E. M. Forster’s rallying cry was “only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted.” When Robert A. M. Stern wrote that “people want to look at buildings and make connections,” did that suggest that architects impart their passion to the buildings they design, or do the buildings themselves wordlessly communicate that passion as public art? If you believe Winston Churchill, it doesn’t really matter. “We shape our buildings,” Churchill said. “Thereafter they shape us.”
In one way or another, that’s true of the landmarks profiled in this book. Some, like the Bowne House in Queens, have survived thanks to prescient historians and civic-minded preservationists or were deemed obsolete only after legal protections against wanton destruction were in place. Others, like Grand Central, had, and continue to have, a monumental impact on urban planning and density. Still others, like Jean Herman’s brownstone apartment, might not qualify as official landmarks, but, for better or worse, expose the pitfalls that tenants and developers can face just trying to survive in the city or make what passes for progress. Other buildings endured because they were repurposed or simply too costly to tear down.
What constitutes progress is in the eye of the beholder. Some people crave novelty. Others fear flux. “Buildings long outlive the purposes for which they were built,” the architect Edward Hollis wrote, “the technologies by which they were constructed, the aesthetics that determined their form; they suffer numberless subtractions, additions, divisions and multiplications; and soon enough their forms and functions have little to do with one another.” In his The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (2009), Hollis concluded existentially, “the life of the building is both perpetuated and transformed by the repeated act of alteration and reuse.”
New York is not like London or Paris or many other Old World cities, a large part of whose charm is derived from the undeviating low-rise eighteenth- and nineteenth-century block-fronts that temper the hullabaloo of the modern built and mobile urban environment. What drives New York has been its resiliency, its capacity for reinvention, not all at once, but piecemeal, according to the plots laid out in the grid imposed by the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 and by its successors and the developers who conglomerated parcels on which to temporarily leave their footprint. Instead of a uniform look, Alexander G. Passikoff, in his 2011 book about New York, A Façade of Buildings, identified a minimum of thirty basic designs that only hint at the diversity to be found on a door-to-door walking tour of the city. In a congested skyline, much less a pedestrian streetscape, even the most idiosyncratic buildings rarely exist in a vacuum. “Buildings are seldom isolated facts,” the sociologist Richard Sennett said. “Urban forms have their own inner dynamics, as in how buildings relate to one another, to open spaces, or to infrastructure below ground, or to nature.”
So why these twenty-seven? This is not the list of landmark buildings that have defined New York. It’s my list. It’s subjective and abridged. The challenge was whittling it down to twenty-seven from scores of other candidates. How, some readers will ask, could I possibly have neglected the Woolworth, Chrysler, and RCA (now Comcast) buildings? The Dakota apartments, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fraunces Tavern, the Conference House on Staten Island, Tammany Hall, and Hamilton Grange? My goal was to tell the story of the city through a handful of defining edifices, but also to stimulate debate: What makes a building transformative? Why do some survive? Which deserve to? What is the cost to society of sacrificing a transformative site to the future? How does the collective legacy of landmarks contribute to our understanding of who we are today? In a world of virtual reality, what is the value of authenticity?
Which ones would be on your list of twenty-seven, and why? Send your choices to 27buildingsnyc@gmail.com.