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As I mentioned in my last post, grand old estates are plentiful along the Hudson River. One such estate is Clermont, a mansion situated on 500 acres in what is now Germantown, New York.
Clermont was built by and home to the Livingston family, an important clan during the early days of this great nation. The land, originally totaling 13,000 acres, was first owned by Robert Livingston, or Robert of Clermont, the Lord of Livingston Manor. The estate was named for the French words for "clear mountain," as the peaks of the Catskill range are visible across the river. The Lord's only son inherited the land in 1728.
Now here's where things get confusing. While researching Clermont's history for this post I thought for awhile that there were some inconsistent details on the Clermont website's history rundown, but as it turns out the website has it right and it's only confusing because all these Livingstons have the same names and virtually the same jobs. So bear with me: Robert Livingston, Lord of Clermont, passed on his land to his son Robert R. Livingston, a judge on New York's supreme court, whose son, Robert R. Livingston, Jr., is a notable figure because he was one of the Committee of Five who drafted the Declaration of Independence. He did not end up signing the Declaration, though; that distinction went to his cousin Philip Livingston, son of Lord Robert's brother and Judge Robert's uncle, also named Philip Livingston. At this time, apparently, 
there were four Livingston family members in congress, and Philip Jr. signed on behalf of the whole family (he is depicted doing so along with the other Founding Fathers on the back of the two dollar bill). Robert R. Livingston, Jr. -- again, this is the Lord's grandson, the Judge's son, and two dollar bill guy's first cousin once removed -- was also the first Secretary of State (then called Minister of Foreign Affairs), and he gave the oath of office to President George Washington. Later he was Jefferson's Minister to France and went to Paris to negotiate the Louisiana Purchase. Oh, and just to further complicate things, that R. in Robert R. Livingston? It stands for Robert. Robert Robert Livingston, Jr., son of Robert Robert Livingston. Got it? Good. Me too (here's the family tree -- not that it clarifies anything).
During the Revolution, the original Clermont house was burned to the ground by British troops because of the Livingston family's known support for American independence, and it was rebuilt between 1779 and 1782. When Robert Robert, Jr. died in 1813, he left the house to his daughter Elizabeth. Changes were made to the house throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, most recently in 1920, when Alice Livingston renovated it in the Colonial Revival style, and she willed it to the state of New York upon her death in 1962. Today the house is a National Landmark and part of the Hudson River National Landmark district, twenty miles of land up the Hudson River in Dutchess and Columbia counties dotted with noteworthy historic estates such as this one. The interior has been restored to show what it looked like in the early 1900s. I've never actually gone inside but I did spend a lovely fall afternoon sitting next to the river on the Clermont property, reading. I don't remember what I read; the scenery in those parts can be a bit distracting.
How's this for a segue: Elizabeth Livingston, daughter of Robert Robert, Jr., had a daughter named Robert. Just kidding, her name was Elisabeth, and she was the great-grandmother of Eleanor Roosevelt. Which brings us a few miles down the Hudson to Hyde Park, where both the Roosevelt family home and the Vanderbilt mansion can be found. I'm going to focus on the Vanderbilt for this post, since I haven't actually been to the FDR house yet.
The Hyde Park Vanderbilt mansion is one of several Vanderbilt mansions in the US. This one belonged to Frederick Vanderbilt, one of eight children of William H. Vanderbilt. The other well-known Vanderbilt homes, such as Breakers and Marble House in Newport, Rhode 
Island, and Biltmore in Asheville, North Carolina, belonged to Frederick's brothers. You can see from this picture that the Hyde Park mansion is spectacularly done in a Classical Revival style, the columns and porticos and arcades evoking a very grand Parthenon. The Vanderbilts were prime examples of the "nouveau riche," families who made their millions in the new business frontiers of the 19th and 20th centuries -- the Vanderbilts made their money in the railroad industry -- as opposed to inheriting social stature from aristocratic ancestors. A bit of insecurity about this fact is apparent in the architecture of the mansion: the Vanderbilt mansion website describes the nouveau riche of the late 1800s as beginning to feel that "money was no longer enough." In an effort to conform with the old families who dominated the social scene and were considered higher class than these new millionaires, Frederick Vanderbilt built his family a house reminiscent of "the ancestral home of a noble European line." 
With fancy new homes that looked old and historic, families like the Vanderbilts could fake an illustrious family history. The picture on the left shows the house under construction in 1895, and in 1898 the family moved in. It was designed by Charles Follen McKim of architectural firm McKim, Mead and White. Despite its classic exterior, the house was state-of-the art for its time. It had central heat, power supplied by a hydroelectric plant built on the property, and was made to be fireproof after a previous house on the estate had burned down. I haven't been inside this house either, but apparently the artificial ancestry theme is carried over into the decorating scheme: the house is filled with European art and artifacts, with a particular emphasis on Renaissance and Rococo styles. Also interesting is that this house was decorated during a significant shift in interior design fashions. In the 1890s, the Victorian style of stuffing rooms full of miscellaneous objects (Olana, described in my post below, is a good example of this), was on its way out, and the notion of having an overarching "design principle" was taking over. As a result the Vanderbilt mansion is an eccentric mixture of the two styles, with various designers from both schools of thought putting their mark on each of the house's fifty rooms.
What's next on Cool Old Buildings? Why, more cool old buildings, of course! Check back soon!
Some slight changes are going to be made here at COB. Although the original concept was to take all the pictures for the blog myself, I've found that I just don't have the time to go on photography escapades every single week. So in the interest of keeping COB current and updated I'm going to begin finding some photos on the internet to use. I'll still limit them to pictures of buildings I've actually seen in person.
So with that, here are some cool old buildings from the Hudson River Valley of New York State.
The Hudson Valley is in my humble opinion one of the most beautiful places on Earth. I went to school there, in a little spot called Annandale on Hudson, New York. It's not really a town -- just the Bard College campus and woods -- but it sits right in between Red Hook and Tivoli, two very different but equally quaint little towns. As the name suggests, the Hudson Valley is the lush indentation of land that surrounds the Hudson River on each side. It's one of the oldest parts of the country, not to mention the most literary. This is where the Headless Horseman rode through Sleepy Hollow, where Rip Van Winkle slept for twenty years, and where Edith Wharton's doomed heroine Lily Bart did her most ambitious social climbing. Many of the towns have Dutch or German names (such as Saugerties, the town next to Woodstock and the place where the iconic rock concert actually took place, or Rhinebeck, where the uppermost classes of the early 1900's kept their grand country estates), reflective of the area's long history as New Netherland, before the English came to colonize it.
I could probably go on and on about this area -- having lived there for four years I'm very attached to it, and as a writer I found myself continuously inspired by it. The buildings make up no small part of the inspiration factor. If you drive through Tivoli, or down River Road into Rhinecliff and Rhinebeck, or to a greater extent through formerly booming port towns like Kingston and Hudson, you get this sense of decaying elegance, of a once grand area being gently washed away by time and water. This great photograph by Virginia Wilcox below is a nice example of what I mean (see more of her work here). The houses you see are inarguably beautiful, mostly spacious Victorians loaded with wraparound porches and bay windows and other arc
hitectural details, or simple upright Colonials, like the one in Kingston with a plaque commemorating the night George Washington spent there. But the damp valley climate is not ideal for preservation, and wood begins to warp, and paint chips, and once spectacular estates, like Edith Wharton's family's, fall into ruins. So everything has an aging, wet, shabby beauty to it. I guess what I like about the Hudson Valley aesthetic is that you can see the history in a building -- you can tell what it looked like when it was new and you can see how that newness has faded. Like I said, I could go on and on.
That said, there are also a number of those elegant riverside mansions that have been beautifully preserved -- in fact, visitors to the Valley can go on a number of historic house tours. The building below is called Olana, and is located right on the river, near the town of Hudson. It was the home of Frederick Church, a famous painter from the Hudson River school. He wanted to build his house on the spot with the most beautiful view of the Hudson, and he did, but today that view is marred somewhat by power cords and the white to
wers of a factory next to the water. The house was designed by Calvert Vaux after Church, who had originally intended to replace his cottage on the hill with a French-style manor on the hill, went on a tour of the Middle East with his wife and son, and came back so impressed with the Islamic art and architectural styles he had seen on his trip that he decided to reimagine his house on the hill as a Moorish palace. He filled the house with his extraordinary art collection: paintings, sculpture, artifacts and antiques from all over the world. Olana's website calls the house "a Persian fantasy adapted to American tastes and manners." Indeed the collection, not to mention the house itself, is a crazy mixture of periods, styles and cultures: Arabic oil lamps sit on mantles next to busts of French aristocrats, and neoclassical bronze statues stand on Persian carpets. Church's daughter-in-law, who inherited the house along with her husband and lived at Olana until 1964,
was adament about keeping the house and collections exactly as Church left them. As a result the Olana you can visit today is virtually unchanged from the Olana that Frederick Church lived in and meticulously, eclectically decorated.
Stay tuned for more Hudson Valley cool old buildings. There are a lot of them.
Okay, it's been awhile since my last post, but now we're back with some very cool, very old buildings from the area in West Harlem where I live.In 1658, the village of Nieuw Haarlem was founded by Dutch settlers on the island of Manhattan. The name was anglicized to Harlem when the English took control of the New Netherland colony. It began as a small agricultural town and remained a rural area consisting mostly of upscale country estates well into the 19th century, including the one belonging to James Roosevelt, great-great-grandfather of Franklin Delano, before that branch of the family moved north to Hyde Park. In 1873, as the quality of the soil began to deteriorate and the fancy homes were auctioned off, Harlem was incorporated into the City of New York. In 1880 elevated train service was extended into the neighborhood, and the area experienced an urban renewal.
At the beginning of the 20th century, West Harlem was a Jewish neighborhood and East Harlem was an Italian neighborhood. The Jewish population reached its peak in 1917 with 150,000 European Jews living in the area. Today the Old Broadway Synagogue, located on Old Broadway just above 125th Street, is the only living relic of Jewish Harlem. In place of the Jews, the area saw a mass migration of African Americans, who moved north from other Manhattan neighborhoods like San Juan Hill (where Lincoln Center is today) and Hell's Kitchen during the first two decades of the 20th century. West Harlem remains a predominately black neighborhood to this day, while East ("Spanish") Harlem is mostly Hispanic. In the 1920s and 30s the neighborhood went through the "Harlem Renaissance," during which African American arts and culture bloomed and the great careers of Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Langston Hughes and many others were launched.
The photos on the left and right show some beautiful examples of Harlem brownstones, which line the side streets in the West 120's. Unfortunately I don't know much about these buildings specifically. My guess is that they were built sometime between 1880 and 1920, when Harlem was first transitioning from country to city, and 
when its demographics were changing rapidly. In high school I had a history teacher who was in her 80s, and she told me that her grandparents were wealthy Jews who lived in a brownstone in Harlem because Jews at that time were restricted from living on the Upper East Side, where affluent gentiles lived. I like to think about the incredible variety of people who have lived in these houses over the years. Perhaps more than any other New York City neighborhood, Harlem is a symbol for the many cultures and identities and personalities that make up the culture, identity and personality of New York.
Below are some lovely architectural details from other cool old Harlem buildings:
I've lived in Harlem for a year and haven't even almost seen it all yet. I definitely have some exploring to do, and there will be more cool old buildings from Harlem in the not-too-distant future. Keep reading!
When I was a kid I used to go up to Dartmouth now and then with my mother (she transferred there as a sophomore the first year it went co-ed), and because it's the first college I ever became familiar with it's in my head as sort of the gold standard in college campuses. It's beautiful, it's old, it's self-contained, it's green in summer and very very cold in winter, and it's located in Hanover, the quaintest little college town you ever did see. I ended up going to Bard, which is in the middle of the woods instead of a town and is more architecturally eclectic, but otherwise fits the Dartmouth template (campuswise, that is; the students are a little different...). 
A little historical background: Dartmouth was founded in 1769 by Reverand Eleazar Wheelock for the purposes of educating, according to the charter granted by King George III to the Royal Province of New Hampshire, the "Youth of the Indian Tribes in this Land ... and also of English Youth and any others." To this day the college actively recruits Native American students and seeks to educate them in issues specific to their tribes and communities. According to the Dartmouth website, over 700 Native Americans have graduated from the college since 1970, more than from all other Ivy League schools combined.
The building pictured above (I happen to really like this picture; the sky broke open about 30 seconds after it was taken) is called Dartmouth Hall. It was the first -- and for forty years, the only -- building of the college. The original Dartmouth Hall was built in 1784, but it burned down and was rebuilt twice before the present version was completed in 1906. This one is made of brick, not wood (odd that it took more than one fire to affect that change), and two of its windows and the exterior hardware are originals from the
first Dartmouth Hall. Today it houses the French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and German departments.
The building on the left is Wilson Hall. It went up in 1885 and functioned as the college library until 1928, when the Baker Library (see below) was built. The eponymous Wilson was George F. Wilson of Providence, who also donated a Wilson Hall to Brown University. Its distinctive towers served as book stacks and reading rooms, and in the eaves above the stacks contained the Picture Gallery. Today, Wilson is used as the headquarters for the Dartmouth Film Society, administrative offices of the Hopkins Center (the student center, located a few paces away) and the Film and Television Studies Department.
The Fisher Ames Baker Library was financed by George Baker, founder of what became Citibank (which means he's rolling in his grave right about now), and named for his uncle. Baker was closed for the Fourth of July while I was there, which is unfortunate because I desperately wanted to go in and see the Orozco Murals inside, which are massive beautiful expressionist masterpieces. And now that I'm reading about it I'm learning that there's something inside called the Treasure Room. THE TREASURE ROOM. I don't know what's in it (other than treasures). I wish I could have gone to the Treasure Room.
Well, that's all for today. Keep reading/start reading. Next I'll have some cool old buildings from Harlem.
NOTE: I've learned that the Hopkins Center is actually the performing arts center, not the student center. Apologies to all, and thank you to Peter Smith for the correction!
I got back last night from a delightful Fourth of July weekend in New Hampshire. Yes, it rained on and off throughout the Fourth, but that didn't stop us from enjoying a little rain kayaking and the sound of fireworks (not the sight of them, though; the woods are pretty dense in those parts). Furthermore, it didn't stop me from FINALLY TAKING MY VERY OWN PICTURES OF COOL OLD BUILDINGS!
We stayed in a log cabin that's part of an inn called Loch Lyme Lodge in the town of Lyme. Above is a picture of the lodge itself, a beautiful farm house built in 1784, which is where we had breakfast every morning and where you can order sandwiches to be served to you by the lake at lunchtime. I can't get over the way those two big pine trees curl around the front porch like that. It looks so precarious to me, but clearly those trees have stood right there about as long as the house itself. To me this image is about trusting in nature.
The church on the left is the Lyme Congregational Church. It's located on the town green in the center of Lyme. It looks to me like the quintessential New England church: white, simple, old, beautiful. The sign on the front says it was built in 1812 but according to the LCC's website the congregation has existed since 1771. The night I took this picture (actually I think my boyfriend Jay might have taken this particular one -- thanks, Jay!) was so lovely. It had been raining for about six weeks straight (just like in New York) and everyone in the neighborhood was out taking in the beautiful evening. We went to a great barbecue at the home of my family friends who live on the other side of the town green from the church. Jay and I agreed that we love the city while we're there but as soon as we go out into the country we don't want to leave.
There are a lot of other cool old buildings in Lyme. Like any small town in New England, there are ancient houses and barns everywhere you look. I also highly recommend Loch Lyme Lodge as a place to go for a low-key outdoorsy inexpensive vacation.
The next post will expand upon my trip to New Hampshire with the cool old buildings of Dartmouth College. Stay tuned!
It wasn't until this morning that I got my camera back into working condition, so I have yet to take a single picture of a single cool old building. But I don't want to keep my adoring public waiting any longer so I figured I might as well put up a picture that I didn't take of an incredibly cool old building.This is the Dakota, an apartment building at 72nd St. and Central Park West. It is beautiful and creepy and dripping with historic and cultural significance. I get a little chill every time I get out of the subway at 72nd St. and find myself in front of this haunting, looming castle.
Here are some reasons the Dakota is significant:
1. Perhaps most notably, this is where John Lennon was murdered in 1980. He and Yoko moved there in 1973 and she lives there still. If you cross the street and walk into Central Park you'll arrive pretty quickly at an area of the park called Strawberry Fields, designated as a memorial for Lennon. Once I walked through there on what I didn't realize would have been his 64th birthday. A big group of people were standing around the "Imagine" mosaic, holding lit candles and singing Beatles songs.
2. The movie Rosemary's Baby, which is one of my all-time favorites, was filmed here. If you haven't seen the movie, stop whatever you're doing and see it right now. Mia Farrow plays Rosemary, but I think the real star is the Dakota.
3. Time and Again is a really really excellent book. It's about time travel but without any sci-fi or fantasy involved: the main character goes back in time using only the power of his mind. He uses the Dakota as the place where he goes to sever all the ties that bind him to the present (well, 1970) so he can slip back into 1880s New York.
I've always heard that the Dakota is so named because back when it was built in 1884 it was so far uptown that people felt it might as well have been in the Dakota Territory, but according to Wikipedia this is probably not true and it's more likely because the building's owner was into Western and Native American names. I like the other story better. But which ever one's true, this picture on the right shows you just how unrecognizable the city was barely over a hundred years ago.
Anyway. The Dakota: a cool old building if there ever was one.
Hello, Internet!
I think the title of this blog says it all. There's nothing (nothing inedible, that is) I love more than checking out cool old buildings. I live and work in New York City so that's where most of the cool old buildings I'll be putting on this blog can be found. I do have a few trips lined up for this summer, though, so keep an eye out for cool old buildings from New Hampshire, upstate New York, Massachusetts and maybe even St. Louis (which really does have some very cool old buildings)!
Besides being a first-time blogger, I'm also hoping to learn how to take good pictures. I love looking at photography but don't know much about it, and I'm hoping that taking pictures of something I like to look at -- namely, cool old buildings -- will be good practice.
So welcome to Cool Old Buildings! My first cool old building pictures should be up in a few days.
As I mentioned in my last post, grand old estates are plentiful along the Hudson River. One such estate is Clermont, a mansion situated on 500 acres in what is now Germantown, New York.
there were four Livingston family members in congress, and Philip Jr. signed on behalf of the whole family (he is depicted doing so along with the other Founding Fathers on the back of the two dollar bill). Robert R. Livingston, Jr. -- again, this is the Lord's grandson, the Judge's son, and two dollar bill guy's first cousin once removed -- was also the first Secretary of State (then called Minister of Foreign Affairs), and he gave the oath of office to President George Washington. Later he was Jefferson's Minister to France and went to Paris to negotiate the Louisiana Purchase. Oh, and just to further complicate things, that R. in Robert R. Livingston? It stands for Robert. Robert Robert Livingston, Jr., son of Robert Robert Livingston. Got it? Good. Me too (here's the family tree -- not that it clarifies anything).
Island, and Biltmore in Asheville, North Carolina, belonged to Frederick's brothers. You can see from this picture that the Hyde Park mansion is spectacularly done in a Classical Revival style, the columns and porticos and arcades evoking a very grand Parthenon. The Vanderbilts were prime examples of the "nouveau riche," families who made their millions in the new business frontiers of the 19th and 20th centuries -- the Vanderbilts made their money in the railroad industry -- as opposed to inheriting social stature from aristocratic ancestors. A bit of insecurity about this fact is apparent in the architecture of the mansion: the Vanderbilt mansion website describes the nouveau riche of the late 1800s as beginning to feel that "money was no longer enough." In an effort to conform with the old families who dominated the social scene and were considered higher class than these new millionaires, Frederick Vanderbilt built his family a house reminiscent of "the ancestral home of a noble European line." 
With fancy new homes that looked old and historic, families like the Vanderbilts could fake an illustrious family history. The picture on the left shows the house under construction in 1895, and in 1898 the family moved in. It was designed by Charles Follen McKim of architectural firm McKim, Mead and White. Despite its classic exterior, the house was state-of-the art for its time. It had central heat, power supplied by a hydroelectric plant built on the property, and was made to be fireproof after a previous house on the estate had burned down. I haven't been inside this house either, but apparently the artificial ancestry theme is carried over into the decorating scheme: the house is filled with European art and artifacts, with a particular emphasis on Renaissance and Rococo styles. Also interesting is that this house was decorated during a significant shift in interior design fashions. In the 1890s, the Victorian style of stuffing rooms full of miscellaneous objects (Olana, described in my post below, is a good example of this), was on its way out, and the notion of having an overarching "design principle" was taking over. As a result the Vanderbilt mansion is an eccentric mixture of the two styles, with various designers from both schools of thought putting their mark on each of the house's fifty rooms.
