You Cheer for Mr. Special

Take a gander at my latest dispatch for The American Guide, this...

Tue, 07 May 2013 16:34:12 -0400

Take a gander at my latest dispatch for The American Guide, this one on armories and arsenals in the City. If you know more about current uses of different armories, let me know - always curious to see how they’re being used today.

americanguide:

CASTLES IN THE CITY - ARMORIES OF NEW YORK, NY

A city as old as New York contains layer upon layer of building types, each exhibiting its own architectural and social histories. Distinctive structures are therefore fairly pedestrian in that they are all around, popping up in the midst of indistinguishable rows of sameness that have their own charm. Turning a corner to see a castle, however, may not seem one of the more likely occurrences, regardless of your location on bustling Park Avenue or a quiet Hasidic Williamsburg block.

Armories and arsenals – generally massive masonry structures fashioned in the medieval Gothic style of fortresses (parapets and turrets included) – are scattered throughout the city. The WPA Guide to New York City mentions many armories briefly, four for their 50-cent badminton rates and others for their resident regiments’ performance in this or that war, though it definitely does not serve as a comprehensive source for the building form. In the 1930s, armories were noted pieces of a community, at once social clubs for men of the upper and upper-middle classes, training grounds for the State’s National Guard divisions, and symbols of government and military might that also sometimes doubled as civic centers. Today, their uses vary widely, as do their states of (dis)repair. In the current economy, one would have a hard time justifying the contemporary construction of such monumental structures on some of the most valuable real estate in the world. But these were quite expensive to construct back in the day as well, which begs the questions of why they were built initially and how these elephant-in-the-city holdovers from a previous era are being used today.

Wanting a bit more information on these behemoths designed to house guns and the people authorized to use them, I stumbled on the NY State Military Museum’s listing of still-existing and long-demolished armories across the state. This resource, coupled with Nancy Todd’s New York’s Historic Armories: An Illustrated History, gave me the bones of a plan to jaunt around the city and visit a few. Todd’s situation of form’s rise in the state within the larger context of the militia in the country’s history is fascinating. To paraphrase greatly, the state militias went from the military force of the colonies and newly minted states to a fairly equal partner with the centralized military, largely focused on domestic unrest, to a group of trained folks that serve overseas and scramble to action when disasters strike at home.

Armories grew in popularity when the state National Guard became a serious force. With industrialization giving rise to class inequality that seems quaint by today’s standards, labor-capital conflicts exploded in the 1870s to the 1890s and the National Guard – rallying out from its urban (and rural) castles – was the group that quashed the riots. The Guard’s consequence among the moneyed classes during that time figured prominently in the construction of more homes for Guard regiments across the city.

The reserve force we know today, which in the City rallied (to name only two instances) post-Sandy and post-9/11 for significant relief efforts, no longer requires structures from which to withstand siege. (Whether the necessity ever truly existed is a very valid question.) Largely beginning in the late 1960s, armories began to fall out of use by the Guard, sometimes due to the cost of upkeep when balanced against the true need for the structures. Ownership of some was transferred to the City, others maintained by the State, some to private groups, and most falling into some sort of disrepair. Many remain in such condition, though some have been repurposed, and plans are in the works for others to be put back to use.

The Central Park Arsenal at 5^th Ave. and 64^th St. is the oldest of the bunch I visited (constructed in 1848), and one of two structures within Vaux and Olmsted’s great park that predate its creation. As an arsenal, it was largely a warehouse for arms and over time saw many uses, including as a police precinct, a menagerie, the first home of the American Museum of Natural History, and, since Robert Moses assumed its helm in 1934, the City Department of Parks and Recreation.

To bring the regiments off of parade grounds into a weatherized space, the state moved away from the construction of simply arsenals to armories, which generally include an administrative structure, complete with fancy rooms in which cigar smoking would seem a fitting activity, backed by a massive drill shed used for military exercises. Todd calls the Seventh Regiment Armory, known also as the Park Avenue Armory, the “flagship of the building type” and dedicates a whole chapter in her book to its history. Sitting on Park Ave. between 66^th and 67^th, the 1880 building strikes a powerful image, thanks in part to its rehabilitation as the performance arts space it is today. The massive drill shed, the roof of which is held up by eleven wrought-iron arches, now hosts a range of performances. The space is so large as to permit feats like the reconstruction of an entire four-story theater in the round for a run of performances by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2011 (with ample space left over). The building’s management was not too keen on allowing me to take photos, so take a look at the armory’s interior here.

In the midst of one the nation’s largest Hasidic Jewish populations in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, sits the Forty-Seventh Regiment Armory at Marcy Ave. between Heyward and Lynch Streets. The juxtaposition between the Yiddish-speaking community, their school buses parked alongside the imposing brick walls of the armory, and the building itself makes for a particularly curious scene. Built in 1884 and expanded in 1899 (thus bringing together two different architectural styles utilized in the form), the space is used for major movie filming. I snuck a glance inside at the construction of sets for Spiderman 3, but again, no luck in a thorough look at the interior. Still owned by the State but promoted by the City as part of its Made in NYC film initiative, there has been talk of late of the sale of building, and the rapidly expanding Hasidic community seems first in line to purchase it for school and community space.

The Fort Washington Avenue Armory, which sits between 168^th and 169^th streets in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, was constructed in 1911. After the National Guard regiment vacated the space, the city operated a homeless shelter in the drill hall from the late 1980s and early 1990s, as it did with a vast number of armories across the five boroughs. The armory now serves as a track and field center hosting area races as well as Olympic qualifying events, a track and field hall of fame, and community center. Oddly, despite being heavily renovated to accommodate the sloping turf surface of the track, it maintains an interior purpose not unlike that of the old drill sheds. The stands that now host supporters of the athletes racing around the track below may have more modern seats, but they look out from the same vantage point the people of the city would have had when surveying troops in full regalia. Some original flooring, molding, and stairways also remain.

Walking into the 369^th Regiment Armory in Harlem on 5^th Ave. between 142^nd and 143^rd, I was promptly sized up by a camo-wearing guardsman. While the drill shed, built in 1924, is now used by the Harlem Children’s Zone, the administrative block, completed in 1933, is still home to the regiment that gives its name to the structure: originally the only black regiment in New York City and nicknamed the Harlem Hell Fighters. Built long after the boom in armory construction in the late 19^th century, the 369^th has a distinct style, incorporating many art-deco features in its floors and molding. Alas, I was asked to leave before I could snap photos, and the exterior is currently undergoing a restoration, but at the very least the thick, iron-girded doors are something to behold.

Much can be said about the architectural features and styles that define armories across the city, as could be about their changing uses and ownership. Fortunately, they will not likely be going anywhere soon, as most are either landmarked by the City or on the National Register of Historic Places.

To see how we utilize these spaces, designed for an entirely different function but no less useful for our own purposes today, provides a curious case study in adaptive reuse in a time when significant buildings are all too often slated for destruction, victims of real estate money-making schemes, or a lack of creativity in adapting their spaces. Armories also serve as a reminder of the past militarization of cities in a time when our police forces are increasingly equipped with technology and trained in tactics previously reserved for the professional federal military. Which makes me think: we are still building armories and arsenals in the city today. They do not, however, double as a social club relatively open to the outside or treat the eye to an anachronistic image of a castle out of medieval times, situated just around the corner from your local bodega.

* * *

JONATHAN TARLETON is a State Guide to New York. He was schooled in Georgia and North Carolina before moving on to denser pastures in Brooklyn. He currently helps out at Urban Omnibus where he researches and writes about the policy, art, peculiarities, and movements that make New York City so enticingly combative. He likes to be outside and to make things, preferably concurrently. Follow him on Tumblr at jttarleton.tumblr.com.

Cultural Fluency: Intersections of Art and Urbanism

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 21:02:00 -0400

Cultural Fluency: Intersections of Art and Urbanism:

Went to the BRIC Rotunda Gallery a couple weeks ago to see the current exhibition Cultural Fluency: Intersections of Art and Urbanism. I highly recommend it - see my review here for Urban Omnibus. Very well curated to make for a real examination of the interaction between artists and their environment and how that affects their work/work affects place. It’s open till the 27th - get at it. One particularly interesting piece is Martin McCormack’s The Great New York City Mapping Project shown above.

americanguide: ROAD TRIP WITH THE AMERICAN...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:22:57 -0400

americanguide:

ROAD TRIP WITH THE AMERICAN GUIDE

What: Downtown Literary Festival

Where: Housing Works Bookstore Cafe - NYC

When: Sunday - A pril 14 - 2:30PM

Facebook: RSVP

For a visitor to New York City in the 1940s, no guide was more comprehensive than the WPA Guide to New York City, a block-by-block encyclopedia of the neighborhoods, covered by some of the city’s most talented writers. The book was a part of the “American Guide Series,” published by the Federal Writers Project between 1935 and 1943, which encouraged Depression-weary Americans to explore their own backyard.

For our exploration of the American Guide, we’re joined by Erin Chapman and Tom McNamara, creators of the The American Guide Tumblr, which aims to capture the spirit of travel and discovery fostered by the original guide. Also joining us is Gabriel Kahane, composer of Gabriel’s Guide to the 48 States, a suite based on the American Guide, which will have its world premiere at Carnegie Hall on April 27th. Discussion moderated by Michelle Legro of Lapham’s Quarterly.

Guide Note: Follow your guide and hear about 1939’s Lower East Side. See The Bowery, “sinister street of lurid fiction and drama,” and its pawnshops, beer saloons, flophouses and missions. (The Bowery “Salvation” and “Rain” illustrations by Eli Jacobi, WPA.)

* * *

Road Trip With The American Guide is a part of the inaugural Downtown Literary Festival in New York City, from McNally Jackson and Housing Works Bookstore Cafe. It’s a daylong celebration of the literary culture of the city. The festival will take place at both bookstores simultaneously throughout the day on Sunday, April 14, 2013.

APT.en Gallery Presents:

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 12:30:00 -0400

Alexander Stephens: A Life in Pictures

March 13 – April 21

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

The rise in social media over the last 10 years has created an unprecedented stock of archival material – photographs, prose, and histories of self-curation – that are too often confined to the interwebs. In the rare instances that this material is animated beyond the digital sphere, audiences are privy to a rawness difficult to reproduce in any other context.

In the first of a series of exhibits that will seek to break down the barrier between the world of high art and that of the personal stories and beauty imbedded in our online presences, the APT.en Gallery will display a series of photographs turned ornaments that provide a complex yet satisfying look at one subject: Alexander Stephens.

In the portraits, minimally displayed with ribbon and twine, we see the man in various states of life across an undefined temporal landscape. Whether he his dancing, smirking playfully, dressing up as a Clue character, or engaging in pensive consideration, in Stephens we find a worthy protagonist of our contemplation.

Alexander Stephens: A Life In Pictures will run from March 13 to April 21. Viewings by appointment only. For inquiries regarding future stagings of this exhibit, please contact Jonathan Tarleton at jonathan.tarleton@gmail.com.

————

APT.en Gallery is a 440 square foot exhibition, co-working, and artist in residence space embedded in the vibrant art scene of the Southside of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Check out my first post for The American...

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 18:41:39 -0400

Check out my first post for The American Guide

americanguide:

BROOKLYN NAVY YARD - NEW YORK

“The United States Navy Yard, Navy Street, Flushing and Clinton Avenues, better known as the Brooklyn Navy Yard, skirts Wallabout Bay, a semicircular elbow of the East River opposite Corlear’s Hook, Manhattan. This busy naval city covers a total of 197 acres, 118 on land, 79 on water, and is surrounded by forbidding brick walls with massive iron gateways.” – New York City Guide (WPA, 1939)

Biking down Flushing Avenue, dubbed the Hipster Highway for its convenient bike connection between the neighborhoods of DUMBO, Williamsburg, and Greenpoint, any sense of neighborhood evades you. Warehouses and auto parts stores are countered by an expanse of quiet industrialism along the East River waterfront. The district now seems to lack the pulsating energy of intensive production in the Navy Yard’s past: from 1801 to 1966, the Navy Yard was one of the foremost shipbuilding and provisioning centers in the nation with a workforce upwards of 70,000 employees during World War II. Now owned by the city and operated as an industrial park, the gates remain and entry is restricted - an anomaly of the street grid with a smattering of competing building styles and orientations, punctuated by half empty parking lots that give the impression of just another industrial waterfront awaiting redevelopment.

“The yard (…) contains four drydocks ranging in length from 326 to 700 feet, two huge steel shipways, and six big pontoons and cylindrical floats for salvage work (…) numerous foundries, machine shops, and warehouses (…) barracks for marines, a power plant, a large radio station, and a railroad spur. (…) Beyond the dull waters of the East River looms the New York sky line, like the backdrop of a stage set.” – New York City Guide (WPA, 1939)

Despite its guarded, dulling presentation to the outside, the Navy Yard thrives. Now one of the fastest growing green manufacturing centers in the nation, the Yard also houses artists, an urban farm, the city’s oldest current operating whiskey distillery (a few years old), woodworkers, architects, a pioneering modular construction firm, and remnants of its ship-centric past operating the gargantuan dry docks reaching inland. The steel hull of Building 128 - just months ago a bygone shipbuilding factory shrouded in caution tape and rust - is slowly shaping into a Collaborative Design and Fabrication Center. Steiner Studios, the largest film studio complex outside of Hollywood and home to the largest sound stage on the East Coast, provides a backdrop ripe for the silver screen: the Empire State Building, the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges, and the new World Trade Center building all rise in the distance.

“At the south end, facing Flushing Avenue are the officer’s quarters, two-story buildings of painted brick, scrupulously neat despite their age (some were built before the Civil War), and bordered by gardens, tennis courts, and carefully kept walks.” – New York City Guide (WPA, 1939)

The past and the present meet frequently in New York, but rarely do the past and the future coalesce so nearly as they do in the Navy Yard. Bordered by the crumbling facades of Admiral’s Row and the regally decrepit former hospital, industry is adapting to the constraints and needs of the current environment. The nonprofit development corporation that manages the site has made the rich history of the Navy Yard’s past and present available through BLDG 92, a museum, job placement center, and community space housed in the adaptively reused Marine Commandant’s Residence. It may not look like much from the outside, but the Navy Yard stands in stark contrast to an economy founded on real estate booms and the fluctuations of Wall Street, and is much more impressive and intriguing for it.

Guide Note: While admission to BLDG 92 is free, tours of the Navy Yard itself run to at least $20. I highly suggest a visit to the distillery followed by some slightly illicit exploration of the grounds, by bike if possible.

* * *

JONATHAN TARLETON is a State Guide to New York. He was schooled in Georgia and North Carolina before moving on to denser pastures in Brooklyn. He currently helps out at Urban Omnibus where he researches and writes about the policy, art, peculiarities, and movements that make New York City so enticingly combative. He likes to be outside and to make things, preferably concurrently.

Follow him on Tumblr at jttarleton.tumblr.com.

Community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn: 1970s and Today

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 22:29:06 -0400

Community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn: 1970s and Today:

Take a look at my most recent article for Urban Omnibus, a review of the film Metropolitan Avenue by Christine Nochese which documents the working class, diverse women of 1970s Williamsburg who organized to save their neighborhood through the lens of the community present in the Williamsburg of today.

Perhaps there's a Superfond Manufactured Gas Plant on the Gowanus

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 08:34:00 -0500

Perhaps there's a Superfond Manufactured Gas Plant on the Gowanus:

In the context of new activity in the quest for the creation of the LowLine, which by design invokes the legacy of its higher, existent cousin, I’ve seen a few new and come back across critiques of the High Line as a misplacement of public funds, a gentrifying tool, and just one more addition to a luxuriated and Disneyfied Manhattan. While I can sympathize with some aspects of these arguments, I take issue with a good bit of them (how’s that for evading really parsing out my views). Let’s skirt that for the time being and instead take solace in some good ole fashioned irony. A quotation from the article linked above:

Brownfeld Auto, on West 29th Street near 10th Avenue, lost its lease after nearly a century. Today it’s another hole in the ground. Its third-generation owner, Alan Brownfeld, blamed the High Line for taking away the thriving business he’d inherited from his grandfather. “It’s for the city’s glamorous people,” he said.

Could a defunct auto repair plant have a better name than Brownfeld?

The Ethics of Trespassing...and some tips on how to do it

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 21:54:00 -0500

The Ethics of Trespassing...and some tips on how to do it:

N.D. Austin and Ida Benedetto, the fine folks behind Wanderlust Projects, gave a lecture on the “how to” of trespassing and the ethics behind their work as transgressive placemakers at the Observatory Room a few weeks ago - take a look at my short recap for Urban Omnibus.

Arguments for the benefits of trespassing do not make it an ethical practice. Indeed, adopting a philosopher-approved, normative ethical standard by which to judge trespassing was far outside the scope of the discussion. However, trespassing — and the images and artifacts it can release to an otherwise locked-out public — can produce awareness and foster newly imagined potential futures not possible otherwise.

There’s a good bit out there on urban exploration. For a fun primer, check out Undercity, a short documentary on Steve Duncan’s shenanigans and a UO interview teasing out the public benefits and notable motivations behind said shenanigans.

Occupy Muppet Theater

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 18:48:00 -0500

A note from writer/actor Jason Segel

There comes a time in all great puppet franchise productions that a writer must decide whether to capture the zeitgeist of the times or accept as adequate the already boundary-breaking assumption that puppets of varying zoological persuasions are respected as equal members of a society otherwise much akin to our own. I admit: I opted for the latter, unknowingly bowing to the private interests that sought to incapacitate conservative critics from launching an additional barrage of condemnation beyond their abhorrence of the clearly-stoned Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem and the star-crossed interspecies romance of Kermit the Frog and Ms. Piggy, the soul of a cultural touchstone and the crowning indiscretion of an especially-despised boogeyman of the Right. Please accept this abridged alternate ending as my retraction of the blatantly neglectful anthem “everything’s great, everything’s grand.” If one theme holds sway from the first version of the film, let it be the Muppets’ tireless fight against the Tex Richmans of the world – a grand example of the kind of perseverance necessary to enact real social change, whether you’re a man, a Muppet, a Muppet of a man, or a very manly Muppet. - Jason

SPOILER ALERT

(The Muppets have just realized they have not raised enough money to save their theater from destruction by the evil oil baron Tex Richman.)

Tex Richman: GET OUT! This is my private property now Muppets!

Sam the Eagle: Well, Muppets. Private property is the law of the land. (Dejectedly) It’s time to call it quits.

Kermit (lifting his downtrodden eyes from the floor of the theater to face the devastated crowd): You may be right Tex Richman (voice quivering at first but gaining strength), but we do not recognize your ill-gotten power. You have too long sapped wealth from beneath our communities for the sole purpose of your personal gain, giving back in the form of polluted lakes and rivers – a sickness amphibians as myself feel acutely as it seeps into our bodies through our porous skin. But together, we are not porous! WE WILLOCCUPY OUR THEATER. THIS IS OUR SPACE. IT IS EVERY MUPPETS’ AND NON-MUPPETS’ SPACE TO LAUGH AND BUILD OUR BEAUTIFUL COMMUNITY, NOT TO DESTROY IT…OCCUPY MUPPET THEATER!!!

(The crowd goes wild; Michael Cain as Scrooge enters from Stage Left, assesses the populist uprising before him, and quickly retreats offstage again)

Ms. Piggy: Oh Kermie! (and faints)

(One hour into the ensuing General Assembly)

Dr. Bunsen Honeydew: Point of Procedure! Animal – you can only yell “Mic Check” to respond to a…

Animal: MIC CHECK! MIC CHECK! MIC CHECK!

Dr. Bunsen Honeydew: Point of Procedure! POINT OF…

Animal (now surrounded by a drum circle nearby): DRUMS DRUMS DRUMS DRUMS!

(The LAPD has surrounded the theater and is approaching the doors with a battering ram; scene shifts to the Upper Balcony Box)

Statler: Is this the part when they all get arrested?

Waldorf: Let’s just hope the Muppet Lawyers’ Guild doesn’t show up!

(They laugh heartily)

(Outside the LAPD begins battering the doors of Muppet Theater; Tex Richman stands nearby)

Tex Richman: Maniacal Laugh, Maniacal Laugh…

Evil Bear Sidekick: Maniacal Laugh… huh huh huh

(Meanwhile, on stage…)

Gonzo the Great: And now for my most important performance yet! (launching into a dramatic monologue) I used to be the 1% (crowd gasps)… until I blew up my plumbing works empire! (crowd cheers) But my actions will not stop at the merely destructive! We must build anew. We are art! We must create by freeing ourselves of our chains! Crazy Harry - ready my cannon.

Rowlf the Dog: Gonzo! You gotta stay nonviolent!

Gonzo: There is nothing violent about flying free through a theater’s doors! (To Crazy Harry) Light it up!

(Gonzo climbs into his cannon and is shot to the back of the theater, straight through the doors the LAPD is trying to break down)

(An hour later, most of the Muppets have been arrested, their wrists bound by zip-ties as they file into a paddy wagon)

Fozzie Bear (with one hand behind his back free of the zip ties, addresses a policeman): Hey Fuzz, what’s an angry bear’s favorite dessert?

Policeman: A bearclaw?

Fozzie Bear: An Occu-PIE! (pies the policeman) Oooo Waka waka!

(as the paddy wagon carts the arrested Muppets away, the front doors of the Muppet Theater are open, showing the Swedish Chef directing Camilla and the Chickens as they serve their fellow occupiers behind a table labeled “The Muppets’ Kitchen;” the drum circle continues in Animal’s absence; the faint sounds of singing emanate from the departing paddy wagons, “Life’s a protest song…everything’s not great, everything’s not grand, we’re going to do all we can do to occupy this land…”)