38. Federal Hall National Memorial

AKA: United States Custom House; U.S. Sub-Treasury
Location: 28 Wall Street
Built: 1833-1842
Architects: Town & Davis
National Register Number: 66000095
Listed: October 15, 1966
Visited: September 28, 2007



An exasperating landmark. I take no issue with the building qua building at all: a nonpareil Greek Revival structure with one of the city's few great rotundas. But for all its beauty, it's only an echo. Federal Hall was New York's City Hall for most of the 17th Century, then home to the young nation's Capitol before it was moved to Philadelphia, then Washington. It was where Peter Zenger was tried and acquitted for libel; where Washington took the oath of office; where Congress ratified the Bill of Rights. And then, in 1812, the building was torn down and sold for scrap. Why? Feh, who knows. The building now standing at 26 Wall Street was the first Custom House in the country, and later a Federal Reserve Bank, but today its primary function today -- other than being a pretty but vacant space -- is to commemorate what was there before. A non-period printing press, George Washington's bible, the sheet of rock from the original building: these are interesting artifacts but the way everything is presented, there is no reason (save for a sentimental attachment to a place) these things should be here as opposed to anywhere else. These things could just as easily be displayed down the block, or Brooklyn, in Baltimore, and you'd learn about as much. The Memorial is at best storehouse for artifacts rather than a new, coherent context for them the way a good museum is. It is so lacking in purpose that one room is devoted almost entirely to the National Park Service's other sites. Seriously, a Starbucks would be a less trivializing use for this building.

37. Manhattan Company Building

AKA: Bank of The Manhattan Company Building; The Trump Building
Location: 40 Wall Street
Built: 1929-1930
Architect: H. Craig Severance
National Register Number: 00000577
Listed: June 16, 2000
Visited: September 28 and November 10, 2007



I was taking pictures for this blog when somebody, perhaps sensing from my guidebook that I might know something about architecture, asked me what building that was -- the one with the pyramid roof down the street. I told him well I uh...I dunno! The bitter irony was that I had just taken plenty of pictures of it just minutes before. When you get too close, the pyramid's angles are such that it pretty much disappears your line of sight. It was probably meant to be devoured from a distance, then: a beacon announcing its presence far and wide. It was the tallest building in the world for a few mere months until the people behind the Chrysler Building decided to totally cheat and top it with a 125 foot spire constructed within the building. It in turn was eclipsed by the Empire State Building, which was eventually eclipsed by the Twin Towers, which was etc. etc. As I learned from Dave Marsh's Trapped: Michael Jackson and the Crossover Dream (a great rock book, btw -- rock is often my frame of reference for all sorts of far-flung aesthetic artifacts), his disquisition on Thriller and the cultural context that made it (for a time) an omnipresent thing, being the biggest is always a set-up for being eclipsed, becoming #1 invariably leads to being #2. Today, while it's the fifth tallest building in New York even after all these years, its stature is a bit diminished: Donald Trump boasted on The Apprentice that he bought 40 Wall for a mere million, practically nothing even in the 20th century.

36. Wallace Building

Location: 56-58 Pine Street
Built: 1893-4
Architect: Oswald Wirz
National Register Number: 03000848
Listed: August 28, 2003
Visited: September 28 and November 10, 2007



Oswald Wirz designed a few New York City buildings in the Gilded Age; of those that survive, a few are in landmarked districts, another achieved an accidental and incidental fame by being across the street from the World Trade Center, and yet another is this one, which I'll get to in a bit. The most substantial information I have on the life of Wirz comes from NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission's designation report for this building. It is only a paragraph long. The details of his death are not alluded to, perhaps out of concision and perhaps out of delicacy. Google, being ruled less by social mores than algorithms, knows no such propriety, and so a search for "Oswald Wirz" spits out a tawdry New York Times death notice as the second or third result:

ARCHITECT COMMITS SUICIDE. Attributed to Despondency Due to Lack of Employment. Oswald Wirz, an architect, forty-nine years old, committed suicide yesterday in his flat, on the second floor of 544 West One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street. He inhaled gas from a rubber tube, attached to the pipe which supplied the kitchen range. Wirz lived with his wife, Josephine, and four children, the eldest of whom were May, twelve, and Laura, fifteen years of age. He came to America from Switzerland twenty years ago. Until five years ago he was connected with the firm of Wallace Brothers, but since leaving their employ had done no work. Mrs. Wirz and the two girls were out for a walk and returned home late in the afternoon. On opening the door they were driven out by the gas which filled the flat. Mrs. Wirz screamed, and neighbors went to her aid. Wirz was lying on the kitchen floor. Dr. Addoms of the J. Hood Wright Hospital said he had been dead for some time. The suicide is attributed to despondency.

The New York Times of 1900 judged Wirz's death as worthy of only three paragraphs, where the outrage of the day, the Jennie Bosschieter Case, gets over twenty on the same page. Not that there is any surprise in this. Bosschieter was drugged, raped, and murdered; she was an innocent despoiled, and stories like that write themselves. Wirz committed suicide, and why anybody kills themselves is an awful mystery few can bear dwelling on for long. So within the question mark of Wirz's life is another question mark, a blankness within a blankness. The only thing I know about Wirz with any depth is this building. But it's grand enough that if you, dear reader, could point me towards Wirz' grave, I'll gladly pour a 40 out for him.



Based on the evidence of the Wallace Building, I think he would've appreciated that. I'm not sure where the hip-hop practice of pouring out liquor in remembrance of the dead comes from, but even if it's not Africa-via-Cuba-via-New Orleans as I'm guessing, it has to be incredibly old, a pagan ritual hiding in plain sight within modern America. And likewise, in the old-growth forests of the Wall Street region, so thick with buildings the sun can barely shine through, Wirz made the Wallace Building a home for nature deities long abandoned. On the facade, we can see a terra cotta representation of the Green Man.



He is a decorative element used in British architecture since the 11th century depicting a man made of foliage, or smothered in foliage, or sprouting foliage in his mouth. He is an echo of European Gods annihilated or subsumed into Christianity. He personifies nature; he also effaces the distinctions between the human and the natural worlds. He (and a few compatriot dragons) seem to give birth to a crazy tangle of terra cotta decoration that cover parts of the building like kudzu. The details lack the fineness of the terra cotta of Sullivan's Bayard-Condict; they do not achieve and do not pretend exact symmetry, but do achieve something of the play between order and randomness that makes our experience of nature so satisfying.

35. Bank of New York Building

AKA: Bank of New York & Trust Company Building
Location: 48 Wall Street
Built: 1928
Architect: Benjamin Wistar Morris
National Register Number: 03000847
Listed: August 28, 2003
Visited: September 28 and October 15, 2007



The Bank of New York has historical bragging rights that other, much bigger American banks do not. Not only is it the oldest American bank, it was founded in 1784 by actual Founding Father (not to mention ten-dollar bill cover model and Aaron Burr victim) Alexander Hamilton.

Save for a few brief moves to Greenwich Village on account of yellow fever, the bank stubbornly sat on the corner of Wall and William in form or another for two hundred years. King's Handbook of New York City 1892 has an engraving of the first bank on the site, a small Federal-style mansion with fantastically elongated windows. Calvert Vaux designed its replacement just a few years before the collaboration Frederick Law Olmsted that produced Central Park. King's book has a photo of it, some years after two floors were added: seven stories of brick, brownstone, and mansard roof that looks modest only in comparison to what the site -- and all of Wall Street -- would eventually become.



As if to admit Vaux's building amounted to insufficient ancestor worship, the replacement for Vaux's building marked a return to the architectural styles of America's birth. Both times I've photographed the building for this blog, the Federal-style lantern that's the building's most striking feature, was covered in black tarp, so you'll have to head on out to emporis.com or greatgridlock.net for a photo. It is not unlovable, but it strikes me as an oddball extravagance. The first time I really noticed the building, back in 2002 or so, I was hit with the feeling that the lantern was grossly inappropriate for a skyscraper. It's the 1920s, buildings are being built with new kinds of technologies, and yet architects are still finishing them with details derived from the ancients. No wonder modernist glass boxes were so exciting, at least for a time.

The Bank of New York finally severed its historical connection to the spot when the acquisition of Irving Trust allowed a move to One Wall Street. If a BONY employee is lucky enough to have a window office on the west side of One Wall, they can spend their idle moments looking over Trinity Church and its graveyard, the final resting place of Alexander Hamilton.

If you're keeping track of such things (and I know you are): for the umpteenth time, apartments. (And soon, a museum.)

34. Wall and Hanover Building

AKA: The Brown Brothers Harriman & Company Building; The Crest at 63 Wall Street
Location: 63 Wall Street
Built: 1929
Architects: Delano & Aldrich and Yasuo Matsui
National Register Number: 05001288
Listed: November 16, 2005
Visited: September 28 and October 15, 2007



The pressures of the Dutch street plan and/or the 1916 Zoning Resolution occasionally force downtown real estate into curious shapes. 20 Exchange Street twists on its base like a branchless tree. 26 Broadway and the Lee Higg Building curve gently along their roads. The Delmonico's and Beaver Buildings gesture towards the Flatiron. And this one. It's an odd bird that sits on the bottom end of a sort-of triangular block, massed on the bottom like a skew Chrysler Building and blessed with a crewcut top spiked with gargoyles; from the air, the roof resembles a backwards question mark, or maybe a "p." Before you ask...yes, yes, apartments. My GOD, were you expecting an arts collective? No? Then were you expecting well-crafted apartments with lots of amenities? Well, you would, wouldn't you? But this is New York City and nothing is ever so simple, even when you've got a little jingle in your pockets.

33. First National City Bank

AKA: Regent Wall Street Hotel; National City Bank; Merchants' Exchange
Location: 55 Wall Street
Built: 1836-1841
Architects: Isiah Rogers; McKim, Mead & White (1907 addition)
National Register Number: 72000872
Listed: August 18, 1972
Visited: September 28 and October 15, 2007

The same building as before. Yeah, it was landmarked twice -- two different dates, two different numbers, two slightly different names. No, I don't know why. Was it this an oversight? Maybe one was an exterior designation and the other an interior one? Shrug.

Here's another picture, then: