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

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