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.)

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.

56. Corbin Building

Location: 11 John Street/192 Broadway
Built: 1888-1889
Architect: Francis H. Kimball
National Register Number: 05001287
Listed: December 18, 2003
Visited: February 15 and 19, 2008



I like it now that this blog project forced me to think about it some, but I am reasonably certain that I didn't pay one second of attention to the Corbin Building when I worked downtown. I noticed its next-door neighborhood, 194-196 Broadway: it was a TGIFriday's, and it was sky-blue. By contrast, the Corbin was taller, but it was camouflaged by insensitive storefronts and decades of pollution that turned its brick a brackish brown. Black and white photography disguises the decay, and makes its dourness seem intentional--today it looks like a rugged parade of arches in a handsome funk.



The Corbin stands alone now, as its neighbors were demolished by the Metropolitan Transit Authority to make way for the Fulton Street Transit Center. The Center's a definite Good Thing, as it'll link up a dozen subway lines currently connected via a maze of grimy pathways--but the original plan didn't include the Corbin. After some tussling, preservationists were able to win a promise from the MTA that they wouldn't knock it down; in fact, the MTA would incorporate the Corbin into the Center, with the building providing a grand entrance from John Street. Great idea, but the renderings of the design left a lot to be desired. On one side, you've got a egg-shaped "oculus" rising from a gleaming box that dominates almost an entire city block--and uncomfortably squeezed over to the side, you have this thin, dark slab of a building (20 by 161 feet and eight stories!) of a different age, aesthetic, size, color, and scale. You couldn't even call the two structures "contrasting" or "in juxtaposition," rather than completely indifferent towards one another.

Since the economy is melting like a snowman in a global warming world, the Center has been scaled back to the point where there'll likely be no above-ground structure at all. I cannot find anything on the web about what the Corbin's fate is now--most of the updates about the Center seem to blindly re-hash of old news about the building. It'd be sad to have this lonely old slab come all this way into the 21st Century only to be denied modern-day love!

55. Park Row Building

A.K.A.: Ivins Syndicate Building; The Syndicate Building; 15 Park Row at City Hall Park
Location: 15 Park Row
Built: 1899
Architect: R.H. Henderson
National Register Number: 05001287
Listed: November 16, 2005
Visited: March 2, 2008
Additional Documentation: 15 Park Row at City Hall Park website; Tom Fletcher's NYC Architecture webpage; Christopher Grey's NYT article



It was the tallest, once. Tallest in the world, from 1899 to 1908.

Today, it doesn't even have the honor of being tall. In New York City alone, there are 367 buildings that are bigger. Nor does it have much aesthetic virtue to compensate. The Woolworth, the Chrysler, and the Empire State buildings were all world-champeens in their hey-days, but remain beloved because they are beautiful. The Park Row Building is not beautiful. Not ugly, but not beautiful.

It has a perfectly adequate Beaux-Arts façade, if a little dull. Tall buildings from the Potter Building to the Empire State Building the World Trade Center used long upwards lines on the building surface to emphasize verticality. The Park Row Building uses a lot of horizontal lines in its rustication, ornamental balconies and ledges, while many of the vertical lines on the buildings are interrupted, as if neutralize the offense of its height. The one way it unapologetically expresses verticality is in its profile. There's no steppy setbacks or ziggy-zagginess, which is what architects added to later high-rises to allow air and light to the street; no, it goes straight up, ZWOOP! and stays up until the roof, where there are two domes to give it a little bit of distinction. Without the domes, it'd look like a box--but only if you were looking at it from City Hall Park or the little islands of land near where Broadway and Park Row meet; that is, from north and west sides. Walk around and you'll see it's not quite that simple.




The Ann Street side shows the building has a interior courtyard with a series of braces to stabilize the building's two parts. Walk a little further down...




...and there's another thin strip of building reaching out to provide an entrance to Ann Street, and another courtyard. And another part of the building open to another street, this time Theatre Alley. But unlike the Park Row and Ann Street faces, the Theatre Alley side doesn't even bother giving it much of a look--no rustication, no balconies, just columns of windows. Several of the building's sides don't even have that, just thirty bleak stories of brick wall almost completely uninterrupted by window.

The building perimeter is thus shaped like an eccentric W (there's a floor plan on Tom Fletcher's site). There were rational reasons for this: for one, the building stands on what were originally seven different plots of land; the courtyards are added to allow light to penetrate the building interior as much as possible (remember, this was built in 1899, when electric light was still fairly novel). Further, I'm guessing those walls of brick might've left blank intentionally in anticipation of other tall buildings being built on neighboring sites.

Technological innovation of many sorts, along with the public's fear of a future city populated by volume-filling monsters, would lead future high-rises to be constructed a little more thoughtfully, but it's the Park Row Building's awkwardness that makes me like it so much: it's skyscraper form in its gawky pre-adolescent phase; it's fascinatingly unique because future New York City architects were sensible enough not to repeat its flaws.



Another reason the building is so interesting to me is that out of all the landmarks I've covered or will cover, it's the one I know most intimately. The block on Park Row, between Beekman and Ann Streets, are dominated by J&R, one of New York City's retail colossi. Only a block away from the World Trade Center, J&R was always a good way to spend a lunch hour. Mainly I'd go and get CDs from their music store a few blocks down, but the Park Row Building location had the computers and software. I spent quite a few longueurs spent debating whether I should buy a certain piece of graphics or websmithing software (all outdated crap now) that, if applied with confidence and patience, would enhance my creativity. Or a game that would end up wasting it.

It was on just such a trip that I first paid attention to the Park Row Building. I had been going to J&R for years already without any inkling of its history or its claim to fame, but one day I looked up and saw the braces. It didn't occur to me they might have structural value; I wondered if they were bridges. It took a while to realize they weren't. Even with their purpose unclear, I thought they were a fine thing to have, a little something for the people in the upper stories to contemplate. Other features fell into focus. There was the light falling on the expanses of brick, the shadows in the courtyard. The green domes, squat like knobs. Windows. Before they left my sight, I toyed with the irrational feeling that, somehow, this building magically appeared only a week or so ago. Or maybe I was on the wrong block. After all, if such a grand (not beautiful--grand) building was really there all this time, surely I would've noticed it.

54e. 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



The Bennett Building
(Arthur D. Gilman, 1872-73; additions, James M. Farnsworth, 1890-92)

We'll discuss cast-iron architecture at length once we snake our way up Manhattan a bit more, but for now it should suffice to say that, yes, it's a cast-iron building; that is, the faces of the building were made of an iron alloy heated until molten, poured into molds shaped into arches and cornices, and cooled.

Originally the Bennett was a six-story building done in the Second Empire style, complete with mansard roof. By the early 1890s, with the Bennett needing upgrades to its mechanical systems, and the Potter and the New York Times buildings only just erected down the street, a new owner decided to modernize the building by tearing off the roof (sucka) and adding several floors that closely replicated the ones below. It pushed the building away from the familiars of Second Empire architecture into...something else. Something machine-like, an example of repetition barely relieved by variation--a look conceptually appropriate for a structure partly the fruit of mass production; something so richly attired it seems as if the windows on the top floors are occluded by all the pilasters and arches. As a statement, it feels a bit extreme, and thrillingly so.

Back when I worked at the World Trade Center, strolling through the nabe on my lunch hour (and resigning myself to Teriyaki Boy), the Bennett was the most obvious indication that the neighborhood had any kind of history beyond the fly-by-night discount stores of dubious provenance. But it looked like shit, in poor condition, painted in smarmy Victorian pastels. Today, it's in an neutral cream that lets the texture of the building speak for itself: light casts deep shadows into its crevasses, while highlights glisten in the sun.

54d. 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



Temple Court
(Silliman & Farnsworth, 1890-1892/Benjamin Silliman, Jr. 1889-1890)

A serious proto-skyscraper, a deep berry-red to the Potter Building's firey near-orange, severe and square to its neighbors' terra-cotta cliffscape, and capped with pyramidal towers that--appropriately enough--look like steeples, giving the building something of an ecclesiastical flavor. It also has a nine-story atrium, and the daylight's even visible from the front doors on Beekman. It's been subject to a condo conversion seemingly forever.

"It was on this site," Moses King tells us, "in a theatre built in 1751, that Hamlet was first produced in America." Before Newspaper Row, the area was the center of New York's theater life, a past with even fewer physical traces. Theatre Alley is one exception, and Kevin Walsh can tell you about it more comprehensively than I can.



Morse Building
(Silliman & Farnsworth, 1880)

Ten years before Temple Court, another brick skyscraper by the same architects, mostly notable for its rainbow arcs of red and black piano keyboards over the windows. It loses some of its impact thanks to some weird brick replacements--the new ones seem awfully pink. Perhaps in anticipation of future skyscraper development, it has one side of sheer nothing save for a collection of windows that's ever-so-slightly eclectic in position and shape. For a long while, this blank side overlooked a parking lot, but if certain parties can get their act together, there'll be a huge-ass Gehry skyscraper to steal everyone's daylight before long.

54c. 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



That's Ben Franklin, newspaper dude, wondering what the hell happened to Newspaper Row. (FWIW, the main building behind him is the American Tract Society Building; the New York Times Building is the one peeking in the corner.)

According to Mitchell Stephens, New York City once had twenty dailies. Twenty, a number that just shames our post-literate age. Stephens doesn't pinpoint the year when this peak occurred, so his figure may cover newspapers in all five boroughs, or just New York City as it was prior to incorporation, Brooklyn-, Queens-, and Staten Island-free. Whenever it was, it was likely during the very late 19th and very early 20th centuries, back when most of the city's dailies, along with countless weeklies and monthlies, were located in Newspaper Row, a kind of media analog to the Insurance and Financial Districts. New York Then and Now says it was defined by "a three-block area on the east side of adjoining Park Row from Beekman Street to the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, giving it the name Newspaper Row," but based on the exhaustive account Moses King gives in his 1892 Handbook of New York City of most of the important papers of his day, it could be said to have stretched even further down to the Mail and Express and Evening Post Buildings on corner of Broadway and Fulton, and up to the Staats-Zeitung Building on Tryon Row.



The New York Times Building (George B. Post, 1888-1889; expansion by Robert Maynicke, 1903-1905) was in the middle of it all, historically, physically, psychically. This wasn't the first NYT office: the first one was on 113 Nassau Street; the second on the corner of Nassau and Beekman; the third, a five-story building at the corner of Park and Spruce. The fourth is the one in the above photos, and is actually also the third, sorta. When the need arose for new offices--the paper needed more space, but also wanted to teach those bastards at the 260-foot-tall Tribune building (Richard Morris Hunt, 1875) a hurtin' lesson--they got 'em in a not-obvious way. As the NYT, 110 years later, explained, "[t]o allow the presses to remain in place, the new building was constructed around the core of the old building, which was demolished in phases as its replacement was rising." This may have made some smidge of financial sense, since (I guess) the printing presses couldn't stop or be moved, but it also sounds like an awfully expensive folly. And it was, exacerbating financial problems caused by reduced readership. A couple of years later, it was purchased by Adolph S. Ochs.



And then it moved again. When the Times announced its plans in 1904, the Hartford Courant remarked that "there is no doubt that the start made by these two enterprising newspapers will lead to so many other similar moves that Newspaper Row will before long be a name and no longer a fact," and the Brooklyn Times encouraged "everybody [to] move up town and leave lower Manhattan for Brooklyn Bridge approaches" so that "the great problem of transportation facilities will be solved." What they were saying without actually saying was that a whole buncha buildings would be demolished and oh goody goody for that. It took a while, but depressingly, this is exactly what happened. Those twenty dailies thinned to eight by 1940--with similar carnage effected all over the country--partly because the likes of Frank A. Munsey merged many of them into oblivion, and partly because radio (and later, television) rendered newspapers BOR-ING. (In response, newspapers tried to differentiate themselves from other media with a brief vogue for "quality" and "responsibility" that was kind of nice while it lasted.) The above-mentioned Tryon Row doesn't exist anymore, demolished along with the Staats-Zeitung to make way in 1909 for the Municipal Building and its environs. (It should be mentioned that the New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung was a daily that at one point had the third-largest readership in the city; today it exists, albeit phantasmically, on the web. A couple of World Wars can do that to a German-language paper.) In 1955, the New York World Building--once the tallest building in New York City--and the Tribune were demolished to make way for unromantic Brooklyn Bridge on-ramps, forever emasculating the physical context in which the likes of Thomas Nast and Horace Greeley, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer did their culture-creating business.

(By the way, the Times' very first offices were demolished surprisingly recently, only last summer, in fact. Sucks to be an old building sometimes.)

54b. 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



Man builds building. Building is destroyed; people die. People accuse man of criminal negligence. They say he could've done more. Man then vows to build the biggest, strongest, safest building the world has ever seen. A cliché, or a Jungian archetype of real estate development?

Orlando B. Potter was a politician, a property man, a six-million-dollar-man at his death (meaning he'd be worth $140,000,000 today). The New York World Building (not the later 1890 one), at five stories, a relatively tall building for its day, was his baby. In late January 1882, some tenants, including Alfred Ely Beach (the Scientific American editor and inventor of the proto-subway Beach Pneumatic Transit system) complained to Potter of burning-wood smells and unnaturally hot walls, but Potter refused to contact the fire department. A fire gutted the place soon after, one of the worst New York fires of the time. At least six died, included two who jumped to escape flames.



Only a few weeks later, Potter proposed a new structure for the site. The result is known as, aptly enough, the Potter Building (N.G. Starkweather, 1883-86)--or, for the people who can remember what came before, the New Potter Building. At eleven stories, it pushed the limits of what could be done with the new-fangled iron construction then sweeping the architectural world, and made extensive use of terra-cotta, both as fireproofing and decoration. The exterior is so overloaded with brown terra-cotta ornamentation complementing the vivid, orange-red brick that it reads more like a curiously symmetrical rock cliff than anything belonging a building. It possesses so much ornamentation, in fact, that out of all the people who have ever laid eyes on the building, maybe only a vanishingly small minority have noticed what's on the capital of the huge column on the corner of Beekman and Park Row. The person who wrote the NYCLPC designation report for the Potter even mistakenly refers to it as an eagle. It's not: it's actually a Phoenix rising from the flames.

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.)

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.

41d. 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



18 and 20 Beaver Street are the kinds of buildings historic districts are made for: too minor to landmark on their own--neither of them appear in the AIA Guide to New York City--but too redolent of a lost architectural context to give up. 20 Beaver Street looks like a Federal-style (right? Federal?) warehouse. Some net-sleuthing connects the site (and probably the building itself) to the Holmes & Haines cabinetmaking company starting at some indeterminate point early in the 1800s. By 1901, it is home to George A. Kessler & Co.; Kessler was a wine merchant written about in numerous New York Times articles, including this one about his escape from the Lusitania disaster and another on a mad expensive $300-a-plate "polar party." Later it became home to Samuel Lakow's custom office furniture business. Now it's a pizzeria.



Apart from its connection to a once-renowned furniture enterprise, the history of 18 Beaver is less obvious, but OMG would you just LOOK at this little neo-Renaissance hors d'oeuvre! OK, it looks decrepit up-close--the brick is quite possibly stucco and if I didn't know any better I'd say the moldings are painted cast-iron--but it might be a nice fixer-upper for somebody with money and a passion for this kind of thing.

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.

36. Wallace Building

Location: 56-58 Pine Street
Built: 1893-4
Architect: Oswald Wirz
National Register Number: 03000848
Listed: August 28, 2003
Visited: September 28 and November 10, 2007



Oswald Wirz designed a few New York City buildings in the Gilded Age; of those that survive, a few are in landmarked districts, another achieved an accidental and incidental fame by being across the street from the World Trade Center, and yet another is this one, which I'll get to in a bit. The most substantial information I have on the life of Wirz comes from NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission's designation report for this building. It is only a paragraph long. The details of his death are not alluded to, perhaps out of concision and perhaps out of delicacy. Google, being ruled less by social mores than algorithms, knows no such propriety, and so a search for "Oswald Wirz" spits out a tawdry New York Times death notice as the second or third result:

ARCHITECT COMMITS SUICIDE. Attributed to Despondency Due to Lack of Employment. Oswald Wirz, an architect, forty-nine years old, committed suicide yesterday in his flat, on the second floor of 544 West One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street. He inhaled gas from a rubber tube, attached to the pipe which supplied the kitchen range. Wirz lived with his wife, Josephine, and four children, the eldest of whom were May, twelve, and Laura, fifteen years of age. He came to America from Switzerland twenty years ago. Until five years ago he was connected with the firm of Wallace Brothers, but since leaving their employ had done no work. Mrs. Wirz and the two girls were out for a walk and returned home late in the afternoon. On opening the door they were driven out by the gas which filled the flat. Mrs. Wirz screamed, and neighbors went to her aid. Wirz was lying on the kitchen floor. Dr. Addoms of the J. Hood Wright Hospital said he had been dead for some time. The suicide is attributed to despondency.

The New York Times of 1900 judged Wirz's death as worthy of only three paragraphs, where the outrage of the day, the Jennie Bosschieter Case, gets over twenty on the same page. Not that there is any surprise in this. Bosschieter was drugged, raped, and murdered; she was an innocent despoiled, and stories like that write themselves. Wirz committed suicide, and why anybody kills themselves is an awful mystery few can bear dwelling on for long. So within the question mark of Wirz's life is another question mark, a blankness within a blankness. The only thing I know about Wirz with any depth is this building. But it's grand enough that if you, dear reader, could point me towards Wirz' grave, I'll gladly pour a 40 out for him.



Based on the evidence of the Wallace Building, I think he would've appreciated that. I'm not sure where the hip-hop practice of pouring out liquor in remembrance of the dead comes from, but even if it's not Africa-via-Cuba-via-New Orleans as I'm guessing, it has to be incredibly old, a pagan ritual hiding in plain sight within modern America. And likewise, in the old-growth forests of the Wall Street region, so thick with buildings the sun can barely shine through, Wirz made the Wallace Building a home for nature deities long abandoned. On the facade, we can see a terra cotta representation of the Green Man.



He is a decorative element used in British architecture since the 11th century depicting a man made of foliage, or smothered in foliage, or sprouting foliage in his mouth. He is an echo of European Gods annihilated or subsumed into Christianity. He personifies nature; he also effaces the distinctions between the human and the natural worlds. He (and a few compatriot dragons) seem to give birth to a crazy tangle of terra cotta decoration that cover parts of the building like kudzu. The details lack the fineness of the terra cotta of Sullivan's Bayard-Condict; they do not achieve and do not pretend exact symmetry, but do achieve something of the play between order and randomness that makes our experience of nature so satisfying.