1849Charlie Parker ResidenceArchitect: UnknownLocation: 151 Avenue B I have to squint my third ear to hear Charlie Parker’s music as the seething garble of traditionalist imagination. To me, it runs a perfectly relatable gamut of emotions, a knottiness tending towards sad reflection; in other words, it just sounds like jazz. But if whatever made Parker revolutionary is hard for me to capture, I sometimes think I feel his respectable side, his with-strings side, his friendly-with-Varèse side. (This shouldn’t be a surprise, I suppose: I was practically born bourgeois in thought and act.)This house is where Parker briefly got respectable with Chan Richardson and settled into a kind of family life, at least as much as addiction and a music career would allow. And what an odd site for it, too. This is a Gothic Revival townhouse in a city where few were built and fewer survive. Keyed to the Romantic idea of nature, Gothic style was thought to need a performance in nature — or a reasonable stand-in like in a large, green lot — and a townhouse in an assembly-line row of townhouses in a city full of such rows seemed mighty antithetical to that idea. Perhaps apologetically, then, it lays claim to Gothic in a few, bare gestures: an ogive-shaped, colonnetted entrance; pencil-thin hood moldings over the windows; a little trefoil molding below the cornice. They’d look as glib as a portico in front of a McMansion were they not so expertly done and expertly cared for.
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1849
Charlie Parker Residence

Architect: Unknown
Location: 151 Avenue B

I have to squint my third ear to hear Charlie Parker’s music as the seething garble of traditionalist imagination. To me, it runs a perfectly relatable gamut of emotions, a knottiness tending towards sad reflection; in other words, it just sounds like jazz. But if whatever made Parker revolutionary is hard for me to capture, I sometimes think I feel his respectable side, his with-strings side, his friendly-with-Varèse side. (This shouldn’t be a surprise, I suppose: I was practically born bourgeois in thought and act.)

This house is where Parker briefly got respectable with Chan Richardson and settled into a kind of family life, at least as much as addiction and a music career would allow. And what an odd site for it, too. This is a Gothic Revival townhouse in a city where few were built and fewer survive. Keyed to the Romantic idea of nature, Gothic style was thought to need a performance in nature — or a reasonable stand-in like in a large, green lot — and a townhouse in an assembly-line row of townhouses in a city full of such rows seemed mighty antithetical to that idea. Perhaps apologetically, then, it lays claim to Gothic in a few, bare gestures: an ogive-shaped, colonnetted entrance; pencil-thin hood moldings over the windows; a little trefoil molding below the cornice. They’d look as glib as a portico in front of a McMansion were they not so expertly done and expertly cared for.

1846Trinity ChurchArchitect: Richard UpjohnLocation: 79 Broadway The first Trinity Church (1698) burned in the Great Fire of 1776, which was apt (if not pleasant) given its connections to the Loyalist cause; the second was replaced awfully tardily (1790), had a good forty-year run until it was pulled down on purpose on account of heavy snows. So this is the third. The picture’s abstract, sure, but you know what it looks like. It’s the dark eminence at the end of Wall Street, God’s vacation home in the land of Mammon. Comprehend its shadows and you comprehend the building: the church is a signpost for the windswept Romanticism of the Gothic Revival, coming into in its own in America at this time, with its emphasis on natural passion and irration, great contrasts of darkness and light, both on building facades and in men’s souls. But for all its buttresses and crocketing and ogive, its authenticity — that is, its likeness to those spooky old churches in Europe once called Gothic as a slur — does not go all the way. Its massing is symmetrical. It’s faced with brownstone, something the Europeans didn’t know. In fact, it’s not even made entirely of stone: the ceiling is made of wood and plaster. In other words, it makes concessions to the rational and the pragmatic. Why these half-measures? Was New York too damned practical? (Too damned money-driven?) Or wasn’t pure, true Gothic sort of redundant in New York once the city passed a certain threshold of size and complexity? Didn’t it feel impossibly old even when it was actually rather young? Wasn’t it already filled with extremes of light and shade in every imaginable sense?
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1846
Trinity Church

Architect: Richard Upjohn
Location: 79 Broadway

The first Trinity Church (1698) burned in the Great Fire of 1776, which was apt (if not pleasant) given its connections to the Loyalist cause; the second was replaced awfully tardily (1790), had a good forty-year run until it was pulled down on purpose on account of heavy snows. So this is the third. The picture’s abstract, sure, but you know what it looks like. It’s the dark eminence at the end of Wall Street, God’s vacation home in the land of Mammon. Comprehend its shadows and you comprehend the building: the church is a signpost for the windswept Romanticism of the Gothic Revival, coming into in its own in America at this time, with its emphasis on natural passion and irration, great contrasts of darkness and light, both on building facades and in men’s souls. But for all its buttresses and crocketing and ogive, its authenticity — that is, its likeness to those spooky old churches in Europe once called Gothic as a slur — does not go all the way. Its massing is symmetrical. It’s faced with brownstone, something the Europeans didn’t know. In fact, it’s not even made entirely of stone: the ceiling is made of wood and plaster. In other words, it makes concessions to the rational and the pragmatic. Why these half-measures? Was New York too damned practical? (Too damned money-driven?) Or wasn’t pure, true Gothic sort of redundant in New York once the city passed a certain threshold of size and complexity? Didn’t it feel impossibly old even when it was actually rather young? Wasn’t it already filled with extremes of light and shade in every imaginable sense?

1838St. Peter’s Church Architect: James W. Smith (builder), Clement Clarke Moore (designer)Location: 346 West 20th Street We invented Santa Claus. Sure, aspects of the myth had been boiling up through Europe and America for millenia, starting with Saint Nicholas himself, then through the Dutch Sinterklaas celebration, but it’s through the work of 18th-Century New Yorkers that they crystallize into what we recognize as Santa Claus today. Washington Irving’s A History of New York, a self-conscious attempt at creating a mythical origin story for a city that had none, featured a St. Nicholas and a flying wagon full of presents. Clement Clarke Moore’s poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas” (“Twas the night before Christmas” etc. etc.) riffed on the idea, and added/solidified all sort of details that we still have today: the chimney invasion, the fatness, the reindeer. (Thomas Nast would elaborate on the myth further.) Not content with fathering Santa Claus, Moore also gave birth to Chelsea. The neighborhood is named after his family’s estate, Chelsea, which once spanned from West 19th to West 24th Streets, and what today are 8th and 10th Avenues. As the city crept northward, and the Commissioner’s Plan of 1811 started to work its leveling magic on Moore’s land, he began to divest himself of the estate. The apple orchard was donated to the Episcopal Church and became the grounds of the General Theological Seminary. Moore later leased, then deeded, land for a chapel, and when that was deemed insufficient, a new church. Even though he was serving as a professor at the seminary, Moore found the time to be an active determinant in the fate of his former property. At various times, Moore was the church’s warden, a vestryman, and organist. Even more impressive, he drew up the plans for the chapel (now a rectory) and the church himself. At some point, the design switched from Greek Revival, which you’d figure would appeal to a philologist like Moore, to Gothic Revival, a style for high-minded aesthetes drunk on nostalgia and Sir Walter Scott. The change may have happened after construction began, the NYC LPC suggests, as the church is still has the plan of a Greek temple, and is neither cruciform or boldly asymmetrical, as was typical for a Gothic church. All of this suggests to me (as does the residential development of of Chelsea, which we’ll get to in a future post) suggests a generous control freak — a Santa Claus stuck in the chimney.
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1838
St. Peter’s Church

Architect: James W. Smith (builder), Clement Clarke Moore (designer)
Location: 346 West 20th Street

We invented Santa Claus.

Sure, aspects of the myth had been boiling up through Europe and America for millenia, starting with Saint Nicholas himself, then through the Dutch Sinterklaas celebration, but it’s through the work of 18th-Century New Yorkers that they crystallize into what we recognize as Santa Claus today. Washington Irving’s A History of New York, a self-conscious attempt at creating a mythical origin story for a city that had none, featured a St. Nicholas and a flying wagon full of presents. Clement Clarke Moore’s poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas” (“Twas the night before Christmas” etc. etc.) riffed on the idea, and added/solidified all sort of details that we still have today: the chimney invasion, the fatness, the reindeer. (Thomas Nast would elaborate on the myth further.)

Not content with fathering Santa Claus, Moore also gave birth to Chelsea. The neighborhood is named after his family’s estate, Chelsea, which once spanned from West 19th to West 24th Streets, and what today are 8th and 10th Avenues. As the city crept northward, and the Commissioner’s Plan of 1811 started to work its leveling magic on Moore’s land, he began to divest himself of the estate. The apple orchard was donated to the Episcopal Church and became the grounds of the General Theological Seminary. Moore later leased, then deeded, land for a chapel, and when that was deemed insufficient, a new church.

Even though he was serving as a professor at the seminary, Moore found the time to be an active determinant in the fate of his former property. At various times, Moore was the church’s warden, a vestryman, and organist. Even more impressive, he drew up the plans for the chapel (now a rectory) and the church himself. At some point, the design switched from Greek Revival, which you’d figure would appeal to a philologist like Moore, to Gothic Revival, a style for high-minded aesthetes drunk on nostalgia and Sir Walter Scott. The change may have happened after construction began, the NYC LPC suggests, as the church is still has the plan of a Greek temple, and is neither cruciform or boldly asymmetrical, as was typical for a Gothic church. All of this suggests to me (as does the residential development of of Chelsea, which we’ll get to in a future post) suggests a generous control freak — a Santa Claus stuck in the chimney.