The Dyckman Farmhouse "Schlep In The City: Walking Broadway": June 21, 2018 At 204th and Broadway we stopped and pondered the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, sitting handsomely atop one of those hills. Built in 1784, it is the oldest farmhouse in Manhattan, which is both an impressive feat and also demonstrates the vagaries of Manhattan real estate. The other four boroughs all have farmhouses from the 18th century, but houses from the same period in Manhattan were regularly lost to fires, destroyed in the Revolutionary War (as is the case for the house that occupied this spot before the current Dyckman house), sold, resold, and demolished to make way for more commercially viable properties. The Dyckman Farmhouse itself nearly met the same fate before being repurchased by Dyckman descendants in 1915 and then turned into a museum from 1916-onward. To learn more about the Dyckman Farmhouse and other buildings along Broadway, visit: https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/schlep-in-the-city-walking-broadway

The Belleclaire "Schlep In The City: Walking Broadway": June 21, 2018 The Belleclaire was one of Emery Roth's first projects in New York, a precursor to his legendary apartment buildings on Central Park West. Completed in 1903, it was one example of a first generation of opulent structures designed to entice upper-class New Yorkers into apartment living. The building was landmarked in 1987, and its designation report characterizes its mixture of Art Nouveau and Secessionist architecture styles as "a fascinating stylistic anomaly." Its original bowling alley in the basement is gone, as is the cupola that once topped its northeastern turret. But its lively and dynamic facade remains, and after years as an SRO stripped of many of its original features, it has now been reconfigured as a hotel with restored details. To learn more about the Belleclaire and other buildings on Broadway, visit: https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/schlep-in-the-city-walking-broadway

The Equitable Building "Schlep In The City: Walking Broadway": June 21, 2018 The Equitable Building, at 120 Broadway, was the largest office building in the world when it was completed in 1915. But soon after it opened complaints mounted from its neighbors about the massive shadows cast by its unbroken, 40-story facade. These concerns added greater urgency to a debate that was already occurring about what the unchecked growth of skyscrapers might mean for New York's future. In 1916 New York passed its first zoning regulation, limiting the mass of buildings once they reached certain height thresholds. Architects adapted to this regulation with the use of setbacks, giving a generation of New York's skyscrapers their distinct silhouettes. To learn more about the Equitable Building and other buildings on Broadway, visit: https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/schlep-in-the-city-walking-broadway

140 Broadway "Schlep In The City: Walking Broadway": June 21, 2018 In 1961 the zoning law was amended — among the new standards was a concept called incentive zoning, which meant that buildings could be tall with flat facades if they were set back from the street and provided a public plaza. 140 Broadway, built in 1968, is a prime example of this principle in action. It features a quintessential 1960s paved plaza whimsically offset by Isamu Noguchi's Red Cube. To learn more about 140 Broadway and other Broadway sites, visit: https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/schlep-in-the-city-walking-broadway

1 Broadway (former Customs House, now NMAI) "Schlep In The City: Walking Broadway": June 21, 2018 Ice cream in hand, with New York Harbor sparkling to our right, we gazed at one last site — the U.S. Customs House. Now home to the National Museum of the American Indian, it stands largely in the footprint of the first major structure recorded here — Fort Amsterdam. How poignant and disorienting New York can be — we traversed an entire island's worth of architectural innovation, economic rises and falls, deep and unresolved arguments about gentrification and neighborhood character, cliffs and forests, hot dogs and ice cream, to find ourselves contemplating a museum striving to interpret the lives of people whose own displacement and quest for survival was set into motion by the settlers who previously built a fort in the same spot. And our own vantage point at 1 Broadway is built on landfill, and originally would have been in the river — the invented coast of an infinite city. To learn more about the former Custom house and other buildings on Broadway, visit: https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/schlep-in-the-city-walking-broadway