This ranch-style house extends along a gently sloping lot near Little Neck Bay. The building is of frame construction but does incorporate brick cladding around the lower half of the exterior. There is a garage under the structure at the lowest part of the slope. The residence is sited within the Douglaston Historic District.
The Mount Lebanon Cemetery administrative offices are housed in this understated building just inside the cemetery gates. Built on a slope, there is a parking lot on either side of the site. The building itself is clad in brick and has had several additions added or spaces enclosed. The structure can still be identified by the vertical pylon to the right of the entrance. The Brooklyn-based architect Martyn Weston is buried in the cemetery not very far away from this award-winning structure he designed.
The first Borough’s Outstanding Award was presented in 1953 to the Bulova Watch complex. This monumental building uses a severely classical design, evoking many European and American classical municipal structures from the 1930s. Alexander Crossett was not a prominent architect of the period so it is unclear why he was offered such a major commission. Most of his other buildings in the city were small utilitarian industrial buildings. However Aymar Embery III, Robert Moses’ chief architect and designer of many of the Depression-era pool and recreational complexes across the city was the consulting architect here, which could explain the strong 1930s classical evocation. The design was inspired by the Federal Reserve Bank in Washington, DC.
This honorable mention is mostly a minimally landscaped plot. Con Edison used evergreen trees and shrubs to shield the substation equipment from the surrounding residential neighborhood. Today the evergreens have grown substantially with no branches at the bottom, making the equipment considerably more visible behind smaller shrubbery. In addition, the neighborhood has continued to expand, with houses and a later mid-century Jewish Center directly abutting the Con Ed property. This makes the need to hide this equipment possibly less of a necessity than when the area was more remote and bucolic.
Jamkay Realty is named for the developer and not the actual structure which is in effect, a large indoor mall taking up several blocks in downtown Jamaica. The building is mostly of a uniform height and frontage all the way around, using limestone and granite as cladding, which gives it a solid appearance. All parking is on the roof level so that there are store windows fronting onto the street. Even some signage and minimal detailing still exists on the exterior, which is surprising given Jamaica’s ongoing downtown redevelopment.