The City: Doing Over the Town

The cloud-capped towers and echoing canyons of Manhattan have long been a beacon for immigrants, a bonanza for photographers and a familiar profile to its citizens. But in the past five years, new towers have reared skyward, old landmarks have disappeared, and vistas have opened with such suddenness that a returning native would scarcely know the place. Manhattan is in the midst of a building boom that in volume, value and variety is unmatched in the history of the human race. Even oldtime Manhattanites have been startled into a sharp awareness of their city’s dramatic angularity and inexhaustible enterprise as they peer at it from their new tower offices, or come upon an open plaza where once there was only a narrow sidewalk.

This sudden architectural flowering is only an outward manifestation of the spirit of the world’s richest and most incredible city—a clangorous concatenation of wealth and squalor, the crowded island that is a center of culture and a hotbed of crime, a place where everything is for sale, and anything can be done. This tremendous outpouring of energy and treasure ranges from apartment houses to bus terminals, from office buildings to slum-clearance projects (see color pages).

Culture Complex. This week with John D. Rockefeller III on the stage, Leonard Bernstein on the podium, Jacqueline Kennedy in the audience, and a nationwide TV audience looking on. Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts made its debut with the opening of the $15.4 million Philharmonic Hall. It is still surrounded by a pocked and chugging wasteland of bulldozers and derricks, power shovels and cement mixers, which will eventually be a 14-acre landscaped park containing a repertory theater, a theater for dance and operetta, a library-museum, a building to house the Juilliard School of music, and (by 1965) the new $35 million Metropolitan Opera House. When completed in 1966, Lincoln Center will be a $142 million complex, and the most important cultural center in the U.S.

Ten blocks to the south, there was a different kind of opening with its own brand of superlative: the tallest hotel in the world. The Americana zooms up 50 stories in a kind of crescent on Seventh Avenue between 52nd and 53rd streets. Like its rival, the 46-story still-unfinished New York Hilton a block away, the Americana will help remedy Manhattan’s constant shortage of public rooms by supplying them in all sizes and shapes. There are 41 of them in all, seating a total of 11,290 diners (the seven kitchens occupy nearly an acre and contain such housewifely nightmares as dishwashers capable of sterilizing 15,000 pieces of glass or crockery an hour and potato-peelers that can skin 75 potatoes a minute). Very Important People may be whisked upstairs in a private automobile elevator without setting foot on sidewalk.

30-Story Insects. The bill for this vast renovation job dwarfs some small nations’ total budgets. In 1961 the total value of private construction prospects in the city’s five boroughs, not including public works or utilities, amounted to $1,184,100,000. Part of the 1961 boom is attributable to the rush to get under the wire before the new zoning regulations* went into effect.

Like any family having the house done over. New Yorkers have had to put up with a lot of inconvenience. Construction work has cramped four-lane side streets to single lanes of crawling cars flanked by piles of steel beams, cinder blocks, bricks, sand, window frames, concrete mixers and oversized trucks. Sidewalks disappear suddenly into mazy tunnels of love as pedestrians are routed around and through and up and down the encroaching construction. Familiar clusters of shops and houses turn abruptly into yawning chasms four stories deep, in which men and machines maneuver like toys. Dark lattices of girders loom like skeletons, and everywhere the towering necks of cranes stab 300 ft. into the sky, moving with ponderous delicacy, like 30-story insects. Riveters, trip hammers, pneumatic drills, earth movers, rock blasters, and horns honking in the resulting traffic jams add to the noise of what is already the noisiest city in the world.

But for all the inconvenience, New York’s booming construction is a miracle of logistics; getting 35,000 tons of mica schist out of the ground and getting more tons of steel, concrete, glass and machinery in while the traffic flows is a marvel of coordination and timing comparable to mounting an amphibious landing in heavy weather with troops who fight only an eight-hour day.

∙PARK AVENUE. Out of all this effort has come a new elegance. The drab stretch of heavy-looking, aging apartment houses between 46th and 59th has been transformed into one of the architectural showplaces of the world—a glittering half-mile of tinted glass towers reflecting each other and the changing sky by day. glowing and blazing by night like gigantic jewels. The floating tourmaline lightness of Lever House and the rich, understated dignity of Mies van der Rohe’s bronze Seagram Building set the style for a lavish squandering of space for plazas and fountains.

∙WEST SIDE. The Avenue of the Americas (more familiarly known as Sixth Avenue), until recently a no-man’s land of pawnshops, sleazy bars and purveyors of girlie magazines interrupted only by a part of Rockefeller Center, has suddenly acquired a community of handsome new office buildings, starting with the 48-story TIME & LIFE Building and including the 42-story Equitable Life Building, the unfinished Sperry Rand Building, and the Hilton Hotel, which boasts that its tinted glass will make it “the first blue skyscraper to be added to the New York skyline.” Still to come is the new CBS Building, a clean, 38-story tower sheathed in green granite and set in its own sunken plaza, designed by the late Eero Saarinen.

∙EAST SIDE. Another transformed avenue is Third, where the gin mills and high-class junkshops that once flourished in the dappled darkness under the elevated have given way to vast air-conditioned skyscrapers, into which many Madison Avenue advertising men have migrated. Thrift shops have become antique shops, antique shops have become decorating establishments, and the bars have become somewhat self-conscious period pieces. North of 57th Street, old trolley barns and quick-lunch cafeterias have been replaced by some of the city’s most impressive apartment houses, some of them grandly set in their own block-long parks.

∙DOWN TOWN. The time is long gone when the Flatiron Building was an architectural astonishment, and when the Woolworth Building held sway as the tallest in the world, but even the old soil that was the birthplace of the skyscraper has sprouted new towers. The area received a massive booster shot this year with the completion of David Rockefeller’s 60-story Chase Manhattan Bank Building, packed with modern art and surrounded by a plaza roughly the size of Venice’s Piazza San Marco. The dancing glass wall of No. 2 Broadway brings a note of new brightness to the area’s soot-stained limestone. And last week Architect Minoru Yamasaki was commissioned to design the $270 million World Trade Center, which will occupy a 15-acre site bounded by West, Barclay, Church and Liberty streets, and is planned to bring together all the city’s export-import activities and information.

Too Many People. All over town, living rooms, bedrooms and baths are being added at a rate to match the office boom. Slum clearance projects have been marching through Harlem and the Lower East Side; low-cost housing has been supplied by organizations along the lines of the cluster of 22-story cooperative apartment houses recently erected west of Eighth Avenue by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. But the middle class has not been served so well by private builders.

Many of those who have rented apartments for as much as $100 a room and up in Manhattan’s shiniest new apartment buildings have gained in gadgets—built-in air conditioning, modern kitchens, washers and dryers—but they have lost elsewhere. Walls are often paper-thin, floors sag, fireplaces are nonexistent, ceilings low and rents high.

Whether or not the new New York is a better place to live in than the old one, it is certainly a better place to work in. Modern office buildings are efficient, self-sufficient communities, containing everything from clinics and barber shops to bars and restaurants. They are air conditioned, which makes them not only cooler in summer but infinitely cleaner all year round (on every square mile of New York City, 89.6 tons of soot fall each month). They are lighter; the hanging curtain wall has made possible many times as much window space. But they have one serious drawback: they are bigger, which means more people, which means more congestion.

Monster Octagon. What this means for New York may be examined in terms of that still-unfinished midtown giant, the Pan American Building, an elongated octagon that stands athwart Park Avenue between the Grand Central Terminal and the once proud Grand Central Building, now diminished to a small shadow against the looming white concrete slab of the Pan Am.

Pan Am claims to be the “world’s largest commercial office building.” (On the grounds that the Pentagon is not commercial and Chicago’s Merchandise Mart is an exhibition hall as well as an office building.) It will have 2,400,000 sq. ft. of rentable space—400,000 more than the Empire State Building, though it is only 59 stories high to the Empire State’s 102. No building ever had a more accessible location; it can be reached by train, car, subway, taxi, air. Its roof will be a heliport equipped to handle 25-passenger twin-turbine helicopters; through its cellarage rumble some 400 trains daily; and in between, 63 elevators will carry some 25,000 office staffers and executives up and down.

It is these 25,000—and the countless thousands more in other new buildings, plus those who come to do business with them—that are posing a problem for New York as big as the Pan Am Building itself. For New York is a tidal city, and the tide is human.

Some 3,300,000 people enter New York’s nine-mile-square “central business district” each day. The decline of city shopping as more stores sprouted in the suburbs has actually lowered the commuter flow by 10% since 1948, but as offices proliferate, the number entering the center of the city at rush hours has increased 4.6%. And as the buses and trains have grown more and more congested, more and more commuters are making things worse than ever by taking to their cars.

Headquarters City. New York is also the major port of entry into the U.S., and Idlewild—the busiest airport in the world —has become a kind of sub-city in itself. As large as all Manhattan from 42nd Street to the Battery, Idlewild has developed a range of consumer services that include banking, dentistry, photographic studios, and a $275,000 animal motel where bears can bed down for $2.50 a day, tigers for $5, bulls for $7 and wolves for $2.50.

Even if it seems about to choke on its own traffic, New York is pre-eminently “Headquarters City” for major U.S. business. Thus it will continue to be the center of culture and entertainment; the luxury apartments will not go empty nor the big hotels lack for tourists.

But more and more architecturally conscious Manhattanites think that some sort of order should be imposed on heedless builders, who exercise their free-enterprising right to build with little thought for neighboring buildings and still less for sentimental architecture buffs who mourn the passing of old landmarks. Aroused traditionalists are now battling to save the grand old bulk of Pennsylvania Station, which is scheduled for demolition to make way for two office buildings and a mammoth sports arena. Carnegie Hall was saved, but the old Ritz-Carlton and Brevoort Hotels have fallen to progress and the wrecker’s ball.

Monotony or Scale? Among the pros, views of the new boom are mixed. Gordon Bunshaft, chief designer for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, says flatly: “Architecturally, the general standard is lower than anywhere else in the world.” Says Arthur Drexler, director of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art: “The bulk of the commercial buildings is only packaged space. About all that can be said of them is that they function mechanically.”

Architect Harmon Goldstone finds mer it in the much criticized monotony of the glassy new façades. “It gives a certain scale and character that is very important to a cityscape. In the long run, the poor buildings that are going up will be lost. There are poor buildings in Paris, too, but you really never notice them.” But Italy’s great Engineer Pier Luigi Nervi perhaps comes closest to Manhattan’s essence.

Says he: “New York is ‘unica, enorme, potente,’ it must be judged as a whole.” Park Avenue he declared “una strada superba,” even found the bulky Pan Am Building “an expression of power.”

Spaces & Caves. Manhattan will probably never become a city of handsome spaces. In other times and in other cities, it usually took a prince or a Pope to control the shape of a square or dictate the disposal of an avenue. Manhattan’s builders—insurance companies, corporations or speculators—cannot manage that; any man with enough money or gumption can put up just about what he likes next door, and block the view they counted on.

But if the total is uncoordinated and the individual creations few, the resultant cityscape still achieves a kind of American exuberance that has its own authority.

On a winter’s evening, when the dusk drops suddenly and the lights go on in a thousand offices against the twilight sky, the thrusting towers become a sight like nothing else on earth, having some of the presumed radiance of an Aladdin’s cave, something of the misty suspended magic of an underwater seascape, and an unearthly grandeur of scale that suggests a fantasy of hell or an angular heaven. Like the Grand Canyon, it may not be art, but it is breathtaking.

*The new zoning ordinance establishes a relation between height and space at the base of buildings that will encourage high buildings with large open spaces for promenades, plazas, fountains and pools. It is designed to end the ugly set-back “ziggurats” that resulted when contractors tried to get the most space for the least money under the old regulations.