NY Sun
At Home Among the Clouds
By FRANCIS MORRONE
Special to the Sun
February 14, 2008
New York is again reaching for the sky, as the city has perhaps not done since the 1920s. Developer Larry Silverstein recently announced that his forthcoming apartment building and hotel at 99 Church Street would be 912 feet high. That will make the Robert A.M. Stern-designed structure the tallest residential building in New York.
Until recently, all of the city's super-tall buildings have been office buildings. New Yorkers have never really lived all that high up in the air. The fabled penthouses of Park Avenue or Central Park West were ever only 300 or 400 feet high. By the standards of history and of many other places, that's pretty high up. But by the standards of Manhattan skyscrapers, a handful of which rise more than 1,000 feet, it's not much.
Today, the city's tallest residential building, in whole or in part, is the Trump World Tower (on First Avenue between 47th and 48th streets). At 861 feet, it has had that title since 2001 — before which it was held for 14 years by CitySpire (on 56th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues), which is mixed-use with apartments in its higher reaches. The Trump Tower (Fifth Avenue at 56th Street), also mixed-use, reigned between 1983 and 1987, taking the top spot from the Waldorf Towers part of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. But while the Waldorf had permanent apartments, it was primarily a transient hotel. The highest all-residential building between 1926 and 2001 — an amazing run for such a title in New York City — was the 541-foot Ritz Tower, on 57th Street at Park Avenue.
The Ritz Tower was an "apartment hotel." Though they were for permanent and not transient residents, units in apartment hotels did not — or were not supposed to — have kitchen facilities. That exempted the buildings from the tenement house laws and certain fire regulations that applied to all apartment buildings. In fact, many apartment hotel units were built with serving pantries equipped with refrigerators, running water, and outlets to which electrical stoves could be attached. In 1926, as the Ritz Tower was being readied for occupancy, the press implicated it in a sweeping move by the state's Tenement House Commission to declare illegal many of the apartment hotels going up in the city. Arthur Brisbane, the former Hearst journalist who was the developer of the Ritz Tower, protested that his building was falsely implicated — that it contained but two kitchens on its 42 floors. One kitchen served the building's tenants. The other was in Brisbane's own duplex apartment. There the matter rested.
Brisbane hired Emery Roth to design the building. Roth, more than any other architect, pioneered the "mansions in the clouds" style of Manhattan living. He designed Central Park West classics such as the San Remo, the Eldorado, and the Majestic. Roth and Brisbane, however, had some difficulties getting the design of the Ritz Tower just to their liking, and brought in Thomas Hastings to contribute to the design. Hastings had been the partner of the late John Carrère, and their credits included the New York Public Library. Late in his career, Hastings grew interested in the design of tall buildings. (In fact, the firm of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, which designed the Empire State Building, grew out of Carrère & Hastings.) Classical devices enliven the Ritz Tower's sleekly telescoping stepped-back masses, and the obelisk finials are highly reminiscent of those on Hastings's contemporaneous Standard Oil Building at 26 Broadway. There's also a definite Jazz Age quality to the Ritz Tower, reminding us that the jazziest part of the Jazz Age wasn't marked by Art Deco, but by an easygoing classicism.
Contrast its design with that of the Trump World Tower. Donald Trump's building was designed by the Polish architect Marta Rudzka. Outraged neighbors opposed its construction; they were particularly concerned about its tremendous height. I myself have been known to consider certain buildings as too tall. In the end, though, it's the quality of design that matters. Trump World Tower is very successful on its own terms. It's the terms that are problematic. Basically, the building is an undifferentiated dark glass mass, a shiny object meant to register as such — and as nothing more. Sustained viewing is not only unrewarding, but also psychologically jarring.
Mr. Stern can handle tremendous scale because he understands that good buildings are made of varied and sensibly interrelated units. It's an old-fashioned notion to be sure — the same as that which informs the Ritz Tower's design. It's why his 550-foot apartment building, 15 Central Park West, works so well. Its rhythmical fenestration, moldings, and varied roofline are the sorts of devices New York skyscraper architects, all the way through the Art Deco era, knew humanized their tall buildings. Let's be clear: It's not so much that a style becomes passé in architecture as that the purposes a style serves become passé. In this case, humanizing the tall building is the purpose that has become, for the most part, hopelessly unchic.
Perhaps the best thing about 15 Central Park West is its beautiful limestone exterior, which creates a pocket of warm, shimmering light that benefits all the buildings around it. Mr. Stern plans to use limestone again at 99 Church St., which Mr. Silverstein says will be completed in 2010. Just as some Turtle Bay residents were concerned that Trump World Tower would overwhelm the United Nations Secretariat Building, some have voiced concern that 99 Church Street will overpower the adjacent Woolworth Building. Given that three 1,000-foot-plus towers have been approved for the former World Trade Center site, I think the Woolworth Building will be overwhelmed anyway. And from the renderings, 99 Church Street — with its slender profile and subtle massing — could improve the ground zero towers by placing them in a sensible sequence with the Woolworth Building.
A worrisome thing about the present boom is that at least twice before in New York did flurries of super-tall buildings run smack into colossal economic meltdowns — think of the crash of 1929 and the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s. But the histories of cities are full of surprises. Who just a few years ago had not ceded the tall-building sweepstakes to Hong Kong, Dubai, or Kuala Lumpur? Who just a few years ago didn't think that New Yorkers just weren't interested anymore? Well, apparently we are.