Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll look at a 101-year-old apartment building on the Upper West Side that is celebrating its link to a famous architect. We’ll also say goodbye to Pale Male, the red-tailed hawk who captured the city’s heart.
Before the famous buildings on Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue with the famously opulent duplexes, there was 215 West 92nd Street, a building on the corner of Broadway that was Rosario Candela’s first solo commission.
Candela is often celebrated as the quintessential apartment building architect of the 1920s. The residents of the 92nd Street building — who will celebrate its 100th anniversary with a party on Sunday, delayed a year because of the pandemic — say the touches that distinguished Candela’s larger, later buildings are apparent in theirs: the generous layouts. The service doors in every apartment. The coffered ceiling in the lobby. The marble floors and walls there. (More about them later. )
“He was very definite about his philosophy for the layouts of the apartments and how he would have the separation of the public and private spaces,” said Harriet Greisser, a member of the building’s co-op board, who has lived in the building since 1987. “It was the flow of the apartments. He really believed that they should have the integrity of a home.”
Candela was seven years out of Columbia University when he got the commission for the Clayton, as 215 West 92nd is named. He was said to have put a velvet rope around his drafting table when he was a student to keep others from peeking at his designs and poaching them. “He really was a genius,” the journalist Michael Gross quoted Candela’s granddaughter Jackie as saying. “He was very arrogant and knew his talents.”
The architectural historian Andrew Alpern wrote that the layouts in the Clayton were a testament to Candela’s “early ability to balance effectively the often-conflicting requirements of the developer, the city’s building regulations and the ultimate tenant.” Candela “evidently satisfied his client,” Alpern added, since he received another commission from one of the two developers almost immediately.
And by the end of 1922 he had six more, including one for his first building on the Upper East Side, at 1105 Park Avenue. Alpern wrote that it was “superficially similar to the Clayton on the outside,” but the “very different lobby and interior planning” showed how adaptable Candela could be.
Alpern described the Clayton as “stolid.” It is also solid. Linda Radano, who lives on the second floor and retired recently as a physician assistant, said that she did telehealth sessions in one room while her husband, David Shuler, a choral conductor, worked in another room where there is a Chickering spinet piano. “It is incredibly quiet here,” she said. “The walls are so thick.”
But there are reminders that it was a 1920s building. Laura Schooler said that when she moved in 11 years ago, she discovered that there was no electrical outlet in the bathroom. “Could not dry your hair,” she said. She had one installed.
Maxene Kupperman-Guiñals, on the 14th floor, has lived in the building for almost half its life. She moved there in 1974 with the man she married. They had walked by and asking if any apartments were available.
“Mike the doorman was on,” she recalled, “and he said, ‘There’s a four and a five.’ I said, ‘Could we see the four?’ He goes, ‘No, I don’t have a key.’”
So they looked at the five and loved it, but at $400 a month, the rent was $35 more than they thought they could afford. “We were two young teachers,” she said. “We didn’t have a lot of money.”
“We were like, $35 — we could do this,” she said, “and we did it.”
In 49 years there, she lived through the ups and downs, including a neighborhood that was “dicey” during the crack epidemic. A doorman “took a bullet for us,” she said. “Somebody tried to come into the building and he stopped him, and he got shot.”
In the lobby Greisser pointed out the travertine marble floors and smooth marble walls. The travertine is porous and hard to maintain, she said, adding that she had read that Candela put the travertine on the walls and the smooth marble on the floors in his later buildings.
“This was his first building,” she said. “He definitely learned something here.”
Weather
Expect a sunny day and light wind in the afternoon. At night, it will be mostly clear with light wind and temps around 50.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
Suspended today (Solemnity of the Ascension).
The latest Metro news
Pale Male, the red-tailed hawk who died this week at the age of 32, had a relationship with New York City. And New York City had a love affair with him.
There were the protests that followed a Fifth Avenue co-op board’s decision to have the nest taken down. There was the elation when birders who kept watch saw little hawks poking their heads up.
“He was so visible and so charismatic,” said Jessica Wilson, the executive director of New York City Audubon. “It was a sure thing you could see Pale Male in Central Park and along Fifth Avenue. He really helped popularize bird watching and made it accessible to nonbirders in a way that had not existed before.”
There is the question of whether the bird who died in his sleep was actually Pale Male, who had never been banded. If the dead hawk was Pale Male, he would have been the Methuselah of red-tails, which usually live to about 20.
If Pale Male had a relationship with New York City, he also had lots of relationships with other red-tails. In 2011 there was mate-swapping. The raptor expert John Blakeman told me at the time that this “violates everything we know about red-tails.”
Lola, Pale Male’s mate from 2002 to 2010, had become an ex. No one knew why. Did Pale Male order a rub-out? Marie Winn, who wrote the book “Red-Tails in Love,” told me at the time that “one of Pale Male’s former females was found dead on the side of a highway in New Jersey.”
She said that a new female had shown up “almost instantly.” Her name was Ginger.
She did not last long, and there were others, apparently most recently Octavia.
Blakeman said on Wednesday there was a reason Pale Male had exceeded the life expectancy of red-tailed hawks. “He did not have to expend a great deal of energy chasing his prey,” Blakeman said. “Chowing down on rats” in the park burns relatively few calories, “so he did not wear himself out feeding himself and his offspring. Life was good for him.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Favorite painting
Dear Diary:
A few years ago, I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, as is my habit, stopped in to say “hello” to my favorite painting, Velázquez’s “Juan de Pareja.”
My custom is to take a seat on the bench across from Juan, and then together we carry on, silently, having long intense conversations on art, philosophy, aesthetics, even politics.
On this particular occasion, as I entered the gallery, I saw a well-dressed, middle-aged woman sitting on my usual bench and staring at Juan.
I have become used to having Juan all to myself, so I was mildly annoyed. She was probably resting and would walk away in a few minutes, I thought to myself.
I sat down next to the woman, and began one of my typical unhurried conversations with Juan. After about 10 minutes, the woman was still sitting beside me.
Curious, I turned to her.
“A wonderful painting, isn’t it?” I said.
She smiled.
“Yes, it is,” she said, and then continued to stare silently at Juan.
“Do you come to the Met often?” I asked.
“No, I live in Colorado, so I only come here a few times a year when I visit New York,” she answered. “And when I am in New York, I always visit the Met so I can spend time with this painting.”
#Classic #York #Building #Celebrates #101st #Birthday