Sarah P. Duke Gardens

The Sarah P. Duke Gardens are on the grounds of Duke University in Durham, NC. It was the brainchild of Dr. Frederic M. Hanes, an original faculty member of Duke Medical School. A botanical enthusiast, Dr. Hanes passed a debris-filled ravine on the way to the school every day, and so persuaded Ms. Duke, who was the widow of one of the university's founders, to finance a public garden on the land. The gardens were built, but unfortunately heavy summer rains and floods ruined them. Sarah Duke had passed away, but Dr. Hanes was still around, so he convinced Sarah's daughter, Mary Duke Biddle, to bankroll a new garden on higher ground and name it in honor of her mother. The Sarah P. Duke Gardens were dedicated in April 1939. It was designed by Ellen Biddle Shipman, an early pioneer in American landscape design. It's one of the remaining examples of her work. It has since expanded to 5 miles of trails and walkways across 55 acres.

Virgin Islands Sketchbook

A couple of weeks ago, me and the family went on vacation to the St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. I figured I wouldn't have much if any solo time for the long-term, labor intensive sketches I usually do, and I've been wanting to try something new anyway. So I bought a small, inexpensive sketchbook and a small watercolor kit. The book was 3.5x5.5 inches (8.9x14 cm), much smaller than my usual 9x12 sketchbook, and the color was all watercolor. All drawn so much faster and looser than I ever do. It's how most urban sketchers work, but it's pretty alien to me. I need a lot more practice and technique, but I liked how some of them came out.

Creque Alley is one of a series of narrow passageways near the shoreline in Charlotte Amalie, the main town of St Thomas. These warehouses once were notorious for housing pirates' loot; now they house restaurants and lots and lots of jewelry stores. It was also the namesake of a song by the Mamas and the Papas, (they added an 'e' in the title of  'Creeque Alley'). Supposedly they wrote the song while crashing with hippies in this alley, though the song doesn't mention the Virgin Islands at all.

The view from our hotel overlooked the bay where the cruise ships docked.

Magen's Beach is probably the most famous of the St. Thomas beaches, so it was the first one we hit. It was great, but actually not our favorite of the trip.

The observatory at Coral World Ocean Park. When you go downstairs, you're under the water and can view all the sealife swimming around.

It immediately reminded me of the Hall of Doom from the old Super-Friends cartoon.

We spent one day on neighboring St. John's Island and made a stop at the Annaberg Plantation, The remnants of this slave plantation are now part of the Virgin Islands National Park. This structure is the ruins of the windmill, standing 38 feet (11.5 m) high.

There is another, similar plantation windmill ruin that stands at the top of the Peace Hill trail.

This is not my favorite painting of the week, but it was my favorite beach, Secret Harbor.

Inscope Arch

Inscope Arch, in the southern end of Central Park, near the zoo and the pond.

Central Park has an intricate system of bridges and arches that were designed to accommodate both pedestrian and equine traffic. These spans allow one form of traffic to pass over or under the other. Originally, there were 27 arches and bridges constructed between 1859 and 1866, with others added later. Each bridge and arch has a unique design, all designed by Calvert Vaux, some with assistance from Jacob Wrey Mould.

The Inscope Arch, built in 1873, is one of the newer bridges. It was built in response to a bottleneck of pedestrians and horseback and carriage drivers on the East Drive near the Pond. Vaux and Mould designed it in the then-popular Ruskinian Gothic style, facing the Tuscan arch with pink and gray granite. Built on swamp land, it is 12 feet (3.7 m) tall, 13 feet 7 inches (4.14 m) wide, and 34 feet (10 m) long. It was restored in the 1970s and then again in the early 2000s.

Process:

As usual, it was drawn on site in pencil, then inked with Pigma Micron pens, and then painted in layers, mostly with water soluble pencils and watercolor washes.

Before It's Gone: The Elizabeth Street Garden

Somehow, I'd never been to the Elizabeth Street Garden in 20+ years of living in New York City, despite having spent plenty of time in the Lower East Side. At least, I don't remember ever going there, and it's a memorable place. But when I heard it was in imminent danger of succumbing to yet another development plan, I made a point of visiting to check it out for my "Before It's Gone" series.

In 1990, an antiques dealer named Allan Reiver leased an abandoned city-owned lot next to his gallery/store to serve as overflow storage for his stock. He kept antique busts and oversize sculptures on it, and eventually began to plant perennials, grass, and trees. People started to come through the store to hang out in the green space, and eventually, in 2013, he added a public entrance to the garden. Besides being a green space, in recent years it has become a community space, hosting yoga classes, concerts, movie nights, readings, and the like.

A few years ago, the city announced plans to turn the lot over to a developer who would build housing units. The pitch is that it would be very affordable housing for senior citizens. They also promise that units will be set aside for the homeless, and that it will be a green eco-friendly building, and LGBTQ-friendly. A lot of promises. And apparently this lot is the only site anywhere in the city that this can be built. Last month, the city served the garden with an eviction notice. Some neighborhood locals, including the late Allan Reiver's son, Joseph, are attempting to fight it in court, but I imagine  that will go the way it usually does. 

As to the question of whether this place is worth saving, I was a bit agnostic, and still am. After visiting this garden, it really did strike me as a special spot, especially in this area of the city, which is really lacking green spaces. It helped that it was a particularly beautiful, unseasonably warm Autumn day when I went. The garden was full of people of all types, enjoying the day and chilling in this peaceful, beautiful spot. What makes it especially attractive is that it has such a quirky, individual, organic character, as opposed to all the generic, cookie cutter plazas that get plopped down by planners.

On the other hand, truly affordable housing really is very, very needed. I'm a bit skeptical of all the promises this developer is making, but it sounds really great on paper. At least it's not just another luxury condo or overpriced retail space. Also, there's a lot of anti-development sentiment that seems to me borders on fetishization. Some people want to preserve every single building, every site, every inch of the city, no matter what, just on some principle. 

Recently, I've been reading a book called Lost New York, and it's striking in how many things have existed in this city which were, in their time, considered iconic and irreplaceable. Much more so than this garden, and with a lot more history . . . it occurred to me that perhaps the reason I wasn't familiar with this garden is because actually it's only been open to the public for less than a decade. So, that puts it into some perspective. It will still be a sad day when this gets bulldozed - I wish the garden's defenders luck, but I don't think they have a chance. So go check it out while you can.

Johnson's Glass House

I don't remember why, but in 2007 I was passing through southern Connecticut with my then-girlfriend/now wife Lisa, and I had heard that architect Philip Johnson's famous Glass House had just been opened for public tours. I wasn't particularly an architecture aficionado, but I thought it might be a fun side trip, only to find that there tickets were sold out for the next six months! Fast forward to this summer, and Lisa's birthday surprise for me is a visit to the Glass House. Much more availability during a global pandemic, I guess.

Built in 1949, the Glass House is just what it sounds like - a house with four glass walls. The entire 1,800 sq ft. (167 m2) interior is visible to the world, except for a brick cylinder that conceals the bathroom. "The idea of a glass house," Johnson said, "where somebody just might be looking - naturally you don't want them to be looking. But what about it? That little edge of danger . . . " I always imagined it to be a transparent house that any passerby could look into. In actuality, it's situated in the middle of 50 acres of rural land. 

The Glass House was not well-received by other prominent architects; Frank Lloyd Wright said that he didn't know whether "to take my hat off or leave it on," and Johnson's idol and inspiration, Mies van der Rohe, ended his first visit to the house in a drunken rage. Nonetheless, the house solidified Johnson's reputation and popularized the notion of modern architecture in the U.S. Johnson used it as a weekend home and hosted events there, including performances by Merce Cunningham and the Velvet Underground. Later it became his permanent residence with his partner, David Whitney, until his death in 2005.

I had heard a bit about Philip Johnson's fascist leanings in the 1930s, and was aware that lately there is a lot of effort devoted to stripping his name off buildings and otherwise cancelling him. Later in life, he dismissed it as a youthful "phase," and it's often downplayed or bracketed as a side note. But reading up on him after this visit, I found that he was really, really into Nazism! He worked as journalist a far-right newspaper, Social Justice, where he wrote admiring reviews of Mein Kampf, visited Hitler Youth camps, attended the Nuremberg Rallies where he thrilled to "all those blond boys in black leather," and then visited the front as Germany invaded Poland. After the U.S. entered the war, of course, he stopped with all that talk, and after the war pointedly avoided mentioning his seven-year "phase."

Years later, he claimed the inspiration for the Glass House to be "a burnt wooden village I saw once where nothing was left but foundations and chimneys of brick." Several historians have pointed out that this ruined house would have been one of the Polish homes destroyed by the German Nazi invasion, to which Johnson was an eyewitness. If that's true, well, holy shit! That beautiful structure suddenly takes on a very dark cast. Johnson's political leanings were not a secret, but somehow he managed to avoid contemporaneous consequences for them, and according to biographer Ian Volner, he used this very fireplace to destroy his incriminating letters and articles.

Johnson used the acreage for full-scale architectural experiments. In addition to the Glass House itself, there are 14 other structures on the site. This one is The Study, Johnson's library and work space.

This 30' (9.1 m) tall tower is a monument to Johnson's best friend, Lincoln Kirstein, a poet and co-founder of the New York City Ballet.

The Glass House site

Blooming Sunflower

 A sunflower in mid-bloom.

Tree and fence

Tree outside my apartment building.

Process

McKenna Park

A still-bare tree at Captain John McKenna, IV Park. It's a small park in Windsor Terrace named after a local soldier who died in the war in Iraq. I like taking my kids there because it's so small and hardly anyone is ever there, except this cranky old woman who's always yelling at other people for being there. She seems to be angry that people aren't social distancing enough, even though it's only a very few people nowhere near each other or her. I suspect she's just never liked people being in "her" park, even before the pandemic.

Inktober 2019 Week 2

Week 2

Terrace Bridge

The Terrace Bridge in Prospect Park.

The Terrace Bridge spans the Lullwater wetland and Prospect Park Lake. It was designed by Calvert Vaux and built in 1890, replacing a previous wooden bridge. It is comprised of six steel arches, set in stone and brick. The bridge was Vaux's last contribution to the park. Olmsted and Vaux originally conceived this area of the park as a site of restaurants and open-air concerts, which did not come to pass. The day I drew this, there was a man who'd tucked himself away in the trees, playing a cello, which gave a sense of what Olmsted and Vaux might have imagined.

The yellow-green of the water is a spread of pond scum that appears every spring.

Prospect Park Urban Sketching

I regularly post sketches to the NYC Urban Sketchers Facebook page, but have never joined them for one of their outings. My schedule never seems to allow it. But this past Wednesday, they were in Prospect Park, at the The Boathouse, not far from my apartment, and I was free, so I joined up with them for a bit. I wasn't able to stay that long and so didn't get to meet many of them in person, but hopefully I'll have the opportunity to join future outings.

Miracle Garden

For the last several years, my summer gig has been working on a play festival for Clubbed Thumb theater. The venue is across the street from this community garden, the Miracle Garden, and last summer I spent my down time drawing it.

This lot was once occupied by a dilapidated, drug-infested building. In the 1983, it was torn down, and the local community was able to secure the lot for a garden. The initial plants all died due to bad soil, but they were able to resurrect it, hence the name "Miracle Garden." For more of the history of the garden, including a film interview with Penny Evans, one of the main forces behind it, visit their website here.

This was actually my third attempt at this view, drawn from the roof of the Wild Project across the street. I still wasn't 100% satisfied, but three tries was enough for me.

These have been there, unmoved, for at least two years. I think it's hilarious that someone used such a huge chain to secure these two rusted old bikes. They are a 1980s Challenger BMX scooter and Schwinn L'il Chik bike. I wonder if they've been there since the garden was built!

The garden is run completely by volunteers, so you never know when it will be open, but if it is, you can visit and hang out in this little oasis on East 3rd St. between Avenues A and B.