{ May 2, 1975: Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, left, and Los Angeles County Supervisor Baxter Ward hold a news conference in an old Pacific Electric tunnel to propose an 80-mile light-rail system that would use the former tunnel for part of its downtown connection. The project was never built. | LA Times | Continue reading }
Nobody asked me, but the building was designed for the Astor Estate by Herman Lee Meader, a Harvard-trained architect who gave legendary parties and kept a boa in his penthouse.
{ Christopher Gray | Photo: Ray Sawhill }
Herman Lee Meader (died February 14, 1930 at 55) was an American architect and author. He designed several prominent buildings in Manhattan, both commercial and residential, as well as much work on the Astor estate, including the Waldorf building located at 8 west 33rd St., then the heart of the fashionable shopping district. Meader lived in the Waldorf Building penthouse, where he created a surrounding rooftop Italian garden. There he held elaborate parties which attracted musicians, artists, writers, prizefighters, chess players and others—at one, Meader staged a fight between a black snake and a king snake.
bonus [click to enlarge]:
{ NY Times }
In late 1929, Alfred E. Smith, the leader of a group of investors erecting the Empire State Building, announced that they were increasing the height of the building to 1,250 feet from 1,050. Mr. Smith, a past governor of New York, denied that competition with the 1,046-foot-high Chrysler Building was a factor. “We are measuring its rise by principles of economic investment rather than spectacular standards,” he told The New York Times.
The extra 200 feet, it was announced, was to serve as a mooring mast for dirigibles so that they could dock in Midtown, rather than out in Lakehurst, N.J., the station used by the German Graf Zeppelin. Mr. Smith said that at the Empire State Building, airships like the Graf, almost 800 feet long, would “swing in the breeze and the passengers go down a gangplank”; seven minutes later they would be on the street.
But the Germans, who dominated dirigible technology, had not asked for a docking station, and passenger traffic on dirigibles was still minuscule. The mast camouflaged the quest for boasting rights to the world’s tallest building, an ambition to which it seemed indecent to admit.
photo { Lewis W. Hine, Welders on the Empire State Building, circa 1930 }
Green Buildings: Dow says many buildings are actually getting less efficient
Mike Kontranowski, Strategic Marketing Manager of Dow Building Solution’ Thermax brand of rigid insulating board, presented a sobering analysis of the direction of building efficiency during the Summit. Although buildings of all types have become more energy efficient on a per square foot basis for the past 50 years, many buildings constructed over the past decade have bucked the trend and have begun regressing on energy efficiency. This reversal comes despite newfound interest in “green building” among governments, occupants, and the building owners themselves, and despite the plethora of insulation, window, equipment, and other devices that yield far greater efficiencies. More surprisingly, many of the buildings are LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) certified, because energy efficiency is only one of many metrics that accrue points needed for certification.
The proximate cause of the backslide in efficiency is a switch to less expensive aluminum wall studs in place of wood or block in recent years. Because aluminum is such a good conductor of heat, walls that are otherwise well-insulated – with insulation batts installed between the studs – see an overall insulating R-value of the wall drop in half, from 11 or more to 5. Thermal images of walls are particularly poignant, showing relatively small amounts of heat escaping from between the studs, while the studs themselves were lit up like Christmas trees.
{ Lux Research Analyst Blog | Continue reading | via Josh Wolfe }
{ Frank Lloyd Wright, Johnson Wax Building, Wisconsin, 1936-1944 | Main room with lily-pad columns | more photos }
The construction of the Johnson Wax building created controversies for the architect. In the Great Workroom, the dendriform columns are 9 inches (23 cm) in diameter at the bottom and 18 feet (550 cm) in diameter at the top, on a wide, round platform that Wright termed, the “lily pad.” This difference in diameter between the bottom and top of the column did not accord with building codes at the time. Building inspectors required that a test column be built and loaded with twelve tons of material. The test column, once it was built, was tough enough that it was able to be loaded fivefold with sixty tons of materials before the “calyx”, or part of the column that meets the lily pad, cracked (crashing the 60 tons of materials to the ground, and bursting a water main 30 feet underground). After this demonstration, Wright was given his building permit.
related:
Heavy police sawhorses of rough wood with a stenciled warning — “Police Line Do Not Cross” — have been a visible staple of New York’s landscape for decades. But now they are being demoted.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said that wooden sawhorses were being phased out. The last ones owned by the New York Police Department, made by inmates in upstate prisons, are being relegated to dull duty at street fairs and other low-impact events.
The glory, the front-row seats to history, will go to the interlocking gray aluminum partitions that the police call “French barriers.”
It’s like a first-grade detective in Midtown Manhattan being busted to overnight patrolman on the outskirts of Staten Island.
From a few hundred French barriers bought in the early 1990s, there are now about 12,000 (seven feet long and $70 each). Just 3,200 veteran wooden sawhorses (14 feet long and $60 each) remain. Other cities like Chicago and Philadelphia also use both types.
related:
{ Top, fake badges for assistant chief and patrolman; bottom, real detective and patrolman badges. | In New York, some officers don’t wear their badges on patrol. Instead, they wear fakes. Called “dupes,” these phony badges are often just a trifle smaller than real ones but otherwise completely authentic. Officers use them because losing a real badge can mean paperwork and a heavy penalty, as much as 10 days’ pay. | NY Times | Continue reading }
{ Eero Saarinen, TWA Terminal, New York International (now John F. Kennedy International) Airport, New York, circa 1962. | Photo: Balthazar Korab }
{ Eero Saarinen, Patent drawing for pedestal chairs, June 7, 1960 }
{ A new show champions the sinuous legacy of Eero Saarinen | Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future | The Museum of the City of New York, from Nov 10, 2009 to January 31, 2010 | Press Realease | PDF | Catalog preview }
