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.

100. Brooklyn Bridge

A.K.A.: East River Bridge
Built: 1867-1883
Architect: John A. Roebling
National Register Number: 66000523
Listed: October 15, 1966
Visited: February 1, June 26, and November 21, 2008
Official Documentation: NYCLPC Report; NRHP Nomination Form



This is the famous Brooklyn Bridge! One hundred and thirty-three feet high, fifteen hundred feet long! Contains hundreds of miles of cable! From it, Steve Brodie made his sensational leap into the East River!

You know, he actually did jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. Most sobersided historians believe one of his cronies threw a dummy from the bridge, and once it hit the water, Brodie came out swimming from under a pier, very much alive and triumphant. To believe this is to accept a level of stupidity in the New Yorkers of 1886 that defies common sense: even at a distance, who's going to mistake a straw-filled sack for somebody who can swim? No, Brodie made the jump all right. But--and this was Brodie's genius--there was a dummy, too. He made sure people saw it on the river, but the jump was all his and he had the seared skin and the shuffled pancreas to prove it. What he faked was the faking. He was a newsboy, a great one, so he knew stories circulate better when there's the whiff of bullshit about them. Corrupted truths are objects of imagination and opportunities to fight; facts are just schoolday lessons. Later, much later, he'd remind people that we have standard-issue incontrovertible proof that Robert Odlum jumped and died and that Larry Donovan jumped and lived but we don't remember them.

After he died and his family and friends got on with their lives, he walked all the way from San Antonio to claim his title of Ghost Protector of the Brooklyn Bridge. Not that he knew what it meant, but he figured he'd grow into the role by, well, being Steve Brodie. He assumed he'd be treated like a conquering hero, but the bridge was littered with other ghosts, workmen who fell from the towers or got crippled in the caissons. They were vague and insensate, and couldn't be charmed. He got lost.

The Bowery had a more interesting mix of souls anyway; in this new gray world, he only knew some, but they all knew him. But the life was constricting. He missed sex, food, money. His bookie instincts--what made him a motherfucker in his former life--didn't matter in a world without possessions, they withered. He figured it was a kind of mortification. Most of the other ghosts weren't especially game, anyway. Oh there were sweet girls and sporting fellas but a lot of the rest weren't all there, as mute or crazy or incomplete as the bridge men. And all of them eventually vanished from the scene, in onesies and twosies, always without fanfare or goodbyes or even much notice from others. A new ghost would appear on the street so often, usually in a state of confusion or denial, but within a few days' or years' time, they would walk away and not be seen again. Presumably to heaven or hell but he never got any proof of that.

Brodie didn't disappear, which confused him. There seemed no reason for it. And all things considered, he still had his wits about him. He settled for voyeurism, picking a store or an apartment and inhabiting it for months at a time, drinking in the minutiae of its inhabitants' lives like a wine connoisseur.

He spend many hours listening in to their conversations, hoping the subjects would turn to the Bowery or the Bridge or daredevils or whatever, and thus to him. A passing mention of him could make his month, or, if it wasn't cadenced properly, ruin it. That dumb Bowery movie from a few years back was bad enough, and worse yet some Hollywood softie saw fit to steal his name. Then there was a cartoon--and he liked Bugs Bunny--that riffed on the jump but featured this classless galoot that didn't look like him, didn't sound like him, and didn't even have the right name. (Brody, with a -y and not an -ie. He coldcocked men for less.) He knew verisimilitude was besides the point with these things, but still, what a fix: his reputation survived, but it was the kind of reputation that only folk heroes get, one where it didn't matter if he really lived or not. So this is why I'm stuck here, he thought, hardly for the first time. Sin of pride. I'm being shown up, being shown what a paltry thing my pride is.

Eventually he learned to read well because there was little else to do. Mainly it was the newspapers lying on the ground. He slept a lot, and when he did, he dreamed about the bridge. He could slink his way into theaters and watch shows. There was sports. Boxing. He loved boxing. He felt shamed by them; they were gladiators, kings, even with the gloves and the incomprehensible rules. Ali made him cry all the time.

He learned how to haunt, which at first he did for kicks, then to satisfy his mushy side by wanting to help the living, like he was a guardian angel. Nothing he could do really got through to them. It was exhausting enough trying to throw an ashtray across a room or to manifest himself as an apparition; when it came time to communicate something he couldn't make himself sensible. He was accused by other ghosts of just wanting to be noticed, something he couldn't deny because, after all, that's what his whole life was about.

He went back to the bridge after its hundredth anniversary, sensing once again it was loved. He conquered it once, he owned it, but it proved to be stronger than him. He would, on spring and summer nights, patrol his bridge, walking back and forth or climbing the cables. Cops there would sometimes speak of premonitory sensations when there was trouble, something stronger than a second sight, almost a buzzing in the ear. It was him, going for subtlety for once.

He also found some purpose in kids. By now he had lost his accent and forgot some of his old friend's names but he stubbornly held onto sentimental attitudes about children that were pure throwback. He had this inexplicable knack for being around when kids flamed into purgatory, and a more explicable knack for talking kids down from the anguish and fear they'd usually be in. He was big dumb kid, too (well a smart big dumb kid), charming them with his bravado and natty flash and his silliness. (Some of them knew him from Bugs Bunny.) He got real good at it. God condescended to meet with him on 9/11--about time--asking him to guide a Cantor Fitz broker through the netherworld. Not his thing, really, but she was so shook and, well, you don't say no to God.

People would walk through him all the time (an mildly uncomfortable sensation) but now they pass down the street and he could just swear that they had shifted their bodies, just a little bit, like in unconscious acknowledgment that they were in the presence of Steve Brodie, Unknown Ghost Protector of the Brooklyn Bridge, somebody not to be fucked with. He tendered the possibility that he might be imagining things but oh, it pleased his vanity immensely.

He wasn't sure he liked these new people who now live in his old stomping grounds. More money than smarts. Folks that would've been cut or cowed round these parts, back then. But the anger is subsiding. He is feeling ecumenical. It gives him no pain anymore. He is still king. He knows it, even if they don't. He thought once his pride kept him here, and maybe it does, but still he lords over these buildings, all of them, the apartments, the kitchen fixture stores, lighting. So little remains. But it doesn't matter, it's OK. His lit from within, incandescent. He gets his energy from unseen channels now. And there is the bridge.

The craziest thing happened a few years ago. He found himself drawn from the bridge to this one dumb bar, lousy with hustler-students and business creatives, a place he'd swore he never go back to again...it had a shot of whiskey in a creche. Whiskey that was a vivid amber and not the pallid washout colors he had known for a hundred years. He remembered something like this happening from some religious ceremony he walked in the middle of once on the Lower East Side, long time ago. (Vodun? Santeria? Krishna? Something totally off the books? His memory was bad.) A shrine with cakes and oranges, forgotten pinks and golds and greens, vivid as the sun; other ghosts politely offered him a bite, but he was too stunned to do anything but demur. Was this whiskey for him? He stared at it for the longest time, wondering if this was some Devil's temptation, or God fucking with his head. He passed his hand through the shotglass. A double of the whiskey emerged, ghosted yet still burning golden. A miracle. He took it to his lips and swallowed and the world's colors returned.

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!

97. Municipal Building

A.K.A.: Manhattan Municipal Building
Location: 1 Centre Street
Built: 1912-1914
Architect: William M. Kendall of McKim, Mead & White
National Register Number: 72000879
Listed: October 18, 1972
Visited: February 2, October 15 and 21, and December 14, 2008
Official Documentation: NYCLPC Report; NRHP Nomination Form



Bureaucracy operates at several removes from the life of the very citizens it is supposed to serve. Designed to centralize much of the city's newly-expanded administration after the consolidation of 1898, this skyscraper is, inadvertently, an embodiment of that distance. Once Chambers Street ran right through its loggia, as if it was a massive version of the Chandelier Tree, which lives with a giant hole at its base--as if to emphasize that something as trifling as traffic could not bother its Olympian operations.

I keep reading that "allegedly" (just "allegedly"--I can't find a first- or second-hand source) Stalin admired this building so much that it served as a primary inspiration for Moscow's "Seven Sisters" skyscrapers, his attempt at refashioning post-War Moscow into a modern endeavor to rival Western cities. A terrible irony, that: by the time all of them were constructed, new architecture in New York had long since moved on, abandoning its Roman monumentalism for more beautiful kinds of monumentalism, the Secretariat and Lever House.

96. Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall Subway Station (IRT)

Location: Under Centre Street between Chambers and Frankfort Streets
Built: 1901-1904
Architect: Heins & LaFarge
National Register Number: 05000674
Listed: July 6, 2005
Visited: Multiple times; mainly December 3 and 14, 2008
Official Documentation: NRHP Nomination Form



In spite of the name, this is not the famous abandoned station at City Hall you may have heard about--the one with vaults and Gustavino tile. No, this is its more anodyne brother. (The other one will be covered...whenever.) Originally known as the IRT's Brooklyn Bridge station, it took over as a terminal and a portal to the mysteries of city government when the City Hall station closed in 1945. Hence the name: Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall.

Like the original City Hall station and twenty-six others, this one inargurated the subway system on October 27, 1904, so its historical import is fixed and clear, but whatever once made it a distinctive aesthetic artifact is unfortunately not for public consumption. Only six years after it opened, the station's outermost platforms were declared redundant and were walled up; later some ends of the remaining platforms were blocked off when they were lengthened in the other direction. These no-go areas, visible only to MTA workers and the occasional subway wonk (not an insult!), have what's left of the station's original tilework. A mid-90s renovation merely references aspects of the original design--like the double-B symbol that used to be heralded by eagles--perhaps out of a sense that recreating the originals would be dishonest, not to mention costly. Not bad, but on the mezzanine level is a bolder kind of referencing: Mark Gibian's Cable-Crossing, which transforms the cabling of the nearby Brooklyn Bridge into sinuous Tyrannosaurus spines.

95. Chambers Street Subway Station (Dual System BMT)

Location: Beneath the Municipal Building at Chambers, Centre, and Duane Streets, and Lafayette Plaza
Built: 1911-1913
Architect: Heins & LaFarge
National Register Number: 05000669
Listed: July 6, 2005
Visited: December 14, 2008
Official Documentation: NRHP Nomination Form



Once a crowded terminal for trains coming in from Brooklyn, this subway station's functionality was compromised throughout the 20th century by new connections and a shift of the city's vibe uptown. Now several entire platforms are unused and inaccessible, including the eastern-most one that, if I remember correctly, has all that's left of the original mosaics. They're in a grubby state, but they've been worse off, and the whole station's been much worse off. It was informally voted the ugliest station in the New York subway system, quite a lot to live down. The MTA has since cleaned it up a bit, but fascination the station exerts on me doesn't come from the grime but its sense of the empty. The station is unusually long, high, and wide, even reasonably well-lit. Everything is open and visible--yet not everything is reachable--and yet again, there's nothing around to reach. Subway stations are empty all the time, but not like this: the platforms of Chambers Street have the feel of a museum whose exhibits have all been plundered, a dying department store reduced to selling the displays once the stock's all gone.

94. Surrogate's Court

A.K.A.: The Hall of Records
Location: 31 Chambers Street
Built: 1899-1907
Architect: John R. Thomas (1899-1901); Horgan & Slattery (1901-1911)
National Register Number: 72000888
Listed: January 29, 1972
Visited: November 15 and 21, 2008
Official Documentation: NYCLPC Report; NYCLPC Report (interior); NRHP Nomination Form; NHL Form



Abram S. Hewitt is haunted like a man with X-ray eyes, and bequiffed Philip Hone is gonna rave on after he throws that pen at you like a dart; and the rest of these cornice-dwellers peeking through the curtains, well, they're just showroom dummies in comparison. But inside, the lobby has a grand staircase modeled after the one at the Paris Opéra, which irresistably suggests we are to understand this building as a theater, these great men as actors, and the history of New York as an extravagant musical production--and not mere Vaudeville, however more appropriate that might be.

(Some of the wacky hijinx you knew and loved in the making of the Tweed Courthouse threatened to make encore performance here--there were unsavory connections to Tammany Hall, and the original architect died as this was being built--but propriety won out, with everything seemingly completed on-time and budget.)

93. Tweed Courthouse

A.K.A.: New York County Courthouse, Old New York County Courthouse
Location: 52 Chambers Street
Built: 1861-1881; alterations in 1911, 1913, 1942, 1978-1979; restored in 2002
Architect: John Kellum (1861-1871); Leopold Eidlitz (1876-1881); John Waite (2002)
National Register Number: 74001277
Listed: September 25, 1974
Visited: November 15 and 21, 2008
Official Documentation: NYCLPC Report; NYCLPC Report (interior); NRHP Nomination Form; NHL Form



No building in New York has anything like the agonized life history that the Tweed Courthouse does. It took twenty years for the city to bake this wedding cake, and a hundred to swallow it.

Tweed was William M. "Boss" Tweed, who I'm gonna assume you're going to have a nodding acquaintance with thanks to high school social studies: Tweed was Tammany Hall, was machine politics, was a ring of thieves and a diamond pin, was the demon of Thomas Nast's cartoons, grinning, bulging, so very pleased with himself, offering the eyes his corruption the way a bonobo ape shows off a red butt.



The New York County Courthouse was Tweed embodied in stone and marble. A medium for funneling public monies to him and those in cahoots, nearly every contractor working on it overcharged the city, a little for themselves, some for the ring, and Tweed alone getting 25% percent. Work was slow: contractors would do work, undo work, redo work, stop, start again. After six years, it was partly occupied even though the main staircase only went up to the second floor, even though the unfinished rotunda let snow and rain in. In July 1871, after about ten and the building still incomplete, The New York Times began running articles, based on records painstakingly copied by the city's bookkeeper, a tumble of numbers laying down the levels of ridiculousness involved. As The Times would write later: "A solitary carpenter, the entries revealed, pocketed $360,751 for a month's work. About $7,500 had been spent on thermometers, $400,000 on safes." (These figures aren't even adjusted for inflation--multiply them by seventeen if you want to.) The Times estimated that the sums allotted for carpeting alone would've covered City Hall Park three times over. Originally priced at $250,000, Theodore Roosevelt's uncle, Congressman Robert Roosevelt, estimated that the courthouse cost about $13 million--more than the United States paid for Alaska, or the UK paid to build the Houses of Parliament.



The Ring thereafter fell to pieces in tragi-comic fashion, with Tweed being sent to prison, fleeing to Cuba, then Spain, where he was captured; even though the man had lost a lot of weight in the interim, authorities were able to identify him thanks to Nast's cartoons. While the civitas benefited in the long-term (in the short-term, the city government got broke as fuck very fast), the courthouse did not. Construction stopped and would not start again until 1876. It carried on without the architect, John Kellum, who had the bad luck of dying a month after The Times' first exposés. Kellum had envisioned a fine Italianate building on the order of United States Capitol, and liberally festooned it with cast-iron and plaster ornament aping pricier materials. The new architect, Leopold Eidlitz, no doubt associated such masquerade with Tweedian corruption, and rejected it in favor of the "natural" and "honest" expression of materials, subsequently redesigning unfinished interiors in brawny polychromatic brickwork. To the architectural ignoramus such as myself, it looks snazzy--history tends to flatten all distinctions, even those that cause revolutions--but Eidlitz caught hell for the mismatch: the American Architect and Building News would say "Of course no attention was paid to the design of the existing building and within and without a rank Romanesque runs cheek by jowl with the old Italian, one bald, the other florid; cream-colored brick and buff sandstone come in juxtaposition to white marble."



Its completion didn't end the embarrassment. Starting with Mayor Grant in 1888 and continuing as late as the 1970s, the city would canvas proposals for a new Civic Center that was more accommodating, more logical, more appropriate to the greatest fucking city on Earth. Most would've razed the courthouse (many would've done away with City Hall, too); The New York Times even excoriated one plan that kept it saying:

"There is no good reason why the court house should be preserved...It is not of any architectural value, it is practically the subject of complaint from everybody who is forced to inhabit it, or to make habitual use of it, and there are no associations connected with it that are not disgraceful to the city."

Yet it was kept--so much money had gone into that it so relatively recently that it was thought to be slightly obscene to simply knock it down.

Koch and subsequent mayors threw money at it for repairs, but the building was finally given a full-blown restoration at the turn of the millennium. Among other accomplishments, it recreated the Chambers Street entrance, which had been demolished when the street was widened, and removing eighteen layers of paint from the polychrome brick and cast iron, originally applied in 1908 perhaps because it was cheaper than cleaning it, and perhaps its gaudiness was out of fashion. $80 million was spent on the restoration, up from an initial $37 million--numbers Tweed would've envied, no doubt, even if no money was stolen (and I have no reason to suspect any was).



Today you can tour the building for free. Few do--when I went a few weeks ago, there were only four people in total, two of whom were from South Africa--but if you're a New Yorker, you should. Some embarrassments are worth remembering.

92. Former Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank

A.K.A.: New York City Parking Violations Bureau
Location: 51 Chambers Street
Built: 1909-1912
Architect: Raymond F. Almirall
National Register Number: 82003375
Listed: February 25, 1982
Visited: April 13, 2008; November 15 and 21, 2008; December 3, 2008



Go to the Emigrant website and this is what it'll say about its history:

Emigrant Bank was founded by Irish emigrants as a mutual savings bank in 1850. By the 1920s it had grown to become the largest savings bank in the nation.

Terse! Most (or all, depending on the source) of those Irish emigrants were members of the Irish Emigrant Society, a charitable organization that greeted the immigrants deposited at Castle Clinton, this to discourage thiefs from taking advantage. Encouraged by Archibishop John J. Hughes (who deposited $25 in bank account #9), the eighteen trustees "chipped in $200 each to buy pencils and chairs (as Sora Song puts it). Largely catering to the swelling populations of Irish New York, it only seven years, it became the city's seventh-largest savings bank, and in seventy-five years, the largest savings bank in the nation.



The bank's third headquarters at 51 Chambers Street were built when architects were still casting around for sensible ways to build big: it is shaped very much like the behemoth Equitable Building, built only a few years later, with an H plan and no setbacks. It's so much more attractive, as it's scaled a little smaller and its shafts are much more generous, filled with column-like bays that soak up the sunlight. Like sooo many former bank interiors in this ding-dong city, the main floor is apparently hot stuff but off-limits to mere mortals like myself.

And like the A.T. Stewart & Co. Building, 51 Chambers was purchased by the city in 1965 in anticipation of an ambitious Civic Center redevelopment that would've torn the building down. It appears that none of the models for the plan I'm seeing in New York 1960 are available anywhere on the web--and that's a good thing, because they're hideous. My God, it's as if the 60's Establishment, for all its surface-level terror of youth culture, were as grossed out by old things as a tween at a family reunion.

91. A.T. Stewart Company Store

A.K.A.: The Marble Palace; The Sun Building
Location: 280 Broadway
Built: 1845-1846; additions 1850-1851, 1852-1853, 1872, 1884, 1921, and 2002.
Architect: Trench & Snook; Frederick Schmidt (1872); Edward D. Harris (1884)
National Register Number: 78001885
Listed: June 02, 1978
Visited: April 13, 2008; November 15 and 21, 2008; December 3, 2008

"This must have been at the hours when we were left discreetly to our fortitude [at the dentist's], through our aunt's availing herself of the relative proximity to go and shop at Stewart's and then come back for us; the ladies' great shop, vast, marmorean, plate-glassy and notoriously fatal to the female nerve (we ourselves had wearily trailed through it, hanging on the skirts, very literally, of indecision) which bravely waylaid custom on the Broadway corner of Chambers Street." (Henry James, "A Small Boy")

As a category, the department store bleeds into other, older predecessors such as the bazaar, the general store, the French magasin de nouveauté; as such it may not be possible to pinpoint the very first. But Alexander Turney Stewart's fourth store on 280 Broadway is sometimes called that, or slightly less prestigiously, the first department store in the United States. In any case, it was home the future model for the Macy's and Bloomingdale's and Lord & Taylors to come--and an incubator for modes of consumption (a fancy way of saying "buying stuff") we all take for granted.

Before the emergence of the department store, customers were followed (or politely hounded) by an assistant attending to their needs, and expected to make a purchase after entering a shop; prices were not fixed, but bargained for. Today, this is barely imaginable. Shy by nature, I couldn't plunge myself into such a world. Every simple purchase of a shirt would make me want to claw my skin with broken clamshells--and that'd be nothing on a stomach-churn of a bourgeois woman in a society that saw the weaker sex and expected her to act accordingly, even in a shop. A.T. Stewart was one of the first (again, by some observers, the first) to do away with such potentially pressured selling, turning what was once a contest, a confrontation, a psyche-out for consumers into something more relaxed--something that could even be a leisure activity. The indecision of Henry James' aunt wasn't but a little crumb of liberation: without an assistant on her back, she be could indecisive as she damned well please.



A.T. Stewart was an Irish immigrant born in 1803; thirty-four years and three dry goods locations later, he'd become a millionaire. He used his wealth to construct his "Marble Palace": Tuckahoe marble in a sea of wood and brick, four stories where other stores were maybe one, stately Italianate when even the rich lived in chaste Federal- or Greek-Revival homes. The September 18, 1858 Supplement to the Hartford Courant described the store after one of its many extensions:

The marble palace of A.T. Stewart & Co. has lately been enlarged, and it is now probably the most spacious and the handsomest store of the kind in the world. With its dimensions thus extended, it is 175 feet deep and 165 feet wide. 350 men are employed in it; 100 sewing machines are kept constantly busy, and 150 women earn their daily bread by taking work from the establishment. Carpets from Persia, England and France, shawls from Cashmere and from China, silks from all the celebrated manufactories of Europe, curtain draperies and ormolu furniture from Paris, and exquisite laces from Brussels and Mechlin are here brought together as if by a fairy wand. But what is of still more interest, at least to the reflecting visitor, is the multitudinous assemblage of humanity,--men, woman, and children,--numbering between five and six thousand, who daily throng the immense bazaar, and weary the attentive salesmen with their various errands of business or of fashionable extravagance and pleasure. What a story for the moralist opens here!

Even after the multiple additions, the business outgrew its home yet again, so Stewart leapfrogged up Broadway to 9th Street and built an even larger palace in cast-iron, as was the fashion. (It later became part of Wanamaker's, then burned down in 1950.) Eventually, according to Michael Klepper and Robert Gunther, he was worth what would be $70 billion in today's money, making him the seventh-richest American of all time.



With his death in 1876, the story take a hard-right turn to qrotesquerie. Some motherfuckers stole his corpse for ransom (this account uses the phrase "a trail of viscous human desquamation"); while a body was eventually returned, whether it was actually Stewart's is not definitively known. Meanwhile his lawyer, Henry Hilton, wound up with the most of the fortune and whittled it away to nothing in less than twenty years' time. Thanks to him there is no A.T. Stewart & Co. store today, even as his former competitors, Bloomingdale's and Macy's, dot the world with stores larger than the Marble Palace as a matter of course. This is bad enough, but not Hilton's only infamy: he is perhaps best remembered for turning away Joseph Seligman from his Grand Union Hotel on account of his Jewishness, a scandal that inspired other acts of exclusion by the American upper classes.



Hilton sloughed off 280 Broadway at some point early in his reign of error, and it lingered on as an office building. (Curiously, it was home to F.W. Woolworth and Company's headquarters from 1888 to the completion of the Woolworth Building just down the street.) Its current name came about when The Sun newspaper bought it in 1917. After the Sun went bust, the city took it over in 1966, hoping to demolish it for some development scheme that blessedly never happened. Amusingly, it now houses the city's Department of Buildings, as well a Modell's, a Radio Shack, and a Duane Reade--all three of which, while considerably more prole than what he had in mind, owe something to A.T. Stewart's retail genius.

89. Former New York Life Insurance Company Building

Location: 346 Broadway
Built: 1894-1898
Architect: Stephen D. Hatch (eastern section); McKim, Mead & White (western section)
National Register Number: 82003376
Listed: June 28, 1982
Visited: November 15, 2008
A.K.A.: The Clock Tower Building



I don't wear a watch. My last one inexplicably popped from my wrist--and off a moving train. Its suicide so shook me I vowed never to wear another. When I walk around the city now, it is in ignorance of the time. This is a pain when catching movies or showing up for dates, but miracurously, I am rarely late. I can get by with discreet peeks into stores, looking for working clocks, or furtive glances at people's watches. Public clocks are better bets, but they're pretty rare in New York City, rare once people realized in the sixties-seventies what a fucking pain in the ass they are to maintain.

Entirely mechanical, the clock atop 346 Broadway needs someone to manually wind it every eight days. It hadn't worked for twenty years until two city employees, Marvin Schneider and Eric Reiner, decided to give a damn and fix the thing, this in the era of the ungovernable city. The NYT: "'There was a foot of garbage up here,' Mr. Schneider recalled. 'A lot of the parts were missing; junkies had sold them. The glass faces were broken, which exposed the clock to all kinds of weather. Even the pigeons found the place repugnant.'” Today, Schneider is the city Clock Master, handling all the clocks on city property, thirteen in all, including seven in City Hall, plus the subject of dozens of New York Times profiles in addition to those just linked to--and why not, really? The job is so quaint, his story, so compelling.



The clock situation is currently assured, but the rest of the building's history hasn't been quite so straightforwardedly happy-ending. New York Life had its headquarters on this site starting in 1870; after the installation of a new-fangled Otis Elevator, two more stories were added. King's Handbook of New York City 1892 shows a lovely marble Italianate building with a high mansard roof. But the company kept growing, so in 1894, it hired Stephen D. Hatch to design an eastern extension (which is weird because the photo in King's Handbook shows it already extended down the block, but...whatever). Then, soon after he died, McKim, Mead & White were hired to replace the entire original building--no more mansard--with the Broadway front we see today.

A statue of Atlas used to top the clock tower, but disappeared around 1950 under mysterious circumstances. (The building looks incomplete without it.) Natural light used to bathe the insurance agents poring over their actuary tables on the south side of the building, but some jerk decided to replace some low-rise retail with a mid-rise apartment building block to its right. The lobby. Hmm. It was once quite grand, but by 1982 it had gotten all hoiked up with an added mezzanine for file storage. It may or not have been renovated. When I went there last week, it did not even occur to me to check. There was a cop and cop car on the corner, so I didn't even feel comfortable taking pictures of the thing from across the street. Even if he wasn't there, well, my default assumption for most downtown buildings is that NO, you CANNOT just walk through the front door for a look. If you try, some security guard will kill you, KILL YOU DEAD.

88. Firehouse, Engine Company 31

Location: 87-91 Lafayette Street
Built: 1895
Architect: Napoleon Le Brun & Sons
National Register Number: 72000870
Listed: January 20, 1972
Visited: November 15, 2008



More municipal masquerade. Yes, a firehouse--not a French chateau or an Upper East Side derivation. One that cost almost four times as much as your average firehouse at that time. Absurd? What, is nothing too good for the working class? But even with the dormered windows and the fancy Gothic detailing (including dolphins!), it manifestly is--or was, rather--a firehouse: you can tell from the fire-engine red accents on the doors and windows.

It was still operating as a firehouse as late as 1966 when it was landmarked by the NYCLPC. The city later sold it off to two non-profits, the Chinese-American Planning Council and the Downtown Community Television Center, who soon realized they had the historic renovation job from hell on their hands. Christopher Gray: "The building was built on wooden piles preserved by sinking them under the water table. But the water level fell, the piles dried and rotted and some of the interior floors roll and heave like waves." After seven years of work, the foundation was completely restored in 1990; then the exterior was restored in 2000, and the interiors in 2004. There was some rumblings last year about an absolutely batshit-crazy blue trapezoid to be built behind it; even if the city bureaucracy hadn't already gravely wounded that project, then economy probably woulda finished it Mortal Kombat-style.

67. St. Paul's Chapel

Location: 209 Broadway
Built: 1764-66 (church); 1794 (tower)
Architect: Attributed to Thomas McBean (church); Crommelin Lawrence (tower)
National Register Number: 66000551
Listed: October 15, 1966
Visited: March 23 and 27, 2008
Additional Documentation: St. Paul's Chapel website



March 23, 2008, 8:00 AM: Thinking Easter Sunday would bring out the crowds, I rush downtown to get a good seat...only to find plenty.

March 27, 2008, 1:00 PM: I rush downtown to get some good pictures on my lunch hour only to find people, plenty of them.

When I knew it, it was a place of lunchtime quiet. The sounds of Broadway bled through the walls and windows but you felt derelict when, while walking through the pews, your shoes squeaked. Sitting down, everyone went their clockwork ways in the streets and sidewalks around the church as if you had fallen into the secret center of the world.

Across the street, the towers were brought down.

Volunteers slept in the pews between shifts at Ground Zero.

St. Paul's Chapel's role as a tourist site, a holy relic of 9/11, now overwhelms its role as an arm of the church, and as a holy relic of George Washington, who worshiped here during the first two years of his presidency, this back when the nation's capital was New York and not yet Washington. The pink and blue Georgian interiors are embroidered with tokens of affection from people all over the world, touched and bewildered by what happened. Early Easter Sunday, the tourists didn't stop by; instead, the church was visited a smattering of locals, plus a few transients who, while polite, were faintly embarrassed by the attentions the clergy gave them. Only a few days later, it is as packed as any church I've ever seen. Tourists walk around from exhibit to exhibit, dazed. In their faces, contemplation and boredom are hard to distinguish.

65. No. 8 Thomas Street Building

A.K.A.: David S. Brown Store
Location: 8 Thomas Street
Built: 1875-6
Architect: Jarvis Morgan Slade
National Register Number: 80002705
Listed: April 30, 1980
Visited: May 8, 2008
Additional Documentation: NYC PLC report



My references describe it as Gothic Revival, Venetian division. Now I went to Venice as a teen but remember little of it save for crummy personal shit. Never read Ruskin, either. (I should though, right?) And apparently No. 8 is a relic of a style with few surviving examples in the city. So how am I going to contextualize this building? Well, it sometimes uses bold shapes and colors and quotes older styles...well, sounds kinda postmodern to me! Yes, obviously wrong--modernism arguably hadn't even started yet when this building was built, forget about its putative successor--and yet it's my understanding of postmodern architecture that comes rushing in to fill the vacuum of my knowledge.



I don't mean New York postmodern, though. Our examples of the style such the Sony Building, Worldwide Plaza, and 60 Wall Street are a turn-off; the details meant to distinguish them from the soulless glass boxes of the modernists are so blunt, so elephantine they end up making not much of a difference at all. No. 8 is so modest in size there's no room for elephants, just a rather fanciful composition of colonnettes, arches, mansard roof, and punctuating oculus, all scaled just right for the man in the street below to apprehend and enjoy.

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.

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.