102. New York Telephone Company Building

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

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.