I’m a New Yorker, and I run. I get bored doing laps around the park or running up and down the Hudson River path. Instead, I use my long-distance runs to explore the neighborhoods in my city, especially in the outer boroughs. I’ve decided to take a cheap digital camera with me on some of my runs to document the city and its changes as seen when crossing on foot.


Monday, September 20, 2010

Bums, jerks, and surfers, by way of Canarsie

"By way of Canarsie" is supposedly Old New Yorkish for taking the most circuitous route possible. As in: "How'd that cab ride cost you twenty bucks? Jeezus, did the guy take you by way of Canarsie?"

In other words, it's kind of out of the way. Until yesterday, in fact, it was the only major Brooklyn neighborhood I'd never been to. So... that's fixed now.

This run was just a touch over 12 miles. It also went through Crown Heights, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Flatbush and East Flatbush. Basically, the Caribbean heart of Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Museum. Those blobs in the foreground are pulses of water
from the choreographed WET Design fountain. View here.
From 2010-09-19

Apartment building at the home of the Dodgers
From 2010-09-19

Townhouses in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens district
From 2010-09-19

Supermarkets here sell barrels for shipping stuff
back to family in the islands.


From 2010-09-19

Too many possible captions.
I've settled on: "We're gonna need a bigger building..."

From 2010-09-19

A shipping center on Utica Ave. These were headed to Trinidad.
From 2010-09-19

The Wyckoff House, parts of which date back to 1652,
making it New York City's oldest building
From 2010-09-19

The last glass-bottle seltzer works in New York.
Here's a great new short film about it: Seltzer Works.

From 2010-09-19

A sign for a street that isn't there anymore. Canarsie has
a lot of these. ForgottenNY explains.
From 2010-09-19

Another Ghost Bike. This one for Keith Powell.
From 2010-09-19

Fishing on Canarsie Pier in Jamaica Bay
From 2010-09-19

He says the fish here are porgies.
From 2010-09-19

From 2010-09-19

Canarsie rowhouses.
From 2010-09-19

Google did not reveal any explanation for this intriguing name.
From 2010-09-19

The first/last stop on the L. Transit geek moment: It's unusual for being
at grade, and for having a bus gate for free transfers.
From 2010-09-19

At the top of the awesome three-level Broadway Junction station.
From 2010-09-19

The hipster-heavy L from Williamsburg and L.E.S. meets with
the Rockaway Beach-bound C here. So the station was crawling with surfers.
From 2010-09-19

Saturday, September 18, 2010

After the Great Brooklyn Tornado

I went on a short run today in Clinton Hill and Prospect Heights. Here are some shots of the damage Thursday's wild storm did to Lowry Triangle, a vest-pocket park on Washinton Ave.

From Tornado

From Tornado

From Tornado

Friday, September 17, 2010

Meanwhile back at the ranch: Middle-class modern in Aurora, IL

On my August vacation, I also spent a few days in my home town, a small city about an hour west of Chicago. Driving around the day before this run, I noticed how may interesting ranch-style houses there are in my old neighborhood. These houses didn't register as anything special when I was growing up—they were just what newish Midwestern suburban houses looked like back then. But that was before I moved to the Northeast, where ranches are rare. And it was before the housing boom, which turned builder-designed McMansion tracts into the default for suburban housing. And maybe I'm also under the spell of Mad Men's midcentury swankitude. In any case, these houses suddenly look stylish and sophisticated in a way my 17-year-old self would have considered impossible in a place like Aurora, Illinois.

In addition to the ranches, there's a Frank Lloyd Wright house and an internationally famous house by the architect Bruce Goff, known locally as the Round House. It was photographed by Life magazine in 1951; check out this amazing interior shot. It was built for an artist named Ruth Van Sickle Ford and the neighbors hated it: At one point, according to this bio, she put up a sign on the lawn that said, "We don't like your house, either." My neighborhood also has several examples of something more humble, yet positively Space Age: prefab steel Lustron homes, clad in powder blue enamel tiles. 

I don't think I'd like the ranch to make a comeback as a model for new houses. As this article by Witold Rybczynski suggests, the ranch is a creature of automotive sprawl: You needed a lot of land to build a relatively small house. But compared to today's suburbia, the ranches are refreshingly grown-up homes They're built to house a family, not a family plus the maximum amount of stuff one can haul back from Costco. Rybczynski says they "lacked traditional domestic status symbols, such as porticoes and tall gables," signifying an openness to new ideas, and even some social modesty. I'm romanticizing a bit, of course. The main reason houses like this weren't built until the 1980s was that people couldn't afford them yet.



The whole package: Ranch house, Airstream RV,
wood-paneled station wagon, aerial antenna.
From midmodern

I bet there's a big Zenith in the living room.
From midmodern

From midmodern

From midmodern

A Lustron house of steel and enamel
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From midmodern

Ruth Van Sickle Ford house by Bruce Goff
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a.k.a. the Round House
From midmodern

From midmodern

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The hissing of summer lawns
From midmodern

The Lester Kaufman house, one my favorites in the city
From midmodern

From midmodern

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Frank Lloyd Wright's William B. Greene house
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Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Chicago International: Running to Mies' Illinois Institute of Technology

Here's a run I did a month ago while on vacation in Chicago, the first big city I ever lived in. There's really too many places to run and too many things to photograph in the city, so I decided to focus on one notable part of the city I don't know very well: the south 30s and the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology.

The campus was master-planned by the great modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who also led IIT's architecture department. I've been down there before, but this run was my first chance to spend a lot of time there on foot. I moved away from Chicago in 1997, and IIT wasn't loved (or visited) by many Chicagoans back then. The adjacent neighborhood was dominated by some of the country's worst, most dangerous housing projects, which stood as  examples of just how horribly modernism could fail. And with the conspicuous exception of Mies' masterwork, Crown Hall, the campus buildings didn't look, at first glance, all that different from Stateway Gardens or the Robert Taylor Homes. (I wrote earlier about modernism and public housing here.) Modernism in general was out of style: For most people, it evoked, at best, windblown office parks and cheap government buildings; among the architecture-and-design smart set, it was often mocked. I remember reading around that time Charles Jencks' postmodernist takedown of the IIT campus, it which he pointed out that the heating plant is shaped like a church, while the church looked like a heating plant. (I thought that was pretty funny.) In the mid-1990s, IIT seriously considered packing up and moving to the suburbs. In his essay Miestakes, architect Rem Koolhaas writes
According to statistics, a student and his or her parents decide, within five seconds of arrival, whether to apply to a given university or not.
With that test, Mies van der Rohe’s IIT Campus is in trouble.
The IIT campus is a masterpiece invisible to the contemporary eye. Mies’ work has become unnoticeable without explanation.
A lot has changed since 1997. Stateway and Robert Taylor have been demolished, and IIT decided to stay and pour money into its campus. Koolhaas designed a new campus center—controversially, because it connects to and obscures Mies' Commons Building. The new building incorporates the overhead El tracks, turning them into an architectural cloister-like feature of the campus rather than a divider. It actually looks like a bow tying the two sides of campus together. It's a loud, intentionally comic, glamor-mongering thing, but it works well with the Mies buildings. The contrast helps you see that the older classrooms and labs aren't bland and blank, but clean, uncluttered and sharp. That chapel doesn't look like a heating plant. It looks like a place perfectly suited to its purpose: getting you to sit up straight and think.

Modernism seems to me to be aging well—especially now that we know that it's just one historical style, not the only thing we're going to get from now on. I wasn't the only person roaming the campus with a camera. Which makes me wonder: Are we ever going to regret they way they ripped the guts out of Walter Netsch's UIC?

This run was just over 11 miles. It started on the lakefront, and also passed by Mies' two Lake Shore Drive apartment complexes. A shout-out is due to the excellent Galinsky.com, an online guide to modern and post-modern landmarks. I've linked to some of its pages in the captions below.

Mies' 900-910 N. Lake Shore Drive
From Chicago run

And his earlier 860-880 N. Lake Shore Drive apartments
From Chicago run


Chicago's new southern skyline
From Chicago run

Entering IIT: the Rem Koolhaas McCormick Tribune Campus Center
From Chicago run

Mies' giant face
From Chicago run

From Chicago run


From Chicago run

From Chicago run


Helmut Jahn's dorm building
From Chicago run

First view of S.R. Crown Hall
From Chicago run

From Chicago run

From Chicago run

I was surprised to find the door unlocked...
From Chicago run

From Chicago run

From Chicago run


From Chicago run

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From Chicago run

The only dorm Mies designed
From Chicago Run 2

His only church: St. Savior
From Chicago Run 2

a.k.a. the God Box
From Chicago Run 2

From Chicago Run 2

From Chicago Run 2

From Chicago Run 2

Peeking inside
From Chicago Run 2

From Chicago Run 2