltering Arms Orphanage.
Ca. 1870: Manhattanville Academy of the Sacred Heart.
This class, race and cash struggel all began long ago, in 1806. That was when the Industrial Revolution reached New York with the founding of the village of Manhattanville in the valley at the crossroads of Bloomingdale Road and Manhattan Street, now roughly Broadway and 125th Street. The village's original streets were laid out for wealthy landowners who were friends or relations. The hamlet’s success, as a kind of industrial park serving the city, resulted from shrewd exploitation of transportation links. Naturally the Hudson River’s convenient access became a crucial catalyst for growth. Transporting both passengers and freight on the river was far faster and less arduous than relying on Manhattan’s unpaved roadways. However, the timely introduction of the steamboat and steam locomotive-powered trains, with a local stop on the Hudson River Railroad established by 1840, proved even more beneficial. Situated at approximately the same latitude, Harlem and Manhattanville flourished together throughout the 19th century as the two most prominent villages in upper Manhattan.
Jacob Schieffelin a British army officer Loyalist, who following the Revolution founded a wholesale-drug business which still imports spirits, including Moët & Chandon Champagne was Manhattanville's most prominent resident. Remarkably, he married Hannah Lawrence, the fiercely republican patriot-daughter of John Lawrence, a leading Quaker and merchant. Captured and imprisoned at Williamsburg, Virginia by American forces, Schieffelin escaped. Making his way to British held territory in New York, he was billeted at the Lawrence’s house. How love overcame the hostility of two sworn adversaries is unrecorded.
Rocca Hall, the Schieffelin’s river-front country seat located between today’s 142nd and 144th Streets, no longer exists. Nor for that matter, dose the charming frame St. Mary's Protestant Episcopal Church. Organized by the couple in 1823, it was the first Episcopal church to dissolve pew rentals in 1831. Completed in 1824, it burned in 1907. But, at the edifice replacing it, designed by Theodore Blake to resemble a medieval English parish church, in a vault beneath the porch, the Schieffelin’s final resting place endures.
Hanna and Jacob Schieffelin, sworn opponents who found love.
Theodore Blake's St. Mary's Protestant Episcopal Church Manhattanville of 1908.
Soon enough French nuns, the Madames of the Sacred Heart, also found their way to Manhattanville to start a Catholic boarding school for girls. Founded in a three-story house on Houston Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side, in 1847 the the Academy of the Sacred Heart was relocated on on a hillside overlooking the village of Manhattanville comprizing the former estate of tobacco magnate Pierre Lorillard, . Destroyed by a fire in 1888, the Academy's nuns temporarily found an unlikely place to worship nearby. An elaborate orientalist-style pavilion designed by William Schickel, had been built in 1879 on the estate of newspaper publisher Oswald Ottendorfer as a garden teahouse.
Rebuilt on the same foundation, and also designed by Schickel, the new Academy grew to become among the most fashionable 'convent schools' in the city. Rose Fitzgerald, who became Mrs. Joseph Kennedy, resented her politician-father for not allowing her to attend Wellselly College, forcing her instead to attend school here. Converslly, Tallulah Bankhead, the stage and movie star, found the Academy of the Sacred Heart, her favorite school, of all those she was kicked out of, because from here, she said, it had been so easy to skip class and ride the subway to attend the theater. Admitting no black students, apart from child prodigy Phillipa Schuyler, as the surrounding area became ever more African American, by the late 1940's the college moved to Purchase, New York.
At first, landowners seemed perfectly contented to view the chimneys of the meatpacking plants, paint works and ribbon factories making them rich. However, living in close proximity with workers was quite a different matter. And if for a long time, smokestack industries were slow to replace the estates, villas, truck-farms with ranges of cold-frames, schools and social welfare institutions that first predominated in Manhattanville, following the Civil War industrial development here, grew and grew. With the arrival of more factorys, more smoke, more noise and more foreign-born laborers, the gentry fled, but not entirely.
Early Manhattanville truck-farm cold-frames.
Ca. 1880
The Academy of the Sacred Heart's origional multi-purpose Gothic Revival building from 1841, buned in 1888.
Awaiting construction of their new school building rebuilt on the same foundation as the burned structure, temporarily the Madames of the Sacred Heart worshiped nearby in an elaborate orientalist-style pavilion. At the Hudson's edge, it was built in 1879 on the estate of newspaper publisher Oswald Ottendorfer. The Ottendorfer pavilion architect, William Schickel, also designed the new Academy.
Built in 1884, just north of Manhattanville College at 135th Street, architect Frederick S. Cook's Romanesque Revival Croton Aqueduct Gate House not only helped to supply New Yorkers with water, it also provided a dramatic juxtaposition of contrasting building materials that would inspire George B. Post when he later designed adjacent City College buildings.
J. William Schickel's multi-purpose replacement building at Manhattanville College.
German born J. William Schickel, best recalled as a respected church specialist who designed the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, gave his multi-purpose replacement building at Manhattanville College a particularly fine neo-Renaissance style chapel.
A student dornitory.
The impetus to build Mnhattanville's many factories, good transport and cheap land, giving rise to the Accademy of the Sacred Heart, brought into being a host of other charitable institutions as well. In 1884 the Hebrew Benevolent Society constructed a large building at Amsterdam Avenue, between 136th and 138th Streets, the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York. A Second Empire Renaissance style behemoth occupying an entire block, the building was designed by William H. Hume. Not surprisingly it cost $750,000 including the land, and $60,000 a year to operate. Dominated by a central squar tower the complex eventually had a capacity for 1,755 children. It was self-sufficient enough that it was able to survive for a week on its own, cut off during the Blizzard of 1888. After 7 children died durring a dysentery outbreak caused by impurities in the city's water supply, the orphanage board installed its own water filtration system. During the influenza epidemic of 1918 not a single child here died. The Victorian landmark closed in 1941. Thereafter used by City College it was demolished in 1955.
Replacing Richard Upjohn's John Devlin house, razed in 1891, the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York's Second Empire Renaissance-style complex was designed by William H. Hume.
Completed just in time for the 1904 opening of New York's first subway, Broadway's Interborough Rapid Transit Viaduct is 365 feet longer than the arched Riverside Drive span. This is due to the widening of Manhattan Valley as it moves east from the Hudson River to the Harlem Plain.
Mushrooming, from 500 residents in the mid-19th-century, to 14,675 by 1900, how the Manhattanville neighborhood will advance in the future, has long inspired passionate debate. Fifty years ago government committed to producing innovative housing for workers of moderate means with public subsidies. Corbusian towers in landscaped parks, these 'housing projects' were immense. Whether at 3333 Broadway, Manhattanville Houses or elsewhere, the numbers of tenants in residence usually far exceeded the area's entire population from a century ago.
For a long while, it seemed as if the teeming numbers of poor people here would mean Manhattanville's salvation. Reliable voters, project residents seemed sure to elect legislators who would act in their interests. Given the great numbers of low-income people here and the emnity many who are affluent have to living among such people, it seemed as if gentrification might just be held at bay.
Now the marketplace seems poised to pressure the elimination of such oasis of civility. More and more affordable housing and other matters affecting the poor are dismissed, even as the rich and their concerns are embraced more warmly than ever before.
Manhattanville Houses project was designed by modernist architect William Lescaze, reflecting the "tower in the park" concept in vogue during the mid-20th century. Lescaze designed the towers to emphasize view corridors that maxamize residents air and light. Completed June 30, 1961 at a cost of $24 million, the site formerly consisted of city blocks of tenements which were demolished via slum clearance, beginning in 1957.
Like many of us my late friend Carolyn Kent loved being right. One matter about which she had no doubts whatever, was the value of protecting a large portion of Manhattanville, as a New York City historic district, celebrating 19th-century America's industrial and institutional importance.
Of course she was right. The pleasure of being a virtuous Cassandra had tremendous appeal to her, but not I. Like Paul Krugman, I should like to prevail, at least enough that being right is no mere hollow victory. We disagreed more than once about this, but in a way, again, she was right.
Wow!!! all these building looks too beautiful. it's design really fantastic. hey guy, are you tell me who created this buildings. i know compliment him for his good job.
carry on your step.
thanks for that........
bye.......
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Posted by: Md | 07/26/2012 at 06:27 AM
Michael this really is great work. On behalf of all of us who appreciate the beauty and majesty of Harlem's architecture, Thank You
Posted by: Gre Washington | 07/31/2012 at 02:53 PM