MANHATTAN UNLOCKED

The inverse of archeological digs, cities are anthropological builds, and New York is an extraordinary one by any measure. From City Hall to Central Park the built environment is a Frankenstein’s Monster of history and architecture. Join us on a walking tour, or explore the blog, to deconstruct, dissect and demystify one of the world’s most incredible cities.

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 The streets of Manhattan are a chock-a-block mix of buildings old and new:  Georgian and brownstone homes, skyscrapers, tenements, department stores, loft buildings, churches, warehouses, theaters, factories and firehouses to name some of the dozens of building types found in a city streetwall.

New Yorkers drink at bars in old parlors and foyers, and dine in old bedrooms; they live modestly in old luxury hotels, and admire art where textiles once stacked to the rafters; they have lunch in old churches and stables, and dance where secretary pools once typed out forms in triplicate; they live in luxury where seamstresses and cutters once spun out racks of dresses. Buildings from different eras, in various states of repair and disrepair, adapted for reuse over time at different points in time, sometimes many times over.  Buildings reworked through a succession of architectural styles with materials from different ages. Brownstones overhauled with cast iron facades; Georgian-Federal era homes with upper floors added; fine Gilded Age hotels converted to low-income apartments and back again; commercial “loft” buildings redone for luxury residential. Block after block of buildings in logic-defying combinations, neighborhoods in a fixed state of wondrous architectural chaos. Is there any way of making sense of how such a jumble of buildings, and one of the world’s greatest cities, came together?