Drafting Board Cities

Planned cities are nothing new: perhaps the first one, Mohenjo-Daro in present-day Pakistan, was created around 4,500 years ago. Usually such planning is little more than platting a grid pattern for streets. Here in the United States, large, early examples include Philadelphia in the 1680s and the grid layout established for New York in 1811.

Not all planned cities consisted of pure street grids. Philadelphia's plan included some squares for parks, and Savanna, Georgia has many such squares. At some point, vistas, focal points, circles and other details became fashionable concepts for planners slaving over their drawing boards. I suspect that there were times that a plan was proposed and accepted simply because it looked attractive as a graphic layout -- an extension of the plan-based studies 19th century architectural students had to produce.

Such street patterns might have seemed nice when displayed on a wall, but often were somewhat defective when implemented. Let's take a look.

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Brasilia
This image and the following one are from this collection of space views of planned cities. Brasilia features a sort of arrow or wing motif. I've never been there so can't offer an opinion, through I've read that inhabitants were not fully pleased with its layout.

Canberra
I've never been to Canberra, either. Its designer, Walter Burley Griffin, was influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, so the plan has an "organic" feeling to it.

Longview, Washington
Longview is a small city planned in the late 1920s. The lake on the left side of this image from Bing is artificial, part of the plan. There are a few diagonal streets, holdovers from the thinking shown in the following images.

Chicago, Burnham Plan of 1909
Little of the Burnham Plan was implemented as designed. The grid-layout central area (the Loop) was too well established to be altered. (It's the area the river bends around in this view where the top of the image faces west, away from Lake Michigan.) In addition to some formal layouts by the lake, the street plan features diagonal avenues, circles, focal points and a civic center square from which many of the diagonals radiate. None of that was built.

Washington Plan of 1800
One such plan that largely came to be is the L'Enfant-Ellicot Plan for Washington, D.C., capital of the USA.

Washington, D.C.
Here is how the street layout looks today viewed from above. Perhaps those angled streets bouncing off various circles and small squares handled horse-and-buggy traffic adequately in the early days.
But when I was in the army stationed nearby in the early 1960s I found it a hassle to work my way to the Mall on those diagonal avenues even on a quiet Sunday morning. (Though there were plenty of parking spots on the Mall when I got there.) A pure grid pattern might have been better for traffic flow. Furthermore, despite all those diagonals, squares and circles, there are few impressive vistas once one leaves the Mall and Pennsylvania Avenue (running from the Capitol to near the White House).

Paris: central area
Paris with its boulevards by Baron Haussmann and others works better than Washington. That's because Paris' street layout is essentially unplanned, having grown from pre-Roman days through the Dark and Middle ages to the point where creating boulevards was necessary for traffic circulation. Note how irregular is the "background" to the dark boulevard pattern in this view from above.

John C. Wenrich: Forgotten Architectural Delineator

John C. Wenrich (1894-1970) was a fine architectural delineator. While he wasn't as famous as his near-contemporary Hugh Ferris, he was involved in some important projects, one of which was Rockefeller Center.

Biographical information on Wenrich is scanty. This link is the best I could find using Google. And here is a blog dealing with Wenrich at a site featuring architectural illustration. It was the source of some of the images below.

The current post presents some of Wenrich's Rockefeller Center work. He had a nice, effective touch that wasn't as dramatic or impressionistic as Ferris' renderings often were.

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This features the Maison Française (left) and British Empire Building (right) separated by the "channel." The buildings as completed feature less ornamentation than shown in the rendering.

Rendering of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, best known to me as the RCA Building.

An earlier rendering showing the RCA Building. The two tall buildings to the left were conjectural. The left-hand one was never built, but a building somewhat similar to the one to the right exists, though it lacks the tower and other details vary. Wenrich included the Empire State Building (3/4 of a mile -- about one kilometer -- south on Fifth Avenue) at the far left.

Another rendering done at about the same time as the previous one. Those two tall buildings on Fifth Avenue appear, as do the low-lying Maison Française and British Empire Building nestled between them.

Showing rooftop gardens on the Maison Française and British Empire Building. These buildings actually received such gardens. The orientation of Wenrich's image is a view from the southwest, where St. Patrick's Cathedral is shown at the top of the image on the other side of Fifth Avenue.

This 1932 rendering depicts a proposed rooftop garden on the Radio City Music Hall theatre. It was never made, the same being the case for the skybridge shown crossing West 50th Street.

This later rendering is of Rockefeller Center's essentially completed first phase planning. It doesn't quite agree with what was actually built. For instance, a Music Hall rooftop garden is still included.

A Review, then Towards the End: Hugh Ferriss

Hugh Ferriss (1889–1962) is my favorite architectural delineator. He has plenty of other fans, if the nearly 200,000 results from Googling his name is any indication. A brief Wikipedia entry about him is here.

Ferriss is probably best known for two aspects of his work. The first deals with 1920-1930 renderings of skyscrapers actually built or that were proposed but not built for one reason or another. The other is the set of speculative rendering of a future city collected in his book "Metropolis of Tomorrow" (1929). Many of these images are iconic of their times.

He usually rendered using pencils, charcoal and related shading media. This suited the high-rise architectural themes of the 1920s -- styles known as Art Deco and something that might be called streamlined Gothic.

The 1930s saw the Great Depression with its general lack of new construction aside from government buildings that often featured highly simplified classic themes with a hint of Deco. Post- World War 2 architecture soon conformed to International Style dictates. That is, tall buildings were severely rectangular with glass-and-steel cladding while lacking any form of decoration.

Ferriss' successful 1920s rendering style and mediums were not really appropriate for depicting International Style buildings. They worked best with buildings with more intricate shapes, stone or brick cladding, and ornamentation. Although he was involved in some major projects, the resulting renderings were not nearly as impressive as his earlier works. This was despite an effort to adjust his style to the new circumstances.

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Wanamaker's Bridge (New York City) - 1917
Wanamaker's was a major Philadelphia and New York City department store.

American Radiator Building (New York City) - completed 1924
The building still stands on West 40th Street across from Bryant Park.

Fisher Building (Detroit) - 1928
Located on West Grand Boulevard across the street from what then was General Motors' headquarters.

The Majestic Hotel (Chanin Construction Co.) - 1930
A speculative project, probably in New York City.

Future city scene
As was the case for the previous images, Ferriss' style matched the architectural style very well.

Metropolis of Tomorrow - 1928
Again, the buildings are sculpted masses where windows are comparatively small details.

Metropolis of Tomorrow - c.1928
Dramatic night scene. I wish I were at that cocktail party on the terrace at the lower right of the rendering.

United Nations Headquarters - c.1948
A proposed ensemble.

United Nations Headquarters - c.1948
More about the UN Headquarters here. Design began in 1947, a cornerstone was laid in 1949 and the initial grouping was completed by 1952. The tall Secretariat building is steel-and-glass on the longer sides, and all this reflective material is hard to depict using Ferriss' toolkit. Here he did his best to emphasize massing rather than fenestration.

Lever House (New York City) - c.1949
The Lever House, built 1950-52, was an early International Style office building in New York. Sensational when it was new, but now nondescript. It is on the west side of Park Avenue between 53rd and 54th Streets. In this rendering, Ferriss selected a night setting that allowed him to capture some of the structural elements without the complication of reflections off the glass.

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts - c.1959
The main Lincoln Center groundbreaking was in 1959, and the original ensemble largely complete by 1966. Shown here is the Metropolitan Opera House. It was completed in 1966. Given that Ferriss died in January 1962, it is likely that this is one of his last renderings.

A Last Look at the Waldorf Before Renovation

New York City's famed Waldorf-Astoria hotel (1931 version) is set to be closed early in 2017 for renovation and partial conversion to condominiums. That's what this Wikipedia entry mentions as of the time this post is being drafted (5 October 2016).

My wife and I decided to stay at the Waldorf to experience it before its closure. She had stayed there as a college student on her way to a European tour and I spent a few nights there in the late 1970s while on a business trip.

Below are some photos I took of present details. I suppose most of these will be preserved, but don't know for sure.

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An architectural rendering of the hotel from before it was built. It's on display on the lobby floor. Some reflections are on its protective glass, so the image is slightly degraded.

The Park Avenue entrance.

A closer look at the exterior ornamentation.

View towards Park Avenue from inside that entrance.

Panning to the left of the previous image, we find this.

Foyer view opposite from the previous photo.

Opposite the entrance is this hallway and elevator lobby leading to the main lobby.

Inside the main lobby. The elaborate clock was from the original Waldorf-Astoria located on the present site of the Empire State Building.

Two views of Peacock Alley, located on the north side of the main lobby. It's a bar and restaurant, but the original was a passage in the old Waldorf-Astoria where elegant ladies could and would promenade.

Door grillwork on the lobby level.

Tower elevator door decorations.

This was our room in the Towers. I include this photo because, unlike the public areas pictured above, this is likely to disappear during the renovation.

As you probably noticed, the Waldorf-Astoria is an example of Art Deco architecture and ornamentation. Very little of the geometric kind of Art Deco here, but more of the "organic" style seen in the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (Wikipedia entry here), which had its roots in Art Nouveau.

Vanished and Vanishing New York: 1960s Photos

New York City has been demolishing its past and rebuilding since it was established by the Dutch in 1624. Recent decades have seen successful efforts to preserve buildings that otherwise might have been destroyed.

This post is a photo essay showing some photos I took in April of 1962 when I was stationed at Fort Slocum (also gone), the summer of 1963 when I was at Fort Meade, Maryland, and in June of 1965 when I was gathering information for my Masters thesis. Perhaps some readers who are New York fans might appreciate them.

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Art Students League, West 57th Street (1962)
The building still exists, but overshadowed and overhung by a large modern tower, as this Observer article reports.

Columbus Circle, Gallery of Modern Art under construction (1962)
Millionaire Huntington Hartford favored a more traditional variety of modern art, so he had this building created to display it. The exterior was sheathed in marble, but only bits were in place when I photographed it. Edward Durell Stone was the architect. I visited it once, and all I remember was that it seemed cramped. The museum closed in 1969 and this explains what happened since. Yes, that's the Empire State Building at the left, sighted down Broadway.

Savoy Plaza Hotel (1963)
It's the building to the right. This isn't a good photo and many fine ones can be found on the internet. I include it because it's mine. The hotel was replaced by the large, nondescript, General Motors Building. The tall building is the Sherry-Netherland hotel-plus-apartments that still stands. The Savoy Plaza Wikipedia entry is here.

Singer Building (1963)
This was for a short while (1908-09) the tallest building in the city. It was demolished by taking it apart bit-by-bit in 1968. Its tall shaft was capped by the slightly bulbous top pictured here.  It never looked right to me. More information is here.

Tribune Building (1962)
During the late 1800s some newspaper offices clustered near City Hall, and the Tribune was one of them. The building by Richard Morris Hunt was completed in 1875 and demolished in 1966. More information is here.

Subway entrance/exit, Park Avenue South & East 28th Street (1963)
This is what subway entrances often looked like early in the 20th century. They were disappearing when I made a point of taking this picture. The drab-looking neighborhood has been gentrified, if Google street views are any guide.

42nd Street, west of Times Square (1965)
This stretch of 42nd Street has been spruced up a little in recent times. Fifty years ago it was more gritty, as can be seen here. Those movie theaters were second-run houses. When a movie had its initial run, it would be seen around the corner in Times Square on Broadway or Seventh Avenue. When attendance fell off, the film would move to a house on 42nd where prices were lower and affordable for people with limited entertainment budgets. Back in those pre-internet days, one way of telling the commercial success of a movie was to take note of how long it lasted in Times Square before it went to 42nd.

Railroad yard revealed below new construction, Park Avenue (1965)
The Wikipedia entry on Park Avenue mentions that the street is partly built over railroad tracks. In my New York days, the New York Central and New Haven lines came down Park and then around 50th Street fanned out to Grand Central Terminal's gate system. The photo was taken while construction was getting underway at 299 Park Avenue, the Westvaco Building, as it was first called. The link mentions that the tracks under the building site were those of the New Haven. Since not many buildings are built along this stretch of Park, my camera captured a rare sight.

Ziegfeld Theatre (1965)
The Ziegfeld Theatre designed by Joseph Urban opened in 1927 and was demolished in 1966 as this Wikipedia entry reports. When my photo was taken it was clearly on its way out. So, like the subway entrance above, I made sure to photograph it.

TWA Terminal at JFK Airport : Some 1965 Photos

There is little lack of photographs of the TWA terminal designed by Eero Saarinen at JFK Airport in New York City, but I'll add to that pile in this post.

For some background on the terminal, its Wikipedia entry is here.

It was an astonishing building when it opened in May of 1962, and remains so. TWA was staggering by the 1980s however, entering its first bankruptcy in 1991 and ten years later its remains were acquired by American Airlines. The terminal has had an equally uneven existence, and the plan is to transform it into a hotel -- the structure being the hotel's public areas (as best I can tell).

With one exception, the photos below were taken by me in June of 1965. They originally were slides that I scanned, cropped in many cases, and most had their color adjusted. They are not great photographic art, but might give you the flavor of the place when it was still fairly new.

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View of the TWA terminal when nearly completed.

The approach was through a parking lot that is long gone.

Heading towards the entrance from the passenger drop-off zone.

The clock says it's nearly 6 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.

The tube-like shape in the background is a passageway to the airplanes.

View from the upper level.

A conversation nook.

The restaurant-bar.  The tail of a KLM airliner is seen at the extreme left.

Another view from the second level. It's now exactly 6 p.m.

Flight information board.  The parking lot can be seen in the background.

The building is visually entertaining because all those sweeping shapes have to come together here and there to create interesting details such as this.