97. Municipal Building

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.

89. Former New York Life Insurance Company Building

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.

33. First National City Bank

AKA: Regent Wall Street Hotel; National City Bank; Merchants' Exchange
Location: 55 Wall Street
Built: 1836-1841
Architects: Isiah Rogers; McKim, Mead & White (1907 addition)
National Register Number: 72000872
Listed: August 18, 1972
Visited: September 28 and October 15, 2007

The same building as before. Yeah, it was landmarked twice -- two different dates, two different numbers, two slightly different names. No, I don't know why. Was it this an oversight? Maybe one was an exterior designation and the other an interior one? Shrug.

Here's another picture, then:

32. National City Bank

AKA: Regent Wall Street Hotel; First National City Bank; Merchants' Exchange
Location: 55 Wall Street
Built: 1836-1841
Architects: Isiah Rogers; McKim, Mead & White (1907 addition)
National Register Number: 78001875
Listed: June 2, 1978
Visited: September 28 and October 15, 2007



First it was the Merchants' Exchange. Replacing a building destroyed in the Great Fire of 1835, it was a stern Classical Revival building with an colonnade of twelve Ionic columns (with another four behind at the recessed entrance), each fashioned from a single block of stone. After the exchange failed, it was home to the New York Stock Exchange for twelve years; then it became the Customs House before the Customs House. Then it was bought by the National City Bank. Crazily, they hired McKim, Mead & White to add four more stories to the three-story building, including a Corinthian colonnade perfectly aligned with the colonnade below. Eventually the National City Bank became Citigroup, ranked by the most recent Forbes Global 2000 as the biggest company in the whole wide world. (You have to wonder if buildings connected to Wal-Mart, Apple, Microsoft, or the Home Depot will ever get landmarked. Yeah, probably.)



The building is now dedicated to...condos. Surprised? Well, OK, the website for 55 Wall Street actually calls them "residences," something I'm fine with since "condo" has become such a tainted word. The residence-condo-whatevers themselves look dandy, but in a puzzling lapse, the opening animations feature posed club scenes with such past-peak personalities as cell-phone-throwing model Naomi Campbell, and a man whose face has been so ruined by plastic surgery its texture has been likened to dog food, Mickey Rourke. There is also a ballroom where a banking hall used to be; from the looks of it, an intoxicating venue, prompting dreams of champagne-fueled waltzing in the first flush moments of a new year. But when I write this, a website promoting an subscription-only concert series for the well-off plays Lenny Kravtiz in loop, and like Campbell and Rourke, Kravitz is a picture of nightlife glamor at least a decade stale.