The White City

The palette of MyWy’s housing stock trends towards light and bright, with brick that references the many hues of limestone from nearly white (infused with gray and green), through a lemony lunar yellow, gold with ferrous flecks, and at the deepest saturations, radiant orange.

If we can take the word of Montrose, blogging a week or so back on Brownstoner, design decisions of Ridgewood’s early 20th century developers were inspired, in part, by the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair whose grounds were called “The White City.” American architects of stature, including Louis Sullivan and McKim, Mead, and White, designed the Fair’s buildings whose plaster and whitewash facades earned the fairgrounds its name. The 1893 Fair is cited as a powerful influence on the turn of the 20th century neo-classical/beaux arts movement in American residential and civic architecture. Brownstone and dark brick facades were passé, paler materials were embraced as a means to transform American cities from shadowy squalor to sunlit splendor.

Here is Ridgewood, imperfectly reflecting the idealized “White City” of another century as property owners struggle to keep that promise of splendor despite the encroaching signatures of (paradoxically) anonymous youth. It seems likely that young men, mostly, intent on asserting their encrypted presence, pass through the night (the rightful hours of youth) and pause, sometimes, to spell out mists of heavy color in chest-wide loops. I don’t think the graffiti writers are champions of squalor, though they may be its witnesses.

Here are some places where pale brick and/or pale paint reassert - albeit with varying degrees of confidence and hope - the idyll of the White City.









Queenswalk: The Plan for Ridgewood, Part 2
http://queens.brownstoner.com/2013/08/queenswalk-the-plan-for-ridgewood-part-2/