Lofts Narrative
Joseph Pell Lombardi, Architect LOFTS Pioneering in the Urban Wilderness -- Title of a 1977 book by James Stratton INTRODUCTION “He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion. Uh, no, make it he, he, romanticized it all out of proportion”. --The movie Manhattan by Woody Allen I have always sought out the older, forsaken buildings of New York City. In the 1940s and 1950s, as a child, I observed the then deteriorating residential areas of Harlem. In the 1960s, as a young architect, preservationist and investor, I became immersed in restoring multi-tenant rooming houses back to one family townhouses in the Upper West Side and the Kips Bay/Murray Hill areas of Manhattan. At the beginning of the 1970s, as I began to discover the fading magnifi cent commercial buildings of lower Manhattan, my focus shifted to converting warehouse and commercial buildings to residential use. At that time, lower Manhattan had hundreds of spectacular buildings which were physically and economically distressed. Like the townhouses of the 1960s, exploring lower Manhattan was the discovery of treasures; behind the beautiful, but dusty and poorly maintained, facades of lower Manhattan were magnifi cent lobbies, high ceilinged spaces with large windows, top fl oors with multiple skylights and, often, fully detailed interiors -- it was a preservation architect’s dream. At fi rst there was little competition in the residential conversion fi eld from other architects because it was an off -beat specialty consisting less of conventional architecture and more about preservation, retrofi tting, zoning obstacles and building code issues. It was also a waiting opportunity.
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