The Best Example Of A Truly Ordinary Building

As the city gets more and more comfortable with historic preservation, it’s time to start thinking about preserving the best examples of the most ordinary architecture:

The six-story brick apartment houses of Pelham Parkway in the Bronx have little in common with the cast-iron emblems of SoHo, the opulent town houses of Gramercy Park or the palatial apartment buildings of Central Park West.

Yet a group of graduate students in historic preservation from Columbia University has proposed designating roughly 14 blocks of the seemingly unremarkable buildings as a historic district.

“What gets paid attention to in 20th-century housing in New York City is often atypical,” said Patrick Ciccone, one of the six students, in explaining the wisdom of designating the Pelham Parkway structures, which were built in the 1920s and 1930s. “These fairly standard buildings are important as examples of a type.”

On Tuesday, walking through the proposed historic district, which would lie generally south of the Pelham Parkway and east of Bronx Park East, Mr. Ciccone pointed to Alhambra Gardens, a fanciful 1928 building with Moorish elements set around a courtyard, and Tudor Arms, also constructed in 1928, with plaster lobby walls made to resemble travertine marble.

Other buildings had Spanish tile, crenellated rooflines and additional elements that, Mr. Ciccone noted, made them feel “not mass-produced to the degree that they were.”

. . .

Andrew Dolkart, the professor of historic preservation who oversaw the students’ work, thought they had made a compelling case for the neighborhood to become the city’s first historic district of six-story apartment houses.

“There’s so much interest in the preservation of the 19th-century row house, yet we have thousands of six-story apartment houses that very little has been written about,” he said. “It was really a civilized way to create housing for people who weren’t enormously wealthy.”