The Vanishing Woolworth Building

 

Say goodbye to most views of the landmark Woolworth Building.  Over the last couple of years, what was once the tallest skyscraper in the world (1913-1929), has been getting lost in the skyline.

The Woolworth was one of the only buildings New Yorkers could use as a frame of reference in images of Lower Manhattan after the attacks of September eleventh.  With the towers gone, the Woolworth was one of few buildings that told us what was north, what was south, what was up, what was down.

One of my favorite shots of the Woolworth was from the plaza of the World Trade Center (i.e., from the southwest).  That picture can no longer be taken.  See that boring new apartment tower above, to the right of the Woolworth? 

 

Here's that tower from the south.  Voila.  No more Woolworth. 

Here's the Woolworth from the west again, but notice the empty lot in the foreground...soon to host an obstruction.

At least the front of the building will remain visible...but only in the near vicinity, because as you can see below...

...8 Spruce Street, or the massive Beekman Tower by Frank Gehry, is climbing into the sky above the Newspaper Row and blocking the iconic view of the Woolworth from most of the Brooklyn Bridge. 

Ah, well.  Almost 100 years.  It had a good run.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Turns 50

In April of 1959, one of America's greatest architects passed away.  Six months later, on October twenty-first, one of his most significant structures opened on Fifth Avenue.

Visit THE DAILY NEWS for fifty beautiful photographs of the landmark building, which include wonderful shots of the site during construction as well as pictures of the Gehry Guggenheim which Wright's imaginative freedom inspired.

Tonight the Empire State Building will be lit red in homage to its fellow icon--original plans for the Guggenheim featured a red exterior.

The interior of the Guggenheim in 1998 when the spiral was sheathed in chrome for its Art of the Motorcycle exhibit.
 

Elevators That Force You To Take the Stairs

A feature in last week's New York Magazine called Step It Up by Alex Pasternack is filled with interesting trivia about our city's 54,806 elevators, the new health initiative to convince people to take the stairs, the theory behind the architectural trick that forces you to do just that (as seen in the Cooper Union's new building), and this byte to chew on:  "...Stair-climbing is a more efficient form of exercise than walking: Two additional minutes of stair-climbing per day (approximately three floors) can burn more than enough calories to eliminate the average adult’s annual weight gain."

Another Friend Climbs to the Top of St. John the Divine!!

Why do I always miss this opportunity?!?  This was my second invitation and again I had to decline.  Both times I was busy writing and couldn't spare the morning.

But I do envy my friends who have taken this exclusive tour.  Here are some pictures from Doug Nervik's fancy new phone:

 

The nave as seen during the climb up.  To give you a sense of proportion, those red squares in the middle in the middle of the photo are chairs.

 

A close-up of one of the recently cleaned stained glass windows.

 

A shot between the buttresses.

 

This last shot was taken in the attic, above the vaulted Guastavino ceiling.  Here you can see the tiles.  From down below, it's far too dark.  This is the vault above the crossing where the Statue of Liberty could comfortably stand.  (If she ever came down off her pedestal.)

Little Bytes Recommends: The New American Wing at the Met

For me, the new American wing at the Met was even more of a surprise than the opening of the spectacular Roman galleries two years ago.  Much of the Charles Engelhard Court is now floored with yellow marble.  A sunken area was retained on the northern end that allows visitors to examine some of the collection's marble statues before stepping up through the facade of the Branch Bank of the United States (which was first erected on Wall Street in the 1820's) to explore the newly renovated and refurbished period rooms, which look better than ever.  There's a glass elevator on the eastern side of the rooms and a brand new mezzanine-level balcony that literally adds another level of display space on the western end of the court.  One of the museum's better cafes still remains, tucked away obscurely below the new balcony, and the Visual Storage seems more welcoming and user friendly. 

If you can, visit this weekend.  I can also vouch for the amazing (beautifully disturbing) Francis Bacon retrospective.

Sadly, I can't vouch for the Roxy Paine installation on the roof, since the roof has been closed due to rain each of the last FOUR times I've been there.

Pictured:  Judy Krauss imitating Diana by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. 

G.M. Declares Bankruptcy at the Old Customs House

Last week, General Motors filed papers at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in lower Manhattan.

This court is located in the old Customs House, the lavish building replete with colored marble and covered in elaborate statuary. 

This court is also situated directly behind the rear end of the city's most famous bull.

Appropriate.

For all the symbolism, watch our Bowling Green, Part 2.

 

An Interim Video

Our newest video will be up next Monday. Please enjoy this earnest substitute in the meantime:

A Vertical Tour of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine

Jim Dykes (www.richandfamoustours.com) is back to share his thoughts on his incredibly thorough visit to one of our city's greatest buildings.

Here's Jim:

Recently a group of New York City tour guides were invited to increase our knowledge of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine—or "St. John the Unfinished"--by attending a specially organized seminar on two of the coldest, snowiest days of the winter.  On the first morning, we had a general highlights tour of the cathedral. The guide, Kevin Blum, was a very nice young fellow from Iowa, who had followed his studies (and his girlfriend) to New York City. His tour was fine and efficient, but underwhelming for a group of well-read New York guides who had been leading groups to the church for many years.

In our group alone, we calculated about 100 years of NYC guide experience, including myself, Mike Brennan, Tour Goddess Jane Marx and Juliette Frydman. Kevin soon began letting us all contribute and embellish his accounts of Cathedral history, including the struggle between the architectural firms in the 1890s which resulted in two architectural styles--Romanesque Revival and French Gothic Revival—which usually clash but are surprisingly harmonious at St. John the Divine.

After lunch, we  had a chance, casual meeting with the Dean of the Cathedral (an Aryan from Darien) and were able to ask any question we liked. Following this, we had a special Numerology tour.  Various numbers are repeated quite a bit for various religious reasons (4 signs of the cross, 7 deadly sins, 12 apostles, etc.). It doesn’t sound interesting but the numerologist, a young volunteer named Howell, was excellent and spoke compellingly for 2 hours.

The next morning began with an in-depth tour of the fabulous stained glass windows, including the Media window (with its images of Jack Benny on the radio and the Gutenberg printing press) and the American History window donated by the Astor family in memory of John Jacob Astor, who died on the Titanic. (Its sinking is depicted in the lower right corner of the window.)

After lunch on the second day, we finally got to do the one thing I’d been wanting to do for 20 years:  The Vertical Tour, where we would be permitted to venture through locked doors and climb more than a dozen flights to view the Cathedral from above.  The guide distributed flashlights and told us the rules.  We climbed up and up.  First stop:  a view of the nave from a balcony 4 flights up.  Second stop:  a view of the altar from 8 floors up.  Third stop:  a close-up view of the ceiling 12 stories above the floor.  Along the way, the guide spent a few minutes at each landing discussing the art and the windows from this wonderful vantage point.

Just as I thought we’d be heading downstairs, the guide led us up through more passages and more flights to the huge attic area above the cathedral ceiling (who knew it existed?), where we viewed the giant iron supports and the Guastavino tiles from the flip side.  Then she took us up even FURTHER, to the very roof of the Cathedral, to the stone balconies that ring the building where we viewed the Morningside Heights in its entirety.  Truly breathtaking.

Of course, my camera’s battery died after only a few pictures (isn’t that always the case?) but a few pictures survived of the gorgeous limestone carvings and the bird's eye view of the nave.

After years of restoration, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine is now entirely open to the public...though the Vertical Tour is a rare offering.

Notes on the George Washington Bridge Tour

Although yesterday's video is almost six minutes long, we STILL had extra material we wanted to include.  

--There are actually TWO Manhattan bridges named after George Washington.  The other crosses the Harlem River at 181st.  Besides these bridges, Washington's name is attached to twelve avenues and streets as well as the large neighborhood near the top of Manhattan.  I think it's fitting that we named so much of our city after the first president since the earliest known use of the term "New Yorker" comes from a letter written by George Washington in 1756.

--William Randolph Hearst assumed that the bridge to span the Hudson would line up with the midtown bridge that spanned the East River (the Queensboro), so he bought up a row of real estate lining 57th Street.  (This explains why the Heart Headquarters is located on 57th and Eighth Avenue.  See the Newest Star of the Skyline in our First Hoparound Tour.)  To his surprise, however, the bridge was eventually built over 100 blocks north. 

--The GW took 4 years to complete and cost 13 lives, not including the one man who died of a heart attack while waiting in the crowds on Opening Day.

--The main span of the GW Bridge is 3500 feet, more than twice as long as the span of the Brooklyn Bridge.  Six years later, however, the GW was surpassed by San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge (4200 feet).  In 1964, New York reclaimed the title of America's longest suspension bridge when the Verrazano-Narrows opened.  The Verrazano is currently the seventh longest suspension bridge in the world.

Yesterday's video post was directed by Nona Lloyd and featured Berda Gilmore as the enthusiastic real estate broker.  Nona directed several of the Little Bytes up Broadway--between Madison Square and Columbus Circle--and Berda appeared in several bytes shot in Central Park and along 46th Street.

Berda Gilmore recently moved to Los Angeles from New York City where she worked and studied as an actress. Berda is having such a good time on the West Coast that she has been chronicling her adventures on her hugely popular website www.berdagilmore.com.

Nona Lloyd is now the General Manager of the new hot lounge, WATERMARK,located on the Jersey Shore in Asbury Park.  While it may seem that she's left the theater world, she's still using all of her producing and directing skills, every ounce of her creativity, and is sure to jump into "show biz" again.

Hudson Heights, Part One--The George Washington Bridge (The Bridge and the Broker)

Our fifth video tour is finally here.  Every other Monday we'll be posting the newest byte in our walk through Hudson Heights, my neighborhood in Upstate Manhattan, the stretch on the western ridge between the GW Bridge and the Cloisters.  Enjoy!

HUDSON HEIGHTS CALENDAR

3/23--The Bridge

4/6--The People

4/20--The Revolution

5/4--The Apartments

5/18--The Barista

6/1--The Saint

6/15--The Soldier

6/29--The Park

7/13--The Cloisters

7/27--The Sculptor

Dyin' Before the Good Stuff, Part Three

THE ARCHITECTS

5--Ray Hood did get to see his skyscrapers finished (including the American Radiator Building, the McGraw-Hill Building, and the Daily News Building) but he died before the completion (and before being recognized as the lead planner) of New York's most important business and entertainment complex.  According to Daniel Okrent's history, Great Fortune, Hood's "obituaries made surprisingly little mention of his role in Rockefeller Center, presumably because, at the time, the specific contributions of the various architects were not clear.  Hood never once attempted to claim credit due him for the design triumph that was Rockefeller Center."  

6--A major critic of Hood's (and almost every other architect) was Frank Lloyd Wright who still eulogized Hood respectfully:  "Architecture needs about ten first class funerals of the higher-up more than it needs his."  Unlike Hood whose reputation was quiet, Wright loudly proclaimed his own genius, perhaps rightfully so as he gave us some of the greatest structures in the U.S.  Wright designed few buildings in New York City, but one of his masterpieces and one of his final achievements stands boldly on Upper Fifth Avenue:  the Guggenheim.  Wright died in April, 1959, and his inverted ziggurat opened that October.  (Solomon Guggenheim for that matter also never saw the museum that bears his name, the temple for nonobjective art he dreamt about and financed--he died a decade before it opened.)

The Vandalism at Bethesda Terrace

(Photograph by Jen Chung/Gothamist)

At the beginning of the month, The Gothamist posted photos of the graffiti wilding that took place at Bethesda Terrace on Saturday night, January 31st.  Less than two years after the arcade was finally reopened to the public, it was criminally defaced by four socially defective morons--David Gonzalez Jr., 20, Aisha Calow, 18, Victoria Deniaminova, 16, and Sabrina Santiago, 16.  I would print their addresses if I had them.

My first view of the damage (estimates for its repair range from $50,000 to $100,000) was on Sunday.  Heartbreaking and infuriating.  My photos after the break. 

Fifty Strange Buildings

Another tidbyte from Cayce (Robert deserves a break occasionally):

Hard as it is to believe, there are interesting buildings outside of New York City. Although Manhattan boasts the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building and the Flatiron Building or, more recently, the IAC Headquarters, Hearst Building and the Austrian Cultural Foundation, here's a spot where you can view some beautiful, quirky, interesting, and, yes, STRANGE structures:

FIFTY UNIQUE EDIFICES

Would you like to live here?

 

Where would you like to live? Let us know...

Wingsuit Base Jumping

Tidbyte from Cayce:

Perhaps this is an idea for our next videos? Off the Empire State Building? Statute of Liberty? Top of the Rock?

What do you think? Leave us a comment ...

One Last Byte of Elevators

Watch our video from our walk from Bowling Green to Columbus Circle to see the first building in the world to have an elevator shaft...not an elevator, just the shaft.

Even More Elevators--Another Byte of Elevator Captivity

First posted in the summer of 2006: "On May 25th, a tour group from Minnesota, led by my good friend and shining star, Tessa Derfner, visited the new Apple store (on Fifth Avenue) after their Broadway show.  While trying to leave, part of the group took the elevator and these five soon found themselves completely trapped inside the glass cylinder.  Employees of the store tried but could not rescue them, so the NYPD had to be called and the hydraulic fluid had to be drained.  For forty-five minutes, they were stuck in the middle of the illuminated cube, in the center of the plaza, objects of "public ridicule and contempt" to the surprising amount of people walking by at midnight. They spent their time in captivity recreating numbers from Chicago, until the elevator was lowered, the doors were pried open and they climbed up to safety, but not without two of them burning their hands "enough to blister on the hot lights in the shaft."  Click here to read one of the student's accounts.

More Elevators--My Own Otis Elevator Anecdote

For his article, Paumgarten visited the Otis testing center in Connecticut and shares the Otis claim that their elevators carry "the equivalent of the world's population every five days."  Otis is the world's oldest and largest elevator manufacturer.  Elisha Graves Otis installed the first safety passenger elevator (in the E.G. Haughwout Building in SoHo) in 1857 after inventing the safety brake in 1853 and demonstrating the brake at the Crystal Palace the following year.  In 2003, I gave tours for the Otis company during the festivities celebrating their 150th anniversary. 

One morning I helped escort guests to the Hammerstein Ballroom on 34th Street for a party/meeting.  As we entered the old opera house, we encountered actors dressed in nineteenth-century costume standing on a wooden platform.  "Mr. Otis" explained his new brake, which was there to catch the platform when it suddenly fell as part of the demonstration reenactment.  We applauded politely--we had had 150 years to get used to this technology--and then a curtain parted on the other side of the auditorium to reveal a giant screen.  Music began to play and we were all drawn towards the projection of famous buildings and structures equipped with Otis elevators.  History nerd that I am, I was still surprised that tears were actually filling my eyes with the images of the Eiffel Tower, the Woolworth Building, the Cities Services Building, the Empire State and Chrysler.  "Look at all the skyscrapers!" I wept with the musical accompaniment, unprepared for what was about to happen.

For this to make sense, you should understand that if you are an editor creating a video montage with photographs, you usually try to add movement, say panning across the photo or zooming into it, but if the subjects are skyscrapers and the theme is the elevator, then you're limited to vertical choices--you either tilt up or you tilt down, and if the montage is FULL of skyscrapers, you alternate. So the camera that morning went up one skyscraper and down the next one, up another and down the one after that, and somewhere in the 1970's, it started getting uncomfortable.  I wasn't the only one in the audience who was reminded that the skyscraper is the ultimate phallic symbol.  As we got closer and closer to the 2003 mark, this Otis-sponsored pornography increased in tempo--up and down and up and down and, faster, faster, up down up down up down, faster, faster, updownupdownupdown until the music crescendoed, the screen went to black and a giant O appeared followed by the letters TIS.  During the wild applause, glances were exchanged--did that really just happen?--and then some of us went for water, others outside for a smoke.

Paper : Reading...Gunpowder : War..._____ : City

From the Archives:  originally posted in the spring of 2008.

Nick Paumgarten published another fantastic article in last week's New Yorker, this time about elevators (click here to read).  I've already used a few of his reported facts in a couple of my step-on tours, and as I try to commit more of the article to memory, I should warn those of you coming on tours of mine in the near future, that you will most likely be hearing a great deal about the history, the technology, and the future of the vertical transportation industry.

Paumgarten tells the story of Nicholas White who in 1999 was trapped alone in an express elevator of the McGraw-Hill Building at Rockefeller Center from 11pm Friday night until 4pm Sunday afternoon.  There's a time-lapse security video posted on YouTube--forty-one hours of his ordeal compressed into three minutes.  I still haven't been able to watch all the way through.  Although I don't have an elevator phobia, this video makes me very nervous.  Maybe it's the music. 

Here's an excellent excerpt from the Paumgarten article:

A Tour of New York from the 53rd Floor

It's been reputed, and many times repeated, that Guy de Maupassant would have lunch at the Eiffel Tower because it was the one place in Paris where he wouldn't have to look at it.  Frankly, I'll take the Eiffel Tower over the New York Palace any day. 

 

But some of our uglier buildings offer some of our better views.  I recently spent some time in a corner suite on the 53rd and 54th floors...

And can now take you on a bird's eye tour of midtown.

 

Here's St. Patrick's, the largest Catholic cathedral in the U.S. (but not the largest church in NYC), begun in 1851, abandoned during the Civil War, and then resumed and completed in 1879.  (Well, not the towers--they were finished nine years later.)

Little Bytes Recommends a DVD

MAN ON WIRE

I saw this documentary during the Tribeca Film Festival and wanted to share my enthusiasm now that it’s out on DVD.  Thirty-four years ago, Philippe Petit, walked and danced in the sky between the newly built Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan.  Seven years earlier, in the waiting room of his dentist, Petit saw a rendering in a magazine of the future World Trade Center.  He tore the pages out and left before his cleaning, obsessed, dreaming and planning how he would undertake a tight rope walk between the towers that had yet to be erected.  This documentary follows the story from the dentist’s office until  today, combining archival footage from the sixties and seventies, talking head interviews with Petit and his associates, and scenes of reenactment (many of which were shot in the new 7 World Trade Center) in the tradition of the great heist films.

 

 We hear the participants remember the tense moments in detail—sneaking into the two buildings and maneuvering their way to the top on the eve of the stunt, hiding from the security guards, in one case under a tarp a few feet away, spending the night preparing, connecting the buildings through archery, climbing to the edge to retrieve the arrow and wire, and then securing the tight rope.  By the time Petit takes his first steps 1350 feet above the city, we feel like co-conspirators standing on the roof bearing witness, and we are only more inspired and moved when he makes not just one but several crossings, walking, dancing, even lying down on his back with one leg hanging lazily below him.

 

Admittedly, there are times while watching the acts of this conspiracy unfold, as the two teams evade security with fake id’s and costumes, when you can’t help but think of the terror cells who spent years plotting their own interaction with the Twin Towers, but that gives Petit and his team an aura of nobility—as artists creating something beautiful and empowering.  When these buildings were brand new, architectural wonders, two monoliths rising above a city, a man somehow overcame them, humanized them.  And now that the towers are no longer there, that feat is rendered even more magical, because it happened only once and can never happen again.

 

Photos ©2008 Jean-Louis Blondeau / Polaris Images.

Brownstone Versus Brown Tenement

Here's a part of a conversation I had with a friend last week. 

WILLIAM:  I live right there on 43rd Street.

ROBERT:  You do?  Where?

WILLIAM:  In one of the brownstones.

ROBERT:  Brownstones?  On that block?

WILLIAM:  Yeah, right there.  With the fire escapes.

ROBERT:  That's a tenement.

WILLIAM:  Oh.  Well, brownstone sounds better.

"Brownstone sounds better."  It sure does.  So does palace.  From now on, I'm going to say that I live in a "mansion on Fifth Avenue" and, by that, I mean a one-bedroom apartment in a 54-unit building in Washington Heights.

Pictures of a brownstone and a tenement after the jump.

WHY, DONALD, WHY??

With a few exceptions, Donald Trump's buildings are painfully bland.  Admire the grand, century-old apartment buildings on Riverside Drive and then cringe at the row of mediocrity lining the West Side Highway, designated Trumpistan on the famous New Yorker cover that came out after September eleventh.  One of the exceptions, I always felt, was Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, the sleek tower of black glass with trees planted in the recesses above Fifty-sixth, with its six-story atrium of pink marble, escalators and eighty-foot waterfall.

There was something fun about it.  Playful.  I sometimes laughed when I brought groups through the doors--not a derisive snort but a genuine giggle embraced as we immediately were by the gaudy wonderland excess.  I moved to the city in 1990 and Trump Tower represented for me one aspect of the New York of the Eighties (i.e., Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities and Trump's own The Art of the Deal).

I was shocked this fall to find the atrium completely altered, redone, crapped up.

 

HOUSE SEATS IN TIMES SQUARE

One of the my favorite sequences in the movie I Am Legend, set in the year 2010, takes place in Times Square and features a red staircase that did not exist during production of the film.  This month, the staircase and the new TKTS discount booth (which takes credit cards!!) opened at long last in Duffy Square. 

Now you can sit where Seventh and Broadway intersect, watch the crowds and inhale the exhaust from buses and taxis stuck in traffic.