If you’re a New Yorker, walking through Neil Goldberg’s retrospective at The City Museum of New York is like walking through a collection of moments from your own day. Stories the City Tells Itself (now extended through June 19th) examines seemingly unremarkable urban moments that suddenly become worthy of our attention because, as city dwellers, we all share them. One installation features video of shop keepers raising their shutters in the morning, next to video of elderly passengers boarding the M15 bus. They pull themselves up, and the film captures both resilience and decrepitude as their ascension synchronizes with the rhythm of the opening shutters. There are film stills of disappointed passengers as they’ve just missed their train; silent footage of roller coaster riders trying to describe the Cyclone at Coney Island; close-ups of hungry salad bar patrons at lunch hour. These pieces demonstrate the varied ways New Yorkers encounter the same situation, with some appearing eerily identical.

In 1993 Goldberg shot video footage of eighty gay men from all five boroughs stroking their pet cats and saying, “She’s a talker.” I watched museum patrons giggle when they stood in front of the film, but amidst the lightheartedness, there’s a latent grief between frames. “Though the premise is unabashedly campy, the work was created at a time when many people around me were dying,” he says in an artist’s statement. “And that pervasive experience of mortality drove my wish to preserve these men on videotape.” I’ve only lived in New York for two years, but in a way, Goldberg’s work embodies exactly how I feel about this city. Some days I still find myself only delighted by, or horrified by my new home, with little range of emotions in between. Stories the City Tells Itself captures the feeling that underneath fun or silly New York peculiarities, we can often find signs of loss.

Goldberg’s “Truck Drivers’ Elbows.”

Over the course of several weeks in 2005, Goldberg took portraits of truck driver’s elbows when he was stopped next to them on his bike. Each elbow takes on its own personality. The different birthmarks, scars, and skin colors become as evocative as facial expressions. The piece captures an everyday image, but I can’t help feeling as if it’s also a little sinister. One by one, the elbows begin to resemble severed but living limbs; disembodied flesh that hangs limply over the side of the large, sharp metal doors.

When I first moved here, I went through a phase of intense adoration for the energy of the city, especially the subway. I spent most of my adult life in San Francisco and grew up in Los Angeles, so I’m used to life in a city, but a Los Angeles commute is completely different from a New York commute. Here, I was excited to see us all piled into a train car together, rather than divided into our compact sedans and SUV’s as if we’re flying around the freeway in separate little houses. Here, the woman in head to toe Prada sits only a few feet away from the homeless man carrying all of his possessions in a garbage bag. I was thrilled by the musicians who would interrupt my reading on a morning commute. I stared at the art and wondered if everyone else loved it as much as I did. I went out every night not wanting to miss a thing. I was high on the city and then I crashed, with hardly any middle, level headed emotions in between.

The piece that moved me the most in Goldberg’s show was Wind Tunnel, in which he filmed blasts of air that blew through a rider’s hair as the train approached behind them in the Bedford L station. Each rider stares into the camera with her back to the train, slightly flinching as the climate changes. The footage is slowed down and silent. It’s a relief to watch the bumbling monster of a train hurdle through the frame without sound, the only consequence being the soft movement of a woman’s curls. Hair lashes around ecstatically, with violence as well as serenity; in step with the growing suspense of an approaching train. As I watched, I relaxed in the caring expression on each woman’s face and thought, This is exactly what I need.

Visitors of The City Museum of New York watch “Wind Tunnel.”

My New-York-grade anxiety began one summer night when I was on my way to an art opening on the roof of some tall building. I had only lived here for about a month, so maybe it was homesickness that made me so uneasy that night. Maybe it was the oppressive heat, or the smells in the subway station, or the man with acid burns where his face used to be who was walking through the train car asking for money. When I arrived at the top floor and looked at the view I was hardly struck by its beauty, but by its violence. The architecture surrounding us looked harsh, rather than elegant, with jagged angles of metal and glass. I pictured the man in the train and thought, that is what this city does to a body. The words that came to mind were; sharp, shatter, fall, burn. In the following days, I started to feel increasingly agoraphobic. Crowds of people felt disgustingly inhuman, along with the environment. My body was its own city and New York was foreign and dangerous, made up of a substance completely different than that of myself. The thought crept up on me that by living here, my body was at risk of being cut, destroyed.

Things got better for the next year and a half, but my anxiety reached another peak a few months ago. Since January, three people have died off of stops along my morning L train commute. Of course, my agoraphobia intensified, for me as well as many other straphangers in my neighborhood. The first two deaths happened in only one weekend. On that following Monday, I extended my commute and transferred at a different station. I was getting too good at looking around and imagining where exactly the violence had happened. Where on the tracks was he hit? Could any of those brown spots on the off-white tile wall be a drop of blood that emergency maintenance crews overlooked? Could a stretcher have carried someone along this very spot where I just put my foot? If I felt the yellow bumps that signified I was getting too close to the edge, I recoiled, as if stepping on something hot. I felt my pulse quicken as trains came near. I wondered what would happen if heart monitors measured the pulses of passengers waiting for a coming train. Doesn’t everyone’s pulse quicken when the huge metal beast races to a sudden, screeching halt only inches away from our faces?

I went back to my regular routine a few days later. It’s easy to act like nothing has happened when everyone else is acting like that too. The first thing that struck me was that there were no shrines—no flowers, photos, candles—nothing to indicate that a tragedy had very recently occupied this public space. Everyone looked the same, walking, hurrying as usual. I spoke to a representative from the MTA who told me that a loved one of the deceased would have to get special permission to put out flowers or pictures, and they’d probably be denied. The subway is too crowded for extra objects on the platform. It would be a safety issue.

I was on my way home on a Friday night in late March when, passing the Bedford station without stopping, the conductor came on the intercom to tell us that due to a police investigation, the next stop would be the last and we would have to transfer to a shuttle bus. A fight between two men had spilled onto the tracks right as the Manhattan bound L train was approaching. One man had escaped, and the other was pinned and killed while trying to climb back onto the platform. Hundreds of witnesses saw his body spin along the side of the platform as the train slowed. Witnesses said he was still breathing and moving his arms against the metal walls of the train after it had stopped. I read that the conductor told the passengers to get away from the windows, yelling, “You don’t want to see this.”

I avoided the Bedford Avenue stop for a week, but police sketches of the man who fled from the fight were plastered in every nearby station. The case was being treated as a homicide. The sketch of the man looked like an evil villain, too ugly and disheveled to be real. I tried not to look at the posters but when I looked at the ground in front of me, I again imagined drops of blood. I remember feeling relieved to hear the musician in the tunnel from the L to the 1-2-3, who sings the same annoyingly cheerful Beatles songs over and over again. I welcomed the innocence of his rendition of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” The next time I found myself at the Bedford L stop, I felt tears welling up when I heard the train approaching.

In Los Angeles, if you drive past a car accident, you are much more distant from the trauma. It is as if you are inside of a separate room; your own protective metal box, and whatever you witness is through a window. You will never walk over the ground where a person died on a freeway, because no one walks on a freeway. You zoom past the grave in your car. Perhaps you remember that you saw something there once, but by the time you can even begin to recreate the scene in your head, you’re too far away to notice any resemblances that the landscape in front of you has with the picture of the tragedy in your memory.

I wonder if seeing a shrine or flowers commemorating the spot where this man died would have made me feel better or worse. I didn’t know him, but it was a familiar place and I know that the energy in a space is altered when trauma and violence occupy it for a moment. Whenever I’m in Los Angeles, I feel a heaviness behind my eyes and my heart quickens when I drive by the UCLA Medical Center where someone close to me died. How many others regard the same hospital as a place of significance, a place that has been forever changed because of a tragedy that happened there? The subjects in Wind Tunnel look solemnly at the camera, and to me, they look like they could be mourning. They’re standing in the same spot where I tried not to look for blood on the ground, grieving for a space that has been changed.

Goldberg’s video installation, “Surfacing.”

Behind the Wind Tunnel screen is Goldberg’s next piece, Subway Trapezoids which are photographs taken from the bottom of stairs leading out of subway stations. The grimy walls and gray stairs are a frame around the sky, or the trees, or the buildings above. The trapezoid shape resembles a coffin, with stairs leading out of it into a world of light and air. In Surfacing, Goldberg filmed the faces of bewildered passengers as they emerged from a station, blinking in the sudden daylight. Again the film appears as a choreographed dance, each person looks immediately disoriented, and then relieved when they recognize a familiar street and orient themselves in the direction they will follow. Each piece in Stories the City Tells Itself recognizes the complexity of being alive in a body in a particular place in time. It acts as a shrine for mourning the way we lose ourselves in a city, and it’s strangely healing. I left the exhibit feeling reoriented and comfortable in my home. I felt alive and whole in a body among other bodies here, as if the workings of New York City are not so separate from the workings of myself.

I’m projecting, of course, but situations as neutral and blank as a salad bar or a train station stairwell become available for thoughtful projections, especially when Goldberg rests his eyes on them. “Usually something I’ve half noticed countless times will for some reason start to distinguish itself,” Goldberg said in an interview with the show’s creator, Sean Corcoran. “Only later do I realize that there might be some connection between the specific moment I’ve selected and what’s going on in my life. For instance, I became interested in people orienting themselves as they emerge from the subway about a year after my father died. As I worked with the footage, I realized that what I was seeing on their faces somehow connected with the grief and disorientation I was experiencing just then. They have a look of vulnerability, tenuousness, searching. This wasn’t something I was conscious of when I started the project, but it’s there. This is not to say the project is about grief. The footage will hopefully mean different things to different people.” In my eyes, the work is about communal and unspoken grief. We give significance to a place by looking at it, not just by marking it with violence. It’s a relief to carefully celebrate the familiar places we might have otherwise failed to notice.

Museum of the City of NY
1220 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10029

Follow Untapped Cities on Twitter and Facebook.

The landmark neighborhood of Clinton Hill, designated in 1984, is the proud home to some of the most remarkable late 19th century architecture in New York. Developed in the 1840’s as a suburban retreat, many of the city’s affluent invested in the neighborhood where the works of prominent architects cycled through Greek Revival, Italianate, French Second Empire, and into Romanesque Revival, Queen Anne, and the Beaux-Arts, then back into the Colonial Revival. One of five significant churches in the neighborhood, Brown Memorial Baptist provides a community anchor and diversity to a district ever affected by gentrification as Clinton Hill, Fort Green, and Bedford Stuyvesant continue to see the effects of neighborhood change and large scale development at nearby Atlantic Navy Yards.

Ebinezer L. Roberts designed the Early Romanesque Revival façade in 1860 for the Washington Avenue Baptist congregation. In 1929, the space was sold to a Seventh Day Adventist congregation who remained in the location until 1958. The Brown Memorial Baptist congregation, founded in 1916, purchased the building in 1958 and has since been the stewards of its restoration. Red brick with decorative limestone accents, with large curve arched openings at the porch entryway, are welcoming and distinctive for their time period. Perhaps the most dominant feature of the structure is the massive square tower and corbelled lace brick work at the roof eaves. Notable Louis Comfort Tiffany stained glass windows, “The Pilgrims,” depict the struggles of leaders of the abolition movement and workers of the underground railroad; a nod to Clinton Hill’s past as a hotbed of abolitionist activity. It is these eleven stained-glass panels that Brown Memorial Baptist Church hopes to restore through grants from Partners in Preservation.

Stained glass images courtesy of Beverly Jacobs from Brown Memorial Baptist Church

A recent winner of the 2012 Lucy G. Moses Preservation Award, Brown Memorial Baptist was recently reopened to an enthusiastic congregation after two years of structural roof repairs. With unstable vaults and leaks throughout, Li Saltzman Architects provided direction to repair and restore the interior vaulted ceiling to its original appearance. Beginning in 2001 the roof trusses, plaster ceiling and stained glass windows were stabilized, allowing further conditions assessments to be made as the congregation raised funds. Later, with the support of Sacred Sites a non-profit associated with the New York Landmarks Conservancy, the congregation would take steps to further watertight the building structure by replacing the roof, and associated drainage systems, as well as capping the tower and providing new pointing at façade exteriors.

Having secured the exterior of the building from the elements, the congregation began the restoration of the sanctuary in 2009. Removal of blue paint would reveal an imitation stone plaster ceiling in need of repair. The restored ceiling, reminiscent of great cathedrals interiors, would brighten and reinvigorate the sanctuary space. After more than ten years of work, Brown Memorial Baptist continues to restore the church to its original splendor.

Additional information from New York City Landmark Preservation Commission, Andrew Dolkart, Clinton Hill Historic District Designation Report.

Click here to vote for the Brown Memorial Baptist, and find out more about the church on Facebook. Follow Untapped Cities on Twitter and Facebook.

Brown Memorial Baptist Church [Map]
484 Washington Avenue
New York, NY 11238

Untapped Cities is an official blog ambassador for Partners in Preservation, a community-based initiative byAmerican Express and the National Trust for Historic Preservation to raise awareness of the importance of historic places. Stay up-to-date with Untapped’s coverage of all 40 sites by following our Partners in Preservation category.

Nestled in the middle of Brooklyn lies one of New York’s most precious yet unrecognized treasures – Erasmus Hall. Arguably the oldest secondary school in the State of New York; the school has grown to become an iconic symbol in East Flatbush. The school’s roots date back to Dutch settlements in the late-1700s when it was built from a land grant and the generous donations of some of our founding fathers (i.e. Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, Peter Lefferts and Robert Livingston). Erasmus Hall, initially consisting of one tiny wooden structure, was officially founded in 1878 and landmarked in 1966.

Due to the massive influx of immigrants and the passing of school attendance legislation, more and more students were crammed into the small Erasmus building up until the turn of the century. As a result, the City’s School Board presented plans for a new campus on the Erasmus site in 1904. The task was charged to  C.B.J. Snyder, who was at the time the Superintendent of Buildings for the Board of Education. He has been credited with over 400 of New York City’s most architecturally-heralded schools. Snyder’s plans called for four new wings that would be phased in as classroom demand required them. The four sections adorned in the Collegiate Gothic Style popularized by Snyder became monuments to the East Flatbush neighborhood.

However, it is not the awe-inspiring civic exterior that is most notable about Erasmus (in this author’s opinion). It is the interior that provides the richest history of the building. It was said that Snyder liked to let the designs of his buildings seep into all of their forms, and the best way to achieve this was though artwork. While most artwork in schools at the time were commissioned paintings, hung as a symbol of the school, Erasmus was known to be different because it contained a type of art not typically found in schools: stained glass.

In fact, Erasmus has one of the most breathtaking collections of stained glass in the entire city; surpassing those of even some of the most prominent cathedrals. The works are placed throughout, finding their way into some of the most solitary sections of the school. One of the most breathtaking works is the collection of windows found in the school’s auditorium. One cannot help but be taken in while walking through the double-doors and into the massive expanse. Some of the school’s famous alumni such as Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond and Mae West practiced for talent shows amidst the stained glass. As the hours of the day slowly pass, the colors of each sill expel a vibrancy that changes in an instant’s time to create a living work of art that plays off the subtlest changes in light.

Windows to either side of the auditorium drift up towards the ceiling with three levels of colored shards that allow this experience to be felt from every conceivable angle. Patterned sequences of floral and geometric designs are set in panes of varying colors, textures and opalescence.

It is not until your look forward however, that you can take in the beauty of some of the finest details depicted in the Erasmus collection – The Life of Erasmus. Projected on the wall in the most brilliant of imagery lies the life of the school’s icon and namesake.

Once you come to your senses (and from an overwhelming subconscious desire to kneel and pay your respects), you make your way down the hallway to admire the next piece of stained glass that hangs proudly above the door leading to the school’s central courtyard. This banner of stained glass is aptly named Knowledge, depicting key events in the evolution of modern society in the United States.

Photo courtesy of NYC School Construction Authority

The school’s greatest work, however, is hidden from the public eye. The piece was commissioned in 1919 to honor the first principle of the school Walter B. Gunnison. It was created by Louis Comfort Tiffany, son of famous jewelry company founder.  The piece is only faintly visible from the street and perhaps more elusive from the inside as the work has to be viewed through plexi-glass and a partition. Formations of the intricately stained glass have created a work that seems to lift itself out of its frame and towards the viewer. Tiffany was a master of his trade. He was able to create pearly opalescent veins of color that rushed through the glass like strokes of a brush (this is not to be confused with painted glass; Tiffany stained every individual piece).

With such great works of art, it is hard to imagine that Erasmus is also a fully functioning academic institution, in addition to an unofficial museum. This is understood only when the condition of some of the school’s neglected portions are viewed. The once pristine original Erasmus Hall is now a boarded up eyesore – the product of long standing budgetary constraints and a general disinvestment in the New York City school system.

Photo courtesy of NYC School Construction Authority

This same effect has also unfortunately begun to impinge on the stained glass collection of Erasmus. Colors have begun to fade, holes that are just as likely to come about from cracking and bending–typical pressures of humidity and aging in addition to the unavoidable haphazardness of youth–have emerged, and cracks in the panes themselves are all becoming visibly apparent.

In order to stave off the further crumbling of this school’s most treasured possessions, Erasmus is now pitted against 39 other locations for a share of $3 million in grant funding from the Partners in Preservation effort to save New York City’s most treasured landmarks.

The collection of stained glass at Erasmus Hall, among many others of the school’s pieces, must be preserved. Scrolling down the list of preservation sites you see a sleuth of locations, each more deserving than the next for these much needed funds.

But, take a walk through the hallways of Erasmus, head to the courtyard and through the auditorium, aptly named the “Great Hall,” and consider how you felt when you saw these stained glass masterpieces for the first time. Now take a closer look at the opalescence of the glass as the light transitions throughout the day, each hour setting a distinct mood channeled throughout a seemingly endless array of colors. Finally, think for whom will preservation of these works of art benefit?

This restoration is not for the curators of museums, visitors or tourists. It is for the youth who walk past everyday on their way to class and interact consciously and unconsciously with this art. Although Erasmus is not located in a dense cultural corridor, it still contains one of the finest collections of artwork that I have ever seen in New York. This collection of stained glass has instilled a sense of pride for these students and their community, and this grant will afford them the opportunity to ensure that it is preserved for generations to come.

Click here to vote for Erasmus Hall, and find out more about the school on Facebook. Follow Untapped Cities on Twitter and Facebook. Get in touch with the author at @BMoke28.

Erasmus Hall High School [Map]
911 Flatbush Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11226

Untapped Cities is an official blog ambassador for Partners in Preservation , a community-based initiative by American Express and the National Trust for Historic Preservation to raise awareness of the importance of historic places. For complete coverage, follow our Partners in Preservation category.

Every day so far on the Partners in Preservation initiative, I’ve looked at the public voting and thought, Congregation Beth Elohim in Williamsburg, Brooklyn must be packing in the votes from the strength of a community that deeply cares about the future of its architectural home. That’s actually a bit of an understatement because as you can see from the video below by Reel Works, its success in the competition is derived from the communities, plural, that have come together. The heartwarming story of nearby Old First Reformed Church offering their church and staff to Beth Elohim for Yom Kippur when their ceiling collapsed, is replicated in Beth Elohim’s service to the local community, particularly in their program for neighborhood children of all backgrounds. Without further ado, I’ll let the video tell the story of this beautiful building and community organization supporting it–a story of giving and acceptance that may ultimate save the building’s architecture.

Congregation Beth Elohim [Map]
274 Garfield Place
New York, NY 11215

Click here to vote for Congregation Beth Elohim and find out more on Twitter and Facebook. Follow Untapped Cities on Twitter and Facebook. Get in touch with the author at @BMoke28.

Untapped Cities is an official blog ambassador for Partners in Preservation , a community-based initiative by American Express and the National Trust for Historic Preservation to raise awareness of the importance of historic places. For complete coverage, follow our Partners in Preservation category.

On March 7, New York City became the first local government to pass legislation ensuring public access to data. The passing of the bill symbolizes a political embrace of the “open” culture already underway in New York City’s “Silicon Alley.”  City agencies and non-profit organizations in New York are making new correlations between urban conditions and social phenomenon, utilizing crowdsourcing and open data, to support traditional methods of data analysis.

Open Plans, a New York-based non-profit organization with a focus on transportation and urban planning, is an example of such a progressive group. The Open Plans team builds software which enables public agencies and non-profit organizations to crowdsource input from the community. You may recognize their work with New York City’s Department of Transportation’s interactive bike station suggestion map from this past year. In its decade of existence, Open Plans developed open source projects which include OpenGeo, Streetfilms, Streetsblog, GothamSchools, Civic Commons and OpenTripPlanner. According to the non-profit, all the tools serve to facilitate open source software, information transparency and progressive transportation planning.

Recently, Open Plans co-hosted a panel at the American Planning Association (APA) Conference in Los Angeles with Denver-based firm Place Matters, highlighting the challenges to come as we navigate amidst a constant and sometimes overwhelming flow of data. Important questions loom: How do we make sense of the data? With limited resources, should companies focus on making the quality of data better or the analysis tools better?

“I think we have a long way to go,” explained Frank Hebbert of Open Plans. “The majority of tools are broadcast tools.” Analysis of the increasingly amount of collected data remains difficult for the average resident, especially with the difficult program interface of GIS (Geographic Information System)–the industry standard. But with new online, open source mapping tools like MapBox, strides are being made–so much so that Hebbert announced to the chagrin of seasoned planners that desktop GIS was as good as dead, and that people shouldn’t waste any more time learning it.

Publicly submitted requests for bike share stations in NYC 

In partnership with Open Plans, the NYC Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) has also embraced this trend towards a more “open” culture by utilizing crowd-sourced information to plan station locations for the soon-to-be-launched Citibank bike share program. Bicycle commuting has increased in the city (35% from 2007 to 2008), but there are still significant challenges associated with bike ridership, including access. The collected crowd-sourced data, submitted via an interactive map on the NYCDOT website, allowed the public to suggest bike share stations for the rollout.

GIS map of bike share request points

However, one of the limitations of crowd sourced data is the input bias. Open source data cannot be used alone to determine bike share stations. The above represents the results of the publicly submitted bike share station requests. Untapped Cities’ Managing Editor Alley Lyles conducted a spatial analysis of the information.

On a city-wide level, the most requested bike share stations are in Manhattan, northern Brooklyn and western Queens.

To balance out the lack of data from underserved neighborhoods, the NYCDOT conducted participatory planning sessions around the city where residents could weigh in on where bike share stations would be necessary.

The case of bike share program is just one example of how real time feedback and data collection is influencing planning and informing design. It is also an example of the limitations of data collection. Much like the work of Charles Booth 150 years ago, as shown by Gehl Architects, it is necessary to combine and overlay a mixture of ethnographic, observational and spatial data in analysis.

Follow Untapped Cities on Twitter and Facebook.

The old block originally housed a dingy police court over a saloon, as well as a wooden fire tower. In 1870 the legislation in Albany decided to build a new municipal building on the site of the original market. By 1873, the  plans for Jefferson Market Courthouse hit a bit of a snag. $150,000 had already been spent on materials that sat rotting a pile for years. A new set of supervisory commissioners evaluated the original scheme and determined that it would have cost several million dollars to build.

So they discarded the original plans and hired Fredrick Clarke Withers to draw up a new plan. Withers had helped the firm Vaux and Olmstead design Central Park after he emigrated to America from England in 1853. But the Jefferson Market building is Withers’ best known work. His design drew inspiration from William Burgess‘ competition for the London Law Courts and also from Venetian architecture. Withers designed an elaborate, tightly knit cluster of buildings that exploited the scenic potential of the acute angle at Sixth Avenue and West Tenth Street. This complex included a courthouse, the five story prison (demolished) and the fire and bell tower attached to the courthouse. There was also a market, which has since been demolished, that was designed by Hogan and Hogan in 1883. The complex was one of the country’s best planned urban renewal projects of its time.The total cost of the buildings, exclusive of architects’ fees, amounted to less than $360,000.The judicial building which housed the police and district courts was Withers’ masterpiece. Its plan used every last inch of the unusual shaped lot to obtain the maximum accommodations. The one building was actually two triangular buildings wedged together into the acute angle of the lot with the fire tower hinging them together. 98 feet above the street sat the room for the look-out. It is reached by a separate, spiral stone staircase, with a private entrance from the street. On the first floor of the courthouse there were examination rooms, police court and offices for officers. The second floor had the civil court and rooms for judges. The third floor was reached by the staircase in the tower and had rooms for janitors and clerks. Connecting the courthouse and prison was an enclosed yard for the prisoners to be ushered in and out without publicity.

The entrance to the prison was on Tenth Street. Floor one had a guard room, a keeper room as well as two waiting rooms, one for male prisoners and one for female prisoners. Individual cells were provided on the second floor for 29 female prisoners and on the third floor for 58 male prisoners. A steam elevator moved the prisoners around the building and even up to an airing court on the roof for exercise without the change of escape.

Though the prison has since been demolished, the courthouse still stands. The basement is now a reference room not a kitchen. And the first floor has a children’s reading room and smaller room used as an auditorium. The spiral staircase leads to the main reading room on the second floor. There’s also a circulation desk, staff work areas and smaller reading areas. The third floor has a staff work room on one side that is connected to a staff lounge by a catwalk that spans across the main reading room below.

There is a stoop on the north facade that has an old iron railing that is possibly original. The nonstructural parts are opulently ornamented, especially the Sixth Avenue facade. The carving, which forms and important element of the design of the building, was done under the construction of William Simon. Carved details encrust the entrance and accumulate under the beautiful stained-glass windows and elsewhere around the building. The water fountain is decorated with reliefs depicting a weary traveller and a life-giving pelican.  There is also a state seal in the main gable and a frieze representing the trial from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice that hangs over the window above the main entrance.

The interior walls of the main halls and staircase are lined with stone. Doorways in the hallway on the first floor are limestone with square-headed openings faced with marble with ornamental arches over them. Original carved doorways and paneled doors throughout the building have since been painted black. Today a modern glass and metal vestibule surrounds the main entrance. A Partners in Preservation grant would enable the library to replace the main entrance doors.

Later additions and alterations include plumbing, partition alterations, fireproof doors and some ceiling height changes. In 1961 the clock in the tower was electrified as a result of efforts by Greenwich Village citizens. On August 23, 1961, it was announced the building would be rehabilitated by architect Giorgio Cavaglieri and used as a branch of the New York Public Library. Renovations started in 1965, the bricks were cleaned, new windows, doors and sashes were installed and a walk way connecting the two third floor rooms was constructed. New plumbing, heating and lighting also replaced the aging systems. On November 27, 1967, the building was formally opened as a library. To this day the New York Public Library calls the Jefferson Market building home. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972 and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1977, both under its name and as “Third Judicial District Courthouse”.

Click here to vote for the Jefferson Market Library, and find out more on Twitter and Facebook. Follow Untapped Cities on Twitter and Facebook. Get in touch with the author at @BMoke28.

Untapped Cities is an official blog ambassador for Partners in Preservation , a community-based initiative by American Express and the National Trust for Historic Preservation to raise awareness of the importance of historic places. For complete coverage, follow our Partners in Preservation category.

Yes, 42nd street. New Yorkers, this is normally when you would make your exit, nose pointed to the sky (I’m just like you, you see). But I swear this is worth a read. So, close that Chrome tab with all of the photos of that underground thing in the LES that no one knows about. This is more important. This is The Ride.

The Ride, the largest bus in NYC

On the surface, it seems like everything a New Yorker could ever not want at all: a massive tourist bus owned by Madame Tussauds that religiously stays within earshot of midtown. It’s easy, and perhaps even natural, to be skeptical. But this is not your typical bus, nor is it your average tour.

When you walk onto the bus, the largest of its kind allowed by law, you immediately notice a few things. First, the seats are facing sideways toward a massive window, arranged as they would be in a Broadway theater. Second, the thing is wired with more audio, video, and lighting equipment than Terminal 5.

Stadium seating in a bus?

The “tour” travels through midtown under the control of two hilarious, self-deprecating hosts. This is a tour that knows it’s a tour, and isn’t afraid to make fun of the streets it’s driving on (they’ll point out every Duane Reade as if they were lost Mayan temples). The bus, self aware and able to communicate with both the hosts and the passengers, is state of the art. In short, it has all the tools to be totally awesome.

An orange-pantsed host interacts with the crowd

And it is. As you stare out the window, picking up interesting facts here and there (did you know ‘The Big Apple’ is named after an early 20th century Harlem dance?), you’ll notice that people outside are interacting with the bus. No, I’m not talking about the tourists that stand and wave, awestruck by The Ride… there are thousands of those, trust me. I’m talking about performers – dancers, freestyle rappers, comedians, singers, and more who put on a show for you all over the city. They’re mic’ed into the bus so they can converse with the hosts, and you. And they’re very, very talented, the freestyle rapper being our favorite.

Freestyle rapper entertains The Ride

That’s not to say, however, that awesome stuff isn’t happening on the bus, too. From game show-style quizzes to Frank Sinatra sing-a-longs to dance offs, The Ride is best enjoyed if you couldn’t care less about what other people think. And why would you? 99% of the people watching you from the street are likely never going to see Manhattan again after the coming Sunday, and the other 1% are busy spray painting children’s names on pixelated Spongebob printouts. So, don’t be afraid to enjoy yourself, as this is truly something you choose to enjoy, or not.

An intimate dance choreographed for The Ride in Columbus Circle

As of last month, the bus has been wrapped with work by Charles Fazzino, the New York-based pop artist who was recently named official artist of the 2012 London Olympics. In addition to the hosts and the bus itself, you’ll get to see the city through Fazzino’s eyes, too. As he tells you which New York landmarks inspired his work, television screens on the bus introduce you to it. Though we would have liked the Fazzino integration to be a bit more robust, it was a welcome addition to the tour.

Fazzino’s work displayed prominently on The Ride

Before I experienced The Ride, I had originally planned to encourage you to have a drink, or perhaps four, before trying it out yourself. And you’re welcome to do so. With an open mind, however, and the willingness to have a bit of fun, The Ride can be every bit as fun as anything you’ll ever do in the city without ever taking a sip… especially in Times Square, where you’ll pay $12-$16 for one. As a New Yorker, I came out of it richer for the experience. Plus, how often do you get to sing karaoke to the whole of midtown via intercom? You don’t, unless you go for a Ride.

Our host, ever dancing

The Ride [Map]
234 West 42nd Street
New York, NY 10036

Price: $69/Person

Tip 1: Get a 10% discount when you check-in on Foursquare
Tip 2: Show your student ID right now to get unlimited $50 tickets
Tip 3: Family and group deals

Follow Untapped Cities on Twitter and Facebook. Get in touch with the author @lukekingma.

Once appropriately known as the Little Theatre, the Helen Hayes Theatre is the smallest Broadway theatre with just over 600 seats.  In fact, when it first opened in 1912, it had half the seating capacity, and its intimate productions led the way for what became known as the Little Theatre Movement in the early 20th century.  The theatre is also unique for its Neo-Classical façade, standing out among a sea of other Classical or Beaux Arts theatres on Broadway.

The theatre changed hands—and names—a few times in the hundred years of its existence.  In 1931, it was sold to the New York Times and converted into a conference hall.  CBS used the theatre as a radio studio, ABC as a television studio.  Notable filmings and broadcasts include “The Dick Clark Show”, Johnny Carson’s “Who Do You Trust?”, “The Merv Griffin Show”, and “The David Frost Show”, so basically a who’s who of early twentieth century television.   During this illustrious period, the theatre was renamed four times, twice of which were the Little Theatre.

The theatre was finally christened the Helen Hayes Theatre after the original Helen Hayes Theatre on West 46th Street was bulldozed to make room for a Marriott hotel.  Because Ms. Hayes was still alive at the time, the powers that be decided to rename the Little Theatre in her name rather than have her outlive her monument.

Since 1979, the theatre has been privately owned and operated, and home to over twenty Broadway productions, including current production “Rock of Ages.” In 2008, it was announced that Second Stage Theatre, the fifth largest NY non-profit theatre company, was planning on acquiring the Helen Hayes.  With a projected first season starting next year, Second Stage Theatre’s Helen Hayes will become the only Broadway theatre dedicated solely to plays and musicals written by American playwrights and composers.

Shot of the overhead chandelier and ceiling detail

Second Stage is requesting support for the restoration of the façade of the theatre, including repair of the entranceway, surrounding columns and cornice, signage, windows, shutters, lighting, and masonry. However, a bit ironically, management did not allow this photographer to take photos of the exterior façade for this article.  For those curious, please feel free to Google Image Search the theatre.

Click here to vote for the Helen Hayes Theatre.  Follow Untapped Cities on Twitter and Facebook. Get in touch with the author @plainjanehu.

Helen Hayes Theater [Map]
240 West 44th Street
New York, NY 10036

Untapped Cities is an official blog ambassador for Partners in Preservation , a community-based initiative by American Express and the National Trust for Historic Preservation to raise awareness of the importance of historic places. Stay up-to-date with Untapped’s coverage of all 40 sites by following our Partners in Preservation category.

Although the impressive flight deck has planes from all four services of the armed forces, back on ground level at the furthest end of Intrepid’s dock is a British Airways Concorde supersonic jet. Walking beneath the jet is not to be missed. But today we want to focus on the Growler Submarine, the only nuclear missile submarine open to the public in the United States. You can find the Growler at the dock, sitting in the water just outside the main entrance and lobby of the museum.

Jessica Williams from The Intrepid Museum says that the submarine “really is a unique survivor of the Cold War.” On a visit to the Growler you’ll get to explore the cramped interior, check out a Regulus I cruise missile, see a torpedo and enter the torpedo room. Ron Rousseau, who served on the Growler tells Reel Works that the best place to sleep on the ship was the torpedo room!

The museum is looking for funds from Partners in Preservation to maintain the “sail,” the tall steel structure on the back of the submarine, fix corrosion on the Regulus I missile and repaint the missile. It’s difficult to keep ships in great condition when they’re docked, as water will seep in and cause rust and other damage. Extra funds will be used to restore the spaces, surface areas, and hardware in the galley and hatches. Click here to vote for the Intrepid in Partners in Preservation and find them on Facebook and Twitter.

The Air and Space Museum is not to be missed, but don’t forget to check out the more Untapped places in this well-known landmark. And the latest addition coming to the Intrepid is the Enterprise Space Shuttle, which Untapped went to check out in its JFK hangar the other day.

Intrepid Museum [Map]
700 West 46th Street, New York, NY

Follow Untapped Cities on Twitter and Facebook. Get in touch with the author @untappedmich. Untapped Cities is an official blog ambassador for Partners in Preservation , a community-based initiative by American Express and the National Trust for Historic Preservation to raise awareness of the importance of historic places. For complete coverage, follow our Partners in Preservation category.

Seeing is believing

In 1889 in London the philanthropist and social researcher Charles Booth, frustrated by the lack of data on the city’s changing demography and in particular on the city’s poor, set out to complete an extensive study of the people and places of the industrial city. Claimed to be a more lively and accurate portrait of London than even Dickens’ novels, his mixture of ethnographic, observational and spatial data filled many volumes and was expressed as a colour-coded, beautifully intricate map. This displayed the inequalities that went to form the ubiquitous paradox of the urban industrial society: ‘poverty in a land of plenty’.

With permission of the Charles Booth Archive at the Library of the London School of Economics 

Booth’s social survey caused a significant discursive shift – it served to dispel the myth that poverty was the punishment for idleness and immorality; that poverty was due to the failings of the poor themselves rather than society or the poor conditions of the city itself. Booth produced data which showed that 30% of the population lived in poverty caused by low pay, old age, sickness disability and unemployment – and that unemployment was in fact a spatial issue. This led to the urban malaise being treated as a spatial problem as well as an individual one. Areas of low-employment needed targeted injections of jobs, and so began the place based nature of urban regeneration and policy. The work proved to be revolutionary in the scientific spatial representation of society – social cartography or mapping began to interrogate the correlations between urban conditions and social phenomena. Journalistic accounts at the time reported poverty, and the places in which it was endemic – Dickens’ serialised and widely distributed novels dramatized the issues -  but picturesque narrations do little for the legislator. Social-scientific presentations, on the other hand, were more adept at forcing institutional responses. City managers ‘manage what they can measure’. This was – and still is – the bureaucrat’s remit, and this data gave the visibility necessary to spur change.  Booth and Rowntree (who conducted a social study of poverty in York) are cited in the reform of the poor law and their data is said to have inspired the Liberal government of 1906 to embark on their extensive welfare reform programme. The programme explicitly targeted children, the sick, the elderly and the un-employed  and is the basis of the modern-day welfare system.

Read more from this article on the Gehl Institute blog, Making Cities for People. 

Gehl Institute Bloggers are Simon Goddard, Claire Mookerjee, Jo Posselt and Jeff Risom.