101. Woolworth Building

A.K.A.: "The Cathedral of Commerce"
Location: 233 Broadway
Built: 1910–1913
Architect: Cass Gilbert
National Register Number: 66000554
Listed: November 13, 1966
Official Documentation: NRHP Nomination Form



"Gothic," Lindy Grant tells us, "is an architecture of skeleton, rib and bone."

In a Gothic cathedral, the means of structural support—vault, arch, and buttress—are visible for everyone to see; whatever can be seen plays a role in the delicate physics of force and counterforce that keeps the cathedral intact. In Gothic, the skeletal is laid bare, unprotected by flesh, just as every man's skeleton will be laid bare by God. Even the most beautiful examples of Gothic will always have that tang of the grotesque, serving up reminders of man's corruptibility and finitude alongside reminders of man's transcendence.



E.V. Lucas said "The Woolworth Building does not scrape the sky; it greets it, salutes it with a beau geste."

In crockets and spires, arches and finials, the Woolworth famously utilizes the language of Gothic in its terra-cotta ornamentation. But Gothic here has nothing to do with structure. While some of what you see—the soaring piers and minimized horizontal lines—suggests what's inside, none of it keeps the skyscraper standing up. Its finery hides a skeleton; it is transcendentally superficial, old-world values draped on new-world invention. There is nothing morbid about the Woolworth. In the right light, its terra-cotta surface is not the white of bones, but clouds—against the earth, the firmanent.

99. US Courthouse

A.K.A.: Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse; Thurgood Marshall Federal Courthouse
Location: 40 Centre Street/40 Foley Square
Built: 1932-1936; currently under restoration
Architects: Cass Gilbert and Cass Gilbert, Jr.
National Register Number: 87001596
Listed: September 2, 1987
Visited: December 30, 2008
Official Documentation: NYCLPC Report; NRHP Nomination Form



As an urban space, the Civic Center does not work, and probably never will. Knock down the gallumphing modernist anonymoids, and you'd be left with a grand buildings in odd spatial and height relationships with each other. Tear them down--and this was seriously considered many times in the last hundred-plus years--and you're still left to contend with useless plazas and bridge-fed traffic arteries that make life difficult for the pedestrian. Remove them, and...well, now you're beyond the realm of real-world budgets and political will, so forget it. (Manhattan's most successful urban space outside of Central Park is inordinately devoted to mass media companies--what does that tell you?)



Like even the best buildings in the immediate vicinity, this courthouse provides grandeur in a frankly awkward way. Paired with the Municipal Building forms a solid, almost wall-like presence on the west side of Centre Street that isn't matched on the east: grand, but lopsided. And by itself, when consumed in one visual gulp, it feels like a unimaginative expression of expediency. Need to house a hunk of courtroom space and give your building a certain ineffable sense of gravitas? Well, tower + temple = problem solved! Yeah, at least it tries for ceremony--more you can say about certain other dreary places I've been stuck in thanks to jury duty--but all that austere neoclassical jazz below, I can't really warm up to. Its gilded pyramid makes up for a lot, though. That's perfectly sited to catch the rays of the sun and provide a little golden twinkle for the people on the ground.



This is Cass Gilbert's last work, by the way--he passed away in the middle of its construction, leaving his son, Cass Gilbert Jr. to see it through its completion. I'll be saying a lot more about him when I cover the Woolworth Building...which should be in a week or three! Happy New Year! I'm off to impromptu and drunken late night festivities at the 59th Street Apple Store! Woo!

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.

57. New York County Lawyers Association Building

Location: 14 Vesey Street
Built: 1929-1930
Architect: Cass Gilbert
National Register Number: 82001201
Listed: October 29, 1982
Visited: March 27, 2008



Cass Gilbert's finest buildings in Manhattan--the US Customhouse, the West Street Building, and the Woolworth--give the eye so much to feed on that the flatness of this neo-Georgian is a disappointment. Even the AIA Guide to New York City is unusually mean, calling it "the wimp of the neighborhood" and a product of Gilbert's "late, fainthearted years." Not a bad little building, but there might be more to it if it was faced with brick instead of limestone, as most Georgian buildings in America were back in the day. It looks as if its interior references Georgian architecture--and the founding-father democratic ideals associated with it--much more profoundly, with a second-floor auditorium modeled after Independence Hall. But it's off-limits to me, as I'm not a lawyer.

27. U.S. Customhouse

AKA: Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House; National Museum of the American Indian
Location: 1 Bowling Green
Built: 1913
Architect: Cass Gilbert; Daniel Chester French
National Register Number: 72000889
Listed: January 31, 1972
Visited: August 5 and 26, September 1 and 29, and October 6, 2007



I am mad for this building.

The primary way the United States generated revenue before the income tax was through custom duties, and as New York City was once the largest port in the country, a huge hunk of this money funneled through it. And just a glimpse of it will amply demonstrate that this building was designed to overwhelm all those within eyeshot with the fact of its importance.



It has a city block all to itself, and has been blessed by neighbors that, whatever their shortcomings, don't crowd or dwarf their Beaux-Arts elder. Above, on the entablature, statuary representing twelve great seafaring nations of the West, from Greece and Rome to France and England, loom over the building and its operations like guardian angels.



Yet ruling over them all sit the symbols of the United States: its shield on a large cartouche, an eagle, the flag. And although such eclecticism is completely characteristic of Beaux-Arts architecture of the time, it is worth noting that the building cannibalizes many details from the history of the architecture of power: thick Corinthian columns from the Classical world, rusticated stonework of an Italian palazzo, Mansard roofs redolent of the Second French Empire. Through this sea of references, the building claims its role in the development of American Empire, and America's role as inheritor of all that came before it. Including Europe's babysteps into the New World -- as noted before, the building sits in front of the site where, as legend had it, Peter Minuit "bought" Manhattan for $24 bucks.



Which makes the building perfect place for the New York branch of the Smithsonian's Museum of the American Indian. Housed here are beautiful artifacts (none of which I can show you -- art is lit dimly, and flash is disallowed, meaning photos of suck), marred a little by your typical explanatory blather: "Native Americans have demonstrated a distinguished ability to integrates new materials and design motifs into their creations, yet make them uniquely and culturally identifiable." Yeah, and like every other culture, EVER. The museum itself, encrusted with the exhaustingly beautiful works of human hands, its Gustavinao skylight and Tiffany'd suites, serves as the greater caption: in here, craft pays perfectly equitable service to craft, art to art.