How many proposals could the observation deck have seen in its 75 years?
Mira Akerman, 34, who flew to New York from Sweden for her wedding, has come to the top for a postnuptial kiss with new husband, Martin Nilsson, 33. Running out on the deck, still in her white wedding dress, she explains, “It’s such a New York thing to do.”
The City That Was, And the City That Is Now
By PAUL GOLDBERGER | August 18, 1991
THERE HAS BEEN NOTHING LIKE MCKIM, Mead & White before or since. Charles McKim, William Mead and Stanford White reigned over New York at the turn of the century. They designed Pennsylvania Station, the original Madison Square Garden, the Villard mansions, the Pulitzer mansion, the Morgan Library, the University Club, the Century Club, the Metropolitan Club, the main post office, the Washington Square arch, the Brooklyn Museum, the campus and most of the buildings of Columbia University, and on and on and on.
All their work in New York—which was but a fraction of their total output—was characterized by a sure sense of urban presence. These were buildings in the city and of the city; even the most private of their private houses uplifted the public realm through an elegant facade, handsome detailing and a respect for the street. And the firm’s truly public buildings, like Pennsylvania Station, the Morgan Library and the Municipal Building behind City Hall, did more than just acknowledge the public realm; they truly ennobled it. These buildings were the output of an imperial city in its ascendance.
Few of McKim, Mead & White’s buildings followed any historical model exactly. These architects looked to history not for something to copy, but for inspiration; they were consistently inventive within the historic framework in which they operated. If they did not believe, as their near contemporaries Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan did, that the past was a drag on their creative energies, neither did they have any sense of being enclosed or trapped by it. Historical architecture was able to do for McKim, Mead & White precisely what Frank Lloyd Wright argued it could never do for anyone, which was spark creativity. Both McKim and White loved the city they were making, and believed deeply in the notion that every building contributed something to the larger idea of the city, to the idea of a public realm that everyone, including those who never had any reason to enter a particular building, could benefit from. They believed that architecture could be not only ennobling but sensuous as well.
Subdued Tower Of Light
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF | March 22, 2007
IN THE YEAR SINCE THE CONCRETE FRAME OF Frank Gehry’s first New York building began to rise along the West Side Highway in Chelsea, architecture fans have been quarrelling over its design. Are the curvaceous glass forms of the IAC headquarters building, evoking the crisp pleats of a skirt, a bold departure from Manhattan’s hard-edged corporate towers? Or are they proof that Mr. Gehry’s radical days are behind him?
Well, both. Mr. Gehry is adding a much-needed touch of lightness to the Manhattan skyline just as the city finally emerges from a period of mourning after the 9/11 attacks. The IAC building, serving as world headquarters for Barry Diller’s media and Internet empire, joins a growing list of new projects that reflect how mainstream developers in the city are significantly raising the creative stakes after decades of settling for bland, soul-sapping office buildings.
Yet the building, which is not quite complete, also feels oddly tame. For those who have followed Mr. Gehry’s creative career, these easy, fluid forms are a marked departure from the complex, fragmented structures of his youth. Rather than mining rich new creative territory, Mr. Gehry, now 78, seems to be holding back. The results—almost pristine by Mr. Gehry’s standards—suggest the casual confidence of an aging virtuoso rather than the brash innovation of a rowdy outsider.
Mr. Gehry’s structure looks best when approached from a distance. Glimpsed between Chelsea’s weathered brick buildings, its strangely chiseled forms reflect the surrounding sky, so that its surfaces can seem to be dissolving. As you circle to the north, however, its forms become more symmetrical and sharp-edged, evoking rows of overlapping sails or knifelike pleats. Viewed from the south, the forms appear more blocky.
This constantly changing character imbues the building’s exterior with an enigmatic beauty. And it reflects Mr. Gehry’s subtle understanding of context. Rather than parodying the architectural style of the surrounding buildings, he plays against them, drawing them into a bigger urban composition. The sail-like curves of the west facade seem to be braced against the roar of the passing cars. The blockier forms in back lock the composition into the lower brick buildings that extend to the east.
Suddenly, a Landmark Startles Again
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | July 21, 1991
The Flatiron building at night.
PERHAPS IT WILL NEVER LOOK AS DRAMATIC as it did in 1902 and 1903, when its surprising triangular form shot up at the foot of Madison Square. But the Flatiron Building is still as startling an architectural sight as one can find.
In 1901, a syndicate including Chicago’s George A. Fuller Construction Company filed plans for a 20-story building on the triangular plot bounded by 22nd and 23rd Streets, Broadway and Fifth Avenue. The building was never the city’s tallest, but its location in what was then the main shopping district made it one of the most famous. Making full use of the small, oddly shaped lot, it rose straight up, directly and bluntly, from its wedge-shaped site—no setbacks, turrets, towers or domes.
But what was to a professional journal simply a “conventional skyscraper” attracted crowds, “sometimes 100 or more,” said The New York Tribune in 1902. They looked up “with their heads bent back until a general breakage of necks seems imminent.”
Stories of the wind effects of the building are apparently true. In February of 1903, a gust magnified by the great triangle blew John McTaggart, a 14-year-old messenger, out into Fifth Avenue where he was killed by a passing automobile.
In 1929, the Fuller Company moved out, and the Flatiron Building gradually became a gritty symbol of an aging section of town. But now the building’s owner, Jules Olsheim, is cleaning accumulated years of grime off the facade, a $1 million project that is turning heads as the massive, familiar wedge suddenly seems to float out of a dingy shroud.
A New City Is Emerging Downtown
By ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE | March 29, 1970
Lower Manhattan in the late 1960’s.
LOWER MANHATTAN, THE SOUTHERN TIP OF the island behind all the famous skyline views of those clustered Wall Street spires, is not so much in a state of renewal as in a state of explosion. The rising towers of the 110-story Trade Center will only be the top of the iceberg. What is going on from the Battery to Brooklyn Bridge is the remaking of a city. It usually takes bomb damage or bulldozer public renewal to produce clearance and rebuilding on a comparable scale.
An expatriate New Yorker with Lower Manhattan memories of small buildings redolent of coffee and spices and the graces of the Greek Revival would be lost. The handsome, five-story, red-brick rows that survived the 1830’s and 1840’s virtually intact along the East River are almost all gone. So are slips and streets with historic names.
There are a few 19th-century survivals and landmarks—India House, Fraunces Tavern, Sweet’s restaurant in the Fulton Street row are slated for lonely preservation as the South Street Seaport.
What has been lost is New York’s past, and that part of the story casts no glory on the city or its developers. What is being gained is a kind of planning and architectural quality all but unknown to 20th-century New York. The best will be spectacular. We are witnessing the coming of New York’s Second Skyscraper Age.
From the Rubble, Ideas for Rebirth
By DEBORAH SOLOMON | September 30, 2001
INEVITABLY, WE TALK OF REBUILDING THE World Trade Center, envisioning a moment beyond the ash-coated present. Such thoughts console. Building is not just a matter of office space and revenue. It is also a basic human impulse, a means for imagining an ordered universe.
> Still, many feel that the void created by the fallen towers needs to be preserved, preferably in the form of a park. Empty space can have its own eloquence, be a place of memories, of unrushed reflection.
What should rise on the site where the twin towers stood? Following are suggestions from some esteemed architects and artists.
LOUISE BOURGEOIS, Sculptor That we will have to make a memorial is obvious. The memorial should be a list of the victims’ names; names beautifully hand-carved into stone. I have a lot of carvers. We will do that with a chisel and a hammer.
RICHARD MEIER, Architect The site should not be a park. We already have a great new park along the west side. A park is not an appropriate symbol of what happened here. We need office space, we need new buildings that are an even greater symbol of New York than what was there before.
JAMES TURRELL, Sculptor People want a memorial now because they’re feeling emotional, but emotion passes, all emotion passes, and then the memorial has no meaning. We should not feel bad about building on top of the ashes. All cultures are built on top of earlier cultures. The new buildings should be higher than the old ones, and there should be three of them.
DAVID M. CHILDS, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, architects We need to go back in and make downtown absolutely breathtaking. There should be some great piece of sculpture that reminds us of the tragedy, spaces of landscape where one could sit and contemplate, and some kind of cultural center, maybe a jazz museum.
ROBERT ROSENBLUM, Professor of art history at New York University It sounds like a Richard Serra opportunity. But I think it should be a ghost monument. It should be a tall building that is reminiscent of the original building and that is totally useless. A phantom building. I’m thinking of a Jenny Holzer, with phantom lights and something that is immaterial, translucent, gossamer. Or else we could just have a pile of rubble.
Stuntman Walks a Tightrope Between Trade Center Towers
By GRACE LICHTENSTEIN | August 8, 1974
COMBINING THE CUNNING OF A SECOND-story man with the nerve of an Evel Knievel, a French high-wire artist sneaked past guards at the World Trade Center, ran a cable between the tops of its twin towers and tightrope-walked across it.
Hundreds of spectators created a traffic jam shortly after 7:15 a.m. in the streets 1,350 feet below as they watched the black-clad figure outlined against the gray morning sky tiptoeing back and forth across the meticulously rigged 131-foot cable.
Finally, after perhaps 45 minutes of knee bends and other stunts, Philippe Petit turned himself over to waiting policemen. (He was released from custody a few hours later at the direction of Richard H. Kuh, the Manhattan district attorney, who made a deal to drop the charges in exchange for a free aerial performance in a city park “for the children of the city.”)
No date or place has been announced yet.
“If I see three oranges, I have to juggle. And if I see two towers, I have to walk,” Mr. Petit, a professional stuntman, explained afterward in heavily accented English, punctuating his sentences with a Gallic “bon!”
The day was an extraord inary climax to months of scheming by Mr. Petit, 24, and several accomplices. They masqueraded as construction workers wearing hard hats when they began taking their cable, rope, guy lines and other equipment to the uppermost floors of the still-unfinished North Tower three nights ago. With a five foot crossbow, they shot an arrow carrying a hemp cord across to the south tower. They passed heavier lines until they were able to lay a galvanized steel cable across the gap.
Mr. Petit said he had hesitated about taking the initial steps because there was a stiff breeze.
He was finally brought in by a policeman who shouted, “Get off there or I’ll come out and we’ll both go down.” As he was led away, street-level spectators booed the police while construction workers tried to shake Mr. Petit’s handcuffed hand.
TOURIST ATTRACTIONS
A Familiar Haunt, But in a New Light
By RITA REIF | April 4, 1999
Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia named the library lions Patience and Fortitude, for qualities he felt New Yorkers would need to survive the Great Depression.
The Rose reading room.
THE GLOOMY WINTER AND THE BRIGHT spring have provided the proof. The glorious fullness of light that the architects John M. Carrere and Thomas Hastings envisioned 90 years ago for the New York Public Library’s main reading room has returned.
The room—the length of a football field, the height of a cathedral nave—was darkened during the blackout days of World War II when its 15 soaring windows were painted over. Over time, entire tiers of bulbs in the chandeliers short-circuited and lighting fixtures on the book stands and reference shelves burned out, never to be repaired or replaced. Now, after a $15 million renovation, the room is filled with light, even on the darkest days. The windows gleam with exquisite clarity, each pane replaced with energy-efficient glass that prevents ultra-violet damage to the books and the painted or stained-wood surfaces throughout the room. Lighting fixtures—new or, in some cases, refurbished—have made the titles on the spines of the books easy to read again.
“Architecture is all about light,” said the architect Lewis Davis, who masterminded the restoration, paraphrasing his mentor, Louis Kahn.
Light even influenced the choice of new finishes on the American white oak furniture throughout the room. The sun had bleached some surfaces in the north and south sections, so they were refinished in a paler tone than their original nut brown.
As for the lights, 60 baluster-shaped lamps with bronze bases and brass shades were made by the Excalibur Bronze Sculpture Foundry of Brooklyn to go along with 100 originals that survived. Excalibur also made the cone-shaped white-glass hanging lamps in the book delivery and retrieval area. These replaced those with green-glass shades, which people who studied in this room decades ago remember.
Jerry W. Henderson, who fields questions at the information desks in the room and has worked at the library for 39 years, said visitors still asked, “What ever happened to those emerald green lamps?” He said he didn’t miss them: “They were part of the darkness that’s gone now.”
The Glow at the City’s Heart
By PAUL GOLDBERGER | December 24, 1976
The 71st annual lighting of the tree at Rockefeller Center in 2003.
THE PRESENCE OF WHAT MUST BE THE world’s most famous Christmas tree would alone make Rockefeller Center the city’s symbolic heart at Christmas; the nearness of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the great stores of Fifth Avenue confirms it. Tourists swarm about the center, attracted by the tree and the free show of ice skaters gliding across the sunken plaza. But the thick crowds at this time of year contain a fair share of New Yorkers as well, who come remembering Christmases past at Rockefeller Center and see in the great Christmas tree and decorated plaza a sense of continuity in a changing city.
Rockefeller Center is at its best at Christmas. In the clear, crisp December air the towers stand out sharply against the sky with an air of nobility unmatched by postwar skyscrapers. The tree is only the beginning of the holiday decorations—the best part of the center’s display is doubtless the angels sculpted of white metal wire that line the promenade from Fifth Avenue to the central plaza; they appear to be raising their trumpets not only the Christmas tree but also in celebration of the height and drama of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, which rises grandly at Rockefeller Center’s midpoint.
The plaza is constant theater, its ice skaters the cast of a pageant, and all we as visitors need to do to understand the plaza is allow ourselves to be pulled toward it and to look down into it.
Rockefeller Center’s design strikes a brilliant balance between the traditional and formal values of 19th-century Beaux-Arts design and the machine-age romanticism of 30’s modernism. On the promenade at Fifth Avenue, the center’s traditional aspects hold sway. The Maison Francaise is to the left, the British Empire building to the right, low, symmetrical structures defining a comfortable pedestrian street between th
em. The sense is of a clear order leading to a central focus, the sunken plaza and, behind it, the 70-story tower of 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
Walk down the promenade toward the central plaza: its power as a magnet is considerable. The plaza is constant theater, its ice skaters the cast of a pageant, and all we as visitors need to do to understand the plaza is allow ourselves to be pulled toward it and to look down into it. Paul Manship’s Prometheus at the edge of the plaza enhances the central focus of the complex. Inside the GE Building—originally the RCA Building—is a lobby that is a grand setting for a 30’s movie about corporate power.
“Cesspool of the World”
By THOMAS F. BRADY | February 21, 1969
Once besieged by adult entertainment, Times Square has become family-friendly.
“TIMES SQUARE HAS BEEN A RUNNING SORE as long as I’ve known it—anyway for 15 years,” Chief Inspector Sanford D. Garelik says.
A plainclothes inspector calls it “the cesspool of the world,” adding, “The dregs of the whole country drain into our sump.”
In December, the last month for which complete statistics are available, the arrests made in the Times Square area for robbery, felonious assault, larceny, narcotics, disorderly conduct and prostitution and other sex offenses amounted to 25.6 percent of the city’s total, slightly more than double the proportion from December 1966.
The New York Times Book of New York Page 17