June Wanderings
In the middle of June I had a doctor's appointment in the city and took advantage of it to wander around for hours then went home and came back in my car to shoot some of the stuff at night and in the hopes Bergdorf Goodman would have more of their windows done.
I have photos of Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale's, Louis Vuitton, H&M, Dolce & Gabbana, Dior, and St. John's window displays up at my Flickr account and my deviantArt, as well as a few photos of the side of the restored I. Miller Building. These photos, and some nerdage about NYC buildings, are just for here:
Between the afternoon I showed up and the night when I returned, the window dressers of "Horse 1" exchanged an adorable poodle purse for an adorable sailboat purse.
Here's a close-up of some of the needlework covering the horse in "Horse 3." Notice the nude on the tail! Also, it appears to be a male horse....
This is the illuminated glass globe at the top of the Paramount Building in Times Square. It was painted black during World War II in case enemy airplanes came into the airspace but the paint wasn't taken off until 1996!
The exterior of 285 Madison Avenue was redone recently. There's nothing spectacular about the building, and it was most recently famous for having become so badly maintained that someone was killed by an elevator malfunction in it in 2011. But it has these little figures in the exterior window frames--apparently gnomes/grotesques and things were popular in the era it was created, 1926--and they haven't been restored. In fact, some of them look terrible. (You can see even more of these, pre-recent restoration, here.) All the window frames have been painted dark brown since I took these shots. They're not very sharp because I was shooting after dark with some weird lighting.
Close-ups of two of the grotesques. That last one started life as a little girl with a doll!
I don't have my own photos of them, but I also looked up 281 Park Avenue, the 1894 Church Missions House, and 4 Park Avenue, the former Vanderbilt Hotel. Church Missions House is an interesting looking building with an interesting history. This account also discloses some of the jawdropping racism of the times. A 1991 restoration involved "resurrecting and restoring the mosaic marble floors that had been covered with vinyl tiles; removing dropped ceilings to re-expose the plaster-ornamented ceilings, repairing the copper and terra cotta roof; restoring the leaded, stained glass windows; and bringing back to its former appearance the wooden wainscoting, doors and trims." It's a story that's common to a lot of old grand buildings in NYC that were converted to office space, but I still wonder who the hell looks at cool old detailwork and decides to cover them with drop ceilings and vinyl tiles? Is it really so much cheaper to rip out and/or cover up the ailing original work with utter crap?
The former Vanderbilt Hotel used to have even more terra cotta busts on its roof and a more distinctive exterior until 1967, when the hotel was converted to apartments and office spaces by stripping and "modernizing" the lower levels of the exterior and removing a dozen or more of te statues on the roof "to improve the view from several new penthouse apartments... But a 1985 survey by the Landmarks Preservation Commission said that the exterior had less architectural significance [than the interior], perhaps because of the modernization of the lower section."
In the late 1960s, when the Paramount Theater closed the theater space was converted to offices, the marquee removed, and the arch in-filled; the marquee and arch were thankfully restored in 2001. They're currently obscured by scaffolding, but I took a recent photo of part of the marquee.