NYC - West Village: 39 and 41 Commerce Street

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NYC - West Village: 39 and 41 Commerce Street

Image by wallyg
This one of a kind pair of Second Empire style buildings, by D.T. Atwood and dating to 1831 and 1832 respectively, was, as local legend has it, built by a sea captain for his two feuding daughters, separated by a garden with hopes that it would lead to reconciliation. Records, however, show that it was built for Peter Huyler, a milkman. The roofs date to the early 1870's, added by a Huyler descendant.

Like Bank Street, Commerce Street got its name during an early 19th-century ellow fever epidemic when many business from downtown moved to the Village.

NYC - MoMA: Jackson Pollock's Number 1A, 1948

Image by wallyg
Jackson Pollock
American, 1912-1956

Number 1A, 1948, 1948
Oil and enamel on unprimed canvas, 68" x 8' 8"

Publication excerpt from The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 194:

One is a masterpiece of the "drip," or pouring, technique, the radical method that Pollock contributed to Abstract Expressionism. Moving around an expanse of canvas laid on the floor, Pollock would fling and pour ropes of paint across the surface. One is among the largest of his works that bear evidence of these dynamic gestures. The canvas pulses with energy: strings and skeins of enamel, some matte, some glossy, weave and run, an intricate web of tans, blues, and grays lashed through with black and white. The way the paint lies on the canvas can suggest speed and force, and the image as a whole is dense and lushyet its details have a lacelike filigree, a delicacy, a lyricism.

The Surrealists' embrace of accident as a way to bypass the conscious mind sparked Pollock's experiments with the chance effects of gravity and momentum on falling paint. Yet although works like One have neither a single point of focus nor any obvious repetition or pattern, they sustain a sense of underlying order. This and the physicality of Pollock's method have led to comparisons of his process with choreography, as if the works were the traces of a dance. Some see in paintings like One the nervous intensity of the modern city, others the primal rhythms of nature.

NYC - Greenwich Village: First Presbyterian Church - Alexander Chapel

Image by wallyg
First Presbyterian, established in 1716, built its first church on Wall Street in 1719. It was called "The Church of Patriots" during the struggle for American Independence. By 1840, to keep pace with its growth, the congregation chose to move to the more residential Greenwich Village.

The present English-inspired Gothic Revival brownstone building, architected by Joseph C. Wells, one of the founders of the American Institute of Architects, and built by J.G. Pierson, was dedicated in 1846. Wells modeled First Church on the Church of St. Saviour at Bath, England, and the crenellated central entrance tower on the Magdalen Tower at Oxford. The dressed ashlar tower is embellished with a tracery of quatrefoils. In 1893, a south transept chapel was added by McKim, Mead and White.

The 1918 merger of First Presbyterian, University Place Presbyterian, and Madison Square Presbyterian, provided a pulpit for Harry Emerson Fosdick, one of the nation's best known liberal preachers.

In 1919, a chancel with a gifted stained blue glass rose window from Robert W. de Forest, the founder of the American Wing of the Metropolitan museum, was added. That same year, the reredos, painted by Taber Sears in 1917 with a theme of Te Deum Laudamus, was moved to the west wall of the chancel.

In 1937 the Alexander Chapel, decorated with the Scottish symbols of thistle, heather, and ivy, was completed in one of the rooms of the South Wing. The chapel’s three stained glass windows depict the cathedral on the isle of Iona, the Ionic cross of St. Martin set against a Hebridean landscape, and a young Crusader setting forth from his Scottish homeland.

The need for more space for First Church’s program activities led to the construction of the new Twelfth Street church house in the late 1950s. Architect Edgar A. Tafel, a pupil of Frank Lloyd Wright, designed a modern building that harmonizes with the Gothic style of the church. The exterior of the building was done in Roman brick, colored to match the brownstone of the church. A balcony facing Fifth Avenue and a pseudo-balcony above it feature a quatrefoil design that is the same as that on the church building.