Manhattan Fades to Memory

Manhattan 1998.

Barnes and Noble is much more than a bookstore; the books themselves on dark varnished wooden bookcases give a sense of something more akin to the library of the Reform Club as described by Jules Verne in Around the World in 80 Days. All around, armchairs occupied by people reading newspapers add to the illusion; books on coffee tables are available for anybody to pick up and thumb through. A counter serving coffee and cakes actually encourages people to be there, take their time, and actually enjoy the experience of reading, exploring and usually buying a book or three. For some, shopping is a necessary evil and reserved for times when items need to be procured. For others, it is a leisure activity, and in New York, Macy's Department store occupies a whole block, bounded by Thirty- Fourth and Thirty-Fifth Streets, Seventh Avenue, and Broadway and could probably occupy a week for the leisure shopper. For the rest of us, it is worth a visit if only to ride on the original wooden escalators, said to be the world’s first, that climb through the ten and a half levels. 

On Fifth Avenue is McDonald’s, close to where the global food chain originated with one man selling hamburgers from a temporary stand at the side of the street. Now situated in a restaurant, the hamburger tastes like it contains beef, the fries actually contain potato, and the regular meal is too much to finish in one hit. This is top food in contrast to the McDonald’s that are available all over the UK. Across the controlled crossing of the Fifth where walk/don’t walk is displayed in the yellow box facing the pedestrians, jaywalking is illegal, so you actually have to wait for the walk sign to be displayed, but there again I would not fancy taking my chances with ten lanes of traffic.

The lobby of the Empire State Building, decked out in marble with a huge mural formed of metal strip set into the marble, forms a stylised elevation of the building with rays of light emanating from the tip of the spire. A ride up in the wood-panelled elevator car takes a few minutes, and the sense of anticipation builds at arriving into the gift shop before taking the walk out into the cage that surrounds the observation deck, which happily is open as it is far too hot for ice now. The panorama is reminiscent of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities where the city of Irene, when viewed from the plateau in the distance, is a different city from the one you would stand within. From here, the places with reputations for being “rough”—Bronx, Harlem, Brooklyn—are looking pretty, fed by the constantly moving lines of flux, ignited in the darkness by the car headlights and taillights, painting white-and-red streaks through the cityscape whilst planes streak their own lines across the sky like fireflies as they are flying in and out of JFK and Newark airports; that’s a serious amount of people arriving and departing the metropolis. The chimneys of the power stations along the shore of Brooklyn cast reflections on the ever-moving surface of East River. The glittering spire of Chrysler still glitters at night, its curves picked out in electric light. Flatiron, which looks so tall on the ground, now actually appears as a small triangular block. Following the lines of flux from the traffic that animate Broadway as it heads north, the intensity increases as the flux is augmented by the neon of the theatres and advertisements of Times Square. 

The walking city has made its way to Chinatown—well, almost— at the Storefront, an architectural gallery, which in itself is a dramatic intervention into the cityscape, with doors and windows that are rotating panels set so that they offer fragmented views of the city, where the traffic crosses in front of the brick façades, steel fire escapes adorned with vertical neon signs of the Chinese alphabet. Inside, the walls are covered with a complete fragment of the Archigram exhibition as viewed in Manchester. Here, the exhibition is made up of the work of Ron Herron, best known for “Walking Cities” where more drawings than were seen at Manchester are displayed behind a layer of Perspex (Plexiglas), just giving a hint to the thoroughness of the work undertaken at the time. Here the exhibition also concentrates on the work of Heron’s practice since Archigram, the Imagination Headquarters being the best known. The work of the other members of the group is exhibited at the architecture schools at Columbia University and Cooper Union. 

Like all good things that must come to an end, so does the amazing experience, travelling beneath the Hudson River and into New Jersey. Viewing Manhattan in the rain out of the coach window, somehow quite fitting that the city that has been home for the past nine days, a city of so much life and energy, with every view dominated by the towers, now the silhouettes of Empire State and the Twin Towers fade in the mist as they fade into memory. 

The full story is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble published by Xlibris — Do We Need ARCHITECTS? A Journey Beneath the Surface of Architecture

- See more at: https://scriggler.com/DetailPost/Story/34546#sthash.MoetB0Co.dpuf

Strawberry Fields to the Oasis...

April 1998. Central Park is a strange place. If you don’t have wheels on your feet, you are a second-class citizen; rollerbladers have priority here, along with the cyclists. You take your life in your hands as you cross in front of them, gaining some worried looks from the fast-approaching rollerblader in the process. The marathon man perimeter fence around the reservoir must be to stop joggers from getting their feet wet if they forget to follow the one-way system. The sloping glass wall of a huge conservatory nestled in amongst the trees presents an entirely different front to the Met, with an obelisk out front (Cleopatra’s Needle?). A bit of research reveals that this is one of three obelisks sold by the Viceroy of Egypt in the nineteenth century, so this is probably the oldest structure from the “civilised” world to exist in North America. 

Strawberry Fields is extremely busy. “Imagine,” the John Lennon memorial, apparently has had fresh flowers placed on it every day since the singer’s death. By contrast, the scene of the crime outside the Dakota Building stands anonymously among the apartment blocks; that is, except for a guy on rollerblades that takes a tumble at that very point, quickly helped up and who apologises profusely for the interruption, before skating off down the street. Back in the park, ice-skaters are getting their feet wet as the 105 degrees air temperature is proving too much to keep the ice rink from melting.

Walking south, traffic, traffic, traffic and the Friday night stampede to get off Manhattan. The stampede is not actually going anywhere due to the sheer volume of traffic. I am told this happens every Friday as workers who stay on Manhattan during the week look to get home for the weekend. The destination for the walk is a jazz club in lower East Village, songs about heads turning up in garbage cans, tales about life in New York, performed by a band with female singer/guitarists, and a really entertaining evening. 

The Lincoln Centre, home of the New York Symphony Orchestra, is strangely deserted during the day. Nearby, a slightly overweight statue of liberty appears above the rooftops of buildings on the opposite side of Broadway. Heading south along Broadway to Columbus circus at the east entrance of Central Park forms one impressive entrance to the subway, not taking the subway now though it is only a short walk to West Fifty- Third Street and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), “Humanising Modernism”, an exhibition of the works of Alvar Aalto, displayed in models and immaculate pencil drawings. In the main exhibition are the surrealist works of Salvador Dali, paintings much smaller than anticipated, probably due to the large number of oversized reproductions available as posters. The large canvases of Piet Mondrian, grids, primary colours, seemingly so appropriate to the location; the abstract expressionism of Joan Miro that captures so much life and movement; to the absolute raw energy of Jackson Pollock demand serious attention it could easily take a week to view each piece. Outside, in the sculpture garden, it really feels that MoMA forms an oasis in the desert of skyscrapers. 

Barnes and Noble is much more than a bookstore; the books themselves on dark varnished wooden bookcases give a sense of something more akin to the library of the Reform Club as described by Jules Verne in Around the World in 80 Days. All around, armchairs occupied by people reading newspapers add to the illusion; books on coffee tables are available for anybody to pick up and thumb through. A counter serving coffee and cakes actually encourages people to be there, take their time, and actually enjoy the experience of reading, exploring and usually buying a book or three. For some, shopping is a necessary evil and reserved for times when items need to be procured. For others, it is a leisure activity, and in New York, Macys Department store occupies a whole block, bounded by Thirty- Fourth and Thirty-Fifth Streets, Seventh Avenue, and Broadway and could probably occupy a week for the leisure shopper. For the rest of us, it is worth a visit if only to ride on the original wooden escalators, said to be the world’s first, that climb through the ten and a half levels. 

The full story is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble published by Xlibris — Do We Need ARCHITECTS? A Journey Beneath the Surface of Architecture

Gotham and the Guggenheim

New York, April 1998.

Arriving back into the World Trade Plaza at eighty-nine degrees (Fahrenheit, not tilt) and heading south to walking between the wedding cakes of Wall Street, the spaces narrow and dark, is this really the financial centre of the world? A brief look in the lobby of the Woolworth building, the Cathedral of Commerce (or is it Monty Python’s “Crimson Life Assurance”?), with stone vaulted ceilings in the lobby, resembles the nave of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Battery Park, large lawns, dense tree planting make a welcome contrast from the landscape of extruded blocks, Victorian streetlights, promenade and seafront pavilions evoke memories of the English seaside. Looking above the trees, the decorated crowns of the towers borrowed from medieval Europe give a clear sense of the inspiration for Gotham City as created by Bob Kane for in the Batman Comics. 

A rather rapid walk back uptown and joining the constant flow of migrating locals heading along the non-diagonal part of Broadway in what amounts to a daily stampede. Opposite, City Hall Park, one of those not square squares, a great place for demonstrations in front of the city hall, immigrant workers at this time and not a “Ghostbuster” in sight. Dragged northwards by the rush moving along to the Soho Guggenheim Museum, not to be confused with Frank Lloyd Wright’s version, the Soho Guggenheim Museum is hosting an exhibition of Chinese art. The compactness of Soho spreads out to give way to parking lots; adverts are painted directly onto the walls of buildings to cover the entire wall. Such streetscape! Broadway starts on the diagonal and crosses a green park at Union Square and emerges unexpectedly alongside the Flatiron building, that when approached from the South is unrecognisable. 

Crossing the corner of Madison Square Park and onto Fifth Avenue, the names Gap, DKNY, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Levis, Banana Republic, seen as concessions in Rackham’s, Birmingham’s department store, are proudly displayed here each with their own large store. Yes, and there is Tiffany’s, seems to be a jewellery store, and I cannot see anywhere to go for breakfast though. Looking up Fifth, above the sea of heads, there are blocks as far as at the eye can see, the zone above the storefronts dominated by US flags that seem to hang from an inclined flagpole on every building.

A fire truck with sirens whooping and zapping, along with the low rumble of air horns, tries to push through the traffic where car drivers seem to have ignored the fact that they are in the fire lane (zap! zap!), keeping to the left side of Fifth, where the shadows cast by the blocks offer some relief from the heat. Up ahead, the Empire State Building emerges above the blocks and the traffic light that is holding everybody up and the perpetual surge of traffic crossing in what seems to be a yellow stream of the ubiquitous taxis.

There is a clearing in the tall blocks, the entrance plaza to the New York Public Library, steps leading up to a white stone plane of arches, columns, pediments, guarded by two lions set against the backdrop of the skyscrapers. Limousines pull up onto the driveway to the Plaza Hotel amongst crowds of onlookers hoping to catch a glimpse of somebody important. The hotel façade, representative of a kind of oversized European classical fairytale castle, looks out over the trees and lake and paths and railings of the natural splendour of Central Park.

Continuing the walk up Fifth Avenue, with the park to the left, passing the stone arches, columns, and pediments of the Metropolitan Museum of Art or more simply known as the Met as it emerges out of a clearing in the trees. The “real” Guggenheim museum, the one designed by Frank Lloyd Wright that appears in the architecture books, reveals itself, the white concrete sculpture, dramatic from a distance, remarkably reminiscent of Lubetkin’s animal enclosures at Dudley Zoo, and on the surface not in much better condition. The concrete has fared better internally and the spiral ramp is impressive, more Chinese art, but the building itself just maybe not living up to its legend. A group of break-dancers arrive and start their routine on the sidewalk, ghetto-blaster, spinning on heads, that kind of thing, to be moved on by the police after a few minutes.

The full story is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble published by Xlibris — Do We Need ARCHITECTS? A Journey Beneath the Surface of Architecture

- See more at: https://scriggler.com/DetailPost/Story/33339#sthash.SSfzUGE2.dpuf