24. New York Evening Post Building

AKA: 75 West Street; 110 Washington Street; Post Towers
Location: 75 West Street
Built: 1926
Architect: Horace Trumbauer
National Register Number: 00001160
Listed: September 22, 2000
Visited: September 7, 2007



Another building with little documentation triumphing its glories: both the maps in the AIA Guide to New York City and the Guide to New York City Landmarks leave west of Greenwich Street largely blank. Wikipedia though makes Horace Trumbauer seem like a high muckety-muck of Philadelphia architecture and "the gilded age," and with this slim evidence, I am seduced into fantasizing this must be the work of an old lion trying his hand at the new thang of 1926, Art Deco. The colorful geometrics at the higher floors, nearly invisible from the ground, give it a touch, a tincture of the "Oriental" exotic where his earlier buildings (from a quick glance) seem deeply-rooted in the great Western canon of architectural styles.

23. Building at 19 Rector Street

AKA: 19 Rector Street; 88 Greenwich Street; The Greenwich Club
Location: 19 Rector Street
Built: 1930
Architects: Lafayette A. Goldstone and Alexander Zamshnick
National Register Number: 02000551
Listed: May 5, 2002
Visited: September 7, 2007



Another commercial building turned condo. If I could find any substantive documentation on 19 Rector Street other than this page at NYCJPG, maybe I'd find myself wanting to talk about the setbacks or the geometric decoration. Instead, it's the neon sign that I love. I'm guessing that it's a later interloper -- it blocks a particularly striking bit of terra cotta -- but I get all gushy when I think of its life, telling the drivers emerging from the Brooklyn-Battery about 19 RECTOR STREET in all weather, day and night, year after year, in 5000 pt Futura type.

22. Building at 21 West Street

AKA: 21-23 West Street; 11-21 Morris Street; 34-38 Washington Street; Le Rivage
Location: 21 West Street
Built: 1929-1931
Architects: Starrett & Van Vleck
National Register Number: 99000316
Listed: March 12, 1999
Visited: August 31, 2007



Another commercial concern turned condo, this building generates some excitement from its Art Deco brickwork, an assemblage of orange, red, and purple in rhythmic and undulating patterns that the eye doesn't notice unless it's close, and from its asymmetrical massing that, frankly, has been repeated ad nauseum in many dullard mid-century apartment buildings. So I am torn between declaring it ordinary and lovable. What a neighborhood, though. While park access is a walk away, 21 West Street's squeezed between the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and West Side Highway, and a few blocks away from Ground Zero; I can't help but look at those high floors and think how alienated they must feel from the rest of the city, what lonely views they must offer.

21. Fraunces Tavern Block

Location: Bounded by Pearl, Water, Broad Streets and Coenties Slip
Built: 1719-1883
Architect: Multiple
National Register Number: 77000957
Listed: April 28, 1977
Visited: August 5, 2007



Heterogeneity is the rule in most urban areas, but in the lowerest of Lower Manhattan, it runs amuck. Buildings cluster together in cliques based on style, purpose, and age, and as is the nature of cliques, none of the cliques communicate with each other except in the most unproductive ways; skyscrapers from the go-go Eighties bully the smaller, older buildings, who can't help but look shabby compared to their oafish cousins. So this block of sixteen buildings, eleven of which date from 1827 to 1833, look ridiculous compared to the Goldman Sachs Building across the street, and the Goldman Sachs building looks ridiculous next to the block. Everyone loses.

(Worth noting, 'cause I'm not going to be able to note it anywhere else: the Goldman Sachs building interests me almost entirely because it hovers over the bones of the 1641 Stadt Huys; additionally, part of Stone Street was demapped to build it, prompting the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission to landmark the very street plan of New Amsterdam and Colonial New York.)

Taking them on their own terms, these little Federal Style and Greek Revival buildings don't look so bad, even if they lack the intimacy of Stone Street or the rusticity of South Street Seaport. Their uses were primarily commercial and tied to the nearby docks, perhaps explaining their chaste look. Today, it's some apartments, and restaurants and bars feeding skyscraper dezinens on their lunch hour; with their garbage laid out in the summer heat, it even reeks a little like Old New York might've.

The one building everyone cares about, though--the one that visibly stands out even among this set of relics--is this block's namesake, Fraunces Tavern. This is where George Washington bid farewell to his troops after the British finally evacuated Manhattan in 1783, essentially refusing the role of military emperor of the new country. Even with the Tavern, it is only slightly easier to imagine this place as it was when Washington left for Whitehall Ferry and left for a life of (interrupted) retirement than it is to imagine as it was before Europeans set foot on it, so thoroughly has the past been annihilated here. The front page of the museum's website speaks benignly of the "restoration" the building received at the hands of the Sons of the Revolution from 1904 to 1907. However, a chronology deeper within relates that a century of fire damage and unsympathetic redesign ("1890: The first floor exterior was remodeled with cast iron and glass storefronts. The original timbers were sold as souvenirs." Christ.) left the structure with an indeterminate relationship to its original appearance, which by that point wasn't even known; as a result, "the design was somewhat conjectural." The AIA Guide to New York City is so offended by this lack of authenticity that it peevishly dates the building by the new-old design, not its original erection, and harrumphs that the Tavern was a "highly conjectural construction--not a restoration--based on 'typical' buildings of 'the period.'" Furthermore: "Such charades enabled George Washington Slept Here architecture to strangle reality in much of suburban America." A puzzling statement. Most of my life I lived on Long Island, the suburbanest of suburban America, and if there was a lot of ersatz Colonial- and Federal-style buildings, they must've been hiding behind the strip malls and ranch homes because I sure don't remember them. (One exception: Sagtikos Manor, a place where George Washington really slept.)

There's a museum at the tavern now, dedicated in large part to colonial life and the details of Washington's farewell. When I was using my camera in the Fraunces Tavern's Long Room--that's where Washington gave his address--a docent heard me from another room and ran in, angrily telling me "no pictures, no pictures." This, sadly, is what I remember best about the museum a month after I visited. I did not see one single fucking sign in the museum that says photography isn't allowed. Not one. Maybe there's a sign in the bar or the restaurant, neither of which I entered, or maybe the docent is supposed to tell people photography isn't allowed as they enter the museum, and just forgot, or maybe it's just assumed people will know cameras aren't allowed, or maybe just fucking WHATEVER. In any case, stupid.

20. Beaver Building

AKA: 1 Wall Street Court; The Cocoa Exchange
Location: 82-92 Beaver Street
Built: 1904
Architect: Clinton and Russell
National Register Number: 05000668
Listed: July 6, 2005
Visited: September 7, 2007



Uh...oh well.

I'll have to come back to this one next year. Not sure why this one's under wraps -- you'd figure that whatever needs to be done to the building, whether light cleaning ormajor structural work, would've been taken care of when they converted the building into condos last year.

Oh, damn, they had an open house. I should really keep my eye out for these things.

19. New York Cotton Exchange

AKA: India House
Location: 1 Hanover Square
Built: 1854
Architect: Richard Carman
National Register Number: 72001586
Listed: January 7, 1972
Visited: August 23, 2007



This started as the headquarters of Hanover Bank, one of the infinitude of strands eventually bound into JPMorgan Chase; then it became the home to one of the earliest commodities exchanges in the world. Its history of commercial use comes off as slightly ironic, considering that in this town, its look and building material are more commonly associated with our near-iconic brownstone residences. Yet not at all ironic given that the building was apparently modeled after Italian -- oh god, this word again -- palazzos, which were (as my Guide to New York City Landmarks notes) often the homes of important banking families during the Renaissance, such as the Medici.

Brownstone is a notoriously unreliable building material, flaking off in layers like a pastry crust sometimes after only a few decades of weathering, but even after 150 years, the building is almost entirely without blemish -- to use another food simile, it looks like a molded block of chocolate. (I think you can tell I'm on a diet. I can't eat chocolate, and it's killing me.)

18. James Watson House

AKA: Seton Shrine; The Shrine of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton
Location: 7 State Street
Built: 1793-1806; additions, 1965
Architect: John McComb, Jr.
Listed: August 24, 1972
Visited: August 5 and September 1, 2007



A stubborn kernel stuck in the teeth of the city. This survivor from the 18th century lives its life shadowed between two skyscrapers: 17 State Street and a modern building so lacking in distinction that I can't remember what it's called. It sits on prime real estate, but even without the landmark designation they'd never dare tear this one down the way its neighbors have been. 17 State Street may have been erected on a site where (among other things) Herman Melville was born, but the Watson house trumps that several times over because it was once the home of Elizabth Ann Seton, the first native-born American canonized by the Vatican. Our first saint! YEAH! Heck, I'm not even being sarcastic! I genuinely think having homegrown saints are awesome, another sign of America's ability to cultivate civilization. Ra-ra-ra this country! Again: not sarcastic.

It is now a church. One of the so-far unspoken aims of this blog is to not just visit but to experience them as best I can. So I'm going to be visiting a lot of houses of worship in the name of this blog; also, a lot of museums, restaurants, maybe even hotels if I can find I've got some money to blow. We will see. In any event, this is where I attend my first Sunday Mass in decades. When I come in, I take the furthest-back pew in order to be ignored -- though with the beard, I'm sort of unavoidable (I really have to shave it down). Ten minutes to mass, it's still pretty empty, an emptiness heightened by the Spartan elegance of the interior: only a series of modern paintings illustrating the Stations of the Cross interrupts the whiteness of the ground floor.

Eventually a crowd of no more than fifty wanders in. This is nothing compared to most suburban churches I know, never mind city behemoths like St. Patrick's. But you gotta figure that even with its growing residential profile, the Battery Park area isn't populated enough to support anything much larger. Its location also probably explains why the crowd skews so young. With Battery Park's relative lack of stores and amenities within walking distance, this is no country for old men (and women). The older churchgoers here seem to be tourists like myself (let's face it, I am a tourist here), though I could be wrong. Crowd strikes me as largely bachelors and bachelorettes, new mothers and fathers. The latter two try their hardest to calm their children down, and, if time permits, teach them something about the religious life, guiding their kids' hands through the Sign of the Cross. I find this touching partly because I've never been able to learn the Sign of the Cross, much to my embarrassment. Even if I'm not a practicing Catholic and can only mumble my way through most of the things other churchgoers can say out loudly and clearly, I should be able to do cross myself, right?

I end up being impressed by how the mass is conducted. I can only wonder the clergy can do this again and again, week after week, without boring others, without boring themselves.

I leave without a picture. I figure taking a picture in such an untouristed place would be impious and disruptive. (I'll likely not feel such restraint in the larger churches.) I also leave without greeting the priests, because...I'm shy.