This is a row of old tenement buildings on Third Avenue in Manhattan up until a few months ago:

This is the view of that street now:

The red brick on the right in the new image is the tenement in the middle in the old picture. And the tenement with the exposed white brick wall in the old picture is the completely surrounded one in the middle of the new picture.

Some find this kind of transformation unfortunate, but I gotta say, I think the visual and architectural variety on this street is pretty cool:

I can’t take credit for finding this; a New York City blog covered it the other day. They didn’t know exactly what the story was, but it’s almost certainly that the owner of this single building refused to sell. This is similar to China’s “nail houses”—single structures, sometimes single units from erstwhile multifamily structures, which have survived while surrounded by new development.

I also have a couple of examples of this sort of thing from Washington, D.C., with my own pictures.

The second one there is the Mexican embassy. Here’s the story of that:

The building that the Embassy now occupies was designed by architect Peter Vercelli and built in 1986. The building incorporates the façades of the last two remaining of the Seven Buildings–some of the oldest residential structures in Washington, D.C.

One more little point: it’s interesting how little distinguishes a rowhouse from a tenement, and how these buildings that were slapped up pretty quickly and home to pretty poor living conditions are now (with lots of renovations) basically luxury housing. The surprising thing when you think about it isn’t that some of them are being replaced, but that so many of them are still standing.

Related Reading:

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #6

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #8

New Toy, New Ride

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