Photo Friday + Hot Links

Austin Limestone. It's everywhere and really suits the environment. Photo by Preservator.

 In the spirit of sharing, here's some interesting stuff from across the transom this week:

Scouting New York on the Smallest Plot of Land in New York City

Inga Saffon's Philadelphia Inquirer Architecture Critic on the new South Street Bridge design. It's not as beautiful as it could be, but there are bike lanes and chunks of it shouldn't be fall onto the expressway or the Schuylkill River anytime soon. We hope.

The New York Times reports on the Underbelly Project, a top secret art exhibition mounted in an abandoned subway station.

NYT City Room also reports on the removal of Roberta Brandes Gratz, whose books The Preservator has long enjoyed, from the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission and will likely move toward the Mayor's advisory panel on sustainability. Her voice on the LPC was appreciated, and it will serve preservation well to have her in the room as PlaNYC is revised. Here's hoping preservation is better represented in the city's strategy for creating a more sustainable future. We're counting on you Roberta.

Modernistic Austin

The Preservator has, dear reader, been on a brief hiatus. It wasn't you, it was we. In part, The Preservator has been on the road. One recent stop was at the National Trust for Historic Preservation Conference in Austin, Texas.

In Austin, The Preservator was lucky enough to take a a walking tour of downtown's Art Deco buildings. Evidently, Art Deco came late and stayed late in Texas, leaving behind a rich mixture of public and private buildings in the Texas Hill Country. In Austin, here's some of what we saw.


At the time these buildings were constructed, they weren't called Art Deco, but simply "Modernistic." The Depression-era building boom that led to the construction of these buildings also helped create a more modern image of Texas and its cities.

Our tour was led by the wonderful historian David Bush from the Greater Houston Preservation Alliance. Along with his colleague Jim Parsons, Bush wrote Hill Country Deco, which was the impetus for the tour.