Friday, May 30, 2008

Upper West Side, 86th Street at Amsterdam Avenue


Mary Sargent © 2008 ……. click to enlarge
The West Park Presbyterian Church is on the corner of the block my therapist lives on and so I see it weekly and think about photographing it. Not because I like it but because it's there. Not liking it has been a stumbling block, but this photograph almost does it for me. I hasten to add that better people than I have great admiration for it:

Christopher Grey in The New York Times says " . . . its lush, reddish-brown stone is a rare work of rich color." Of course, that was in 1988. He may have changed his mind by now.

The AIA Guide calls it ". . . one of the West Side's loveliest landmarks."

I just can't get with these rough cold stone buildings. Especially if they're that reddish-brown color.

See map.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I ride past that church every day on my way home from work, and as my riding buddy says "Are they EVER going to finish it?" But we can't figure out why the scaffolding is there and what needs to get finished. The scaffolding has been there so long that a troup of homeless people have made the steps into a livingroom, and the church seems otherwise deserted. My specultion is that one day they decided to clean the whole thing and restore it to its reported former loveliness. But then they forgot.