Manhattan, Tear Down These Walls!

MetLife, 200Park Avenue
(Photo: Marilynn K. Yee/NYT)

Nicolai Ourossoff, the architect critic of NY Times, has a very incisive column about some buildings in Manhattan sharing three characteristics: they are important; they are representative; they are terribly ugly. You can see them in the presentation that follows:



I respectfully disagree with Mr. Ourossoff. Not that those buildings wouldn't be ugly, no question about that. But my point is that without them Manhattan would miss its spirit. Manhattan is a fascinating city consisting in ugly impressive buildings. It fascinates because of their ugliness. It is remarkably exquisite because of their ugliness. It is sophisticated because of their ugliness.

Why is that? Here is a possible answer: Manhattan is a city of individuals. Rather than a community it is just the sum of each individuality there. These buildings express each one the determination of someone. They cannot be but aggressive and indifferent for the whole, because each one says Here I Am.

Will they disappear? Yes, each one at its own time, when another strong guy will impose his mark over the place.

Well, that's my view. Now you should read the article:

Even the most majestic cities are pockmarked with horrors. The knowledge that every shade of architectural experience, from sublime to excruciating, can exist in such compressed space is part of a city’s seductive pull. Yet there are a handful of buildings in New York that fail to contribute even on these grounds. For them the best solution might be the wrecking ball.

Not a day goes by, I would guess, that a Parisian strolling through the Luxembourg Gardens doesn’t glance up at the lifeless silhouette of the Montparnasse Tower and wish it away.

Tour Montparnasse, Paris

The endlessly repeated joke is that the tower offers the best views in the city because it is the only place from which you cannot see it.

View of Paris from Tour Montparnasse

Many New Yorkers feel the same way about the MetLife Building (formerly the Pan Am Building), whose dull gray concrete facade punctuates the southern end of Park Avenue like an anvil, blotting out a once-glorious view of Grand Central Terminal. In my own neighborhood near Union Square I’ll occasionally catch people shaking their heads as they pass by a bizarre confection decorated with a vulgar pattern of gold rings on 14th Street.

So here’s what I propose. True, the city is close to broke. But even with Wall Street types contemplating the end and construction of new luxury towers grinding to a halt, why give in to despair? Instead of crying over what can’t be built, why not refocus our energies on knocking down the structures that not only fail to bring us joy, but actually bring us down?

Ugliness, of course, should not be the only criterion. There are countless dreadful buildings in New York; only a few (thankfully) have a traumatic effect on the city.

For this reason buildings that I’ve often ridiculed failed to make my list. I toyed with the idea, for example, of including the AT&T Building (now the Sony Building). I’ve disliked it since 1984, when it appeared (in miniature) cradled in the arms of its architect, Philip Johnson, on the cover of Time magazine. Its farcical Chippendale top was an instant hit, and a generation of architects grew up believing that any tower, no matter how cheap and badly designed, could be defended if you added a pretty fillip to the roof. Yet Johnson’s building also represents a turning point in architectural history. And I eventually came to the conclusion that destroying it would be cultural censorship.

Nor have I included the MetLife Building, although it is one of the most resented structures in New York. (The name change made things worse. Pan Am evoked the glamour of 1960s air travel; MetLife makes you think of life insurance and car crashes.) The tower’s chiseled concrete exterior does create a nice tension with Warren & Wetmore’s 1929 Helmsley Building. And while the lobby was callously renovated in the 1980s, it could be restored, amplifying the flow of movement from 45th Street down into the station.

So the list will not include affronts that are merely aesthetic. To be included, buildings must either exhibit a total disregard for their surrounding context or destroy a beloved vista. Removing them would make room for the spirit to breathe again and open up new imaginative possibilities.

Here, then, are my top candidates for demolition.

MADISON SQUARE GARDEN AND PENNSYLVANIA STATION
No site in New York has a darker past than this one. The demolition of the old Pennsylvania Station, the monumental McKim, Mead & White Beaux-Arts gem that stood on this site until 1964, remains one of the greatest crimes in American architectural history. What replaced it is one of the city’s most dehumanizing spaces: a warren of cramped corridors and waiting areas buried under the monstrous drum of the Garden.

Old Penn Station

Over the years the city has entertained dozens of proposals to improve the station, but none have amounted to much of anything. A decade ago Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan unveiled a multibillion-dollar plan to relocate the entrance at the grand old Farley Post Office Building, a McKim, Mead & White treasure on Eighth Avenue, which would free up more space underground. But the plan became entangled in New York’s byzantine development politics and fizzled.

A few years ago two of New York’s biggest developers, Vornado Realty Trust and the Related Companies, came up with an ambitious plan to move Madison Square Garden to a site west of the Farley Building. New towers would rise on valuable land above and around Penn Station, but the plan would also have opened up enough space above the station that light and air could filter into the waiting areas below. Unfortunately that all unraveled when a scandal brought the resignation of Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who had been a supporter of the project. With little room to maneuver, the state and city are now desperately trying to patch together a modest proposal that would create a new entrance to the station from Eighth Avenue.

The lesson from all this? Demolish the Garden. As arenas go, it is cramped and decrepit. And with it gone we could begin to imagine what a contemporary version of the old Penn Station might look like, with light and airy spaces and cavernous entry halls. In short, it could be a monumental gateway to the 21st-century metropolis. Any other plan is just fiddling around.

TRUMP PLACE
Several years ago I had the opportunity to peer into Donald Trump’s heart over a brief lunch. The meal was pretty sedate until Mr. Trump seized on the topic of Mar-a-Lago, his palatial estate in Palm Springs, Fla. Have you ever watched craftsmen apply gold leaf? he asked, his eyes lighting up. I hadn’t. You really have to see it, he said. The sheets are so thin that if you hold one up to the ceiling and blow, it takes the shapes of the molding. It just sticks there.

Extending his fingertips in front of his lips as if they were supporting a sheet of gold, he blew into the air.

The moment summed up the magic of Donald Trump. You may find his Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue gaudy, but doesn’t its cockiness makes you grin?

So how to explain Trump Place? A cheap, miserable contribution to an area of the city already in need of some mending, this luxury residential complex is about as glamorous as a toll plaza.

Viewed from the West Side Highway its regimental rows have the mind-numbing regularity of Soviet-style housing. A few concrete planters try to soften the complex’s relationship to the elevated highway, but the effect only makes the buildings look more inhuman. On a recent visit I watched a nanny pushing a stroller up the sidewalk and found myself wondering what effect such a dehumanizing environment would have on the little creature bundled up inside.

It could be that Mr. Trump was out of his element on the Upper West Side, which until recently at least was culturally distant from the glitzy boutiques of Midtown. But what is more likely is that it was a cynical effort to cash in on the Trump name. One answer is more gold leaf. A better one is to demolish the complex and start again.

JACOB K. JAVITS CONVENTION CENTER
Pei Cobb Freed & Partners’ Javits Center was never considered one of the firm’s best designs. Many of its most graceful features, like a glittering entry hall that would have opened up to the Hudson River, were eliminated because of budget constraints. And the black glass exterior gives it the air of a gigantic mausoleum.

Javits officials, meanwhile, have been complaining for more than a decade that the building is too small to compete with bigger convention centers. The city has considered several expansion plans, but there was never money to pay for them.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that a number of planners pointed out the obvious: With the continuing redevelopment of the Hudson River, the convention center stands on some of the most promising — and valuable — land in the city. As is, it cuts Midtown off from the waterfront. The site would serve better as housing than as a shed for dog shows and car fanatics.

ANNENBERG BUILDING, MOUNT SINAI MEDICAL CENTER
What inspires architects? Central Park, conceived as a place of social healing, is one place to start. The pledge of medical workers to do no harm could be another.

So what were the designers at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill thinking when they created the Annenberg Building? Completed in 1976, this towering structure, clad in rusted Cor-Ten steel, looks like either a military fortress or the headquarters of a sinister spy agency. The narrow horizontal bands of bronzed windows add to the sense of hostility.

But what’s more disturbing is the tower’s savage effect on its surroundings. The tower anchors a sprawling complex that extends from Fifth to Madison Avenue, just north of 98th Street. Seen from Central Park the complex bears down on pedestrians with brutal indifference. To the east it faces the grim towers of the George Washington Carver public housing development. Together the two complexes break the rhythm of low brick prewar buildings as they march up Madison Avenue from Midtown, creating a silent barrier between the world of the moneyed classes to the south and East Harlem to the north. It’s a vision conceived without compassion.

375 PEARL STREET
During the 1970s AT&T built several towers to house wiring systems. The giant windowless boxes, clad in panels of pink granite or limestone, added nothing to the skyline.

But the New York Telephone Company (now Verizon) tower at 375 Pearl Street is a unique kind of horror. Seen from the Brooklyn Bridge’s elevated walkway it blots out one of the world’s greatest urban vistas, from the neo-Gothic crown of the Woolworth Building down to City Hall Park and across to the massive Beaux-Arts Municipal Building — a wedding cake building in the mold of Moscow’s Stalin-era apartment towers. Each time I cross the East River, I find myself wanting to throw my cellphone at the building.

So when I learned a few months ago that a proposal was in the works to transform the building into an office tower, I went to take a look. Could anything possibly save this horror? The plan was not only elegantly conceived; it also demonstrated a keen understanding of the tower’s singular qualities. The design, by Cook & Fox, would strip away the tower’s gray limestone cladding and rewrap it in glittering sheets of glass. The location of the elevator core at the building’s west side would allow for big open floors inside, and office workers would have some of the most stunning views of the city, from the Brooklyn Bridge and its tangle of offramps across to Wall Street and up to the Midtown skyline.

Unfortunately, what is needed is beyond the capacity of an upbeat developer and an enthusiastic architect. Anywhere else, the proposed redesign of this building would be a revelation.

ASTOR PLACE
Some patches of earth are cursed. Nearly a decade ago Cooper Union had ambitious plans for a small parking lot between the school’s main building and Lafayette Street. Ian Schrager, the hotelier, agreed to develop the site and hired two of architecture’s brightest stars: Rem Koolhaas and Jacques Herzog. Their collaboration led to a likable wedge perforated by round windows, giving it the look of a slab of Swiss cheese. But the budget quickly spun out of control, and Mr. Schrager eventually fired his architects.

A few years later he tried again, hiring Frank Gehry, who designed a hotel with an elaborate glass skin that resembled a woman’s billowing skirt. But then came the World Trade Center attack. The hotel business died, and Gehry too was dumped.

Frustrated, the school turned to the Related Companies, one of the city’s biggest developers, which hired the New York firm Gwathmey Siegel & Associates to design a luxury residential tower.

Though the tower’s curving glass-and-steel skin is an obvious reference to one of the masterpieces of early Modernism, Mies van der Rohe’s unbuilt 1922 Glass Skyscraper project, the crude quality of its execution is an insult to Mies’s memory. His vision was slender and refined. Gwathmey’s tower is squat and clumsy. Clad in garish green glass, it rests on a banal glass box that houses — what else? — rows of A.T.M.’s inside a Chase bank.

But lack of taste is not the point here. Neighborhoods are fragile ecosystems. And while enlightened designs can challenge the past, that is not the same as being oblivious to it. Astor Place would seem more comfortable in a suburban office park.

The East Village is saturated with memories of youthful rebellion. In recent years it has emerged as a crossroads between the world of would-be punks, awkward students and rich Wall Street types. The Gwathmey building serves only the last camp: it’s a literal manifestation of money smoothing over the texture of everyday life.

2 COLUMBUS CIRCLE
Edward Durell Stone’s building, which opened as the Gallery of Modern Art in 1964, incited one of the most bitter preservation battles in recent memory. Its defenders, who ranged from the writer Tom Wolfe to youthful preservation groups like Landmarks West, hailed its faux Venetian exterior as a slap against the prevailing standards of mainstream Modernism. Detractors, who would have been happy to see it leveled, mostly held up their noses, denouncing its swanky décor and cramped galleries as an urban eyesore.

The result? Everybody lost. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission was too cowardly to render a verdict and never reviewed the case. The building was turned over to the Museum of Arts and Design, which gutted it to make room for new galleries and stripped away its white marble exterior.

If the city had chosen to preserve it, a key historical landmark would still be intact. If the building had been torn down, a talented architect might have had the opportunity to create a new masterpiece on one of the choicest sites in the city. Instead we get the kind of wishy-washy design solution that is apt to please no one: a mild, overly polite renovation that obliterates the old while offering us nothing breathtakingly new.


(New York, New York)