Mythic New York
The Future Still Needs the Gimbels Skybridge

For nearly a century, the Gimbels skybridge has served as a kind of gatehouse announcing Pennsylvania Station on the next block west. Few would guess that its interior was once continuous with the station's. The bridge will disappear if plans for the Empire Station Complex proceed. This would be a terrible loss. It is by far the most prominent aerial bridge from an era when the rest of the world looked to New York as the skyscraping, multi-level City of the Future—the crowning example of a phenomenon that influenced modern architecture and still captivates and inspires.

According to a 2014 New York Times piece by Christopher Gray, the bridge was built in 1926 when the Gimbels department store acquired the Cuyler Building across West 32nd Street and hired Shreve & Lamb—soon to be Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, and architects of the nearby Empire State Building—to connect offices in the building to the main store. Gray wrote, "The architects’ design was a no-holds-barred exemplar of the pedestrian bridge, a triplex skywalk with broad windows and magnificent copper cladding."

Gray observed that, "Although there is classical ornament, such as pilasters and coffers, the flat, machinelike character of the material suggests Art Deco, then barely emergent in the United States." He noted that in 1982 The New Yorker called the bridge "the Chartres of aerial tunnelry."

A 1924 skybridge across 33rd Street, also by Shreve & Lamb, linked the other side of Gimbels to the former Saks store. (It is shown being demolished in 1966.) When Saks moved to its Fifth Avenue location in 1922, Gimbels took over the old building, operating it as Saks-34th Street. The tamely classical Gimbels-Saks bridge shows how far its architects' style stepped into the future by the time of the Gimbels-annex bridge two years later.
The two Gimbels bridges were part of a layered transportation arrangement for which New York was world famous. The streets beneath these bridges passed in turn over the subway, accessible through the Gimbels store. A pedestrian tunnel also connected Gimbels to Pennsylvania Station, passing beneath the Hotel Pennsylvania and Seventh Avenue. One could have entered this enclosed system through Gimbels, its annex, or Saks-34th Street and next stepped outdoors in Chicago, having accessed Penn Station through the connecting bridge-tunnel-building network.
The Hotel Pennsylvania and the Governor Clinton (now Stewart) Hotel were also part of this network, linked to the station by tunnels under Seventh Avenue. An out-of-towner could arrive by train at Penn station, get a haircut in its barber shop, buy underwear in Gimbels' bargain basement and a suit at Saks, wear them to dinner in a station or hotel restaurant, listen to a big band in the Hotel Pennsylvania's Café Rouge, sleep in one of the hotels' thousands of beds, breakfast in the station's cafeteria, and return home—without ever stepping outdoors. The linked buildings provided enough services to amount to a city within a city. Like their contemporary mixed-use complex at Grand Central Terminal, they anticipated the megastructure movement of the 1960s and 70s which melded buildings to transportation and aspired to place the full range of urban functions under one roof. In his 1976 book, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past, Reyner Banham wrote that "patriotic Gothamites eager to claim the concept as a New York invention" could point to Penn Station, Grand Central, and Rockefeller Center. The movement had peaked by the time of his writing but it moved architecture's needle. It's ideas still guide leading architectural theorists like Rem Koolhaas and Steven Holl.

Shreve, Lamb & Harmon's Art Deco Empire State Building is seen beyond their proto-Deco Gimbels skybridge which Christopher Gray called "one of the city's great works of metal." Both were designed in the late 1920s, a mythic period of concentrated activity when the exuberance of New York architecture reached a crescendo and many of the city's best-loved and most defining works were produced. Both structures were the apotheosis of their type, the aerial bridge and skyscraper, which in combination dominated early-twentieth-century visions of cities to come. When Kuala Lumpur's 1998 Petronas Towers followed in the Empire State Building's footsteps as the world's tallest buildings, their linking skybridge carried the DNA of this imagery.

The Empire State Building's top, another of the city's great works of metal, was touted as a mooring mast for zeppelins. Impractical for this use, its real purpose was to contribute to the building's record-setting height. The mooring-mast claim was telling, though. The skies of urban fantasies inspired by New York were alive with airships. It's as if the Empire State Building's designers felt obliged to deliver. Like skybridges and skyscrapers, lighter-than-air vehicles resisted gravity. These ingredients mixed to create popular urban visions that promised liberation from an earthbound existence.

Images like Harry M. Pettit's rendering for Moses King’s guidebook, Views of New York, and William Robinson Leigh's painting, "Visionary City," both from 1908, exaggerated New York's towers and aerial pathways to project the future. Practicality aside, these cityscapes looked thrilling to inhabit. Aerial bridges allow people to magically step through building façades and cross streets in the air. Space takes on dizzying visual depth and unprecedented three-dimensional navigability. All of this plays to our fundamental condition as mobile bodies in space possessed of free will. The immersive motion in these images coincided with the advent of popular movies which also appealed to the modern appetite for speed, daring, and excitement.

The illustration at left was featured on the cover of Scientific American in 1913 and reproduced the same year as "The Circulation of the Future and the Cloudscrapers of New York" in the Milanese magazine L'Illustrazione Italiana. Such images inspired the influential Milan-based Italian Futurist movement, as seen in Antonio Sant'Elia's study for his project La Città Nuova (The New City) at right.

This 1914 rendering is Sant'Elia's most fully developed rendering of La Città Nuova. (He was killed two years later in World War One at just 28.) Bridges, overpasses, and transportation systems aren't tacked onto the static buildings of a traditional city, but used as the building blocks of a new kind of dynamic, city-scale structure that jettisons architectural history.

In the 1914 image at left, Sant'Elia imagined a station for airplanes and trains with funiculars. Manhattan's Westyard Distribution Center at right was designed by Davis Brody and opened in 1969—one of countless buildings around the world influenced by Sant'Elia's unbuilt body of work. The historic photo shows Westyard straddling the West Side Rail Yards. It has been renovated as Five Manhattan West. The block of the railyard beyond it has been decked over and developed as Hudson Yards. The block in the foreground has been decked over and developed as part of Midtown West, with a central pedestrian mall running from Five Manhattan West to Ninth Avenue directly opposite the west entrance of the new Moynihan Train Hall. The mall's axis resumes on the other side of Moynihan Train Hall and Penn Station as 32nd Street, passing directly under the Gimbels skybridge like a through-line of architectural history.

Five Manhattan West, formerly Westyard, is seen with its newly enhanced dynamic diagonals at upper right in this rendering of the High Line's planned Moynihan Connector. The pedestrian bridge will link a tree-covered extension of the High Line's spur to the new Manhattan West mall (a right turn just past the pink-flowering trees) which approaches the Train Hall. Another connector will link the north leg of the High Line to the west terrace of the Javits Center and a long-planned but never-built pedestrian bridge over the West Side Highway to Hudson River Park. Together with the High Line itself, this pedestrian network, raised above street traffic, may be one of the closest things ever built to those layered-city magazine fantasies that inspired Sant'Elia and the Futurists.

Fritz Lang said his classic 1927 film Metropolis was inspired by a 1924 visit to New York. It was also clearly influenced by futuristic visions of New York and Sant'Elia's projects, as have been science fiction movies from Blade Runner to Brazil to The Fifth Element, the latter featuring a future New York dense with skybridges and flying taxis. The richly activated three-dimensionality of early visions on paper is inherently cinematic, as witnessed by countless cinematic shoot-outs on the monkey-bar catwalks and ladders of abandoned warehouses. Forward-looking architecture naturally shares territory in the future with science fiction; Frank Lloyd Wright's 1924 Ennis House was still out-there enough to portray 2019 Los Angeles in Blade Runner.

This rendering of the 1963 Walking City project by the avant-garde architectural group Archigram is captioned: "Each walking unit houses not only a key element of the capital, but also a large population of world-traveler-workers." With its leg-like bridges, the Walking City is in the futuristic skybridge-city tradition. It is also in the city-within-a-city tradition of interconnected buildings forming self-contained complexes like the ones centered on Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal. The scheme does the motion-infused city one better—the city itself moves. Reyner Banham included this image in Megastructure, writing of its units: "Their location here in the East River, with the towers of Manhattan in the background, suggests a deliberate challenge to older visions of the future."

Freed from the land and knee-deep in the Hudson against a backdrop of midtown skyscrapers, Architect Steven Holl's 1990 Parallax Towers project mirrors Archigram's Walking City on the opposite side of Manhattan. Its "hybrid buildings" with diverse functions would be connected both underwater and by skybridges.

Holl's 2009 Linked Hybrid project in Beijing shows that his Parallax Towers scheme was far from a pipe dream. Its eight towers linked by eight bridges house 2,500 residents and recall Matisse's ring of dancers clasping hands—an apt metaphor for Holl's intent to un-silo residents, generate random relationships, and "express a collective aspiration." (They also recall Gimbels when it had a bridge on each side like outstretched arms.) The skybridges contain a swimming pool, fitness room, café, and gallery. Holl's description places the complex in the best cinematic, layered-city, proto-megastructure New York tradition:
As a "city within a city" the new place has a filmic urban experience of space; around, over and through multifaceted spatial layers. A three-dimensional public urban space, the project has programs that vary from commercial, residential, and educational to recreational.
In this dazzling project, New York's early skybridges reverberate across a century and around the planet. Linked Hybrid shows that their progeny can be part of a sunnier future that the dystopian ones science fiction movies depend on for dramatic tension and noir atmosphere.

SHoP Architects' American Copper Buildings were completed in 2018. The project's towers are connected by a bridge containing a lap pool and lounge, touted as the highest skybridge in New York City and the first to be built in decades. It is proof of the continuing power of the Gimbels bridge, just the other side of the Empire State Building, to inspire.
What does the future hold for the Gimbels skybridge, the "Chartres" of those early spans that gave so much to the future? It cries out for the landmark designation that would protect it, but this would require also designating of the old Gimbels and Cuyler buildings that hold it up. It's impossible to imagine this being done by our current Landmarks Preservation Commission, which wouldn't even designate McKim, Mead & White's adjacent Hotel Pennsylvania a landmark. The Gimbels store clearly merits consideration for landmark status. It was designed by Daniel Burnham, one of the nation's most influential architects and urban planners.
Christopher Gray's article stated that the buildings connected by the skybridge have been separately owned since 1994 and that plans were filed in 1995 to remove it. He speculated that the daunting cost of demolition may have stayed the bridge's execution: "Perhaps money alone is preserving our 20th-century Chartres." This might be enough to keep it aloft indefinitely were the Empire Station Complex abandoned. If the plan is approved, its zoning changes would greatly increase the built square footage allowed on the Gimbels site. Like most of the property that would be transformed by the Empire Station Complex, the site is owned by Vornado Realty Trust. The more extra area Vornado is allowed to build there, the less reason for it to reuse Gimbels and the more to demolish it and its skybridge, and build all new. In a better world, Vornado would recognize the cultural and potential market value of its property, and incorporate it as the base of any taller building allowed by zoning. Or the Empire Station Complex plan might be modified to make zoning increases contingent on this. That would take the intervention of more enlightened leadership; the project's Draft Environmental Impact Statement states that there are no historic resources on the Gimbels site.
Even if no longer used as a connector, the Gimbels bridge is wide enough for its three levels to follow modern-skybridge examples and contain programmatic space. It could house tenant-attracting board rooms, lounges, or other amenities with dramatic views, accessed from one side. A little imagination and New York know-how could allow other landmark-worthy structures in the Empire Station Complex's path to be saved without defeating the plan's purpose. Foundations could certainly be reconfigured under Saint John the Baptist Church and the Penn Station Powerhouse to allow new tracks and platforms below. Blending authentic New York texture with new development would add great appeal. Steven Spielberg's West Side Story, from its opening to closing credits, is a paean to the established texture of New York. Not surprisingly, the film includes a likeness of the Gimbel's bridge.

Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie is a mixed-use complex in the megastructure tradition, housing concert halls, restaurants, bars, conference rooms, a hotel, a spa, apartments, and parking. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron and completed in 2016, the project reuses a nondescript 1960s brick warehouse as its base. The warehouse reads as an underlying archaeological stratum, expressing how Hamburg's cultural present is built on its geography and history as a working port.
The Gimbels store could similarly serve as a value-adding base for an even larger building. Its famed designer and architectural merit aside, the building tells of the neighborhood's intertwined garment-center and retail-district histories. Gimbels was the major competitor of nearby Macy's, and was completed in the same year as the original Penn Station, near which it was strategically built. Such buildings tell how a neighborhood came to be. They give it historic resonance and a unique identity that can't be made from scratch—the sort of authentic character that makes people want to live in places like New York. Recycling this embodied history would complement the environmental sustainability of adaptive reuse, for which Gimbels cries out. The nearly million-square-foot structure has enormous embedded energy, high structural capacity, tall ceilings, and abundant windows. It could be adaptively reused for any number of purposes.
Imaginative reuse of old buildings has earned growing recognition not just on environmental grounds, but critically. Last year's Pritzker Prize—architecture's highest honor—was awarded to Lacatan & Vassal, the French firm that prides itself on never having demolished a building to construct a new one. This is the direction of the world's enlightened architecture today—the reverse of what the Empire Station Complex proposes. The plan's reversion to Robert Moses-era clearcutting of whole city blocks is a special embarrassment for a city that once led the world into the future.
The Empire Station Complex would follow the formula of the unloved Hudson Yards development, but its destruction of historic architecture will make it even more regrettable. New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman put his finger on Hudson Yards' defining failure, writing that it gives physical form to "a pernicious theory of civic welfare that presumes private development is New York’s primary goal, the truest measure of urban vitality and health, with money the city’s only real currency." Historic architecture that continues to engage the imagination and inspire is another, very real currency. Miami wouldn't be the international brand and destination it is if South Beach's Art Deco hotels had been replaced by larger ones rather than preserved. Who visits or moves to New York for Hudson Yards? It's Teflon to the imagination, just as the Empire Station Complex promises to be—the very opposite of the mythic New York embodied in the Gimbels skybridge.
photo credits:
American Copper Buildings NY1 (cropped).jpg by Acroterion CC BY-SA 4.0 Int'l
Elbpjilharmonie, Hamburg.jpg by Hachercatxxy CC BY-SA 4.0 Int'l.
The Future Still Needs the Gimbels Skybridge

For nearly a century, the Gimbels skybridge has served as a kind of gatehouse announcing Pennsylvania Station on the next block west. Few would guess that its interior was once continuous with the station's. The bridge will disappear if plans for the Empire Station Complex proceed. This would be a terrible loss. It is by far the most prominent aerial bridge from an era when the rest of the world looked to New York as the skyscraping, multi-level City of the Future—the crowning example of a phenomenon that influenced modern architecture and still captivates and inspires.

According to a 2014 New York Times piece by Christopher Gray, the bridge was built in 1926 when the Gimbels department store acquired the Cuyler Building across West 32nd Street and hired Shreve & Lamb—soon to be Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, and architects of the nearby Empire State Building—to connect offices in the building to the main store. Gray wrote, "The architects’ design was a no-holds-barred exemplar of the pedestrian bridge, a triplex skywalk with broad windows and magnificent copper cladding."

Gray observed that, "Although there is classical ornament, such as pilasters and coffers, the flat, machinelike character of the material suggests Art Deco, then barely emergent in the United States." He noted that in 1982 The New Yorker called the bridge "the Chartres of aerial tunnelry."

A 1924 skybridge across 33rd Street, also by Shreve & Lamb, linked the other side of Gimbels to the former Saks store. (It is shown being demolished in 1966.) When Saks moved to its Fifth Avenue location in 1922, Gimbels took over the old building, operating it as Saks-34th Street. The tamely classical Gimbels-Saks bridge shows how far its architects' style stepped into the future by the time of the Gimbels-annex bridge two years later.
The two Gimbels bridges were part of a layered transportation arrangement for which New York was world famous. The streets beneath these bridges passed in turn over the subway, accessible through the Gimbels store. A pedestrian tunnel also connected Gimbels to Pennsylvania Station, passing beneath the Hotel Pennsylvania and Seventh Avenue. One could have entered this enclosed system through Gimbels, its annex, or Saks-34th Street and next stepped outdoors in Chicago, having accessed Penn Station through the connecting bridge-tunnel-building network.
The Hotel Pennsylvania and the Governor Clinton (now Stewart) Hotel were also part of this network, linked to the station by tunnels under Seventh Avenue. An out-of-towner could arrive by train at Penn station, get a haircut in its barber shop, buy underwear in Gimbels' bargain basement and a suit at Saks, wear them to dinner in a station or hotel restaurant, listen to a big band in the Hotel Pennsylvania's Café Rouge, sleep in one of the hotels' thousands of beds, breakfast in the station's cafeteria, and return home—without ever stepping outdoors. The linked buildings provided enough services to amount to a city within a city. Like their contemporary mixed-use complex at Grand Central Terminal, they anticipated the megastructure movement of the 1960s and 70s which melded buildings to transportation and aspired to place the full range of urban functions under one roof. In his 1976 book, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past, Reyner Banham wrote that "patriotic Gothamites eager to claim the concept as a New York invention" could point to Penn Station, Grand Central, and Rockefeller Center. The movement had peaked by the time of his writing but it moved architecture's needle. It's ideas still guide leading architectural theorists like Rem Koolhaas and Steven Holl.

Shreve, Lamb & Harmon's Art Deco Empire State Building is seen beyond their proto-Deco Gimbels skybridge which Christopher Gray called "one of the city's great works of metal." Both were designed in the late 1920s, a mythic period of concentrated activity when the exuberance of New York architecture reached a crescendo and many of the city's best-loved and most defining works were produced. Both structures were the apotheosis of their type, the aerial bridge and skyscraper, which in combination dominated early-twentieth-century visions of cities to come. When Kuala Lumpur's 1998 Petronas Towers followed in the Empire State Building's footsteps as the world's tallest buildings, their linking skybridge carried the DNA of this imagery.

The Empire State Building's top, another of the city's great works of metal, was touted as a mooring mast for zeppelins. Impractical for this use, its real purpose was to contribute to the building's record-setting height. The mooring-mast claim was telling, though. The skies of urban fantasies inspired by New York were alive with airships. It's as if the Empire State Building's designers felt obliged to deliver. Like skybridges and skyscrapers, lighter-than-air vehicles resisted gravity. These ingredients mixed to create popular urban visions that promised liberation from an earthbound existence.

Images like Harry M. Pettit's rendering for Moses King’s guidebook, Views of New York, and William Robinson Leigh's painting, "Visionary City," both from 1908, exaggerated New York's towers and aerial pathways to project the future. Practicality aside, these cityscapes looked thrilling to inhabit. Aerial bridges allow people to magically step through building façades and cross streets in the air. Space takes on dizzying visual depth and unprecedented three-dimensional navigability. All of this plays to our fundamental condition as mobile bodies in space possessed of free will. The immersive motion in these images coincided with the advent of popular movies which also appealed to the modern appetite for speed, daring, and excitement.

The illustration at left was featured on the cover of Scientific American in 1913 and reproduced the same year as "The Circulation of the Future and the Cloudscrapers of New York" in the Milanese magazine L'Illustrazione Italiana. Such images inspired the influential Milan-based Italian Futurist movement, as seen in Antonio Sant'Elia's study for his project La Città Nuova (The New City) at right.

This 1914 rendering is Sant'Elia's most fully developed rendering of La Città Nuova. (He was killed two years later in World War One at just 28.) Bridges, overpasses, and transportation systems aren't tacked onto the static buildings of a traditional city, but used as the building blocks of a new kind of dynamic, city-scale structure that jettisons architectural history.

In the 1914 image at left, Sant'Elia imagined a station for airplanes and trains with funiculars. Manhattan's Westyard Distribution Center at right was designed by Davis Brody and opened in 1969—one of countless buildings around the world influenced by Sant'Elia's unbuilt body of work. The historic photo shows Westyard straddling the West Side Rail Yards. It has been renovated as Five Manhattan West. The block of the railyard beyond it has been decked over and developed as Hudson Yards. The block in the foreground has been decked over and developed as part of Midtown West, with a central pedestrian mall running from Five Manhattan West to Ninth Avenue directly opposite the west entrance of the new Moynihan Train Hall. The mall's axis resumes on the other side of Moynihan Train Hall and Penn Station as 32nd Street, passing directly under the Gimbels skybridge like a through-line of architectural history.

Five Manhattan West, formerly Westyard, is seen with its newly enhanced dynamic diagonals at upper right in this rendering of the High Line's planned Moynihan Connector. The pedestrian bridge will link a tree-covered extension of the High Line's spur to the new Manhattan West mall (a right turn just past the pink-flowering trees) which approaches the Train Hall. Another connector will link the north leg of the High Line to the west terrace of the Javits Center and a long-planned but never-built pedestrian bridge over the West Side Highway to Hudson River Park. Together with the High Line itself, this pedestrian network, raised above street traffic, may be one of the closest things ever built to those layered-city magazine fantasies that inspired Sant'Elia and the Futurists.

Fritz Lang said his classic 1927 film Metropolis was inspired by a 1924 visit to New York. It was also clearly influenced by futuristic visions of New York and Sant'Elia's projects, as have been science fiction movies from Blade Runner to Brazil to The Fifth Element, the latter featuring a future New York dense with skybridges and flying taxis. The richly activated three-dimensionality of early visions on paper is inherently cinematic, as witnessed by countless cinematic shoot-outs on the monkey-bar catwalks and ladders of abandoned warehouses. Forward-looking architecture naturally shares territory in the future with science fiction; Frank Lloyd Wright's 1924 Ennis House was still out-there enough to portray 2019 Los Angeles in Blade Runner.

This rendering of the 1963 Walking City project by the avant-garde architectural group Archigram is captioned: "Each walking unit houses not only a key element of the capital, but also a large population of world-traveler-workers." With its leg-like bridges, the Walking City is in the futuristic skybridge-city tradition. It is also in the city-within-a-city tradition of interconnected buildings forming self-contained complexes like the ones centered on Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal. The scheme does the motion-infused city one better—the city itself moves. Reyner Banham included this image in Megastructure, writing of its units: "Their location here in the East River, with the towers of Manhattan in the background, suggests a deliberate challenge to older visions of the future."

Freed from the land and knee-deep in the Hudson against a backdrop of midtown skyscrapers, Architect Steven Holl's 1990 Parallax Towers project mirrors Archigram's Walking City on the opposite side of Manhattan. Its "hybrid buildings" with diverse functions would be connected both underwater and by skybridges.

Holl's 2009 Linked Hybrid project in Beijing shows that his Parallax Towers scheme was far from a pipe dream. Its eight towers linked by eight bridges house 2,500 residents and recall Matisse's ring of dancers clasping hands—an apt metaphor for Holl's intent to un-silo residents, generate random relationships, and "express a collective aspiration." (They also recall Gimbels when it had a bridge on each side like outstretched arms.) The skybridges contain a swimming pool, fitness room, café, and gallery. Holl's description places the complex in the best cinematic, layered-city, proto-megastructure New York tradition:
As a "city within a city" the new place has a filmic urban experience of space; around, over and through multifaceted spatial layers. A three-dimensional public urban space, the project has programs that vary from commercial, residential, and educational to recreational.
In this dazzling project, New York's early skybridges reverberate across a century and around the planet. Linked Hybrid shows that their progeny can be part of a sunnier future that the dystopian ones science fiction movies depend on for dramatic tension and noir atmosphere.

SHoP Architects' American Copper Buildings were completed in 2018. The project's towers are connected by a bridge containing a lap pool and lounge, touted as the highest skybridge in New York City and the first to be built in decades. It is proof of the continuing power of the Gimbels bridge, just the other side of the Empire State Building, to inspire.
What does the future hold for the Gimbels skybridge, the "Chartres" of those early spans that gave so much to the future? It cries out for the landmark designation that would protect it, but this would require also designating of the old Gimbels and Cuyler buildings that hold it up. It's impossible to imagine this being done by our current Landmarks Preservation Commission, which wouldn't even designate McKim, Mead & White's adjacent Hotel Pennsylvania a landmark. The Gimbels store clearly merits consideration for landmark status. It was designed by Daniel Burnham, one of the nation's most influential architects and urban planners.
Christopher Gray's article stated that the buildings connected by the skybridge have been separately owned since 1994 and that plans were filed in 1995 to remove it. He speculated that the daunting cost of demolition may have stayed the bridge's execution: "Perhaps money alone is preserving our 20th-century Chartres." This might be enough to keep it aloft indefinitely were the Empire Station Complex abandoned. If the plan is approved, its zoning changes would greatly increase the built square footage allowed on the Gimbels site. Like most of the property that would be transformed by the Empire Station Complex, the site is owned by Vornado Realty Trust. The more extra area Vornado is allowed to build there, the less reason for it to reuse Gimbels and the more to demolish it and its skybridge, and build all new. In a better world, Vornado would recognize the cultural and potential market value of its property, and incorporate it as the base of any taller building allowed by zoning. Or the Empire Station Complex plan might be modified to make zoning increases contingent on this. That would take the intervention of more enlightened leadership; the project's Draft Environmental Impact Statement states that there are no historic resources on the Gimbels site.
Even if no longer used as a connector, the Gimbels bridge is wide enough for its three levels to follow modern-skybridge examples and contain programmatic space. It could house tenant-attracting board rooms, lounges, or other amenities with dramatic views, accessed from one side. A little imagination and New York know-how could allow other landmark-worthy structures in the Empire Station Complex's path to be saved without defeating the plan's purpose. Foundations could certainly be reconfigured under Saint John the Baptist Church and the Penn Station Powerhouse to allow new tracks and platforms below. Blending authentic New York texture with new development would add great appeal. Steven Spielberg's West Side Story, from its opening to closing credits, is a paean to the established texture of New York. Not surprisingly, the film includes a likeness of the Gimbel's bridge.

Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie is a mixed-use complex in the megastructure tradition, housing concert halls, restaurants, bars, conference rooms, a hotel, a spa, apartments, and parking. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron and completed in 2016, the project reuses a nondescript 1960s brick warehouse as its base. The warehouse reads as an underlying archaeological stratum, expressing how Hamburg's cultural present is built on its geography and history as a working port.
The Gimbels store could similarly serve as a value-adding base for an even larger building. Its famed designer and architectural merit aside, the building tells of the neighborhood's intertwined garment-center and retail-district histories. Gimbels was the major competitor of nearby Macy's, and was completed in the same year as the original Penn Station, near which it was strategically built. Such buildings tell how a neighborhood came to be. They give it historic resonance and a unique identity that can't be made from scratch—the sort of authentic character that makes people want to live in places like New York. Recycling this embodied history would complement the environmental sustainability of adaptive reuse, for which Gimbels cries out. The nearly million-square-foot structure has enormous embedded energy, high structural capacity, tall ceilings, and abundant windows. It could be adaptively reused for any number of purposes.
Imaginative reuse of old buildings has earned growing recognition not just on environmental grounds, but critically. Last year's Pritzker Prize—architecture's highest honor—was awarded to Lacatan & Vassal, the French firm that prides itself on never having demolished a building to construct a new one. This is the direction of the world's enlightened architecture today—the reverse of what the Empire Station Complex proposes. The plan's reversion to Robert Moses-era clearcutting of whole city blocks is a special embarrassment for a city that once led the world into the future.
The Empire Station Complex would follow the formula of the unloved Hudson Yards development, but its destruction of historic architecture will make it even more regrettable. New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman put his finger on Hudson Yards' defining failure, writing that it gives physical form to "a pernicious theory of civic welfare that presumes private development is New York’s primary goal, the truest measure of urban vitality and health, with money the city’s only real currency." Historic architecture that continues to engage the imagination and inspire is another, very real currency. Miami wouldn't be the international brand and destination it is if South Beach's Art Deco hotels had been replaced by larger ones rather than preserved. Who visits or moves to New York for Hudson Yards? It's Teflon to the imagination, just as the Empire Station Complex promises to be—the very opposite of the mythic New York embodied in the Gimbels skybridge.
photo credits:
American Copper Buildings NY1 (cropped).jpg by Acroterion CC BY-SA 4.0 Int'l
Elbpjilharmonie, Hamburg.jpg by Hachercatxxy CC BY-SA 4.0 Int'l.
Mythical Lower Manhattan, Part 2
The 2002 World Trade Center competition entry by the team of architects Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey and Steven Holl is shown in its finished form at left, and in an earlier study by Holl, at right. The images are juxtaposed as they appear in Holl’s book, Urbanisms. The finished scheme has the regimentation of Upper Manhattan’s street grid while the study suggests Lower Manhattan’s off-kilter intersections. (One legend has it that the slang meaning of “square” comes from Greenwich Village’s bohemian heyday, when free thinkers lived on its unaligned streets and conformists on uptown’s rectangular blocks.) Holl asserts that the distinction mattered to him, in his book Architecture Spoken:
I had been working on a vision called Parallax Towers years before, in which I envisioned horizontal linkage of vertical thin towers. The notion of these as hybrid buildings, meaning they had offices, living, commercial aspects and they were linked in section, orchestrating what is normally known as a vertical typology into a horizontal one. The flexibility of that idea would work for the program we were given for this new project. Peter Eisenman and I fought until the end on how the horizontals should meet the verticals. I always wanted them to move, as in my original project from the early nineties, but he wanted them straight. The compromise was to keep them straight.
Despite this lost battle, Holl would speak proudly of the end result in a lecture at SCI-Arc on September 11, 2003, and bitterly reject architecture critic Paul Goldberger's description of its "icy rationality." Nonetheless, his earlier resistance to the squared-off default, in what he calls "endless and enormously confrontational meetings,” is telling.
Like his World Trade Center proposal, Steven Holl’s Parallax Towers, envisioned to rise from the Hudson off the Upper West Side of Manhattan, are distinguished by sloped bridges. In describing their varied pitches as movement, Holl underscores the way they express human volition and motility. The unsolicited project is one of several created by Holl before his time was commandeered by real commissions. When these visions were collected in an exhibition called Edge of a City, the architect Stan Allen wrote:
They belong to a tradition of utopian realism like that of Superstudio and Yona Friedman in the sixties and the Japanese Metabolists in the fifties; they recall Raymond Hood's Residential Bridges and Le Corbusier's urban proposals of the twenties and thirties. As with other architects working in this tradition, there is something seemingly arrogant in Holl’s assuming the power to remake the image of the city. Yet this is the territory in which these projects operate most effectively: not as concrete proposals, but as infiltrations of the collective imagination, producing an idea of what the city could be.
Allen’s reference to popular suggestion and the collective imagination relates this territory to myth, and its expression of shared human fears and desires.
An image from Superstudio’s 1969 Continuous Monument is shown above Steven Holl’s 1977 Gymnasium Bridge project. They share a visionary tradition and have formal similarities. Both projects substitute a multi-purpose blocky framework for individual buildings. In Superstudio’s hands, this form taps fears of oppressive “scientific methods for perpetuating standard models worldwide,” while Holl makes it a utopian bridge to social re-engagement in a mixed-use - "hybrid" is his constant word – building that hints at the idea of a floating horizontal skyscraper and weightless architecture. For decades, Holl would build on the Gymnasium Bridge in other visions and, notably, major commissions for real buildings.

The building section of Steven Holl's 1992-2002 Simmons Hall at MIT is shown below a 1990 Berlin Free Zone image by his friend Lebbeus Woods. Rebellion against cubic space is seen in both. Holl is about creating the experience of spatial porosity found in cities like Naples; Woods is about myth-like narratives - and political provocations - of transformation. Neither aim is catnip to businesslike clients. Holl is known for turning away commissions that would deny his vision; Woods was a full-fledged rebel angel, refusing to serve clients at all, the better to create uncompromised new worlds.
The body's interaction with the physical world, its movement through space and time, and its experience of changing perspectives are architecture's starting point for Steven Holl, reflecting his interest in the phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In this photo of his Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, static Cartesian space and the vanishing points of its diminishing perspective grid are assiduously avoided; subjective experience is prioritized, and the body's fundamental nature as a sensate, moving entity is engaged and celebrated. The man who designed this space must indeed have regretted seeing his World Trade Center vision regress into the square world’s frozen grid, for its experiential lockstep if not its association with domineering, externally applied reason.
In what might be a belly-of-the-beast view inside Superstudio's Continuous Monument, New York's 1960 Union Carbide Building lends grim new meaning to "vanishing point." Its static cage of X, Y and Z-axes captures a work atmosphere on the verge of precipitating into a half-century hail of Cartesian cubicles. Union Carbide was designed by SOM, the firm responsible for the One World Trade Center tower we will have. SOM's own more poetic, torqued and asymmetrical early versions of the tower ultimately succumbed to the old default of geometric simplicity, a lifeless twist on the original Twin Tower boxes that Lewis Mumford called "just glass-and-metal filing cabinets." The genius of Mumford's characterization is its underlying indictment of such architecture's failure to inspire, its complicity in the modern world's debasement of human lives. The Union Carbide interior photo could illustrate Joseph Campbell's words in The Power of Myth:
When you think about what people are actually undergoing in our civilization, you realize it’s a very grim thing to be a modern human being. The drudgery of the lives of most of the people who have to support families – well, it’s a life-extinguishing affair.... an imposed system is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? How do you relate to the system so that you are not compulsively serving it?... The thing to do is learn to live in your period of history as a human being.... By holding to your own ideals for yourself and ... rejecting the system's impersonal claims upon you.
Flattening - and flat-surfaced - architecture reflects both the tyranny of powers which have the wherewithal to build, and that of the intellect over emotion and nature. This architecture is so pervasive and accepted as to be invisible, leaving its source and merits rarely examined. David Pye is an exception, in his book The Nature and Aesthetics of Design:
A flat surface will touch any other flat surface at all points.... Thus a mason building a wall need not fit each stone he lays to the stone below it. Having cut all his stones to flat surfaces first, he knows that any stone will bed steadily on any other without having to be fitted to it individually.
The versatility of flat surfaces is not commonly seen in nature. Stones which cleave under frost exhibit it; but the breadth of its application was a discovery of man’s, and one of his most valuable, for it enabled him to reduce the cost of construction in all materials very considerably. An extension of the discovery was that if the components of a structure were ‘squared’, i.e. were given two flat surfaces at right angles, then they would not only touch each other at all points of the adjacent surfaces, but would also do the same to a third component.
We take all this very much for granted. Any house and its contents, and the toy bricks on the nursery floor, showed us this before we could talk. The extraordinary rigmarole which I have had to use in writing about it is perhaps evidence that we take it as part of the natural order of things, which it is not....
Only those parts of a component which touch others need be squared. The sides and under surface of a beam need not be squared for the sake of economy, yet from the earliest times we see that this was done, exhibiting the tendency to standardization which appears in all constructional design.... Standardized pieces of material provide the designer with convenient limitations on shape from the start of his job, of the sort which are always welcome, and perhaps necessary, to the designer.
As Pye notes, we take this unnatural flatness for granted from infancy, impose more of it on ourselves than necessary, and have even become dependent on it. That it has infected our brains is proven by the cortical push-back we feel while walking between the tilted walls of Richard Serra's sculptures, and in the Muller-Lyer optical illusion, which tricks only eyes brought up in orthogonal space. All this matters to the extent that squaring disguises limits placed on us both by others and ourselves. Lebbeus Woods wrote in his book Radical Reconstructions:
Architects usually design rectilinear volumes of space following Cartesian rules of geometry, and such spaces are no better suited to being used for office work than as a bedroom or a butcher shop.... While architects speak of designing space that satisfies human needs, human needs are actually being shaped to satisfy designed space, and the abstract systems of thought and organization on which design is based.... Design can be a means of controlling human behavior, and of maintaining this control into the future.
If this sounds Orwellian, think of the mason's pre-squared stone, which saves him hunting for one that fits naturally but compels him to build straight walls, and compare what Orwell said about clichés in his essay Politics and the English Language:
If you use readymade phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.... They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thought for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.... Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.
The worst aspect of this control may be that it comes from what Woods calls "abstract systems of thought." Ever since Superstudio contrasted the orthogonal orthodoxy of its white, gridded, rectilinear Continuous Monument with soft green nature, Cartesian architecture has stood for our bloodless intellect - Goldberger's "icy rationality" - in mortal combat with our true nature. In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell illustrates this dialectic with an example from Wagner's Ring:
When Siegfried has killed the dragon and tasted the blood, he hears the song of nature. He has transcended his humanity and reassociated himself with the powers of nature, which are the powers of our life, and from which our minds remove us.
You see, consciousness thinks it’s running the shop. But it’s a secondary organ of the total human being, and it must not put itself in control. It must submit and serve the humanity of the body....
If Campbell's reference to what "the body's interested in" merges nicely with Steven Holl's focus on bodily engagement with architecture, his use of myth and emphasis on self-determination all but define Lebbeus Woods, author of such titles as Anarchitecture and Radical Reconstructions. In the latter, Woods wrote: "The mythless man stands eternally hungry, surrounded by past ages, and digs and grubs for roots."
Woods' image Lower Manhattan has the psychological resonance of myth. Water of course represents the unconscious. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell describes the well in Grimm’s Tale, “The Frog King,” as "that unconscious deep ('so deep that the bottom cannot be seen') wherein are hoarded all of the rejected, unadmitted, unrecognized, unknown, or undeveloped factors, laws, and elements of existence." As if to convey this, Woods replaced the drained harbor’s smooth bed with plummeting cliff faces rendered in jagged lines, the non-linear complement to the establishment laws that rule above the surface. The unconscious is further invoked by Woods' description of "peeling back the surface to see what the planetary reality is." As Joseph Campbell noted, humans are the consciousness of the earth. For all its skyscraping, the Lower Manhattan of Woods' vision is just a veneer of civilization, "relatively small human scratchings on the surface" of a deeper realm that dwarfs it and puts it in perspective. Woods seemed to suggest the possibility of living in accord with this deeper reality, saying: "The underground – or lower Manhattan – is revealed, and, in the drawing, there are suggestions of inhabitation in that lower region." His own analysis is otherwise limited to observations on scale and density. In text accompanying the image's publication in a 1999 issue of Arbitare he wrote:
Manhattan is not Big, but Too Small, which accounts for its congestion, its unique cultural intensity. Lille and Shanghai cannot becomes cultures of congestion, no matter how big they are or become. At issue is the matter of scale, not of size. Scale is something more subtle than size, having to do with precise relationships.
In exaggerating Manhattan's containment, Woods’ image both emphasizes its intensity and makes it read as a single structure housing all the activities of the city. It may be his response to the statement by Le Corbusier to the American press, which Woods quotes, that "your skyscrapers are too small." But by then, Corb was already infiltrating the collective imagination with visions of multi-use mega-blocks, which would come to bastardized and damning fruition in New York's housing projects.
To be continued . . .
Mythical Lower Manhattan, Part 2
The 2002 World Trade Center competition entry by the team of architects Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey and Steven Holl is shown in its finished form at left, and in an earlier study by Holl, at right. The images are juxtaposed as they appear in Holl’s book, Urbanisms. The finished scheme has the regimentation of Upper Manhattan’s street grid while the study suggests Lower Manhattan’s off-kilter intersections. (One legend has it that the slang meaning of “square” comes from Greenwich Village’s bohemian heyday, when free thinkers lived on its unaligned streets and conformists on uptown’s rectangular blocks.) Holl asserts that the distinction mattered to him, in his book Architecture Spoken:
I had been working on a vision called Parallax Towers years before, in which I envisioned horizontal linkage of vertical thin towers. The notion of these as hybrid buildings, meaning they had offices, living, commercial aspects and they were linked in section, orchestrating what is normally known as a vertical typology into a horizontal one. The flexibility of that idea would work for the program we were given for this new project. Peter Eisenman and I fought until the end on how the horizontals should meet the verticals. I always wanted them to move, as in my original project from the early nineties, but he wanted them straight. The compromise was to keep them straight.
Despite this lost battle, Holl would speak proudly of the end result in a lecture at SCI-Arc on September 11, 2003, and bitterly reject architecture critic Paul Goldberger's description of its "icy rationality." Nonetheless, his earlier resistance to the squared-off default, in what he calls "endless and enormously confrontational meetings,” is telling.
Like his World Trade Center proposal, Steven Holl’s Parallax Towers, envisioned to rise from the Hudson off the Upper West Side of Manhattan, are distinguished by sloped bridges. In describing their varied pitches as movement, Holl underscores the way they express human volition and motility. The unsolicited project is one of several created by Holl before his time was commandeered by real commissions. When these visions were collected in an exhibition called Edge of a City, the architect Stan Allen wrote:
They belong to a tradition of utopian realism like that of Superstudio and Yona Friedman in the sixties and the Japanese Metabolists in the fifties; they recall Raymond Hood's Residential Bridges and Le Corbusier's urban proposals of the twenties and thirties. As with other architects working in this tradition, there is something seemingly arrogant in Holl’s assuming the power to remake the image of the city. Yet this is the territory in which these projects operate most effectively: not as concrete proposals, but as infiltrations of the collective imagination, producing an idea of what the city could be.
Allen’s reference to popular suggestion and the collective imagination relates this territory to myth, and its expression of shared human fears and desires.
An image from Superstudio’s 1969 Continuous Monument is shown above Steven Holl’s 1977 Gymnasium Bridge project. They share a visionary tradition and have formal similarities. Both projects substitute a multi-purpose blocky framework for individual buildings. In Superstudio’s hands, this form taps fears of oppressive “scientific methods for perpetuating standard models worldwide,” while Holl makes it a utopian bridge to social re-engagement in a mixed-use - "hybrid" is his constant word – building that hints at the idea of a floating horizontal skyscraper and weightless architecture. For decades, Holl would build on the Gymnasium Bridge in other visions and, notably, major commissions for real buildings.

The building section of Steven Holl's 1992-2002 Simmons Hall at MIT is shown below a 1990 Berlin Free Zone image by his friend Lebbeus Woods. Rebellion against cubic space is seen in both. Holl is about creating the experience of spatial porosity found in cities like Naples; Woods is about myth-like narratives - and political provocations - of transformation. Neither aim is catnip to businesslike clients. Holl is known for turning away commissions that would deny his vision; Woods was a full-fledged rebel angel, refusing to serve clients at all, the better to create uncompromised new worlds.
The body's interaction with the physical world, its movement through space and time, and its experience of changing perspectives are architecture's starting point for Steven Holl, reflecting his interest in the phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In this photo of his Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, static Cartesian space and the vanishing points of its diminishing perspective grid are assiduously avoided; subjective experience is prioritized, and the body's fundamental nature as a sensate, moving entity is engaged and celebrated. The man who designed this space must indeed have regretted seeing his World Trade Center vision regress into the square world’s frozen grid, for its experiential lockstep if not its association with domineering, externally applied reason.
In what might be a belly-of-the-beast view inside Superstudio's Continuous Monument, New York's 1960 Union Carbide Building lends grim new meaning to "vanishing point." Its static cage of X, Y and Z-axes captures a work atmosphere on the verge of precipitating into a half-century hail of Cartesian cubicles. Union Carbide was designed by SOM, the firm responsible for the One World Trade Center tower we will have. SOM's own more poetic, torqued and asymmetrical early versions of the tower ultimately succumbed to the old default of geometric simplicity, a lifeless twist on the original Twin Tower boxes that Lewis Mumford called "just glass-and-metal filing cabinets." The genius of Mumford's characterization is its underlying indictment of such architecture's failure to inspire, its complicity in the modern world's debasement of human lives. The Union Carbide interior photo could illustrate Joseph Campbell's words in The Power of Myth:
When you think about what people are actually undergoing in our civilization, you realize it’s a very grim thing to be a modern human being. The drudgery of the lives of most of the people who have to support families – well, it’s a life-extinguishing affair.... an imposed system is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? How do you relate to the system so that you are not compulsively serving it?... The thing to do is learn to live in your period of history as a human being.... By holding to your own ideals for yourself and ... rejecting the system's impersonal claims upon you.
Flattening - and flat-surfaced - architecture reflects both the tyranny of powers which have the wherewithal to build, and that of the intellect over emotion and nature. This architecture is so pervasive and accepted as to be invisible, leaving its source and merits rarely examined. David Pye is an exception, in his book The Nature and Aesthetics of Design:
A flat surface will touch any other flat surface at all points.... Thus a mason building a wall need not fit each stone he lays to the stone below it. Having cut all his stones to flat surfaces first, he knows that any stone will bed steadily on any other without having to be fitted to it individually.
The versatility of flat surfaces is not commonly seen in nature. Stones which cleave under frost exhibit it; but the breadth of its application was a discovery of man’s, and one of his most valuable, for it enabled him to reduce the cost of construction in all materials very considerably. An extension of the discovery was that if the components of a structure were ‘squared’, i.e. were given two flat surfaces at right angles, then they would not only touch each other at all points of the adjacent surfaces, but would also do the same to a third component.
We take all this very much for granted. Any house and its contents, and the toy bricks on the nursery floor, showed us this before we could talk. The extraordinary rigmarole which I have had to use in writing about it is perhaps evidence that we take it as part of the natural order of things, which it is not....
Only those parts of a component which touch others need be squared. The sides and under surface of a beam need not be squared for the sake of economy, yet from the earliest times we see that this was done, exhibiting the tendency to standardization which appears in all constructional design.... Standardized pieces of material provide the designer with convenient limitations on shape from the start of his job, of the sort which are always welcome, and perhaps necessary, to the designer.
As Pye notes, we take this unnatural flatness for granted from infancy, impose more of it on ourselves than necessary, and have even become dependent on it. That it has infected our brains is proven by the cortical push-back we feel while walking between the tilted walls of Richard Serra's sculptures, and in the Muller-Lyer optical illusion, which tricks only eyes brought up in orthogonal space. All this matters to the extent that squaring disguises limits placed on us both by others and ourselves. Lebbeus Woods wrote in his book Radical Reconstructions:
Architects usually design rectilinear volumes of space following Cartesian rules of geometry, and such spaces are no better suited to being used for office work than as a bedroom or a butcher shop.... While architects speak of designing space that satisfies human needs, human needs are actually being shaped to satisfy designed space, and the abstract systems of thought and organization on which design is based.... Design can be a means of controlling human behavior, and of maintaining this control into the future.
If this sounds Orwellian, think of the mason's pre-squared stone, which saves him hunting for one that fits naturally but compels him to build straight walls, and compare what Orwell said about clichés in his essay Politics and the English Language:
If you use readymade phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.... They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thought for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.... Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.
The worst aspect of this control may be that it comes from what Woods calls "abstract systems of thought." Ever since Superstudio contrasted the orthogonal orthodoxy of its white, gridded, rectilinear Continuous Monument with soft green nature, Cartesian architecture has stood for our bloodless intellect - Goldberger's "icy rationality" - in mortal combat with our true nature. In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell illustrates this dialectic with an example from Wagner's Ring:
When Siegfried has killed the dragon and tasted the blood, he hears the song of nature. He has transcended his humanity and reassociated himself with the powers of nature, which are the powers of our life, and from which our minds remove us.
You see, consciousness thinks it’s running the shop. But it’s a secondary organ of the total human being, and it must not put itself in control. It must submit and serve the humanity of the body....
If Campbell's reference to what "the body's interested in" merges nicely with Steven Holl's focus on bodily engagement with architecture, his use of myth and emphasis on self-determination all but define Lebbeus Woods, author of such titles as Anarchitecture and Radical Reconstructions. In the latter, Woods wrote: "The mythless man stands eternally hungry, surrounded by past ages, and digs and grubs for roots."
Woods' image Lower Manhattan has the psychological resonance of myth. Water of course represents the unconscious. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell describes the well in Grimm’s Tale, “The Frog King,” as "that unconscious deep ('so deep that the bottom cannot be seen') wherein are hoarded all of the rejected, unadmitted, unrecognized, unknown, or undeveloped factors, laws, and elements of existence." As if to convey this, Woods replaced the drained harbor’s smooth bed with plummeting cliff faces rendered in jagged lines, the non-linear complement to the establishment laws that rule above the surface. The unconscious is further invoked by Woods' description of "peeling back the surface to see what the planetary reality is." As Joseph Campbell noted, humans are the consciousness of the earth. For all its skyscraping, the Lower Manhattan of Woods' vision is just a veneer of civilization, "relatively small human scratchings on the surface" of a deeper realm that dwarfs it and puts it in perspective. Woods seemed to suggest the possibility of living in accord with this deeper reality, saying: "The underground – or lower Manhattan – is revealed, and, in the drawing, there are suggestions of inhabitation in that lower region." His own analysis is otherwise limited to observations on scale and density. In text accompanying the image's publication in a 1999 issue of Arbitare he wrote:
Manhattan is not Big, but Too Small, which accounts for its congestion, its unique cultural intensity. Lille and Shanghai cannot becomes cultures of congestion, no matter how big they are or become. At issue is the matter of scale, not of size. Scale is something more subtle than size, having to do with precise relationships.
In exaggerating Manhattan's containment, Woods’ image both emphasizes its intensity and makes it read as a single structure housing all the activities of the city. It may be his response to the statement by Le Corbusier to the American press, which Woods quotes, that "your skyscrapers are too small." But by then, Corb was already infiltrating the collective imagination with visions of multi-use mega-blocks, which would come to bastardized and damning fruition in New York's housing projects.
To be continued . . .
Mythical Lower Manhattan, Part 1 - In Memory of Lebbeus Woods
The Dutch architectural photographer Iwan Baan took this helicopter photo of Downtown blacked-out by Hurricane Sandy. A memorable New York Magazine cover, it resonates with a century-old genre; views of a transformed Lower Manhattan from above New York Harbor.

Lebbeus Woods died on October 30th, as Sandy left his downtown neighborhood in the darkness captured by Baan's photo. His 1999 drawing, Lower Manhattan, shows the Hudson and East Rivers dammed, draining the harbor. “The underground – or lower Manhattan – is revealed,” Woods told BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh in an interview, continuing:
So I was speculating on the future of the city and I said, well, obviously, compared to present and future cities, New York is not going to be able to compete in terms of size anymore. It used to be a large city, but now it's a small city compared with Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Kuala Lampur or almost any Asian city of any size. So I said maybe New York can establish a new kind of scale – and the scale I was interested in was the scale of the city to the Earth, to the planet. . . . I wanted to suggest that Lower Manhattan – not lower downtown, but lower in the sense of below the city – could form a new relationship with the planet.
So it was a romantic idea – and the drawing is very conceptual in that sense.
But the exposure of the rock base, or the underground condition of the city, completely changes the scale relationship between the city and its environment. It's peeling back the surface to see what the planetary reality is. And the new scale relationship is not about huge blockbuster buildings; it's not about towers and skyscrapers. It's about the relationship of the relatively small human scratchings on the surface of the earth compared to the earth itself.
Woods' follows long traditions in both his speculation on the future of Lower Manhattan and his use of it as a scale reference. His image is prescient in omitting the World Trade Center towers. They are probably left out, along with the Manhattan Bridge, in the interest of romantic effect. Woods says he worked from aerial photographs. Some of these may have predated the World Trade Center and other blocky buildings he also left out. He'd have had plenty to choose from, given the historic popularity of the subject and viewpoint.

Illustrator Louis Biederman's New York City as it will be in 1999 was widely circulated via the Sunday Edition of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World on December 30th, 1900. A where-will-it-all-end reverie on Lower Manhattan's proliferation of skyscrapers and bridges, the image inaugurates a convention of setting a future scene with fantastic airships. They contribute to a pulsating vision of layered transportation systems that would inform later images like King's Dream of New York and reach cinematic apotheosis in the buzzing dystopian city of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

Harry Grant Dart's Some Day, in detail above, followed Biederman's lead. Dart's image indulged his particular penchant for fantasy airships. It appeared in the March 4, 1909, Real Estate Number of Life Magazine, alongside A.B. Walker's influential cartoon of a skyscraper frame planted with suburban houses. (Walker's cartoon would be revisited by Rem Koolhaas's 1978 seminal book Delirious New York and SITE's 1981 Highrise of Homes experimental proposal.) The 44-page Life issue includes four more futuristic views of New York, alongside eight ads for cars and six for car-related products, which paint a more accurate picture of the future.

Aerial photos of Lower Manhattan like this one of around 1930 are a staple of the era's postcards. This example is one of many that oblige earlier expectations by delivering a foreground airship, in this case the USS Akron. It captures the locale fulfilling its role as the future's cutting edge, farther ahead of the world than it would ever be again, and just about to be frozen as such by decades of depression, war and recovery.

Architect Raymond Hood began proposing East and Hudson River bridges with 50 to 60 story residential skyscrapers as support pylons in 1925. In 1930 he presented this photomontage of Manhattan densely ringed with residential bridges and interspersed with mountain-like clusters of skyscrapers at selected street intersections. It recalls Louis Biederman's cartoon, New York City as it will be in 1999, both in what it envisions and its title. Hood looked forward only twenty years, calling his project Manhattan 1950. His melding of residential building and bridge is an early step in the direction of 1960s megastructures, monumental frameworks accommodating structure, transportation and all the functions of a city. The megastructure movement reflected architects' conviction at the time of their responsibility to design the whole human environment, a scary prospect indeed.

Reyner Banham astutely identified the appeal of Lower Manhattan as a canvas for new visions of the future. His 1976 book Megastructure is illustrated with this image of Archigram's 1963 Walking City project, showing the conceptual architectural group's walking cities against a backdrop of Wall Street skyscrapers. Banham's caption reads: “Their location here in the East River, with the towers of Manhattan in the background, suggests a deliberate challenge to older visions of the future . . .” By the sixties, Lower Manhattan had become the standard against which to measure urban visions, sealing its own mythic status.

Lower Manhattan's use as a measuring stick for new urban visions followed upon its use as a scale reference. The outline of Albert Kahn Associates' vast Dodge Chicago Aircraft Engine Plant, built for the war effort, was superimposed on Lower Manhattan in the December 1943 issue of The Architectural Forum. While a New Yorker could compare the length of this factory to a walk from the the Battery to the Bowery, the rest of the world could by now relate as well to what had become an iconic cityscape and universal point of reference. The manner in which the plant's outline passes out of sight behind buildings as it weaves among them surpasses the purpose at hand and speaks of this terrain's power to fire the imagination. The image foreshadows visions of city-containing buildings, sometimes rendered as visitors to New York.

Superstudio's theoretical Continuous Monument of 1969 picks up where The Architectural Forum's Dodge Plant image left off, encircling the very same skyscraper blocks. The Dodge Plant outline is not an unlikely influence, given its publication in a major architectural journal and its remarkable similarities. In the words of Superstudio's Toraldo di Francia, The Continuous Monument was "a form of architecture" reflecting a "world rendered uniform by technology, culture and all the other inevitable forms of imperialism." Fellow member Adolfo Natalini said, ". . . in 1969, we started designing negative utopias like The Continuous Monument - images warning of the horrors architecture had in store with its scientific methods for perpetuating standard models worldwide. Of course, we were also having fun." The ultimate sixties megastructure, The Continuous Monument would circle the planet, carrying to its logical conclusion the International Style's vocabulary of rational, gridded rectangular extrusions, and its arrogation of universal applicability to a world homogenized by progress. Manhattan's transfixed skyscrapers are a foil for this new future, contrasting old-school object buildings and individuality with a uniform structure beyond architecture. As in Lebbeus Woods' Lower Manhattan image, the World Trade Center towers are omitted, although The Continuous Monument co-opts and critiques their scaleless box-tube vocabulary.

The most abstracted scheme for the 2002 World Trade Center competition came from the team of architects Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey, and Steven Holl. Their entry's two structures have five scaleless bridge-connected towers, all made of continuous, extruded, white, rectangular sections, and dwarfing conventional skyscrapers. It resembles nothing imagined before so much as Superstudio's Continuous Monument, as if pieces of it had been salvaged and turned on end. Did this Ground Zero team appropriate from Superstudio's project? ArchiTakes will be back to dig deeper.
Mythical Lower Manhattan, Part 1 - In Memory of Lebbeus Woods
The Dutch architectural photographer Iwan Baan took this helicopter photo of Downtown blacked-out by Hurricane Sandy. A memorable New York Magazine cover, it resonates with a century-old genre; views of a transformed Lower Manhattan from above New York Harbor.

Lebbeus Woods died on October 30th, as Sandy left his downtown neighborhood in the darkness captured by Baan's photo. His 1999 drawing, Lower Manhattan, shows the Hudson and East Rivers dammed, draining the harbor. “The underground – or lower Manhattan – is revealed,” Woods told BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh in an interview, continuing:
So I was speculating on the future of the city and I said, well, obviously, compared to present and future cities, New York is not going to be able to compete in terms of size anymore. It used to be a large city, but now it's a small city compared with Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Kuala Lampur or almost any Asian city of any size. So I said maybe New York can establish a new kind of scale – and the scale I was interested in was the scale of the city to the Earth, to the planet. . . . I wanted to suggest that Lower Manhattan – not lower downtown, but lower in the sense of below the city – could form a new relationship with the planet.
So it was a romantic idea – and the drawing is very conceptual in that sense.
But the exposure of the rock base, or the underground condition of the city, completely changes the scale relationship between the city and its environment. It's peeling back the surface to see what the planetary reality is. And the new scale relationship is not about huge blockbuster buildings; it's not about towers and skyscrapers. It's about the relationship of the relatively small human scratchings on the surface of the earth compared to the earth itself.
Woods' follows long traditions in both his speculation on the future of Lower Manhattan and his use of it as a scale reference. His image is prescient in omitting the World Trade Center towers. They are probably left out, along with the Manhattan Bridge, in the interest of romantic effect. Woods says he worked from aerial photographs. Some of these may have predated the World Trade Center and other blocky buildings he also left out. He'd have had plenty to choose from, given the historic popularity of the subject and viewpoint.

Illustrator Louis Biederman's New York City as it will be in 1999 was widely circulated via the Sunday Edition of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World on December 30th, 1900. A where-will-it-all-end reverie on Lower Manhattan's proliferation of skyscrapers and bridges, the image inaugurates a convention of setting a future scene with fantastic airships. They contribute to a pulsating vision of layered transportation systems that would inform later images like King's Dream of New York and reach cinematic apotheosis in the buzzing dystopian city of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

Harry Grant Dart's Some Day, in detail above, followed Biederman's lead. Dart's image indulged his particular penchant for fantasy airships. It appeared in the March 4, 1909, Real Estate Number of Life Magazine, alongside A.B. Walker's influential cartoon of a skyscraper frame planted with suburban houses. (Walker's cartoon would be revisited by Rem Koolhaas's 1978 seminal book Delirious New York and SITE's 1981 Highrise of Homes experimental proposal.) The 44-page Life issue includes four more futuristic views of New York, alongside eight ads for cars and six for car-related products, which paint a more accurate picture of the future.

Aerial photos of Lower Manhattan like this one of around 1930 are a staple of the era's postcards. This example is one of many that oblige earlier expectations by delivering a foreground airship, in this case the USS Akron. It captures the locale fulfilling its role as the future's cutting edge, farther ahead of the world than it would ever be again, and just about to be frozen as such by decades of depression, war and recovery.

Architect Raymond Hood began proposing East and Hudson River bridges with 50 to 60 story residential skyscrapers as support pylons in 1925. In 1930 he presented this photomontage of Manhattan densely ringed with residential bridges and interspersed with mountain-like clusters of skyscrapers at selected street intersections. It recalls Louis Biederman's cartoon, New York City as it will be in 1999, both in what it envisions and its title. Hood looked forward only twenty years, calling his project Manhattan 1950. His melding of residential building and bridge is an early step in the direction of 1960s megastructures, monumental frameworks accommodating structure, transportation and all the functions of a city. The megastructure movement reflected architects' conviction at the time of their responsibility to design the whole human environment, a scary prospect indeed.

Reyner Banham astutely identified the appeal of Lower Manhattan as a canvas for new visions of the future. His 1976 book Megastructure is illustrated with this image of Archigram's 1963 Walking City project, showing the conceptual architectural group's walking cities against a backdrop of Wall Street skyscrapers. Banham's caption reads: “Their location here in the East River, with the towers of Manhattan in the background, suggests a deliberate challenge to older visions of the future . . .” By the sixties, Lower Manhattan had become the standard against which to measure urban visions, sealing its own mythic status.

Lower Manhattan's use as a measuring stick for new urban visions followed upon its use as a scale reference. The outline of Albert Kahn Associates' vast Dodge Chicago Aircraft Engine Plant, built for the war effort, was superimposed on Lower Manhattan in the December 1943 issue of The Architectural Forum. While a New Yorker could compare the length of this factory to a walk from the the Battery to the Bowery, the rest of the world could by now relate as well to what had become an iconic cityscape and universal point of reference. The manner in which the plant's outline passes out of sight behind buildings as it weaves among them surpasses the purpose at hand and speaks of this terrain's power to fire the imagination. The image foreshadows visions of city-containing buildings, sometimes rendered as visitors to New York.

Superstudio's theoretical Continuous Monument of 1969 picks up where The Architectural Forum's Dodge Plant image left off, encircling the very same skyscraper blocks. The Dodge Plant outline is not an unlikely influence, given its publication in a major architectural journal and its remarkable similarities. In the words of Superstudio's Toraldo di Francia, The Continuous Monument was "a form of architecture" reflecting a "world rendered uniform by technology, culture and all the other inevitable forms of imperialism." Fellow member Adolfo Natalini said, ". . . in 1969, we started designing negative utopias like The Continuous Monument - images warning of the horrors architecture had in store with its scientific methods for perpetuating standard models worldwide. Of course, we were also having fun." The ultimate sixties megastructure, The Continuous Monument would circle the planet, carrying to its logical conclusion the International Style's vocabulary of rational, gridded rectangular extrusions, and its arrogation of universal applicability to a world homogenized by progress. Manhattan's transfixed skyscrapers are a foil for this new future, contrasting old-school object buildings and individuality with a uniform structure beyond architecture. As in Lebbeus Woods' Lower Manhattan image, the World Trade Center towers are omitted, although The Continuous Monument co-opts and critiques their scaleless box-tube vocabulary.

The most abstracted scheme for the 2002 World Trade Center competition came from the team of architects Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey, and Steven Holl. Their entry's two structures have five scaleless bridge-connected towers, all made of continuous, extruded, white, rectangular sections, and dwarfing conventional skyscrapers. It resembles nothing imagined before so much as Superstudio's Continuous Monument, as if pieces of it had been salvaged and turned on end. Did this Ground Zero team appropriate from Superstudio's project? ArchiTakes will be back to dig deeper.
Statue of Liberty or Dipstick of the Apocalypse?
This image by Owen Freeman illustrated last month’s New York Times post-Sandy op-ed by James Atlas, “Is This the End?” Freeman says in his blog that it was commissioned by Times Art Director Erich Nagler, who “proposed an underwater, Atlantis-type view of New York City.” Freeman shows working sketches for the Statue image as well as underwater views of Grand Central Terminal and a city intersection with skyscrapers. The Times’ selection of his Statue of Liberty image says something about what rattles us most. It also extends a long tradition of using the statue as a post-apocalyptic milestone, one with roots pre-dating the statue itself.
The Statue of Liberty is seen even farther submerged by global warming, but from above the water line, in Steven Spielberg’s 2001 Science Fiction film, A.I. As a sci-fi film device, this image has a clear heritage . . .
Franklin J. Shaffner’s 1968 film, Planet of the Apes, ends with this visual kicker, revealing that – spoiler alert! – the planet ruled by apes is no less than our own future earth, turned into a vast desert by man himself. Same recipe as now, but with sand substituted for water.
Planet of the Apes may have been the first film to show a ruined Statue of Liberty, but the idea has a longer history in print, as documented by the surely pseudonymous Joachim Boaz in his blog Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations. He displays no fewer than six pulp science fiction covers showing the statue underwater, buried in desert sand, and discovered by spacemen or post-apocalyptic primitives. Selected above are, left to right, a 1941 magazine cover by Hubert Rogers, a 1953 magazine cover by Alex Schomburg and a 1959 novel cover by an illustrator known only as Blanchard. These might be assumed to reflect Cold War insecurity, except for the Astounding Science Fiction cover from pre-Bomb 1941, which shows an overgrown statue approached by raft-borne throwbacks. Clearly, there’s something older at work.
The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1817 draft of Ozymandias, from Oxford’s Bodleian Library, includes squiggles that might be a premonition of a certain green gown. It reads:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".
The statue’s arrogance might throw one off the scent, but the use of a shattered human form as a cultural momento mori undeniably sets the stage for our 71 year-old ruined-liberty trope. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair” kicks the ladder from under whoever’s currently on the top rung. Shelley, influenced by the revolutionary writings of Thomas Paine, is thought to have been targeting the oppressive monarchy of George III.
In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows.
"I am great Ozymandias," saith the stone,
"The King of kings: this mighty city shows
The wonders of my hand." The city's gone!
Naught but the leg remaining to disclose
The sight of that forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What wonderful, but unrecorded, race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
Smith is no Shelley, but in depicting a future regression of the human race he makes an astonishing leap into modern sci-fi territory, well trod from The Road Warrior to The Road. Sci-fi has always plundered more from the arts than the sciences, as witnessed by the derivation of Hollywood’s Frankenstein from Mary Shelley’s novel, published the same year as her husband’s Ozymandias. What made the Times prefer Owen Freeman’s submerged Statue of Liberty over his underwater Grand Central? It pulls a bigger rug out from under us as an iconic symbol of America and our values, but it has another kind of potency that relates to the sacredness of the human form. Early architects believed God made man in his own image, dignifying classical architecture’s basis in the human body. Imprinted with our own form, classical architecture would no doubt retain its power for us if we learned that God looked like a duck, because the human body is also imprinted on our psyche from day one. This is why so few things disturb us as much as the visible destruction of the body, why decapitation seems more horrible than mere death. Grand Central’s classical forms may be based on the body, but the Statue of Liberty is the body. An assault on it isn’t just symbolic, but ad hominum in a way our bodies register. We identify with the peril of chin-lapping waves. Thank the personal violence of Shelley’s “trunkless legs of stone” and “shattered visage.” Never mind that the Statue of Liberty stands for the opposite of tyranny; the subversive power and romantic appeal of Shelley’s colossal ruin irresistibly fired the imagination as soon as America brought its ready-made colossus to the center of the world stage. Old Ozymandias was just rubbing his hands in the wings.Statue of Liberty or Dipstick of the Apocalypse?
This image by Owen Freeman illustrated last month’s New York Times post-Sandy op-ed by James Atlas, “Is This the End?” Freeman says in his blog that it was commissioned by Times Art Director Erich Nagler, who “proposed an underwater, Atlantis-type view of New York City.” Freeman shows working sketches for the Statue image as well as underwater views of Grand Central Terminal and a city intersection with skyscrapers. The Times’ selection of his Statue of Liberty image says something about what rattles us most. It also extends a long tradition of using the statue as a post-apocalyptic milestone, one with roots pre-dating the statue itself.
The Statue of Liberty is seen even farther submerged by global warming, but from above the water line, in Steven Spielberg’s 2001 Science Fiction film, A.I. As a sci-fi film device, this image has a clear heritage . . .
Franklin J. Shaffner’s 1968 film, Planet of the Apes, ends with this visual kicker, revealing that – spoiler alert! – the planet ruled by apes is no less than our own future earth, turned into a vast desert by man himself. Same recipe as now, but with sand substituted for water.
Planet of the Apes may have been the first film to show a ruined Statue of Liberty, but the idea has a longer history in print, as documented by the surely pseudonymous Joachim Boaz in his blog Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations. He displays no fewer than six pulp science fiction covers showing the statue underwater, buried in desert sand, and discovered by spacemen or post-apocalyptic primitives. Selected above are, left to right, a 1941 magazine cover by Hubert Rogers, a 1953 magazine cover by Alex Schomburg and a 1959 novel cover by an illustrator known only as Blanchard. These might be assumed to reflect Cold War insecurity, except for the Astounding Science Fiction cover from pre-Bomb 1941, which shows an overgrown statue approached by raft-borne throwbacks. Clearly, there’s something older at work.
The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1817 draft of Ozymandias, from Oxford’s Bodleian Library, includes squiggles that might be a premonition of a certain green gown. It reads:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".
The statue’s arrogance might throw one off the scent, but the use of a shattered human form as a cultural momento mori undeniably sets the stage for our 71 year-old ruined-liberty trope. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair” kicks the ladder from under whoever’s currently on the top rung. Shelley, influenced by the revolutionary writings of Thomas Paine, is thought to have been targeting the oppressive monarchy of George III.
In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows.
"I am great Ozymandias," saith the stone,
"The King of kings: this mighty city shows
The wonders of my hand." The city's gone!
Naught but the leg remaining to disclose
The sight of that forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What wonderful, but unrecorded, race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
Smith is no Shelley, but in depicting a future regression of the human race he makes an astonishing leap into modern sci-fi territory, well trod from The Road Warrior to The Road. Sci-fi has always plundered more from the arts than the sciences, as witnessed by the derivation of Hollywood’s Frankenstein from Mary Shelley’s novel, published the same year as her husband’s Ozymandias. What made the Times prefer Owen Freeman’s submerged Statue of Liberty over his underwater Grand Central? It pulls a bigger rug out from under us as an iconic symbol of America and our values, but it has another kind of potency that relates to the sacredness of the human form. Early architects believed God made man in his own image, dignifying classical architecture’s basis in the human body. Imprinted with our own form, classical architecture would no doubt retain its power for us if we learned that God looked like a duck, because the human body is also imprinted on our psyche from day one. This is why so few things disturb us as much as the visible destruction of the body, why decapitation seems more horrible than mere death. Grand Central’s classical forms may be based on the body, but the Statue of Liberty is the body. An assault on it isn’t just symbolic, but ad hominum in a way our bodies register. We identify with the peril of chin-lapping waves. Thank the personal violence of Shelley’s “trunkless legs of stone” and “shattered visage.” Never mind that the Statue of Liberty stands for the opposite of tyranny; the subversive power and romantic appeal of Shelley’s colossal ruin irresistibly fired the imagination as soon as America brought its ready-made colossus to the center of the world stage. Old Ozymandias was just rubbing his hands in the wings.The Iron Triangle, part 2 / from Kowloon Walled City to Singapore
No place in New York elicits such wonder at the retina's capacity as the Iron Triangle. Self-contained, densely packed and eye-boggling, it is an alternate reality recalling Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City, demolished in 1993-4, below.
Comparing the vibrancy of the Iron Triangle to the city's canned and bland development plan for it brings to mind William Gibson's 1993 Wired article on Singapore, “Disneyland with the Death Penalty.” Gibson finds Singapore a sanitized theme park where the physical past “has almost entirely vanished” and “the fuzzier brands of creativity are in extremely short supply.” “It's boring here,” he writes, calling Singapore a habitable “version of convention-zone Atlanta,” at risk of becoming a “smug, neo-Swiss enclave of order and prosperity.” Gibson ends the piece with his departure of Singapore by way of Hong Kong's airport, where he finds a counterpoint:
“In Hong Kong I'd seen huge matte black butterflies flapping around the customs hall, nobody paying them the least attention. I'd caught a glimpse of the Walled City of Kowloon, too. Maybe I could catch another, before the future comes to tear it down.
Traditionally the home of pork-butchers, unlicensed denturists, and dealers in heroin, The Walled City still stands at the foot of a runway, awaiting demolition. Some kind of profound embarrassment to modern China, its clearance has long been made a condition of the looming change of hands.
Hive of dream. Those mismatched, uncalculated windows. How they seem to absorb all the frantic activity of Kai Tak airport, sucking in energy like a black hole.
I was ready for something like that. . . .
I loosened my tie, clearing Singapore airspace.”
In the flight path of La Guardia, the Iron Triangle is New York's own version of Kowloon Walled City, soon to be scrubbed off the map to provide a clean slate for our own little piece of Singapore if the city has its way.
An aerial view of the city's redevelopment plan for the 62 acres of Willets Point clearly shows what an isolated residential community it would make, a condition not helped by the introduction of a convention center, visible at top. The plan also includes 5,500 apartments (20% "affordable"), a school, a 700-room hotel, 500,000 square feet of office space and 6,700 parking spaces. Touted proximity to transportation, including airports, only emphasizes the need for escape routes. A jet is shown departing La Guardia Airport at upper left.
In his 1995 book, S,M,L,XL, Rem Koolhaas cites Gibson's piece in a chapter called “Singapore Songlines: Portrait of a Potemkin Metropolis or Thirty Years of Tabula Rasa.” He calls Gibson's criticism evidence of a Eurocentric misreading, and notes that western-style modernism is now a condition of “universal aspiration” and “a self-administered process that we do not have the right to deny – in the name of various sentimentalities – to those 'others' who have long since made it their own.” Having made this disclaimer, he largely amplifies on Gibson's observations. Where Gibson finds that “there is remarkably little, in contemporary Singapore, that is not the result of deliberate and no doubt carefully deliberated social policy,” Koolhaas says Singapore “is managed by a regime that has excluded accident and randomness. . . . It is pure intention: if there is chaos it is authored chaos; if it is ugly, it is designed ugliness; if it is absurd, it is willed absurdity.” And Koolhaas sounds very much like Gibson when he describes Singapore as “a melting pot that produces blandness and sterility from the most promising ingredients.”
Koolhaas digs deep enough into Singapore's architecture to find, amid all the inauthentic dross, rare examples of built megastructures, "containers of urban multiplicity, heroic captures and intensifications of urban life in architecture, rare demonstrations of the kind of performance that could and should be the norm in architecture but rarely is, giving an alarming degree of plausibility to the myths of the multilevel city and the megastructure that 'we,' in infinitely more affluent circumstances, have discredited and discarded." Born of the sixties, in what he calls "maybe the last moment of architectural confidence," Koolhaas finds a distinctively Asian vitality preserved in them, the positive flip side of urban renewal's destructiveness.
The Iron Triangle certainly warrants remaking, if for no other reason than to stanch its ongoing environmental contamination. What's called for is a solution that keeps its vitality and avoids the blandness of most of Singapore. Koolhaas quotes Fumihiko Maki's 1964 book, Investigations in Collective Form: "There is nothing less urbane, nothing less productive of cosmopolitan mixture than raw renewal, which displaces, destroys, and replaces, in that mechanistic order." Singapore, Koolhaas writes, has taken displace, destroy, replace as its motto. Maki was a major proponent of megastructure, defining it in his book as "a large frame containing all the functions of a city, mostly housed in transient short-term containers." The idea appealed to architects and planners in the sixties by insuring control at the macro-level of infrastructure while granting the flexibility and individual expression at the micro-level necessary for authentic and spontaneous vitality.
By the time of this 1955 street atlas, Willets Point was well on its way to becoming the Iron Triangle, with several lots labeled "auto wrecking" or "used trucks." Construction related businesses are also in evidence along with the "Bono Sawdust Supply Company" on the west side of 127th Place. It turned the nearby lumber yards' waste into an absorbent product for neighboring auto businesses in an early example of the Iron Triangle's resourceful symbiosis. Founded by a Sicilian immigrant in 1933, it remains to this day, more environmentally friendly than ever. It is now run by Jake Bono, who is committed to fighting the city's use of eminent domain to clear the Iron Triangle for development. "My grandfather helped to build this economy and he helped build America," he says, pointing with pride to the leg-up on the American Dream his business has given new immigrants from places like Ecuador and India. The map also shows lots owned by Tully & DiNapoli, now a major New York construction firm. Its name speaks of earlier waves of Irish and Italian immigrants. The majority of businesses in the Iron Triangle today are run by newcomers from Latin American or Korea.
Ramin Bahrani's 2007 film Chop Shop is set in the Iron Triangle. The story of a 12-year-old Latino street orphan and his 16-year-old sister, it is largely about their attempt to start a business there, and thus a story of the American Dream. It was made primarily using non-actors, including a body shop owner who plays himself. The boy and his sister move into the upper story of his shop, echoing the home life of George and Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby, and demonstrating the lasting power of marginal places, and this one in particular, to fire the imagination. This potential suggests the "hive of dream" that the novelist in William Gibson called the Walled City of Kowloon and contrasted to Singapore's lack of creative inspiration. Gibson has compared the "visual texture" of his novel Neuromancer to that of Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner, the look of which is often said to have been inspired by Kowloon Walled City. The sheer otherness of such places provides rich soil for the imagination.
Megastructure may be a starting point or paradigm for a different approach to the Iron Triangle. What it needs above all, and what its business owners have long demanded, is infrastructure. A service frame to which start-up businesses or other uses could plug in for as long as needed could hold both existing businesses and encourage new uses. The Iron Triangle's visual intensity, color and light would make artists' studios a natural addition. The existing architectural vocabulary is prefab and provisional; shipping containers, Quonset Huts and Butler buildings. Combined with their rampant individual expression, these buildings' modularity is already half the megastructure ideal, less the infrastructure, the "permanent frame within which transient enclosed volumes can be deployed as necessary" to use Reyner Banham's words in decribing the Free University of Berlin in his 1976 book, Megastructure. Banham saw these transient containers, in the essential megastructure concept, as being "beyond the control of the architect." The flexibility of such a model would add a higher level of sustainability to the site's environmental clean-up, allowing change without forced removal, now and in the future. It would also preserve the spontaneity, randomness and unplanned vitality that so distinguish today's Iron Triangle while extending its historic role as a place from which to start chasing the American Dream, right in the heart of Queens, where more languages are spoken than any place in the nation.
The challenge of designing such a solution would make a terrific competition brief. It might be worth remembering that most of the valley of ashes has already been made a base for visionary architecture, just across Roosevelt Avenue, in a two-time world's fair site. (The megastructure movement had no impact on the 1964 fair, but dominated Montreal's Expo 67, the 20th century's most successful World's Fair; Moshe Safdie's Habitat 67, built for Expo, is still wildly popular and its apartments much sought after.) LA County's Culver City, where Eric Owen Moss has turned an industrial district into a venue for architectural liberation might also provide inspiration. Given the Iron Triangle's isolation by expressways and Citi Field, its reclamation on a Battery Park City model is unrealistic. Why not make it a laboratory for the kind of architectural innovation critics always find lacking in New York as a result of its straitjacketing constraints?
The numbers for the city's Willets Point redevelopment plan have no doubt been duly crunched, tax revenues above all. It's equally certain that one number was left out; the value of the creativity that separates New York from Singapore.
Above, a photo from a city presentation aims to support Mayor Bloomberg's description of Willets Point as "another euphemism for blight." Like other such images entered into evidence by the city, it inadvertantly highlights the Iron Triangle's appeal to the imagination and suggests its potential as raw material for art.
The photographer Edward Burtynski collected images of similarly petroleum-based landscapes in his 2009 book, Oil. "In 1997 I had what I refer to as my oil epiphany," Burtynsky has said: "it occurred to me that all the vast, man-altered landscapes I had been in pursuit of for over 20 years were all possible because of the discovery of oil and the mechanical advantage of the internal combustion engine."
Stacked shipping containers create a modular building, reflecting ideas of high concept architects like Wes Jones, Adam Kalkin, Shigeru Ban and LOT-EK. Outside, workers keep warm around open fires as a jet approaches La Guardia Airport. The self-constructed and appealingly unpredictable character of the Iron Triangle recalls another flight path community, the Bronx's Harding Park, where Mayor Ed Koch once relaxed building code requirements to help residents legitimize their self made homes.
A vocabulary of temporary prefab buildings, signs and racks produces a rich, unique and changeable visual experience. With forklifts constantly rearranging its contents on fixed frames, The Iron Triangle is akin to Archigram's fantasy megastructure, Plug-In City, which would reconfigure itself as needed using built-in mobile cranes.
Freedom of expression meets the American Dream in a place "bursting with colors and textures that seem to sharpen your senses," as described by Roger Ebert in his review of the film, Chop Shop. "It could be the most exotic spot on the face of the globe or a few blocks from where you live." More than nearness to airports, New York's unique diversity and world flavor make it - for those who would live nowhere else - the center of the universe.
The buildings of the Iron Triangle bring the words of the architect and theorist Robert Venturi to mind with striking literalness, from his celebration of the sign-fronted buildings he categorized as "decorated sheds" in Learning from Las Vegas to his credo in perhaps the most influential architecture book of the 20th century, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: "I am for messy vitality over obvious unity."
The Iron Triangle needs to be lifted out of a flood plain and given sewers. It cries out for planners who can appreciate the American Dream and the economic and visual vibrancy in what most may see only as a slum of chop shops.
Inside the Juanita Nacional, one of a handful of restaurants in the Iron Triangle.
The city's plan will make the Iron Triangle a more hygienic, and much less interesting, place.
Spontaneous public sculpture appears amid signs in English and Korean, where Spanish is often spoken. New York's planners might learn from Rem Koolhaas's observation, "Singapore is a melting pot that produces blandness and sterility from the most promising ingredients."
White people enjoy a sanitized Willets Point in Beyer Blinder Belle's rendering of the city's redevelopment plan. In the silence of their colored-pencil world, a stroller mom and her child are undisturbed by traffic noise or the flight path overhead.
This rendering is titled "The Nexus." It could be anywhere.
Another rendering suggests a future community of rabid Mets fans. They'd better be; there's nowhere else to go but the convention center.
The Iron Triangle, part 2 / from Kowloon Walled City to Singapore
No place in New York elicits such wonder at the retina's capacity as the Iron Triangle. Self-contained, densely packed and eye-boggling, it is an alternate reality recalling Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City, demolished in 1993-4, below.
Comparing the vibrancy of the Iron Triangle to the city's canned and bland development plan for it brings to mind William Gibson's 1993 Wired article on Singapore, “Disneyland with the Death Penalty.” Gibson finds Singapore a sanitized theme park where the physical past “has almost entirely vanished” and “the fuzzier brands of creativity are in extremely short supply.” “It's boring here,” he writes, calling Singapore a habitable “version of convention-zone Atlanta,” at risk of becoming a “smug, neo-Swiss enclave of order and prosperity.” Gibson ends the piece with his departure of Singapore by way of Hong Kong's airport, where he finds a counterpoint:
“In Hong Kong I'd seen huge matte black butterflies flapping around the customs hall, nobody paying them the least attention. I'd caught a glimpse of the Walled City of Kowloon, too. Maybe I could catch another, before the future comes to tear it down.
Traditionally the home of pork-butchers, unlicensed denturists, and dealers in heroin, The Walled City still stands at the foot of a runway, awaiting demolition. Some kind of profound embarrassment to modern China, its clearance has long been made a condition of the looming change of hands.
Hive of dream. Those mismatched, uncalculated windows. How they seem to absorb all the frantic activity of Kai Tak airport, sucking in energy like a black hole.
I was ready for something like that. . . .
I loosened my tie, clearing Singapore airspace.”
In the flight path of La Guardia, the Iron Triangle is New York's own version of Kowloon Walled City, soon to be scrubbed off the map to provide a clean slate for our own little piece of Singapore if the city has its way.
An aerial view of the city's redevelopment plan for the 62 acres of Willets Point clearly shows what an isolated residential community it would make, a condition not helped by the introduction of a convention center, visible at top. The plan also includes 5,500 apartments (20% "affordable"), a school, a 700-room hotel, 500,000 square feet of office space and 6,700 parking spaces. Touted proximity to transportation, including airports, only emphasizes the need for escape routes. A jet is shown departing La Guardia Airport at upper left.
In his 1995 book, S,M,L,XL, Rem Koolhaas cites Gibson's piece in a chapter called “Singapore Songlines: Portrait of a Potemkin Metropolis or Thirty Years of Tabula Rasa.” He calls Gibson's criticism evidence of a Eurocentric misreading, and notes that western-style modernism is now a condition of “universal aspiration” and “a self-administered process that we do not have the right to deny – in the name of various sentimentalities – to those 'others' who have long since made it their own.” Having made this disclaimer, he largely amplifies on Gibson's observations. Where Gibson finds that “there is remarkably little, in contemporary Singapore, that is not the result of deliberate and no doubt carefully deliberated social policy,” Koolhaas says Singapore “is managed by a regime that has excluded accident and randomness. . . . It is pure intention: if there is chaos it is authored chaos; if it is ugly, it is designed ugliness; if it is absurd, it is willed absurdity.” And Koolhaas sounds very much like Gibson when he describes Singapore as “a melting pot that produces blandness and sterility from the most promising ingredients.”
Koolhaas digs deep enough into Singapore's architecture to find, amid all the inauthentic dross, rare examples of built megastructures, "containers of urban multiplicity, heroic captures and intensifications of urban life in architecture, rare demonstrations of the kind of performance that could and should be the norm in architecture but rarely is, giving an alarming degree of plausibility to the myths of the multilevel city and the megastructure that 'we,' in infinitely more affluent circumstances, have discredited and discarded." Born of the sixties, in what he calls "maybe the last moment of architectural confidence," Koolhaas finds a distinctively Asian vitality preserved in them, the positive flip side of urban renewal's destructiveness.
The Iron Triangle certainly warrants remaking, if for no other reason than to stanch its ongoing environmental contamination. What's called for is a solution that keeps its vitality and avoids the blandness of most of Singapore. Koolhaas quotes Fumihiko Maki's 1964 book, Investigations in Collective Form: "There is nothing less urbane, nothing less productive of cosmopolitan mixture than raw renewal, which displaces, destroys, and replaces, in that mechanistic order." Singapore, Koolhaas writes, has taken displace, destroy, replace as its motto. Maki was a major proponent of megastructure, defining it in his book as "a large frame containing all the functions of a city, mostly housed in transient short-term containers." The idea appealed to architects and planners in the sixties by insuring control at the macro-level of infrastructure while granting the flexibility and individual expression at the micro-level necessary for authentic and spontaneous vitality.
By the time of this 1955 street atlas, Willets Point was well on its way to becoming the Iron Triangle, with several lots labeled "auto wrecking" or "used trucks." Construction related businesses are also in evidence along with the "Bono Sawdust Supply Company" on the west side of 127th Place. It turned the nearby lumber yards' waste into an absorbent product for neighboring auto businesses in an early example of the Iron Triangle's resourceful symbiosis. Founded by a Sicilian immigrant in 1933, it remains to this day, more environmentally friendly than ever. It is now run by Jake Bono, who is committed to fighting the city's use of eminent domain to clear the Iron Triangle for development. "My grandfather helped to build this economy and he helped build America," he says, pointing with pride to the leg-up on the American Dream his business has given new immigrants from places like Ecuador and India. The map also shows lots owned by Tully & DiNapoli, now a major New York construction firm. Its name speaks of earlier waves of Irish and Italian immigrants. The majority of businesses in the Iron Triangle today are run by newcomers from Latin American or Korea.
Ramin Bahrani's 2007 film Chop Shop is set in the Iron Triangle. The story of a 12-year-old Latino street orphan and his 16-year-old sister, it is largely about their attempt to start a business there, and thus a story of the American Dream. It was made primarily using non-actors, including a body shop owner who plays himself. The boy and his sister move into the upper story of his shop, echoing the home life of George and Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby, and demonstrating the lasting power of marginal places, and this one in particular, to fire the imagination. This potential suggests the "hive of dream" that the novelist in William Gibson called the Walled City of Kowloon and contrasted to Singapore's lack of creative inspiration. Gibson has compared the "visual texture" of his novel Neuromancer to that of Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner, the look of which is often said to have been inspired by Kowloon Walled City. The sheer otherness of such places provides rich soil for the imagination.
Megastructure may be a starting point or paradigm for a different approach to the Iron Triangle. What it needs above all, and what its business owners have long demanded, is infrastructure. A service frame to which start-up businesses or other uses could plug in for as long as needed could hold both existing businesses and encourage new uses. The Iron Triangle's visual intensity, color and light would make artists' studios a natural addition. The existing architectural vocabulary is prefab and provisional; shipping containers, Quonset Huts and Butler buildings. Combined with their rampant individual expression, these buildings' modularity is already half the megastructure ideal, less the infrastructure, the "permanent frame within which transient enclosed volumes can be deployed as necessary" to use Reyner Banham's words in decribing the Free University of Berlin in his 1976 book, Megastructure. Banham saw these transient containers, in the essential megastructure concept, as being "beyond the control of the architect." The flexibility of such a model would add a higher level of sustainability to the site's environmental clean-up, allowing change without forced removal, now and in the future. It would also preserve the spontaneity, randomness and unplanned vitality that so distinguish today's Iron Triangle while extending its historic role as a place from which to start chasing the American Dream, right in the heart of Queens, where more languages are spoken than any place in the nation.
The challenge of designing such a solution would make a terrific competition brief. It might be worth remembering that most of the valley of ashes has already been made a base for visionary architecture, just across Roosevelt Avenue, in a two-time world's fair site. (The megastructure movement had no impact on the 1964 fair, but dominated Montreal's Expo 67, the 20th century's most successful World's Fair; Moshe Safdie's Habitat 67, built for Expo, is still wildly popular and its apartments much sought after.) LA County's Culver City, where Eric Owen Moss has turned an industrial district into a venue for architectural liberation might also provide inspiration. Given the Iron Triangle's isolation by expressways and Citi Field, its reclamation on a Battery Park City model is unrealistic. Why not make it a laboratory for the kind of architectural innovation critics always find lacking in New York as a result of its straitjacketing constraints?
The numbers for the city's Willets Point redevelopment plan have no doubt been duly crunched, tax revenues above all. It's equally certain that one number was left out; the value of the creativity that separates New York from Singapore.
Above, a photo from a city presentation aims to support Mayor Bloomberg's description of Willets Point as "another euphemism for blight." Like other such images entered into evidence by the city, it inadvertantly highlights the Iron Triangle's appeal to the imagination and suggests its potential as raw material for art.
The photographer Edward Burtynski collected images of similarly petroleum-based landscapes in his 2009 book, Oil. "In 1997 I had what I refer to as my oil epiphany," Burtynsky has said: "it occurred to me that all the vast, man-altered landscapes I had been in pursuit of for over 20 years were all possible because of the discovery of oil and the mechanical advantage of the internal combustion engine."
Stacked shipping containers create a modular building, reflecting ideas of high concept architects like Wes Jones, Adam Kalkin, Shigeru Ban and LOT-EK. Outside, workers keep warm around open fires as a jet approaches La Guardia Airport. The self-constructed and appealingly unpredictable character of the Iron Triangle recalls another flight path community, the Bronx's Harding Park, where Mayor Ed Koch once relaxed building code requirements to help residents legitimize their self made homes.
A vocabulary of temporary prefab buildings, signs and racks produces a rich, unique and changeable visual experience. With forklifts constantly rearranging its contents on fixed frames, The Iron Triangle is akin to Archigram's fantasy megastructure, Plug-In City, which would reconfigure itself as needed using built-in mobile cranes.
Freedom of expression meets the American Dream in a place "bursting with colors and textures that seem to sharpen your senses," as described by Roger Ebert in his review of the film, Chop Shop. "It could be the most exotic spot on the face of the globe or a few blocks from where you live." More than nearness to airports, New York's unique diversity and world flavor make it - for those who would live nowhere else - the center of the universe.
The buildings of the Iron Triangle bring the words of the architect and theorist Robert Venturi to mind with striking literalness, from his celebration of the sign-fronted buildings he categorized as "decorated sheds" in Learning from Las Vegas to his credo in perhaps the most influential architecture book of the 20th century, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: "I am for messy vitality over obvious unity."
The Iron Triangle needs to be lifted out of a flood plain and given sewers. It cries out for planners who can appreciate the American Dream and the economic and visual vibrancy in what most may see only as a slum of chop shops.
Inside the Juanita Nacional, one of a handful of restaurants in the Iron Triangle.
The city's plan will make the Iron Triangle a more hygienic, and much less interesting, place.
Spontaneous public sculpture appears amid signs in English and Korean, where Spanish is often spoken. New York's planners might learn from Rem Koolhaas's observation, "Singapore is a melting pot that produces blandness and sterility from the most promising ingredients."
White people enjoy a sanitized Willets Point in Beyer Blinder Belle's rendering of the city's redevelopment plan. In the silence of their colored-pencil world, a stroller mom and her child are undisturbed by traffic noise or the flight path overhead.
This rendering is titled "The Nexus." It could be anywhere.
Another rendering suggests a future community of rabid Mets fans. They'd better be; there's nowhere else to go but the convention center.
The Iron Triangle, part 1 / Wilson's Garage
Once a swamp and then an ash dump, the ground of the Iron Triangle in Willets Point, Queens, now feels like both. Its businesses have an unacknowledged ancestor within one of the greatest works of American literature.
The Great Gatsby was going to be called Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires until the great Scribners editor Max Perkins persuaded F. Scott Fitzgerald otherwise. Bad as it was, Fitzgerald's working title serves to tell how much importance he placed on the novel's "valley of ashes," the setting for George Wilson's garage in the novel. The valley of ashes was based on the sprawling Corona dump which would be regraded and buried - under the 1939 World's Fair site, now Corona Flushing Meadows Park, and Shea stadium - except for the corner of it at the tip of Willets Point that was left to its own devices and just maniacally proliferated car repair shops until it came to be known as the Iron Triangle. ArchiTakes' search for Wilson's Garage finds that it was almost certainly located within the Iron Triangle, a unique district whose days are numbered in the path of a city initiated development plan.
The Corona dump: "Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight." - The Great Gatsby
Fitzgerald moved his family from St. Paul to Great Neck, on the north shore of Long Island, in October of 1922 so he could be closer to the Broadway production of his play, The Vegetable. They stayed until May of 1924 before moving to the French Riviera in the off season, where cheaper living and fewer distractions allowed Fitzgerald to write Gatsby. His masterpiece, it was published in 1925. Fitzgerald's experiences in Great Neck, fictionalized as "West Egg", and Long Island's Gold Coast provided material for the book. Trips to Manhattan during his stay in Great Neck would have taken Fitzgerald through Queens' Corona dump, whether he rode the Long Island Railroad or drove along Northern Boulevard. (Even as he fictionalized Great Neck, Fitzgerald moved the Railroad and Northern Boulevard briefly side by side so both could pass close by George Wilson's garage.) The dump consisted of swamp land west of the Flushing River which was being filled in with garbage, horse manure and ashes from the city's coal burning furnaces. It provided the writer a dramatic contrast to the glamor of Manhattan and the North Shore, and resonated with his reading of T.S. Eliot's just published 1922 poem The Waste Land.
Chapter 2 of The Great Gatsby begins:
"About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.
But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic - their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and, when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute, and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan's mistress. . . .
I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon, and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and, taking hold of my elbow, literally forced me from the car. . . . I followed him over a low whitewashed railroad fence, and we walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg's persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it, and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night restaurant, approached by a trail of ashes: the third was a garage - Repairs. George B. Wilson. Cars bought and sold. - I followed Tom inside.
The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage might be a blind, and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead, when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste."
Along with the obvious liberty of running the Long Island Railroad briefly next to Northern Boulevard, Fitzgerald altered the landscape in a way that hasn't previously been noted; he flipped the "small foul" Flushing River east-for-west with the dump. This switch is the only way a Manhattan-bound train stopped for a lift bridge would find itself standing in the dump rather than the town of Flushing. While these changes take the scene two giant steps into imaginary geography, it's easy enough to check old maps for what might have been Wilson's Garage given a reversal of the narrative's direction of travel from westward to eastward. A 1926 real estate map in fact shows two garages within what might be a hundred yard walk back from an eastbound train stopped at the river. They appear where 126th and 127th Streets meet Northern Boulevard. A visit to the site finds one of them demolished. What may be a more modern garage building is found in the place of the other, among older buildings that might date from Fitzgerald's Great Neck days, almost all of which now function as garages. While this section of Northern Boulevard was more populated on the 1926 map than Fitzgerald's "three shop Main Street," he might have pared away his garage's neighbors to give it a Hopperesque isolation, accompanined only by an empty store and proto-"Nighthawks" diner.
These blocks of Northern Boulevard are certainly the location of any real building that might have inspired Wilson's garage. The presence of billboards along this stretch, possibly dating back to the time of the lift bridge, seems to confirm this. The long gone Corona dump is routinely described as Fitzgerald's valley of ashes, but what's been missed is the link between Wilson's garage and the still standing Iron Triangle it pioneered. Cheap land next to a major highway would have appealed to an early garage venture, the kind of business that wouldn't suffer from a dump-side location. What put Wilson's garage there brought droves more until they developed into a symbiotic car repair ghetto.
A map from the 2002 book, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: A Literary Reference, posits locations for Wilson's Garage east of the Flushing River. Although the book was edited by preeminent Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli, the map is highly unreliable. It shows the valley of ashes as a literal river valley cradling the Flushing River from either side, while the Corona dump, upon which Fitzgerald modeled his "valley", extended only west from the river and covered a broad expanse of swampy lowland. The map also shows Roosevelt Avenue crossing the River, as it's done only since construction of a bridge in 1928, three years after Gatsby was published. The only opportunity for a roadside garage within the dump and near the River would have been on Northern Boulevard just west of the River. A street atlas from the time of Fitzgerald's stay in Great Neck shows two garages in this area.
Two pages of the 1926 E. Belcher Hyde street atlas of Queens show Willets Point, formed by Flushing Bay at top and the Flushing River at right. On the left-hand page, at bottom, the Long Island Railroad passes through an uninhabited stretch of dump before crossing the river in the lower right corner. At the upper right of this page, two garages are shown on Northern Boulevard, which runs along the bay's shore. The right-hand page shifts topography slightly south. Near its bottom, the Roosevelt Avenue Bridge is shown crossing the river although it would have been still in the works. Farther up, Northern Boulevard crosses the river on the lift bridge pictured below. Most of the streets and blocks shown on these pages were only mapped and not yet built. (Today they are the blurred mud streets of the Iron Triangle.) Mostly covered by mounds of ash and garbage, Willets Point was only the extreme northeast corner of the vast dump Fitzgerald called the valley of ashes.
A detail from the left-hand atlas page above shows two buildings labeled "garage" on the south side of Northern Boulevard, the main artery between Manhattan and the North Shore of Long Island. (On the Road to West Egg was another of The Great Gatsby's working titles.) Fitzgerald might have idled his car outside these while waiting for the Flushing River lift bridge on a drive home from the city. Turning his head to the right as he waited for the bridge, he'd have had time to study them and their ash heap backdrop. Garages would have been rarer so early in the auto age, and the nearness of the two on this map foreshadows the district's hyperpopulation with garages and body shops. The garage at right is centered on the northern leg of what is now the Iron Triangle. Closer to the river, it's the most likely candidate for Wilson's Garage.
In Flushing, Northern Boulevard was called Bridge Street after the bridge over the Flushing River. This photo shows the drawbridge of Fitzgerald's time, which would have occasionally left eastbound drivers standing on Northern Boulevard beside the Corona dump.
Fitzgerald behind the wheel on the Riviera in 1924, when he was writing The Great Gatsby.
". . . we walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg's persistent stare." A billboard at the corner of Northern Boulevard and 127th Place seems to tell the seeker of Wilson's Garage, "you're getting very warm." The two-story building that raises it into view appears on the 1926 Hyde street atlas. Its upper floor suggests an above-the-shop residence and might have spurred Fitzgerald to wonder over the strangeness of domestic life on the edge of a dump: "It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage might be a blind, and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead . . ." This building, like the Sunoco station just beyond it and the building in the foreground, is now a garage.
Viewed from the no man's land under the Whitestone Expressway, the blue and white structure at right is on the corner of Northern Boulevard and 126th Street, the site of the garage nearer the river on the 1926 street atlas, and the most likely location of the inspiration for Wilson's Garage. The trees at left conceal the billboard pictured above.
Today's version of Wilson's garage on Northern Boulevard, where the owner is more likely to be named Park or Kim. To its left is the blue and white building pictured above.
A study sketch by Francis Cugat for The Great Gatsby dust jacket shows the valley of ashes with balloon-like faces watching from its sky. Cugat began work on the cover while the novel was still in progress and his sketch reflects Fitzgerald's working title, Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires. As Charles Scribner III noted in a 1991 essay, "Celestial Eyes - from Metamorphosis to Masterpiece," Fitzgerald told his editor Max Perkins, "I've written it into the book." Scribner speculates that Cugat's floating faces inspired the billboard eyes of Doctor Eckleburg.
Francis Cugat's painting "Celestial Eyes" may be the most famous jacket art in American literature. Cugat's early sketches of the valley of ashes gave way to a cross between an amusement park and a city skyline, with a single more prominent floating face. His idea of eyes above the valley of ashes lives on in the novel's text.
The historian David Trask has speculated that Doctor T.J. Eckleburg's initials refer to Thomas Jefferson, whose vision of an agrarian republic is mocked by Eckleburg's billboard eyes brooding over the "valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens . . ." (The founding father's initials seem a less tenuous association when the names George and Myrtle Wilson are laid over George and Martha Washington.) The Corona dump may be gone, but as debased a landscape lies beside Northern Boulevard today; not in the car-parts carnival of the Iron Triangle to the south, but in the still ashy ground under and around the Van Wyck and Whitestone Expressways to the north, created by the same Robert Moses who removed the valley of ashes. Emblematic of a national car culture, they make an even better symbol of the defilement of America's landscape than the Corona dump. Their indifference to things human echoes the hit-and-run accident outside Wilson's garage upon which Gatsby's tragedy turns.
Willets point, with Shea Stadium, now replaced by Citi Field, at lower left. The Iron Triangle is at center, within the "V" formed by 126th Street at left and Willets Point Boulevard at right. Above, Northern Boulevard, now part of an extensive expressway system, completes the triangle.
Continued
The Iron Triangle, part 1 / Wilson's Garage
Once a swamp and then an ash dump, the ground of the Iron Triangle in Willets Point, Queens, now feels like both. Its businesses have an unacknowledged ancestor within one of the greatest works of American literature.
The Great Gatsby was going to be called Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires until the great Scribners editor Max Perkins persuaded F. Scott Fitzgerald otherwise. Bad as it was, Fitzgerald's working title serves to tell how much importance he placed on the novel's "valley of ashes," the setting for George Wilson's garage in the novel. The valley of ashes was based on the sprawling Corona dump which would be regraded and buried - under the 1939 World's Fair site, now Corona Flushing Meadows Park, and Shea stadium - except for the corner of it at the tip of Willets Point that was left to its own devices and just maniacally proliferated car repair shops until it came to be known as the Iron Triangle. ArchiTakes' search for Wilson's Garage finds that it was almost certainly located within the Iron Triangle, a unique district whose days are numbered in the path of a city initiated development plan.
The Corona dump: "Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight." - The Great Gatsby
Fitzgerald moved his family from St. Paul to Great Neck, on the north shore of Long Island, in October of 1922 so he could be closer to the Broadway production of his play, The Vegetable. They stayed until May of 1924 before moving to the French Riviera in the off season, where cheaper living and fewer distractions allowed Fitzgerald to write Gatsby. His masterpiece, it was published in 1925. Fitzgerald's experiences in Great Neck, fictionalized as "West Egg", and Long Island's Gold Coast provided material for the book. Trips to Manhattan during his stay in Great Neck would have taken Fitzgerald through Queens' Corona dump, whether he rode the Long Island Railroad or drove along Northern Boulevard. (Even as he fictionalized Great Neck, Fitzgerald moved the Railroad and Northern Boulevard briefly side by side so both could pass close by George Wilson's garage.) The dump consisted of swamp land west of the Flushing River which was being filled in with garbage, horse manure and ashes from the city's coal burning furnaces. It provided the writer a dramatic contrast to the glamor of Manhattan and the North Shore, and resonated with his reading of T.S. Eliot's just published 1922 poem The Waste Land.
Chapter 2 of The Great Gatsby begins:
"About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.
But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic - their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and, when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute, and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan's mistress. . . .
I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon, and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and, taking hold of my elbow, literally forced me from the car. . . . I followed him over a low whitewashed railroad fence, and we walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg's persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it, and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night restaurant, approached by a trail of ashes: the third was a garage - Repairs. George B. Wilson. Cars bought and sold. - I followed Tom inside.
The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage might be a blind, and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead, when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste."
Along with the obvious liberty of running the Long Island Railroad briefly next to Northern Boulevard, Fitzgerald altered the landscape in a way that hasn't previously been noted; he flipped the "small foul" Flushing River east-for-west with the dump. This switch is the only way a Manhattan-bound train stopped for a lift bridge would find itself standing in the dump rather than the town of Flushing. While these changes take the scene two giant steps into imaginary geography, it's easy enough to check old maps for what might have been Wilson's Garage given a reversal of the narrative's direction of travel from westward to eastward. A 1926 real estate map in fact shows two garages within what might be a hundred yard walk back from an eastbound train stopped at the river. They appear where 126th and 127th Streets meet Northern Boulevard. A visit to the site finds one of them demolished. What may be a more modern garage building is found in the place of the other, among older buildings that might date from Fitzgerald's Great Neck days, almost all of which now function as garages. While this section of Northern Boulevard was more populated on the 1926 map than Fitzgerald's "three shop Main Street," he might have pared away his garage's neighbors to give it a Hopperesque isolation, accompanined only by an empty store and proto-"Nighthawks" diner.
These blocks of Northern Boulevard are certainly the location of any real building that might have inspired Wilson's garage. The presence of billboards along this stretch, possibly dating back to the time of the lift bridge, seems to confirm this. The long gone Corona dump is routinely described as Fitzgerald's valley of ashes, but what's been missed is the link between Wilson's garage and the still standing Iron Triangle it pioneered. Cheap land next to a major highway would have appealed to an early garage venture, the kind of business that wouldn't suffer from a dump-side location. What put Wilson's garage there brought droves more until they developed into a symbiotic car repair ghetto.
A map from the 2002 book, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: A Literary Reference, posits locations for Wilson's Garage east of the Flushing River. Although the book was edited by preeminent Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli, the map is highly unreliable. It shows the valley of ashes as a literal river valley cradling the Flushing River from either side, while the Corona dump, upon which Fitzgerald modeled his "valley", extended only west from the river and covered a broad expanse of swampy lowland. The map also shows Roosevelt Avenue crossing the River, as it's done only since construction of a bridge in 1928, three years after Gatsby was published. The only opportunity for a roadside garage within the dump and near the River would have been on Northern Boulevard just west of the River. A street atlas from the time of Fitzgerald's stay in Great Neck shows two garages in this area.
Two pages of the 1926 E. Belcher Hyde street atlas of Queens show Willets Point, formed by Flushing Bay at top and the Flushing River at right. On the left-hand page, at bottom, the Long Island Railroad passes through an uninhabited stretch of dump before crossing the river in the lower right corner. At the upper right of this page, two garages are shown on Northern Boulevard, which runs along the bay's shore. The right-hand page shifts topography slightly south. Near its bottom, the Roosevelt Avenue Bridge is shown crossing the river although it would have been still in the works. Farther up, Northern Boulevard crosses the river on the lift bridge pictured below. Most of the streets and blocks shown on these pages were only mapped and not yet built. (Today they are the blurred mud streets of the Iron Triangle.) Mostly covered by mounds of ash and garbage, Willets Point was only the extreme northeast corner of the vast dump Fitzgerald called the valley of ashes.
A detail from the left-hand atlas page above shows two buildings labeled "garage" on the south side of Northern Boulevard, the main artery between Manhattan and the North Shore of Long Island. (On the Road to West Egg was another of The Great Gatsby's working titles.) Fitzgerald might have idled his car outside these while waiting for the Flushing River lift bridge on a drive home from the city. Turning his head to the right as he waited for the bridge, he'd have had time to study them and their ash heap backdrop. Garages would have been rarer so early in the auto age, and the nearness of the two on this map foreshadows the district's hyperpopulation with garages and body shops. The garage at right is centered on the northern leg of what is now the Iron Triangle. Closer to the river, it's the most likely candidate for Wilson's Garage.
In Flushing, Northern Boulevard was called Bridge Street after the bridge over the Flushing River. This photo shows the drawbridge of Fitzgerald's time, which would have occasionally left eastbound drivers standing on Northern Boulevard beside the Corona dump.
Fitzgerald behind the wheel on the Riviera in 1924, when he was writing The Great Gatsby.
". . . we walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg's persistent stare." A billboard at the corner of Northern Boulevard and 127th Place seems to tell the seeker of Wilson's Garage, "you're getting very warm." The two-story building that raises it into view appears on the 1926 Hyde street atlas. Its upper floor suggests an above-the-shop residence and might have spurred Fitzgerald to wonder over the strangeness of domestic life on the edge of a dump: "It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage might be a blind, and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead . . ." This building, like the Sunoco station just beyond it and the building in the foreground, is now a garage.
Viewed from the no man's land under the Whitestone Expressway, the blue and white structure at right is on the corner of Northern Boulevard and 126th Street, the site of the garage nearer the river on the 1926 street atlas, and the most likely location of the inspiration for Wilson's Garage. The trees at left conceal the billboard pictured above.
Today's version of Wilson's garage on Northern Boulevard, where the owner is more likely to be named Park or Kim. To its left is the blue and white building pictured above.
A study sketch by Francis Cugat for The Great Gatsby dust jacket shows the valley of ashes with balloon-like faces watching from its sky. Cugat began work on the cover while the novel was still in progress and his sketch reflects Fitzgerald's working title, Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires. As Charles Scribner III noted in a 1991 essay, "Celestial Eyes - from Metamorphosis to Masterpiece," Fitzgerald told his editor Max Perkins, "I've written it into the book." Scribner speculates that Cugat's floating faces inspired the billboard eyes of Doctor Eckleburg.
Francis Cugat's painting "Celestial Eyes" may be the most famous jacket art in American literature. Cugat's early sketches of the valley of ashes gave way to a cross between an amusement park and a city skyline, with a single more prominent floating face. His idea of eyes above the valley of ashes lives on in the novel's text.
The historian David Trask has speculated that Doctor T.J. Eckleburg's initials refer to Thomas Jefferson, whose vision of an agrarian republic is mocked by Eckleburg's billboard eyes brooding over the "valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens . . ." (The founding father's initials seem a less tenuous association when the names George and Myrtle Wilson are laid over George and Martha Washington.) The Corona dump may be gone, but as debased a landscape lies beside Northern Boulevard today; not in the car-parts carnival of the Iron Triangle to the south, but in the still ashy ground under and around the Van Wyck and Whitestone Expressways to the north, created by the same Robert Moses who removed the valley of ashes. Emblematic of a national car culture, they make an even better symbol of the defilement of America's landscape than the Corona dump. Their indifference to things human echoes the hit-and-run accident outside Wilson's garage upon which Gatsby's tragedy turns.
Willets point, with Shea Stadium, now replaced by Citi Field, at lower left. The Iron Triangle is at center, within the "V" formed by 126th Street at left and Willets Point Boulevard at right. Above, Northern Boulevard, now part of an extensive expressway system, completes the triangle.
Continued
- The Future Still Needs the Gimbels Skybridge Jul 01, 2022
- Mythical Lower Manhattan, Part 2 May 06, 2013
- Mythical Lower Manhattan, Part 1 - In Memory of Lebbeus Woods Jan 02, 2013
- Statue of Liberty or Dipstick of the Apocalypse? Dec 27, 2012
- The Iron Triangle, part 2 / from Kowloon Walled City to Singapore Jan 01, 2010