The Lost City of Wood
The Lost City of Wood is our term for a vernacular architecture of New York that has been destroyed in the most cruel way, much like a person with advanced dementia: body alive, identity gone. When the Lost City of Wood (LCoW) was at its height, its streetscapes were among the most colorful, charming and coherent of any produced by New York in its history. Without exception, all of the blockfronts that once were full expressions of the Lost City have been drastically altered, now dulled and cloaked with crappy, mismatched materials, with vinyl siding ruling as the dominant element. Of all the dispiriting consequences of New York’s postwar architectural evolution, the least known and the most pointless was the loss of its wood- framed architectural heritage. Without comment or dissent, this legacy was destroyed, but, weirdly the majority of buildings that were its foundation are still in business, effaced but functioning as they were intended.
How many knowledgeable New Yorkers understand that half the houses and tenements of Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Bushwick, Ridgewood, Ravenswood and a dozen other neighborhoods are wood-framed structures and that, a hundred years ago, many were covered with exuberant, well-crafted ornamentation and intricately painted architectural details? Even the most modest wood-framed workers’ housing employed the architectural vocabulary we see preserved on thousands of brownstones and masonry tenements. As built, and for decades following, wooden rowhouses and tenements features facades dense with decorative elements, including geometrically patterned shingles, classical entablatures and countless entrance canopies with spokes- in-wheel brackets. Perhaps this all seems far-fetched and possibly ridiculous. No one remembers such a city, there is hardly any visual evidence of it that remains. In fact, very few photographers at the turn of the century seem to have been interested in documenting the typical buildings of working class neighborhoods. Almost always, neighborhood photos pridefully recorded churches, libraries, banks. The best, if spotty, contemporaneous record of the LCoW is found in the City’s tax assessment photo archive from the 1940s.
The houses and multiple-dwellings under discussion here are not free-standing Victorian houses of the sort we see in Ditmas Park or Richmond Hill or any older suburban community. Nor are they of the wooden, evocative spec houses built after World War 1 in huge numbers in a constellation of neighborhoods ringer around the older urban core. The LCoW were attached buildings, the wooden counterparts of Late Brownstones and tenements, primarily Old Law Tenements.
New Yorkers cherish and celebrate the city’s enormous stock of buildings produced when materials, craftsmen and schemes for architectural ornamentation were abundant and the requirement for ornamentation on all types of buildings was unquestioned. Wooden rowhouses displayed precisely the same types of decoration as contemporaneous brownstones: elaborate door and window framing, decorative friezes and cornices, etc.. In fact, it was easier and less expensive to produce comparable ornamentation from wood than from stone, metal or terracotta. Clapboard siding was generally used in place of brick as the primary surface of wood-frame facades, but shingles were a common alternative and these lent themselves to creating multi-colored, geometric patterns across building fronts. Clapboard fronts and complex surfaces of architectural details were painted a far greater variety of colors than bricks could provide for brownstones, as well as creating a visual rhythm that enhanced decorative schemes.
We cannot show you color photographs of Greenpoint or Bushwick streetscapes from 1910. You have to use imagination and thought experiments to visualize the kind of architectural environment they presented in that era. We don’t have even one intact blockface of the LCoW to serve as a model for this effort of projection. Actually, there is one street, Sylvan Terrace in Washington Heights in Manhattan, that has marvelously preserved a 19th century wooden streetscape of twenty rowhouses, although, as a “mews”, it is an anomaly, developed as a narrow, private street with side-facing stoops. Nevertheless, let us try. A pitiful handful of essentially intact LCoW buildings provide examples of what vast sections of the city looked like.
Perhaps the best preserved and maintained group of attached, 19th century wooden houses in the city and the closest thing we have to a true streetscape from the Lost City of Wood is located on Webster Place in South Park Slope, Brooklyn. These six houses were identical when built and are nearly so today. Most of their current owners have chosen to highlight architectural panels with contrasting colors, as we think was the original treatment. Here we see quite clearly what New York lost when the LCoW was destroyed, our equivalent of Victorian San Francisco.
1238 Bushwick Avenue in Bushwick, Brooklyn is a terrific, intricately painted survivor from what was a real showcase of the LCoW along the grand boulevard of Bushwick Avenue. It takes an effort to visualize the fact that the houses to the left and right of No. 1238 were originally its virtual replicas. This was Bushwick in 1900; its neighbors are Bushwick now.
Patterned shingles with rhombuses, perfectly preserved cornices and friezes, as well as an excellent examples of canopy with spoked-wheel brackets can be seen at 194 Butler Street in Gowanus, 121 N.5th St in Northside Williamsburg and 48 Broome Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Noble Street in Greenpoint is unusually well preserved with a Federal style pair of dormers on No. 107, shingled rhombuses on No. 109 and more shingled rhombuses and a gabled front at No. 96.
This group of 14 wooden rowhouses on 16th Street in South Park Slope was built circa 1895 and all of them have survived without major alterations, save cosmetically. About seven of them retain quite a bit of original features, including a distinctive decorative pattern repeated above the entrance, above each of the windows and on the frieze between the cornice brackets. Two of the houses (No. 332 and No. 320) are in nearly pristine condition, and two of them have been fully effaced.
Seemingly every detail of this unusual group on Adelphi St. in Fort Greene is unchanged since the 1870s. Their brilliant painted highlights represent a dimension of the LCoW that brick row housing entirely lacked. In similarly good shape are these four houses with very high stoops and perfectly preserved balusters on St. James Pl. in Clinton Hill.
A very early example of the semi-detached, rowhouse form is wonderfully intact on Cambridge Place in Clinton Hill. No. 40 still has its cast-iron roof parapet! A similar grouping exists on 13th St. in South Park Slope. No. 244 1/2 is particularly beautiful.
On Temple Court in Windsor Terrace, live a group of nine tiny, humble, very charming houses, with several delightful, surviving, Arts and Crafts-style friezes. The houses across the street show different levels of surviving details, from the very pristine Nos. 23 and 21 to a nearly total vinyl look at No. 11. Temple Court is a cul-de-sac, and in a way, if one squints slightly, the overall effect is somewhat like a Twilight Zone visit to the Lost City of Wood. Other blocks have more impressive examples of the LCoW but Temple Court somehow suggests quite well the essence of what has been lost.
On 7th Avenue in Greenwood Heights are ten small rowhouses with almost all of their cornices intact. Doesn’t seem like much, but compare them with this similar, now fully effaced group on Hausman Street in Greenpoint.
Because new wood-frame construction was prohibited (in northward advancing stages) in Manhattan as a fire prevention measure, the LCoW is a predominantly in Brooklyn and, to a lesser extent, Queens, but it is not a minor or isolated type of urban vernacular. The decades from 1860 to 1910 saw a tremendous surge of growth in Brooklyn, with its population increasing nearly 600%. This development was concentrated in a rough triangle with Sunset Park and East New York as its base and Greenpoint as its apex. A very high proportion of residential construction in northern Brooklyn, perhaps one third, was wood-framed and fronted. In 1890, any builder and developer of low-rise residential or mixed-use buildings had first to answer a crucial question: shall this row of houses, or that group of tenements, be wood-framed or load-bearing brick? If the building code at a particular site allowed the construction of wood-framed buildings, it was often the preferred, less expensive mode of construction.
Importantly, following this initial wave of urbanization, the architectural fabric of these neighborhoods entered a long period of relative dormancy that prevailed until the 21st century. The great majority of these wood buildings remain in place, uncleared by redevelopment, still housing working-class and lower middle-class New Yorkers.
But two great forces doomed the Lost City of Wood. More insidiously, they destroyed awareness of its existence. The first of these forces was material; the reluctance of homeowners and landlords to perform the ongoing maintenance required to protect wood from water. Wood that is not continually repainted and repaired decays fairly rapidly. The process of serially repainting complex wooden surfaces always faces the same calculus: it is cheaper to remove these surfaces and features than to repaint them every few years. In fact, with many aspects of an old wood façade, it can be more convenient to simply cover wooden features with a new material than to remove them.
The second force reinforced the first by rendering the preservation of wood surfaces, architectural details and ornamentation not just difficult and expensive, but actually undesirable. The ethos of the homeowners and landlords of the LCoW in the postwar period did not value the antique. Part of the process of assimilation embraced by these immigrants and first generation New Yorkers involved embracing modernity, at least as they understood it. Fussy Victorian gingerbread was very much out of fashion in interwar and postwar America in general, more so for working class New Yorkers sensitive to being thought old-fashioned, old world.
Actually, the unraveling of the LCoW began earlier, after the First World War, with the advent of a wildly popular new style that we term “Naïve Modern”. This downmarket, insurrectionist architectural movement rejected the classical architectural vocabulary of Beaux Arts in favor of geometric, machine-age forms and patterns. Naïve Modern was the dominant style for the huge wave of urbanization that that swept over New York in the 20s, rolling out a carpet of new neighborhoods in East Flatbush, Bronx River, Flatlands, Marine Park, Ditmars, and many other areas. Naïve Modern inspired homeowners and landlords to modernize their old-fashioned, low-rise buildings by removing traditional, horizontal-projecting cornices and replacing them with variations of the raised, “crenelated” rooflines that were the signature design element of the new style. This unfortunate modernization was common for both masonry and wood-framed houses and tenements.
And so accelerated a ruthless extermination of wood facing and decorative architectural details. Aluminum siding was dominant in the early postwar period as the replacement for wood but this gradually gave way to vinyl in the 70s. Cornices, with their brackets and friezes, were either removed or somehow covered over with awkward flared or boxy shapes. In the 60s, wooden canopies were replaced with a particular style of aluminum awning that was clearly a talisman of modernity for postwar owners of New York’s wooden houses and tenements. And yet, underneath so much vinyl, wooden surfaces and details still exist in abundance, entombed, available for archeological study and, conceivably, resurrection.
The imperative to undo the Lost City of Wood was not felt uniformly throughout its neighborhoods. For some combination of reasons, Greenwood Heights and South Park Slope, along with Windsor Terrace, Fort Greene, Wallabout and Clinton Hill, resisted somewhat the cultural pressures that swept away whimsical wooden surfaces and details almost completely in Greenpoint, Williamsburg and Bushwick. Perhaps the proximity of brownstones as the dominant architectural fabric encouraged owners of wooden buildings to emulate their example, at least here and there. Ironically, areas where the LCoW was the dominant fabric were those that most completely erased their architectural inheritance.
In a sense, the city’s loss in destroying the LCoW is abstract because no one seems to have experienced this loss. But it is nonetheless real and acute. New York lost its iteration of Victorian San Francisco. We had neighborhoods that once resembled downmarket versions of the “painted ladies” of Haight-Ashbury and Noe Valley. The wooden houses of San Francisco escaped modernization and are cherished and celebrated. The same vintage and basic style of buildings in New York were modernized into oblivion.
Did this have to happen? Perhaps, but it might still be possible to revive some of the Lost City of Wood and partially re-establish the architectural integrity of neighborhoods like Bushwick. This need not be prohibitively expensive; modern composite wood materials are cheap, resistant to decay, light, and easy to work.
A few impressive illustrations of these possibilities can be seen in isolated reverse-modernizations scattered among the desolations of vinyl. None of these examples are rigorous restorations but they connect to the fabric of the Lost City.
165 Russell Street in Greenpoint was faced with beige fake brick in 2019. Sometime in the next two years, its owners re-established a cornice with brackets and frieze, clapboard siding, small lintels over the windows and an entrance canopy.
Also in Greenpoint, at the same time, 655 Humboldt Street had a really fine reverse-modernization, replacing vinyl shingles with cedar shingles, along with a full cornice, defined window frames and an exceptional, decorative canopy.
A few other modest reverse-modernizations in the mode of the Lost City of Wood:
Why not create a new kind of official Landmark Historic District that included, along with a couple of preserved buildings, wooden houses with renovated facades that reflected their original character? The city might do well to offer a program of subsidies and tax incentives to restore a number of blocks of wooden rowhouses and tenements which have been stripped of their identity. One or two rehabilitated streetscapes could end our amnesia of this once vital, joyous vernacular architecture and inspire more efforts to revive it.
Perhaps Hall Street, in Wallabout/Clinton Hill, Brooklyn is a good candidate for this project. The block between Myrtle Avenue and Park Avenue contains eight or nine good houses from the LCoW, including No. 113 and its neighbors. The next block, between Myrtle Avenue and Willoughby Avenue, has two adjacent rows of wooden houses, one, a group of six, the other, a group of twelve. Most of these houses have retained important original features, including probably the best group of LCoW canopies anywhere in the city.
Interestingly, these structurally intact rows of wood-framed rowhouses are contiguous with the Clinton Hill Historic District which preserves and honors upper class mansions and middleclass masonry brownstones. The wood-framed rowhouses of Hall Street, as well as many others distributed throughout the neighborhood, are an integral and essential part of Clinton Hill’s historic architectural fabric. Excluding them is a willful act of historical forgetting.
Please enjoy the many more examples of the Lost City of Wood we have found in the gallery below.
