The Racist Tone of Trump and Giuliani's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in New York City.

I am not dead yet and my long term memory is quite good. I remember a lot of media noise from TV (three channels) and the Murdoch NY Post and the NYT - PC chat makers in the 80's. And looking at it all now from the true POV - ART OF THE LIE Vietnam Veterans Memorial dedicated in 1985 and (?) built by Trump's construction??? ...


A lot of background noise in which, if I were a total innocent, would have to say from memory that all the PR and Publicists and Free Murdoch canary cage newsprint - giving most credit to The Donald for the stirring monument to our local boys who fought and more importantly died in the Vietnam War.


Something triggered this thing. The firing of Colonel Alexander Vindman who was fired from his White House job for testifying to the House on Trump extortion call to the President of Ukraine. And an Internet headline of 1,000 veterans attacking Trump and defending Colonel Vindman in the public forum.


Then trying to refresh my memory - There is this thing. I see in Wikipedia that Donald Trump donated one million dollars to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in downtown New York City.


I would if I could demand a citation other than the footnote numbers in Wiki. Because somehow a cow or a cat or whatever Donald Trump is if classifiable as a animal / beast does not change its stripes and or spots except when lying 24/7 in the President's House at DC's Pennsylvania Avenue.


That I know in my heart and soul that Donald Trump's million dollar donation never made it to the commission but got side-tracked or put in accounts receivable while the city went ahead and build this racist monument to whites only in particular in NYC.


I say racist because when I first visited this site I was moved by the words of letters sent home from Vietnam by soldiers doing the grunt work of war.


But the monument is built at street level and something did no ring true in the sincerity or inspiration of its design. And then, and well as now, my POV is not from a penthouse or a corner CEO office in a high rise office building far, far away from the rhythm and beat of the street of ordinary people such as myself.


The "letters etched in glass lacked just one thing" - my inner voice said to me as I finished that first visit. The Monument lacked one letter in Spanish or even one letter translated from Spanish from a soldier with a Hispanic sounding name as I recall.

Not much true bang for the buck from a pile of glass bricks for 2.5 MILLION in 1985 Bucks imho.


That literature on the site states that it was a nationwide search for letters home from Vietnam Veterans. That perhaps if the Vietnam Veterans NYC memorial were a national monument, it would be fair to say to search nationwide for veteran's letters with white sounding surnames  were used and would be something that Fred Trump would have appreciated and actually contributed to in the 1930s, 1940s etc. And a lover of all things fascist / racist too.


I say this now in retrospect. I knew it in my thirties. I smelled a con regarding this monument and its insincerity to Vietnam Veterans. The hype was too much at the time. People with bone-spurs had the New York Times hanging on his every quote like he was going to transform NYC architecture instead of just putting a band-aid over it - clad covered over more like the case, in many cases.


Hell Rudy Giuliani had already poured another $7 million into the shrine in the months prior to 911 and rededicated the park with a new fountain added and black granite pylons listing the names of the seven thoughts NYC dead in Vietnam.


BTW, I count approximately 245 Hispanic names on the list of the 1,741 NYC Vietnam dead. That works out to be something like 14% of the dead. National search for letters and not one Spanish letter on Trump and now Redux Rudy's monument to greed and mob supplied concrete like over at the Rudy'd defunct emergency city command center at 7 WTC - defunct after 911.


And the Wikipedia article already says that they are going to knock down this monument of respect to Vietnam Veterans when the Second Avenue Subway boondoggle reaches down into downtown in the next decade or so. Can't put a subway entrance out of the basement of the two or three adjacent office towers. They could put Penn Station under Madison Square Garden but the public officials are already dreaming up ways to make a fortune off of no bid contracts and trash the Trump-Giuliani Veterans cash cow one more time.


Walk of Honor Names

https://www.vietnamveteransplaza.com/virtual-tour/walk-of-honor/walk-of-honor-names-abbate-through-brandes/




Oswego NY Palladium Times 7 May 1985


Among those in the dedication ceremonies were men wearing black armbands and black jackets to remember 2, 247 American soldiers list as missing in action.


President Reagan sent a telegram asking veterans to "re-dedicate ourselves to the mission comrades in arms."


Said developer Donald Trump, who donated $1 million to the veterans and to a jobs program set up by the city to help 70, 000 unemployed New York veterans. "It was a great evening. I only wish it could have taken place 10 years ago"


(Have to wonder if the reporters or editorial staff of a New York State newspaper worded the money thing about Trump as it stood at the moment - and not like NYT reporters repeating the official party line over and over again like a lot of hack historians - with regard to the back-dated Trump Corp check still to be cashed by the city and it being moved from the monument construction budget column to the "maybe we will do something for Vets in the future thing" A/R column of the accounting tricks books of Ed Koch & co. etc.)



NYT - 7 May 1985 - New York Pays Homage to Vietnam Veterans


The centerpiece of the commission's effort is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a glass-block wall, 70 feet long and 16 feet high, which is etched with excerpts from 83 letters - including Sergeant Calamia's - that were written by or to the soldiers who served in America's most unpopular war.


''It's not just brick and mortar,'' said Donald Trump, the real-estate executive who donated $1 million of the $2.5 million raised by the commission, which is also charged with financing programs for unemployed local veterans. ''It's very much a living monument."

''I was a very strong opponent of the Vietnam War,'' he said, ''but I also recognized that the people who went to fight were great Americans. I always thought they got a bad shake in life and never got their just recognition.''

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Mother Cabrini - A Great Soul Being Insulted By/In NYC Politics

Mother Cabrini in her lifetime did more charity for the benefit of humanity than a dozen billionaires today and their greasy check books. This is more than an ethnic thing to me. Pity she is being tossed around today as some sort of political football in a popularity contest/poll for statue space to reinforce feminism and not true female power of soul. I won't call the mayor's wife biased but she and her circle have a lot of PC blindspots. Just saying.

https://nypost.com/2019/10/13/cuomo-on-cabrini-statue-snub-is-symbol-of-difficult-times-in-this-country/

Speaking at Saturday night’s Columbus Citizens Foundation Gala, Cuomo urged the entire Italian-American community to “stand up” in support of the honor — calling it an “affront” that Mother Cabrini was passed over despite coming first in a poll by first lady Chirlane McCray’s “She Built NYC” statue program.

Cuomo suggested that the rejection was emblematic of the “difficult times in this country” with the “pain and the injustice of discrimination.”

“There is a fear, there’s an anxiety, there’s a divisiveness that you see and feel every day,” he said.

“As Italian-Americans, we must also remember that we ourselves are not immune from attack. The ugliness of Italian American stereotyping is still alive and well. Our battle is not over.”

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Bishop Sheen Being Evicted From His Crypt in Saint Patrick's Cathedral NYC - Bones Worth More in Illinois Religious Market Than NYC Market

Archdiocese of New York gives up fight over Bishop Sheen’s remains

Door to the bishop's crypt under the altar btw opposite a door leading to the sacristy and altar boy's changing room (wink, nod). Millionaire banker Eugene Kelly who started his substantial fortune in the gold fields of California in 1849 paid for half the original cathedral and got denied a crypt promised to him in the "private chapel", the original "crypt" under the Lady's Chapel, now rented out by the hour in the basement. Countess Annie Leary promised a spot there too but her niece ripped her off and never gave the archdiocese the $200,000 promised in her will in 1919 for said purpose. Miss Anna Leary cited over years for keeping two houses, in Manhattan and Queens, full of cats and dogs which the ASPCA had to clean out and destroy every ten years or so for neglect ("cruelty"). Miss Leary died alone and blind, aged 91, and in the care, in the house of her housekeeper in Hastings on Hudson in 1965 and worth half a million dollars and without a will. Oh the bricks and faux stone facades of St. Patrick's have a lot of tales to tell. Meow.


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Francis Cardinal Spellman - Patron Saint of Closeted Clergy?

Looking at the agony of some closeted clergy who can’t leave their job and or vocation, they have no job skills. And quite frankly they have never touched a child or adolescent in the rounds of their duties.

Looking at the heartbreak of young men who cannot lie to themselves about their natural sexuality, who cannot pretend that they are not homosexual in their life outlook or deny their birthright. They do not want to be clergy living a lie. That is one reason the clergy is dying. For centuries it has always been the "odd" son that got foisted off the family meal ticket and into Holy Orders.

Looking for an image to match the hypocrisy of the self serving American Bishops, trying for close to a decade now, to keep throwing shit against the wall in hopes that it will stick and find a sufficient scapegoat, to blame the clergy child sex abuse scandal on, nothing sticks except the truth.

Mismanagement and not caring about humanity has marked the American Catholic Hierarchy for decades.

The magisterium of the RC church has always been trickle down from the top. Arch-conservatives such as Francis Cardinal Spellman set the tone of things to come, failure, in the American Catholic church when he said “Change will not get past the Statue of Liberty” at Vatican II to his cronies.

When the John Jay College/USCCB whitewash talks about priests not properly trained in the 1940s and 1950s and not being able to function, they only scratch the surface of ten more needed studies on human sexuality and the repressed state of it in the RC church.

“Researchers at John Jay College of Criminal Justice said most of the abusive priests were ordained in the 1940s and 50s and were not properly trained to confront the social upheavals of the 1960s.”

Interesting point. But who was in charge of the American Catholic Church in the 40s, 50s and 60s or set the tone for the whole nation. None other than Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, first among equals among American Catholic clergy and very clever and very ambitious to push that church’s foreign born agenda.

“Franny” was the success role model of every Irish Catholic boy in the Seminary who wanted to be rich, respected and powerful. And yeah there was that ritual and Jesus thing too. But the real power was in raising money from rich friends to build schools, hospitals, universities and churches too.

The baby boom of post WWII meant that you had to crank up the seminary machine and spit hundreds and thousands of new priests out on an annual basis to maintain all that new church property, schools, hospitals, universities and churches too.

On that point, the John Jay College report may be right. But then again what the Vatican is presently embracing with pandering to the right wing SSPX party in the church is probably a mistake and an unintended cup of hemlock.

Grinding out priests out of makeshift seminaries in South America, Africa and Asia is setting the stage for the final refuge of the RC church and also the final death throes of that church using the Spellman model of church business success to sell the product. It is a defective dysfunctional model of that product, because child abuse among untrained and sexually repressed, closeted, celibate clergy will produce the same results in the rest of world that it has done here in America in the past half century.

I remember attending the Army Navy Game in 1967 with my father in Philly. The loud speaker made the announcement that Francis Cardinal Spellman, Vicar General of the Armed Forces, had died. The crowd was momentarily silent and then went back to its business.

I asked my father who Cardinal Spellman was. He gave me that “don’t ask” non verbal Irish look. It was also the look you might get when asking about uncle Fred who you never met. It was that don’t ask about your crazy queer uncle in the attic look. I shut up.

Indeed, Cardinal Spellman’s taste for chorus boys was no secret amongst Irish Catholics it would seem. The MSM complied with the conspiracy to keep quiet as well on the subject of the biggest queen in America, red dress and all, living in the Bishop’s Palace at 50th St. and Madison Avenue in New York City on the grounds of St. Patrick’s Cathedral as Archbishop of the New York Diocese.

Perhaps the present political culture wars started in the thirties when people like Joseph P. Kennedy, Eugenio Pacelli (Pius XII) and Franny Spellman sat down to dinner in Boston to plot the silence of radio populist Father Charles Coughlin and plot other political strategy for the 1936 re-election of FDR. But this is not really a history lesson, is it?

An aside, I don’t think that J. Edgar Hoover was as big a queen as Francis, as some say. J. might have been a closeted gay and maybe even asexual. I don’t think that he wore dresses. I think those stories about J. Edgar are exaggerated and revenge after that blackmailing bureaucratic snake went to his eternal reward and have been perpetuated by his many, many, many enemies.

Indeed, the dysfunction of recent American culture seems to stem from the McCarthy era. Everybody knows that Joe McCarthy was a tortured repressed closet gay and only married to have a beard wife. Another crony of Joe Kennedy, former gangster and bootlegger, and father of a future Catholic (first and only, thank God) U.S. President.

The overtone of the present culture war is not so much about gay or suppressed gay sexuality as it is about suppressed sexuality among Christians who have a mindset that all sex is dirty. It is an immature view that the rest of the world is not aware of from a distance. But if the American Empire falls tomorrow and people, future historians, ask why. One primary reason was that honest discourse in the public arena had to always talk around the elephant in the room, and that is the Christian distorted view of human sexuality. Laws against women, laws against gays, they are all laws against God’s gift to humanity – sexuality.

In a sense there was one great conspiracy among the RCs or the Irish Catholics in general to get a RC and or Irish Catholic into the White House. And if that meant covering up everybody’s personal flaws - of McCarthy, Kennedy, Spellman, well it worked. Don’t ask, don’t tell worked quite well for centuries among the rich and the elites of governments and church hierarchies.

There is an incredible amount of silence and lack of published documentation about Franny Spellman’s open secret sexuality. Even the New York Times kept silent. Now that was power to be feared for the NYT to be silenced back then when that paper still had a backbone.

So when the present hierarchy of the American Catholic Church want to blame child abuse on the 40s, 50s and 60s, let’s also have an open discussion about celibacy and closeted clergy and the patron saint of closeted “celibate” clergy, let’s start talking about Saint Franny, our gay uncle in America’s history attic. The truth could set you free. 



T.C.C. May 24, 2011


Threat - Cultural Rape of the Poor - Repeal of ACA - White Male Entitlement

Looking at the powers of the corporations, the evil corporations to drain the blood and soul out of us for the next quarterly profit and CEO mandated bonuses - I look at the recent election of White Ethnic Neanderthals to turn back time. I realize that I can do nothing to stop the about to happen shit storms resulting from putting a mentally (Caligula level) ill creep in as chief executive of the American government...

A guy you just want to rape an underage ... with is the new having a beer with standard of the GOP? * 

(The Roman Church way ahead on that learning curve btw.)

That I thought that having an inbred wasp idiot like George W Bush the ideal man for the moron in the street to have a bud lite with as a standard for the sale of one's worthless soul to excellence on the Wharton Global Spreadsheet that values humans as zero or less than zero on that new standard of man's "worth" - less than zero... thought that was a new world low in the evolving global culture. Talk about going down low(er)...

That the dying embers of the white male entitlement going back to the hatred and division of humanity with the newly minted King James christian justifiable hate book in the seventeenth century planting the two roots of American evil stemming out from the Puritans in New England, stealing land from and killing natives, and the Cotton Exchanges / slave marts of the South.

... that the dying embers of the old world order thinks it can epoxy it's way back to life entombed in clear plastic, stagnant and an iconic relic for all to worship or suck on like a relic of John Paul II etc...

That the implied gratification of white men to rape their slaves, black and white, male and female, poor mostly, these Obamacare creatures... that this political and moral threat regarding basic human rights to healthcare is not unlike a pending real Cultural Rape of the Poor on a metaphoric scale. 

That the number of men and women willing to sell their souls to the new ball washer GOP Great NEW "christianity" is not unlike a bunch of malformed privileged teenage boys, addicted to too too much porn, and with the world and or its once moral teachers etc. out to tea. So PC...

* White Male Entitlement

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The Donald’s Education Ponzi Scam Comes Home to Roost

The Donald’s Education Ponzi Scam Comes Home to Roost

J.FifeSymington III was a crook who made a pile of money off of bank loans from his own bank to build plazas and empty office buildings in downtown Phoenix in the Savings and Loan scam in the late Eighties. The best way to stay out of prison was to run for Governor and keep the federal prosecutors at bay with Arizona Taxpayers dollars. Hillary Clinton ran for the Senate because of all her and her husband’s enemies wanting to subpoena them after Bill left office. Retiring Senator Monahan of NY urged her to run for his Senate seat, told her that if she and or her husband got caught on any legal matters, she could demand to be tried in the Senate by her peers which rarely happens. She stayed in Senate for eight years, one year longer than the standard seven years statute of limitations laws regarding civil law BTW. George W. Bush and his hand in the promotion and non-inspection/regulation of the ENRON SCAM made it necessary for him to run for higher office to avoid prison as co-conspirator as early as his years as Texas Governor - Ken Lay and Enron two monsters that W could never say no to. 

Now Donald

Trump ahead of his Trump University multi-million dollar Ponzi Scam blowing up in the California and NYS courts and with it negative press wants, hoping for the FBI to protect the future GOP Prez of the United States = is seeking higher office to protect his thieving ass from JAIL. Geez. America, ain’t it a great place. #DonaldTrump #TrumpUniversity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fife_Symington

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron

http://www.democracynow.org/2006/5/26/enron_the_bush_connection

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New York City NYC - 5 Boroughs - Topical

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"Read my lips." 2016 - "He Kept Us Safe" -- Jeb Bush

George H.W. Bush:

"Read my lips. No New Taxes!" 1988

2016 Update:

"He (sic - W) kept us safe! -- Jeb Bush

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Mayor de Blasio Marches in Queens County “St Pat’s For All” Parade

In respect to the decades old ban on openly Gays in the Manhattan St Patrick’s day Parade, a symbol of local RC bishopic and Irish power, the mayor of all the people marched today in favor of diversity and individual freedom.

http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/NYC-Mayor-Marches-in-St-Pats-For-All-Parade-294581841.html

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio marched in the snow Sunday with hundreds of participants in an alternative St. Patrick's Day parade -- one that welcomes lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender groups.

The parade in Queens is called St. Pat's for All. It's an alternative to the city's centuries-old St. Patrick's Day Parade in Manhattan, which for years has excluded gay groups….

De Blasio praised the crowd at the alternative parade for braving the cold and snow.

"That is what pride is all about -- pride in the fact that in New York City, you can be whoever you are, he said.

The two grand marshals at the 15th annual St. Pat's for All parade were longtime human rights activist Kerry Kennedy and Tony Award-winning actor Brian O'Byrne.

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Unearthing America – One Shovel Full of Shit At A Time – History Channel

Cleopatra's Needle, Central Park NYC
(Public Domain)

Scott Wolter, the world’s leading “Forensic Geologist” is forever trying to figure out if it was a cat or a possum that shit on a rock in your backyard, is host of a History Channel entertainer “Unearthing America”.

Working from and or for an unseen POV – paranoid, white, Mormon-like, this clown has one of those background noise history programs that sees conspiracy and the Templars and the Masons behind every bush rock and tree in America. Kind of reminds me of my late grandma and her paranoia towards the “Commies” in better American days and being fronted by the, any unions.

Program last night was about Cleopatra’s giant granite Dildoe in back of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Granite involved here and so only a forensic geologist can say who or what for certain has taken a dump in the vicinity of obelisk for the last 3,000 years. It was stolen from Egypt in the nineteenth century btw.

Why is it there? How did it get there? What is the real reason for it being treated as ancient art and behind the MET and its nefarious and as yet undetermined hidden agenda of “Art” – (wink, nod).

Scott walks through Grand Central Terminal calling it a train “station” and then goes downtown to St.Paul’s Chapel and calls it a church. There is another secret in sight is the obelisk in plain sight in St. Paul’s graveyard, a tombstone, like Cleopatra’s Dildoe in Central Park. St. Paul’s is a chapel and attached theologically to the Trinity Church (Queen Anne Charter) a few blocks over on Wall Street.

Cleopatra’s Needle lines up with the Worth Obelisk at Madison Square and does not quite line up in a straight line with the obelisk gravestone at St. Paul’s Chapel downtown but this expert knows it all, yeah right, between any two separate points is a straight line. That imperfect line continues and does not as his expert prescribes point to the Statue of Liberty on an island in New York harbor but rather straight at Governor’s Island, the original settlement point of the Dutch in NYC.

Governor’s Island is the secret hiding place of the Ark of the Holy Grail, the wooden animal vessel that the Kristian god Yahweh Junior drank from at some supper party once upon a time btw. Don'r ya know yaor bib-L?

And as I suspect the subject of another history channel mystery/conspiracy.

This program “Unearthing America” along with “Ancient Aliens” is the most highly rated cable shows on the History Channel making it most likely to jack-off to while in your living room and in your underwear, from boredom or lack of concrete fact, while watching cable TV btw...

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Washington Statue - 1939 New York World's Fair

George Washington - February 22, 1732 / December 14, 1799


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Cable Street Cars - New York - Broadway - 1900

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Countess Annie Leary Burial Vaunt - Under Old Saint Patrick's Cathedral NYC

Old St. Patrick's Cathedral and Graveyard NYC

http://urbanomnibus.net/2012/02/a-walk-down-mulberry-street-with-monsignor-sakano/

Papal Countess Annie Leary 1832-1919

http://thisculturalchristian.blogspot.com/2014/06/countess-annie-leary-1832-1919.html

Leary Family Burial Vault Under Old St. Patrick's Cathedral NYC

One of Several Corridors of Burial Vaults Under Old St. Patrick's Cathedral


http://www.timeout.com/newyork/things-to-do/take-a-photo-tour-of-the-crypts-underneath-st-patricks-old-cathedral-slide-show.

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Bethesda Fountain - Central Park - NYC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethesda_Terrace




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Haight House Apartments 1870 - Kensington Hotel 1901 - New York City

Hotel Kensington, Fifth Ave. near Washington Square – Photo by Byron Company (New York, N,Y,) – 1904 -From the Collections of the Museum of the City of New Yorkhttp://collections.mcny.org/Collection/Hotel-Kensington,-Fifth-Ave.-near-Washington-Square.-2F3XC53THVN.html

(Kensington Hotel 1901, formerly Haight House Apartments (French Plan) 1870, formerly New-York Club, formerly Private Residences, Southeast Corner Fifth Avenue and E. Fifteenth Street, NYC)

The Haight Mansion, (No. 2 ? E. Fifteenth Street) from the early 1850s. was the original corner part of the Haight House Apartments (1870) of the still fashionable Fifth Avenue neighborhood just off Union Square. The new apartment buildings offered services like a hotel to a perhaps reluctant upper crust who saw the new apartment idea little different than the age old tenements of the poor. 

By the turn of century (1900) the apartment building was a new hotel setup from about 1901 after a fire in the late 1890s at the apartment building setup. The building I believe got torn down in 1906.

Some supporting links for your information:

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive...B266838A669FDE

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9B05E7DD123DE034BC4953DFB766838E649FDE

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=99241792

---

http://upcommons.upc.edu/revistes/bitstream/2099/12610/1/C_89_3.pdf

"Only a year later, in 1871, the first apartment building with hotel services was opened. It was an adaptation of an old family home into multi-family dwelling for twenty families and several bachelors. 

The building was situated on the corner of 15thStreet and Fifth Avenue, it was called Haight House and had five floors, four devoted to family apartments and the fifth floor devoted to bachelor apartments. In each floor plant there were five apartments composed by three bedrooms, parlor, living room, kitchen, pantry, bathroom and two bedrooms for the service. 

On the fifth floor there were eleven bachelor apartments, five of them had a parlor and two bedrooms, the rest had only a parlor and a bedroom.

 A laundry and a kitchen sited in the basement could serve through a dumbwaiter the different apartments. Meals were served in the common dining room or in each of the apartments. Pneumatic tubes and electric bells connected the apartments with the kitchen and the reception of the building. 

After the construction of the Haight House many similar buildings began to proliferate in New York. Although most of the examples followed the same pattern, the name used to designate them used to change depending on its character or its services. During this first epoch both the used terminology to describe them and the law that regulated them were of a great ambiguity. 

The existing housing law considered only the word "tenement", which defined a building that housed three or more families cooking on their premises. Usually the word "tenement" was associated to low income working class, so new housing typologies targeted the middle class using other terms to be clearly different from them, apartment building with hotel services were usually appointed under the term hotel, family hotel or apartment hotel. During these early years several examples were built around Fifth Avenue, between 10th and 27th Street…"

Advertisement 1901 - (copyright expired)

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One World Trade Center - Six Views - 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/sep/08/-sp-one-world-trade-center-new-york-rebuild-ground-zero-twin-towers#comment-40682619

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The Outrageous Ongoing Maintenance Costs of the Faux European Style Cathedral of Saint Patrick’s in NYC

Saint Patrick's Cathedral Under Repair Again

I have mentioned this here and there and in bits and pieces.

One, they are spending officially something like $180 million dollars to patch up and paint the poorly built to begin with Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.  That to be quite honest, it would be cheaper to tear down the building and build a brand new one.  To build it right the second time without politics, corruption, graft and inferior materials.

But with the RC Neanderthal concept of Sacred Tradition, the old church, built piecemeal over the decades, over the past century and a half, built with cheap inferior dirty white limestone from Westchester County for the exterior and some of the interior bits that are not wood, chicken wire and stucco imitating real stone and a faux vault interior ceiling, the list goes on and on, maybe throwing good money after bad is not the best investment.  This considering that in 15 years, the next half a billion dollar repair job makes me suggest that repair at gold and diamond prices is perhaps only a scam for some sort of money laundering for some and or all of the billionaire contributors, donors, putting Saint Patrick’s through this unnecessary patching up of scabs and bits that in all honesty from the beginning has been an oversized parish church with Hollywood Stage Set hints of European Gothic style and faux European workmanship. 

And with a final cost figure around 1900 hovering at $4 million dollars, one has to wonder how many Tammany Hall kickbacks and how much job featherbedding went on to build the original Saint Patrick’s before it came to anything like a finished stage.

Cardinal Spellman put in a stained glass Rose Window and the “Famed” Spellman Bronze Doors on the Western Entrance in 1949 to finally respond to the 1879 Atlantic Monthly critique of the parish barn doors at the entrance to this pretense European style “Cathedral”.  Kind of like a metaphoric Council of Trent response to Luther's 95 suggested points for reform.

I should note that Frannie Spellman’s dressing up the entrance on Fifth Avenue, with the rose window and Bronze Doors with his Motto emblazoned on them at the back of the doors  “Follow the Money God” in Latin of course - Doors, designed by church architect Charles Maginnis, and British born sculpture John Angel, to give pizazz to the church across Fifth Avenue from the Art-Deco masterpiece of Rockefeller Center or should a dare say it – to give this Catholic mid-town parish church of the local Bishop a bit of sheer fabulous gay-ness.  The doors are stiff in human and divine postures, boring and in need of constant maintenance too. 

"Spellman" Bronze Doors - Saint Patrick's Cathedral - 1949
(Image - Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/highsm.13054/)

The doors were restored recently for half a million dollars to remove half a dozen layers of paint. Hey, you don’t paint bronze btw unless it is faux bronze and faux like the rest of the structure. I think that the bronze doors on the Pantheon in Rome, an official Catholic structure, has not had to remove or paint its bronze doors for something like 1900 years. Like what’s going on here in the maintenance and or out to lunch cathedral management department? Duh!

Below some excerpts from two original Critiques of St. Patrick’s from its official opening in 1879, one from the critic Clarence Cook of the Atlantic Monthly (February 1879) and the other from The American Architect and Building News (May 1879).

"Finished" Saint Patrick's Cathedral 1879 - Without Buttresses or Spires

The New Catholic Catholic Cathedral in New York By Clarence Cook

Of course, it was a subject of no little wonder where the money was to come from, not only to build the church itself, but to buy the land, which under ordinary circumstances would have cost no small part of the whole sum. How this latter feat was accomplished we all know now, and New Yorkers are disposed to say as little about it as possible. The city was jockeyed out of the finest site on the island by a crafty and unscrupulous priest playing upon the political hopes and fears of as base a lot of men as ever got the government of a great city into their power. 

For the consideration of one dollar the Archbishop of New York became possessor of the deed for the whole square bounded-west and east by Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue, and south and north by Fiftieth Street and Fifty- First Street, a plot of ground four hundred and twenty feet on the cross streets, and two hundred feet on the avenues, situated in the heart of the most fashionable part of the city, and on one of the highest points of the whole island....

No doubt he (James Renwick Jr.) is perfectly competent for all ordinary undertakings, no doubt he could build a cathedral if he would. But Archbishop Hughes wanted a man who would accept the situation as he found it, and would build a cathedral with a constant eye to saving and sparing, so as to produce the maximum of stage effect at the minimum of cost. Stage effect was the one thing absolutely needed…

Plain Wooden Doors of Cathedral's Original Design and Budget
(Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ggbain.00299/ St Patrick's Easter1908)

The principal door at the western end is perhaps in design the most discreditable part of the building. All the rest is clumsy repetition and copying of forms and arrangements found here, there, and everywhere in the crowd of Gothic monuments in Europe. But the great doorway came from nowhere, unless from some confectioner's shop. In place of the cavern-like entrances of some of the French cathedrals (Rheims is a notable example), richly molded, and with their thronging saints and angels, each on its pedestal and with its own deep, shadowing canopy, with its sculptured tympanum and its sweet-faced Virgin and child upon the central pillar, we have here a shallow embrasure, conveying no idea of thickness in the wall out of which it is hewn, with coarse and clumsy moldings and engaged pillars, and with a sort of trumpery frill of openwork stone, the beau-ideal of a cap-maker's apprentice, framing in the whole.... 

Rheims Cathedral Entrance - France

And not a sacred emblem, not an inch of sacred imagery, to be found; nothing but the ostentatious display of a cardinal's hat, and the equally ostentatious and equally out-of-place display of the American shield. How many little parish churches there are in England, built at a period when Catholic archbishops knew something about architecture, that have door-ways more noble, for all their smallness, than this cathedral can boast!...

 

Jesus Christ Shrine - "Bin" Niche Chapel - Side Aisle
(Lacking in Space Due to Lack of Flying Buttresses)

Little remains to be added to our indictment, except to speak of the bins which are ranged along the side of the aisles, opening by low, flat arches under the aisle-windows, and which are to be utilized as chapels. Externally they project from the sides of the building, filling up the bays between the buttresses, and give no sign from without of their existence, the roofs being hid by the solid, unpierced parapet of the wall, and no windows being necessary, as each bin is lighted by a small sky -light filled with stained-glass. The effect of this long blank wall is very bad; apart from its clumsiness, it deprives the design of the effective light and shade that should have been got from the buttresses. 

The American Architect and Building News (May 1879)

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Countess Annie Leary of New York City Evicted From Her Fifth Avenue Mansion – 1904

Photo Source: Both Sides of Fifth Ave. J.F.L.Collins 1910

https://archive.org/stream/collinsbothsides00newy#page/12/mode/2up

This is perhaps a bit silly but there is so little available on the life of Countess Annie Leary of NYC that a bit of gossip in a tattle mag of the time says a lot about interest in the rich and famous even back then.

Broadcast Weekly 14 April 1904

The way this is written I am not certain if Countess Annie was evicted from her long term home at 3 Fifth avenue, which I cannot find a picture of yet – or she first left that perhaps childhood home at 3 Fifth Avenue when a 99 year lease, made by her father James Leary the Merchant/Hatter, on the land it was built on expired in 1902. That the two year lease is perhaps another rental further up Fifth Avenue and that too became unavailable as developers were tearing down these old brick or brownstone mansions and building apartment buildings in the teens and 1920s.

In any case, Annie seems to have been "homeless" for a few short years while she finally moved into digs at 1032 Fifth Avenue between 84^th Street and 85^th Street and in sight of the Metropolitan Museum of Art across the road, located within the boundaries of Central Park.

The house at 1032 Fifth Avenue was a fixer upper, a renovation and re-clad in white stone of a bunch of spec townhouses built in the 1870s. In the image of 1032 above, the building next door at 1033 is still a brownstone as of 1910, and 1034 was being converted at the same time with Annie’s 1032 in 1905 with the “rebuilt front wall” and getting in Annie’s case a three story extension in back where the stables used to be. 

April 1905

The building progress report lists Countess Leary’s no doubt temporary address as 16 E 75^th Street.

1033 btw is still standing with a white stone re-clad and squeezed between two tall apartment buildings.

                                              1033 Fifth Avenue NYC                                          
                                                                                                                                          Google Maps

The smart looking townhouse at 1032 Fifth Avenue is described in some accounts as a mansion and I guess it is, was, but maybe a little bit cramped – less space I would say in square footage than 3 Fifth Ave from Plot Maps I have seen – but the difference is of course made up by location, location, location. 

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