74. Fleming Smith Warehouse
Location: 451-453 Washington Street
Built: 1891-92
Architect: Stephen Decatur Smith
National Register Number: 83001745
Listed: May 26, 1983
Visited: May 21, 2008
Warehouses. The 21st Century knows them as the giant zombie husks, sequestered in industrial parks out in the suburbs where nobody has to look at them much. Not even their employees, for many have none, populated by automated robots carrying goods of the long-tail back and forth in a 24/7 dreamless sleep. Their sole concession to organic life are long, bland lawns. To design a warehouse as if it was something other than a box to contain smaller boxes is a defiant waste of money and materials. Boxes and robots do not need pretty.
The old-timey fractables of the Fleming Smith reference the warehouses of Amsterdam (and New Amsterdam) that, in their heyday, took after their residential betters, and were a part of a city's fabric not some alienated outliers; like their cousins across the puddle, it transformed into a damn fine place to live, being one of the first residential conversions in Tribeca. Unless future society in structured in terms of enormous communes and not discrete families, it is hard to imagine that today's warehouses will ever get that kind of second life.
The National Register nomination form: "Nothing is known about Fleming Smith at this time." Well, fuck.
Built: 1891-92
Architect: Stephen Decatur Smith
National Register Number: 83001745
Listed: May 26, 1983
Visited: May 21, 2008
Warehouses. The 21st Century knows them as the giant zombie husks, sequestered in industrial parks out in the suburbs where nobody has to look at them much. Not even their employees, for many have none, populated by automated robots carrying goods of the long-tail back and forth in a 24/7 dreamless sleep. Their sole concession to organic life are long, bland lawns. To design a warehouse as if it was something other than a box to contain smaller boxes is a defiant waste of money and materials. Boxes and robots do not need pretty.
The old-timey fractables of the Fleming Smith reference the warehouses of Amsterdam (and New Amsterdam) that, in their heyday, took after their residential betters, and were a part of a city's fabric not some alienated outliers; like their cousins across the puddle, it transformed into a damn fine place to live, being one of the first residential conversions in Tribeca. Unless future society in structured in terms of enormous communes and not discrete families, it is hard to imagine that today's warehouses will ever get that kind of second life.
The National Register nomination form: "Nothing is known about Fleming Smith at this time." Well, fuck.
Labels: Fleming Smith Warehouse, Tribeca, Warehouse
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