But it also ended because of Ed Logue’s personal boldness in confronting nine towns in Westchester County and attempting to force upon each of them a small increment of low- and moderate-income housing. It would not have meant a thing to any of those communities if the 100 or 150 units of one- or two-story housing were built. But it didn’t happen. The winds had gone the other way. New York State pulled back its forces.
At a hearing in Bedford, one of the nine towns, Ed Logue had to have a bodyguard with him because of death threats, something he never faced in New York City. A woman in a long skirt got up and said, “You know it’s not the families that live here now that are poor, but it’s all of their friends from the Carolinas that they bring with them.”
At the end, the atmosphere had become less pleasant. Questions of financial mismanagement were raised. Of course there was none. The truth was no one was willing to put money into housing, and therefore the agency that was geared up to produce it had to be retrenched. The office of the chief of architecture, the design arm that hired the architects and did the planning, was eliminated. Who needs to hire architects when no building is going on? When they stopped doing housing in 1975, the excuse was that the programs weren’t there. The truth is the political will wasn’t there. The day Ed Logue left UDC, the heart of UDC left with him.
As chief architect of UDC, my mission was to help create the best housing in neighborhoods that could be created, no limits. While it lasted, I had the best architectural job in the world.
11
Looking at New York through Its Buildings
BILL GALLO: I always thought of buildings like heavyweight champions. The Empire State Building was the champion. Then the Twin Towers came up, and you felt sorry for the Empire State Building. That was still your champion.
MICHAEL GEORGE: A realtor once told me the mortgage on a new building in New York was twenty years. A building is built to last only twenty years because New York City changes so much that it pays to tear the thing down and build something fresh after that time.
The older guys built for forever. That’s why when Penn Station was torn down, which I regret so much, guys came to knock this thing down, and it would not fall. It would not fall.
I look at New York through its buildings. The city had grown up in the great classical age. The Public Library, which was built at the turn of the century, is an example of that kind of architecture. The sons of the people who did the Public Library continued to work in this style through the 1920s. Many of the architects who created the Greek classical buildings in Manhattan went to the École des Beaux Arts in Paris or were influenced by it. When in the 1950s and ’60s the international style became the aesthetic ideal, the calling card of architects in New York, that was the nail in the coffin of Beaux Arts architecture.
The Empire State Building at night.
GILLES LARRAÍN: All the great architects came here after the war: Mies van der Rohe, who did Seagram’s; Marcel Breuer, who did the Whitney. The Bauhaus idea was realized here. The power, the space was here. There are no ruins in America; you don’t have to deal with the ancient times, to adapt to it, to transform it. You are free to invent your own idea.
Penn Station in its heyday, around 1910. “Guys came to knock this thing down, and it would not fall.” Nevertheless it ultimately did, making way for the present Madison Square Garden/Penn Station complex.
CAROLE RIFKIND: The first modern postwar buildings of character and quality were the UN and Lever House in 1952 and the Seagram Building in 1958. The UN represented the tower in the park; it was Le Corbusier modern. Lever House has a low element that hugs the streetline. Compare that to the Seagram Building, which steps back in splendid isolation.
In the strong grid of Manhattan, it’s really difficult to build a strongly modernist building. Lever was hesitating; Seagram was assertive. But Seagram was a building that could never be built by anyone else because it was built as a corporate logo and no cost was spared. It could afford to underbuild on the site, making for a confluence between economics and the ambition to state something assertively.
Six riverfront blocks between 42nd and 48th Streets were leveled to make room for the United Nations building, completed in 1952.
GILLES LARRAÍN: The Seagram Building, recessed in a plaza, nicely proportioned, has character. The metal beam that is the structure is very close to the Greek column. The order, the repetition of that space creates a harmony.
CAROLE RIFKIND: The story of New York architecture is one of sacrificing to the expediency of real estate formulas, of the economic expectation one can get out of a site.
MICHAEL GEORGE: Park Avenue used to be a wonderful wall of apartment houses and hotels. They were part of the gigantic building boom of the 1920s, all uniform, of the same height and the same style that went down virtually to the New York Central Building and Grand Central Station and spilled down some of the side streets to Lexington Avenue.
In the 1950s and ’60s, the neighborhood was remade. A series of junky buildings went up, the white-brick apartment houses and the glass office towers. They also extended from Park Avenue back to Lexington, Third and Second Avenue. To be effective, the modern building has to shock. The Lever House and Seagram Building were a big shock, the opposite of what had been there before. But once other buildings came up copying the green glass, the shock was gone.
The New York Central Building had dominated Park Avenue and brought it to its conclusion in the same way the Arc de Triomphe ends the Champs-Elysées in Paris. Coming south down Park Avenue, the view was perfect. But coming north up Park Avenue South and seeing the great Grand Central tower was wonderful as well. You’d come up this ramp, and it would slow you down even if you normally do not look at things.
In the early 1960s, the Pan Am Building (now Met Life) came up and destroyed that image. It was a direct attack on the kind of architecture that had been done in the 1920s. It’s a much larger building than Lever House, twice as big as the Empire State Building, not in height but in size, probably half the size of the Pentagon.
Now there’s nothing wrong with having a tall building on a street. There’s nothing wrong with having a building behind another building. But there is something wrong with having a building neutralize perhaps one of the greatest views ever.
Here we are in the center of the world. In no other place would the center of town be a railroad yard. But here in Grand Central it is. The Grand Hyatt was originally the Commodore Hotel, which was done in the manner of Grand Central. But they stripped the thing down to its frame and put a glass wall on the outside. Behind the hotel is the smokestack, the power plant of Grand Central. You couldn’t see it before when it was the Commodore, but with the glass wall, it just stands out.
GILLES LARRAÍN: Many of the uptown buildings that were built in the postwar period have no signature; they have no character. They are just efficient places for the purpose of functioning as offices or apartments or whatever. Space for the floor, ten-foot ceilings, because that is efficient. It’s not designed with a vision; it’s designed with a purpose.
CAROLE RIFKIND: The building of the 1950s and 1960s was very destructive of a highly designed college campus like Columbia. I had a personal association with a particular postwar building at Columbia, a mean ugly student center. Since this building came up just before I got to Barnard, I accepted it as given. But we would much rather go to the drugstore on the corner and have a coffee than go into that so-called student center.
This building was one of the first to actually break the scale at Columbia, to disrupt the pattern, the height. It was a pallid structure of about fifteen to twenty stories in a very weak, reduced kind of abstract Georgian style that picked up the mannerism of what the old architecture had been like but didn’t really understand it at all. It came up around the time the college walk was enclosed. I suspect Columbia was having trouble attracting students to New York City with the social problems, the new immigrants that confronted prospective students
. Maybe they were trying to isolate the students from the city. It was a time of pulling in, of the red scare, of xenophobia. The Columbia College campus kind of closed in on itself.
Buildings represent the culture of their time. Retrograde times, retrograde architecture. The serious Eisenhower years with all their qualities were represented by Lever House or Manufacturers Hanover Bank. Modernism? Yes. Progressivism? Yes. But kind of timid, fearful of Communism, reflective of corporate America, McCarthy years—kind of conservatism. Even Seagram’s, great as it is, is not flaming modernism in terms of the ecological modernism of the Germans and the Bauhaus. It’s an example of the conservative modernism of the fifties.
JOHN TAURANAC: Many great buildings had come up during the 1920s and early 1930s but those styles had ended. There wasn’t any building to speak of during the Depression, and then the war came along when we were building bombers and not buildings. Building didn’t really begin until the mid-1950s, just around the time the Third Avenue El was torn down.
MICHAEL GEORGE: The Third Avenue El was the last El in Manhattan. I can remember riding it when I was a child, and like any child, I ran to the front window and looked out. The next time I saw Third Avenue, the El was gone. Suddenly Third Avenue was bright. You could not believe how wide the street was. And it triggered an explosion of building.
JOHN TAURANAC: Third Avenue, which had been in shadow for so long, metamorphosed into a boulevard and developed in a rush. Manhattan House, between 65th and 66th and between Second and Third Avenues, was the first prestigious apartment house up. One of the early white-brick buildings, it was set back from the street, breaking the regular grid pattern. And it had terraces. A cartoon appeared around that time where a table on a terrace is set for two and the woman is crying, “Hurry, dear, your soup’s getting dirty.”
The white-brick buildings that arose overnight became emblematic of Third Avenue. You can find them elsewhere in Manhattan, even on Park Avenue. Still, the biggest concentration of white-brick buildings is on Third Avenue. They were all given names—York Towers, Buckingham—but they were carbon copies of each other, and the original was not a good standard. The white-brick buildings had no sense of place. Aesthetics were held to a minimum. It was just to make a buck.
Terminus of the Third Avenue El in The Bronx. After the El was taken down, “Suddenly Third Avenue was bright.”
MICHAEL GEORGE: Why did they use white brick in a city that has lots of soot? I don’t know. But it became the material of choice along with the lower eight-foot ceiling.
There was tremendous change on the East Side. From First to Lexington had been a neighborhood of working people, with the exception of Beekman Place, Sutton Place, and Tudor City—which were along the river—and the area around Grand Central Station, which had lots of hotels. But the side streets and Third Avenue were lined with tenements. There weren’t many restaurants because people didn’t need restaurants; they cooked at home. You had grocery stores, fruit and vegetable stores, all the Main Street stuff. You could go two blocks and find it happening again. The idea was you never would have to walk more than two or three blocks to get whatever you needed. The people on Park Avenue had other people bring their food for them. Or they could go to the Waldorf or the Ambassador or one of the other hotels.
But once office buildings and apartment houses started to go up, they went up with tremendous speed. A building like the one on the northwest side of 54th and Lexington took a year and a half to build. Small stores and structures were cleared away and larger buildings taking up an entire block were put up.
JOAN WASHBURN: People still lived on 57th Street, but the property was becoming too commercial, and the landlords broke up the spaces, turning them into galleries or offices. Buildings were coming down and larger buildings were replacing them. There were a whole group of town houses on 57th and Madison taken down when the IBM Building came up.
MICHAEL GEORGE: The West Side changed too but not to the same degree. If you go along Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, if you go north of the Museum of Natural History on Columbus Avenue, you can see wholesale changes where block after block has been wiped out. The way you can tell, if it’s higher than six stories and there’s no ornament on the outside of the building, it came after 1960.
The beginning of the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s shows Fifth Avenue as a two-way street. All the avenues were two-way streets. It was a big, big deal to convert them to one-way traffic. In the 1950s, a traffic commissioner by the name of T. T. Wylie—they called him “One-Way” Wylie—not only came up with the idea that traffic would move more smoothly with one-way streets, he also came up with the idea of synchronized traffic lights. To make more room for cars, the sidewalks were narrowed. It may only be a matter of three feet, but the space of green along the curb was taken away to make room for the cars. Nevertheless, Manhattan remains a walking city.
One of the postwar goals was to get rid of all the slums. Another was to make more parks. There was this movement to expand the kinds of things the wealthy enjoyed so that those who were not so wealthy could enjoy them as well. That was one of Robert Moses’s visions. I don’t think Moses was a villain. A lot of things he did were good, and a lot of the things he did had very bad results.
JANE JACOBS: Robert Moses was the monarch of the city in the postwar period and a terrible influence on New York. His emphasis was on automobile traffic while public transit was left to deteriorate. The Regional Plan Association, which I understand is very different today, was also a bad influence. Its scheme for crosstown expressways would have totally Los Angelized Manhattan.
But a loose federation of activists, residents of the city who didn’t want to see what was being planned come to be, fought against such proposals. We weren’t urban planners. We were part of a grassroots uprising of people who recognized things were being done that hurt the life of the city.
Edith Lyons, who lived on West 9th Street in Greenwich Village, was one of the activists. Together with another daring woman, Shirley Hayes, she came up with the idea of closing Washington Square Park to automobiles. Until 1958, a roadway that originally had been a carriage drive carried traffic through the park from its Fifth Avenue entrance to its south side. Robert Moses proposed to close this roadway but compensate for it by trimming down the sides of the park and widening the perimeter streets, encircling the park with a high-speed traffic artery. This scheme was fought and defeated.
In the mid-1950s, Moses came up with a new plan: to build a major depressed highway through the center of the park that would carry high-speed traffic between midtown Manhattan and an expressway he wanted to develop south of the park.
Jane Jacobs, tireless urban critic and foil to Robert Moses’s efforts to “Los Angelize” Manhattan.
This was the impetus for Edith Lyons’s and Shirley Hayes’s idea to close the park to traffic altogether. It became a popular cause in the community. Ultimately, through tough political pressure, the community won. The park road was closed, first on a trial basis, and then permanently, while the perimeter streets stayed as they were.
While the battle was being waged, I was down at a hearing at city hall in the Board of Estimates chambers when Robert Moses got up to speak. “They’re nothing but a bunch of, a bunch of, a bunch of . . . mothers!” he said, characterizing his opponents.
They were a bunch of mothers who had gotten acquainted in the park as they watched their children play. But they, and other community activists, were the real leaders in New York, citizens who did stick their necks out and invested an awful lot of effort and time into what they thought was good for the city.
MARGOT GAYLE: In the early 1960s, the Jefferson Market Courthouse on Sixth Avenue and 10th Street, which was about half a block from where I lived, was put up for auction. They said they couldn’t locate any agency that could find any use for that odd building. But I knew that with really strong community demands, things that were not considered worthy at that time could be saved.
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�Why do you want to save that old pile?” people said to me.
“Well,” I said, “I really like it. You probably don’t, but let me remind you that your kids look up at the big clock in the tall brick tower when they go to P.S. 41, and you look at it when you take the Sixth Avenue subway. That clock is important in your life, and if you don’t save the building under it, you won’t have it.” And so we founded this organization called the Village Neighborhood Committee for the Clock on the Jefferson Market Courthouse.
At that time, everything old was being torn down. People didn’t think about conserving old buildings. Our committee, which included Lewis Mumford, Maurice Evans, and e. e. cummings, was in the forefront of something new. We met in my apartment. We had no money. But we did have an artist with us who designed Christmas cards of the Jefferson Market, and we sat on the steps of Jefferson Market and sold these Christmas cards. We got petitions signed. It was a heck of a fight that went on for about a year, but we succeeded.
Philip Wittenberg, a well-known lawyer, felt very strongly that the Village needed a new library. There was only a small library on Sheridan Square, and the Village was a highly literate part of town. He brought pressure that the Jefferson Market become a big central library. But here’s a funny thing: When the mayor said he would restore it for the New York Public Library, the library said, “That’s really nice. But we’d like to tear down the building and build a nice modern library.”
“No way,” said Mayor Wagner. He was a friend.
Giorgio Cavaglieri was the architect who transformed the Jefferson Market Courthouse into a library in 1967. One day I said to him, “I want to take you down to this area south of Houston Street and show it to you.” We walked down there about eight o’clock on a summer evening. It was still light out. But there was no one in sight. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.
Manhattan at Mid-Century Page 25