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.

41f. Wall Street Historic District

Location: Roughly bounded by Cedar Street, Maiden Lane, Pearl Street, Bridge Street, South William Street, Greenwich Street, and Trinity Place.
Built: N/A
Architect: N/A
National Register Number: 07000063
Listed: February 2, 2007
Visited: December 30, 2007



The AIA Guide to New York City calls this the Old Morgan Guaranty Building (Francis Kimball, 1907), but just about nobody else does, instead preferring "37 Wall Street" or the "Trust Company of America Building." The fate of this Beaux Arts beaut neatly summarizes the evolution of the district: from a home of a financial giant (one that eventually lent its genetic material to what we now call JPMorgan Chase) to not only apartments (arrrgh, again) but a branch of Tiffany's. Along with the Hermès around the corner, this is yet another recognition that Wall Street (qua the location) is a tourist power point, a place to spend money, not make it.



How did this happen? Obviously, 9/11 had a lot to with this new state of affairs: once security checkpoints on Wall, Broad, Nassau and Exchange streets were in place, the New York Stock Exchange and its environs became virtually traffic-free, a walker's paradise in a city where most drivers seem to have an unconscious desire to simply run pedestrians down. Yet the tourist crowds of last week--when it seemed I was as likely to overhear people speaking in French as English--weren't here as recently as five years. (As far as I remember, anyway.) I think this may be due to the way the threat of terrorism has receded in our consciousness. Rather than a likely target for a suicide bomber or suitcase nuke, Wall Street feels safe, safe enough to walk through in the middle of the night without any trouble, something I did a lot last year to my great pleasure. (A pity most of the night photos I took came out all blurry 'n' shit. A tripod, next time.) In 2001 and 2002, Wall Street's social geography was determined by fear; in 2007 and 2008, it's determined by our collective forgetfulness of that fear.

41b. Wall Street Historic District

Location: Roughly bounded by Cedar Street, Maiden Lane, Pearl Street, Bridge Street, South William Street, Greenwich Street, and Trinity Place.
Built: N/A
Architect: N/A
National Register Number: 07000063
Listed: February 2, 2007
Visited: December 30, 2007



One Chase Manhattan Plaza (Skidmore, Owens & Merrill, 1960) is considered another modernist masterwork, but I have less affection for it: only seven years older, it feels dated in a way its neighbor, the Marine Midland Bank Building, doesn't. Maybe it's because it's clad in bright 'n' shiny aluminum rather than the eternally "cool" negation of black. (Did New York City have black or near-black buildings before the Seagram Building?)



What I like, though, is the plaza itself: its Dubuffet mutant mushrooms and the stage-like views of The Manhattan Company Building and Louise Nevelson Plaza.

41a. Wall Street Historic District

Location: Roughly bounded by Cedar Street, Maiden Lane, Pearl Street, Bridge Street, South William Street, Greenwich Street, and Trinity Place.
Built: N/A
Architect: N/A
National Register Number: 07000063
Listed: February 2, 2007
Visited: December 30, 2007



A designation so new I can't find a map for it, thus I'm not sure what this historic district includes or excludes. All I know is that it's "roughly bounded" by seven streets, covers thirty-six blocks, and that it "includes significant buildings from as late as 1967."

That last bit is a likely reference to the Marine Midland Bank Building (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1967). I think there are only three post-war NRHP landmarks in Manhattan--the Guggenheim, Lever House, and the Seagram Building--so its inclusion in the historic is something of a nice surprise. I know the building fairly well. My dad worked for years at a investment bank once headquartered here, taking the family to see his office back on Christmas Eve 1977. Imagine my surprise when I saw Robert A.M. Stern declare the building a key work of American modernism on his PBS series Pride of Place. To me, it was just an anonymous box whose distinction from other anonymous boxes would be hard to grasp were it not for Isamu Noguchi's Red Cube. (The cube is that rare piece of corporate minimalist sculpture people (kids too) love rather than regard blankly.) Truth is, while I have never been hostile towards the minimalist modernism this building represents, I am still trying to understand and savor the tiny distinctions such buildings live and die by. One such distinction is the fact this building isn't a mere box: it actually has a trapezoid footprint, something invisible from the ground but unmistakeable from the sky, making the building a thin black wedge driven between the Equitable and 150 Broadway.

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.

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.)

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:

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.

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.