26. Empire Building

Location: 71 Broadway
Built: 1895-1898
Architect: Kimball & Thompson
National Register Number: 83004643
Listed: August 28, 1998
Visited: September 28 and October 4, 2007



Trinity Church is sandwiched between Trinity Building and Empire Building. While these two office buildings were built about fifty years after the church and are somewhat taller, they make a fetching box. They offer the viewer standing in Trinity's property two vast skyscapes of windows: Empire's rows and rows of neo-Classical window surrounds and rustication, and Trinity's slightly more subdued expanse of GOTH. (I hafta admit I like the Trinity building better, especially the even Gothier inside, which feels like a church retrofitted for accounting.) In return, the apartment-dwellers of Empire get a smashing vista of...gravestones. Very important gravestones, mind, but dead people is still dead people and I can't help but think how it must irk the living. Maybe they condition themselves to it. Maybe when they absently peep out their windows every morning, they make-believe the gravestones are some kind of rustic architectural detail without meaning. Maybe they tell themselves that these people, long buried in these brownstone graves, are SO DEAD they're practically not even dead anymore.

There are supposedly wonderful qualities to the Empire Building's entrance -- the AIA Guide to New York City calls it "a triumphant Roman ensemble" -- but it was largely hidden by scaffolding both times I visited. Such is the curse of scaffolding: all around the city, it obscures buildings for obscure reasons.