18. James Watson House

AKA: Seton Shrine; The Shrine of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton
Location: 7 State Street
Built: 1793-1806; additions, 1965
Architect: John McComb, Jr.
Listed: August 24, 1972
Visited: August 5 and September 1, 2007



A stubborn kernel stuck in the teeth of the city. This survivor from the 18th century lives its life shadowed between two skyscrapers: 17 State Street and a modern building so lacking in distinction that I can't remember what it's called. It sits on prime real estate, but even without the landmark designation they'd never dare tear this one down the way its neighbors have been. 17 State Street may have been erected on a site where (among other things) Herman Melville was born, but the Watson house trumps that several times over because it was once the home of Elizabth Ann Seton, the first native-born American canonized by the Vatican. Our first saint! YEAH! Heck, I'm not even being sarcastic! I genuinely think having homegrown saints are awesome, another sign of America's ability to cultivate civilization. Ra-ra-ra this country! Again: not sarcastic.

It is now a church. One of the so-far unspoken aims of this blog is to not just visit but to experience them as best I can. So I'm going to be visiting a lot of houses of worship in the name of this blog; also, a lot of museums, restaurants, maybe even hotels if I can find I've got some money to blow. We will see. In any event, this is where I attend my first Sunday Mass in decades. When I come in, I take the furthest-back pew in order to be ignored -- though with the beard, I'm sort of unavoidable (I really have to shave it down). Ten minutes to mass, it's still pretty empty, an emptiness heightened by the Spartan elegance of the interior: only a series of modern paintings illustrating the Stations of the Cross interrupts the whiteness of the ground floor.

Eventually a crowd of no more than fifty wanders in. This is nothing compared to most suburban churches I know, never mind city behemoths like St. Patrick's. But you gotta figure that even with its growing residential profile, the Battery Park area isn't populated enough to support anything much larger. Its location also probably explains why the crowd skews so young. With Battery Park's relative lack of stores and amenities within walking distance, this is no country for old men (and women). The older churchgoers here seem to be tourists like myself (let's face it, I am a tourist here), though I could be wrong. Crowd strikes me as largely bachelors and bachelorettes, new mothers and fathers. The latter two try their hardest to calm their children down, and, if time permits, teach them something about the religious life, guiding their kids' hands through the Sign of the Cross. I find this touching partly because I've never been able to learn the Sign of the Cross, much to my embarrassment. Even if I'm not a practicing Catholic and can only mumble my way through most of the things other churchgoers can say out loudly and clearly, I should be able to do cross myself, right?

I end up being impressed by how the mass is conducted. I can only wonder the clergy can do this again and again, week after week, without boring others, without boring themselves.

I leave without a picture. I figure taking a picture in such an untouristed place would be impious and disruptive. (I'll likely not feel such restraint in the larger churches.) I also leave without greeting the priests, because...I'm shy.

16. International Mercantile Marine Company Building

AKA: United States Lines Building; Washington Building
Location: 1 Broadway
Built: 1883-1884; reclad 1919-1921
Architects: Edward H. Kendall (1883-1884); Walter B. Chambers (1919-1921)
National Register Number: 91000108
Listed: March 2, 1991
Visited: August 18, 2007



The big plaque on the corner of this building says:

Adjoining this site was the first Dutch fort on Manhattan Island, known as Fort New Amsterdam.

OK, let's stop here for a second. Fort Amsterdam was the giant four-pointed star on the earliest maps of New York. It was there at the founding of New Amsterdam, a settlement of a couple hundred, and it changed hands several times in the dizzying back-and-forth between the Dutch and the English and the Americans (not to mention Jacob Leisler) before demolition in 1790. More about the this site when I do the entry for the U.S. Customs House. Onward...

The first house was erected here before 1664.

Sort of a vague fact, this. The Castello Plan shows the site with a house and farm four years earlier, in 1660. 1664 might've been used because that was the year the British seized New Amsterdam from the Dutch and renamed it New York, and originally the date enshrined on the city flag and seal.

In 1771 Captain Archibald Kennedy built here his residence which was used in 1776 by General Washington as his headquarters...

Well, this place and like a thousand others during the Revolutionary War: Washington moved around a lot.

and later by General Howe during the British occupation. It was later used as a hotel.

OK, adaptive re-use, can't front on that.

It was replaced by the Washington Building...
Now this blows my mind. Did anybody in 1881 complain about this? Didn't it irk people that somebody razed a site with a clear historical connection to The Father of Our Country and replaced it with an an office building? And that in some kind of sick joke, the new building was named after Washington? Well, OK, the idea of historic preservation is still a bit avant-garde at this point. And I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by the freakish naming -- I come from the suburbs, and there's a long-running joke that suburban housing developments are always named after the things they destroy: Shady Grove, Cedar Creek, Whispering Pines, Tasty Meadows, and so on.

Jokes aside, the replacement was actually rather fine. A picture in King's Handbook of New York City 1892 shows a brick feast of mansards, cupolas, and corner bay windows gaping southward. The views must've been a key selling point; King's book also includes thrilling panoramas taken from the building of Battery Park and the Harbor, as well as a somewhat less edifying view of industrial buildings and tenements facing north.

which was transformed in 1920-1921 into this building for occupancy by its owners the International Mercantile Marine Company and known as NO.1 BROADWAY.

"Transformed." Sounds absolutely magical, doesn't it? It was reclad in limestone and largely de-ornamented, that's all, and as such, it's largely not much to look at, though they did think to include seals of the cities the IMMC serviced at the time. I like that. (The U.S. Customhouse across the street has something like that, too, though it features scultpural personifications of great port cities and the continents.)

Oh, and the IMMC owned the Titanic.

15. Battery Park Control House

AKA: Bowling Green IRT Control House
Location: State Street and Battery Place
Built: 1904-1905
Architect: Heins & LaFarge
National Register Number: 80002669
Listed: May 6, 1980
Visited: August 19, 2007



Today in the annals of New York City lostness: the subway entrance. For the IRT, New York City's first subway line, the architects Heins & LaFarge designed handsome iron and glass kiosks and masonry control houses. None of the original kiosks remain. Not one. (The one at Astor Place? A replica from 1985.) Somewhat more substantial structures, three control houses still exist, two still functional. This is one of them. (The other is at West 72nd Street).

Much like our friends at 13 and 15 South William Street, its rounded gables were inspired by the local buildings of 250 years earlier. After all, what better way to dress up the most technologically-advanced municipal facilities of 1908 than with the architectural styles of the Flemish Renaissance?

Thing is tiny, uncomfortably so. Sure, it looks quaint on the outside, but with only two turnstiles, it takes any sizable crowd of people far too long to exit from it. And given that it's the subway exit closest to the Statue of Liberty ferries, there's always a crowd. Sometimes the crazy Statue of Liberty people park in front and the tourists stop and gawk, further blocking the flow of people. Luckily there's a larger entrance between Bowling Green Park and the U.S. Customhouse; otherwise, I'd worry more about people getting crushed should fires (or worse) break out on the platforms below.

14. Bowling Green Fence and Park

Location: Broadway and Beaver Streets
Built: 1733 (Park) and 1771 (Fence)
Architect: Unknown
National Register Number: 80002673
Listed: March 9, 1980
Visited: August 19, 2007



It's New York City's oldest park but the fence gets top billing. It's an actual honest-to-goodness relic from colonial New York City, erected a few years before the Revolutionary War to protect a statue of King George III against vandalism. Once news of the Declaration of Independence hit the city, New Yorkers ripped that fucker right down, hacked off the fence's crown-shaped tips, and in a fine bit of Patriot irony, fashioned the lead into ammunition for use against British soldiers. (Parts of the statue were somehow spirited away by local Tories, eventually making their way to the Museum of the City of New York and the New-York Historical Society.)

In another fine, fine irony: according to legend, the park is the site of Peter Minuit's purchase of Manhattan for $24; today, it faces the New York City branch of the National Museum of the American Indian. Oh and yeah people used to bowl here, just like the ghosts of Irving's "Rip Van Winkle."

Save for a homeless man sleeping on a bunch, the park is empty on the Sunday I visit. It's well-kept, full of geraniums in bloom and liatris (I think) leaning over the fence, and has a kind of wildness that it lacked only a few years ago, but still, such a tiny spot of green especially compared to the nearby Battery Park. And yet there's enough of a habitat to warrant a Parks Department sign on the fence noting the presence of peregrine falcons in the area. The tourists avoid it, preferring instead to take pictures of Arturo Di Modica's Charging Bull: they want to see what they've already seen on the tee-vee.

13. City Pier A

AKA: Pier A, Liberty Gateway
Location: South end of Battery Place at Hudson River
Built: 1884-1886
Architect: George Sears Greene, Jr.
National Register Number: 75001203
Listed: June 27, 1975
Visited: August 19, 2007



While I don't intend to pay for the New York Times article this realdeal.net story is based on, it seems as if something is FINALLY going to happen to this pier, which has been under scaffolding as long as I can remember. And as long as I can remember, its immediate surroundings have been growing in beauty and utility. Robert F. Wagner Jr. park, where I took most of the pier photos, was always pleasant to begin with, but today, the rows of trees that once seemed like a token effort towards greenery when I first knew them now form a canopy -- it's dark underneath! -- and the gardens were filled with buzzy insects, a sure sign of an intelligently designed habitat. (Take care of the insects and the rest will follow, I say.) Compared to all this, the unrefinished pier is an oasis of visual confusion.



The NYC Economic Development Corporation's plans for the pier using it for ferry service to and from the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island; after spending nearly a whole hour in the heat on a line for these ferries a few weeks ago, all I can say is godspeed.

10. Castle Clinton National Monument

Location: South Ferry
Built: 1808-1811
Architects: Lt. Col. Jonathan Williams and John McComb, Jr.
National Register Number: 66000537
Listed: October 15, 1966
Visited: August 4, 2007



Castle Clinton is about as wide (200 feet) as its sister, Castle Williams, but for some reason not quite as tall and as imposing. Time has tamed it, anyway. If it ever looked fearsome, it looks largely harmless now; maybe not ready to crumble (though the open roof, a modern addition, sags a bit) but cracks show it to be mortal. Little bits of stucco still left on the pimple-cratered sandstone attesting to better uses, better times.



Better times? OK, OK, I know this stuff by heart now. Bear with me here. Like Castle Williams, Castle Clinton (originally called "West Battery") was built between 1808 and 1811 to defend New York against the hostile British, even though neither fort ever saw war. Then when the military was done with it, it became a fancy restaurant and entertainment center called "The Castle Garden." Then it became an opera house. Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, sang there. (Oh, you don't know about Jenny Lind? Whatever.) Morse demonstrated the telegraph there, too. They added a roof. It looked fucking amazing. Then it became the "Emigrant Landing Depot," processing about eight million immigrants between 1855 to 1890, all in space about less volume than a Staples. Then the infinitely more commodious Ellis Island took over its immigration duties. Then it became an aquarium. (McKim, Mead, and White designed it.) It looked like this:



Then after it closed, Robert Moses demolished all the pretty additions and nearly the whole thing, too, because he wanted to build a bridge on top of it, and also because he was a gigantic crybaby douchebag who always had to have his way. Then it was declared a National Monument by Congress. Then, for almost 35 years, nothing. Then in 1975, hooray, it opened back up, right in time for the Bicenntenial, hooray! Hooray!



Today it's uh um well IT EXISTS, which is nice. People come here to buy tickets for the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. It's also a very nice venue for free concerts during the summertime: I saw the Magnetic Fields there in August 2000 before a tremendous thunderstorm ended all the fun.



I suppose this is not nothing. I suppose this is nice. After all, hundreds of thousands of people pass through its walls every year. But undeniably it's playing a second banana role to it younger, sexier, leggier National Monument cousins. I was the only tourist on one of the NPS' guided tours two Sundays ago. No surprise there -- who wants to tour of what amounts to a really historical ticket booth? The aquarium was a more noble use. A mini-Ellis Island would be keen. (Eight Daddinos and four D'Addinos passed through this place!) Hell, I'd settle for a skatepark at this point.

7. Joralemon Street Tunnel

Location: From Bowling Green to beneath the East River
to Joralemon St. and Willow Place
Built: 1903-1907
Architect: William Barclay Parsons
National Register Number: 06000015
Listed: February 9, 2006
Visited: August 1, 2007



The list of Manhattan sites on the National Register of Historic Places includes a small scattering of hardcore irregulars that aren't buildings or concatenations thereof: twelve boats (including two aircraft carriers), five bridges, twenty-five subway stations, and two tunnels -- the Holland Tunnel, and the one under the microscope today, the Joralemon Street Tunnel. 1.5 miles of wormhole under the East River, its claim to greatness is that in 1908, it helped connect New York City's first underground subway line into Brooklyn. For all that, I'm not sure I've ever been through it before. The Joralemon carries the 4 and 5 trains; if I go to Brooklyn, I typically use either the 2 and 3 trains or the M and R trains, and they go through the Clark Street and Montague Street tunnels. More typically, though, I don't go to Brooklyn at all.

Down by the nearest train station, I let a few trains pass until there's one empty enough, not that people blocking my view is going to be my main problem. For all of the subway trains on this line, a small portion of the front car is dedicated entirely to the train conductor. Thus any good head-on view of the tunnel has to be seen through two windows, at least one of which features a kind of distorting glass that prevents a person from seeing much of anything around its perimeter. Plus my digital camera -- eight years old and two measly megapixels -- is absolute shit when it comes to darkness, even when supplemented by a flash. So I get on the train knowing and accepting that any photograph I take of the tunnel isn't going to be remotely illustrative, just a token effort at best.

You know, I'm OK with this. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been rather hard-assed lately about personal photography on the subways, having made overtures towards banning it entirely not once but twice in the last few years, and according to Wikipedia, they still don't allow flash photography. (Uh, oops.) God forbid anybody detains me I can always show them my blurry and indistinct pictures of not much. Still, I can tell the other people on the train are a little skittish seeing me take pictures: they too are thinking about bombs in tunnels. One guy sitting down is muttering something under his breath. It probably doesn't help that I have a mid-sized beard and thus look OMG possibly potentially "Al Qaeda" or maybe just "crazy-ass" to those not hip to the hipster trends in facial fashion.

OK, so what does the Joralemon look like? Well, it looks like any other subway tunnel ribbed with tracks and supports that prevent the East River from crashing down onto us. If it has any grace that marks it as being something other than a wondrous feat of engineering (the way that, for example, the Gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge make it stylish, maybe even witty), this is either lost on me or lost in the dark. It is not completely dark, mind, but outside of the odd shape of the tunnel walls (almost keyhole-shaped -- I must be remembering this wrong), what I can see best are the chromatic blue and green lights.