62. US Post Office--Church Street Station

A.K.A.: Federal Office Building
Location: 90 Church Street
Built: 1935
Architect: Cross & Cross; Pennington, Lewis & Mills, Inc.
National Register Number: 88002359
Listed: May 11, 1989
Visited: April 13, 2008



In all weather save the worst, I could see it from my office in Tower Two: a block wide, and wider than tall; a cruise ship sailing through downtown Manhattan. Or a patch of desert. I have memories, possibly false ones, of its life from the street, the sun bearing down on expanses of limestone unrelieved save for air vents. Its blankness sucked the life out of the immediate vicinity, maybe even more than the monoliths across the street. People would walk by and not stop and not look up at the thing, at least on the Vesey Street side, because there was so little for the eye to focus on. Church Street was where the life was, with a few vendors of books and fruit mucking up traffic past and inside the entrances; inside the entrances, more confusion, more life, a warren of corridors and windows and lines.



It is something Art Deco, something Classical, but also neither: no fluted columns, no formal razzle-dazzle. It feels incomplete to me. The monumentality of its scale suggests a much taller building than is actually there. What happened to that building, I wonder.

61. John Street Methodist Church

Location: 44 John Street
Built: 1841
Architect: Attributed to Philip Embury
National Register Number: 73001219
Listed: June 04, 1973
Visited: April 13, 2008



One of the websites related to the United Methodist Chuch calls the John Street church "home of America's oldest continuous congegation." Old, yeah. Like the title character of Virginia Lee Burton's The Little House, this tiny little Lego brick of a building has survived long enough to see the neighborhood rise up and over it; today it's dwarfed by 33 Maiden Lane and Home Insurance Plaza. When I enter the building, I immediately smell the dry and dusty air of construction. You have to figure that's inevitable--167 years old, it likely needs spurts of intense maintenance, spaced a few years apart, to prevent it from falling to the ground. Scaffolds stand above many of the central pews, forcing the congregation to disperse around them, and making it look smaller than it might otherwise.

I feel bad when I visit small churches like this one. At Trinity, I can come in and observe things with a comfortable anonymity, hidden in the crowd, my presence noted by no-one but myself and God. At John Street, I sense that I've been noticed, an unfamiliar face floating through a small, tight-knit community, raising expectations for new blood that I will only dash. I even feel bad for saying that I feel bad about it, because I recognize I may be unfairly assuming they've got a thinner skin than they do. Can't win.

Anyway, the pastor was striking. I didn't bring my notes with me (I'm at my mom's this weekend), so I can't remember what he talked about, but I was liked his mien, the way he bore down on his words: intense, with no hysteria or doom. (He also looked sort of like a young, sincere, and undebauched Christopher Hitchens, if you can believe that--and I think that's rather impressive, if you can believe that.)

60. Old New York Evening Post Building

A.K.A.: The New York Evening Post Building
Location: 20 Vesey Street
Built: 1906
Architect: Robert D. Kohn; Gutzon Borglum (statuary)
National Register Number: 77000963
Listed: August 16, 1977
Visited: March 27, 2008



Journalism. New York journalism. Brash, brawny, manly journalism. Muckraking! Sensationalism! Totally making shit up! A take-no-prisoners attitude that lives with us today.

Modernism. Viennese modernism. Radical, intense, stylized modernism. Egon Schiele! Josef Hoffmann! Gustav Klimt! A rejection of things past that fed the future.

The Old New York Evening Post Building: New York Journalism + Viennese Modernism. Two tastes that should taste really weird together. But!

I can't find many definitive words on why the newspaper-eventually-to-be-known-as-the-New York Post would seek an Art Nouveau headquarters building, but the Post was owned by Oswald Garrison Villard, a man with lefty views on race, suffrage, labor, and pacificism (which eventually made him mad unpopular during World War II, as you can imagine). Even wrote a book on John Brown. As such, it's not hard to imagine him betraying some sympathy towards contemporary art movements--though I'm too ignorant to know if turn-of-the-century liberalism really was some kind of natural ally of early modernism. Actually, it's even easier to think of this building, ruled as it is by lithe and fluid lines, as a statement of oneupmanship over all those other newspapers and their elephantine buildings on Newspaper Row and uptown. Iconoclastic man, iconoclastic building: the building's so iconoclastic that it was described by the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission as one of the few Art Nouveau buildings in the country, forget about the city.

Incidentally, this was building was listed on the National Register the day Elvis died. This is one way you can tell I'm still a rock critic.

59. Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Location: 33 Liberty Street
Built: 1919-1924
Architect: York & Sawyer
National Register Number: 80002688
Listed: May 6, 1980
Visited: December 1 and 29, 2007; March 7, 2008
Additional Documentation: Official website



Timely. (Well, always timely.) And yet, even now, my idea of what the Fed actually does isn't any more expansive than a thumbnail sketch you can get on the internet: it is the central bank of the United States; it directs the country's monetary policies; sets interest rates, and so on. It's both steering and ballast for the American economy. Beyond that, it's beyond me.

Likewise, this building, which houses the FRB's New York area operations, defies attempts at comprehension, or even apprehension. It takes after the palazzos of the Italian Renaissance--imposing buildings themselves--in form and detail, but on a much grander scale. (It looks like it could eat an old school palazzo.) Unlike most other massive buildings in the city, it's low and wide rather than high and thin; the building is so near the ground and, thanks to the narrow streets, so near other buildings that either you're too close or can only see a part, if at all.

The guided tour of the facilities I took a few weeks ago was a little anticlimactic, given how little one saw of such an enormous building, and how I needed to reserve my ticket a month in advance. A couple of videos and exhibits about American currency--all of which were quite good, actually, as I'd never found any reason to get emotional over coins before--then an elevator down five floors, down to Manhattan's bedrock, down to the vault that just happens to store more gold than anywhere else in the world. It looked like a storage facility, the kind where you rent a little locker on a per-month basis...albeit one so impenetrable that you have to access it via a ten-foot tunnel in a revolving 90-ton steel cylinder.

58. West Street Building

Location: 90 West Street
Built: 1905-1907
Architect: Cass Gilbert
National Register Number: 06001303
Listed: January 25, 2007
Visited: August 31 and September 7, 2007, and whole buncha other times
Additional Documentation: 90 West Street website



I am in love with this building, and I want you to fall in love with it, too. But I'm not sure I'm up to the challenge.

As with the Park Row and the Chamber of Commerce buildings, I have sharp memories of the first time it went from background noise to an object of contemplation: I was at the FedEx station in the lobby of Two World Trade Center, waiting for my package to be processed, and outside the huge glass windows, I could see it lit like electric lace, the upper floors burning hot with the highlights and shadows thrown by tiny figures too small to apprehend. What was I thinking? I was thinking, oh, what a beautiful old building. And nothing more. And even as I walked the streets south of Tower Two in my idle time, or had lunch alone at the Tall Ships Restaurant with all the commodities brokers, or just stepped out to step out, 90 West did not force itself upon my attention the way it would now. A parking lot in front, though allowing an unobstructed view, also blunted its impact--it was too far away to ever get all up in my face. St. Nicholas was far smaller, yet it was hard not to notice because it was so anomalous; 90 West just looked like another building. Once thought a tall one, it had been overshadowed at least since the World Trade Center was constructed, and so it would remain.



When the towers went down, they compromised the integrity of other buildings. Falling rubble poked holes all around. 7 World Trade Center was slashed, burned, and collapsed; the Deutsche Bank Building, exposed to the elements through holes in its facade, was eventually declared unsalvagable. 90 West got beat up bad, too. Two people died in an elevator. Four floors were gutted by fire, and four others were substantially burned. Huge parts of the north side's façade were scraped and slashed. But this 1907 building survived all these late 20C structures--in part due to being covered, inside and out, in terra-cotta, a distinctly 19th-Century form of fire-proofing--and after a careful multi-million dollar renovation, is an apartment building. (Albeit one with an excellent view of World War III's first stomping grounds.)



On the outside, the terra-cotta assumes the language of Gothic architecture: bracket and colonette and crocket and rosette and arch and spandrel and molding and foil and archivolt and ball flower. Almost all of this is done up in creamy-buff color (which any sky will flatter, no matter the weather), save for bands of green and some touches of baby blue, yellow, and brick-red. Much of the detail is invisible to the naked eye, but contribute to an overall sense of complexity--for example, I'm guessing that the polychromy is there to give the illusion of depth--but it takes binoculars or a telephoto lens to actually see any of it for what it is. When I did for the first time last year for this project, it was as if I just discovered the backyard I grew up contained a fully-functioning rainforest. It was beguilement, it was shock. It was love at first sight.



You almost wonder why anyone would go through much trouble to achieve such subtle optical effects, but perhaps all these details are maybe not so much to be seen as to be there, serving as totems; a thick coating of the past to protect the building from harm.

OK, I don't think I can touch this building. Just look at the pictures.