Place Matters Celebrates Its Tenth Anniversary
June 12, 2008
Last night, Place Matters celebrated its Tenth Anniversary at the Municipal Art Society by honoring ten great places selected from the more than 600 places nominated to the Census of Places That Matter. The honorees were Federation of Black Cowboys, Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center, JCR Percussion, La Plaza Cultural Armando Perez, Mandolin Brothers, A.J. Muste Building ("Peace Pentagon"), Snug Harbor Cultural Center, THE POINT Community Development Corporation, Weeksville Heritage Center, West 4th St. Courts ("The Cage").
To learn more about the honorees, click here to watch a short movie. Also, you can visit the Place Matters website and check out the Census Explorer to search more a database of places that matter in New York, or click here to scroll through the Place That Matters of the Week on the MAS website. The honorees were also featured in yesterday's MetroNY.
Place Matters Celebrates Ten Years
May 01, 2008 |
Coinciding with the 10th anniversary of Place Matters, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has adopted the Place Matters theme for its annual Preservation Month this May. Join MAS and City Lore — sponsors of Place Matters — at a party in June to celebrate this anniversary, salute the people that make these places possible, and honor 10 places that matter selected by a panel of place enthusiasts from the more than 650 places nominated by the public. See the back cover of this newsletter for details, and visit www.placematters.net to add the places that matter to you to the census.
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Place that Matters of the Week
From local bakeries and hidden gardens to neighborhood sandlots and historic churches, New York City is filled with places that matter to its residents. The MAS highlights a different Place that Matters each week.
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More Information
Place Matters is a joint project of City Lore and the Municipal Art Society and was founded in 1998. For more information on Place Matters visit www.placematters.net.Week 69: Jacques Marchais Museum - Unique Collection of Tibetan Art
May 13, 2008
Sitting on Lighthouse Hill -- one of the highest points on the eastern seaboard -- the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art has been a beacon for Staten Island's cultural life since 1948.
In the early 1940s, former actress and successful gallery owner Jacques Marchais built a special home for her unique collection of Tibetan art. Sadly, only months after completing her Center for Tibetan art, library and garden, Ms. Marchais died. However, the endowment left by her husband and the caretaking efforts of family friends and volunteers kept the collection and building sufficiently intact to survive. Continue reading...
Week 68: The Mosaic Benches at Grant's Tomb - Public Art on a Large-Scale
April 30, 2008 |
In the early 1970s, as vandalism and graffiti threatened to engulf the 1897 memorial to General Grant in Riverside Park, the National Park Service had an interesting idea. Rather than try to protect Grant's Tomb by building a fence to keep people away, why not make the austere memorial and nearby residents feel more like neighbors? The Park Service collaborated with the organization CITYarts to work with artists, architects, and community volunteers to create something wonderful on site.
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Week 67: Site of Piccirilli Studios - Where Stone Monuments Were Born
April 15, 2008 |
Giuseppe Piccirilli and his six sons -- Attilio, Furio, Ferrucio, Getulio, Masaniello and Orazio -- opened two sculpting and stone-carving studios near their home at 471 E. 142nd Street, in the Mott Haven district of the Bronx not long after arriving in the US from Italy in the late 1880s.
Week 66: Kaufmann Conference Center at 809 United Nations Plaza - Hidden Modernist Gem
April 02, 2008
In 1961, Finnish architect Alvar Aalto (1898-1976) designed the beautiful conference room on the 12th floor of the Institute for International Education (the organization that administers the Fulbright programs). This little-known gem of a meeting room is used by the Finnish consulate for its holiday gala in honor of Aalto, who is known in Finland and elsewhere as a master of the International Modernist style. The room can also be rented for public events. Try to attend one and you'll see for yourself the curving ash and birch forms and the blue porcelain tiles that grace the space. The balcony looks out onto the UN.
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Week 65: Highbridge Park - 19 Acres and 3 Landmarks
March 18, 2008 |
Highbridge Park covers about 119 of the more than 500 acres of city parkland north of 155th Street. It's also the site of several much-loved and officially designated landmarks: the High Bridge itself (dating from 1848 - the oldest standing bridge in the city), the Water Tower (1872), and the High Bridge Pool and Play Center (1936, one of the 11 giant pools that Robert Moses built).
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Week 64: Harlem Record Shack - Rare Groove Source Going Extinct
March 05, 2008
Located at 274 W. 125th Street in Harlem, the Harlem Record Shack has been in its current location opposite the Apollo Theater in 1972 and open for business since 1968.
Owner Sikhulu Shange first came to New York in 1964 to perform at the World's Fair with a South African dance troupe, and four years later opened his store. Since then, he has been stocking the kinds of music that he and his customers love, regardless of whether the record companies or big stores sell it. Unfortunately, at the end of this month, the Record Shack will lose its lease. Continue reading...
Week 63: The Former Rand School - New York Socialist Hub
February 19, 2008
Politics in NYC hasn't always been limited to the Democrats and Republicans. The Rand School, located at 7 E. 15th St., in Greenwich Village, was founded in 1906 by the American Socialist Society.
Established to extend the understanding and practice of socialism, it soon expanded its course offerings to include vocational training and non-socialist courses in the humanities. During its peak years in the early 1920s, the school counted over 5,000 enrolled students and held frequent lectures by notables such as August Claessens, Helen Keller, W.E.B Dubois, Bertrand Russell, Diego Rivera, Upton Sinclair, and Jack London. Continue reading...
Week 62: 4W Circle of Art and Enterprise - Celebrating the Cultures of the African Diaspora
January 23, 2008
For 17 years, 4W Circle of Art and Enterprise at 704 Fulton St. in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, has been a place to buy gifts -- some African-inspired, others locally made or from around the world. It has also been a showcase and business incubator for local artists, and a community space for programs celebrating the cultures of the African Diaspora.
4W, referring to the tag the four female co-founders gave themselves - "Women Working and Winning for the World", was featured as a Place that Matters in 2006 and, unfortunately, the store is closing at the end of January 2008. Rising rent certainly influenced the decision to close 4W, but it was not the only reason. Individual and family factors also played a role, as they often do for places that are neither institutions nor large corporations. We love places like 4W because they are unique. But that very quality also makes them more vulnerable. Continue reading...
Week 61: Luna Park - Former Wonder of Coney Island
January 14, 2008
Currently a "ghost site", Luna Park opened in 1903 as the second of Coney Island's three great amusement parks. Its breathtaking rides, seaside location, graceful physical spaces, thousands of electric lights and the fantasy it all created thrilled New Yorkers for decades until fires in 1944 and 1945 closed the park down.
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Week 60: Roosevelt House - Former Residence of FDR
January 07, 2008
Located at 47-49 E. 65th Street, the Roosevelt House is actually two interconnected townhouses which were formerly inhabited on one side by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and their children and Franklin's mother Sara on the other. It was the Roosevelt's NYC home base in the years before his Presidency.
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Week 59: La Nacional Spanish Restaurant - Un Pedazo de Espana en Nueva York
January 01, 2008
Located at 239 W. 14th St. (between 7th & 8th avenues) in Greenwich Village, La Nacional is one of the few remaining remnants of a strip once commonly known as "Little Spain" for its constellation of stores, restaurants and community institutions that served Spanish New Yorkers.
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Week 58: Margaret Sanger Clinic - Vanguard of Planned Parenthood
December 13, 2007
Margaret Sanger's first birth control clinic, at 46 Amboy St. in Brownsville, Brooklyn, was the city's first clinic promoting birth control. For 9 days in 1916, women and men thronged the sidewalk outside of a 3-story tenement at 46 Amboy St., waiting to learn about contraception from Margaret Sanger and her sister Ethel Byrne, both nurses. Learn was the operative word. Just disseminating information about birth control (a term Sanger later coined) was then illegal.
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Week 57: NYC's Jazz Clubs - Still Going Strong
December 04, 2007
Since the 1920s, New York’s hundreds of jazz venues have been a key part of the history and experience of jazz. Take our brand new virtual Jazz Tour to learn about some of the spots New Yorkers have loved -- the Savoy, Park Palace, Village Vanguard, the W. 52nd St. clubs, Club 845, the Five Spot, The East, Lenox Lounge, and Marjorie Eliot's Parlor. Three of these places are still going strong, and contact info is listed.
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Week 56: The Magic Table at Cafe Edison - No Illusion
October 18, 2007
Since 1942, the Magic Table at Café Edison, in the Edison Hotel, 228 W. 47th St., Manhattan, has been the gathering place for magicians and their friends to share secrets and schmooze. "The Table" is site of the Society of American Magician's Magic Table and, though the site has changed occasionally over time, for the last three decades it has lodged in the coffee shop at the Edison Hotel.
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Week 55: Jackson Heights Historic District - Garden Apartment Central
September 26, 2007
Roughly stretching from 76th to 86th streets and Northern Boulevard to Roosevelt Avenue, in Jackson Heights, Queens, the Jackson Heights Historic District, designated in 1993, preserves a remarkable cluster of buildings from the 1910s and 1920s. These buildings were originally built to entice upwardly mobile (and white, non-Jewish) middle-class New Yorkers to the then rural stretches of Queens by creating distinctively urban, multi-unit apartment buildings in a landscaped and suburban setting.. With designs inspired by philanthropic experiments in middle-income and working-class housing in Europe and the US, the Queensboro Corporation and its principal architects created a new housing type that became known as the "garden apartment."
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Week 54: Two 9/11 Memorials
September 10, 2007
In remembrance, our places that matter of the week are two September 11th memorials: "Postcards" in St. George, Staten Island, nominated by Laura Jean Watters, and the "Tribute in Light" in lower Manhattan.
"Postcards" is the name of architect Masayuki Sono's memorial tribute to Staten Islanders lost in the attacks. Sono gave his two outsized postcards "origami-like inward folds (as if to keep a personal message private)." On the sculpture's inner walls, small granite "commemorative stamps" facing the harbor bear the names of those who died. Continue reading...
Week 53: Stanton Street Synagogue - Persistent LES Jewish History
One of the few remaining tenement synagogues in the Lower East Side, the compact Stanton Street shul (Yiddish for synagogue), at 180 Stanton Street, was built in 1913 by a hometown society in Brzezan in southeast Galicia, in modern-day Ukraine. It was almost closed in 2000 but the sale of the building and the demise of the shul was stopped by members of the congregation. Now, a homegrown effort is underway to restore the building and renew the congregation, and an open welcome is extended to all to visit the synagogue.
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Week 52: Garden Cafeteria - Former Hang-Out for Jewish Intelligencia
September 05, 2007
The Garden Cafeteria at 165 East Broadway and the corner of Rutgers Street, was one of the most storied places on the Lower East Side in its day. Adjacent to the offices of The Forvertz/ Forward Jewish Daily the cafeteria was a favorite of the paper's writers and poets, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, and so beloved was it that many believe that Leon Trotsky once frequented it, despite the cafe only being founded in 1941.
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Week 51: Lenox Lounge - Historic City Jazz Club
August 28, 2007
Operated continuously since 1941, except for a seven-month interruption for renovation in 1999-2000, the Lenox Lounge at 288 Lenox Ave. in Harlem is one of New York's most historic jazz clubs.
Alvin Reid, Sr. found the club a bit too elegant for his taste when he first encountered it as a youngster in the 1950s. But when he bought it from the Greco family in 1988, he thought a revived Lenox Lounge would be just the thing to revitalize his beloved neighborhood and its signature music at one and the same time. It hasn't been easy. Continue reading...