BOXES 51-52: Mostly Manhattan

If I asked you to guess where this Antebellum mansion might be located, you might need to be a history buff or a longtime New Yorker to know. It's in Manhattan, just a few blocks from where I lived during my last school year in the city.

In the fall of 1971 I had an opportunity to sublet the apartment of Tom Beeler, a fellow graduate student and Little Magazine editor who lived with his wife and children in a spacious 3-bedroom flat, but who needed to be out of state for a year. The Grinnell was a triangular building occupying an entire half-block at 157th St, just west of the subway stop on Broadway, where a branch of Riverside Drive curves eastward toward Broadway. The rent was too high for me alone (and the apartment ridiculously large for one person), but I found a roommate who was in the School of Architecture, and later, through his connections, a second roommate, a young architect from Zurich who was working for the Port Authority. It was a great year for making new friends, mostly through Ed and Heinz, and for expanding my awareness of architecture in many directions. It was also a sad year because of the death of my father in January.

I didn't take any photos of the Grinnell exterior, but the link above provides plenty of information and photos. As for our apartment, here is a glimpse of part of the living room:

The rope in the foreground is attached to a swing that Tom had set up for his kids--it hung from the supporting beam between the living room and the dining room. The convex mirror was Tom's; the guitar was Ed's and often played; the Paul Klee print was mine; and the typical-graduate-student wine bottles were probably Tom's. As for the floodlight, it was temporarily set up, no doubt by Ed for a photographic experiment. (He had good equipment.) Maybe he was taking photos of reflections in the convex mirror; I see that I tried taking such a picture, revealing the windows in the wall perpendicular to the right of the fireplace. I also tried taking a picture of Ed standing at the end of the long corridor that led down to the two main bedrooms and main bathroom:

In the spring of 1972 I explored a lot of New York neighborhoods, either on my own or with Ed, Heinz or other friends. (Heinz called these expeditions "Strange Walks.") One was up to Inwood Park, at the extreme north end of Manhattan, and back down along the shore of the Hudson toward the GWB. In the photos below you see first a handsome apartment building (the Sutherland) across the street from the Grinnell; then Inwood, with part of the span of the Henry Hudson Bridge across Spuyten Duyvel Creek; a close-up of part of the bridge; railroad tracks along the Hudson; Ed and Heinz walking over a railroad bridge; Heinz; Ed with his camera; and two views of sunset on the Hudson.

A less shadowy photo of Heinz was taken when we were exploring the cast-iron buildings of SoHo, with the nearly completed World Trade Center behind us (I don't recall who was with us to take the picture):

As I mentioned, Jumel Mansion (now more often listed as the Morris-Jumel Mansion, adding the original colonial British owner's name to the rather notorious 19th-century family that had it redesigned) is just a few blocks from the Grinnell, on a high rise of ground overlooking the Harlem River near 161st St. I walked to it one spring day, and continued farther north to the High Bridge around 174th St. This is the site of New York's oldest bridge, originally an aqueduct and footbridge, rebuilt but by 1972 closed to the public, as you see in the photo. (It was reopened to pedestrians in 2015.) Standing above it is the High Bridge Water Tower.

This walk concluded with a visit to the former Loew's 175th Street, one of the great movie palaces, now a church (as it already was in 1972; I was allowed to see the grand auditorium, but didn't attempt any pictures).

Another (shorter) walk where I took photos was a stroll along Riverside Drive near Columbia with Foster, Mike and Toby. The first of these pictures has unfortunately been somehow damaged, but I'll throw it in anyhow.

Another time, I went to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where I saw a movie (When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth) and walked around the area closest to the bridge from Manhattan. Decades away from the hipster scene it has become, Williamsburg at the time was considered "rundown" from an "establishment" viewpoint but I liked seeing the community (mostly Hasidic Jews and African-Americans in the blocks where I walked) and its architectural landmarks, notably a couple of movie palaces and the 1875 Williamsburgh Savings Bank with its imposing Classical dome (and the "h" in its name; it's now a banquet hall). At one point as I stood on a corner looking at a map, a woman drove up to ask directions on how to get up to the Williamsburg Bridge entrance. After I showed her, she said, memorably, "Listen, you look like a nice kid. Take my advice--get out of Williamsburg!" But I stayed to take photos; I'd like to pretend that the ones below are Whistleresque, but they're the usual result of the Instamatic reacting to dim light:

On another Brooklyn walk, I went with Heinz to see a town house that someone he knew had bought--a fixer-upper or, you could say, an early case of gentrification in this part of the borough. But I didn't bring my camera, and all I can say is that we started on Atlantic Avenue and walked maybe to the Fort Greene neighborhood.

I did bring my camera a second time to Stevens, where I was still an instructor, and took a couple of photos of colleagues. All I can tell you now is that in the photo with the equestrian statue and the library in the background, the fellow on the right is my friend Ed Foster; and in the second photo, the left two of the men walking toward the camera are Bob and Maurice, also in the Humanities Department.

One weekend earlier that semester (still winter, in fact), Ed gave me a tour of parts of Western Massachusetts, near where he grew up. One stop was at the poet William Cullen Bryant's Homestead:

As for the other photos I took that weekend, I can identify only some of their locations with any precision: (1) Ed and his car with the Bryant Homestead's view of the Berkshire Hills behind him; (2) Berkshires in the distance beyond a snowy field; (3) totally mysterious empty fountain and gateway; (4) equally mysterious tower, possibly connected with Tanglewood, since that institution owns (5) a replica of a house Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in during the 1850s, near Lenox.

I took a separate Massachusetts trip a few months later, to Boston, where I saw a production of Berlioz' The Trojans and stayed at the house of a group of architecture students I had met through my roommate Ed--but I took no photos. That spring was to be my last living on the East Coast. I was hired to teach at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, starting the next fall. Though I was excited by the prospect of the new position and the courses I'd be teaching, I found it terribly hard leaving New York and all my friends. At least I could anticipate meeting a couple of those friends in Europe later that summer, during my second trip abroad.

A rental car was enough to carry my few belongings and myself from Manhattan back to Ohio, where I took a few photos of the family and one of a tree:

Followers of these pages will recognize my sister, my brother, and of course Donya. The tree was declared, in a local newspaper that summer, to be the oldest black oak in North America--and it was just beyond the end of the block that you see in the preceding photo! An encyclopedia.com entry and a scholarly 2017 article both reaffirm this claim, saying that it has a height of 123 ft. and a circumference of 21.6 ft.--presumably a bit bigger than it was in this 1972 photo.