62. US Post Office--Church Street Station

A.K.A.: Federal Office Building
Location: 90 Church Street
Built: 1935
Architect: Cross & Cross; Pennington, Lewis & Mills, Inc.
National Register Number: 88002359
Listed: May 11, 1989
Visited: April 13, 2008



In all weather save the worst, I could see it from my office in Tower Two: a block wide, and wider than tall; a cruise ship sailing through downtown Manhattan. Or a patch of desert. I have memories, possibly false ones, of its life from the street, the sun bearing down on expanses of limestone unrelieved save for air vents. Its blankness sucked the life out of the immediate vicinity, maybe even more than the monoliths across the street. People would walk by and not stop and not look up at the thing, at least on the Vesey Street side, because there was so little for the eye to focus on. Church Street was where the life was, with a few vendors of books and fruit mucking up traffic past and inside the entrances; inside the entrances, more confusion, more life, a warren of corridors and windows and lines.



It is something Art Deco, something Classical, but also neither: no fluted columns, no formal razzle-dazzle. It feels incomplete to me. The monumentality of its scale suggests a much taller building than is actually there. What happened to that building, I wonder.

28. Lee, Higginson & Company Bank Building

AKA: Bank of American International Building
Location: 37-41 Broad Street
Built: 1929
Architect: Cross & Cross
National Register Number: 06000476
Listed: June 7, 2006
Visited: August 31 and September 28, 2007



What people seem to remember of Lee, Higginson & Company, if they remember it all, is how it was eventually laid low by Swedish match king Ivar Kreuger's fraud. (A empire built on matches! It's like right out of Ben Katchor!) Lee Hig only spent a couple of years in this valuable piece of real estate (it cost $3.7 million) and sold it at a loss ($2.2 million) to the New York Stock Exchange, who sold it to a bank in 1941 for an even more hair-raising loss ($400,000!!). Until recently, the building had off-price apparel retailer Conway (Get it? Conway!) on the first floor, a mortifying loss of face for this elegant building. Today, the students of Claremont Prep School run through it, and the super-awesome Deco banking hall is used for the kind of private events unconnected sclhubs like myself don't get invited to. You can see a little bit of it from the outside: maybe one column, mosiaced with vines. Along with the midlevel Zodiac medallions on the exterior front, those vines are a near-subliminal advertisement for pagan nature worship hidden in the building's overall message of Classical Style stability and permanence.