Sublime

The suddenness of migration led to some strange phenomena across upstate New York. Renovations were rushed, and houses were thrown onto the marketplace with barely a piece of furniture in them, with conspicuous issues like broken plumbing or holes in the floors.

When the Cornelius Vanderbilts had acquired the land in the 1880s, it had cost $375,000 and the house $3 million more. Their new mansion had been hailed by the press as “a private house which must for a century or two elevate the standard of such houses, and tend, at least, to the improvement of domestic architecture.”8 Now in 1925 the land, a

the Bellcomb47 system of cardboard-like honeycombs sandwiched between sheets of cheap strandwood (pressed like chipboard, but using tough fibrous strands of wood). The sandwiches are prefabricated in many precisely cut shapes that fit tightly together like a child’s miniature house kit—only this kit can be full-sized. Two unskilled adults could

Tobin didn’t have a mortgage: he had bought the trailer park for $2.1 million in 1995 and paid it off nine years later.2 But he did have to pay property taxes, water bills, regular maintenance costs, Lenny’s and Office Susie’s annual salaries and rent reductions, advertising fees, and eviction costs. After accounting for these expenses, vacancies,

He drove wedges, too. In his 1935 budget request, he asked the Board to allocate $3,600,000 for construction projects in Jacob Riis, Fort Tryon, Pelham Bay and the two Marine parks. The Board did, and the thin edge of the wedge was in. Year after year, thereafter, he returned to the Board for new allocations which he said were necessary to make the