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Design, Architecture, Photography & Urbanitas from NYC™
—B Dean Skibinski, Proprietor.

Skibinskipedia™ is the online wunderkammer of B Dean Skibinski, a graphic designer and writer based in New York City. Launched in 2010, it has since been a repository of inspirations and links related to design, architecture, art, film, literature, music, photography, and, of course, New York City. I take great care to either retain or add accurate attribution to each post, but if for some reason any citations are missing or incorrect, please don't hesitate to let me know. Additionally, if work I've featured is yours and you for some reason don't want it featured, I shall be happy to remove it upon your request. Please email or message me as you wish.

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builtmanhattan: 1849Charlie Parker ResidenceArchitect: UnknownLocation: 151 Avenue B I have to squint my third ear to hear Charlie Parker’s music as the seething garble of traditionalist imagination. To me, it runs a perfectly relatable gamut of emotions, a knottiness tending towards sad reflection; in other words, it just sounds like jazz. But if whatever made Parker revolutionary is hard for me to capture, I sometimes think I feel his respectable side, his with-strings side, his friendly-with-Varèse side. (This shouldn’t be a surprise, I suppose: I was practically born bourgeois in thought and act.)This house is where Parker briefly got respectable with Chan Richardson and settled into a kind of family life, at least as much as addiction and a music career would allow. And what an odd site for it, too. This is a Gothic Revival townhouse in a city where few were built and fewer survive. Keyed to the Romantic idea of nature, Gothic style was thought to need a performance in nature — or a reasonable stand-in like in a large, green lot — and a townhouse in an assembly-line row of townhouses in a city full of such rows seemed mighty antithetical to that idea. Perhaps apologetically, then, it lays claim to Gothic in a few, bare gestures: an ogive-shaped, colonnetted entrance; pencil-thin hood moldings over the windows; a little trefoil molding below the cornice. They’d look as glib as a portico in front of a McMansion were they not so expertly done and expertly cared for. This is lovely. And also filed under “photographs of things right around the corner from my apartment that I never think to stop to appreciate myself but probably should more often.”

builtmanhattan:

1849
Charlie Parker Residence

Architect: Unknown
Location: 151 Avenue B

I have to squint my third ear to hear Charlie Parker’s music as the seething garble of traditionalist imagination. To me, it runs a perfectly relatable gamut of emotions, a knottiness tending towards sad reflection; in other words, it just sounds like jazz. But if whatever made Parker revolutionary is hard for me to capture, I sometimes think I feel his respectable side, his with-strings side, his friendly-with-Varèse side. (This shouldn’t be a surprise, I suppose: I was practically born bourgeois in thought and act.)

This house is where Parker briefly got respectable with Chan Richardson and settled into a kind of family life, at least as much as addiction and a music career would allow. And what an odd site for it, too. This is a Gothic Revival townhouse in a city where few were built and fewer survive. Keyed to the Romantic idea of nature, Gothic style was thought to need a performance in nature — or a reasonable stand-in like in a large, green lot — and a townhouse in an assembly-line row of townhouses in a city full of such rows seemed mighty antithetical to that idea. Perhaps apologetically, then, it lays claim to Gothic in a few, bare gestures: an ogive-shaped, colonnetted entrance; pencil-thin hood moldings over the windows; a little trefoil molding below the cornice. They’d look as glib as a portico in front of a McMansion were they not so expertly done and expertly cared for.

This is lovely. And also filed under “photographs of things right around the corner from my apartment that I never think to stop to appreciate myself but probably should more often.”

Tags Architecture New York City East Village Avenue B Charlie Parker Residence Love

Reblogged from East Village, Manhattan  Source builtmanhattan