Ford Amphitheater at Coney Island: Restoration of the Child’s Restaurant

In her Applicator cover story, “The Ford Amphitheater at Coney Island and the Seaside Park,” Architect Diane Kaese highlights the redevelopment and restoration effort at the former Child’s Restaurant. For Vertical Access Preservation Technician Patrick Capruso it was a thrill to see photographs of the finished façades. As a former finisher at Boston Valley Terra Cotta, Patrick helped to sculpt a number of the 752 terra cotta units replicated for the building.

As Kaese explains, ornamental elements of the maritime motif originally modeled by Sculptor Max Keck and produced by the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company were meticulously reproduced using undercutting techniques to accentuate shadows and hide the ¼” joints required for seamless assembly.

According to Patrick, shaping these elaborate snails, ships, and seashells was both difficult and immensely rewarding.

Congratulations to Diane Kaese, Boston Valley Terra Cotta, and the rest of the project team on a job well done!

Berta de Miguel Earns Her Ph.D

Berta de Miguel has earned her Ph.D in Preservation of Architectural Heritage from Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Valencia, Spain. She joined VA as in intern in 2011, initially focusing on our continued research into the works of the Guastavino Company in New York City.

A SPRAT Level I technician, she currently participates in Vertical Access field projects and preservation conferences.

 

Berta is our Metropolitan New York branch office manager and is a NYC Department of Buildings CD-5 Filing Representative. She co-instructed a graduate level course, “Restoration of Historic Buildings: Discovery, Design, Execution”, at Manhattan College in New York City in Spring of 2013.

Berta also participated in the award-winning biographical documentary, El Architecto de Nueva York, a celebration of the lives and careers of the Rafael Guastavinos, father and son, developers of the Guastavino vault architectural construction technique.

For six years prior to joining the VA team, Berta was a project manager of building restoration projects at Edycon, one of the top ten architectural conservation and historic preservation firms in Spain. She was responsible for managing multiple projects with large teams simultaneously, in addition to the preparation of reports to clients and institutions. Berta’s professional background also includes two years studying architectural preservation in Cuba and Belgium. She has been the restoration site project manager on more than twenty landmarks, including the UNESCO World Heritage Site Catedral de Teruel (12th century), the National Landmark Castle of Sagunto (Roman origin), and the San Martin Church of Valencia (14th century).

Congratulations Berta!

Tourist In Your Own Town: Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument

View the latest video in the series, Tourist in Your Own Town, made by the New York Landmark Conservancy, all about the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument.  During the Revolutionary War, the British held thousands of prisoners on ships anchored in the East River. These prisoners represented all thirteen colonies and at least thirteen different nationalities. The Monument marks the site of a crypt for more than 11,500 men and women who died of overcrowding, starvation and disease aboard these prison ships.

Vertical Access performed a comprehensive conditions survey of the exterior granite, bronze brazier and interior brick masonry to help inform the preparation of construction documents for repairs and restoration.  More on our work at the Monument.

 

Tourist in Your Own Town: New York Botanical Garden

View the latest video in the series, Tourist in Your Own Town, made by the New York Landmark Conservancy, all about the New York Botanical Garden.

We’ve had the pleasure of working at the Botanical Garden in  the past and are currently assisting with  maintenance and access fall protection design.  (We love our “hero shots'”!)



 

Blair Kamin: Thompson Center Sale Shouldn’t Automatically Mean Demolition (Chicago Tribune)

 

In the course of its storied architectural history, Chicago has come to rue the demolition of buildings like Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan’s Chicago Stock Exchange. They were torn down for the usual reasons. Owners claimed they were outdated. Politicians refused to stand in the way of “progress.” Activists protested, but not enough ordinary citizens raised their voices. The Stock Exchange, whose entrance arch outside the Art Institute of Chicago forms the city’s wailing wall of historic preservation, fell in 1971-72.

Now, a new crisis looms, this one over the fate of the James R. Thompson Center, the spaceship-shaped glitter palace that is, despite formal and functional flaws, one of Chicago’s most significant works of postmodern architecture.

Read the rest of the story here.   Learn about our involvement with the Thompson Center here.

Flume Fever Afflicted: 126-Year-Old Mining Flume in Western Colorado Clings to its Secret

There is something about the tattered remnants of a 126-year-old mining marvel that keeps drawing the curious back to this remote area along Colorado 141 located in Colorado Canyon Country, mostly on public lands operated by the Bureau of Land Management, Uncompahgre Field office.

Those who keep returning to measure, survey, photograph and examine the mysterious structure known as the Hanging Flume call it “flume fever.” The afflicted wake in the middle of the night to puzzle over how enterprising but misguided gold seekers pinned a 10-mile-long wooden water chute to a sheer cliff to create a hydraulic gold separator.

Our Hanging Flume investigative team this year: Kent Diebolt, Donn Hewes, Keith Luscinski, and Kevin Dalton

Previous preservation efforts on the Flume identified the need for additional investigative work to better understand the diverse construction, innovative engineering, and significance of the Flume to mining history in Colorado.

The red sandstone cliffs of the Dolores and the San Miguel Rivers are the site of one of the longest and most intriguing heritage sites in Colorado: running parallel to the Unaweep-Tabeguache Scenic Byway, this storied and iconic western slope structure has awed international travelers and regional passersby for decades. Sparking such questions as, “What was it for?” “How long did it take to build?” “Who built it?” “And how?” Years of research by local residents, BLM archeologists, and national specialists have provided many conclusive answers however answers to the question of the flume’s construction have remained speculative at best, until now. From April 26 –May 5th Anthony & Associates, Vertical Access and Alpine Archaeological Consultants will be completing Phase Three of an Archaeological Survey funded by History Colorado and the State of Colorado Div. of Reclamation, Mining & Safety The team of experts will conduct investigation of construction methodology at approximate six drop locations.

Project Manager Ron Anthony, of Anthony & Associates, a wood scientist from Fort Collins, CO, believes the technical questions about the flume’s construction methods will be best answered with careful research and investigation.

“Construction of the Hanging Flume in the 1880s was accomplished in a time and place that we can barely imagine,” Anthony says, “It would be selfish and irresponsible to allow these construction, engineering and human achievements to vanish without doing our best to make them available for future generations.”

The flume carried 80-million gallons of water in a 24-hour period to the hydraulic mining operations of the Montrose Placer Mining Company. Taking 3 years and 25 local men to complete, the water was used to provide hydraulic power to separate gold from alluvial rock deposits which originated in the San Juan Mountains before being deposited along the Dolores and San Miguel Rivers. “We know what they built; we just don’t know how they built it and to our knowledge, the construction technology was not documented. Over 100 years have past since its construction and the flume is showing its age.”

In 2006 the Hanging Flume made the World Monument Watch list of 100 Most Endangered Sites. Since that time, the BLM has developed partnerships with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Colorado Preservation, Inc., the Unaweep-Tabeguache Scenic Byway Association, the Interpretive Association of Western Colorado, History Colorado and Colorado Div. of Reclamation, Mining & Safety to help determine how best this unique western slope artifact can be preserved for public education and historic interpretation for future generations.

For more information about the Historic Hanging Flume project please contact Chris Miller, Executive Director, Interpretive Association of Western Colorado at 970-874-6695 or visit www.hangingflume.org

(This story was circulated as a press release on April 20, 2017, and published in the San Miguel Basin Forum).

For more on the hanging flume check out the Unaweep-Tabeguache Scenic Byway Association video here or read some collected musings about our flume fever since 2004.

The Hanging Flume: Gold ambitions led to Marvel of Engineering in Dolores Canyon

As we embark on another investigative assignment at the Hanging Flume next week in Colorado, we found this interesting article from Bob Silbernagel of the Grand Junction Sentinel: Gold ambitions led to Marvel of Engineering in Dolores Canyon.

A century after the flume was abandoned, an effort began to preserve it. The nonprofit Interpretive Association of Western Colorado, working with the Bureau of Land Management, and with assistance from a Colorado State Historical Grant, the JM Kaplan Fund and John Hendricks of Gateway Canyons Resort, contracted for studies of the flume’s construction and its history. In 2012, 48 feet of the flume were rebuilt, using construction techniques similar to those used in 1890 and 1891.

The flume is listed on the National Register of Historic Structures and is the longest historic structure in Colorado.

We’ll be joined by Anthony & Associates and Alpine Archaeological Consultants as we return to the Hanging Flume for continued investigations. Read more about the efforts to document and understand the mysterious construction methods of this historic marvel:

http://bit.ly/2q7FkaT

Can You Guess This Building? Series No. 10

Test your knowledge of historic and iconic buildings in the U.S. (and beyond!) in this series of “guess the building” blog posts.

Series No. 10:

The clues to this building’s use are in its marble and terra cotta ornament. It was designed by the firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, and completed in 1930. Where is it?

 

Answer: Shedd Aquarium, Chicago, IL. This indoor public aquarium was once the largest in the world, holding over five million gallons of water. The building’s Beaux Arts style complements neighboring buildings on the Museum Campus Chicago.

 

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Don’t miss another architectural challenge: subscribe to our newsletter by signing up with your email address in the sidebar. Click here to see all of the posts in this series.

Photos by Vertical Access. Read more about our involvement with the Shedd Aquarium here.

Facade Ordinance Inspection Updates

Building facade inspection programs are mandated by many cities in the United States to proactively identify unsafe conditions that may present a risk of causing injury or damaging property. While the specific requirements of each city’s ordinances differ, all regulations stipulate that inspections be performed at regular intervals.   Specific deadlines and updated requirements are approaching this year for the following municipalities:

  • The City of Philadelphia’s next scheduled inspection reports are due by June 30, 2017 (for buildings constructed between 1951 and 1970);
  • The City of Cincinnati is the newest city to pass a façade ordinance, requiring buildings constructed prior to January 1, 1920 to be inspected on or before July 1, 2017.
  • A new Department of Buildings requirement under New York City’s FISP (Fascade Inspection Safety Program) states that a Supplemental Report on Balconies and Railings needs to be filed for all Local Law 11 Cycle 7 Filings. Cycle 8 filings already incorporate the balcony evaluation requirement.

Vertical Access can assist with city-mandated inspections by using industrial rope access, proven to be an appropriate, safe, efficient and cost-effective option for many façade inspection projects.

More on facade ordinances