The Lenape word Manahatta means island of many hills. Today it's an isle of many windows. How many, one wonders. A hundred million? A billion? The ones above drape the Secretariat building of the United Nations, completed in 1952 and designed by Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer and Wallace K. Harrison.
350 West 85th Street: The multi-paned windows of The Red House (1904) by Harde & Short are based on those of Hardwick Hall, an Elizabethan English country house of 1590. (The word window, by the way, entered the English language about three centuries earlier. From Old Norse, window literally means "wind eye" and referred to an unglazed aperture in a roof.)
145 Hudson Street (1929) by Renwick, Aspinwall & Guard.
67 East 11th Street: The James McCreery Dry Goods Store by John Kellum opened in 1870, and a little over a century later, in 1973, became one of the first cast-iron buildings in NYC to be converted into residential lofts.
309 East 103rd Street: The East Harlem School (2010) by Peter Gluck and Partners.
100 Ninth Avenue: The portholes of this 1966 building by Albert C. Ledner befit the original occupant, the National Maritime Union of America. These days it's the Maritime Hotel.
Around the corner from the Maritime, on West 16th Street, is under construction the new Dream Downtown Hotel by Handel Architects, who have imagined a pattern of fenestration not unlike a cheese grater.
105 Norfolk Street: The residential building smugly titled Blue (2007) by Bernard Tschumi.
295 Lafayette Street: Rundbogenstil windows of the Puck Building (1886) by Albert Wagner.
488 Madison Avenue: The glass-strip windows of the Look Building (1950) by Emery Roth & Sons.
45 East 66th Street: 12-over-12 double-hung windows on a Perpendicular Gothic-style apartment building designed in 1906 by Harde & Short, architects of the above-referenced Red House.
500 Park Avenue: Elegant and expansive bays of glass on the architectural pearl originally known as the Pepsi-Cola Building and designed in 1960 by Gordon Bunshaft.
150 East 42nd Street: Late-late-late Art Deco-ish embossed stainless-steel panels surround the windows of the former Mobil Building, designed in 1955 by Harrison & Abramovitz.
East 30th Street and First Avenue: Finely detailed concrete rhythmically outlines the windows of Kips Bay Plaza, designed in 1965 by I. M. Pei & Associates and S. J. Kessler.
488-492 Broadway and Broome Street: This cast-iron facade designed by Daniel D. Badger in 1857 is based on the drawings of Sebastiano Serlio (1475-1554)--drawings that greatly influenced Andrea Palladio.
To look at more N.Y.C. architecture, visit: Arch Architecture in New York City & Groovy, Curvy Architecture in New York City
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