99. US Courthouse

A.K.A.: Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse; Thurgood Marshall Federal Courthouse
Location: 40 Centre Street/40 Foley Square
Built: 1932-1936; currently under restoration
Architects: Cass Gilbert and Cass Gilbert, Jr.
National Register Number: 87001596
Listed: September 2, 1987
Visited: December 30, 2008
Official Documentation: NYCLPC Report; NRHP Nomination Form



As an urban space, the Civic Center does not work, and probably never will. Knock down the gallumphing modernist anonymoids, and you'd be left with a grand buildings in odd spatial and height relationships with each other. Tear them down--and this was seriously considered many times in the last hundred-plus years--and you're still left to contend with useless plazas and bridge-fed traffic arteries that make life difficult for the pedestrian. Remove them, and...well, now you're beyond the realm of real-world budgets and political will, so forget it. (Manhattan's most successful urban space outside of Central Park is inordinately devoted to mass media companies--what does that tell you?)



Like even the best buildings in the immediate vicinity, this courthouse provides grandeur in a frankly awkward way. Paired with the Municipal Building forms a solid, almost wall-like presence on the west side of Centre Street that isn't matched on the east: grand, but lopsided. And by itself, when consumed in one visual gulp, it feels like a unimaginative expression of expediency. Need to house a hunk of courtroom space and give your building a certain ineffable sense of gravitas? Well, tower + temple = problem solved! Yeah, at least it tries for ceremony--more you can say about certain other dreary places I've been stuck in thanks to jury duty--but all that austere neoclassical jazz below, I can't really warm up to. Its gilded pyramid makes up for a lot, though. That's perfectly sited to catch the rays of the sun and provide a little golden twinkle for the people on the ground.



This is Cass Gilbert's last work, by the way--he passed away in the middle of its construction, leaving his son, Cass Gilbert Jr. to see it through its completion. I'll be saying a lot more about him when I cover the Woolworth Building...which should be in a week or three! Happy New Year! I'm off to impromptu and drunken late night festivities at the 59th Street Apple Store! Woo!

98. LETTIE G. HOWARD (schooner)

A.K.A.: Mystic C.; Caviare
Location: Off Pier 16, off of Fulton Street
Built: 1893
Builder: Arthur D. Story
National Register Number: 84002779
Listed: September 7, 1984
Visited: December 14, 2008
Official Documentation: NRHP Nomination Form; NHL Form



An annoyance. As it rarely stays in one spot, this boat resisted all my attempts at capture, wintering at Kings Point when I did my first batch of Seaport posts back in January and February, and off on all sorts of mad adventures the rest of the year. Impromptu drop-ins, inquiries into the museum, even trying to befriend this ship via its MySpace page still led me to a blank spot by Pier 16 where a ship should be. So when the MySpace page announced "alongside the Lightship Ambrose in her winter berth," I was less in a mood for discovery than getting the damned thing done, a feeling abetted by the ship's temporary under-wraps and sail-free condition. Not the optimal setting for blog excitement, I must admit.

One Toronto website, offering cruises and "team building challenges," explains that "Schooners were popular in occupations that required high speed and windward ability," a statement so mild and factual that it does not prepare you for "such as slaving, privateering, blockade running and"--going back to mild--"offshore fishing." Well, not that mild, as fishing was always a nasty occupation, and even today has with the highest fatality rate in the United States. The Lettie G. Howard is one of the last surviving fishing schooners of its kind, but if you're hoping it has ripping yarns, stories that wake us up to the blood-and-wounds business of nation-building, you're shit of out of luck. The online historical record for the Lettie G. does not offer too much in the way of specifics--the NHL form linked to above is even missing every other page. What I can tell you is that it was born in Essex, Massachusetts, worked the Gorton's Fisherman territory around Gloucester for its first eight years, then later moved to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico before getting purchased by the South Street Seaport in 1968. It does not appear to have deep New York roots, though the South Street Seaport Museum website notes that it is "similar to the schooners that carried their Long Island and New Jersey catches to New York City's the Fulton Fish Market"--a fine thread of historical continuity between the ship's and the seaport's pasts and present severed when the market relocated from South Street to the Bronx. Today the museum offers sail training courses and the like on the ship which, at $150 and up, is too rich for my blood.

97. Municipal Building

A.K.A.: Manhattan Municipal Building
Location: 1 Centre Street
Built: 1912-1914
Architect: William M. Kendall of McKim, Mead & White
National Register Number: 72000879
Listed: October 18, 1972
Visited: February 2, October 15 and 21, and December 14, 2008
Official Documentation: NYCLPC Report; NRHP Nomination Form



Bureaucracy operates at several removes from the life of the very citizens it is supposed to serve. Designed to centralize much of the city's newly-expanded administration after the consolidation of 1898, this skyscraper is, inadvertently, an embodiment of that distance. Once Chambers Street ran right through its loggia, as if it was a massive version of the Chandelier Tree, which lives with a giant hole at its base--as if to emphasize that something as trifling as traffic could not bother its Olympian operations.

I keep reading that "allegedly" (just "allegedly"--I can't find a first- or second-hand source) Stalin admired this building so much that it served as a primary inspiration for Moscow's "Seven Sisters" skyscrapers, his attempt at refashioning post-War Moscow into a modern endeavor to rival Western cities. A terrible irony, that: by the time all of them were constructed, new architecture in New York had long since moved on, abandoning its Roman monumentalism for more beautiful kinds of monumentalism, the Secretariat and Lever House.

96. Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall Subway Station (IRT)

Location: Under Centre Street between Chambers and Frankfort Streets
Built: 1901-1904
Architect: Heins & LaFarge
National Register Number: 05000674
Listed: July 6, 2005
Visited: Multiple times; mainly December 3 and 14, 2008
Official Documentation: NRHP Nomination Form



In spite of the name, this is not the famous abandoned station at City Hall you may have heard about--the one with vaults and Gustavino tile. No, this is its more anodyne brother. (The other one will be covered...whenever.) Originally known as the IRT's Brooklyn Bridge station, it took over as a terminal and a portal to the mysteries of city government when the City Hall station closed in 1945. Hence the name: Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall.

Like the original City Hall station and twenty-six others, this one inargurated the subway system on October 27, 1904, so its historical import is fixed and clear, but whatever once made it a distinctive aesthetic artifact is unfortunately not for public consumption. Only six years after it opened, the station's outermost platforms were declared redundant and were walled up; later some ends of the remaining platforms were blocked off when they were lengthened in the other direction. These no-go areas, visible only to MTA workers and the occasional subway wonk (not an insult!), have what's left of the station's original tilework. A mid-90s renovation merely references aspects of the original design--like the double-B symbol that used to be heralded by eagles--perhaps out of a sense that recreating the originals would be dishonest, not to mention costly. Not bad, but on the mezzanine level is a bolder kind of referencing: Mark Gibian's Cable-Crossing, which transforms the cabling of the nearby Brooklyn Bridge into sinuous Tyrannosaurus spines.

95. Chambers Street Subway Station (Dual System BMT)

Location: Beneath the Municipal Building at Chambers, Centre, and Duane Streets, and Lafayette Plaza
Built: 1911-1913
Architect: Heins & LaFarge
National Register Number: 05000669
Listed: July 6, 2005
Visited: December 14, 2008
Official Documentation: NRHP Nomination Form



Once a crowded terminal for trains coming in from Brooklyn, this subway station's functionality was compromised throughout the 20th century by new connections and a shift of the city's vibe uptown. Now several entire platforms are unused and inaccessible, including the eastern-most one that, if I remember correctly, has all that's left of the original mosaics. They're in a grubby state, but they've been worse off, and the whole station's been much worse off. It was informally voted the ugliest station in the New York subway system, quite a lot to live down. The MTA has since cleaned it up a bit, but fascination the station exerts on me doesn't come from the grime but its sense of the empty. The station is unusually long, high, and wide, even reasonably well-lit. Everything is open and visible--yet not everything is reachable--and yet again, there's nothing around to reach. Subway stations are empty all the time, but not like this: the platforms of Chambers Street have the feel of a museum whose exhibits have all been plundered, a dying department store reduced to selling the displays once the stock's all gone.

94. Surrogate's Court

A.K.A.: The Hall of Records
Location: 31 Chambers Street
Built: 1899-1907
Architect: John R. Thomas (1899-1901); Horgan & Slattery (1901-1911)
National Register Number: 72000888
Listed: January 29, 1972
Visited: November 15 and 21, 2008
Official Documentation: NYCLPC Report; NYCLPC Report (interior); NRHP Nomination Form; NHL Form



Abram S. Hewitt is haunted like a man with X-ray eyes, and bequiffed Philip Hone is gonna rave on after he throws that pen at you like a dart; and the rest of these cornice-dwellers peeking through the curtains, well, they're just showroom dummies in comparison. But inside, the lobby has a grand staircase modeled after the one at the Paris Opéra, which irresistably suggests we are to understand this building as a theater, these great men as actors, and the history of New York as an extravagant musical production--and not mere Vaudeville, however more appropriate that might be.

(Some of the wacky hijinx you knew and loved in the making of the Tweed Courthouse threatened to make encore performance here--there were unsavory connections to Tammany Hall, and the original architect died as this was being built--but propriety won out, with everything seemingly completed on-time and budget.)

93. Tweed Courthouse

A.K.A.: New York County Courthouse, Old New York County Courthouse
Location: 52 Chambers Street
Built: 1861-1881; alterations in 1911, 1913, 1942, 1978-1979; restored in 2002
Architect: John Kellum (1861-1871); Leopold Eidlitz (1876-1881); John Waite (2002)
National Register Number: 74001277
Listed: September 25, 1974
Visited: November 15 and 21, 2008
Official Documentation: NYCLPC Report; NYCLPC Report (interior); NRHP Nomination Form; NHL Form



No building in New York has anything like the agonized life history that the Tweed Courthouse does. It took twenty years for the city to bake this wedding cake, and a hundred to swallow it.

Tweed was William M. "Boss" Tweed, who I'm gonna assume you're going to have a nodding acquaintance with thanks to high school social studies: Tweed was Tammany Hall, was machine politics, was a ring of thieves and a diamond pin, was the demon of Thomas Nast's cartoons, grinning, bulging, so very pleased with himself, offering the eyes his corruption the way a bonobo ape shows off a red butt.



The New York County Courthouse was Tweed embodied in stone and marble. A medium for funneling public monies to him and those in cahoots, nearly every contractor working on it overcharged the city, a little for themselves, some for the ring, and Tweed alone getting 25% percent. Work was slow: contractors would do work, undo work, redo work, stop, start again. After six years, it was partly occupied even though the main staircase only went up to the second floor, even though the unfinished rotunda let snow and rain in. In July 1871, after about ten and the building still incomplete, The New York Times began running articles, based on records painstakingly copied by the city's bookkeeper, a tumble of numbers laying down the levels of ridiculousness involved. As The Times would write later: "A solitary carpenter, the entries revealed, pocketed $360,751 for a month's work. About $7,500 had been spent on thermometers, $400,000 on safes." (These figures aren't even adjusted for inflation--multiply them by seventeen if you want to.) The Times estimated that the sums allotted for carpeting alone would've covered City Hall Park three times over. Originally priced at $250,000, Theodore Roosevelt's uncle, Congressman Robert Roosevelt, estimated that the courthouse cost about $13 million--more than the United States paid for Alaska, or the UK paid to build the Houses of Parliament.



The Ring thereafter fell to pieces in tragi-comic fashion, with Tweed being sent to prison, fleeing to Cuba, then Spain, where he was captured; even though the man had lost a lot of weight in the interim, authorities were able to identify him thanks to Nast's cartoons. While the civitas benefited in the long-term (in the short-term, the city government got broke as fuck very fast), the courthouse did not. Construction stopped and would not start again until 1876. It carried on without the architect, John Kellum, who had the bad luck of dying a month after The Times' first exposés. Kellum had envisioned a fine Italianate building on the order of United States Capitol, and liberally festooned it with cast-iron and plaster ornament aping pricier materials. The new architect, Leopold Eidlitz, no doubt associated such masquerade with Tweedian corruption, and rejected it in favor of the "natural" and "honest" expression of materials, subsequently redesigning unfinished interiors in brawny polychromatic brickwork. To the architectural ignoramus such as myself, it looks snazzy--history tends to flatten all distinctions, even those that cause revolutions--but Eidlitz caught hell for the mismatch: the American Architect and Building News would say "Of course no attention was paid to the design of the existing building and within and without a rank Romanesque runs cheek by jowl with the old Italian, one bald, the other florid; cream-colored brick and buff sandstone come in juxtaposition to white marble."



Its completion didn't end the embarrassment. Starting with Mayor Grant in 1888 and continuing as late as the 1970s, the city would canvas proposals for a new Civic Center that was more accommodating, more logical, more appropriate to the greatest fucking city on Earth. Most would've razed the courthouse (many would've done away with City Hall, too); The New York Times even excoriated one plan that kept it saying:

"There is no good reason why the court house should be preserved...It is not of any architectural value, it is practically the subject of complaint from everybody who is forced to inhabit it, or to make habitual use of it, and there are no associations connected with it that are not disgraceful to the city."

Yet it was kept--so much money had gone into that it so relatively recently that it was thought to be slightly obscene to simply knock it down.

Koch and subsequent mayors threw money at it for repairs, but the building was finally given a full-blown restoration at the turn of the millennium. Among other accomplishments, it recreated the Chambers Street entrance, which had been demolished when the street was widened, and removing eighteen layers of paint from the polychrome brick and cast iron, originally applied in 1908 perhaps because it was cheaper than cleaning it, and perhaps its gaudiness was out of fashion. $80 million was spent on the restoration, up from an initial $37 million--numbers Tweed would've envied, no doubt, even if no money was stolen (and I have no reason to suspect any was).



Today you can tour the building for free. Few do--when I went a few weeks ago, there were only four people in total, two of whom were from South Africa--but if you're a New Yorker, you should. Some embarrassments are worth remembering.