My SC4 CJ Scrapbook

perfect ! perfect ! 

where did the big plant with the red and white smokestack come from?

Great job! Everything looks so organic.

Wish you luck!

Just watched Good Will Hunting yesterday and this east-coast american city feel is the best reminder of the general atmosphere of that movie

Very beautiful images, The Big Mango is such a cute city

Great job!

The housing stocks in Brooklyn are better preserved than those in Manhattan. Great work!

12 hours ago, mrsmartman said:

The housing stocks in Brooklyn are better preserved than those in Manhattan. Great work!

Thanks for that! Though I didn't know that in real life- I'd presume Brooklyn would be worst than Manhattan.

17 hours ago, The British Sausage said:

Thanks for that! Though I didn't know that in real life- I'd presume Brooklyn would be worst than Manhattan.

The physical conditions of housing stocks vary across neighbourhoods. For example, the brownstones in Brooklyn Heights near Downtown Brooklyn are more valuable than the tenements in Harlem of Upper Manhattan. The better residential apartments in Manhattan are generally newer art deco buildings like those in Upper East Side as most of the remaining older buildings in Manhattan are tenements. Fewer old buildings are demolished in urban rewewal projects in Brooklyn.

On 4/17/2020 at 5:06 AM, mrsmartman said:

The physical conditions of housing stocks vary across neighbourhoods. For example, the brownstones in Brooklyn Heights near Downtown Brooklyn are more valuable than the tenements in Harlem of Upper Manhattan. The better residential apartments in Manhattan are generally newer art deco buildings like those in Upper East Side as most of the remaining older buildings in Manhattan are tenements. Fewer old buildings are demolished in urban rewewal projects in Brooklyn.

The tenements of Harlem are either "Old Law Tenements" of the 1880s to the 1890s or "New Law" tenements built after 1901.

Wikipedia explains the differences well: Old Law Tenement - Wikipedia

Old Law Tenements are tenements built in New York City after the Tenement House Act of 1879 and before the New York State Tenement House Act ("New Law") of 1901. The 1879 law required that every habitable room have a window opening to plain air, a requirement that was met by including air shafts between adjacent buildings. Old Law Tenements are commonly called "dumbbell tenements" after the shape of the building footprint: the air shaft gives each tenement the narrow-waisted shape of a dumbbell, wide facing the street and backyard, narrowed in between to create the air corridor. They were built in great numbers to accommodate waves of immigrating Europeans. The side streets of Manhattan's Lower East Side are still lined with numerous dumbbell structures today.

The 1879 Act was a response to the failure of the Tenement House Act of 1867, which required fire escapes from each suite as well as windows in each room. Builders met the letter of the 1867 law by merely inserting meaningless windows between interior rooms.^[1] Without air shafts, the 1867 requirement failed to increase natural light or fresh air ventilation in the crowded tenement "dark bedroom".^[2]

Responding to the new requirements, a magazine, Plumbing and Sanitation Engineer, held a tenement design contest in 1879. James Ware's winning dumbbell design represented a compromise between legal health standards and commercial viability. By indenting the sides of the structure three feet, he opened a slender airshaft between abutting buildings. The three-foot indentation required only a minimal sacrifice of rent-revenue space, placating the landlords, and provided just enough aperture for ventilation and natural, if not direct, light.

The 1879 Act, though well-intentioned, failed even worse than the 1867 Act. Tenement dwellers tossed garbage, bilge water and waste into these air shafts which were not designed for garbage removal. As a result, the law's attempt to improve sanitation only created a new sanitation problem. Worse, the air shaft acted as a flue spreading fire from apartment to apartment.^[3] The 1901 law did away with the air shaft, replacing it with the large courtyard for garbage storage and removal. In later structures, the introduction of elevators reduced garbage defenestration by upper-story tenants.

Stylistically, Old Law Tenements are unique and conspicuous. Though each uniformly occupies a twenty-five-foot lot just like the pre-Old Law tenement, the Old Law facade – with its fanciful sandstone human and animal gargoyles (sometimes in full figure), its terracotta filigree of no apparent historical precedent,^{[citation needed]} its occasional design aberrations (e.g., dwarf columns), and its often varicolored brick – departs radically from the plain, dignified simplicity of the unassuming and largely unornamented older structures. Later in the Old Law period, the ornaments settle into a Queen Anne style,^[4] as the human representational forms gradually disappear into the more abstract extravagance of the following Beaux Arts style.

The symmetrical floor plan of the typical Old Law Tenement included four virtually identical apartments per floor. Three rooms each with a railroad layout, two of which shared an interior window that allowed light to reach the inner room. The entrance opened to the kitchen containing a bathtub that had a lid that could be lowered to form a working surface, alongside a sink opposite a wood-burning stove feeding into a flue. An icebox completed the appliances. Tenants usually placed a table and chairs at the angled window at the end of the narrow airshaft. Most people constructed a shelf at the kitchen window that hung out into the airshaft. During winter, food could be stored there and refrigerated without the expense of buying ice. Two toilets, cramped water closets were located on the landing in the hallway for common use. (The boldface is my addition...it shows the gigantic weakness in the design. Lavatory facilities like these turned the Old Law Tenement into an incubator for disease, and wiped out whole city blocks.)

New Law Tenements were built in New York City following the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901, so-called the "New Law" to distinguish it from the previous two Tenement House Acts of 1867 and 1879. New Law tenements are distinct from "Old Law" and "pre-law" tenements both in structural design and exterior ornament.

Required under the New Law to include a large courtyard which consumed more space than the 1879 Old Law's air shafts, New Law tenements tend to be built on multiple land lots or on corner lots to conserve space for dwelling units, the renting of which is the money-making purpose of the structure. In the early 21st century, a typical Lower East Side or East Village street will still be lined with five-story, austerely unornamented pre-law (pre-1879) tenements and six-story, bizarrely decorated Old Law (1879-1901) tenements, with the much bulkier, grand-style New Law tenements on the corners, always at least six stories tall.

Aesthetically, the New Law coincided with the fashion for Beaux-Arts architecture. The fanciful sandstone faces, gargoyles and filigreed terracotta of the previous twenty years of tenement design gave way to the more abstractly classical, but extremely florid ornamentation of this historically informed and integrated, urbane, international and more grandiose Parisian style.^[1] Unlike the flat street wall of previous tenements, which maximized the space available to tenants, the street wall façade of the New Law tenement often features recessed indentations, sometimes curved, sometimes rectilinear, giving the impression that stylish appearance mattered to the designer and owner more than optimizing space. They also feature oval and arched windows—more expensive to produce and replace—heavy terracotta ornaments around the windows and often thin brick, again, more expensive to manufacture and to lay. They give an impression of opulence which belies their purpose, location and their inhabitants; many were built in the ghetto to make money on the housing of largely impoverished immigrants by packing several families into small apartments.^[2] 

(Here I point out how the greedier landlords of New York at the turn of the last century slapped up New Law tenements in Harlem and the Lower East Side, and showed off their opulent exteriors to fool immigrants -- whites from Europe or blacks from the South -- into believing they were moving into high-class apartments. They weren't.)

New Law tenements can be seen throughout Manhattan and especially in the Lower East Side and Washington Heights.

Get your hands on the Architects Institute of America Guide to New York and it will rattle off many examples of these buildings.

Ironically, today, rents in these apartments go for $3,000 a month.

Here are some photos of old-law tenements...the shots of the apartments make me think: that could be my family, more than 100 years ago.

 

On 4/16/2020 at 2:47 AM, mrsmartman said:

The housing stocks in Brooklyn are better preserved than those in Manhattan. Great work!

Manhattan has had more real estate barons crushing existing structures.

Take a look at photographs of 2nd, 3rd, and 9th Avenue before and after the elevated lines were removed. Ripping out the elevated lines for real estate development was a big reason those arteries are all skyscrapers now.

Although the 3rd Avenue El had one problem...the structure could NOT handle the new steel cars the Transit Authority was rolling out. It was either rebuild or remove, so it was removed. The line in The Bronx hung on, WITH wooden cars, until the late 1960s, when it got steel R-12, but they had to operate at a very slow speed.

Here's a Third Avenue El train -- Low-Vs -- rumbling along the line in the 1950s.

 

  Edited December 25, 2020 by Kiwiwriter47