Saphier, Frederick | Bronze Plaque for Office Buildings | Extant | Jamaica | Office Building | 1967 | Mirrored glass began to appear more frequently in the late 1960s and here a bold bronze tinted plate glass and amber spandrel glass gives a corporate sheen to this former union headquarters. The building is raised up on a brick base with a large glazed brick band across the cornice as well. There is some marble cladding at the entrance stairway although its unclear if that is original.
Weston, Don and Martyn | Bronze Plaque for Residences | Extant | Far Rockaway | Residence | 1967 | These townhouses are distinctly modern yet try to retain the low-rise character of the Rockaways and encourage socialization through front and back porches. The main feature here is the low dip in the eave-line. The buildings are all completely fireproof. Similar townhouses nearby with large center gardens demonstrate the likely success of this development.
Samuel Paul and Seymour Jarmul | Bronze Plaque for Commercial-Retail | Demolished | Bayside | Commercial Building | 1967 | The Water’s Edge Building is one of the few intentionally temporary structures in the Queens Modern pantheon. It was constructed by the Birchwood Park Organization as a showroom for the neighboring Water’s Edge community, a large planned development that also won its own award. The exhibit center included a landscaped garden, a model of the entire Water’s Edge community, and access to model homes. In the late 1960s it was replaced with a somewhat banal group of townhouses.
Bifano, Lou with Levien, Maurice B. | Bronze Plaque for Rehabilitations and Alterations | Significantly Altered | Long Island City | Industrial Building | 1966 | Today this building is a plain brick industrial building that has been converted to educational use. But when it won an award in 1966, the building featured an unusual combination of breeze block screens, fieldstone veneer around the entrance, aluminum framing the windows, and vertical piers of marble chips embedded in white cement. Sadly, none of this remains today as an example of when companies were using eye-catching buildings to stand out from fellow competitors. The owner of the building Arnold Levien likely gave the architect and his relative, Maurice Levien, a loose hand to design as he liked when he radically altered the building from its previous appearance.
Shreve Lamb and Harmon Associates | Bronze Plaque for Schools and Colleges | Extant | Jamaica | Religious Building | 1966 | This educational building is built on a sharp slope above Hillside Avenue. The design is a simple brick faced box with peaked bays from the front connected to the neighboring church with a glassed in walkway. At the rear the building projects out over the parking lot with an additional floor exposed. A simple and effective design from the firm that gave us the Empire State Building.
