July 16, 6:30 p.m.
The Decorated Tenement: An Illustrated Book Talk
FRIENDS has long maintained that Yorkville’s richly diverse cultural heritage was shaped by immigrants. Join us for a book talk with historian and author Zachary J. Violette exploring how the work of immigrant builders and architects shaped architectural streetscapes. In his recent book, The Decorated Tenement: How Immigrant Builders And Architects Transformed The Slum In The Gilded Age, Violette focuses on what he calls the “decorated tenement,” a wave of new buildings constructed by immigrant builders and architects who remade the slum landscapes of the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the North and West Ends of Boston in the late nineteenth century. Drawing on research and fieldwork of more than three thousand extant tenement buildings, Violette uses ornaments as an entry point to reconsider the role of tenement architects and builders (many of whom had deep roots in immigrant communities) in improving housing for the working poor.
Utilizing specially commissioned contemporary photography, and many never-before-published historical images, The Decorated Tenement weaves together monolithic notions of architectural taste and housing standards while broadening our understanding of the diversity of cultural and economic positions of those responsible for shaping American architecture and urban landscapes.
Thursday, July 16
6:30 p.m.
Zachary Violette has a Ph.D in American and New England Studies from Boston University. His first book, The Decorated Tenement: How Immigrant Builders and Architects Transformed the Slum in the Gilded Age (University of the Minnesota Press, 2019), is the winner of the 2019 Fred Kniffen Award from the International Society of Place, Landscape, and Material Culture. Violette is the recipient of the 2019 short-term H. Allan Brooks Traveling Fellowship for travel in Central Europe. He serves on the Board of the Vernacular Architecture Forum and is a lecturer at Parsons/The New School of Design in New York. He is currently researching a follow-up volume to The Decorated Tenement on the inner suburban apartment house in the early twentieth century.
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