A 19th century "rookery" (what we would today call a "loft apartment building", but they didn't have the strict residence laws they have today, so the conditions were horrible), and by extension, the "Five Points" area it was located in.
It started 30 years ago, when I was becoming increasingly interested in comparative architecture in different cities. This from growing up in NYC, and noticing the differences of Springfield, MA on old buildings. The most obvious being that NYC ues fire escapes, while Springfield uses wooden "back porches" (not just on houses, but old apartment buildings or "tenements" as well, which you don't see in NYC. Chicago does use them, however. My grandmother up there was very hard to get along with, so the whole experience had an effect on me, and the older style physical surroundings just added to my homesickness and became something I fixated on when I grew up).
So I run across this newspaper article on Jacob Riis'
How the Other Half Lives about the horrible condition of "tenements" in NYC in the 19th century.
It shows this picture of a building with a wooden porch-like extension (with steps to a second floor entrance), and the architecture didn't look like NYC either. It reminded me a bit more of New England.
So I was just so intrigued, and wondered where that was, if it was still there, why it looked so different, and is that what "tenements" looked like 100 years earlier.
15 years later (halfway between then and now), I run across another article on it, that gave the street (right near where I worked) but not the address, and this sparked off my interest again briefly. The article also showed one other building with a wooden porch, a "rear tenement" on a street I could not even find on the map, and it mentioned "Five Points", the neighborhood right behind where I work, and foundations being uncovered for the new courthouse that was just built there.
A few years later, I was reminded of this when the movie "the Gangs of New York" came out, which takes place in the neighborhood 150 years ago. (Didn't watch it, and now seeing some clips online, it's way too gory for me with all the violence).
So just this past winter, something led me to do an internet search on it, and while the photo was not apart of Riis' book (he had many other photos besides the ones in the book), I find the photo, and it has the actual address which was located
right at the back entrance of my old job! (I had passed right over it going out to look for it one lunch hour back then!) Wow!
So that sparked off this latest interest, and seeking to find out exactly
what it was, I research Five Points, learn about "the Old Brewery" at the center of it (and the movie) and then run across old fire insurance maps, which show a distillery at the address I was interested in, and the distillery was adjacent to the real life Old Brewery (and likely once apart of it).
So it wasn't a real tenement after all, just an industrial building converted into one.
So I began chronicling the changes I saw in the fire insurance maps, up to the building being replaced by a regular tenement (which itself was cleared shortly after for the Civic Center where I used to work), and started a blog entry on this, which then I had to break into several comments, and even spin off a couple of new articles.
Porches, Points and Poverty: How Other Halves Lived | "ERIPEDIA"
I even had to sign up for the NY Historical Society library to gain access to three maps that weren't online, in order to complete the chronology.
It seems like something silly to have spent so much energy on, but it is something that was basically "grandfathered" into my mind, since it goes back 30 years, and would come to the surface every now and then.
In the course of all of this, I even discover a back porch on a rather familiar building still there!
It was like a fun "distraction" in a somewhat tough period, both financially (which seems like a great injustice for several reasons), and just being in midlife and looking back over everything and where I am now.
Before, most of my time was going into Typology (as I've discussed here a bit). But right now, I'm trying to use the Jungian concepts to understand my life better, as well as trying to develop better ways of explaining the type concepts.
So this was just something else that I found very "interesting". Interesting to see how different the area is, and even to see the "survivors" from the period.
And if it's true that the distillery was once apart of the Old Brewery, then that has some historical significance (being that the brewery is given a lot of significance) since there don't seem to be any real pictures of the brewery, but Riis did take this photo of [what was once] the distillery.