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.

99. US Courthouse

A.K.A.: Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse; Thurgood Marshall Federal Courthouse
Location: 40 Centre Street/40 Foley Square
Built: 1932-1936; currently under restoration
Architects: Cass Gilbert and Cass Gilbert, Jr.
National Register Number: 87001596
Listed: September 2, 1987
Visited: December 30, 2008
Official Documentation: NYCLPC Report; NRHP Nomination Form



As an urban space, the Civic Center does not work, and probably never will. Knock down the gallumphing modernist anonymoids, and you'd be left with a grand buildings in odd spatial and height relationships with each other. Tear them down--and this was seriously considered many times in the last hundred-plus years--and you're still left to contend with useless plazas and bridge-fed traffic arteries that make life difficult for the pedestrian. Remove them, and...well, now you're beyond the realm of real-world budgets and political will, so forget it. (Manhattan's most successful urban space outside of Central Park is inordinately devoted to mass media companies--what does that tell you?)



Like even the best buildings in the immediate vicinity, this courthouse provides grandeur in a frankly awkward way. Paired with the Municipal Building forms a solid, almost wall-like presence on the west side of Centre Street that isn't matched on the east: grand, but lopsided. And by itself, when consumed in one visual gulp, it feels like a unimaginative expression of expediency. Need to house a hunk of courtroom space and give your building a certain ineffable sense of gravitas? Well, tower + temple = problem solved! Yeah, at least it tries for ceremony--more you can say about certain other dreary places I've been stuck in thanks to jury duty--but all that austere neoclassical jazz below, I can't really warm up to. Its gilded pyramid makes up for a lot, though. That's perfectly sited to catch the rays of the sun and provide a little golden twinkle for the people on the ground.



This is Cass Gilbert's last work, by the way--he passed away in the middle of its construction, leaving his son, Cass Gilbert Jr. to see it through its completion. I'll be saying a lot more about him when I cover the Woolworth Building...which should be in a week or three! Happy New Year! I'm off to impromptu and drunken late night festivities at the 59th Street Apple Store! Woo!

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.

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.

37. Manhattan Company Building

AKA: Bank of The Manhattan Company Building; The Trump Building
Location: 40 Wall Street
Built: 1929-1930
Architect: H. Craig Severance
National Register Number: 00000577
Listed: June 16, 2000
Visited: September 28 and November 10, 2007



I was taking pictures for this blog when somebody, perhaps sensing from my guidebook that I might know something about architecture, asked me what building that was -- the one with the pyramid roof down the street. I told him well I uh...I dunno! The bitter irony was that I had just taken plenty of pictures of it just minutes before. When you get too close, the pyramid's angles are such that it pretty much disappears your line of sight. It was probably meant to be devoured from a distance, then: a beacon announcing its presence far and wide. It was the tallest building in the world for a few mere months until the people behind the Chrysler Building decided to totally cheat and top it with a 125 foot spire constructed within the building. It in turn was eclipsed by the Empire State Building, which was eventually eclipsed by the Twin Towers, which was etc. etc. As I learned from Dave Marsh's Trapped: Michael Jackson and the Crossover Dream (a great rock book, btw -- rock is often my frame of reference for all sorts of far-flung aesthetic artifacts), his disquisition on Thriller and the cultural context that made it (for a time) an omnipresent thing, being the biggest is always a set-up for being eclipsed, becoming #1 invariably leads to being #2. Today, while it's the fifth tallest building in New York even after all these years, its stature is a bit diminished: Donald Trump boasted on The Apprentice that he bought 40 Wall for a mere million, practically nothing even in the 20th century.

35. Bank of New York Building

AKA: Bank of New York & Trust Company Building
Location: 48 Wall Street
Built: 1928
Architect: Benjamin Wistar Morris
National Register Number: 03000847
Listed: August 28, 2003
Visited: September 28 and October 15, 2007



The Bank of New York has historical bragging rights that other, much bigger American banks do not. Not only is it the oldest American bank, it was founded in 1784 by actual Founding Father (not to mention ten-dollar bill cover model and Aaron Burr victim) Alexander Hamilton.

Save for a few brief moves to Greenwich Village on account of yellow fever, the bank stubbornly sat on the corner of Wall and William in form or another for two hundred years. King's Handbook of New York City 1892 has an engraving of the first bank on the site, a small Federal-style mansion with fantastically elongated windows. Calvert Vaux designed its replacement just a few years before the collaboration Frederick Law Olmsted that produced Central Park. King's book has a photo of it, some years after two floors were added: seven stories of brick, brownstone, and mansard roof that looks modest only in comparison to what the site -- and all of Wall Street -- would eventually become.



As if to admit Vaux's building amounted to insufficient ancestor worship, the replacement for Vaux's building marked a return to the architectural styles of America's birth. Both times I've photographed the building for this blog, the Federal-style lantern that's the building's most striking feature, was covered in black tarp, so you'll have to head on out to emporis.com or greatgridlock.net for a photo. It is not unlovable, but it strikes me as an oddball extravagance. The first time I really noticed the building, back in 2002 or so, I was hit with the feeling that the lantern was grossly inappropriate for a skyscraper. It's the 1920s, buildings are being built with new kinds of technologies, and yet architects are still finishing them with details derived from the ancients. No wonder modernist glass boxes were so exciting, at least for a time.

The Bank of New York finally severed its historical connection to the spot when the acquisition of Irving Trust allowed a move to One Wall Street. If a BONY employee is lucky enough to have a window office on the west side of One Wall, they can spend their idle moments looking over Trinity Church and its graveyard, the final resting place of Alexander Hamilton.

If you're keeping track of such things (and I know you are): for the umpteenth time, apartments. (And soon, a museum.)