Built Manhattan: An Arbitrary Road Map • Posts Tagged ‘architecture’

The first Trinity Church (1698) burned in the Great Fire of 1776, which was apt (if not pleasant) given its connections to the Loyalist cause; the second was replaced awfully tardily (1790), had a good forty-year run until it was pulled down on purpose on account of heavy snows. So this is the third. The picture’s abstract, sure, but you know what it looks like. It’s the dark eminence at the end of Wall Street, God’s vacation home in the land of Mammon. Comprehend its shadows and you comprehend the building: the church is a signpost for the windswept Romanticism of the Gothic Revival, coming into in its own in America at this time, with its emphasis on natural passion and irration, great contrasts of darkness and light, both on building facades and in men’s souls. But for all its buttresses and crocketing and ogive, its authenticity — that is, its likeness to those spooky old churches in Europe once called Gothic as a slur — does not go all the way. Its massing is symmetrical. It’s faced with brownstone, something the Europeans didn’t know. In fact, it’s not even made entirely of stone: the ceiling is made of wood and plaster. In other words, it makes concessions to the rational and the pragmatic. Why these half-measures? Was New York too damned practical? (Too damned money-driven?) Or wasn’t pure, true Gothic sort of redundant in New York once the city passed a certain threshold of size and complexity? Didn’t it feel impossibly old even when it was actually rather young? Wasn’t it already filled with extremes of light and shade in every imaginable sense?

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1844
170-188 Sullivan Street

Architect: Unknown
Location: 170-188 Sullivan Street

So intact, so streamlined: apart from the poppy colors, it looks as if it was floated in from a cloud from an earlier time, a speckless row in a city with so many compromises made between the past and present. But it is no such thing. A company bought up this and another row on the other side of the block, both of which had been owned by a family who’d kept them in rundown condition for a couple of decades. Rather than demolish the rows and put up something bigger, as was custom then and now, the company developed them into homes for the middle class, “modernizing” them by removing Greek-Revival-and-after-details, and fashioning the interior space in the block into a communal garden area invisible from the street. As such, the Sullivan and MacDougal rows serve as very early examples of New York gentrification. And just as with nearly every other gentrification story the city has to offer, the middle class can’t touch the things now: Richard Gere lived on this row until a few years ago, and Anna Wintour still lives on the MacDougal side.

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1843
47 Irving Place

Architect: Unknown
Location: 47 Irving Place

Not many options available for this year. There is Ithiel Town’s Leake & Watts Orphan Asylum Building: a good subject, woefully under-appreciated, not even landmarked, but we’ve just covered Town. This paucity of 1843 buildings might be explained by a lingering depression triggered by the Panic of 1837, not that you’d never know from the opulence of the last couple entries. So we have this modest Greek Revival townhouse, built just south of Gramercy Park. Oscar Wilde may have lived here on his American tour, so there’s that.

Next door (and next year) is what’s known as the Washington Irving House, even though Washington Irving — who Americans remember for penning “Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle” and treat a little condescendingly as a kind of American literary superstar who came before the real heavyweights like Hawthorne, Melville, Poe — never actually lived here, this being the fiction of awesome crazy-lady Elsie de Wolfe.

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1842
Federal Hall National Memorial

Architects: Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis
Location: 26 Wall Street

“From both an architectural and historical point of view,” Nathan Silver writes, “Federal Hall might have been the greatest national landmark had it survived.” Silver’s referring to the Federal Hall that came before this Federal Hall, the building that for about a century was the City Hall before our City Hall, and then for a brief time was the US Capitol before the US Capitol, back when New York was the temporary capital of the country — the Washington, DC before Washington, DC. The Bill of Rights was passed here. George Washington was inaugurated as our first President on its balcony. And, in 1812, it was torn down and sold as scrap.

This building, first a custom house, replaces it a tardy thirty years later. Before the income tax, the Federal government got most of its money from custom duties — basically taxes on imports — and custom houses were where such transactions were processed. Sitting in the country’s biggest port, this custom house had an international audience, and thus had to speak loudly to that audience. Its exterior echoes the Parthenon; the interior, with its magnificent rotunda, the Pantheon. Even more, much more than the porticoed row houses popping up all over the city, these borrowings are not merely concessions to a fashion for classical looks. With more than a little presumptuousness, they say to the world that the Americans are the inheritors of the Greeks and the Romans.

The exterior was designed bt Alexander Jackson Davis and Ithiel Town. They dropped Greek temples just like this one all over the country. Together and separately, they are responsible for three state capitol buildings (Connecticut, Indiana, North Carolina, and partly Ohio; only the latter two remain). Later, Davis specializes in country villas and in the process kinda invents the suburban ideal, or at least one of them.

After the custom offices were moved down to 55 Wall Street, the hall was for a time as sub-treasury where some of the government’s gold and silver was kept. Today it’s a museum that details its past uses: a memorial to itself.

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1841
Merchants’ Exchange Building

Architect: Isiah Rogers
Location: 55 Wall Street

After I’ve already written an entry for the John Street Methodist Church, I stumble upon an entry in Philip Hone’s diary proving that the building I originally wanted to use for 1841 was, in fact, completed in 1841 and not 1842 like multiple sources says it was. So take that, Landmarks Preservation Commission.

Before this, on this site, was a pioneering Greek Revival building, Merchants’ Exchange Building. Made of marble, and thus supposedly fireproof, it went up with the rest of lower Manhattan in the Great Fire of 1835. Its replacement was even more of a vision: a colonnade a block long, with columns fashioned out of single blocks of granite, and inside, a vast rotunda, one of the city’s great feats of engineering. When the exchange failed, the building’s history became one of endless refashionings and repurposings; old buildings in Wall Street seem to exchange organizations the way viruses exchange strands of DNA. It housed the New York Stock exchange before it left for slightly more modest quarters, then the US Custom House before it moved to even nicer quarters. The National City Bank (a precursor to Citibank) purchased the building and asked McKim, Mead & White to add several new stories, complementing the Ionic colonnade below with a Corinthian colonnade above. Then the bank moved to more Mad-Men modern digs, leaving it as a branch. Luxury restaurant operators Cipriani swooped it up late in the 20th century, and turned it into apartment buildings because nearly every single fucking building on Wall Street is an apartment building now, real estate matching stocks and futures in terms of speculative insanity. Oh, and also a club. It looks beautiful, but I wouldn’t know first-hand, I’m not Cipriani’s crowd.

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1840
The Cushman Row

Architect: Unknown
Location: 406-418 West 20th Street

Just as Clement Clarke Moore drew up designs for the ecclesiastical buildings on his former property, he also laid a heavy hand on Chelsea’s residential development to ensure it was to his liking. The covenants drawn up for these homes included exacting specifications regarding their dimensions, their style, the materials they were to be faced with, and their spatial relationship to the street. They also banned much of the grubby aspects of the city — like manufacturing, stables, tenements — from appearing.

It worked, to a point: when industrial development came, it stayed largely to the west, near the river. Restrictions like these were nothing new to the city, but never had they been applied so consistently to such a large amount of real estate. Control-freak-ish, sure, but the results were spectacular. It encouraged the construction of relatively unbroken rows of buildings like the Cushman Row, forming vast, almost martial walls of brick and stone on street after street. New Yorkers in this era may have been paying lip service to Greek values but their ambitions were Roman-size. (And yet — especially after 170 years of individuation — each Row member looks so homey.)

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1837
St. James Church

Architect: attributed to Minard Lefever
Location: 32 St. James Street

A Greek Revival church, quite possibly from one of the leading lights of the style. But Minard Lefever’s most lasting contribution to American architecture isn’t anything that stands, or ever did stand. Instead, it might be his pattern books.

You’ve probably noticed most entries so far don’t list an architect. Well, in the days before the profession was rationalized by government and professional associations like the AIA, few buildings were made according to customized plans drawn up by an architect. Doing so wouldn’t merely be considered expensive, but unnecessary, overwrought — like bringing out a bazooka to a deer hunt. Instead, for all but the most complex buildings, it would be considered enough for a builder to consult a pattern book that detailed possible floorplans and elevations, plus treatments for doorways, windows, fireplaces and the like in a wide variety of styles. A builder would then use his experience to adapt such designs to the contingencies of a site and the whims of the owner.

Lafever’s four books, three of which had already been published by 1837, did much to promote the Greek Revival: suddenly, everybody with a little scratch can have their temple to Apollo.

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1835
445-451 Sixth Avenue

Architect: Unknown
Location: 445-451 Sixth Avenue

I chose this picture for its aesthetic, not illustrative, qualities. So you can’t really see that this set of six buildings, united behind a common façade, extends to ten bays on Sixth Avenue. And that on the West Tenth Street corner, it combines with another set of buildings constructed a year later that’s sixteen bays wide. The monumentality of Colonnade Row and The Row spreads.

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1834
Tompkins Square Park

Architect: Unknown
Location: Situated between East 7th and 10th Streets and Avenues A and B

On the other side of the island, a failed attempt at replicating the success of parks like Washington Square.

The idea was that this block of swampy land, when drained and leveled and landscaped, could serve as the focal point of a new upscale neighborhood like those in nearby Bond or Stuyvesant Streets. Didn’t quite work that way, as development got body-slammed (I’m speculating here) by the Great Fire of 1835, which would’ve diverted money and resources, and the Great Panic of 1837, which dried up the real estate market. Only properties on the north side ever got developed as was expected; the rest of the park was eventually surrounded by tenements populated by Germans, the Irish, Russian Jews, Puerto Ricans.

As one of the few open areas in the city, the park was the site of multiple protests throughout the 19th and early 20th century, but New Yorkers of my age (I’m almost 40, btw) associate the park with riots in 1989 and 1991; the latter prompted by a heavy-handed attempt by the police to remove a shantytown in the park. The riots were framed as a revolt against the forces that sought to gentrify the neighborhood, yet everything once believed antithetical to such gentrification — the drugs, the violence, the homeless, the squatters, the revolutionary thinking — in the long run probably only heightened the neighborhood’s allure to a well-funded Bohemia that came a little later, one that gladly absorbed all values except those that bored it. And today we have the spectacle of The New York Post defending the newcomer investment bankers against those terrible resident hipster snobs, because (after all) all that’s solid melts into air.

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