Monthly Archive for January, 2011

From Michael Barbaro at The New York Times…

For her wedding over the weekend, Nina Johnson had worked through a predictable checklist of locations in town: hotel ballrooms, restaurant halls and catering outfits.

In the end, though, she opted for the most glamorous, upscale and stylish setting she could find — a parking garage.

“When we saw it, we were in total awe,” said Ms. Johnson, 26, an art gallery director. “It’s breathtaking.”

Parking garages, the grim afterthought of American design, call to mind many words. (Rats. Beer cans. Unidentifiable smells.) Breathtaking is not usually among them.

Yet here in Miami Beach, whose aesthetic is equal parts bulging biceps and fluorescent pink, bridal couples, bar mitzvah boys and charity-event hosts are flocking to what seems like the unimaginable marriage of high-end architecture and car storage: a $65 million parking garage in the center of the city.

They are clamoring to use it for wine tastings, dinner parties and even yoga classes. Or taking self-guided tours, snapping photographs and, at times, just gawking. More…

From Christopher Gray in The New York Times:

The Dakota, the Gramercy, the Chelsea, the Windermere … all these and more have, on occasion, been set forth as the oldest (or even the first!) apartment house in Manhattan. The game of superlatives is always chancy, but the obscure little Black, Starr & Frost building, erected in 1874 at Fifth Avenue and 28th Street, has an inside track — even though no one has lived there for decades.

The burdens and wastefulness of private house life in Manhattan were apparent as soon as land values forced houses to four and five stories — how many bedrooms can a widow, or a couple without children, or a professional man actually use? Before the 1860s the options were either living in a hotel, with its dreaded common dining room, or a boarding house, about as homelike as a railroad sleeper car.

The Black, Starr & Frost building was built by William Black, head of the silver firm later known as Black, Starr & Gorham. Mr. Black was mixing business with business. He moved his firm to the ground floor, and leased apartments above.

The tenants of 1 East 28th Street were people like Asa Wilkinson, a chemist who had patents on many gas illuminating devices; George C. Barrett, a playwright and lawyer who in 1871 played a key role in removing the Tweed Ring from power; and John B. Bristol, a Hudson River painter who had been living in the big artists’ studio building at Park Avenue South and 23rd Street. He was listed in an 1886 article in The New York Times as one of the “old fogies” of the National Academy of Design, along with Frederic Church and Jasper Cropsey, who opposed loosening exhibition and membership restrictions.

For more…