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In total, police and workmen took 103 tons of garbage out of the house. Salvageable items fetched less than $2,000 at auction; the cumulative estate of the Collyer brothers was valued at $91,000, of which $20,000 worth was in the form of personal property (jewelry, cash, securities and the like). Items removed from the house included rope, baby carriages, a doll carriage, rakes, umbrellas, rusted bicycles, old food, potato peelers, a collection of guns, glass chandeliers, bowling balls, camera equipment, the folding top of a horse-drawn carriage, a sawhorse, three dressmaking dummies, painted portraits, pinup girl photos, plaster busts, Mrs. Collyer's hope chests, rusty bed springs, the kerosene stove, a checkerboard, a child's chair (the brothers were lifelong bachelors and childless), more than 25,000 books (including thousands of books about medicine and engineering and more than 2,500 on law), human organs pickled in jars, eight live cats, a beaded lampshade, the chassis of the old Model T Langley had been tinkering with, one British and six American flags, tapestries, hundreds of yards of unused silks and fabric, clocks, fourteen pianos (both grand and upright), a clavichord, two organs, banjos, violins, bugles, accordions, a gramophone and records, and, of course, countless bundles of newspapers and magazines, some of them decades old. Near the spot where Homer died, police also found 34 bank account passbooks with a total of $3,007.18.
And in addition to the bundles of paper, there was a great deal of garbage. The house itself, having never been maintained, was also decaying: the roof was leaking and some walls had already caved in, showering bricks and mortar on the rooms below. Eventually the house was deemed a fire hazard and razed.
A gathering of some of the stranger materials pulled from the Collyer Mansion were taken to be exhibited at Hubert's Dime Museum, where they were featured alongside Human Marvels and sideshow performers. The morbid center piece of this display was the chair in which Homer Collyer died. Upon being removed from public exhibit in 1956, the Collyer chair entered the private collector's market. As events progressed, the chair earned the reputation of being cursed due to the misfortunes of the series of collectors who had come into possession of it. Today the Collyer Death Chair is maintained in the holdings of a collector of oddities named Babette Bombshell, of Orlando, Florida.
the who / bucket t
what you get for your money on miami beach: 49k will get you a studio condo (read: your own hotel room) in the 1948 midcentury modern casablanca and another 58k will get you a 120 sf cabana (w/ bathroom) on the pool and just off the beach. theres a lot more. for instance: 64.9k gets you 640 sf in a 1926 deco building. (just scroll past the rentals and timeshares.)
Otterbein's board of trustees voted last month to "deconstruct" the building and donate salvaged materials to Shaker dwellings. According to Gilmore, only 20 percent of the building is original. Other portions were lost during renovations in the 1950s and 1970s. "There's nothing in that building in terms of walls and stairwells that resembles how the Shakers lived. It's been totally reconfigured," Gilmore says. But some ask why the building can't be saved and revitalized as an arts center or employee dormitory. "They're doing this [demolition] because it's not going to be cost-efficient to redo for the specific use they're looking for," says Thomas Palmer, executive director of Preservation Ohio. "There's so little left in Ohio from that period ... there are a number of other uses for this building."
the cyrkle turn-down day
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hand rail / guard rail
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The current issue (#50) of the excellent experimental and improvised music magazine Signal To Noise prominently features a terrific article on your favorite Freeform Radio avatars (that's us). Writer Jesse Jarnow spent some quality time with us during our 2008 fundraising Marathon back in March, earned our trust, and got some choice quotes to accompany his keen observations (and largely accurate historical details). A few of us even got our pictures in the paper, thanks to the very pleasing photographic efforts of Caroline Bell. Not Station Manager Ken though - he got cut out of the group shot, probably because of the ridiculous slogan on his "funny" t-shirt.
What grabbed the eye was the sleeveless purple silk crepe sheath made for Mrs. Obama by Maria Pinto, the former Geoffrey Beene assistant who has long been an Obama favorite. Simple in silhouette and, at about $900 retail, not the kind of garment most working-class voters can reasonably aspire to, the dress was immediately subject to water cooler dissection.
i helped paint this dudes loft
on collectible architecture
People Who Buy Glass Houses
ARE ARCHITECTURAL LANDMARKS A GOOD REAL-ESTATE INVESTMENT?
By Daniel Gross
Valuing Modernist Architecture MARKET MOVERS by Felix Salmon
project gutenberg architecture (bookshelf)
corrugated tin available with no rust to various stages of rust
236
George Nakashima
Grass-Seated Chairs, pair
USA, c. 1955
American black walnut, woven sea-grass
24 w x 20 d x 27.5 h inches
Estimate: $500–700
nyc neon
CHANGE = CHANEL
Many designers have waxed admiringly about Barack Obama’s sophisticated typographical design scheme, particularly the consistent use in much of his graphic material of the typeface Gotham, designed by Tobias Frere-Jones. So I called Brian Collins, an expert on branding, to get his thoughts on what this “good design” means for the candidate.
[...]
Louise, (comment #4),
it’s not so much Pepsi as a direct take-off on Chanel!
Seriously!
The reason it was so affordable a half century later, however, was its condition. "I basically had to completely redo everything to the outside," Diao said, "and the kitchen."
He and his wife settled into a pattern of heading up to Dutchess County property on weekends and staying in the separate studio, with its own wide set of windows, from which they could look out on the Breuer structure while putting guests in it, or even renting it out.
But after Wright had success auctioning off another Modernist home in late 2006, and with Christie's having achieved some eye-opening sales as well, Diao figured that might be a way to make a healthy profit or at least get his investment back. So they set the estimated price from $1 million -- "the break-even point," he said -- to $1.5 million, then got a bid at the low end during the phone-in auction conducted out of Chicago.
"Then the guy who actually bid on it never saw the house until the following week," said Diao, who believes that the would-be buyer had not told his wife what he was doing.
Today, after being one of the biggest boosters of the auctioning of such houses, Wright rattles off a series of practical obstacles to what he now downplays as a "very small trend." In a traditional real estate transaction, he notes, the buyer has equal power to the seller, if not more, while in an auction the terms are basically set in stone by the seller. Another hitch is how buyers have to pay the substantial auction house premium in sales done this way, whereas regular real estate commissions are part of the sales price. Then there are the little ways in which buying a house is different from buying a sculpture, "the maintenance, the property taxes, checking for radon gas . . . timing of the closing . . . what are the fixtures?"
"A real estate transaction is a far more complicated transaction," summed up Wright, who isn't sure whether he will try to sell another home this way.
Where does that leave the Breuer house with the aluminium trailer tucked under it?
It's still for sale, Diao reports -- but through a local real estate agent. And for $1.5 million, "$1.488 million, actually."
Diao does not sound bitter about the experience, however, and even recounts one side benefit -- on his paintings. Modernist homes started finding their way into his works.
One highlighted the Modernist houses in New Canaan, Conn., to protest how some were being demolished. Another of his paintings was influenced by Philip Johnson's famous Glass House in that community. Diao was fascinated to learn how the rug there kept getting smaller every time it was cleaned, and also how Johnson was so anal about where the furniture should go, specifying the positioning in blueprints.
His painting thus showed a sequence of images, "beginning with the rug in the original position. And in the last frame the pieces of furniture are all on top of each other because the rug has shrunk so much."
black 16c uk barn conversion in nyt