The City: Changing the Skyline

High above the traffic’s boom and deep below the granite surface, New York relentlessly carries on the task of renewing itself. To keep up with the pace, Manhattan alone will spend $1 billion this year, and no city on earth can build faster, taller, bigger or better. Whole avenues are changing as outmoded structures come tumbling down and stores cheerfully bid their customers goodbye with placards: “We’ll be back next year, right here in the new building.” Never were the signs of change more evident than this summer.

Trains still run underground into Pennsylvania Station, but the station itself has disappeared, while up above, the steel skeleton for a new $75 million Madison Square Garden (third structure to bear the name), a 29-story hotel and office building is going up. On Madison Avenue, the 94th Street Armory, once home for the socialite Squadron A, is crumbling under the siege of wreckers to make way for an integrated junior high school; while at 74th Street, Architect Marcel Breuer’s new Whitney Museum, with its massive cantilevers and moat, is readying for its September debut. Across Central Park at Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera is putting the finishing touches on its new building, opening next month.

Inevitably, the wreckers are wrenching a few heartstrings. Frantic efforts to save the venerable, 83-year-old opera house ended in failure last week as the Old Met Opera House Corp., whose trustees included Soprano Licia Albanese and U.S. Senator Jacob Javits, admitted “with a heavy heart” that it was unable to raise the $8 million to $12 million needed to save the building. Commented the New York Times: “It is live opera that opera lovers support, not dead houses.”

At Avenue of the Americas and 54th Street, the Ziegfeld Theater, which opened in 1927, last week also received its death warrant. It will be torn down to make way for a new 50-story structure, fifth new building to be built in three blocks along the avenue, making it a rival to Park Avenue for glossy new office buildings.

Nor is all the big building in midtown. Last week, after six months of hassling over tax terms, Mayor John Lindsay and the Port of New York Authority came to terms, gave the green light to the construction of the $525 million World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. Main feature of the Minoru Yamasaki-designed 16-acre complex: twin stainless-steel towers, each 110 stories tall, or 100 ft. taller than the Empire State Building, which since 1931 has retained the proud title “Tallest Building in the World.”