36. Wallace Building

Location: 56-58 Pine Street
Built: 1893-4
Architect: Oswald Wirz
National Register Number: 03000848
Listed: August 28, 2003
Visited: September 28 and November 10, 2007



Oswald Wirz designed a few New York City buildings in the Gilded Age; of those that survive, a few are in landmarked districts, another achieved an accidental and incidental fame by being across the street from the World Trade Center, and yet another is this one, which I'll get to in a bit. The most substantial information I have on the life of Wirz comes from NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission's designation report for this building. It is only a paragraph long. The details of his death are not alluded to, perhaps out of concision and perhaps out of delicacy. Google, being ruled less by social mores than algorithms, knows no such propriety, and so a search for "Oswald Wirz" spits out a tawdry New York Times death notice as the second or third result:

ARCHITECT COMMITS SUICIDE. Attributed to Despondency Due to Lack of Employment. Oswald Wirz, an architect, forty-nine years old, committed suicide yesterday in his flat, on the second floor of 544 West One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street. He inhaled gas from a rubber tube, attached to the pipe which supplied the kitchen range. Wirz lived with his wife, Josephine, and four children, the eldest of whom were May, twelve, and Laura, fifteen years of age. He came to America from Switzerland twenty years ago. Until five years ago he was connected with the firm of Wallace Brothers, but since leaving their employ had done no work. Mrs. Wirz and the two girls were out for a walk and returned home late in the afternoon. On opening the door they were driven out by the gas which filled the flat. Mrs. Wirz screamed, and neighbors went to her aid. Wirz was lying on the kitchen floor. Dr. Addoms of the J. Hood Wright Hospital said he had been dead for some time. The suicide is attributed to despondency.

The New York Times of 1900 judged Wirz's death as worthy of only three paragraphs, where the outrage of the day, the Jennie Bosschieter Case, gets over twenty on the same page. Not that there is any surprise in this. Bosschieter was drugged, raped, and murdered; she was an innocent despoiled, and stories like that write themselves. Wirz committed suicide, and why anybody kills themselves is an awful mystery few can bear dwelling on for long. So within the question mark of Wirz's life is another question mark, a blankness within a blankness. The only thing I know about Wirz with any depth is this building. But it's grand enough that if you, dear reader, could point me towards Wirz' grave, I'll gladly pour a 40 out for him.



Based on the evidence of the Wallace Building, I think he would've appreciated that. I'm not sure where the hip-hop practice of pouring out liquor in remembrance of the dead comes from, but even if it's not Africa-via-Cuba-via-New Orleans as I'm guessing, it has to be incredibly old, a pagan ritual hiding in plain sight within modern America. And likewise, in the old-growth forests of the Wall Street region, so thick with buildings the sun can barely shine through, Wirz made the Wallace Building a home for nature deities long abandoned. On the facade, we can see a terra cotta representation of the Green Man.



He is a decorative element used in British architecture since the 11th century depicting a man made of foliage, or smothered in foliage, or sprouting foliage in his mouth. He is an echo of European Gods annihilated or subsumed into Christianity. He personifies nature; he also effaces the distinctions between the human and the natural worlds. He (and a few compatriot dragons) seem to give birth to a crazy tangle of terra cotta decoration that cover parts of the building like kudzu. The details lack the fineness of the terra cotta of Sullivan's Bayard-Condict; they do not achieve and do not pretend exact symmetry, but do achieve something of the play between order and randomness that makes our experience of nature so satisfying.