The Lollipop Building: Queer as a Three Dollar Bill

This past weekend in the Arts section, Herbert Muschamp of the Times demonstrated why he achieved such heights as an architecture critic, even if he wasn't always beloved by everyone in that position (he was moved over and replaced by Nicolai Ourousoff). Muschamp's manifesto in defense of Edward Durell Stone's "lollipop" building, The Secret History of 2 Columbus Circle, is one of the most brilliant pieces of cultural/architecture reportage I've read, with these graphs worth quoting at length:

I HATE TO BE THE ONE TO TELL YOU THIS, but the old, relentlessly mourned Pennsylvania Station was a dismal piece of architecture. A late arrival in the City Beautiful movement, the building tried to augment meager conviction with extreme colonnades. Walking into its cold, cavernous spaces was like arriving in Philadelphia two hours before you had to.

But so what if Penn Station wasn't Grand Central? It was a crime to tear down a building that had become so deeply impregnated with New York's emotional life. The yawning interiors had a distinctive atmosphere. Like a vast sponge for intense expectations, the station soaked up the psychic energy of arrival, departure, separation, reunion and waiting that had accumulated over the years along with the soot, water damage and flimsy commercial intrusions. The station met the new arrival with a dare: can you make the big city know that you're alive? There's nothing like debased Beaux-Arts design for throwing out a frigid welcome.

A building does not have to be an important work of architecture to become a first-rate landmark. Landmarks are not created by architects. They are fashioned by those who encounter them after they are built. The essential feature of a landmark is not its design, but the place it holds in a city's memory. Compared to the place it occupies in social history, a landmark's artistic qualities are incidental.

To find out why the building is "queer," read the whole article here.

Bryant Park Ice Pond

I took some pics at the Bryant Park Ice Pond this afternoon. Is there anything that New Yorker's won't do while using their cell phones? (Click photo to enlarge.)

For a short slide show, click here.

If I Can Make It There ...

You know you've made it when you get mentioned on Curbed ... and then slammed in the comments. If I were in bed with brokers, literally or figuratively, then I certainly wouldn't be staying in a dump on St. Marks Pl.

New Year's Eve 365: Sales Booming at 1600 B'way [Curbed]

Times Squared

Finally managed to get a post up on the New York Times real estate blog, The Walk-Through, about the fast-selling 1600 Broadway, the only luxury condo in Times Square.
Check it out here:
Times Square: Living La Vida Loca.

Best of Tropolism

My favorite architecture blog, Tropolism, has posted the Best of 2005, determined by the number of clicks each blog item received. Numero Uno: 55 Water Street's newly refurbished elevated public plaza, which Tropolism himself was involved in creating. I used this site as an example in a Times article of a private developer doing the right thing by creating real public space in exchange for a density bonus. For the rest of Tropolisms's top ten, click here.

Wall Street Conventional Wisdom (Or Another Installment of Breathtaking Inanity)

Floyd Norris of the Times' business page gets a mention on Polis for helping with today's installment of "breathtaking inanity." From an article titled, The Wisdom of Wall Street? Sometimes It's Wrong (the title alone conjurs up a snicker):

"As 2006 begins, the great American housing boom is going to weaken, if not collapse. But that will not hurt the economy very much, and growth will continue at a good pace.

Or so goes the conventional wisdom."

In Mr. Norris' able hands, this absurdity somehow comes out to seem not quite so absurd. Read the whole article and judge for yourself. But I ask thee, have we once again lost our minds? I've said it before, and I'll surely say it again: "breathtaking inanity" is the new "irrational exuberance."

Art and Architecture

My two favorite things are coming together in a new show: photoghraphy and architecture. Opening on Jan. 5th at the Center for Architecture is a multi-media exhibition showcasing new photography by Esto, an architectural photography collaborative. Buildings and structures located in New York City will be featured, (many of them award-winners), including Danny Meyer's wildly successful Shake Shack at Madison Square Park, and the Staten Island September 11 Memorial by Masayuki Sono (pictured).

WTC Site Planning (Or Today's Installment of Breathtaking Inanity)

When I first proposed "breathtaking inanity" as the new "irrational exuberance," I knew the phrase would come in handy, but I had only an inkling of just how handy. Today's installment comes from a great Times article by David Dunlap about how a draft of the design guidelines for the World Trade Center site have been circulating for two years with no finalization in sight while building designs have been thrown at the wall like spaghetti just to see what sticks:

In that time, the Freedom Tower has been designed and redesigned, partly following the draft guidelines and partly ignoring them. The transportation hub has been designed in a form quite unlike that contemplated in the 2003 draft. Ditto, the memorial. Ditto, the cultural building.

Now, the architect Norman Foster ... has been chosen by Larry A. Silverstein to design the second largest office tower on the site...

And there are still no guidelines.

In a recent piece I wrote about the Transbay Terminal (or the "Grand Central of the West") in San Francisco, my favorite line got cut from the piece (for good reason, I will readily admit), but I so wanted to indirectly point out the right way to plan a site. The final line in this graph, alas, did not appear in print:

The [Transbay Terminal and accompanying tower] competition, guided by conceptual designs unveiled on Dec. 19, is a result of … the adoption of a high-density master plan, devised by Skidmore Owings & Merrill, to redevelop the surrounding 40 acres and provide much of the financing for the terminal and tower. In other words, years of planning, coalition building, and financial structuring were done before the public’s imagination was dazzled by star-studded architecture.

Sigh.

Lounging, Not Just for the Homeless Anymore

The Times has a great little piece today about lounge chairs popping up in public spaces around New York City, and rightly notes that we've come a long way (baby) from a time when people walked around parks trying to avoid getting mugged rather than into them to take a little snooze.

Above photo by Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times of a park in Queens that encourages sunbathing (weather permitting) and skyline gazing.

Suburban Dystopia

No matter how many American downtowns get redeveloped and revitalized, there remains an unmistakable obsession with the suburbs. To wit: "Sprawl: A Concise History," a new book by Robert Bruegmann, an urban planning egghead at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He makes a contrarian argument in favor of suburbia on a populist soap box; namely, it is the liberal elites who oppose sprawl even though, were it not for the suburbs, many people would not be able to partake in the good life that the liberal elites so enjoy. And I will admit there's enough truth to this argument to entice me to actually read the book. But from what I've read about the book, the author neglects to address what happens to a city when there is sprawl without population growth, which is the cause of death for essentially the entire middle section of the country, save for Chicago, where he just so happens to live (i.e. there's an important distinction between "surburia" and "sprawl").

More interestingly, a recent article in the Times asked, "What is the future of suburbia in America?" The article notes the life cycle of suburbia and how Long Island is at the crisis point: "local taxes are among the nation's highest, gangs, traffic jams, pockets of poverty and decay, dwindling open space, insufficient mass transit, segregation, blighted strip malls, an influx of immigrants, sprawl and a lack of focal points for community life." In other words, it's the inner-ring suburb syndrome writ large.

Long Island needs to reinvent itself, and lo-and-behold, one of the more promsing options is to urbanize, especially by applying urban revitalization techniques that have revived downtowns from Providence to Albuquerque. What's more: "Some call for radical transformation, even a startling new look. A couple of miles from Levittown, in Uniondale, Charles B. Wang proposed something never before contemplated on Long Island: the Great Lighthouse, with a luxury hotel and condominiums, topped by an observation deck and a large shiny ball visible for miles" (pictured above, inset).

Suburbia, of course, is not going away and nor should it. I don't hear liberal elites (or even E.Villagers for that matter), walking around complaining about the horrors of suburbia ... that's so '80s. All we are saying is, give density a chance.

P.S. I've been alerted by Starts and Fits that Wong has dropped his plans to build a tower on Long Island. I can't say I was crazy about that idea to begin with, but that doesn't mean that certain parts of Long Island shouldn't densify to revitalize itself.

Photographs, above and inset, by Barton Silverman/The New York Times

Jeanine Pirro: "Breathtaking Inanity"

Continuing with my effort to promote "breathtaking inanity" as the new "irrational exuberance," I have just two words: Jeanine Pirro.



Pirro Quits Senate Race to Run for Attorney General [New York Times]
Political Pirrocide [Polis]
Can Anyone Say Flyspeck? [Polis]

Steeeee-rike Three: "Breathtaking Inanity"

My thought for the day: "breathtaking inanity" will come to define the current era the same way "irrational exuburance" once defined the dot.com bubble years. Like any defining catchphrase, it applies to so many current circumstance and has a great cadence. The two-thousand-oughts: Breathtaking Inanity. Pass it on.

Steeeee-rike Two

Day two of the transit strike ... and like any fairweather New Yorker, I'm outta here. Wish me luck getting to the airport.

In the meantime, Miss Representation has some wonderful musings about the strike, offering his usual ill humor towards the media and politicians, sprinkled with some positive thoughts for good measure:

With lots of air time to fill, we’ve been subjected to mostly the uninteresting stuff, even though this is actually a rather rich story, from end to end: a militant union that is perhaps rife with an internal conflict that is the driving force in the walkout, a intellectually bankrupt governor who set the stage by cravenly handing out ill-advised benefits (with the rousing approval of a state legislature -- heavily funded by that same union -- eclipsed only by Maoist-era China in its intransigence and seeming permanence), and the seeming inability to manage (stocked with appointees from that dimwit governor) the long-term health of one of the largest, best, and most effective public transit system in the world.

Steeeee-rike One

It seems there's some kind of strike happening here in New Yorkistan. Not sure about the details since I work at home and rarely ever see daylight. But hop on over to Gothamist to find out what the brouhaha is about, and then enter their "most inconvenient commute" contest. The winner's prize? An unlimited monthly Metrocard, of course!

P.S. When I told my lovely mother, who lives in Cleveland, that the transit strike might cause me a problem getting to the airport tomorrow, she replied, "Well, can't you just get a cab?" As if the other 8 million people trying to get around New York wouldn't also be vying for a cab. Ah, the blissful ignorance of living where no one else does.

This is What I'm Talking About

I don't know about you, but I'm getting really freakin' tired of luxury condo this, luxury condo that, especially when they're as uninspired as the Astor Place Sculpture for Living, which still infuriates me on a regular basis as I walk about the East Village (read Paul Goldberger's take-down, titled Green Monster, in the New Yorker here). I mean, if I can't afford to live in it, at least make it nice for me to look at.

But I digress. The fact is, there's a housing crisis in New York that the luxury condo glut is not going to fix because, no matter how bad the market gets, they'll let 'em sit empty before they rent 2000 square foot high-rise lofts to people making$75,000 a year (i.e. while the filtering effect is undoubtedly real, there is surely a limit). What we need to be erecting are fantastic and innovative buildings like this, discovered (belatedly) on one of my new favorite architecture and design blogs, Inhabitat:

A company in the UK has developed a high rise apartment concept ... Abito ... a testament to the wonders of technology and the huge potential of small spaces. The template is a 347-sq-ft apartment with a central pod that serves all the functions that are traditionally distributed among a number of rooms.

One side of the pod contains a bathroom behind double doors; another has a cupboard with washer/dryer hookups. A third side contains a his and hers wardrobe and a utility console, and the fourth contains a kitchen unit featuring integrated fridge/freezer, a two-burner range, an oven/microwave/grill combo, and a waste sorter. Opposite the wardrobe is a bedroom wall with a fold-up bed. Atop the pod is space for an extra bed or additional storage.... And every Abito apartment has a private balcony.

My favorite part is the two-burner range complimented by the oven/microwave/grill combo. Brilliant! What urban cook uses more than two burners at once? Several of these uber-efficient buildings are planned throughout the UK. Read and see more images here.

New York Times Real Estate Blog

The Times has officially unveiled its real estate blog (although it wasn't password protected during development) called The Walk-Through. It will focus on residential real estate and related topics aimed at a national audience. I will be contributing, so please send me blog ideas for the site. Check it out here.

New Museum Digs

The New Museum of Contemporary Art held a groundbreaking ceremony a couple of months ago (as noted here on Polis in early Oct.), but the actual digging for its new building didn't get underway until earlier this week. The new building, on Bowery, will be the first museum built in downtown Manhattan in more than 100 years, and will liven up the area with some very modern architecture.

Tropolism excerpts a recent interview with the Japan-based architects for the new building, SANAA:

what are you afraid regarding the future?

s: I am always afraid of the future but at the same time I’m looking forward to it. we want to be able to contribute to it.

Well, okay. The future of The New Museum, which will relocate from Chelsea, gets underway about 2007. Unfortunatley, one of the best museum bargains in town ($6 general admission) will likely go way up in order to pay for this:

Political Pirrocide

I generally stay away from politics here on Polis, with the one exception of watching Jeanine Pirro go down in flames. I predicted here that she wouldn't even make it through the primary in her bid to challenge Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Sure enough, after running a comletely hapless campaign, starting with her fumbled announcement, New York Republican leaders are now asking her to step aside and she's refusing! Is this woman completely tone deaf or what? I hereby call out all political commentators and pundits who said she would be a good candidate to "rough up" Hillary. Please.

Previous Polis Post: Can Anyone Say Flyspeck?
New York Times article: Republican Leaders Tell Pirro to End Senate Bid

Happy Holidays from the East Village

The Alamo at Astor Square, aka The Cube, a long-time symbol of the neighborhood, was recently reinstalled after a refurbishment, disappointing E.Vil. conspiracy theorists who were sure it was taken away at the behest of yuppie condo dwellers. Note the hanging wreaths just behind The Cube. Kinda cheers the place up, no? (Click to enlarge the photo and get a good view of this man's happy face.)

New Yorker Hotel Sign

Last night the New Yorker Hotel sign was relit for the first time since the 1960s. The hotel had a party and, in addition to hotel workers and other guests, invited some decedents of the hotel's historic luminaries to watch the relighting via closed circuit camera. Using an original elevator control handle that was still in use as late as 1994, the general manager of the hotel, Kevin Smith, pulled the lever and after a pregnant pause, the red letters were alight. The sign refurbishment is part of a major renovation. It was built in 1929 and -- despite opening shortly after the stock market crash -- became one of the hottest spots in New York City. But the hotel declined and finally closed in the 1970s. It was partially reopened in 1994 and has been operating as a modest mixed-use commercial and hotel building, a far cry from its glory days of yore. Photo courtesy of Joe Kinney, the hotel's fascilities manager and keeper of all things Hotel New Yorker. For a Times article about the renovation, click here.

Another shot from Mr. Kinney:

Glass House Part II

I was at the topping off party for the Urban Glass House, Philip Johnson's very last building. (The Urban Glass House, a discreet, twelve-story glass and steel structure, is being built at 330 Spring Street at Washington. It will have 40 residences designed to evoke his famous “pared-down but modernist luxury” Glass House in New Canaan, CT.). According to the sales office, 25 percent of the building is in contract after only two weeks. Because the building isn't heavily loaded with amenities that no one will ever use, the price per square foot is less than other starchitect designed luxury condo buildings (about $1500/square foot). Read more about the Urban Glass House here. Apologies for the pics below, taken with my camera phone.

Back On Top

I've wrapped up the book proposal and am back in the saddle here at Polis. I'd like to get restarted with a fun story I did for the Times today about the old New Yorker Hotel that is about to undertake a major renovation, starting with the relighting of its historic sign. The letters on top of the building are 20 feet high and are visible from the west side of Manhattan during the day, but will be lighted later this month and visible at night for the first time since 1967. The hotel itself is just chock full of great history, collected by the building's facilities manager Joe Kinney. One of my favorite stories is about a fully grown bellhop at the hotel named Johnny Roventini, who lived in Brooklyn and stood less than five feet tall. He became something of a minor celebrity and a spokeman for Philip Morris. If he were around today, he would have become a recuring character on Seinfeld. (Read the Johnny Roventini story here.) As part of the hotel's renovation, it is also going to bring back the original logo design of a doorman (see below). The above photo provided by Joe Kinney.

Beautiful Fall Morning at Tompkins Square Park

I went for a quick walk in the park yesterday morning (Nov. 3) and then immediately ran back home to grab my camera when I saw how gorgeous the light was. The diversity and beauty of this park on a random fall morning is just amazing. It's hard to believe this was the epicenter of anti-gentrification riots fifteen years ago.

P.S. I didn't realize I was shooting in black and white until I dropped the film off to be developed, and what a pleasant surprise, especially since I thought I was capturing beautiful fall colors.

For the slide show, click here.

32nd Annual Village Halloween Parade

I haven't been posting here on Polis because I've (ostensibly) been working on a book proposal. But I just had to put up a slide show from last night's Halloween parade. It was led by a ten year old trumpet player from New Orleans, and I marched with a group called The Hungry March Band (and they were damn good!). Our theme was a mock funeral for New Orleans Jazz. Despite the depressing theme, it was a total blast. Check out the slide show here. I will put a permanent link under My Photo Essays shortly.

Will It Float?*

I'm temporarily breaking my fast here on P0lis (see below) to note an article in the Times about floating architecture, which I've already posted about a couple of times. I was also at the inaugural gathering of the Forum for Urban Design last night, hosted by Paul Goldberger, which was a discussion about rebuilding New Orleans, and amphibious housing came up there, too. (The Forum is so new it doesn't have a website yet, but I'll link to it when its up.) Anyway, this amphibious neighborhood idea is obviously getting some traction.

There's also a good slide show accompanying the article.

*Apologies to David Letterman.

On Book (Proposal) Leave

Polis is in a state of suspended animation while I hammer out a book proposal. Will return in a week or so. In the meantime, peruse some of my photo essays (no more than six slides each, very painless) or read some of my favorite Polis posts, both are linked at right. Cheers.

P.S. At least a month ago, I started posting here on Polis about how Mayor Bloomberg needs to take over plans at Ground Zero, and it's looking like he's laying the groundwork to do just that.

Mayor Seeking Major Changes at Ground Zero {NYTIMES}
Mr. Mayor, Do the Right Thing {Polis}
Idling at Zero {Polis}

New York, Then and Now

A really cool photography piece in The Morning News juxtaposes historic photos from the 1930s with more recent ones taken from the same vantage point by Douglas Levere, which are collected in a book entitled New York Changing. The Morning News excerpts some of these photos, and it’s really fascinating to see what’s changed for the better, for the worse, or not hardly at all. There’s also a show at the Museum of the City of New York.

Click here to see the photographs.

Click here for a short interview with the photographer.

All Over But the Shoutin'

It seems that Bruce Ratner of Forest City Ratner has a proposal for a new arena and big mixed use development project on the edge of downtown Brooklyn, which has drawn some criticism, apparently. Who knew? All I know is, the shouting has drowned out MY very important story in today's Times about all the other stuff that's going on in downtown Brooklyn ... projects that don't get people's dander up.

Nostalgia Tripping

Curbed has been tripping for weeks on the redo of the LES into a '60s psychedelic wonderland, and it seems we might finally be about to peak:

It's almost time for the Lower East Side's pyschedelic closeup as shooting day for Julie Taymor's Across the Universe draws neigh. ... With less than 24 hours until shooting begins, the crazed squad of neighborhood refurbishers are hard at work this morning turning the Clinton/Rivington nexus into even more of an Haight-Ashbury wonderland.

So who is Julie Taymor and what is Across the Universe, you ask? Julie Taymor is a babyboomer theater actress and a "puppet artist." If that wasn't enough to kill any interest I might have in this flick, here's the clincher:

Across the Universe is a romantic musical told mainly through numerous Beatles songs performed by the characters. A young man from Liverpool comes to America during the Vietnam War to find his father. He winds up in Greenwich Village, where he falls in love with an American girl who has grown up sheltered in the suburbs. Together they experience the sweeping changes of America in the late 60's.

Puppets on a psychedelic trip, singing Beatles songs -- now that I would go see.

The Gutter Takes on "RoPog"

The Gutter, an architecture blog, in a typical snarky piece, slams Times reporter Robin Pogrebin:

It has long been whispered that Robin Pogrebin, the New York Times' "architecture reporter", doesn't have a whiffof an idea what she's talking about. Now, the whispers can stop: we've got proof. This weekend there was a design charrette in Biloxi... RoPog manages to get through the story without once using the term "New Urbanism," pointing out that Andres Duany lui meme was there preparing the way for a thousand Seasides...

Usually I find The Gutter's take-downs a little underhanded, and this is no exception. But I have to agree with one point: How do you write a story about a design charrette organized by Andres Duany and not say a word about New Urbanism, even if just in passing? I doubt it's because she hasn't heard of it or didn't get that's what the charrette was all about. Nonetheless, it does seem like an odd omission.

I don't know if Mr. Duany keeps up with things here on Polis, but my suggestion is to forget the white picket fence crapola and rebuild the Gulf Coast with amphibious neighborhoods. Now that's some New New Urbanism. See pic below and read more about it here.