32. National City Bank

AKA: Regent Wall Street Hotel; First National City Bank; Merchants' Exchange
Location: 55 Wall Street
Built: 1836-1841
Architects: Isiah Rogers; McKim, Mead & White (1907 addition)
National Register Number: 78001875
Listed: June 2, 1978
Visited: September 28 and October 15, 2007



First it was the Merchants' Exchange. Replacing a building destroyed in the Great Fire of 1835, it was a stern Classical Revival building with an colonnade of twelve Ionic columns (with another four behind at the recessed entrance), each fashioned from a single block of stone. After the exchange failed, it was home to the New York Stock Exchange for twelve years; then it became the Customs House before the Customs House. Then it was bought by the National City Bank. Crazily, they hired McKim, Mead & White to add four more stories to the three-story building, including a Corinthian colonnade perfectly aligned with the colonnade below. Eventually the National City Bank became Citigroup, ranked by the most recent Forbes Global 2000 as the biggest company in the whole wide world. (You have to wonder if buildings connected to Wal-Mart, Apple, Microsoft, or the Home Depot will ever get landmarked. Yeah, probably.)



The building is now dedicated to...condos. Surprised? Well, OK, the website for 55 Wall Street actually calls them "residences," something I'm fine with since "condo" has become such a tainted word. The residence-condo-whatevers themselves look dandy, but in a puzzling lapse, the opening animations feature posed club scenes with such past-peak personalities as cell-phone-throwing model Naomi Campbell, and a man whose face has been so ruined by plastic surgery its texture has been likened to dog food, Mickey Rourke. There is also a ballroom where a banking hall used to be; from the looks of it, an intoxicating venue, prompting dreams of champagne-fueled waltzing in the first flush moments of a new year. But when I write this, a website promoting an subscription-only concert series for the well-off plays Lenny Kravtiz in loop, and like Campbell and Rourke, Kravitz is a picture of nightlife glamor at least a decade stale.

31. J. P. Morgan & Co. Building

AKA: Morgan Guaranty Trust Company Building; Downtown by Philippe Starck
Location: 23 Wall Street
Built: 1913-1914
Architect: Trowbridge & Livingston
National Register Number: 72000874
Listed: June 19, 1972
Visited: September 28 and October 15, 2007



This building is the subject of one of the most iconic photos in early modernist photography, Paul Strand's 1915 Wall Street. The relationship of the building and its deeply recessed windows to the people on the street irresistibly summons all manner of potted sociological interpretations in the suggestable. Robert Morse Crunden: "...before these masses scurry buglike humans, mere undifferentiated shadows, all heading like lemmings off to the left, each casting a separate shadow in what seems to have been an early morning sun." Mark Stevens: "The image is a fearful intimation of tragedy, a presentiment of a century of spiritual crisis. You can see foreshadowed the inhuman scale of totalitarian power; the emptying of traditional meaning into the void; the cranking of human beings into the geometric maw of modernity." Keey-rist. The boldness of the black shapes in contrast to the gleam of morning light make it easy to ignore little details, like the guy carrying his walking stick (or umbrella) in a most un-lemming-like way. And, as the photo is so tightly composed, you can't tell from the photo the building's design owes less to "modernity" than to the classical precepts of architecture, and that the building itself is actually only four stories tall.

Even in the smaller scale of 1914's global economy, it is frankly amazing that J. P. Morgan & Co. was headquartered here. It doesn't seem like it'd be enough. Architectural machismo is ordinarily understood in terms of building bigger, taller, wider, but here, the reverse is true. The House of Morgan built it small, defiantly turning down a chance to maximize an investment in some of the priciest real estate in the world, as if to say such potential revenue would be mere straw compared to the moolah made day-in, day-out behind these doors.

It's part of a condo complex now, of course.

30. New York Stock Exchange

Location: 11 Wall Street
Built: 1901-1903
Architects: George B. Post; J.Q.A. Ward and Paul Bartlett (pediment); Trowbridge & Livingston (1923 addition)
National Register Number: 78001877
Listed: June 2, 1978
Visited: September 28 and October 15, 2007



The first and fourth (and presumably the second and third) edition of the AIA Guide to New York City calls this one of "one of the few great architectural spaces open to the public in this city." The fifth won't. Because...well, you know. The terrorists. They ruin everything, don't they? (A warning: there are oceans of ambivalence behind my flipness.) The NYSE offered tours to mere civilians up until 9/11, but now, if you do a search for the word "tour" on the NYSE Euronext site, the first thing that comes up isn't a search result, but a note: "The NYSE is not open for visits or tours." (Obviously a few people are royally sick of being asked certain questions.) The largest stock exchange in the whole effing world, a linchpin of all civilization whether we like it or not, it is too important to be public, perhaps. So it is protected through extraordinary means for the city. The streets surrounding the NYSE are blocked off from traffic, either with checkpoints, retractable barriers, or huge quartz-shaped boulders suitable for sitting on.



And yet, after 9/11, even as the area around the NYSE became a paranoid fortress, it also became more of a tourist destination than it ever was. Largely free of cars, crowds of people mill around on the streets, taking pictures of each other. Even with the guys carrying the machine guns who stand in front of the J.P. Morgan building, it is a cautiously festive place, at least during work hours. There are even little café tables and chairs in the middle of Broad Street where people can sit in front of the NYSE main entrance and wonder what kind of tumult is going on behind its oversized Corinthian columns and overwrought American flag.

29. Broad Exchange Building

AKA: 25 Broad Street; The Exchange at 25
Location: 25 Broad Street
Built: 1902
Architect: Clinton & Russell
National Register Number: 98000366
Listed: April 13, 1998
Visited: September 28 and October 15, 2007



Another recent condo conversion. I feel bad about not having much of an opinion about it. A wing was recently de-landmarked by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, allowing Swig Equities to demolish it and transfer its air rights to a new building to be built on 45 Broad Street. In turn, this lets 45 Broad have twelve more stories than initially planned. Going higher means better views means pricier apartments, after all. I'm totally cynical about this equation because I'm cynical about the worth of good views; I wholeheartedly agree with Christopher Alexander's observation that a well-designed building conserves its views rather than leaves them gaping and unavoidable. Not that Alexander's insight necessarily applies here: when I'm in another cynical snit, I wonder if anybody who'd buy into 45 Broad would actually live there long enough to get bored by it. Maybe all they're looking for are pied-à-terres, albeit unfathomably expensive ones.

25 Broad comes with a snazzy website (that I'm not linking to, sorry) whose message seems to be less "this is such an awesome place to live" and more "this is gonna be such an awesome investment." An awesome investment because one day all the cranes and construction workers and dust and debris will go away and we'll have a new World Trade Center and a new Fulton Street Transit Center and and and everyone will want a piece of the action and your property's value will reach unheretofore seen heights. Though I'd sure like to what feat of magic will turn these limestone canyons and these streets, so bone-dry after dark, into an actual neighborhood filled with people who do things people in neighborhoods do. Right now groceries, hardware, cultural amusements, etc. all require something of a trek; though, again, that inconvenient fact may not make much of a difference to those who can afford assistants to fetch silk pajamas and aubergines at a whim's notice.



God, enough with the attitude already, Mike. OK, can't say nothing bad about the building. Hell, it probably is an awesome place to live. Look at that entrance, that nice entrance with the Doric columns. Nice amenities, it seems. I could sure use a resident-only health club. I could even use a health club. I don't really need a neighborhood filled with people because I hate people anyway. Nyeah.

28. Lee, Higginson & Company Bank Building

AKA: Bank of American International Building
Location: 37-41 Broad Street
Built: 1929
Architect: Cross & Cross
National Register Number: 06000476
Listed: June 7, 2006
Visited: August 31 and September 28, 2007



What people seem to remember of Lee, Higginson & Company, if they remember it all, is how it was eventually laid low by Swedish match king Ivar Kreuger's fraud. (A empire built on matches! It's like right out of Ben Katchor!) Lee Hig only spent a couple of years in this valuable piece of real estate (it cost $3.7 million) and sold it at a loss ($2.2 million) to the New York Stock Exchange, who sold it to a bank in 1941 for an even more hair-raising loss ($400,000!!). Until recently, the building had off-price apparel retailer Conway (Get it? Conway!) on the first floor, a mortifying loss of face for this elegant building. Today, the students of Claremont Prep School run through it, and the super-awesome Deco banking hall is used for the kind of private events unconnected sclhubs like myself don't get invited to. You can see a little bit of it from the outside: maybe one column, mosiaced with vines. Along with the midlevel Zodiac medallions on the exterior front, those vines are a near-subliminal advertisement for pagan nature worship hidden in the building's overall message of Classical Style stability and permanence.

27. U.S. Customhouse

AKA: Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House; National Museum of the American Indian
Location: 1 Bowling Green
Built: 1913
Architect: Cass Gilbert; Daniel Chester French
National Register Number: 72000889
Listed: January 31, 1972
Visited: August 5 and 26, September 1 and 29, and October 6, 2007



I am mad for this building.

The primary way the United States generated revenue before the income tax was through custom duties, and as New York City was once the largest port in the country, a huge hunk of this money funneled through it. And just a glimpse of it will amply demonstrate that this building was designed to overwhelm all those within eyeshot with the fact of its importance.



It has a city block all to itself, and has been blessed by neighbors that, whatever their shortcomings, don't crowd or dwarf their Beaux-Arts elder. Above, on the entablature, statuary representing twelve great seafaring nations of the West, from Greece and Rome to France and England, loom over the building and its operations like guardian angels.



Yet ruling over them all sit the symbols of the United States: its shield on a large cartouche, an eagle, the flag. And although such eclecticism is completely characteristic of Beaux-Arts architecture of the time, it is worth noting that the building cannibalizes many details from the history of the architecture of power: thick Corinthian columns from the Classical world, rusticated stonework of an Italian palazzo, Mansard roofs redolent of the Second French Empire. Through this sea of references, the building claims its role in the development of American Empire, and America's role as inheritor of all that came before it. Including Europe's babysteps into the New World -- as noted before, the building sits in front of the site where, as legend had it, Peter Minuit "bought" Manhattan for $24 bucks.



Which makes the building perfect place for the New York branch of the Smithsonian's Museum of the American Indian. Housed here are beautiful artifacts (none of which I can show you -- art is lit dimly, and flash is disallowed, meaning photos of suck), marred a little by your typical explanatory blather: "Native Americans have demonstrated a distinguished ability to integrates new materials and design motifs into their creations, yet make them uniquely and culturally identifiable." Yeah, and like every other culture, EVER. The museum itself, encrusted with the exhaustingly beautiful works of human hands, its Gustavinao skylight and Tiffany'd suites, serves as the greater caption: in here, craft pays perfectly equitable service to craft, art to art.

26. Empire Building

Location: 71 Broadway
Built: 1895-1898
Architect: Kimball & Thompson
National Register Number: 83004643
Listed: August 28, 1998
Visited: September 28 and October 4, 2007



Trinity Church is sandwiched between Trinity Building and Empire Building. While these two office buildings were built about fifty years after the church and are somewhat taller, they make a fetching box. They offer the viewer standing in Trinity's property two vast skyscapes of windows: Empire's rows and rows of neo-Classical window surrounds and rustication, and Trinity's slightly more subdued expanse of GOTH. (I hafta admit I like the Trinity building better, especially the even Gothier inside, which feels like a church retrofitted for accounting.) In return, the apartment-dwellers of Empire get a smashing vista of...gravestones. Very important gravestones, mind, but dead people is still dead people and I can't help but think how it must irk the living. Maybe they condition themselves to it. Maybe when they absently peep out their windows every morning, they make-believe the gravestones are some kind of rustic architectural detail without meaning. Maybe they tell themselves that these people, long buried in these brownstone graves, are SO DEAD they're practically not even dead anymore.

There are supposedly wonderful qualities to the Empire Building's entrance -- the AIA Guide to New York City calls it "a triumphant Roman ensemble" -- but it was largely hidden by scaffolding both times I visited. Such is the curse of scaffolding: all around the city, it obscures buildings for obscure reasons.

25. American Stock Exchange

Location: 86 Trinity Place
Built: 1921
Architect: Starrett & Van Vleck
National Register Number: 78001867
Listed: June 2, 1978
Visited: September 28th, 2007



So, last Friday, I'm taking pictures of the Old Morgan Guaranty Building and this German family approaches me. "Do you know where the stock exchange is?" I tell them, well, there are actually two exchanges. The New York Stock Exchange is right around the corner -- I hold my cupped hand down Wall Street -- but the American Stock Exchange is down the street past the church. But I hastened to add that it was in all likelihood the NYSE they wanted to see. Its market value is many, many times greater, the NYSE's grand Greek temple looks gets to be on all the postcards and used in television stock footage to symbolize "Wall Street," while Trinity Church prevents the ASE's bland Art Deco façade from even being visible in America's primary financial district. To me, the most interesting thing about the building is that for the longest time, the ASE didn't even need a building, persisting as an outdoor enterprise from 1842 to 1921. This would be unfathomable today -- probably in even the most basketcase of economies, exchanges rely on banks of indoor computers to do their dirty work.