Julie Lasky

His death, at a hospital, was announced by his company, Ingo Maurer GmbH, which said the cause was complications from a surgical procedure.

Maurer had a wonky fascination with technology that took nothing away from his reputation as a poet of light, as he was often described.

His first lamp, designed in 1966, was a large crystal bulb enclosing a smaller one. Called simply “Bulb” (his product names would become more fanciful), it won praise from designer Charles Eames and in 1968 became part of the Museum of Modern Art’s collection in New York.

For “YaYaHo,” which he made in 1984, he fashioned a lamp in the form of parallel low-voltage wires draped with shaded halogen bulbs that dangled like jewelry. In 2001 he made an early desk lamp using LEDs (“EL.E.DEE”) then later attached LEDs to wallpaper in a pattern that resembled twinkling rosettes (“Rose, Rose on the Wall”). In 2005 he embedded waferlike organic LEDs in glass tabletops, creating starry clusters with no visible connections. In 2012, he collaborated with Moritz Waldemeyer, another German designer, to produce a narrow table lamp with 256 LEDs simulating flickering candlelight (“My New Flame”).

“He loved the technology that was coming out, but to him it was like Houdini,” said his longtime friend Kim Hastreiter, co-founder of Paper magazine. “He used the technology in his lamps like a magic trick.”

Even so, Maurer never renounced the old-fashioned incandescent lightbulb, with its golden hue and emotional power.

With “Lucellino,” he attached goose-feather wings and suspended the bulb like a hovering Cupid, and with “Wo bist du, Edison ... ?” (“Where are you, Edison?”) he reinvented it as a hologram projected on a shade.

But while the materials he used for his lamps made them artful and cheeky, Maurer professed to be more interested in the medium of light itself.

“I’m very lucky to work with the material which does not exist,” he said in 2017 on a podcast produced by design retailer Arkitektura. He couldn’t take light in his hand and bend it and look at it from different sides, he explained; light is not a thing, he said, but “the spirit which catches you inside.”

Ingo Raphael Maurer was born May 12, 1932, to Theodor and Henny (Boeckmann) Maurer on Reichenau, an island in Lake Constance, in southern Germany near the Swiss border. His father, a fisherman and inventor, died when Ingo was 15, and his brother, the eldest of his four siblings, ordered him to leave school and find work. He could apprentice, he was told, either as a butcher or as a typographer at a local newspaper.

He chose the newspaper. Though it wasn’t an obvious career path for a lighting designer, he would later point out the lessons taught by the airy gaps between letter forms. The sparkling water of Lake Constance had also been a mesmerizing influence on him, he said.

Maurer traveled to the United States in 1960, settling in cisco with his German girlfriend, Dorothee Becker, and working as a graphic designer. He was there for three years, soaking up pop art inspirations that resurfaced throughout his career.

Returning to Munich as a newlywed, he founded a company called Design M to produce his Bulb lamp, as well as a wall storage unit called Wall-All invented by Becker. (It is currently sold by Vitra under the name Uten.Silo.) The couple divorced in the mid-1970s.

His company, now known as Ingo Maurer GmbH, eventually expanded to include 70 employees and took on all of its own manufacturing locally. It also executed ambitious civic and private commissions.

Maurer is survived by his daughters, Sarah Utermoehlen and Claude Maurer, the company’s managing director; and four grandchildren. Maurer’s second wife, Jenny Lau, died of cancer in 2014.

A handsome man with a square jaw and flowing hair that turned paper white in his last decades, Maurer had a great deal of charisma, which helped propel him through hard economic times.

“The Italians even thought he was Italian,” said Mariangela Viterbo, head of a public relations firm in Milan, Italy, who met him in the late 1960s when he presented Bulb at a trade show in Turin. “In that period the big vision of modern design was Danish or Finnish. Ingo came with something more similar to our temperament — more ironic, more joyful. It made a difference.”

A crowning moment of disruption occurred at the 1994 Euroluce lighting fair in Milan, where Maurer introduced a chandelier made of suspended porcelain dish shards. The fixture was initially called “Zabriskie Point,” after the Michelangelo Antonioni film, which has a scene of a house exploding in slow motion. At least one startled Italian visitor to the fair exclaimed, “Porca miseria!,” a phrase that translates roughly as “Dammit!” Maurer decided that he preferred that name for the chandelier.

Several Porca miserias! are still made, by hand, each year, but Maurer was never comfortable with the high price tag, upward of 30,000 pounds (about $38,000), as quoted by at least one website. He donated some of the profits to a family he once met in Aswan, Egypt.

Not everyone was charmed by his antic designs. Reviewing a 2007 retrospective of Maurer’s work at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in Manhattan, Ken Johnson wrote in The New York Times, “While some of his pieces are lovely to look at, his work in general is so precious and so busily eager to please that it will make you pine for the reproving austerity of the fluorescent-light minimalist Dan Flavin.”

Paola Antonelli, senior design curator at the Museum of Modern Art, disagreed.

“I’ve never seen anyone experiment with such abandon,” she said, “and experimentation is the opposite of wanting to please.”

Antonelli provided Maurer with a showcase in 1998, when she included his lamps in a design exhibition, and hung “Porca Miseria!” in the current MoMA exhibition called “Energy.”

She said that at one of his design events, Maurer handed out paper 3D glasses that created a vision of little hearts when the viewer looked toward the light.

“That was so him,” she said of his whimsy. “In a pair of throwaway glasses.”

This article originally appeared in

Ingo Maurer, Designer Known as a Poet of Light, Dies at 87

Ingo Maurer, a German lighting designer who was Promethean in his delivery of illumination — fashioning lamps out of shattered crockery, scribbled memos, holograms, tea strainers and incandescent bulbs with feathered wings — died Monday in Munich. He was 87.

Catherine Skidmore, a registered nurse, was raised in New Jersey, vacationed as a child in Pennsylvania and lived for 10 years in Manhattan. Eventually she moved near Phoenix, but when family ties called her home, she bought a house near the intersection of all three of her formative states, in the historic river city of Port Jervis, New York.

Skidmore, 45, chose “P.J.,” she said, using a common nickname for this community of 8,800, because it is just over the bridge from Matamoras, Pennsylvania, where her mother and aunt live. She found a 1,500-square-foot Victorian on Erie Street that dates to the turn of the 20th century and has a rocking-chair porch and a nice backyard. The price was $156,000.

Her house is close to the Delaware River, where she likes to tube. “And the downtown revitalization is terrific,” she said.

After decades of drubbings from an assortment of socioeconomic ills — the evaporation of industries and jobs; a misguided urban renewal program that razed dozens of historic buildings; the flight of businesses and consumers to lower-tax Pennsylvania; and the tyranny of the great recession — Port Jervis is finding its feet.

“The market is off the charts,” said Paul Hamilton, the owner of Orange West Realty, which is based in the city. “When we list, we’ll have an accepted offer in a week or two. That’s not just with me, but everybody.”

Port Jervis began as a 19th-century railway-and-canal hub, but, blessed with natural beauty, it is recasting itself as a destination for lovers of the outdoors. “The goal,” states the draft of a new comprehensive municipal plan submitted for public comment this week, “is to have a thriving historic downtown within a walkable, livable city that benefits from the combined aspects of the commercial and the natural world to the benefit of all.”

Crime and drugs have plagued the city in recent decades, but are receding to the extent that the municipal plan addresses the problem of overcoming the perception of these conditions, as much as their reality. Violent crimes and serious property crimes declined 24% during 2017 and 2018.

Residents give much of the credit for improvements to Kelly Decker, 51, a sixth-generation citizen, middle-school history teacher and retired police officer who became the mayor six years ago when Port Jervis was on the verge of bankruptcy. (Less than 1% fund balance was left in the general account.)

Decker — who, not coincidentally, shares a name with the 1793 Fort Decker, the oldest building in Port Jervis and home of the Minisink Valley Historical Society — recalled the place of his youth “as a booming town” that could boom once again with the help of fresh development strategies.

On his watch, hip businesses like the Fox N Hare Brewing Co. have come to the spruced-up Front Street, with its pedestrian promenade. A six-story boutique hotel with a rooftop bar is planned to break ground nearby next month. Forty-eight miles of hiking and biking trails were added to the 2,000-acre watershed area and Elks-Brox Memorial Park to the north, and the East Coast’s largest pump track opened for bicyclists in May at the 40-acre Riverside Park on the Delaware.

Last summer, Orange County Community College opened the satellite Sarfatti Education Center, offering classes in a renovated building on Pike Street. Long-term efforts are underway to build a white-water kayak park on the Delaware and a railroad museum at the Erie Turntable, a still-operating vestige of Port Jervis’ industrial past.

When Decker became mayor, 82% of the city’s population rented their homes, usually in single-family houses that had been subdivided. The City Council rewrote the code to stipulate that any multifamily buildings vacant for more than 180 days revert automatically to single-family status, reducing the neglect created by absentee landlords. The percentage of renters has dropped to 63, Decker said. His goal is 30%.

Their ranks will soon include Corey R. Taylor, a self-described aspiring writer of psychological thrillers. Taylor, 31, was raised in Cuddebackville, New York, a hamlet in the neighboring town of Deerpark. He recently signed a lease on a two-bedroom apartment in a renovated circa-1900 two-family residence on Owen Street, for $1,200 a month.

Taylor described Port Jervis as “a typical small town, where everybody knows everybody’s business,” yet always offers support at critical moments, particularly tragic ones. “When somebody is going through the worst time of their life and sees the whole town show up for them, it gives them hope,” he said.

Some longtime residents who cherish the values Taylor described insist that bringing in outsiders is not the solution to an economic slump. Several members of a private Facebook group recently voiced concern about urbanites disrupting the intimacy and tranquillity of their way of life.

Their objections are not being heeded.

“We definitely see a younger group of people that I’ve never seen before, and I grew up in Port Jervis,” said Paula J. Meloi, a local real estate agent, referring to newcomers, including those snapping up weekend homes. “We are probably the best buy in Orange County, even though we’re a little farther out.”

What You’ll Find

Port Jervis is about 70 miles northwest of New York City and 60 miles east of Scranton, Pennsylvania. Its 2.5 square miles are bordered to the south by the convergence of the Delaware and Neversink Rivers and turn hilly to the north and east.

Residents have access to multiple parks, playgrounds and even a public beach. The 34-acre Laurel Grove Cemetery, which officially dates to 1856, has walking paths that are part of the Delaware River Heritage Trail. At the tip is the Tri-States Monument, marking the spot where New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania meet.

As of 2015, Port Jervis had 3,984 total housing units, 60% of which were built before 1940 and 75% before 1960.

“It’s an older city with older homes,” Meloi said, noting that Victorians are common and fly off the market if they have fireplaces, stained glass and fine woodwork.

Neighborhoods include the West End (once called Germantown), a residential stretch along the Delaware, where Skidmore lives. Southwest of the train tracks is the Acre, which was known as Bully’s Acre in the 19th century when it was predominantly Irish. Low-priced rentals here are popular with residents who work at Kolmar Laboratories, which manufactures beauty products.

Port Jervis has a 1903 Carnegie library with a permanent exhibition devoted to the writer Stephen Crane, who lived in the town as a child and returned in later years to visit relatives. There is also a weekly farmers’ market from June through October; an annual Fireman’s Day Parade that marked its 169th edition on July 13; and what is claimed to be the largest soapbox derby in the world.

What You’ll Pay

As of July 21, the median sales price of a single-family home was $109,000, a year-over-year increase of 28% and a two-year increase of 63%, said Hamilton, of Orange West Realty. Outside investors flipping properties, he said, have contributed to the sharply rising number of sales: 103 single-family houses changed hands from late July 2018 to late July 2019, compared with 87 during the prior 12 months, and 77 the year before that.

The 65 listings drawn from multiple sources on Redfin’s website, as of July 22, included, on the high end, an 1880 four-unit building a block from East Main Street, priced at $324,000, with taxes of $12,081. On the low end was a 1920 house with three bedrooms at the edge of Elks-Brox Memorial Park, priced at $93,500, with taxes of $2,500.

The Vibe

Riverside Creamery, a white-clapboard house with pink shutters at 5 Water Street, is the place to be on a Sunday afternoon. The shop, which offers deep-fried ice cream among its five menu pages of treats, opened in 1999 on the site of a long-vacant 1950s ice-cream parlor. The original interiors were re-created, down to the original soda fountain.

Some patrons remain from that bygone decade, while others are day tourists dropping by for a sugar jolt after kayaking or biking. In the picnic area along the river, a sign on the wrought-iron fence says, “The Fence It’s Old! Please Do Not Throw Rocks!! Rocks Don’t Grow Naturally.”

The Schools

The Port Jervis City School District extends to the town of Deerpark and two towns in Sullivan County in New York, and includes about 2,500 students in two elementary schools, one middle school and one high school. The 2017-18 student population was 69% white, 15% Hispanic or Latino, 8% black or African American and 2% Asian.

Mike Rydell, the superintendent since last July, has increased after-school and summer programs to “engage students and enrich learning,” he said. A former science teacher, he has also led the integration of hands-on STEAM projects into traditional English and math curriculums.

Anna S. Kuhl Elementary School enrolls about 900 students in kindergarten through sixth grade. On 2017-18 state tests, 35% were proficient in English versus 46% statewide; 44% were proficient in math versus 48% statewide.

Hamilton-Bicentennial Elementary School, in Cuddebackville, enrolls about 400 students in kindergarten through sixth grade. On 2017-18 state tests, 47% were proficient in English versus 46% statewide; 43% were proficient in math versus 48% statewide.

Port Jervis Middle School enrolls about 400 students in seventh and eighth grades. On 2017-18 state tests, 31% were proficient in English versus 44% statewide; 23% were proficient in math versus 37% statewide. Rydell has formed a facilities review committee with the aim of upgrading or replacing the aging building, a longtime community goal.

Port Jervis High School enrolls about 750 students in ninth through 12th grade. The average 2018 SAT scores were 538 in reading and writing and 515 in math, versus 534 in both subjects statewide.

The Commute

Interstate 84, just south of the city, is the main route to New York City. Driving time to Midtown Manhattan is between 90 minutes and two hours, depending on traffic. Metro-North’s Port Jervis Line originates downtown and runs eastbound trains 12 times a day on weekdays. Travel time to Pennsylvania Station, with a transfer at Secaucus Junction, in New Jersey, averages 146 minutes and costs $23.25 each way. Stewart International Airport, in New Windsor, New York, is 45 minutes by car northwest.

The History

Named in 1827 for John B. Jervis, the chief engineer of the Delaware and Hudson Canal, a waterway used for shipping Pennsylvania coal to New York City, Port Jervis was incorporated as a village in 1853 within the town of Deerpark and became an independent city in 1907.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/realestate/port-jervis-ny-a-19th-century-industrial-hub-blessed-with-natural-beauty.html" id="14a14862-8740-30d6-a4b2-a58183de3222">The New York Times</a>.

(Living In)

Port Jervis, New York: A 19th-Century Industrial Hub Blessed With Natural Beauty

An architectural alien dressed in shingles and passing itself off as just another roomy East Hampton beach house — no one will be fooled — is on the market at 33 Ocean Ave. for $9.5 million.

Designed by Robert A.M. Stern, the former dean of the Yale School of Architecture, and completed in 1975, the 6,963-square-foot house on 2.16 acres is an exuberant postmodern mashup of boxes and swoops with ocean views and 190 feet of Hook Pond frontage. The listing agent is Denise Wilder of Douglas Elliman.

Its original owners, Norman and Carol Mercer, both worked from this home. Norman Mercer, a businessman-turned-artist who died in 2007 at the age of 91, made popsicle-colored, cast-acrylic sculptures, while Carol Mercer, a landscape designer, used the grounds to demo her plantings. In 1997 she told Newsday that keeping the gardens perfectly groomed and ready for inspection meant rising every morning at 6 a.m. “It’s like having your good clothes on all the time,” she said.

After she died in 2016 at 92, the property was listed at $13.9 million and sat on the market, its price falling like shriveled petals. Jeffrey Gates and R. Michael Moran, a married couple next door, watched and worried that a house that had won notice from architectural critics like Vincent Scully and Paul Goldberger would fall into the hands of a spec builder and vanish from the Earth.

Early last year, they bought it themselves, paying $9.4 million and spending an estimated $800,000 to reverse what they described as disrepair and adulteration. “The house was in bad shape; it showed terribly,” Moran said.

The walls had turned pink and orange under Carol Mercer’s floral eye, and doors, like the closet in Narnia, opened to strange wonderlands of artifacts and machinery. Stern had declined to add an art studio because he said it would destroy the building’s lines, so the Mercers hired a local architect to do the job, also putting in a greenhouse that, according to Moran, “looked like a UFO.”

Now the walls are white and the studio and greenhouse gone, replaced — with the Stern office’s blessing — with a large guest suite. (The house has five bedrooms with en suite bathrooms, a sixth bedroom that lacks a private bathroom and a one-bedroom caretaker’s quarters sans kitchen over the garage.) A sunroom, where the sellers said they first found giant, spiny plants suggestive of “Little Shop of Horrors,” displays the only Norman Mercer sculpture left on the premises — a transparent acrylic mobile dangling from the double-height ceiling.

Stern designed the building with an upside-down layout. Five bedrooms are on the main level, along with the sunroom, an office, a curved chamber that was intended as a dining room and a meandering kitchen with tawny floor tiles and taupe cabinets topped in dark orange Formica. The stainless-steel appliances are new, although a vintage NuTone blender remains embedded in a countertop. The sprightly laundry-room wallpaper is decorated with mod typography that says, “I hate laundry rooms.”

Trotting up a skylighted staircase with tubular brass railings, one finds several of the architect’s signatures, written large and small. “Octagons are a Stern thing,” Moran noted, referring to the eight-sided open living room. The floorboards up here are washed rift-cut white oak, the trim cerused and the artisanal fireplace tiles feathered in brown glaze — a panoply of neutrals Moran identified as “Stern colors.”

A 1974 octagonal Tai Ping carpet attributed to Stern fills the center of the room, along with his bleached walnut coffee table with smoked glass top. (A complementary faceted dining table is in the adjacent eating area.) Moran pointed out a trapezoidal window the architect cut into an exterior wall. “Its sole purpose,” he said, “is to let you look at the shingles as if they were art.”

Behind the living room is a master suite with a fireplace and a nearby midnight kitchen for snacking. The master bathroom’s sinks and tub are scooped from what appears to be a massive block of dark green marble, until you discover that the material is warm to the touch. The globular crystalline faucet handles (produced by Norman Mercer) are likewise plastic. (Real marble is on the floor.)

A flight of stairs with clear plastic siding (not in homage to the former owner but to bring the stairs up to code) leads to a roof deck with ocean views and an aerial perspective of the 50-foot-long heated swimming pool. Until recently, the croquet-demanding backyard lawn flowed all the way to the pond. A wetlands buffer of shrubs and grasses now protects the water from runoff.

Carol Mercer’s plantings spread out at your feet here, from gatherings of butterfly bushes, Montauk daisies and willows to formal beds of salvia, astilbe and bearded iris. In front, roses, junipers and yew form a welcoming committee, and throughout the property colors and scents erupt in their season from maples, star magnolias, burning bush trees and rhododendrons.

The sellers intended to use the property as a guesthouse, but guests haven’t been so plentiful recently, Moran said. And anyway, the couple’s mission should be accomplished by now.

“We like saving things,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/realestate/beach-house-designed-by-robert-am-stern.html" id="03b17cd8-cb70-34a7-a551-5192eaceeaf5">The New York Times</a>.

(Exclusive)

Beach House Designed by Robert A.M. Stern

Kuper, 60, is a graphic novelist and illustrator who contributes cartoons to The New Yorker and since 1997 has drawn the Cold War-inspired “Spy vs. Spy” comic strip for Mad Magazine. (In September, W.W. Norton &amp; Co. published his collection of Franz Kafka tales rendered in multiple panels, “Kafkaesque: Fourteen Stories,” and this fall Norton will release his adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.”)

The Kupers bought their wood-and-stone cottage 26 years ago for $186,000, when Cold Spring was radiating malaise. IBM had recently laid off thousands of its workers in the Hudson Valley. “When we first got up there, it was sad,” Kuper said. “There were a lot of closed stores on Main Street.”

Now on fine weekend days, Cold Spring, which is across the river from West Point, is thronged with day trippers disembarking at the Metro-North station near the foot of Main Street to visit cute shops and cafes that line the sloping avenue. Or they hit the hiking trails at Breakneck Ridge or Bull Hill.

For New Yorkers looking for greenery, scenery and culture, Cold Spring checks all the boxes. The village, which is in the town of Philipstown in Putnam County, has an impressive collection of 19th-century buildings with sedate neoclassical features or frothy Victorian trimmings. It has good food, but no fast food; a public library that lends gardening equipment and museum passes; a riverside gathering spot; and a nearby picturesque preserve on the site of the West Point Foundry. A mainspring of Cold Spring, the foundry produced artillery and other ironworks from 1818 to 1911.

Maybe most attractive is that Cold Spring is a little more than an hour from Manhattan by car or train.

Proximity makes this Mayberry throwback irresistible to New Yorkers who scorn the suburbs but cannot commit to a full-throttle rural lifestyle. It is particularly alluring to gig-economy workers making occasional trips to the city. For weekenders faced with the anticipatory bleakness of Sundays as they contemplate the return trip to their primary homes, the short distance is a comfort.

David May, 68, an architect, said that when he and his wife, Doris, decided to buy a weekend house 12 years ago, “there were very few places we could actually look because my wife doesn’t drive.” They walk from their Manhattan home in Murray Hill to Grand Central Terminal to catch a train and then hoof it to their 1850s stone house on Morris Avenue, uphill from the Cold Spring station.

David May parks his a car at the house during the week and uses it for errands and excursions beyond the village. (Cold Spring has a small strip mall on Route 9D; the nearest big-box store is a 15-minute drive.)

But Mayberry has its price. Demand has driven up the cost of housing to a median sale price of $460,000. That’s a bargain compared with Cold Spring’s affluent neighbor, Garrison, where the median is $686,500, but it’s 27 percent more than the average in Putnam County. And the taxes are high in this low-industry community.

Accessibility also means that Cold Spring attracts an increasing number of visitors who compete for parking spots, scuff hillsides and turn the purchase of a chicken Caesar wrap at a Main Street cafe into an ordeal half as long as the ride up the Taconic State Parkway. On a recent Saturday, as the village teemed with day trippers enjoying the first mild weekend of spring, one woman was overheard muttering, “Damned tourists.” (Improvements in Beacon, up the road, are further credited — or blamed — for an influx of visitors enjoying the smorgasbord of local recreations.)

“It is a double-edged sword,” said Susan Branagan, who runs the Cold Spring Farmers Market, which in winter does business in the parish hall of St. Mary-in-the-Highlands Church and in May moves to the grounds of the Boscobel house museum in Garrison. “As a resident, I don’t like the traffic jams,” she said, but as the market’s president, she thinks the surge of shoppers is “great.”

Historically a company town, Cold Spring has houses that were built for bosses, grunts and everyone in between. Those currently on the market include a circa-1840 estate on Parrott Street ($1.995 million, with taxes of $30,875) believed to have first been occupied by William I. Paulding, who helped start the West Point Foundry; it has a military-themed frieze over the living room fireplace, stained-glass insignia and views of Storm King Mountain. On the modest side of the spectrum is an 1860 stucco workers’ house off Main Street ($375,000, with taxes of $6,607).

In 1982, much of the 0.6-square-mile village, with its 200-plus buildings, was designated a National Historic Landmark District.

“You never see a modern or contemporary house,” said Kathyrine Tomann, an associate real estate broker with Houlihan Lawrence Cold Spring, referring to architectural styles. Beyond the historic district, new construction is limited by the challenging topography and an active land trust. But as aging residents look to downsize, a mixed-use development called Butterfield, with shops, medical offices, a senior center and residences for people 55 years and older is being completed on the site of a former hospital, at Route 9D and Paulding Avenue.

In addition to Cold Spring’s single-family homes, there are two 1970s developments, Forge Gate and Springbrook, that have 131 units between them. The single-level condos are so desirable that “most of them don’t make it to the market,” Tomann said.

Cold Spring’s housing values are solid, Tomann said, if not bulletproof. The market dipped less than others during the last recession and continues to be relatively stable, although as in many other places, the high end is hampered by new rules limiting the amount of property taxes that can be written off.

Data from the website Trulia show that as of late March, Cold Spring’s $460,000 median home sale price represented a year-over-year decline of 17 percent, with an average of 16 sales a month.

The median rent is currently $2,550 a month.

As of April 8, 12 village homes were on the market. The least expensive was a two-bedroom, 940-square-foot condo at Forge Gate, listed for $239,000, with $452 monthly fees and taxes of $4,513. The most expensive was a four-bedroom, colonial-style house built in 2001 on almost 2 1/2 acres, listed for $2.595 million, with taxes of $25,803.

Residents say Cold Spring is a blue spot in a mostly red county. There was more than a touch of Woodstock in a recent sight of protesters displaying anti-war banners near St. Mary’s Church and signs declaring in six languages that “Hate Has No Home Here.”

Twenty years ago, Main Street was dominated by antiques shops, but now there are also home-design boutiques, a camping store and an “apothecary and wellness house.” Local favorites include Cathryn’s Tuscan Grill, Hudson Hil’s Cafe &amp; Market and Split Rock Books, an independent bookstore opened in June by Heidi and Michael Bender, a couple from Brooklyn. (It fills a void left by the previous village bookstore, which closed a decade ago.)

Last year, Niche, a website offering school assessments, ranked the Haldane Central School District in Cold Spring number one of five in Putnam County. In 2017-18, the district enrolled a total of 837 students in three schools — 84 percent were white, 9 percent were Hispanic or Latino, 4 percent were Asian, and 2 percent were black or African-American. Seventeen percent were classified as economically disadvantaged.

Haldane Elementary School has about 300 students in kindergarten through fifth grade. On 2017-18 state exams, 63 percent met standards in English versus 45 percent statewide; 67 met standards in math versus 49 percent statewide.

Haldane Middle School, which shares a building with the lower school, enrolls about 210 students in sixth through eighth grade. On 2017-18 exams, 60 percent met standards in English versus 46 statewide; 51 percent met standards in math versus 38 percent statewide.

Haldane High School occupies a separate building at the same address. It enrolls about 300 students and offers college-level and Advanced Placement programs in 17 subjects. The mean SAT scores for the class of 2018 were 601 in reading and writing and 584 in math, versus 534 in both subjects statewide.

Metro-North’s Hudson Line offers twice- or thrice-hourly service between Cold Spring and Grand Central Terminal. The morning ride takes 75 to 82 minutes. A round-trip fare is $38.50 at peak travel times and $29 at off-peak times; monthly tickets are $422.

Legend has it that George Washington tasted the local water and, finding it frigid, gave Cold Spring its name. “It’s a great story,” said Sarah Johnson, executive director of the Putnam History Museum, although she declined to confirm or refute it.

On Apr. 27, the museum will open an exhibition on important women from Putnam County, including Julia Butterfield, a local philanthropist who was married to the man credited with writing “Taps,” and Emily Warren Roebling, a Cold Spring native who supervised the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge after her husband, the bridge’s engineer, Washington Roebling, became incapacitated.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/realestate/cold-spring-ny-a-sylvan-village-that-beckons-city-commuters.html" id="b49a618a-de6d-3a4c-a226-d1559313c7f8">The New York Times</a>.

On weekdays, Peter Kuper can be found on the Upper West Side, steeped in the angsty writings of dead European novelists. On weekends, it is a different story. That’s when he and his wife head for their 1940 cottage outside Cold Spring, a sylvan village on the east bank of the Hudson River, where angst — and half of New York City, it sometimes seems — likes to take a hike.

Cold Spring, N.Y.: A Sylvan Village That Beckons City Commuters

But the designers of 40 Tenth Avenue in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District managed to prevent pools of darkness from flooding the High Line next to it by sidestepping the sun. The commercial tower’s glass curtain wall recedes and breaks into eye-catching facets on the north and south sides, allowing concentrations of solar rays to find their way to the elevated park and nearby streets.

Studio Gang, the Chicago-based architecture firm led by Jeanne Gang, designed the 139,000-square-foot building using a strategy it describes as “solar carving.” The architects mapped the sun’s annual course to determine which parts of the nearly finished 12-story tower to slice away and sheathed portions of those sections in tilted angular panes of glass.

Multiple benefits will accrue from this gemlike surface to those inside and outside the building, said Weston Walker, the design principal of Studio Gang’s New York office. Coupled with high-performance, low-reflectivity glass, the optimized geometry will minimize heat gain and reduce glare for drivers on the West Side Highway, which runs alongside the building. It will also discourage migratory birds from striking. The sculpting “creates visual noise that makes it easier for the birds to detect the building and fly around it,” Walker said.

Inside, the facets will frame dynamic views of the Hudson River and add interesting bumps to office or amenity spaces.

The building, which is scheduled to open in April, has been designed with minimum ceiling heights of almost 16 feet and outdoor space on every floor but one. An 8,000-square-foot second-floor terrace will sit alongside the High Line, and there will be a 10,000-square-foot communal roof deck.

“We call it the lighthouse,” said Jared Epstein, the vice president of Aurora Capital Associates, which developed the building with William Gottlieb Real Estate. (The cost, he said, while declining to give specifics, was “well over” $200 million.)

Epstein said he hoped the tower would entice leaders in technology, finance, the media or advertising to the Meatpacking District. A Genesis automobile marketing center and restaurant will occupy the base, and office-floor tenants will be announced early next year.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/realestate/the-high-line-gets-a-gemlike-neighbor.html" id="420633bc-c990-3c06-a1cb-0698ec0e72fd">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — For architects of urban towers, the sun is a double-edged sword, producing cheap warmth and light in buildings, but also unneighborly shadows. The taller the building, the more likely it is to throw shade. This problem is of particular note when your neighbor is New York City’s High Line.

The High Line Gets a Gemlike Neighbor

Eight years ago, Jean Holland moved with her family from West Hempstead, New York, to Levittown, about 7 miles east on the Hempstead Turnpike. Drawn to the legendary Long Island hamlet by its reputation for safe streets and good schools (her son, Brandon, was a teenager at the time), she settled in a 3,000-square-foot house. It was a far cry from the modest two-bedroom boxes that the developers, Levitt &amp; Sons, had built from 1947 to 1951 for returning World War II servicemen. But it was typical of what Levittown has become in the decades since: a collection of more than 17,000 snowflakes customized with dormers, bay windows, porticos, shingles and garages.

Holland, a paralegal, found the house had more space than she needed, and the $3,200 monthly mortgage was a strain. So she and her family moved again. And again and again and again. As life threw them curves, or they simply got itchy, they changed addresses, but always within the community. Now Holland, 67, is on her fifth Levitt house, a circa-1950 extended ranch on Blacksmith Road with five bedrooms and an in-ground swimming pool. She and her husband, John, 63, a waiter, paid $432,000 for the property in 2016. Brandon has the second floor to himself.

“Even if I won the lottery, I wouldn’t leave here,” she said. “I may build my dream house, but I wouldn’t leave Levittown.”

Levittown has been lauded for offering the American dream of homeownership, and derided as a model of suburban monotony and intolerance. But a key trait of the 71-year-old development in Nassau County is its stickiness.

Many children of the original homeowners have grown up and grown old in these 7 square miles. The needs of older residents have become so pronounced that one of the suburb’s two bowling alleys is being replaced by an assisted-living community. At the same time, a new generation is turning up in search of an affordable place to start families.

“If you’re a young couple getting married, and you want to live in a good community and can only spend around $400,000, Levittown is the only place to go,” said Nancy Kalberer, an agent with Century 21, who has been selling real estate in the area for 28 years. “You sacrifice your basement, but so what?”

Yes, Levittown has no basements. The mass-construction methods that yielded more than 30 houses a day at the peak of development left no time to dig foundations. The houses were built on radiant-heated slabs.

Buried oil tanks are another quirk, Kalberer said. And she often broods over the poor planning that, as she sees it, left no reasonable place for a washing machine.

But Levittown still has its original nine community swimming pools with playing fields and playgrounds, as well as remnants of the seven intimate shopping strips known as village greens. It also still has active VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) and American Legion posts. And volunteerism is strong in traditional service clubs like the Kiwanis and Lions.

“People are very attached to this community, even the people who move away,” said Louise Cassano, who grew up in the original Levitt house her parents bought in 1951. In 1964, she and her husband moved into their own home, on Lilac Lane. Now 74 and president of the Levittown Community Council, which organizes festivals and anniversary celebrations, she has never lived anywhere else.

But attachment comes at a steep price: Levittown, which lacks a commercial or manufacturing base, has painfully high property taxes. For instance, the taxes on a 1,200-square-foot house on Lilac Lane currently listed for $459,000 are $10,849. And now, after an eight-year freeze, reassessments are expected to raise taxes for 52 percent of Nassau County’s homeowners.

Also, the community’s much-documented history includes ugly chapters of racial exclusion and book banning. The early leases barred homeowners from renting or selling to those who weren’t “Caucasians,” although they stipulated that people of color could work as domestics. Bill Griffith, the cartoonist who for more than 40 years has revisited his Levittown childhood in his “Zippy the Pinhead” strip, recalled ethnic blocks of Italians and Jews (“I was neither,” he said) reflecting the makeup of settlers from Queens and Brooklyn.

Today, Levittown is more diverse. According to 2017 census estimates, the population of nearly 52,000 is 14.6 percent Hispanic or Latino and 7.3 percent Asian, an increase of 7.8 and 4.5 percent since 2000. In that same period, the percentage of black or African-American residents rose from 0.5 percent to 1.4 percent.

The demographic shift is pronounced in local churches. The building on Periwinkle Road that was once the Unitarian Levittown Community Church has since 2016 been home to the India Christian Assembly.

Griffith, who left Levittown after high school, recalled knocking on the door of his old home on Harbor Lane a decade ago, just to say hello. It was opened by a Chinese family, who “immediately tried to sell me the house,” he said.

— What You’ll Find

Developed on 4,000 acres of potato farms, Levittown is a hamlet and census-designated place in the town of Hempstead. Its boundaries are commonly identified with the 11756 ZIP code.

Kalberer, the real estate agent, estimated that 80 percent of the housing stock is modified versions of the 750-square-foot Cape Cods and 800-square-foot ranches built by the Levitts. The remaining 20 percent, she said, was built by competing developers or on the sites of teardowns.

You won’t find many stoop-huggers seeking protection for the original buildings. These houses were meant to be altered, with their unfinished attics and roomy 60-by-100-foot lots. A close example of a pristine Levitt house, on Oak Tree Lane, lost bragging rights when its owners replaced the original asphalt shingles.

What you will find are structures that spread out over their lots, bumping out at the sides and back, and growing upward from the original rooflines.

Local commercial establishments have similarly expanded. “When Levittown was built, each section had a village green, and those businesses were all owned by small-business owners, with the exception of a supermarket,” Cassano said. “Even the major shopping center on Hempstead Turnpike was basically small stores.”

Today Hempstead Turnpike, the main consumer corridor running east-west through the hamlet, is lined with big-box outlets like Staples and fast-food spots like Dairy Queen. Retail at the village greens — which were designed to be within walking distance, so housewives left stranded by their commuting husbands in the age of one-car families could buy necessities — has grown spotty or been supplanted by housing. Many small businesses, Cassano said, are now based in the owners’ homes, like her own public-relations and marketing company.

Locals say they can find everything they need within Levittown or in shopping centers like the Broadway Commons mall in neighboring Hicksville. For recreation they enjoy the community pools, block parties, league sports and a branch of Governor’s Comedy Club. The Levittown Community Council holds a February Winterfest and a July event called Lazy Days of Summer.

“Around the Fourth of July, it’s like a war zone with all the fireworks,” said Holland, the peripatetic Levittown resident. “Oops, I guess I shouldn’t say that.”

— What You’ll Pay

Levittown’s housing inventory is mostly single-family. Among the 114 properties on the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island website as of Dec. 17, the least expensive house in good condition (and not in foreclosure) was an expanded Cape Cod with three bedrooms and one bathroom, priced at $379,000 (taxes: $11,506). The most expensive was a colonial-style house built in 2015, with four bedrooms and 2 1/2 bathrooms, priced at $729,000 (taxes: $34,774).

Cambridge Village/Yorkshire Village is a rental complex on Bowling Lane with 122 one- and two-bedroom units starting at $2,060 a month. Rentals are also available at the 44-unit Brixton Lane Apartments, where one-bedrooms start at $1,850 a month.

According to Trulia, the median sale price of a home in Levittown, as of Oct. 18, was $449,000, a year-over-year increase of 8 percent, based on 1,378 transactions.

— The Vibe

Bob Koenig, vice president of the Levittown Historical Society and Museum, who has lived in the hamlet since 2002 and has composed and recorded affectionate songs about it, described Levittown as “a starter community.”

It set the tone for suburban America and keeps a tight hold on old-school values like civic responsibility and neighborliness, he said: “You feel like you walk out of your house and you see a real enactment of ‘Father Knows Best’ or ‘Leave It to Beaver.’ But not necessarily in a bad way.”

— The Schools

The Levittown Union Free School District serves about 7,100 students and has a 2017-18 budget of $210,218,722, or about $29,600 per student; 65 percent of its revenue comes from property taxes.

The district covers about 5 1/2 square miles of Levittown and parts of neighboring Wantagh and Seaford. It has six elementary schools, two middle schools, two high schools and the Gerald R. Claps Career and Technical Center, a two-year technical high school open to all 11th- and 12th-grade students in Nassau County.

Levittown residents “get really a lot for their taxes,” said Tonie McDonald, the superintendent. She described a panoply of Advanced Placement classes and athletics programs, a full continuum of special education and a highly regarded music curriculum.

On 2017-18 state tests, 61 percent of students in third through eighth grades met standards in English districtwide, versus 45 percent statewide; 70 percent met standards in math, versus 47 percent statewide. But McDonald noted that more than 70 percent of the district’s elementary- and middle-school students opted out of the examinations, so the results might not accurately reflect the schools’ academic achievements.

The 2017 SAT scores for the district’s two four-year high schools, Division Avenue and General Douglas MacArthur, averaged 558 in reading and writing and 561 in math, versus 480 and 530 statewide.

A number of homes in northeastern Levittown fall into the Island Trees Union Free School District, which has 2,250 students and lower taxes. The district, which extends into Bethpage and Seaford, encompasses two elementary schools (one kindergarten through first grade, the other second through fourth grade), a middle school (fifth through eighth grade) and a high school.

On 2017-18 state tests, 68 percent of students in third through eighth grade met standards in English districtwide, versus 45 percent statewide; 66 percent met standards in math, versus 47 percent statewide.

Average 2017 SAT scores for Island Trees High School were 553 for reading and writing and 551 for math, versus 480 and 530 statewide.

— The Commute

Levittown is about 35 miles east of Manhattan. The Long Island Rail Road station in Hicksville is 3 miles from the heart of Levittown; travel time to Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan averages 44 minutes. The one-way peak fare is $13.50, and a monthly pass is $297.

Many residents opt to drive to the train stations in Wantagh, Bethpage, Seaford or Merrick, where parking is usually easier and cheaper.

— The History

Before there was Levittown, New York — the first of seven Levittowns in the U.S. and Puerto Rico — there was a grove of pitch pine trees that grew at the present-day intersection of Hempstead Turnpike and Jerusalem Avenue. The pines looked so anomalous surrounded by a sea of grasses that the area was known as Island Trees. Koenig of the Levittown Historical Society said that before World War II, pilots who flew into the three nearby airfields used the trees to navigate.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/realestate/levittown-ny-the-original-starter-community.html" id="462644a9-ce98-3236-a83c-2f153ead0bef">The New York Times</a>.

A Starter Community and Its Cookie-Cutter Appeal

<h1>(Living In): NEW YORK — When Nasrin Vossoughian bought a three-bedroom condominium at Schaefer Landing, a residential project built on the site of a former brewery, she knew change was coming to gritty South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. But she had no idea how much. That was in the early 2000s, before the rezoned waterfront was lined with gymnastic towers and its most prominent feature, the Domino Sugar Factory, was remade into a 4-million-square-foot multiuse complex that is still under construction.</h1>

Vossoughian and her husband were living in upstate Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, at the time, and bought the property as an investment. (She declined to say what they paid, but units were originally priced up to $1.9 million.)

After she was widowed, she moved into the condo for a change of scene and to be close to her Brooklyn grandchildren. “I had enough of the country,” she said.

Sitting on a bench in the new Domino Park, with its sublime views of the Manhattan skyline and tributes to the sugar-refining industry — syrup tanks, gantry cranes — she talked about the pleasure of walking to increasingly profuse neighborhood shops and restaurants, and boarding a ferry just outside her door for the 20-minute trip to Lower Manhattan.

If Vossoughian felt any sense of disconnect in this new environment, she said, it was because of her age: She is now 70. She was contrasting herself not just against the stereotypical skin-ornamented and creatively self-employed Williamsburg hipster, but also against the affluent young families pouring into the neighborhood.

Today you can’t walk far below Grand Street, the generally accepted dividing line between North and South Williamsburg, without spotting a new Montessori school here, a child’s hair salon there. The babies are out in force. If South Williamsburg’s reputation for grimy authenticity had been teetering, it is now under full assault.

“Once the L train decided it wasn’t going to close, it really put Williamsburg back on the map in general for buyers and renters; the South Side has seen a lot of that interest,” said Evan F. Church, a broker in Corcoran’s Williamsburg office. Eyes that looked to the alternative J, M and Z trains, and to ferries to Wall Street, liked what they saw, especially with scaffolding coming down and exposing the shiny faces of new buildings.

“I’m seeing a lot of local residents from different parts of Williamsburg coming in and checking it out,” Church said.

He also pointed out that, compared with the north, residential developments below Grand Street have a greater share of tax abatements extending for longer periods of time — as much as 25 years. “Much of the housing stock there right now has the ability to have really stable common charges and taxes through any kind of challenging market,” he said.

South Williamsburg’s efflorescence is producing predictably mixed reactions. In 1986, Paulien Lethen, a Dutch-born artist, bought an 1860s brick town house at 63 South Third St. for $145,000, against the advice of a building inspector, and opened a gallery called Holland Tunnel in a shed on the vacant lot next door that she partly owned. After making the home habitable, she happily lived there until a 19-story tower butted right up to her rear property line. The garden-killing loss of sunlight would have been bad enough, but the base of the new building was left unfinished where only she and a few neighbors could see it. The crude surface and loose wires made it look like “a shantytown,” she said.

Lethen’s efforts to improve the unsightly wall are the subject of a new short film called “Requiem for Williamsburg: A Story of Hope.” Directed by Dutch filmmaker Yara Hannema, the documentary follows the artist through months of entanglements with the tower owner and ultimately shows her packing her car and moving to the Hudson River city of Newburgh, New York.

In a phone conversation, Lethen, now 76, said she returns to Williamsburg about once a month to tend her garden. But despite the entreaties of developers whom she has found standing in her foyer (“The door was unlocked,” they told her), she has no intention of selling. The house, now worth more than $3.6 million in Zillow’s estimate, will be passed to her two grown sons.

What You’ll Find

Sliced by the Williamsburg Bridge in one direction and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in another, South Williamsburg had plenty of structural drama before it received its recent spate of towers. Older buildings bounce from short, sober brick to Victorian Gothic to cast-iron classicism to the domed limestone hulk of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank, which has become an event space called Weylin and sits across from the venerable Peter Luger Steak House on Broadway. A 26-story hotel and condo building is planned for the site next door. Nearby, a 23-story office, retail and apartment tower called the Dime is rising behind the soon-to-be-restored 1908 Dime Savings Bank.

The neighborhood is culturally lively, too, with Hasidic Jews filling the blocks approaching Bedford-Stuyvesant to the south, and a Puerto Rican and Dominican population concentrated in the north. The eastern border is widely agreed to be Union Avenue. Everyone mixes in the public green spaces along the river to the west.

“When we built Domino Park, we made an effort, and I think we were incredibly successful, at appealing to a wider cross section of the broader neighborhood,” said Jed Walentas, the chairman of Two Trees Management, which is developing the 11-acre site. “I’m not a huge believer in boundaries of neighborhoods per se, unless they’re things like rivers.”

A 16-story rectangle with a hollow center at 325 Kent Ave. that opened in 2017 is the first completed building in the Domino complex. It has 522 rentals, including 104 affordable units. Up next is the 42-story One South First, an interlocking pair of mixed-use towers that will have 330 rentals, 66 of them affordable, and an outpost of the beloved Bushwick restaurant Roberta’s. Plans for the fortresslike brick refinery building are to insert a glass office building within it.

In January, leasing began for 420 Kent Ave., a new luxury apartment complex on the river developed by former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, with 857 units; available market-rate studios start at $3,040. Twenty percent of the units are deemed affordable and priced from $867 a month for studios to $1,123 a month for two-bedrooms.

As old neighborhood favorites have fallen away (farewell Death by Audio, Moon River Chattel), a new generation has set up shop in South Williamsburg. One member is Jennifer Plotnick, who founded Grand Street Dental in a chic storefront three years ago and now has 7,774 Instagram followers.

“What’s always great about Williamsburg,” she said, is that “it doesn’t matter what time of day it is; people are always around.”

Cédric Cadin, who opened a bistro called La Cafette last year at the corner of Havemeyer and Hope streets, just above Grand, said his choice of neighborhood was motivated by the planned L train closing and the prediction that more people would move closer to the Marcy Avenue station, less than 10 minutes on foot from his restaurant. Cadin relocated from his native France for this venture, and said he is still looking for a permanent place to live in South Williamsburg, but is stymied by the high rents.

“If I compare it to Paris,” he said, “it’s just crazy, crazy, crazy.”

After she was widowed, she moved into the condo for a change of scene and to be close to her Brooklyn grandchildren. “I had enough of the country,” she said.

Julie Lasky

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