The Masterpiece Next Door

102. New York Telephone Company Building

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 06:23:00 +0000

A.K.A.: Barclay-Vesey Building
Location: 140 West Street
Built: 1923–1927
Architect: Ralph Walker
National Register Number: 09000257
Listed: April 30, 2009
Official Documentation: NYCLPC Report

I worked at the World Trade Center for eight years yet have no memory of ever noticing it. Like a stroke victim who's lost part of his visual field, it's as if I couldn't even see this building. Given the size of the towers—the ones that sliced a few edges off the Barclay-Vesey as they crumbled—it's not surprisingly this brown dwarf got lost. Given the size of its current and future neighbors, it looks like it'll continue to be lost.

Ralph Walker, the architect: "It was Emerson, I think, who told us to stop building the sepulchers of our fathers and build our own house. The Barclay-Vesey Building is an attempt to build a house of today." Could this ever have really been a house of today? It requires an imaginative leap. Googie architecture is still "futuristic"—even if quaintly so—because we never actually arrived at the moonbase/jetpack world it promised. There is, perhaps, a similar displacement at work with Streamline Moderne, as it still seems more like the stuff of Hollywood movies than real life, no matter how much the style worked its way into real life. This one seems less distinctive, stumpy masses in khaki. It was the first Art Deco skyscraper, but perhaps the Chrysler Building spoils me into thinking such a thing requires a more flamboyant gesture than this. Thanks to the security concerns which make me hesitant to get me very close (forget about lobbies, reputed to be fabulous), I have to squint hard to see the Barclay-Vesey's dream-life, but it's there in the far-off tops of its piers and corners: stone flora and fauna living in an equatorial paradise.

101. Woolworth Building

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 02:40:00 +0000

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.

A small note.

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 05:11:00 +0000

If you read this blog regularly, you may have wondered about the lack of entries, completely unaware that this happened.

Praise of any kind is always tricky for me to process. Yes, I love it and seek it OH GOD, YES. When I found out, I took some slugs of Cointreau, called my ma, told some friends, ran through the sidewalks of the Upper East Side throwing clumps of new snow into the air, walked along Central Park, walked all the way down to the Apple Store because why the fuck not, pawed some iPods all soppy wet, got some French fries, took a taxi home. And when I catch myself enjoying praise, I find ways to sabotage the pleasure: the high I felt on Sunday, rather than spurring me on to write, encouraged laziness and hypochondria over what are likely sinus headaches BUT WHAT IF IT'S A BRAIN TUMOR, etc. I suppose this is my method of avoiding the sin of pride but wow what a shitty method it is. (It occurs to me as I write this that pride is exactly what Brodie gets punished for in the Brooklyn Bridge story um er uh draw yr own conclusions.)

I should also mention that I've been trying to finish up the Civic Center landmarks, which means I have to tackle the Woolworth Building and City Hall, and such big-deal buildings have always given me trouble: what can I offer that Wikipedia won't? I got out of that hangup with the Brooklyn Bridge by making use of fantasies I'd been entertaining since reading Luc Sante's Low Life (the first book I picked up after 9/11, which is maybe telling you too much but it's out of my hands now--again, draw yr own conclusions) but these two don't lend themselves to mythopoeia quite as easily. So I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them.

But the blog will continue. It pleases me to write about the city. It pleases me to treat New York as unmapped territory, or a memory I am trying to recollect in all its original intensity. It also pleases me to write fiction, but I don't want to do that here, or at least not much of it here--maybe that's another blog.

Thank you for reading.

100. Brooklyn Bridge

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 02:54:00 +0000

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

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 04:05:00 +0000

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!

98. LETTIE G. HOWARD (schooner)

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 18:24:00 +0000

A.K.A.: Mystic C.; Caviare
Location: Off Pier 16, off of Fulton Street
Built: 1893
Builder: Arthur D. Story
National Register Number: 84002779
Listed: September 7, 1984
Visited: December 14, 2008
Official Documentation: NRHP Nomination Form; NHL Form

An annoyance. As it rarely stays in one spot, this boat resisted all my attempts at capture, wintering at Kings Point when I did my first batch of Seaport posts back in January and February, and off on all sorts of mad adventures the rest of the year. Impromptu drop-ins, inquiries into the museum, even trying to befriend this ship via its MySpace page still led me to a blank spot by Pier 16 where a ship should be. So when the MySpace page announced "alongside the Lightship Ambrose in her winter berth," I was less in a mood for discovery than getting the damned thing done, a feeling abetted by the ship's temporary under-wraps and sail-free condition. Not the optimal setting for blog excitement, I must admit.

One Toronto website, offering cruises and "team building challenges," explains that "Schooners were popular in occupations that required high speed and windward ability," a statement so mild and factual that it does not prepare you for "such as slaving, privateering, blockade running and"--going back to mild--"offshore fishing." Well, not that mild, as fishing was always a nasty occupation, and even today has with the highest fatality rate in the United States. The Lettie G. Howard is one of the last surviving fishing schooners of its kind, but if you're hoping it has ripping yarns, stories that wake us up to the blood-and-wounds business of nation-building, you're shit of out of luck. The online historical record for the Lettie G. does not offer too much in the way of specifics--the NHL form linked to above is even missing every other page. What I can tell you is that it was born in Essex, Massachusetts, worked the Gorton's Fisherman territory around Gloucester for its first eight years, then later moved to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico before getting purchased by the South Street Seaport in 1968. It does not appear to have deep New York roots, though the South Street Seaport Museum website notes that it is "similar to the schooners that carried their Long Island and New Jersey catches to New York City's the Fulton Fish Market"--a fine thread of historical continuity between the ship's and the seaport's pasts and present severed when the market relocated from South Street to the Bronx. Today the museum offers sail training courses and the like on the ship which, at $150 and up, is too rich for my blood.

97. Municipal Building

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 07:15:00 +0000

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)

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 03:21:00 +0000

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)

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 05:28:00 +0000

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

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 04:28:00 +0000

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

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 04:01:00 +0000

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

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 04:24:00 +0000

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

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 22:31:00 +0000

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.

90. Building at 254-260 Canal Street

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 02:31:00 +0000

A.K.A.: The Bruce Building
Location: 254-260 Canal Street
Built: 1856-1857
Architect: Probably James Bogardus
National Register Number: 06000475
Listed: June 07, 2006
Visited: November 15, 2008

254-260 Canal Street is also known as the Bruce Building, the Bruce here being George Bruce. The National Register of Historic Places registration form quotes a source calling him the "'father and chief' of typography in America." Not being in the field, I suppose I can't bring his publishing innovations to a height lower than a little over my head, but I do "get" the utility and beauty of the typefaces his foundry birthed, including Ornamented No. 1514 a.k.a. Gold Rush a.k.a. Klondike, a type I had to fake when designing one of my just-about-dead blogs.

Of the thirty-seven buildings known to be or suspected to have been designed by cast-iron pioneer James Bogardus, only five survive. Of the remaining five, the Bruce Building is closer to "suspected" than "known," as we have no direct proof of Bogardus' involvement; however, Bogardus did list Bruce as a client a year after this building was completed, and the Medusa heads topping the fourth-story arches are known to be characteristic of his work. I think it's also possible there's significance in Bruce's background, as several of James Bogardus' largest known works were built for publishers, including the Sun Iron Building and the Harper & Brothers Publishing Plant; perhaps it was thought of as a minor specialty of Bogardus. It's not much of a stretch to imagine the intuitive appeal a cast-iron building might have to someone who works with movable type, as both the printed page and something like the façade of 254-260 Canal Street are the fruits of individual pre-fabricated metal parts that can be mixed 'n' matched in infinite permutations.

89. Former New York Life Insurance Company Building

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 04:58:00 +0000

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

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 04:46:00 +0000

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.

87. Former Police Headquarters Building

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 15:55:00 +0000

Location: 240 Centre Street
Built: 1905-1909
Architect: Hoppin & Koen
National Register Number: 80002690
Listed: March 23, 1980
Visited: October 12, 2008

I got exhausted from this building. So much to take in, so much take pictures of.

It's suspiciously luxe, no? I wonder if the example of Washington, DC has primed us to expect government buildings to be massive bulks expressed in the terms of Greek austerity or a merely functional modernism. Detail is uncivic, a waste of the people's money, and in this building's case, perhaps wasted on the criminal element being hustled through its doors. At the time, though, such Beaux-Arts splendor was justified--or rationalized--by its salutary effect on all spectators; Francis Hoppin, one of the architects, was quoted by The New York Times as saying "...we want to impress both officer and prisoner...with the majesty of the law..." This is of a piece with the premises of the City Beautiful movement that ran contemporary with the building. Its idea was that beautiful cityscapes would inspire a populace--especially immigrant populations, like those surrounding the police headquarters--to transcend their abjection; it was a kind of kindred spirit to the premises of the "broken windows" theory of policing that's been popular in the last couple decades, as both stress people are more likely to be civic-minded when surrounded by evidence, however symbolic and however quotidian, that their surroundings matter.

It replaced a tiny Italianate building at 300 Mulberry Street, built in 1862 when Manhattan alone was home to about 800,000. Demographics alone can explain the HQ's obsolescence circa 1900, as by then Manhattan was a million stronger and the New York City Police Department was building precinct houses about the same size. 240 Centre Street itself, with its gymnasium for "fat policemen" and open-air playground for "poor little waifs and foundlings" (the NYT's words, so not kidding) was superseded in 1973 by the utterly charmless One Police Plaza--a building that, unlike this post's subject, will probably never receive a residential conversion.

86. Odd Fellows Hall

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 04:44:00 +0000

Location: 165-171 Grand Street
Built: 1847-1848; 1881-1882 (roof addition)
Architect: Trench & Snook; John Buckingham (roof addition)
National Register Number: 83001737
Listed: September 22, 1983
Visited: October 12, 2008

So I was writing this on Tuesday when suddenly the cool guy became President and I got a mite distracted. Anyway!

Fraternal orders are a living dead detail of American society, as much of the social-services work that was their original rationale for existence now done by the government and insurance companies, and with the whole idea of socialization with the like-minded towards lofty goals undermined by the collective realization that people are actually rather horrible and why on earth would you want to fraternize with them when there's the TV? (College fraternities and sororities are an exception to this decline, of course: drinking and sexing beats TV. For now.)

The Independent Order of Odd Fellows once had had about 100 lodges in the city. They're still around, to be sure, but I'm not entirely sure there's even one NYC lodge around now. Their purpose was "[t]o visit the sick, relieve the distressed, to bury the dead and educate the orphan...". This hall for the Odd Fellows was ostensibly constructed to do just that, with libraries, classrooms and lecture halls serving (I have to assume) the crush of city immigrants surrounding it. It also had rooms lavishly dressed up in eclectic styles, probably not for all those poor orphans but eh who knows?

Originally it had a dome, removed when the building was sold and two floors were added. They're a different style, Queen Anne mansard over Italianate brownstone; they're like a fetching Sunday hat.

OK, I'm still distracted.

85. Stephen Van Rensselaer House

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 03:57:00 +0000

Location: 149 Mulberry Street (originally 153 Mulberry Street)
Built: 1816
Architect: Unknown
National Register Number: 83001751
Listed: June 16, 1983
Visited: October 12, 2008

Before it was a cheapjack clothier for touristic delectation--and, let's face it, probably also some immigrant's entrée into The Good Life--149 Mulberry Street was a Little Italy restaurant, Paolucci's. And some time before it was a restaurant, it was home to the Italian Free Library and Reading Room, serving the local community with what one account says was 3,000 books in Italian and 32 Italian daily papers from various parts of Italy. (Lord, what happened to the contents of this library?)

None of this is why 149 Mulberry was landmarked, though--neither the 1969 landmark designation report from the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission or the 1983 National Register of Historic Places nomination form say anything about Little Italy. Newer ones are somewhat more ecumenical, but many of these earlier reports are remarkably unconcerned about matters beyond a somewhat narrow architectural aesthetic (the NYC LPC reports from the '60s use words like "quaint" and "charming" a lot) and the Great Men of New York history.

It was landmarked because, well, it was (and is) a surviving wooden-frame Federal Style rowhouse, for one--as you'd imagine, not many survive because of the whole fire thing--and because it was one of the homes of Stephen Van Rensselaer III. He was...well, Fortune called him the 10th richest American of all time. Like many of the ultrarich New Yorkers of his day, he could trace his family back to the some of the earliest Dutch settlements in the New World--and like those families, too, he left his name on our landscape, specifically in the name of the engineering university he helped found.

84. Puck Building

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:10:00 +0000

Location: 295-309 Lafayette Street
Built: 1885-1886; 1892-1893 and 1899 (additions and subtractions); 1983-1984 (restoration)
Architects: Albert Wagner and Herman Wagner
National Register Number: 83001740
Listed: July 21, 1983
Visited: October 12, 2008
Additional Information: New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission Designation Report

That's the Shakespearean Puck right up there, leaning on a pen and carrying a mirror, presumably reflecting the poor slobs down below.

This building was the home of the snark, not once but twice. First time was with the building's namesake, a satirical magazine that excoriated all manner of political and social figures of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era with nasty fantastic grotesquerie. A lot of the subjects dealt with are mostly urr and umm to me (for now), so while it's very interesting to note that Puck's cartoons may have swung Presidential elections, what this prisoner of the 21st century gets is all the identity politics stuff: they were pro-Semitic (yay, even if premised on stereotype), anti-Catholic (argh; this must've been real lulzy to the folks across the street), and anti-racist if not above portraying Frederick Douglass as an ape (guh)--as well as the Irish (OMFG).

A hundred years later, Spy Magazine took up residence here. You know it, or remember it--a comic scorner of all things celebrity. I used to read copies of it in the basement of Woodward Hall my freshman year at St. John's when I wasn't reading some incomprehensible translation from the Greek: it kinda thrilled me because I could get a moontan from its reflected New York sophistication and it kinda disturbed me because it gave me nothing to hold on to other than that, couldn't tell what it stood for, couldn't learn anything from it other than things not worth learning about, couldn't make sense of its stance. And it wasn't very nice, and I always fancied myself from kidhood on as awfully nice. So even as all the biggie magazines out there started to mimic its layouts, its Boschian density of factlets, it was something of a relief not to have to take Spy seriously any more when it started sucking a few years into its existence. And now that I know that VFer and truffled-mac-and-cheese-slinger Graydon Carter was partly behind it, I'm sorta sorry I gave the magazine even the slightest mental encouragement.

(If you're a follower of Gawker like I am, you might be amused to know the Puck is owned by the Kushners.)

The Puck was originally a little smaller--the taller back half of the building was added a few years after it was initially completed in 1886. But it was also a little wider. This is what the corner of Mulberry and Houston looks like today:

And this is how it looked in 1892, according to King's Handbook of New York City:

That's right: two bays' worth of building were sliced off the Puck like it was a block of Cracker Barrel Extra Sharp. You see, when the city decided to open up a three-block cul-de-sac--called Lafayette Place--that ran from Astor Place to Great Jones Street, and connect it to several other existing streets, the route of the new north-south thoroughfare went right through the Puck and several of its neighbors. While the latter were all destroyed, the Puck merely underwent major surgery in 1899, in the end gaining an entirely new Western face to meet Lafayette Street.

That's why the building has two Puck statues: the one on Mulberry and Houston stands over what used to be the original main entry, which was later replaced by a grander entrance with multi-story columns and a brownstone capital on which another Puck stands.

83. Old St. Patrick's Cathedral Complex

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 03:05:00 +0000

A.K.A.: Old St. Patrick's Cathedral; Old St. Patrick's Convent and Girl's School; St. Michael's Chapel
Location: 260-264 Mulberry Street (cathedral); 32 Prince Street (convent); 266 Mulberry Street (chapel)
Built: 1809-1815, restored 1868 (cathedral); 1826 (convent); 1858-1859 (chapel)
Architects: Joseph F. Mangin (cathedral); unknown (convent); James Renwick Jr. and William Rodrigue (chapel)
National Register Number: 77000964
Listed: August 29, 1977
Visited: October 12 and 21, 2008

The oldest city churches are surrounded by an iron gate, if anything at all. Old St. Patrick's--the St. Patrick's before what's now the St. Patrick's was completed in 1879--is surrounded by a wall.

I find it easy to imagine a New York with horses instead of cars, or candles and gas and not electric light. If you're attentive, the physical evidence of that former life is everywhere, in things like big SoHo windows or skinny streets, the horseplop stink of Central Park South in the summer. A New York with an underdog Catholic minority is a much bigger conceptual leap because--wall excepted--evidence of such things has largely disappeared, and its counter-evidence so imposing. Speaking as a Catholic (born as such, barely raised as such, lived my adult not immune to the religion's power but never fully embracing it either--did I mention I'm gay?) we are, well, everywhere. But it was not always thus.

In spite of brief moments of religious toleration in its colonial days, Roman Catholicism was suppressed in New York following England's Protestant Glorious Revolution. So effective was the clampdown, once source I've found states there were only 100 Catholics after the Revolutionary War, this in a city of 33,000. A new era of governmental tolerance, epitomized by the Bill of Rights, and immigration, primarily from Ireland, changed the equation to the point where New York could sustain a diocese of its own in 1808. Construction on St. Patrick's began a year later, in what was then the hinterlands of Mulberry Street, which was so isolated that a fox was caught in the churchyard five years after it was completed.

Immigrants kept coming and coming and coming to New York City (even before Ireland's Great Famine), and Nativist hostility towards what was seen as the great squirmy masses and their lockstep religion sometimes flamed up into violence. As early as 1806, St. Peter's Church (the St. Peter's before what's now St. Peter's) was attacked by a mob on Christmas Eve; the later St. Mary's Church was burned down to the ground in 1831; and St. Patrick's itself was "menaced" by a mob in 1835.

Which brings us back to the wall. On the official website for Old St. Patrick's, a picture of the wall has a caption implying the wall was erected by the diocese's fourth bishop, The Most Rev. John J. Hughes. Hughes was a power behind the establishment of churches and schools to serve the growing population of Catholics. The thing, though, that makes him beguiling to me is his toughness in a tough time. In the face of rioting that had destroyed Catholic churches and killed people in Philadelphia, he told New York's Nativist mayor-elect John Harper that "if a single Catholic church is burned in New York, the city will become a second Moscow." (He was referencing this.) Don't take this wrong--I say this out of a kind of discomfort and a kind of awe, but not impeity--but it's a wonder he could walk when he had cojones the size of church bells. He signed his letters with a dagger-like cross: he was known as "Dagger John," a name right out of Low Life or Gangs of New York.

When Old St. Patrick's finally burned down in 1866, the cause was one of those absolutely quotidian city accidents--flying embers from a Broadway fire--not an angry mob. The church we see today was built from the walls left standing, the eccentricity of its original Gothic style (which predated the craze for it by about two decades) toned down a bit.

As for the neighborhood's Irish, they were replaced by the Italians (hi there), who much later got systematically bodysnatched by hipsters. Mulberry Street, just south of Old St. Patrick's: all flimsy boutiques.

82. Fourteenth Ward Industrial School

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 03:28:00 +0000

A.K.A.: Astor Memorial School; Mott Street Industrial School
Location: 256-258 Mott Street, between East Houston and Prince Streets
Built: 1888-89; restored 2004
Architects: Vaux & Radford
National Register Number: 83001724
Listed: January 27, 1983
Visited: October 12, 2008

A is for Astor--John Jacob Astor III, who paid for the building and the property it stood on to honor his late wife. The school was one of many built for the Children's Aid Society, a charitable organization founded in 1853; this location served a local Italian-American community whose last vestiges in Nolita up and died decades ago. The National Register of Historic Places nomination form says the Children's Aid Society was founded to benefit the lives of the city's homeless children "through the establishment of lodging houses, reading rooms, and industrial schools." In a bit of what is perhaps a misplaced focus, the form gives somewhat more detail about the building's architectural rather than civic virtues, Queen Anne style this and stepped gable that. In her book Alone in the World: Orphans and Orphanages, Catherine Reef is a bit blunter with the details as to what exactly TCAS did. For example: "The volunteer teachers were mainly were mainly well-to-do women who paid particular attention to the girls, hoping to prevent them from becoming prostitutes." Oh. Another fact: between 1854 and 1929, TCAS shipped over 100,000 indigent children from New York City to the Midwest where they'd find new families, something like indentured servitude, or a little of both. My god.

TCAS is still around. New Yorkers of a certain age (and economic strata, I suppose) best know it as the source of an insistent television jingle that goes "I'm really glad they made/The Children's Aid/Society." No YouTube evidence of it exists, it seems; you'll have to take my word for it.

81. E.V. Haughwout Building

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 03:35:00 +0000

Location: 488-492 Broadway, on the northeast corner of Broadway and Broome Street
Built: 1856-1857; restored 1995
Architects: John P. Gaynor; Daniel D. Badger (iron components); Joseph Pell Lombardi (restoration)
National Register Number: 73001218
Listed: August 28, 1973
Visited: June 21 and 24, and August 5, 2008

"If any building in New York deserves to be preserved in aspic, the Haughwout Building is it. With its skeleton of cast iron and its Otis elevator, this building is the best example of skyscrapers' roots." John Tauranac, The Empire State Building

Until the late 18th century, most buildings had their walls carry the weight of everything above them: such walls are called load-bearing walls. These walls, when made of brick, stone, or wood, will allow you to build only so high. For example, the north end of Chicago's Monadnack Building is one of the tallest brick load-bearing wall structures ever, but in order to carry the weight of all sixteen stories, the walls at the bottom floor are six feet wide. Theoretically the building could go even higher, but that'd mean the walls would need to be even thicker--and the thicker the walls get, the less space people have to occupy. New options arose with the mass production of metal alloys such as cast-iron and steel. A building could be construction from a frame of steel carries the weight of the exterior walls and everything else, and thank to steel's strength and lightness compared to other materials, these frames can be built very tall, allowing buildings to scale skyscraper heights.

The Haughwout uses metal as a structural element, and in that, it does prefigure the skyscraper. It also has a cast-iron façade whose repetition of prefabricated elements also serves as a prophecy of modern architecture, too. (I say more about this idea here.) But it doesn't actually have a "skeleton of cast iron," per se: its beams are timber and its north and east sides (the ones you can't see from the street) are good old-fashioned load-bearing masonry walls.

But yes, it had an elevator--the world's first passenger elevator. And I don't think I need to explain the importance of elevators to high-rises beyond pointing out that without an elevator, a great height is not something people are gonna want to scale on an everyday basis. This was the work of Elisha Graves Otis: while lifting devices were known at least since Archimedes, his wrinkle was a mechanism that would lock what was being lifted in place should its hoisting rope break, thus making vertical transportation reasonably safe for human use. It was steam-powered, did not have a fully-enclosed cab, and took a minute to go five stories; primitive, and not even that safe-sounding, but the company Otis founded would later be responsible for the elevators in such landmarks of New York height as the Flatiron, the Singer, the Woolworth, the Chrysler, the Empire State, and the World Trade Center. Today Otis Elevator is the biggest elevator company in the world.

It was built for the E.V. Haughwout & Co., a dry-goods purveyor of some repute. As Haughwout & Dailey, they supplied the Pierce White House with china; later Mary Todd Lincoln paid a visit to purchase a new set. Like the near-contemporary buildings for fellow retailers Cary, Howard & Sanger and Arnold, Constable & Company, and A.T. Stewart, the Haughwout was designed to overwhelm both the consumer and the passerby with bounty, inside and out. (It occurs to me that perhaps these stores aimed for an experience akin to the busyness of New York in microcosm.) Even twelve years after it opened, The New York Times could still describe the store as "colossal" in a A guide to Christmas shopping that also exhaustively enumerates the wares for sale:

"Besides their immense stock of crockery, glassware, chandeliers, gas fixtures, &c., of every descriptions, the HAUGHWOUTS have their store literally crammed from top to bottom with holiday goods. Bronzes of all varieties and patterns, statues, statuettes, Parian marbles, the Rogers groups, jardinieres, vases, artificial flowers and bouquets, bonbonnieres, jewelry, perfumery and handkerchief boxes, nicknacks of every description, in bronze and glass, and suited to the most moderate as well as the most expensive tastes..." The New York Times December 18, 1869

This, mind you, was only three floors (the top two were dedicated to decoration and manufacture) on a 6,000 square feet lot. Small as it was by our standards, an 1859 lithograph shows that in a city still dominated by small and sober Greek Revival buildings, it must've been received like a iron angel floated down from a cloud. Modeled after Biblioteca Sansoviniana in Venice, the façade's basic element is a window framed by an arch on top of two fluted Corinthian colonnettes, then framed again by two full columns of similar design. This gets repeated nearly a hundred times on the Haughwout's south and west faces, letting the wide and high windows shoot light through the interior. The result is the building seems both "richly sculpted," as Christopher Gray calls it, and as porous as a sponge.

Subject for further research: based on Google Books and the New York Times archive, it seems to me the Haughwout languished in a kind of fully-public obscurity once cast-iron façades went out of style, going about largely unremarked by the architectural intelligentsia for close to maybe half a century or longer, and had to wait quite a bit after the skyscraper retroactively rewrote much of architectural history in its image until it was recognized as an omen of things to come and re-recognized as beautiful. Even after that happened, even after it had been landmarked by the city and appeared on the National Register, it still took a while before it got properly restored--photos taken as part of the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1967 and 1970 make it look as if the windows above the first floor hadn't been washed for decades. Finally, in 1995, it got repainted--a cream instead of the black it had for a while--and had missing details replaced.

Only thirteen years later, it looks like it could use another coat of paint, with rust streaks running down here and there. No wonder cast-iron façades in New York City seem to have been designed with less and less detail as the 19th century progressed, evolving from the richly textured Cary and 75 Murray Street buildings to blunter, sparer neo-Grecs: after a while people musta realized that more detail meant more to paint and more to clean.

80. SoHo Historic District

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 04:26:00 +0000

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26; August 8 and 31, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report

To recap:

80a. 390 West Broadway
80b. 107 Spring Street and 105 Mercer Street
80c. 327, 325, 323, and 321 Canal Street
80d. 139 Greene Street and 143 Spring Street
80e. 307-311 Canal Street (a.k.a. The Arnold, Constable Building)
80f. 502-504 Broadway (a.k.a. Bloomingdale's SoHo.)
80g. 443-445 Broadway and 18 Mercer Street
80h. 383-385 and 391-393 West Broadway
80i. 427-429 Broadway (a.k.a. The A. J. Dittenhoefer Building)
80j. 448 Broome Street
80k. 65, 67, 69-71, 73, 75, 77, 79 and 81 Greene Street
80l. 28-30 Greene Street (a.k.a. The Queen of Greene Street)
80m. 72-76 Greene Street (a.k.a. The King of Greene Street)
80n. 47-49 Mercer Street
80o. 477-479 Broome Street and 469-475 Broome Street (a.k.a. The Gunther Building)
80p. 103-105 and 101 Greene Street
80q. 569-575 Broadway
80r. 109-111 Prince Street
80s. 549-555 Broadway (a.k.a. The Rouss Building)
80t. 112-114 Prince Street
80u. 484-490 Broome Street
80v. 443-449 Broome Street
80w. 561-563 Broadway (a.k.a. The Little Singer Building)
80x. 103-107 Prince Street (a.k.a. The SoHo Apple Store)
80y. 599-601 Broadway (and Forrest Myers' The Wall)
80z. 40 Mercer Street

Back down to Nolita, Little Italy, Chinatown and the Civic Center. But first: the E.V. Haughwout Building.

80z. SoHo Historic District

epicharmus@gmail.com (Michael) — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 02:50:00 +0000

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26; August 8 and 31, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report

In 1800, the area in Manhattan later known as SoHo was largely farmland, with some development around Canal and Broadway. In 1850, it was largely middle-class residential. In 1900--by my untrustworthy estimate--85-90% of SoHo's buildings that survive today were standing. Nearly every trace of its residential life had been replaced with ornate buildings dedicated to industry and retail.

By 1950, the prime retail was long gone, having moved, like just about everything else in New York City, further and further uptown, to bigger and bigger spaces: up Broadway to 14th Street, then Ladies' Mile, then the mammoth emporiums of Macy's and Bloomingdale's and Lord & Taylor. Industry was still there but making a long, slow fade, away from the obsolete buildings of SoHo. Upscale women's apparel, once its bedrock, was being made in the Garment District, leaving the neighborhood for the less respectable kinds, like underwear. Industry in general was moving away from the city, with the highways and airports built after the war making it economically practical to place factories outside the heart of the city, to the suburbs and beyond. Outside the city you could build big to produce big; as Charles R. Simpson put it in his book SoHo: The Artist in the City:

"The most competitive plants were very large, one-story buildings which could incorporate the new continuous material flow-systems. Mechanization, the key to the competitive advantage, had raised the average floor area per employee from 1,140 square feet in 1922 to 4,550 square feet in 1945."

A quick skim through the city government's map portal shows just how inadequate SoHo was to contemporary industry: the lot size of its buildings range from 502-504 Broadway's 16,670 square feet to 112-114 Prince Street's paltry 3,000; the old rowhouses from the early 19th century run even smaller. Simpson again:

"While suburban plants were accommodating block-long, continuous-bake ovens and huge rotary presses, firms in the South Houston District were finding that even forklift trucks were too large for use in thirty-foot wide structures and eight-by-eight foot elevators."

Artists took them over these old buildings, starting around the late 50s. And from then on ours is a familiar story of official arrogance and civic revolt, invisibility and edginess and unhipness. There are times when it seems like every person on every blog with a tenuous connection to New York knows about how Quango Moloch Robert Moses wished to piledrive an expressway thru Broome Street, destroying this and this and this and this and OMG this. And how Jane Jacobs helped bring the man down, fucking up one public hearing on the plan by destroying the stenotype machine recording the event, saying "There's no tape, so there's been no meeting." Or how all those artists sought changes in the zoning laws to make their illegal residences legit in the eyes of the law. And how the galleries and the restaurants and the museums and the luxury shops and the developers and the chains and the cupcake stores all followed. The script is so central to mythology of New York City urbanism that I feel no great urge to explain in any great detail how we got from this point to now; instead, I want to wave off versions of it as cliché. There are those who look at something like Jean Nouvel's blue-baby 40 Mercer Street building (pictured above), with its units priced at $6.9 and $8.2 million, as a sign that SoHo's lost its "edge" (which seems to have something to do with picturesque squalor, or the poor regarded as mere objects of aesthetic contemplation). Instead, I'd point out that the neighborhood has come full-circle of a sort: once residential, now residential again; once retail mecca, now retail mecca again. Not that this is an entirely satisfying run of events--no room for the middle class, the poor, art--but if anything's being betrayed, it's not the neighborhood's essence, if there ever was such a thing.