America in 1939, stuck between the rear-view mirror of the Great Depression and the impending war. Idyllic times? The good ole’ days? The New York World’s Fair of 1939 had as its theme “the world of tomorrow,” one based on the underlying assumption that America was a “mature” economy…
…America’s cities were already jammed with cars and its landscape defaced with billboards in 1939, but in other ways things looked a good deal different from the way they look now. New urban building, which had gone through a fantastic boom during the twenties, had been at a virtual standstill for a decade, so the nation’s cities had a certain look of faded splendor. Now, though, a small crop of new buildings were beginning to appear, many of them pioneering low-cost housing projects; with their unadorned rectilinear planes they anticipated the joyless boxes that were to be a feature of the postwar period.
—left to right, original townhouse at 11 West 53 Street in 1932; Philip L. Goodwin and Edward
Durrell Stone building in 1939, photo by Eliot Elisofon; New west wing and renovated and
improved facilities, designed by Cesar Pelli, open in 1984, photo by Adam Bartos. —click image for source…
Some new buildings, such as a high rise apartment house under construction on New York’s Riverside Drive, represented the last gasp of the elegant past, with such elaborations as decorative towers, filigree in stone, perhaps even a gargoyle or two; but the tide had turned. In New York three more end-of-the-century merchant palaces on Fifth Avenue were about to go under the wrecker’s hammer, and the brand new Museum of Modern Art, designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward D. Stone, foretold the future in its simple lines and generous use of glass.
—This Tudor-style house at 1015 Edgewood was built about 1939 for the Maier family.—click image for source…
In the suburbs Tudor and Colonial houses were the fashion, many of them with fieldstone first floors; some of them cost under $10,000, and all but a few under $20,000. In little towns the jukebox blared “Deep Purple” or “Jeepers Creepers” in the short-order joint, and the old hotel with the mansard roof, although looking a little forlorn, still stood near the railway station. In the countryside, rows of tiny “tourist cabins,” shedding paint and heated with kerosene stoves, were the forerunners of the Neronian motels that were the norm in the 1960’s. ( to be continued)…
COMMENTS