Using the city is NYU's strength.
I do the course because I just love seeing the city
historically. I had to learn New York to teach this course, so it taught me how to do it
and then I got absorbed in it. I was really a lecturer on British architecture,
so, uh, I got absorbed in it - I've worked - most of my scholarship is in New York City
so it turned me into a New-York-ophile.
There is the old first police station. It's been converted into apartments with this great big dome -
- did we think we were in Rome? -
What was that about? It's no longer - the police have unfortunately put themselves that are really nasty 1960s building
right behind the municipal building now, but that police plaza was just wonderful. Up on Forty-Fourth Street
That's become the New York Yacht Club. The building has huge frontal windows on the other side of Forty-Fourth Street
But they're the back a ship and the water is bursting over the edges of the boat; really really terrific.
If you think about some of those apartment houses on the Upper West Side, these buildings that have actually two towers,
so it looks like a cathedral and you look from the east side across central park and looming up above you are these two towers.
And so the course, basically, it's kind of a history of how city developed, of the architecture but also the real estate.
In the classroom the first hour will be the things we don't see and to establish the neighborhood of what had been there and
then we'll go to the street and take a look at what is there now.
Okay!
These are paving stones of New York City, originally the paving stones of New York City look something like this
And they were granite that came over as ballast
in the ships that sailed across the ocean until the steamships took over at the end of the 19th century.
Okay, onwards and upwards: the Bleecker Street Bar.
This is a very rare survival of when this was domestic
New York. So, that's a row house of the 1820s.
How do you know that's a row house? It's three windows wide, it's red brick,
it's three stories,
so this is a substantial house for the 1820s and 30s
for the patricians of New York City when this was the center of New York City. Okay, we can cross.
The idea is to really immerse the kids sitting in a class and watching slides is a passive way to do things.
Getting them out, getting them on the streets, having them watch for red lights while they're listening to a lecture,
I think this is important. This is a building built in what I call a backwater of New York City.
Take a look at the rows of
beautiful images of all these
undersea and weeds and rives and up at the very top
the angels at the very top of the building,  and this building is meant to be nice
But it's not in the middle of where normal people go in New York City,
It's in the back, where it's in the textile area, so it's a beautiful textile building,
but it's not an expensive building.
This area has so changed and why has it changed? Because of you guys. It's cause of the students really.
You know when I was young there was no where to live, nobody lived down here and now your
generation thinks you fall off the edge of the earth if you go above 14th Street.
Okay, you made it! So glad Isaiah. Thank you. I look forward to seeing you.
Thank you. The students are the new energy who are going to change New York again and keep it evolving as a
fascinating city.
