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In Which Rel Hides Inside for Months

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

My excuses for not updating:

1. I ordered new memory cards for my camera and the order got canceled! Sucktastic! I have been too busy to place a new order, apparently.

2. It has been a shockingly cool summer in New York, but it has also rained almost continuously. And it’s still pretty hot, relatively speaking, and muggy as death. I haven’t been strolling around much.

However, I did take numerous photographs at the Cloisters a few months ago, and good many pictures at the Bronx Zoo. And I have a long list of buildings to take a zoom too once I can go outside without swimming. Happy summer!

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Green Men of Greenwich

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Sorry about the pun. None of these pictures are actually from the Village, though I’m sure it has its share of this particular character. I spent all weekend calling him the Wild Man, but Wikipedia thinks my terminology is incorrect, as the Wild Man is defined by his hairiness, more like a yeti, where this fellow is generally just a head topped with or framed by leaves. This would make him a Green Man.

A Green Man is a sculpture, drawing, or other representation of a face surrounded by or made from leaves. Branches or vines may sprout from the nose, mouth, nostrils or other parts of the face and these shoots may bear flowers or fruit. Commonly used as a decorative architectural ornament, Green Men are frequently found on carvings in churches and other buildings (both secular and ecclesiastical). . . .

In Britain, the image of the Green Man enjoyed a revival in the 19th century, becoming popular with architects during the Gothic revival and the “Arts and Crafts” era, when it appeared as a decorative motif in and on many buildings, both religious and secular. American architects took up the motif around the same time. The Green Man travelled with the Europeans as they colonized the world. Many variations can be found in Victorian-style Neo gothic architecture. He was very popular amongst Australian stonemasons and can be found on many secular and sacred buildings.

There is no way to talk about this without sounding like a goddamn hippie, so it’s fitting that the Lower East Side seems to be crawling with this motif. There is literally a different variation of him over every doorway on one side of 3rd Street between First and Second Avenues.

And a vaguely creepy one: Green Man of New York Past.

The full photo set is here.

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Grand Central Terminal’s Clock

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Grand Central could easily be considered the most beautiful building complex in New York City. Built between 1903 and 1913, Grand Central Terminal replaced a previous railroad depot called Grand Central Station — to repeat all the other snotty articles on the subject, it is now technically a terminal and not a station, as it’s the terminating point for the railroad lines. But everyone calls it Grand Central Station anyway, and popular usage generally prevails.

A full history of the building is a bit beyond the scope of this blog (for today, at least); we are going to focus on the famous clock and sculptures overlooking the side of the building facing Park Avenue South.

From Wikipedia’s article on the Grand Central Terminal:

Outside the station, the clock in front of the Grand Central facade facing 42nd Street contains the world’s largest example of Tiffany glass and is surrounded by sculptures carved by the John Donnelly Company of Minerva, Hercules, and Mercury. For the terminal building, French sculptor Jules-Felix Coutan created what was at the time of its unveiling (1914) considered to be the largest sculptural group in the world. It was 48 feet (14.6 m) high, the clock in the center having a circumference of 13 feet (4 m).

Jules-Felix Coutan was a student and later a teacher at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and an 1872 winner of the Prix de Rome. He designed a quarter-scale plaster model of the scultures between 1911 and 1914, but he never visited the US to see the finished project for himself. All in a day’s work, I guess.

Mercury is a Roman god and sometimes the better-known pseudonym of the Greek Hermes. He’s an odd figure; in mythology he plays the role of the trickster and messenger of the gods, and in the middle ages he was very popular with alchemists (the Freemasons love him). His significance in this sculpture is his position as a god of travel and commerce.

He traditionally carries a caduceus, which is a herald’s staff entwined with snakes in a double helix. It is very often confused with the rod of Asclepius, which is more or less the same thing only with a single serpent, since both symbols are used to signify medicine. If you look closely, you will see these particular snakes have tiny faces.

I don’t know why Mercury has an eagle here — in Greek/Roman mythology eagles are usually associated with Zeus/Jupiter in his boy-raping form. I’m guessing it’s just meant to be sort of generically American in this case.

Everyone knows who Hercules is, so I will just say that I find this depiction of him unusual. He looks really scrawny next to the gloriously built Mercury. He is surrounded with gears and mallets and I guess signifies good ol’ American hard work or something. I’m… not really sure, so let’s move on.

And here we have Minerva again! The last time we saw Minerva she was in Herald Square decked out in snakes and horses. Today she seems a lot more chill. Almost asleep, in fact. And she’s obviously feeling a bit nippy, but so are Mercury and Hercules! Yes, I am very observant and also mature.

She’s a goddess of wisdom and strategic warfare, and here she is surrounded by books and globes and other accouterments of the educated class. So I supposed taken together she and Hercules represent the hard-working blue collar New Yorker and book-learned white collar citizen, or whatever the turn-of-the-century equivalents of those ideas were.

All in all, they make sort of an odd trio. But they sure as heck make sure you know the time.

The full photo set is here.

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Appellate Division of the Supreme Court

Thursday, March 26, 2009

The Manhattan Appellate Courthouse is just east of Madison Square, on the corner of Madison Avenue and 25th Street.

In the 1890s and 1900s there was a movement in architecture called “City Beautiful”, where the philosophy was that if urban landscapes were pleasant to look at, people would be calmer and have better morals and I guess less inclined to rob banks and kill each other. I’m not sure what the logic behind that was but it left us with a lot of really beautiful buildings and parks planned out during that time. The Manhattan Appellate Courthouse is a prime example.

The Department of Citywide Administrative Services has this to say:

The building is most well known for the unique blending of art and architecture, a major principle of the Beaux Arts movement. On the outside, there are about 30 figures by 16 sculptors, the most sculptors to work on a single building in the United States. The artists were well-known in their field, like Daniel Chester French and Karl Bitter, who were selected by the architect and a panel of their peers. The marble sculptures, which weren’t finished until 1901, Manhattan Appellate Court Room represent allegorical figures such as Wisdom, Peace, Justice and figures in legal history, such as Moses, Confucius, and Justinian. Exterior sculpture and other exterior and interior decorative work represented over 50% of the total cost of the building.

The most sculptors to work on a single building in the United States! I didn’t think that was a stat that people keep track of, but I guess if you hire sixteen different artists you’d like to know if that’s a record. If you’re interested in the history of the building you should go ahead and read that whole page.

The “figures of legal history” are not labeled for the not-particularly-familiar-with-legal-history types like me, so I can’t really tell you who most of them are except the obvious ones, like Moses and Confucius. Apparently the set originally included Mohammad, which is funny in a forehead-smacking kind of way! Muslim ire eventually saw that one removed in the 1950s.

It’s fantastically detailed, and one could probably spend all day taking pictures of it and still miss stuff. The set of pictures I got isn’t great; I may take some better ones later with a tripod on hand. I got a lot of nervous looks from cabbies while snapping photos from across the street.

The full photo set is here.

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Lions of New York

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

This blog took a long vacation while I pleaded with Fate to bring me a better camera, preferably with a good zoom function, and eventually it did, in the form of my father at Christmas. So let’s get this party started!

As I am still easing back into these waters, no statues this time; today I bring you the advice that you should look up more often, because more likely than not, you are being watched.

Lions are my favourite.

I confess that I don’t know why New York City is crawling with lions. I think it was probably just a very popular design theme for a while, along with my second favourite, putti (”cupids”) and their taller and more sober cousins, angels and vaguely Greek winged people. I tend to throw them all together as a single category. But that is another post.

This is the most common beast I’ve seen. Glaring down at the street and clutching a wreath in his jaws, this guy is basically a chimera. I’d argue they are even more common than eagles for decorative function round these parts, though neither comes close to the ever popular leaves and flowers. Boring! Bring on the fangs!

I will continue to update my Lion Faces photo set on Flickr as I come across them — I spot another two or three every day. Looking up in New York is worth the risk of being taken for a tourist, because there is so much artwork in the city just above eye level.

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Greeley Square

Saturday, April 5, 2008

(updated March 2009)

The southern triangle of Herald Square is Greeley Square. You can’t just walk from one triangle to the other, as Broadway and Sixth Avenue create one of the really hellish intersections of New York City. There are usually a handful of cops attempting to direct traffic and pedestrians ignoring both the cops and the traffic lights, and at any given time there are at least two film crews trying to shoot on location. GOOD TIMES.

God, what did any of us do before Wikipedia:

Greeley Square lies between West 32nd Street and West 33rd Street and between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, and is taken up almost entirely by a triangular park. It is named after Horace Greeley, who was the publisher of New York Tribune, the Herald’s rival newspaper. (The two papers later merged to form New York Herald Tribune.) There is a statue of Greeley inside the park, created in 1890 by Alexander Doyle.

Rivals who eventually joined forces! Gosh, exciting. Unfortunately Greeley doesn’t get to be represented by any interesting war deities and is just himself, kind of hanging out. Well, that’s cool too I guess.

Where Bennett’s square is flocked by owls, Greeley’s is flanked by eagles:

The square itself is pretty much the same as the northern one, with the addition of a subway/PATH stop and a food and drink kiosk. There’s a seating area and it’s all very nice, though I personally would have a hard time relaxing with Broadway and Sixth Avenue’s traffic growling on all sides.

The plaque on the base reads:


This statue of the first president New York Typographical Union No 6 was presented to the City of New York by Horace Greeley Post No 577 C. A. R. New York Typographical Union No 6 and Brooklyn Typographical Union No 98

Given to the City of New York in 1890

Hm. For a typographical union they don’t communicate particularly well. Anyway, check this guy out, his story is crazy.

Full photo set is here.

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Herald Square

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

(updated March 2009)

So one day a friend and I were walking down Sixth Avenue, which of all the streets in NYC is probably the street I have walked down the most times total, and something alarming came to my attention. I can’t remember if I noticed it or if she did.

The owls on the clock in Herald Square North… their eyes…


WERE FLASHING BRIGHT POSSESSED-BY-THE-DEVIL ECTOPLASM GREEN

So that was startling.

Quoth Wikipedia:

“Herald Square is formed by the intersection of Broadway, Sixth Avenue (officially named Avenue of the Americas) and 34th Street in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. It was named for the New York Herald, a newspaper originally headquartered there. The Square also gives its name to the surrounding area. The intersection is a typical Manhattan bow-tie square that consists of two named sections: Herald Square to the north (uptown) and Greeley Square to the south (downtown).”

Basically wherever Broadway crosses a numbered avenue, you get a square of some variety. In this case “square” a misnomer of sorts, because what you really have is not a square but a pair of triangles, like the top and bottom of an X.

Herald Square proper, the northern triangle, is dominated by a clock featuring a statue of Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom of strategic warfare. She is accompanied by a bell and a pair of bell-ringers known affectionately as Stuff and Guff.


click for an even larger awkwardly sized image

The inscription at the base reads:

A memorial to
JAMES GORDON BENNETT (1795-1872)
Founder of the New York Herald in 1835
and to his son
JAMES GORDON BENNETT (1841-1918)
through whose vision and enterprise
The New York Herald became one of the world’s great newspapers

The bronze figures of Minerva and the Bell Ringers are the work of Antonin Jean Carles. They stood from 1895 to 1921 above of the cornice of James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald Building on the north side of Herald Square and tolled the active hours to the millions. In 1928 they were given by William T. Dewart, publisher of the New York Sun, to New York University, though whose generosity in 1939 they entered on permanent loan the care of the Department of Parks of the City of New York that they may be here restored to their original area of pleasant service and to their place in the hearts of our citizens. Funds for their restoration were provided by subsription of business organizations whose lives are deep-rooted in the neighborhood of Herald Square.

MCMXL

A lot of people seem to think that means Masons. I understand that the Jameses were kind of dicks, but I think everyone in late 1800s New York was kind of a dick. A tradition, in fact, carried on to this day. No matter!

Apparently Stuff and Guff originally contained a clockwork mechanism that had them “ring” in the hours. As far as I know, the clock no longer tolls. But it does seem to keep the right time, which puts it ahead of 80% of public clocks in NYC.

The north-facing side also contains a clock.

Well, that is all very nice, but what is with the possessed owl I hear you say.

Well, according to the the New York Times, they’ve always done that. Apparently they were wired up to blink like that while they were still installed on the roof of the Herald Building.

The spectacle of the electric-eyed owls and the bell ringers was joined by an ingenious bit of advertising: the pressroom, on the basement level, was visible from plate glass windows on the Broadway side. It was a late-night sport to loiter under the Italian Renaissance arcade and watch while “the entire mechanical force is straining to get the paper printed in time for the early trains,” as Harper’s Weekly put it.

Why are they brilliant electric green? I don’t know why they’re brilliant electric green. I suppose to scare people who look up.

The full photoset is here.

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