Surrounded
What Do You Think You're Looking At? #181
This is a row of old tenement buildings on Third Avenue in Manhattan up until a few months ago:
This is the view of that street now:
The red brick on the right in the new image is the tenement in the middle in the old picture. And the tenement with the exposed white brick wall in the old picture is the completely surrounded one in the middle of the new picture.
Some find this kind of transformation unfortunate, but I gotta say, I think the visual and architectural variety on this street is pretty cool:
I can’t take credit for finding this; a New York City blog covered it the other day. They didn’t know exactly what the story was, but it’s almost certainly that the owner of this single building refused to sell. This is similar to China’s “nail houses”—single structures, sometimes single units from erstwhile multifamily structures, which have survived while surrounded by new development.
I also have a couple of examples of this sort of thing from Washington, D.C., with my own pictures.
The second one there is the Mexican embassy. Here’s the story of that:
The building that the Embassy now occupies was designed by architect Peter Vercelli and built in 1986. The building incorporates the façades of the last two remaining of the Seven Buildings–some of the oldest residential structures in Washington, D.C.
One more little point: it’s interesting how little distinguishes a rowhouse from a tenement, and how these buildings that were slapped up pretty quickly and home to pretty poor living conditions are now (with lots of renovations) basically luxury housing. The surprising thing when you think about it isn’t that some of them are being replaced, but that so many of them are still standing.
Related Reading:
What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #6
What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #8
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This feels like a topic right up your alley.
The other day we went to downtown Dayton, Ohio, to see my partner's son in a play. While eating dinner at a nearby restaurant, I looked across the street at an old building, repurposed as office space and mentioned it looked a lot like the old Cincinnati bus station which used to be right across the street from my office building.
Turns out I was right. The CIncinnati building was torn down decades ago, but Dayton's old Greyhound station still stands, although somewhat shabbier than in its glory days. https://www.roadarch.com/bus/oh.html#:~:text=The%20Dayton%20station%20was%20designed,Arrasmith%20and%20built%20in%201949.
A similar thing happened in Seattle when they tried to flatten the entire city (but quickly realized that it was too much work and only flattened one single hill).
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/seattle-regrading-old-photographs/
And of course, Seattle is also home to the famous "Up House"
https://savingplaces.org/stories/the-story-behind-seattles-up-house