For over a decade, I worked until 4 a.m. on Fridays. My shift would start at 4 p.m. on Thursday afternoons at the TIME Magazine news desk, acting as a liaison between the editorial staff here in New York and the now-since-drastically-neutered network of correspondents around the world that we called "The News Service." At 4 a.m. -- barring any major, breaking news -- I'd pack up my stuff, sign off and was treated to a ride home in a car service, paid for by the magazine. From 1996 on, that car would drop me at the corner of East 12th Street and University Place. I'd wearily climb out and look up at the night sky. At the time -- and for a few short years afterwards -- I was treated to one of the most iconic views of Manhattan history. As I looked south down University Place, the Twin Towers of the Word Trade Center loomed brilliantly over downtown Manhattan, each lit up in a random mosaic of office lights. It sounds contrived to suggest as much now, but that view never failed to wow me. We all know what happened a few years later, so I won't bother getting into that. But oddly enough, I still find my eyes searching for those buildings every time I walk down University Place, even this many years after the fact. I doubt the endlessly-delayed plans to erect a "Freedom Tower" (and please -- let's not call it that if it ever gets built) will change that. The old view still haunts me, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
While it's on a much less dramatic scale, the view to the north on University Place has also seemingly changed forever (or at least until the next unspeakable catastrophe). For decades upon decades, if one looked north from the `Place, one was treated to the greenery of Union Square and the pointed spires of both 874 Broadway (a splendidly dark, baroque building that looks as if it belongs in Prague's most Gothic environs) and the Metropolitan Life Tower. When the latter is lit at night with colored lights, it provides a strikingly garish contrast to the sepulchral gloom for the former. For years, it's been one of my most beloved views of the city.
Click here to see it in its former glory.
Much like the view to the south, that view is vastly different now. In the last several months, thanks to a construction project at 24 East 23rd Street, the cityscape has changed, and an artless monolith has sprouted up like some gargantuan, robotic erection to decimate the symmetry. The rococo architectural flourishes of 874 are now dwarfed and lost beneath this new structure's priapic shaft, whose ever-growing roof juts over the spire of the Metropolitan Life Tower in a manner than can only be described as vain. It exudes a disdainful air of privilege and hubris, and its fruits will only be enjoyed by those affluent enough to live inside it. It's certainly not the first building to do this, and I strongly doubt that it will be the last. Taking off my rose-tinted glasses for a moment, I'm not suggesting that those lost, iconic buildings to the south were especially different architecturally from these new buildings, but the towers of the World Trade Center served a different age and a different function. While they may have embodied the very spirt of American capitalism, they at least acted as a open hub of business in a neighborhood designated for same. These new buildings are symbols of mighty financial muscle as well, but of a purely exclusive variety. They offer nothing to the community and are a visual blight.
Call me a hopeless sentimentalist, but I want the old skyline back.
ADDENDUM: Upon composing this post late last night, I failed to consider another new building that has punctured the vista on Univeristy Place, that being the unsightly structure that was put on the southwest corner of 14th street that calls itself 8 Union Square South, an oh so "tony" luxury condo that occupies the space formerly held by Odd Jobs. I hated Odd Jobs, honestly, but at least it was comparatively low to the ground. Regardless, this new building is awful. Oh, and check out the comments on this post, as my friend Jon makes a valid point.
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