Ciao Manhattan
Michael Sorkin
CIAO MANHATTAN
When I was a boy, my father and I used to go clamming. Standing ankle deep in the seaside mud, we'd scrape for cherrystones, filling a pail. Because my father was the sole eater, we'd only take a few dozen each trip. Our catch was nonetheless regulated by game wardens who patrolled the beach, empowered to command the rejection of young clams, to preserve the population. The medium of inspection was a brass ring: any clam small enough to pass through had to be thrown back.
The idea of a "New York Architecture" also invites a brass ring. As with those Cape Cod clams, something's needed to define the consumable population, some principle of exclusion and inclusion. What principle yields this bucketful? Here's what I gather: this is a collection comprised mainly of work done in or near New York City, mainly by architects from the more or less respectable category (the higher hacks are admitted but not the unself-conscious toilers who make most of the cityscape) who mainly practice in or near New York City. This ring has a dimension, but it's elastic, happy to let pass quite a few mussels and oysters (not to mention sharks).
But the elastic ring may be a necessity, given the organizing trope. "New York Architecture" is a classification without an obvious basis just at the moment. Sure, there are possibilities – region, type, history, metaphysic – but none's really the throat-grabbing, noose-tight category that invents the subject. Of course, this might be a very canny position. If there's a consciousness that typifies current New Yorkism, it lies in the commingling of anxiety and hype. "If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere" is the mantra of empty struggle elevated to credo.
New York, capital of capital, exults proprietorship über alles. Forms have always followed. At its origin, Manhattan parsed itself with bold irrevocability by self-imposing America's premier grid, a primal mapping of property relations. Special conditions sprang, eventually, from the confrontation with anomaly, the grid's dissipation at the island's heroic edges: Central Park, the rectilinear eye of the storm; the rivers – Hudson, East, and the concrete flow of Broadway, those great skewers of the orthogonal; and the twisted by-ways of Dutch downtown, the ever tugging seat of the irrational, lying wait.
Up through this skein pushed the bar graph of value, extruding architecture. And, within it, flourished the roiling ecology of the neighborhoods, New York's greatest accomplishment, the manufactories of both assimilation and diversity. Our architectural inventions were narrower: the scaling up of the party-walled domicile as it marched towards the cliffs of densification, from rowhouse to tenement to block-sharing and then block-filling apartment houses. Then we made the skyscraper, never mind other claims at origin. This was omega, a form which rapidly rose and exhausted itself, cycling in less than one hundred years into auto-parasitism.
There are also further, urbanist, claims on the genius loci, a little less indigenous: that the municipality housed millions in its projects, however Voisinoid; that Olmstead and Moses, their ancestors and heirs, built mighty roads and bridges, covered acres with parkland, provided sites of recreation for millions; that the town generated complicit climax forms, hard-edged avenues, zoning-fired set-back profiles, and the whole lexicon of unexpected juxtapositions that resulted from uneven development, continuous immigration, and anything goes.
But now, it's pretty much over. Exhausted by this activity, riven irrevocably into two cultures, the town's become historic and indifferent, done with fresh ideas. Sure, sure, we're an old city, densely built and filled with compacts about what's supposed to be. And, sure, points transpacific seem destined to become capitals of the twenty-first century (never mind the it’s not many years off that cities will be not simply indistinguishable but continuous). But the central fact remains: whatever individual activity is stimulated by mad synapsing Manhattan, whatever flights this pituitary city goads, the renunciation of the New has become the central fact of construction even as the excluding cycle of publicly assisted greed squeezes our well of variety dry.
Consider Battery Park City, The Third Manhattan, the current urbanist paradigm of our municipal Mussolinis. Initiated during the Rockefeller regency, the site's an invention, a real estate speculator's wet dream, land created out of nothing. It's landfill in the Hudson River, adjacent to Wall Street, where a commercial risurgimento in the 1960s is officially credited to Nelson's brother David, lion of the Chase Manhattan, whose new bank building was the first big "prestige" project the area had seen in years. Following on, Battery Park City was the administrative creature of a Moseslike public authority, able to raise its own funds and create its own agenda, freed from the niggling restrictions of the normal public bureaucracy.
The first schemes were thundering, heroic, pyrotechnical, megastructure: vast waterside plazas, edged by gigantic architecture. But the fashion for such excess was waning and a new idea came to take its place. Battery Park City would be a careful recapitulation of the spirit of New York, a perfected version of its native forms. The basis, naturally, would be the street grid and the site was duly platted and subdivided into developable parcels. Public spaces – most prominently a waterside promenade – were laid out. Finally, an aesthetic code was imposed which sought to distill the essentials of the "classical" New York Apartment House: brick construction, articulation of the base, a bit of decoration, etc. Whatever one thinks of the results (and there are highs and lows), the point is that the mode’s now characteristic. Retrieval has become both the consequential initiatory and corroborating act.
Due East of Battery Park City, just on the other side of the island, is the so-called South Street Seapost. Occupying old buildings from the former Fulton Fish Market, newly constructed pavilions in the manner of the old, and a series of recycled smaller structures from the last century, and arrogating the aura provided by an adjacent maritime museum, the South Street Seaport is the Rouse Corporation's New York outpost. Like its kin in Boston and Baltimore, it's a retail zone, a miasma of boutiques meant to suck in yuppies and tourists, in the guise of offering a slice of history. It's also a machine for differentiating a consumer population.
One of the more striking sights of a pleasant summery afternoon in New York City is that of the citizenry of Battery Park City sunning themselves on the riverside promenade and in the several tiny parks and plazas located among the apartment buildings. It's halcyon, an urban idyll, an activity that should be the minimum right of every city dweller. What strikes, though, is the utter homogeneity of the tanning population. Like South Street Seaport, Battery Park City is, effectively, a demographic instrument, an urban magnet for young, visibly fit, largely childless, almost entirely white professionals.
It isn't simply the fact of the enclave, or the proximity to Wall Street that sustains this, it's the architecture. The appliqué of gentility (here expanded to include a minimum urbanism) is the designated domain of this population, whether in their post-modernized office buildings, their genially cloned downtown restaurants, or their marginally enlived domiciles. Make no mistake: this isn't the heart of darkness exactly, it's just that it displaces something, that it's yet another factory of hyperreality.
Significantly, uptown, a nearly identical drama is being enacted. There, on the West Side, also along the river, Donald Trump – rapacity incarnate – has acquired the largest hunk of undeveloped land remaining in Manhattan, a former railroad yard. Trump proposes to erect a condominium Xanadu, originally called Television City (after a major tenant he was hoping to seduce) and now more frankly Trump City. The original plans were drawn up by Helmut Jahn and featured a gross phalanx of towers (including one meant to be the world's tallest) sitting on a massive podium. A deafening public outcry forced a re-do and Trump turned to the same architects who had produced the (much lauded) Battery Park City scheme.
The expectation, of course, was that they would manufacture a plan sufficiently rich in the signifiers of "historic" urbanism (of which the Jahn scheme was so aggressively bereft) to allay the fears of the public, especially those in the immediate neighborhood, forced to share already dysfunctional transportation and other strained services with a huge new population. The scheme is presently in doubt, in some measure, it seems, because of the impossibility of packaging the densities desired in a semblance of "traditional" scale. But it's the operation that's the key. And, indeed, it's recently been repeated once again, a few short blocks from the Trump site at Columbus Circle where an aggressively large (if perfectly legal according to existing zoning) scheme by the hapless Moshe Safdie for an office and apartment complex was thrown out by an approval-desperate developer in favor of a marginally smaller version from Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, done up in the current version of good taste, camouflage offered in lieu of meaningful urbanism.
The city, then, is afflicted by a plague of semiosis, a St. Vitus’s dance of occlusive signification. Architecture has been devalued by its real proprietors to the level of Madison Avenue: a certain cleverness will do for the endless repackagings that drive the architectural economy. The real issues are territorial: by what means and by what time can the homegenizing upscaling be pressed into every corner of Manhattan? This is the developer version of Manifest Destiny, the assertion that it's the natural right of white folks to occupy all of the island. Localizations of development, surges within discernible boundaries, are merely the medium for the run-up in real estate values. Like the policy of "Strategic Hamlets" that guided the failed latifundianization of the Vietnamese countryside during our late imperial adventure there, the mentality of carve and conquer is relentless in Manhattan.
Another conquest. Times Square is our historic epicenter, commingling our essences – dynamism, variety, vulgarity, art, pleasure, sleaze, corruption, publicity, anonymity, promise, and change without end. Immemorially, this free-fire zone of self-expression has been simultaneously constituted as liberation and threat, a place at once exalted and loathed. Times Square has, in every sense of the word, been irregular. A theater of behavior beyond bounds, it has also been a setting for architecture outside of conventional discipline. As the premier slashing of the grid by irregularizing Broadway, it liberates an archipelago of sites and conditions for the jostling colonization of stressed-out activity.
The self-sustaining ecology of Times Square – the mash of costumers, pimps, actors, theatrical agents, three card Monte players, hoteliers, pin-ball artists, ticket scalpers, costumers, porno exhibitors, barkeeps, pizza vendors, tourists – is the place where the grid of rationality that seeks to structure the city according to the routines of consolidated profit simply breaks down, a compendium of everything and everyone the system doesn't desire. Scarcely a surprise, then, that the greatest barrage of municipal and developer firepower laid down in the past ten years has fallen on Times Square, an enormous and successful effort to expunge Anathema.
There are major prongs to the attack. First, a quasi-public development authority – like that at Battery Park City – was consecrated to "do in" 42nd Street with a suite of enormous new buildings and the conversion of a block's worth of "historic" low-priced movie houses (magnets for the undesired poor) into "legitimate" theaters. The centerpiece of the scheme is an overbearing clutch of kitschy Mansardic towers from the office of the arch-hack himself, Philip Johnson. Although this awful project attracted enormous amounts of flak from the public, it turned out to be simply drawing fire from an even larger initiative.
While debate over 42nd Street raged, a change in zoning regulations provided a windfall for developers not simply there but all over the area. To stimulate the transformation, the city offered builders the opportunity to construct towers within a so-called "special district" which were substantially larger than those permitted under normal limits. This inducement proved, of course, irresistible: the area is now a forest of girders and formwork as one gigantic tower after another is brought on-line.
As with the much vaunted Battery Park City design guidelines, the authorities have tried to take the sting out of this enormous transformation by promulgating a set of obligatory decorative standards for the new buildings on the old square. It's the forest for the trees syndrome again, as if the "messy vitality" of the original could be reduced to a question of signage. Nevertheless, this is exactly what has been done, another menu for another banquet of empty signifiers. Each of the new buildings is obliged to tattoo its bulk with advertising and other supergraphic media, reducing a complex ecology to a matter of decor. Within a few years, the square will be converted to an office canyon, endlessly flashing its neon incitements back and forth across the maw.
The proper name for all of this is "gentrification." Now, gentrification amasses a number of qualities. First, it inevitably displaces – it's about expropriation, one class making a move on another. But it's also about reoccupation. Space must be recast, reacculturated. What distinguishes gentrification from the old model "urban renewal" is that while the latter loves effacement the former thrives on the digestion of the old aura, a parasite. Its claim, though, is to restore, to reinscribe erradicated ingredients. In Manhattan, the gentrifier's beau-ideal is the loft and Soho (always a new name) its ancestral home.
Contemplate the archetypal loft. It's a void, as undifferentiated as possible and the bigger the better, the magnitude of the capture signalling its raw consequence. The primal loft always asserts that it has been emptied, stripped bare of the particulars of its previous occupation. Its floors have been sanded smooth and sealed with urethane. Its walls have been sprayed a spotless uniform white. Its ghosts have been exorcized.
What's left, the certifying relic texture, is architecture, those cast iron columns, tin ceilings and grandly scaled windows and rooms. There's an adequate certification of historic detail and the sure knowledge that such extensive space is itself historic, unrealizable afresh under current conditions. And the walls hold art. Like the geometric baubles in the plazas in front of our old International Style skycrapers or the flashing signs of brave new Times Square, the art validates the space. On the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the Thermopylae of gentrification, the shock troops for the erasure of the poor were the art galleries. The irony lies in the fact that these lofts, galleries, and boutiques are by and large the only commissions available to talent in town these days.
Official architectural culture knows the city according to a narrowing set of standards, the contractions of consumer pluralism and its dedication to producing endless things which are merely distinguishable. This architecture has as its only agenda the production of strategies for telling it apart. The city is, at once, both shopping mall and museum, a distinction which is itself continually effaced in American culture as museums become appendages to their gift shops and stingless art has no ambition beyond ornament: the Museum of Modern Art rebuilds itself in the image of a shopping mall; Battery Park City is peppered with easy-access art; and so it goes.
In the climate of today, architecture's only substantial claim in New York is as a "Landmark." Indeed, the absence of sanction for any other constructive value has transformed the municipal Landmarks agency into a virtual rump planning department, the planners having relinquished authority to the developers. But landmarking is a very frail bulwark, finally answerable only to staid historical routines: unfortunately you can't landmark people's lives. Nor, it seems, are we even able adequately to revere our best buildings. The narcissistic trashing of the Guggenheim and Whitney Museums registers the low ebb.
The simple fact of the matter is this: New York is no longer a center for the building of serious architecture. Sure, talents burn bright in this irresistible city, small projects by under-utilized talents abound, the airports and fax lines are jammed by would-be consumers of what we make. But, casting memory back, it's hard to discern just what our last really distinguished building was. My own candidate for the door-closer is Roche's Ford Foundation. It's certainly a rich example of the culture of the end of the line, the philanthropic arm of the nation's premier industry, arguably the one which has brought our cities to their knees by its hammerlock on the convenience of mobility. The foundation occupies a beautifully crafted, sumptuous cathedral from which funds are disbursed to further American charity's favorite aims: education, the arts, small ameliorations of the lots of various colonized peoples, at home, and – especially – abroad: gentrification with global reach.
The parti is also apt to an ecology that’s run its course. A fragment of nature is sustained like an art object in its climate controlled museum. From the offices flanking Ford's court the city, viewed through the foliage, is softened, converted to modernism's great vision of greening compatibility. But it's false, of course. On the other side of the glass lies unbreathable air and a population obliged to spend its nights sleeping over grates in the sidewalk, huddling for warmth.