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.