The house I live in will be one hundred years old in 2010 and that calls for a celebration. Furthermore, I’ve been here for fifty-five years or for more than half of the life span of the building, and in the same apartment, mind you. I must be the tenant with the longest tenure in the building. You can say I’ve gotten to know the place. Indeed, I have seen so many families come and go, so many tenants arriving and departing, watching children growing up not the least my own. My first son was three when we moved in. He made friends with the neighbors on the floor below and soon the old man and my son were watching baseball games together on the television. Altogether we raised four children, moving them from one room to another as they grew up. Getting them all dressed and fed and off to school every morning was a chore. You could say we had a regular industry going for a while. Happily all my children reached the time when they needed to strike out for themselves and so they left to set up their own homes. For a long time my wife and I enjoyed the apartment, each with our own rooms and the space to pursue our individual interests. But in the nature of things I am now rattling alone in a rather large space; sometimes getting from room to room is an arduous hike.
I am sustained, however, by the fact that the building I live in is a distinguished structure as apartment buildings go. There are several ways a building can be distinguished: interiors, exteriors, and residents. The interior layouts of the apartments were designed to provide generous spaces, natural light and easy movement from room to room. Early in the history of the building the non-supporting wall that separated the living room from the dining room was torn down leaving a much larger space that still served as dining room and living room. The style of continuous interior spaces became the vogue. High ceilings and large windows also contribute to the effect. Years ago the house provided awnings against the summer sun. They have gone the way of other amenities but Venetian blinds fulfill that function of keeping the entering sunlight at just the right level.
Exteriors are the public face of buildings and they consequently carry the burden of conveying the character of the structure. Fortunately, most of the buildings on Claremont Avenue were built before the advent of Modernism and the introduction of influences from the Bauhaus school, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. That meant slick structures of glass and shinny narrow bands of metal and unarticulated surfaces from the ground up to the roof. The new style was based on a new technology, namely the use of steel which made skyscrapers possible. The Claremont Avenue buildings also used steel and so were among the first fireproof apartment buildings in New York City to rise to ten or eleven stories. The elevator also permitted the new heights. Our architect, however, was still infatuated with the French Beaux-Arts style from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hence, the Claremont Avenue buildings used modern technology combined with the classical repertoire of masonry facades, mortar and bricks, corbelled balconies, French windows and powerful cornices to crown the structure. The dignity and elegance of the Old World mated with the new technology conveys the grace and charm of our buildings. The strength of the style, after one hundred years, still endures and enhances the neighborhood as well as the people who reside there. (11/25/09)