New York: The Ephemeral City
MEYER, KARL E.
'INDIFFERENT TO THE PAST AND HEEDLESS OF THE FUTURE' New York: The Ephemeral City By Karl E. Meyer To return to New York after an absence of several months is to revisit a faithless and...
...Grand Central Station, the city's other great rail terminal, has a similarly uncertain future...
...Midtown land is just too valuable to be wasted on travelers...
...The country's biggest and richest city is in the midst of a building boom of staggering proportions...
...Taken all together, it is not too much to say that in a wink of time-the last 20 years -the busy builders of New York have done more esthetic damage than a thermonuclear bomb...
...What color will her hair be...
...The Lafayette and the Brevoort, two beloved Greenwich Village landmarks, are among the missing...
...Is it to make New York a more livable city...
...Surely," said the Italian, "you will pay a little more for the better method because this is a building that will last for generations...
...Here is an instance in which the follies of political leaders will indeed live on after their bones have been interred...
...We build for 20 years.' The remark catches what is perhaps the central fact about New York City: that it lives in a perpetual present, indifferent to the past and heedless of the future...
...But many of the new buildings won't even last until that salubrious year...
...No doubt this lends a certain mordant appeal...
...turn around for a moment and the girl you knew looks a stranger...
...The physical setting for 1984 is taking form...
...If this keeps up," one says to the other, "there won't be anything left of New York...
...Sink below the streets and you sink into a kind of Inferno-the antiquated, evil-smelling, suffocatingly crowded subways...
...Picket signs reading "Spare These Grey Stones...
...And the antiquarian impulse is strengthening...
...But to what end is the activity directed...
...In different terms, the feeling was caught in a New Yorker cartoon the other week...
...as it stands, New York is a monument to the adaptability of human nature to the most hostile environment...
...Take, for example, the edifices that are supposed to be monuments of civic permanence: the railroad stations, the opera house, the symphony hall, hotels of cherished elegance...
...Nonsense," came the brisk retort...
...The RitzCarlton is already a faded memory...
...Anyone can design a Kleenex box, and the city's zoning laws and mediocre architects together conspire to turn New York into a kind of necropolis with glassfaced gravestones...
...Karl E. Meyer is a member of the editorial board of the Washington Post and Washington correspondent for the British New Statesman, where this article also appears...
...Proponents of preservation point out that it has acquired a certain historic interest even if it has been used for several concerts...
...It took a massive civic seige to save Carnegie Hall, and everyone is too exhausted from that to do much about the Metropolitan Opera House-though the Met's breathtaking horseshoe does more to conjure up the 1890s than any other spectacle I know in the city...
...In all of this upheaval, there is only the faintest outline of a plan...
...Perpendicular office buildings dominate the midtown, rising like so many upright Kleenex boxes...
...The Murray Hill Hotel, with its faintly lascivious murals in the taproom, is gone...
...Rome may be the Eternal City...
...And, as monumental buildings go, Penn Station is a mere stripling...
...Has the surgeon altered her nose...
...Above the street level rise concrete and glass cocoons of flagrant modernity...
...New York simply cannot be trusted...
...Everywhere in the Village gaudy and tasteless apartment buildings are rising, with rents as high as the building methods are cheap-you can hear a New York Times rustle three floors away through tissuethin partitions...
...Recently, an Italian architect visited New York and happened to attend a meeting at which his American confreres were discussing the cost of masonry methods for a projected new office building...
...And cultural activities will shortly be isolated in the glass-encased ghetto of Lincoln Center, designed in official modern for what one suspects will be official art...
...it opened its gates in 1910...
...In moral if not legal terms, it is something of a civic crime to permit the construction in midtown of the Pan American Building, "the world's largest commercial office building...
...middle-income housing does not figure in the plans of the ziggurat-builders...
...Last year the value of private construction prospects in the city's five boroughs, not including utilities or public works, reached $1,184,100,000or more than the combined expenditure of at least 13 states...
...A determined campaign might save the old heap for at least five years...
...The demonic activity may come as a tonic to visitors from countries where tradition paralyzes and enterprise is smothered...
...Two worried dowagers are studying a skyline fretted with girders, cranes and half-finished luxury office buildings...
...Fortunately, a reaction is belatedly setting in...
...Part of this includes the tallest hotel in the world: the Americana, 50 stories high and boasting an elevator that can take a guest and his Cadillac to the door of his suite...
...The old slums yield to new slums: superblock apartment houses, where even the children seem to acquire a penitentiary pallor...
...There is even a movement to save the month-old Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center, a movement led by ex-New Yorker Art Buchwald...
...INDIFFERENT TO THE PAST AND HEEDLESS OF THE FUTURE' New York: The Ephemeral City By Karl E. Meyer To return to New York after an absence of several months is to revisit a faithless and fickle grisette...
...Spacious Pennsylvania Station, designed by Sanford White and Charles Folien McKim, is about to make way for a superfluous sports arena and two aggressively ugly office buildings...
...Surely the incongruities and greed of free enterprise, American style, are nowhere in better evidence than in New York...
...New York has the unchallenged title as the Ephemeral City, a place where flux is all and where energy is expended entirely for its own sake...
...Yet this kind of construction, which is strangling the city, is not only permitted, it is encouraged by the likes of Robert Moses, who see such ventures as a mark of "vitality" and "wholesome growth...
...The Washington Square that Henry James knew has been efficiently liquidated, and only a few brownstones remain to suggest what the Visigoths have done...
...And what kind of city are the bulldozers shaping...
...everywhere you look, it seems, something worth saving is being replaced by something not worth building...
...We don't build for generations...
...All are either doomed or have been threatened by the wrecker's ball...
...Manhattan itself is swiftly becoming a reservation for the very poor or the very rich...
...The toll of hotels has been no less melancholy...
...Is it to make New York impressively beautiful...
...The only two buildings of real distinction built recently-I may be overlooking some other hidden exceptions-are Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's bronze-greaved Seagram Building...
...Manifestly not...
...Frankly, to my taste, it is a horror...
...But the slaughter is indiscriminate...
...Perhaps the most unforgivable single act of desecration has been in the Village, once a downtown community where both buildings and people were on an agreeably human scale...
...Some hopeful souls are proposing new zoning laws that would limit building-heights in areas like Greenwich Village...
...Where have her affections turned...
...Hardly an overstatement...
...are being prepared and petitions circulated...
Vol. 45 • December 1962 • No. 26
