41d. Wall Street Historic District

Location: Roughly bounded by Cedar Street, Maiden Lane, Pearl Street, Bridge Street, South William Street, Greenwich Street, and Trinity Place.
Built: N/A
Architect: N/A
National Register Number: 07000063
Listed: February 2, 2007
Visited: December 30, 2007



18 and 20 Beaver Street are the kinds of buildings historic districts are made for: too minor to landmark on their own--neither of them appear in the AIA Guide to New York City--but too redolent of a lost architectural context to give up. 20 Beaver Street looks like a Federal-style (right? Federal?) warehouse. Some net-sleuthing connects the site (and probably the building itself) to the Holmes & Haines cabinetmaking company starting at some indeterminate point early in the 1800s. By 1901, it is home to George A. Kessler & Co.; Kessler was a wine merchant written about in numerous New York Times articles, including this one about his escape from the Lusitania disaster and another on a mad expensive $300-a-plate "polar party." Later it became home to Samuel Lakow's custom office furniture business. Now it's a pizzeria.



Apart from its connection to a once-renowned furniture enterprise, the history of 18 Beaver is less obvious, but OMG would you just LOOK at this little neo-Renaissance hors d'oeuvre! OK, it looks decrepit up-close--the brick is quite possibly stucco and if I didn't know any better I'd say the moldings are painted cast-iron--but it might be a nice fixer-upper for somebody with money and a passion for this kind of thing.

41c. Wall Street Historic District

Location: Roughly bounded by Cedar Street, Maiden Lane, Pearl Street, Bridge Street, South William Street, Greenwich Street, and Trinity Place.
Built: N/A
Architect: N/A
National Register Number: 07000063
Listed: February 2, 2007
Visited: December 30, 2007



An art deco hypodermic needle. According to Emporis, the American International Building (Clinton & Russell and Holton & George, 1932) is tallest building in downtown Manhattan, the fifth tallest in New York City, sixteenth tallest in the United States, and forty-seventh worldwide. One short block away from Wall Street, it is nonetheless on the periphery of the neighborhood. Its entrance on the Pine Street side is typically in shadow, and save for a lone security guard who makes me kinda skittish about taking pictures of the place, curiously free of activity, even in the middle of a weekday. Should they re-open their observation deck, I suspect that would change, but it'll never happen. Just looking at those gorgeous but relatively unprotected decks that ring the top gives me the willikers, and you gotta figure the building's current tenant, the country's biggest insurance company, must feel the same way.

41b. Wall Street Historic District

Location: Roughly bounded by Cedar Street, Maiden Lane, Pearl Street, Bridge Street, South William Street, Greenwich Street, and Trinity Place.
Built: N/A
Architect: N/A
National Register Number: 07000063
Listed: February 2, 2007
Visited: December 30, 2007



One Chase Manhattan Plaza (Skidmore, Owens & Merrill, 1960) is considered another modernist masterwork, but I have less affection for it: only seven years older, it feels dated in a way its neighbor, the Marine Midland Bank Building, doesn't. Maybe it's because it's clad in bright 'n' shiny aluminum rather than the eternally "cool" negation of black. (Did New York City have black or near-black buildings before the Seagram Building?)



What I like, though, is the plaza itself: its Dubuffet mutant mushrooms and the stage-like views of The Manhattan Company Building and Louise Nevelson Plaza.

41a. Wall Street Historic District

Location: Roughly bounded by Cedar Street, Maiden Lane, Pearl Street, Bridge Street, South William Street, Greenwich Street, and Trinity Place.
Built: N/A
Architect: N/A
National Register Number: 07000063
Listed: February 2, 2007
Visited: December 30, 2007



A designation so new I can't find a map for it, thus I'm not sure what this historic district includes or excludes. All I know is that it's "roughly bounded" by seven streets, covers thirty-six blocks, and that it "includes significant buildings from as late as 1967."

That last bit is a likely reference to the Marine Midland Bank Building (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1967). I think there are only three post-war NRHP landmarks in Manhattan--the Guggenheim, Lever House, and the Seagram Building--so its inclusion in the historic is something of a nice surprise. I know the building fairly well. My dad worked for years at a investment bank once headquartered here, taking the family to see his office back on Christmas Eve 1977. Imagine my surprise when I saw Robert A.M. Stern declare the building a key work of American modernism on his PBS series Pride of Place. To me, it was just an anonymous box whose distinction from other anonymous boxes would be hard to grasp were it not for Isamu Noguchi's Red Cube. (The cube is that rare piece of corporate minimalist sculpture people (kids too) love rather than regard blankly.) Truth is, while I have never been hostile towards the minimalist modernism this building represents, I am still trying to understand and savor the tiny distinctions such buildings live and die by. One such distinction is the fact this building isn't a mere box: it actually has a trapezoid footprint, something invisible from the ground but unmistakeable from the sky, making the building a thin black wedge driven between the Equitable and 150 Broadway.

40. Equitable Building

Location: 120 Broadway
Built: 1915
Architect: Ernest R. Graham
National Register Number: 78001869
Listed: June 2, 1978
Visited: December 1, 2007



It's a cold weekend day and the old building stands mute.

It's a massive thing. Its sides are vast expanses of window uninterrupted by horizontal detail the way the nearby Empire Building is. The front and back reveals it to be h-shaped, probably to give more offices a window view, even if views of other windows. This prevents the Equitable from being a total exploitation of the volume one could get out of the city block, but it's still friggin huge. 1.2 million square feet in one building--even today, that's a lot, something like the square footage of a sizable mall.



All my sources (except, curiously, the National Register nomination application) cite the erection of this building as the catalyst for the passing of landmark zoning laws meant to prevent bastard cousins of the Equitable from preventing light and air from reaching New York City's streets. For the next couple of decades, No more walls of sheer verticality; instead, in order to achieve both great height and mass, buildings had to be tiered something like elongated wedding cakes. Considered out of its surroundings, the Equitable is something of a monster, something hard to really swallow in one view, but it doesn't seem quite so freakish thanks to its neighbors--the Bank of New York Mellon building, the Trinity Building and United States Realty buildings across the street, 140 Broadway, and 1 Liberty Plaza--who, while not as utterly domineering as the Equitable, do complement it in height or width or detail.



Mainly what I love about it though is purely accidental, nothing the builders could've planned for: the way the late afternoon light catches and enflames the building's crown.

39. Wall Street Subway Station (IRT)

Location: Under Broadway at Wall, Pine, and Rector Streets and Exchange Place
Built: 1905
Architect: Heins & LaFarge
National Register Number: 04001011
Listed: September 17, 2004
Visited: September 28, October 3, and December 1, 2007



This station is almost completely renovated; LowerManhattan.info says "interior rehabilitation project will conclude in late November 2007" but as of December 1st there were still construction guys doing something-or-other. Far as I can see, the main differences are the removal of electric blue bricks installed in a woebegotten 1979 renovation (a similar to the one in Bowling Green that smothered Heins & LaFarge's tilework with the color of tomato). Now the station is bright and white, and the original 1905 elements--the decorative iron work, mosaics the color of money, and terra cotta tiles depicting a stepped Dutch roof peeking over the original wall of Wall Street--can now sing their populist arias uninterrupted.



One thing missing though: a wooden ticket booth mentioned in the AIA Guide to New York City. I couldn't find it on any of my trips to the station, and I don't remember where it was supposed to be -- I used to work in the area for years but this wasn't my station. What I remember of it, pre-renovation, is ramshackle dimness, but that could describe the condition of most Manhattan subway stations I used until the mid-nineties, when it seemed like a whole bunch of them got cleaned up, one after the other. I don't miss the Bad Old New York anywhere near as much as you likely do, and the subways are one reason why.