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.