Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (19 page)

“There were two factors that contributed to the success of the Chelsea project: it was centered on recreation at a time when the Hudson was clean and its potential recreational benefits widely recognized; and, perhaps most important, all the interested parties genuinely wanted the project to succeed. In the end, sheer force of will, a readiness to be energized rather than discouraged by frustration, political savvy, and the ability to secure private financing finally broke down a portion of the walls that had closed off Manhattan's waterfront for so long,” wrote Ann L. Buttenweiser enthusiastically in her useful book
Manhattan Water-Bound.
Being more of a skeptic, I wonder if Chelsea Piers did not itself set up its own walls on the waterfront, even as it broke others down.

Sitting here at my desk and thinking about Chelsea Piers (I was only pretending to be walking around meditating), I am seized by diametrically opposed emotions: (1) a desire to run right down there and play, hit in the batting cages, try the bowling alley, the swimming pool, and make a day of it; (2) a nausea approaching disgust at the whole idea of this sports complex, springing not from any principled urbanist objections, but from my own estrangement from my body, and my fear and envy of people who celebrate life through their pores—I who live in my head, looking out at the world as if I were constantly reading a book, while my belly softens and my hair thins. When I was younger I did make more of an effort to live in my body, to
be
a body; to play tennis and have sex, both of which I still do, on occasion, but not as often as I would like. I see a tall woman jogging in the street, her breasts bobbing up and down in
her sweatshirt, her ponytail orbiting with every cantered step, and am all too aware that she does not see me; she is concentrated, focused on the tightening sinews in her limbs, the pheromones spreading pleasure to her brain. Perhaps she is thinking of her lover, “I'll show
him!”
or “I'll show
her!”
or “I am making my figure as exquisitely proportioned as the Parthenon.” Yes, I am glad she exists; glad that Chelsea Piers exists; but how can I not feel an outsider in this temple of the body, I whose only exercise is city walking, and that irregularly?

I AM COMING UP ON one of the structures I love most in New York, the Starrett-Lehigh Building, which fills an entire block, from West 26th Street to West 27th, between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues. Its continuous, horizontal floors go on forever, the windows flush with the façade, a flapjack stack of fenestration separated by red-brick bands and a single brick column toward the center. If nothing else, it shows how graceful and grand a block-long building can be. I sometimes think that what's wrong with many of the city's new jumbo office towers, such as Battery Park City's World Financial Center, is that their bases are too broad—they'd be prettier if they took up just half a block—but the Starrett-Lehigh (built in 1930-31) shows how you can ascend majestically on the widest possible foundation. Maybe the important distinction is not so much the size of the building's footprint as the materials used. Consider the solidity of Starrett-Lehigh's masonry versus the distressingly chunky airiness of the World Financial Center's curtain wall, what architectural critic Charles Jencks called “the difference between a brick and a balloon.” Of course it's also true that the Starrett-Lehigh only goes up nineteen stories, making it stunningly horizontal: an impression enhanced by the brick-banded, blue-glazed spandrels that tear around the façade.

The interior was originally given over to lofts for factory or warehouse use. The floors were massive enough to allow for railroad cars to be brought into the ground level of the building. Train tracks ran from the pier at the end of West 26th Street right into the basement, where the railroad cars, brought from barges that had crossed the Hudson River, were unloaded. “They could also be carried into or taken out of the building through two immense elevators that open out onto loading docks at the center of nearly every floor,” wrote a
New York Times
reporter. “But the
building quickly became obsolete as other new architectural wonders, the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels and the George Washington Bridge, made the commercial shipping barges of the Hudson River give way to the trucks of the region's highways.”

Perhaps the building stirs me because of my nostalgia for a time when New Yorkers still made things with their hands and New York was America's manufacturing capital—the blue-collar city of my father, a factory worker who would return from his ribbon-dyeing plant with the then-liberal
New York Post
carried lovingly like a Torah, and tell me not to cross picket lines. All I know is, I'm moved by the way the building towers over everything, yet seems largely invisible. Once acclaimed, now neglected, soldiering on in its functionality. A kind of background building, for all its bulk.

The background building is such an odd, poignant notion in itself. So much of this gridded city must inevitably turn into background music for the preoccupied stroller. Chicago has more four-star architectural masterpieces than New York, but New York is the greater built environment because it possesses a vaster, more continuous urban web, which is composed largely of background buildings, that is to say, barely noticeable, mediocre, or simply average types holding up their end of the street-wall agreement. Background buildings are grunts enlisted in a great war against the horror of emptiness. The heyday of the background building was 1880-1950, when New York City's expansion required thousands and thousands of modest edifices that would do their part. Still, the question arises: Is the designation “background building” a rationalization after the fact for failed ambition, or something intentional? When a background building was first thrown up, did its owners know it was only going to be …a background building? Certainly, if it was a brownstone or a six-story walk-up or a twelve-story apartment house or an ordinary speculative office building, they must have suspected they were not making architectural history. But they were content to do a little business, make a bit of money, using the stenciled formats that had proven successful. Occasionally, sure, they would sport a decorative touch that betrayed impatience with background status, a plinth or gargoyle or entablature of engraved stone; the persistence of vanity. The background building is like a good supporting actress, a
Thelma Ritter or Eve Arden, who is not above stealing a scene with a single line-reading of arch skepticism. The supporting actress knows she's a background character, but does the character she plays know it? A building may mutate from splendid provocation to background status to landmark in several generations. Such has been the fate of the Starrett-Lehigh, which, designed by Cory and Cory in 1930, was praised at its inception by Lewis Mumford in a
New Yorker
“Sky-Line” column (“Here a cantilevered front has been used, not as a cliché of modernism, but as a means of achieving a maximum amount of daylight and unbroken floor space for work requiring direct lighting. The aesthetic result is very happy indeed.”), only to have its industrial
-moderne
charms fail to register on a new breed of glass wall/Mies-smitten modernists, then get rediscovered several decades later as a prototype of restrained elegance, “a landmark of modern architecture” (according to the
AIA Guide to New York City
).

Its forlorn beauty could not help but exert, in time, a hip appeal on the imaginations of design firms, shelter magazines, and dot-com entrepreneurs, and what is more apposite, it had huge floors of below-market raw space to offer, at a time when Manhattan commercial real estate prices were going through the roof. So tenants like Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and fashion manufacturer Hugo Boss and SmartMoney.com moved in, at first drawn to the solitary charm of this industrial relic, then appalled by the pokey elevators, cockroaches, unreliable heat, and poor ventilation. Workers complained of the distance from the nearest subway, deli, drugstore, or diner. It has always been thus on the waterfront, especially when one tries to make it perform like a downtown office center.

One evening I attended the awards ceremony for the IFCCA (International Foundation for the Canadian Centre for Architecture) international design competition. The first site chosen for the triennial competition happened to be the western edge of Manhattan from 30th to 34th Streets, most notably the open railway cut and storage yards for New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Rail Road. In three years' time the architectural visionaries may be planning for Lagos or Singapore, but for the moment they were invited to bring their most untrammeled, cutting-edge imaginations to Old New York. The winner, Peter Eisenman, a respected ideologist for and practitioner of experimental architecture, had
come up with a lofty scheme for a sports stadium over a platform extending into the Hudson River, which would certainly face decades of environmentalists' litigation if it ever threatened to approach reality. The ceremonies were held high up in the Starrett-Lehigh Building, the perfect setting for such a theoretical exercise, I found myself thinking, because it both overlooked the site under consideration and lived in a constant state of decaying futurist potential.

Part of what makes the Starrett-Lehigh Building so impressive today is that it sits in lonely eminence, the only large building for blocks around. It abuts the vast vacuity (for the moment) of the Penn train yards, rising above them like Gibraltar. In recent years there has been much talk of building a stadium, first for the New York Yankees, then for the football Jets, then for Olympics 2012 (should the city win its bid), and incorporating the facility as an extension of the Javits Convention Center. Meanwhile the land sits idle, a perfect foil to the Starrett-Lehigh's rugged, eminent sadness.

It has long been my conviction that New York is the saddest of cities, though I have no argument to support the feeling. All right, let me try. It has something to do with its precise age and built environment. Were it older, it would be a picturesque, Prague sort of museum city; younger, a Disneyesque novelty. But the dominant look of Manhattan (forgetting its few remnants from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries), is Industrial to Early Corporate, 1870s to 1950s, the cast-iron architecture of SoHo, the manufacturing and medical giants near the water, the background buildings, the somberly intelligent Garment Center towers on Seventh Avenue, the art deco setbacks along lower Park Avenue, everything so massive, gray, ineluctable. All of it perfectly, melancholically con-textual—a way of being taken for granted. The Japanese believe that sadness comes from an awareness of the fragility of life at the same time one is captivated by its transient beauty. The cherry blossoms. But that is a very superficial understanding of sadness, may I say. True sadness arises when we realize that the world around us is imperishable, and rather ugly. Let me hasten to add that the ugliness of New York is instantly amenable to a mental flip-flop that converts it into beauty—but a
sad
beauty, such as the Starrett-Lehigh Building, since it cannot claim the beauty tiara on
its own, unironically. The dated obduracy of the man-made is sadder than the radiant transience of nature, which explains why it gives you a more tragic feeling to look across the East River at the Bronx, Queens, Roosevelt Island's asylum in ruins, than across the noble Hudson at the Palisades forest with its scattering of condos. I don't mean to imply that New Jerseyans lack a tragic sense, only that the industrial vista across the East River is much more heartbreaking, and the proof is that Woody Allen would never have chosen a location on the Hudson River for his famous scene in
Manhattan
(looking out from Sutton Place at the 59th Street Bridge) to convey the tenuousness of love.

APPROACHING THE Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, which stretches from West 34th to West 39th Streets, I am struck by how little this bold lump of coal has been assimilated into Manhattan's bosom since it opened fifteen years ago. It was supposed to transform all the blocks around it, making Tenth and Eleventh Avenues bloom with hotels and shops; but of course the area has remained just as bleak and nondescript as ever. The only signs of new commercial enterprise serving the conventioneers are the silverfish dropped by hookers on the pavement.

I remember my excitement when the Convention Center was first under construction. I managed to sneak inside and clamber over sacks of dirt, and look up at that ebony glass roof, with its echoes of the Crystal Palace or some nineteenth-century Paris railroad station. Today I cast about for some explanation as to why this building, by the internationally renowned I. M. Pei, has had so little impact on New York's consciousness. The man who solved the Louvre's entrance problems with a pyramid must have thought to anchor the West Thirties with a stark, jagged rock. If only he hadn't compromised the shivery black glass with that superfluous off-white concrete bulwark on the river façade: was it meant to add a touch of monumental dignity, or protect the building's backside from out-of-control cars crashing into it from the adjoining highway? Pei may not be my favorite architect in any case, but I don't think that design flaws were the reason the Convention Center failed to click with the city around it. True, it was built for out-of-towners, hence never meant to be read as
“New York”; then, the moment it opened it was declared too small for some expositions; then it was bedeviled by corruption and kickback scandals. But the real problem, I think, was that it was too far west, inaccessible by subway, exiled to the lonely, geeky waterfront.

AT WEST
33
RD STREET AND THE RIVER, we are in Trocchi territory.

In April 1956, Alexander Trocchi arrived in New York. The Scottish-born writer, already a very seasoned thirty-one, had come from Paris, where he had dazzled all with his literary promise and charisma (handsome and tall, he resembled Burt Lancaster, one friend wrote, though in the photographs I've seen, he looks more like early Jack Palance), had edited an avant-garde journal,
Merlin
, which showcased Beckett, Genet, and Ionesco before they were international names, had written several pornographic novels and one serious one
( Young Adam)
for Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press, and had gotten himself addicted to heroin. He moved to New York—why? he was never able to say, except that it seemed more downbeat than Paris, and he was on a downwardly mobile quest. After several months of mooching, Trocchi got hired as a scow captain with the New York Trap Rock Corporation. It was one of those jobs tailor-made for writers, like being a hotel night clerk or caretaker of an estate: no other gig, he said, paid so well for so little work. “And no supervision. That was important.” All he had to do was catch the huge ropes, or hawsers, thrown by the tugs, and secure them to his post.