53. Chamber of Commerce Building

A.K.A.: International Commercial Bank of China Building; Mega International Commercial Bank Building
Location: 65 Liberty Street
Built: 1900-1901
Architect: James B. Baker
National Register Number: 73001214
Listed: February 6, 1973
Visited: December 1 and 29, 2007; February 15, 2008
Additional Documentation: NRHP Nomination Form; NYCLPC Form; Christopher Gray NYT article



I used to bank at 140 Broadway, just across the street from this building. Visible from the second floor, it was something to ponder as the teller processed my tiny paycheck every Friday. From what I remember, I found it an impressive artifact. (More than I can say for the Liberty Tower--I have no memory of it dating from this time in my life.) A white-marble candy box with four all-seeing oculi monitoring the street, it was a little like a few other buildings in the neighborhood, and like very few other buildings in Manhattan: built to impress rather than maximize real estate value. Or be functional--it was (and is) impossible to think any serious white collar work went on inside. It had no visible sign of industriousness on the outside. Few people went in and out. Only dim lights, if that. It was easier to imagine something clubby going on within, men in oversized leather chairs reading newspapers, smoking cigars. Maybe. (Not that I knew what a Chamber of Commerce actually did or anything.) Whatever it was, I didn't have the proper credentials to enter. It was imposing in its perfectness, it was capital and cred I didn't have, could never have, made tangible in the form of a building. Today, with more knowledge under my belt, I see the Chamber of Commerce Building as slightly imperfect, both by design (asymmetric façade) and subsequent alteration (removed statuary between the columns, weird boxy dormer that may hide HVAC). And today, actual work goes in inside, as it serves as offices for one of Taiwan's state-run banks. So it is a bit more prosaic to me now. But I still can't get in.

52. Liberty Tower

A.K.A.: Bryant Building; Sinclair Building; Sinclair Oil Building
Location: 55 Liberty Street
Built: 1909-1910
Architect: Henry Ives Cobb
National Register Number: 83001734
Listed: September 15, 1983
Visited: December 1 and 29, 2007; February 15, 2008
Additional Documentation: NYCLPC Report



The LPC's designation report for the Liberty Tower uses the term "romantic skyscraper" as if it the reader immediately understood what it meant. Based on the context, I have to assume it denotes those early, slender stalks of historicist design that created Manhattan's skyline--the Singer, the MetLife, the Woolworth, and Liberty--in opposition to those awful awful modernist oafs that supposedly ruined it in the sixties and seventies. Now Liberty Tower has class, no question. A creamy shaft crowned with Gothic ornamentation and crazy terra-cotta animals and gnomes, it's lithe and light where other buildings in the neighborhood seem to hulk and crowd. It's a tower that doesn't impose; its slender frame prevents it from blocking much sky.



Unfortunately, its thinness is the very reason why buildings like it aren't developed today. As a very general rule for city office buildings, it's more efficient to spread out a given amount of space over a small number of large floors than a large number of small floors. The larger a floorplate is, the more likely it'll allow a company to keep one of its divisions--or several related ones--together. When company divisions are spread out over multiple floors, it means employees have to waste time on elevators or stairs to conduct face-to-face business. The Liberty Tower's floorplate (including space for elevators and linking stairs) is roughly 5,200 square feet per floor. This is nothing in today's market, NOTHING. A floor in an Manhattan office building is typically from four to seven times that. (A floor on the World Trade Center was an acre of space.) 5K of space is fine if you're an exclusive hedge fund, a law firm with a handful of partners, or a lil' internet start-up, but if you're any bigger, it's prohibitively cramped no matter floors you take. A company bureaucracy will require much much MORE.



It's exactly this kind of office-space inefficiency that doomed the Singer Building as a corporate white elephant. But if 5K square feet is unworkable for a company, it's big enough for a movie star--and if that space is divided into multiple apartments, good for us little people, too. Liberty Tower got a new lease on life when it was subject to the first residential conversion of consequence in the Financial District back in 1979-1980, when the area must've been even more bereft of decent places to buy necessities on a weekend than now. The architect (and investor) for the conversion, Joseph Pell Lombardi, took the former Sinclair Oil boardrooms for his own apartment. Aw man, SO JEALOUS.

51. Insurance Company of North America Building

A.K.A.: 99 John Street DecoLofts
Location: 99 John Street
Built: 1933
Architect: Shreve, Lamb and Harmon
National Register Number: 99001425
Listed: November 20, 1999
Visited: February 2 and 19, 2008
Additional Documentation: 99 John Street DecoLofts website



Complementing (and part of) our Financial District, Manhattan has an Insurance District. Or had one, anyway. Did you know that? I didn't. Even though I worked a few blocks away through most of the '90s, I first encountered the idea of New York's Insurance District only a few weeks ago, looking 'pon a great map of Manhattan published by real estate company Trammell Crow with the words "Insurance District" hovering over the block framed by John and Fulton, William and Gold. In hindsight, of course, I guess it makes perfect sense that there would be a clump of insurance companies adjacent to Wall Street as well as the South Street Seaport, what with boat-based business being a pretty damned risky thing. And it also makes sense that the district's coherency would rise and fall with the success of the others. Based on old New York Times articles, Etymologist Barry Popnik identifies the term's birth in the 1880's and its peak at around 1920. During the remainder of the 20th century, Manhattan's financial powers disperse throughout the tri-state area; maritime shipping loses its potency; insurance companies move, die, are purchased by larger ones. So by the time I get to know the place--defined by Emporis as between Maiden Lane and the Brooklyn Bridge--there's little business extant that identifies the place to me as related to insurance. Instead, I knew it as home to Silicon Alley. (Well, one of the Silicon Alleys.)



Even if its coherence as center for industry is diminished, the area's architectural coherence remains. The corner of John and Gold is draped in Art Deco: 100 John Street and its bold terracing; the green-tinged 80 John and its slight twist against street; 111 John and its textures. (Non-Deco buildings like 110 and 100 William add to the area's vitality rather than diminish it.) In the middle of this is the Insurance Company of North America (or "INA") Building. Dressed in stipes of limestone and windows/spandrels, it looks like a stump Empire State Building, which is appropriate, since it's by the same architects, built a few years later. It's not quite as interesting, though. How could it be? So small, so crowded, it's hard to get a sense of the whole thing from the street. Actually, none of these buildings are anything more than minor gems--but taken together, this is a forgotten little district you could root for.

50b. South Street Seaport Historic District

Location: Roughly bounded by East River, Brooklyn Bridge, Fletcher Alley, and Pearl and South Streets
Built: from circa 1781 to circa 2000; mainly 19th century
Architect: Multiple
National Register Number: 78001884
Listed: December 12, 1978
Visited: January 14, 15, and 28, and February 2, 2008
Additional Documentation: Historic American Buildings Survey; NYCLPC Reports for individual buildings and the district



Unlike the aforementioned parking lot, 273 Water Street (the fourth building on the left) has a pedigree. Erected no later than 1781 and possibly as early as 1773, it would be the third-oldest building in Manhattan were it not for the fact that it was reconstructed from a pile of rubble not too long ago, making its claim to antiquity about as doubtful as Fraunces Tavern's. It's also called the Captain Joseph Rose house after the guy who originally owned it--before this part of Manhattan was enhanced with landfill, he used to keep his ship in the back. But the REALLY noteworthy thing about 273, the thing that makes eyes pop out all cartoon-like, is its garish history as Kit Burns' Sportsman's Hall, a place of ill repute notorious for its deathmatches between rats and terriers. Luc Sante's Low Life also tells of animals buried under bleachers and the ghastly smell they made. Awfully colorful, right? Right. It's apartments now.

279 Water Street is the wooden building on the left corner. It's operated as a bar since 1794, making it probably the oldest bar in New York City. By contrast, the oldest bar/pub/tavern in Boston goes back to 1780 and New Orleans to 1772; for London and Dublin, the most likely claimants date back to the 17th century; and Berlin's reputed oldest is from 1525. We have some catching up to do.

50a. South Street Seaport Historic District

Location: Roughly bounded by East River, Brooklyn Bridge, Fletcher Alley, and Pearl and South Streets
Built: from circa 1781 to circa 2000; mainly 19th century
Architect: Multiple
National Register Number: 78001884
Listed: December 12, 1978
Visited: January 14, 15, and 28, and February 2, 2008
Additional Documentation: Historic American Buildings Survey; NYCLPC Reports for individual buildings and the district



This designation could be seen as a token of the preservation movement's growing confidence throughout the seventies. First, the Schermerhorn Row Block gets landmarked by the National Parks Service in February 18, 1971, followed by 170-176 John Street on May 13. Obviously unsatisfied, a year later the Parks Services designates the South Street Seaport a landmark, which it defines as the Schermerhorn block plus four neighboring ones. And six years after that, it mightily stretches its blanket of protection yet again with the South Street Seaport Historic District designation, which (if the map on page 12 is accurate) includes all of the aforementioned sites plus seven-and-change more blocks and four piers. (AND from 1978 to 2002, six boats connected with the Seaport get landmarked as well.)



In what must've been an aggressive attempt at discouraging future interlopers from ruining the neighborhood, the district includes some things that are ehh wellll maybe not so so "historical": a 34-story skyscraper from '83, a '74 ConEd substation that dominates the block it's on, and an acre's worth of parking.

49. Schermerhorn Row Block

A.K.A.: New York State Maritime Museum Block
Location: Block bounded by Front, Fulton, South, and John Streets
Built: 1811-1849
Architect: Unknown
National Register Number: 71000547
Listed: February 18, 1971
Visited: January 14, 15, and 28, and February 2, 2008
Additional Documentation: Historic American Buildings Survey; NYCLPC Reports



Worth $2.5 million in 1848--about $55 million today--Peter Schermerhorn was once one of the wealthiest men in New York City. And of course this means nothing to us now. My city guides variously call Schermerhorn a "ship chandler and developer," a "leading merchant," "one of New York's leading merchants...ran a ship chandler's business..." and so on: so many facts given without context, without a sense of scale, allowing the reader to brush off the guy's life like dandruff from a shoulder. Most of my sources don't even bother to clarify whether Schermerhorn Row was built by Peter Schermerhorn Sr. (1749-1826) or Peter Schermerhorn Jr. (1781-1852) or both, and I have respectable sources saying or implying one or the other. The Astors and the Carnegies and the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers are all a lot closer to us--they got far, far, richer, and left us a slew of surviving monuments attesting to this wealth. In contrast to their libraries and museums, the most tangible evidence of Peter Schermerhorn's career was these unsexy warehouses associated with the fishy stink of the seaport; hard labor, not exalted intellect.



Yet after a little Googling, I found something my guides didn't even hint at: Peter Schermerhorn Jr. was a fellow passenger on Alexis de Tocqueville's first voyage to the United States. Indeed, Schermerhorn suggested to the French sociologist certain notions that would later be key to his landmark book Democracy in America, including the inevitability of civil war, the the country's lack of party politics, and the blot of moneylust on the national character. That last one is an odd, possibly contradictory, possibly hypocritical stance for a millionaire to take, and in this bit of moral knottiness, a hint of the human being behind the name. It makes me wish there was more for me to chew on.



The constituents of Schermerhorn Row Block were originally built in the Federal Style, then remodeled with Greek Revival storefronts, then cast-iron storefronts, then remodeled again and again to fit the needs of its tenants until the Jan Hird Pokorny renovation removed much of the architectural accretions gained from over 150 years of use. Some architectural critics have decried this as a loss of the building's character. Paul Goldberger:

"The brick fronts have been sterilized, made so clean that all sense of time has been wiped out; worse still, the distinctions between the houses that make up the row have disappeared, and so this block looks more like a single overblown mass of brick than like a real 19th-century street."

I sort of know what he means. The bricks and the mortar are both a disconcerting frosty white, but it doesn't make the buildings look new, or even ahistorical. Instead--and I don't know how else to put this without resorting to lazy personification--they look shellshocked.



Still, you don't have to look too closely to find history manifesting itself. The renovation didn't straighten some of the lintels over the windows; in fact, they're so crooked it's almost a wonder how the buildings are still structurally sound. You get a better sense of just that inside Schermerhorn Row, subject to a recent interior renovation by Beyer Blinder Belle. The top floors of these buildings are now museum space, and while there were some good exhibits on ships and whaling--I was particularly fond of a segment from the silent Down to the Sea in Ships, shown in loop--mostly what I wanted to do was ignore the placards and vitrines, and look at the walls, the ceilings; the bricks, the beams. They had a hypnotic cast. Plaster and paint were still partially stuck to them. You could easily imagine these interiors' dusty days and nights, storing cargo from every part of the world. And while I know they're in perfectly fine condition and aren't going to fall down any time soon, they looked a little vulnerable, groaning with the weight of history, knowing more than I do.

48. John Street Building No. 170--176

A.K.A.: Hickson W. Field Building; Baker, Carver & Morrell Building
Location: 170-176 John Street
Built: 1840
Architect: Attributed to Town & Davis
National Register Number: 71000546
Listed: May 13, 1971
Visited: January 14, 15, and 28, and February 2, 2008
Additional Documentation: NYCLPC Report



It is not like the others, this former warehouse. Fronted with granite, not the red brick of its fellow Greek Revival neighbors and contemporaries, and so devoid of ornamentation the windows have no lintels (and barely anything in the way of sills), there is little here to distract the eye. This doesn't mean it's ugly or boring; rather, it is curiously modern without being modernist. Unfortunately its grey repose is too easy a fit with its surroundings. Move from South Street Seaport's main drag on Fulton Street to John Street, and the character of the neighborhood drastically changes, going from tourist-quick to parking-lot-dead in under a block.

47. AMBROSE (lightship)

A.K.A.: Lightship No. 87, Relief, F-LS512, Scotland
Location: Pier 16, off Fulton Street
Built: 1907
Builder: U.S. Lighthouse Service; New York Shipbuilding Co.
National Register Number: 84002758
Listed: September 7, 1984
Visited: February 2, 2008
Additional Documentation: NRHP Registration Form



In the olden days, locations deemed impractical for a lighthouse were instead serviced by permanently-anchored lightships. Lightships are often named after their charges, and so No. 87 was known as the Ambrose when it guided craft through the Ambrose Channel, the shipping channel that leads into New York Harbor. Its career as the Ambrose lasted from 1908 until 1932 during the era of the Cunard and the White Star Lines, back when ships weren't the also-ran to planes in the international transportation sweepstakes they way they are today. (It also became the first permanent radio beacon in the United States in 1921, this at the very beginning of commercial radio broadcasting.)Other light stations, before and since, have also called the Ambrose; and after No. 111 took its place, the No. 87 later served various locations throughout the Northeast until it was decommissioned in 1966, then donated to South Street Seaport in 1968. (The Ambrose Lightship was replaced by a "Texas Tower" lighthouse--sort of a lighthouse on an oil rig--in 1967, and became fully automated and people-free in 1988.) In its retirement, No. 87 has great stories to tell and all, yet here at the seaport, it's something of a fabulous unicorn in captivity, incongruously docked at a maritime museum-mall when it spent most of its career out stationed in the Atlantic hinterwaters.

I now know more about lightships than I ever imagined I'd know.

Until Saturday, every time I visited the Seaport in service of this blog, something prevented me from boarding the Ambrose. Usually the metal ramp that led to the boat had a puny piece of rope blocking its threshold, signifying it was off-limits. I went to the Seaport early hoping to get this responsibility out of the way, but no, the rope was still there. The water was a little choppy for some reason and in my mild disappointment I stood by the ship mesmerized by the way such a huge thing--488 tons--could bob up and down so gently. And weirdly, out of the corner of my eye, I could just barely catch somebody peeking out of one of the boat's portholes. Thinking somebody might come out, I wait a while and still, nothing. I come back after twelve, which is when the boats are supposed to open, I think. No, it remains blocked off. There are open doors on the top of the boat, the Peking has visitors, but there's nothing on the Ambrose--an oasis of ghost ship in the middle of one America's great tourist traps. I sit and wait outside on Pier 17 for about a half an hour. (I've got nothing better to do.) No sign of life. I go inside and eat a meal in one of the mall's better restaurants. I have a window seat so I can nervously check the Ambrose every so often. Eventually, in the middle of my meal, I notice a family boarding it, unencumbered by any rope. The weirdest thing. I haven't taken my eyes off the boat for more than a minute (probably less) and yet, somehow...whatever. So I rush my meal and pay my bill and finally board the thing, after six months of waiting, wondering if I'M ACTUALLY NOT ALLOWED TO BE ON THIS AND I'M GONNA BE IN TROUBLE and such. I take pictures of nothing in particular. I take pictures to take pictures. Then I see a guy's there, sitting down. Dude doesn't even acknowledge my presence, doesn't look at me. A gnome. Then he goes back into the ship. And that's it. I don't even bother going below deck to check out the details of the monotonous, lonely life lightship tenders must've lived. I'm not sure who was being weird here: sea people, museum people, or blogger people.

This is the last of the South Street Seaport ships I'm covering for now. There are two other landmarked ships connected to the Seaport, both I'll have to cover when it's not so cold: the Lettie G. Howard, which according to her own Myspace page (!) is wintering in Kings Point, New York, and the John A. Lynch, whose miserable story is recounted here.