Fifth Avenue & 64th Street

All right people, I think I’m actually going to stick with my regimen, as promised, and see where a tangent from my last post might take us.  Who knows what nuanced, layered connections we may find; what dives into the depths of meditative fancy; what skittering flights along the wild byways of the past  (hey, I’m just like Sebald!)  Although in truth I’m inevitably just gonna write about a building – it’ll be made of stone or brick or metal, maybe have a copper cornice or something, no bigs.  It’s still exciting isn’t it?

We know the architectural firm of Warren & Wetmore built Grand Central Station (their masterpiece) as well as Chelsea Piers, the Con Ed tower on 14th Street and the New York Yacht Club.  But what else did they build?  I have to warn you, the answer is going to involve a lot of rich people, and the slightly less rich people that worked for them.  That’s okay; that’s largely the story of New York’s development….this shit costs money, ya know?

And if you’re speaking about money the Astor family is a good place to start.  We still hear about these guys today.  The founder of this dynasty, John Jacob Astor goes back a ways – even further back than Vanderbilt; in fact he was the first millionaire in the United States, making his money in the fur trade (specifically beaver fur) back when that was all the rage.  The family fortune and bloodline was carried on by Astor’s second son, William Backhouse Astor, who himself had two sons: John Jacob Astor III and William Backhouse Astor Jr.  (I’m picking up on a theme of recurring names here).  John Jacob Astor III would go on to be the wealthiest family member of his generation – actively involved in growing his fortune.  William Jr. was more content to just enjoy the good life, apparently spending a lot of time aboard his private yacht (considered the largest in the world at the time) and standing mostly aside while his wife reigned supreme over New York’s high society.

His wife, Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor (who I’ve mentioned before), came from an old-money New York Dutch family herself, and was known in her time simply as “the Mrs. Astor.”  Her first home (with her husband) was on the present site of the Empire State Building, though it was initially torn down to build the Astoria Hotel, at which point Mrs. Astor moved to Fifth Avenue and 65th Street, in a house designed by Richard Morris Hunt (today the site of Temple Emanu-El) .

A few years later a house was constructed for her daughter Caroline Schermerhorn Astor (again with the recurring names) and son-in-law, Marshall Orme Wilson, just around the corner on 64th and Fifth Avenue, and designed by none other than Warren & Wetmore.  The house, finished in 1903, is massive (by my apartment’s standards at least): 65 feet wide and 5 stories tall, with an amazing blue slate mansard roof replete with five perfectly ornate occuli (them little round windows).   Since 1950 it’s been known as the New India House: the current seat of the Consulate General of India.  Now were the Astors connected to India itself in anyway?  There’s a good chance, given that enough money tends to make you connected with everything, in a certain sense.  And Marshall Orme Wilson’s son may have been a diplomat himself, to Haiti, so that’s a little bit of a connection I guess.  It seems like once you start on this kind of thing, there’s a connection everywhere; it can even get a little tiring.  We don’t have to keep doing it, do we?   I mean, even Sebald probably took a break sometimes, I’d guess; you know: just took a little walk or something, watching the leaves change, thinking about the past.

Eleventh Avenue & 21st Street

It’s still winter, and for the first time this year it’s starting to drag a bit. Sure I’m still looking for the season-specific beautiful moments, the things you aren’t going to find any other time of year, but I’m also starting to really look forward to all those other times of year as well. But oh no, just yesterday I was thinking of how it would be October again before you know it, and I was thinking: how can anybody really enjoy October knowing that November comes after it and then months and months of winter after that; and it made me feel like: what’s the point of looking forward at all? What?! Did I just ask that? That’s when I know winter’s starting to get to me. Maybe I can flip the approach and say that feeling this way is the whole point of February – so let’s really get down into it. Let’s embrace the moment disliking the moment, and still giving it up begrudgingly. I think that’s the best way to pass the time till spring.

I went ice skating at Chelsea Piers the other day (which is kind of the approach I’m talking about) and it did afford me some great wintertime views: the Hudson with light snow falling. It also made me appreciate anew the ongoing construction of Hudson River Park. From the Sky Rink at Chelsea Piers I could look down onto the park at Pier 62, scheduled to be opened later this year alongside Pier 63. Pier 64, the third pier of the Chelsea section of the project, opened last spring and like the rest of Hudson River Park, I think it’s awesome. It feels really of the moment – beautiful open public spaces where people can be outdoors and remind themselves they live on an island.

Hudson River Park is pretty new, (especially as my tastes go) having been created by an act of the New York State Legislature in 1998. It stretches along the Hudson from Battery Park north to 59th Street, and at 550 acres it’s the second largest park in Manhattan after good ole’ Central (although 400 acres of that is tidal estuary – aka, underwater, so kind of a pointless stat). As I said, it’s not fully finished yet, but plenty of it exists to enjoy, including five miles of the Hudson River Greenway, a bike path that runs through the park and makes up a section of the much larger Manhattan Waterfront Greenway – 32 miles of (not quite connected) bike paths that circumnavigate the island. The Hudson River Greenway, which runs in its entirety from Battery Park all the way to Dyckman Street in Inwood, is the most heavily used bikeway in the United States.

The whole idea of the park of course is that it reclaims the waterfront, and its surviving piers, after decades of stagnation and disuse. For most of New York’s history, and especially the latter part of its history, the West Side had been teeming with shipping and industry, all the way up to about 72nd Street. No one of means desired to live around here, and unless you worked the docks or the various plants, factories, warehouses, and railyards that sat along them, it wasn’t a place you wanted to visit. With the coming of supertankers and containerization all of that shipping eventually moved away, but until recently nothing had come to replace it and the piers were simply left to rot in the water.

It was changing technology that had brought shipping to the Hudson to begin with. Prior to about 1880 New York shipping was still centered on the East River, around South Street Seaport, which was better protected than the Hudson from ice, flooding, and the prevailing westerly winds. The arrival of steam ships brought about the need for a deeper anchorage for these much larger boats, something that the West Side shoreline could provide. The Chelsea Piers, opened in 1910, were built specifically to accommodate these giant steam ships, in particular the new luxury liners that were coming to define trans-Atlantic travel. Designed by the firm of Warren and Wetmore (who also designed Grand Central Terminal) the piers originally ran from around 12th Street up to 23rd Street and served as the docking point for both the Cunard and the White Star Line. The Titantic was due to land here on its maiden voyage in 1912 and the Lusitania embarked from here on its equally fatal voyage in 1915.

The construction of Chelsea Piers marked one of the few times in New York’s history that developed land was actually removed to make way for shipping. In 1837 the New York State Legislature had allowed for landfill to extend Manhattan out to a 13th Avenue. The city began to sell underwater, shoreline lots with the stipulation that the owners would fill them in and develop them. The Avenue began at 11th Street in the West Village (where it was east of 12th Avenue) and followed the shoreline north to meet 12th Avenue around 23rd Street; from there it would have continued on to the west, eventually running parallel to 12th Avenue like the city’s other north-south blocks. By the time development had reached that point however the Legislature had changed its mind about expanding Manhattan any further westward, afraid of encroaching on the shipping lanes of the Hudson. As it was the existing 13th Avenue already limited the space that piers had to work with, effectively making them too short to house the new luxury liners. To fix the problem the city had 13th Avenue removed, giving itself the extra space to construct Chelsea Piers. The only segment of 13th Avenue that survives today is the unmarked parking lot of the Bloomfield Street Sanitation Depot, across the West Side Highway from Gansevoort Street.

It seems fitting that a 13th Avenue would have such an unlucky history. And on a slightly tangential note, thinking about 13th Avenue has made me forget all about the fact that it’s winter still – which is one nice thing about knowledge, or else I mean to say, the time you spend in books.

(Originally posted Feb. 19th, 2010 on Takethehandle.com)

12th Avenue & 26th Street

I have a few jobs (and yes, they’re all extremely lucrative — it’s important to diversify). Can I romanticize myself, and quote from Augie March here for a minute? “Saying various jobs, you give out the Rosetta Stone, so to speak, of my entire career.” Well, it’s not quite like that, but it’s a good quote. There is something about working a few different gigs within a day that can add up to more than the individual parts. As if within the juxtaposition of the various places and situations I find myself my life is truly being made. Well a part of my life, at least.

One of my jobs, while the season lasts, is as a tour guide. I lead people on bicycle through Central Park and down the West Side bike-path to the Brooklyn Bridge. I try to spin a narrative, perhaps inherently arbitrary or at least truncated, about New York. And more and more I’m finding as a starting point Manhattan’s history as a port, and the fact that it’s all history now – there’s no port left. We’re living in a unique time in that regard. For most of Manhattan’s lifetime its shoreline has been teeming with ships. Look at an old map or early aerial photograph and you see pier upon pier stretching along the Hudson River up to 72nd Street. Most of the goods coming into New York Harbor would land here, then be shipped by barge across the river to the rail yards of New Jersey – once railroads had been invented, I mean (shipping goes back way further than that). Things only started to change after World War Two, with the coming of containerization and super-tankers, both requiring more space than Manhattan could afford. Today the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey runs four seaports, one in Brooklyn, one in Staten Island, and two in New Jersey. Combined they make up the third busiest port in the United States.

But none of it is in Manhattan anymore. And so you see things changing – the waterfront is actually a place that people want to live by, that people want to visit. It’s not a brand new change, but it is one that remains ongoing. On the West Side you have the bike-path, part of the New York City Greenway, and the Hudson River Park that runs along it, both still being developed. And on the other end of the spectrum you have the wooden supports of all the collapsed old piers, still sticking out of the water, revealing more or less of themselves as the tides change. Somewhere in between are the old industrial buildings, left over from Manhattan’s port heyday.

One of the best one’s I can think of is the Starrett-Lehigh Building, taking up the entire block between 26th & 27th Street and 11th & 12th Avenue. It’s slightly bigger in square footage than the Empire State Building, despite having only 19 floors, compared to the Empire’s 102. Its design and completion in 1932 was intended to rectify the growing cost that traffic delays were causing New York City industry. The financier William A. Starrett leased the block from the Lehigh Valley Railroad and constructed the building over its previous open air rail yard. Trains, connecting via barge to New Jersey, could still pull into the ground floor and then be brought upstairs to any level on giant freight elevators, to load or unload their wares, making “every floor a first floor.” Trucks were able to do likewise.  The building itself was designed in the International Style, then popular in Europe, and was one of the few U.S. buildings included in the exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. The general idea was to do away with symmetry and ornamentation and pay more attention to balance and a sense of volume. Does that make any sense? I’ll tell you what, the more I’ve looked at this building the more I’ve grown to like it. The bands of windows on each level together total more than eight miles long, placed end to end.

The Lehigh railroad left in 1966, unable to compete with the new(ish) interstate highway system and the continued growth of trucking. Today no industrial tenants remain, with the building holding the likes of Hugo Boss, and Martha Stewart, and a number of arts-related businesses. It’s about what you’d expect, situated as it is on the edge of Chelsea.  Plus you gotta figure the natural light it gets is pretty amazing.  It’s only a few blocks away from Chelsea Piers, which is where the Titanic would have docked when it reached New York, if it hadn’t sunk instead.  Now it’s a well known sports complex and t.v. studio.  Passenger liners themselves kind of went the way of the Titanic.  Cars and trucks are still doing pretty well though, running up and down the West-Side Highway, along 12th Avenue.  At least until the next thing comes along.

(Originally posted Oct. 16th, 2009 on Takethehandle.com)