September 10, 2008

Woolworth, High Line on OpenHouse NY list for 2008

(Update: the full OHNY list is now available. Please see NewYorkology’s list of the reservation-required sites that are likely to max-out fast.)

The 6th Annual openhousenewyork Weekend — set for October 4 and 5 — this year will open nearly 200 sites to the public for free, plus almost 150 tours, talks, and workshops.

The partial list has just gone out via press release. It includes the Woolworth Building, the Stanford White-designed French Embassy, Shigeru Ban’s Metal Shutter Houses, a behind-the-scenes tour of Radio City Music Hall with architect Hugh Hardy, the High Line, the World Trade Center site, a Porter House tour with Shop architects and the Cherry Lane Theater renovations.

Also on the list: tours with the architects of the new Museum of Art and Design; a pre-renovation tour of the American Banknote Company Building in the Bronx; the addition to Queens Theatre in the Park originally designed by Philip Johnson for the 1964/1965 World’s Fair; the underground tunnels of the city’s first airport at Floyd Bennett Field; the John J. Harvey Fireboat; the site of the 1939 and 1964/1965 World’s Fairs; and the 2008 AIA/NY Design Award Winner Banchet Flowers event space.

Ellis Island’s shuttered South Side buildings and the recently renovated Ferry Building will also be open both days of OHNY weekend through reserved tours, possibly five tours per day, a Save Ellis Island spokesperson told NewYorkology.

The High Line tours will be be of the same area as last year, a spokesperson for Friends of the High Line told NewYorkology via e-mail today. The tours will cover the west side rail yards just south of the Javits Convention Center. This is the undeveloped portion of the elevated train tracks”still in its self-seeded state.”

There will also be a transit power station tour in Brooklyn with Robert Lobenstein, General Superintendent of New York City Transit, but hold on, all the reservations are already full as the Transit Museum opened its booking early along with its regular fall tours.

Sites and tours are still being added to the OHNY list. The OHNY website with this year’s listings is scheduled to go live the night of September 25, and the New York Times will include an OHNY event guide in its Sept. 26 City Edition. Some events and tours will require reservations; but the reservation period isn’t yet open for most tours.

In addition to the regular weekend events, a fund-raiser event will be held October 2, allowing 15 people (at $500 each) up to the Woolworth Building’s 43rd floor observation deck, into Frank Woolworth’s original office and into other parts of the building with Roy Suskin, vice president of the Witkoff Group and resident historian of the Woolworth Building. The lucky 15 will also get a champagne reception in the Woolworth’s lobby with Barry Lewis, architectural historian and co-host of PBS’ “Walk” series. All but $50 of the $500 price is tax deductible, and it also comes with a front-of-the-line OHNY Passport for the OHNY weekend.

The OHNY Passport can also be purchased for $150 donation to OHNY. Each pass allows you and a guest front-of-the-line access at all sites and programs that do not require advance reservations.

In addition to the $500 tour, a portion of the Woolworth Building will also be open for the free weekend events like it was last year, an OHNY spokeswoman told NewYorkology.

A big list of NYC cultural institutions will also provide free access during OHNY Weekend, including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Brooklyn Children’s Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Morgan Library and Museum, Museum of the City of New York, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Rubin Museum of Art, the New York Botanical Garden, Queens Museum of Art, the Sculpture Center, Waterfront Museum & Showboat Barge, the Austrian Cultural Forum, Japan Society, Scandinavia House, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture.

Other sites taking part in OHNY 2008:
Governors Island
Fresh Kills
Octagon on Roosevelt Island
The Gatehouse of the Croton Aqueduct system
Bartow-Pell Mansion
Van Cortlandt House
Old Croton Aqueduct
Pieter Claesen Wyckoff House
Fort Totten
Annabelle Selldorf’s condo at 520 West Chelsea
SANAA’s New Museum of Contemporary Art
Chrysler Building lobby
The Montauk Club
Eldridge Street Synagogue
St. George Theatre
Alice Austen House
EverGreene Painting Studios
Fairfax & Sammons Residence
Steven Holl Architect’s New York University Department of Philosophy
a NoHo Penthouse and Roof Garden
a modern Sutton Place Apartment
Marpillero Pollak Architects’ Duane Street Live/Work Loft
Forsyth Street Loft
Giesen Residence
an 1880s renovated Park Slope Row House
architect Adam Kushner’s residence
Atelier Ten Environmental Designers’ office
Target East Harlem Community Garden
East Village’s Wild Project
Build It Green! NYC
Queens Botanical Garden Visitor Center
Staten Island’s Greenbelt Native Plant Center

Other Open House NY tours, programs and events:
- Private tours of Museum of Modern Art’s “Home Delivery: Fabricating the
Modern Dwelling”
- Art Deco and Art Moderne tour of the Grand Concourse
- Historic houses of Wave Hill
- Melrose Commons tour
- Coney Island tour
- Mott Haven tour
- Gowanus waterway tour
- Weeksville tour
- Wallabout tour
- Tudor City tour
- Fourth Arts Block tour
- Harlem’s Mount Morris Park tour
- South Street Seaport tour
- Richmond Hill in Queens
- Jamaica Estates tour
- Snug Harbor tour
- Behind-the-scenes tour with architect Lyn Rice of The Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, a new campus center for Parsons The New School for Design created from the shell of four historic buildings
- walking tour of green homes in Battery Park City and the East Village;
- Angles & Accordions, a site-specific tour/performance by choreographer Martha Bowers and Dance Theatre Etcetera at Green-Wood Cemetery
- Dancing in the Streets presents five short works created by five choreographers in five days for a mystery site
- The Crane Wife, a traditional Japanese performance at Pier 66 in West Chelsea
- HomeBase at Whitebox screens a documentary about international artists inhabiting a
raw urban space
- glass blowing demonstrations at One Sixty Glass
- Artists in Place artists discuss their site-specific works below 14th Street
- Flux Factory will partner with OHNY to present Living Room, where ten artists transform strangers’ homes into sites for interactive works
- Screening of a work-in-progress documentary, “Learning from Bob and Denise,” about Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown

Family events
OHNY Family Festival at the Center for Architecture
Soho’s Cast-Iron Buildings walking tour
Science Barge tours
Harlem Through Our Five Senses workshop
School of the Future’s Green Roof and Garden
Great Brooklyn Bridge historical tour
Preservation Detectives at Eldridge Street

Target, for the fifth year, is the lead supporter of OHNY Weekend.

Picture credits: OHNY 2007 tours of the Woolworth building and High Line. Amy Langfield/NewYorkology

September 10, 2008 3:24 PM in Architecture, Cheap Stuff, Downtown, History, Kids, Midtown, Museums, Out of Manhattan, Sightsology, Tours, Transportology, Upper East Side, Upper West Side

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