54a. Fulton-Nassau Historic District
Location: Roughly bounded by Broadway, Park Row, and Nassau, Dutch, William, Ann, Spruce, and Liberty Streets
Built: Multiple dates, mainly around 1860-1930
Architect: Multiple
National Register Number: 05000988
Listed: September 7, 2005
Visited: December 1, 2007; January 6, February 28, and March 2, 2008
Seems more like a bunch of historic districts spatchcocked together by happenstance than one coherent cocatenation of buildings united by a sensibility. Not a complaint, mind! Just an observation. The first microdistrict surrounds Broadway and Maiden Lane: mainly 1890s-1920s unsetbacked skyscrapers composing the kind of "canyon" cityscape downtown was so famous for.
Crowding around the corner of Beekman and Nassau, there's a passel of buildings from about the late 1870s to the late 1890s, most connected with the long-vanished newspaper row and irresistibly ornate.
Between these two poles, centered on Nassau Street and radiating outwards, dark corridors of smaller commercial buildings.
If anything unites these buildings, it's the shitty storefronts, remarkable for their complete lack of sympathy for what they've been glued to. To my mind, 144 Fulton Street is almost legendary in its affronts to taste. The building must date from the late 1900s, and was once the site of Miller's Restaurant, where men in suits dined on Danish cuisine. At some point after the sixties, maybe much later, it changed hands and received the bitch-slap of a façade renovation you see above. A rhombus window, a red triangle awning, a silvery grid: actually, it's a playful composition of geometric elements that'd be almost um admirable...for a unisex hair salon. In Massapequa. In 1984. That is, if the windows allowed any natural light. And the A/C units didn't look like an awkward afterthought of an architect possessed by an idea the muddy details of which he didn't care too much about. AND the design wasn't also completely compromised by the retention of Flemish Renaissance cornice and lamps. (Which are--don't get me wrong--wonderful details, but if you're gonna do MTV modernism, why keep 'em? Or hell, why do MTV modernism at all when South Street Seaport--only a half-mile away, on the same street no less--demonstrates something of the virtue of keeping old buildings kinda old-looking?) AND AND AND everything was ruined further by what look like new green awnings that harmonize with nothing, to say nothing of the way-dated COPIERS - FACSIMILE - TYPEWRITER lettering up on top. The overall effect is so shitty, so ill-conceived, so misbegotten that I have to take a stand against my own tastes and call the whole damned completely beguiling (and since it's on such small scale, harmless, something you can't say about any of Trump's gilded turds). I think I'm in love with it. It's got the kind of sordid retro-futurism kids in Williamsburg having been straining themselves for a decade to achieve. Long may it sore the eyes of passersby.
(I'll get to some of the district's more conventionally beautiful buildings in subsequent posts, I promise.)
Built: Multiple dates, mainly around 1860-1930
Architect: Multiple
National Register Number: 05000988
Listed: September 7, 2005
Visited: December 1, 2007; January 6, February 28, and March 2, 2008
Seems more like a bunch of historic districts spatchcocked together by happenstance than one coherent cocatenation of buildings united by a sensibility. Not a complaint, mind! Just an observation. The first microdistrict surrounds Broadway and Maiden Lane: mainly 1890s-1920s unsetbacked skyscrapers composing the kind of "canyon" cityscape downtown was so famous for.
Crowding around the corner of Beekman and Nassau, there's a passel of buildings from about the late 1870s to the late 1890s, most connected with the long-vanished newspaper row and irresistibly ornate.
Between these two poles, centered on Nassau Street and radiating outwards, dark corridors of smaller commercial buildings.
If anything unites these buildings, it's the shitty storefronts, remarkable for their complete lack of sympathy for what they've been glued to. To my mind, 144 Fulton Street is almost legendary in its affronts to taste. The building must date from the late 1900s, and was once the site of Miller's Restaurant, where men in suits dined on Danish cuisine. At some point after the sixties, maybe much later, it changed hands and received the bitch-slap of a façade renovation you see above. A rhombus window, a red triangle awning, a silvery grid: actually, it's a playful composition of geometric elements that'd be almost um admirable...for a unisex hair salon. In Massapequa. In 1984. That is, if the windows allowed any natural light. And the A/C units didn't look like an awkward afterthought of an architect possessed by an idea the muddy details of which he didn't care too much about. AND the design wasn't also completely compromised by the retention of Flemish Renaissance cornice and lamps. (Which are--don't get me wrong--wonderful details, but if you're gonna do MTV modernism, why keep 'em? Or hell, why do MTV modernism at all when South Street Seaport--only a half-mile away, on the same street no less--demonstrates something of the virtue of keeping old buildings kinda old-looking?) AND AND AND everything was ruined further by what look like new green awnings that harmonize with nothing, to say nothing of the way-dated COPIERS - FACSIMILE - TYPEWRITER lettering up on top. The overall effect is so shitty, so ill-conceived, so misbegotten that I have to take a stand against my own tastes and call the whole damned completely beguiling (and since it's on such small scale, harmless, something you can't say about any of Trump's gilded turds). I think I'm in love with it. It's got the kind of sordid retro-futurism kids in Williamsburg having been straining themselves for a decade to achieve. Long may it sore the eyes of passersby.
(I'll get to some of the district's more conventionally beautiful buildings in subsequent posts, I promise.)
posted by Michael at
6:08 AM
1 Comments:
haha, i hear you man i hear you.
maybe try to let it stand in as an allegory for the city as a whole...might alleviate the pain a little
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