Yet More Ulgy NYC Buildings

Mercifully, we've reached the bottom of my Barrel of Ugly...  Above left, on Greenpoint Ave. in Greenpoint, a building so cursed that I'm certain the current renovation (including removal of the inviting metal "come in and get stabbed" nightclub entrance) will fail to improve its looks.  Above right, proof that the clueless use of details to spice up a hopeless design always amplifies the failure: (Top) French sailor shirt stripes and black refrigerator-bin balconies glued on a generic condo-pile on St. Marks Place, (Bottom) what look like blue tape stripes buzz on bright orange brick at the north end of Battery Park City.


Above l-r: (1) the largest and most infantile entry here, south of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, (2) the backside of the Bowery Hotel, showing off its dumpy HVAC "bell tower," (3) the screaming plastic SVA Theatre on 23rd St.


Above l-r: (1) NYU suburban civic center schmaltz across from Washington Sq. Park, (2) concave balconies make a grim condo fortress look even worse on Meserole St. in Williamsburg, (3) the roof tumor known as the Blue Moon Hotel, on Orchard St. off Delancey.

Below left, at Lexington & 27th St., a giant dirty air filter.  Below right, a mishmash progression of styles culminating in the "luxury box" top right, on Essex St.


[Earlier: More Ugly NYC Buildings]

More Ugly NYC Buildings

More proof that Ugly never sleeps in this city, and that scale has no moderating effect on it (these are all large buildings).  Above, at 6th Ave. & 25th St., a two-toned brown monster with boxy tan outlines near its base.

I'd like to think that the outlines were a conscious effort on the part of the architect -- that they were intended, through sheer ugliness, to distract the eye from the massive heap above -- but the more I look at ugly buildings the more obvious it becomes that they're conceived (just like humans) in the most thoughtless, optimistic and irresponsible (drunken) state possible.


Above l-r: (1) inspired by bathroom furniture?, at 11th Ave. & 24th St., (2) an enormous tan dirty-plastic toy at 5th Ave. & 40th St., (3) another brown two-toned crime against vision from 9th Ave. & 40th St. (that looks a lot better in the aerial still from The Bourne Ultimatum, right).


Above l-r: (1) a massive insult to fluted columns at 3rd Ave. & 86th St., (2) proof that bolting a bunch of used parts together still gets you Frankenstein, on 49th St. off 10th Ave., (3) a dirty bee of a building that would fit right in across the freeway from an oil refinery, at Park Ave. & 54th St.

And finally, below, several examples of the "brick pile" style favored by budget hotels and developers who'd build with garbage-insulated cardboard panels if they could get away with it.


Above l-r: (1) the Holiday Inn on Nassau St. at Maiden Ln., (2) on 39th St. off 8th Ave., (3) on 29th St. off 6th Ave., (4) on 31st St. off 6th Ave.  Below l-r: (1 & 2) three brick piles from 6th Ave. & 28th St., (3) a "corner pile" at 6th Ave. & 18th St., (4) an orange pile with graffiti accents at 2nd Ave. & 61st St.


[Earlier: More Ugly NYC Buildings]

Architectural Hardware

A few cases where functional hardware is a design element.  An obvious one, above, is the pint sized chemical plant on top of the Penn Station LIRR entrance on 34th St.  Left, an apparently permanent crane (like a windshield wiper) at 18th St. & 7th Ave.

Below left, on Allen St. near Rivington, ventilation pipes for the place next door -- so its exhaust doesn't foul the cheesy stallion medallion on the new hulk?  Below right, on 23rd St. off 3rd Ave., some proudly exposed pipe.


Below left, a headband of small HVAC units above Lexington Ave. in the upper 20s; below right, one big HVAC perched like a tiny head on a robot at Purves & Jackson in Long Island City.


And below, one of my favorite pieces of hardware headgear -- at once functional, futuristic, and vaguely fascist -- on Warehouse 11 in Williamsburg.

More New Nice-y (NYC)

Clouds pass over 11th Ave. & 28th St.  Sadly, the wide open space of "Hudson Yards," just north, is destined to be more of the same we've seen for the past decade, a massive antiseptic hive for all the corporate drones drawn to wi-fi / bike lane / luxury service industry NYC, now pronounced "nice-y."  It's sad to see a city once worthy of dreams, of stories that sought meaning, happily succumb to a living death where the narrative is under corporate control, and meaning just equals money.



I guess it's good I've been in brain-dead economic survival mode for months now, without time to fret over the fate of the world, much less this easily seduced city.  I am turning into a drone, and by the time my transformation is complete, the city's will be too, and we'll all live happily ever after in a massive iPhone Puppet Show -- tracked and guided by caring corporate voices through the aisles of life, friction and worry free -- free at last of the need to decide which way the story goes, free at last of the burden of meaning.

If I Ruled NYC

The signs suggest NYC "loves it hard," and I'd be happy to oblige.  If I ruled New York City:

Cellphones would explode at the "event horizon" of my presence, forming a ring of fire 80 feet across.

If only!  Unfortunately I have not developed super powers to match my super desires, so I have to be more realistic:

Bankers would spontaneously combust and make an unearthly shrieking sound, like a burning witch, as they melt into puddles along the sidewalk.

Again, sadly, I'm hoping too high on the hog, because the childhood warning "liar liar pants on fire" has turned out to be nothing but empty words, words that only affect people with a conscience -- a laughable weapon in these times, like a gun that shoots best wishes.  So I have to be even more realistic:

Drivers would be required to have microscopic horns implanted in their ears before they could use their horn or car alarm, so that using them would unleash a skull cracking, eye exploding assault that would cripple the driver and leave them with a never-ending ringing in their ears, as if they were wearing a Gothic church bell hat, even as deafness set in and their sanity drooled out their ears.

Hmm... Still too hopeful.  Drivers are sitting in their escape vehicle, so it would be hard to round them up for the implants without assaulting their vehicle, which would probably destroy it and leave massive piles of wreckage all over the city, causing even more honking and alarm.  I guess I'm just going to have to settle for something pathetically mediocre and hardly worth doing:

Flatbed trucks with catapults would patrol the streets 24/7, flinging cinder blocks at luxury developments until they're all reduced to rubble.  Then crews would pour compost over the rubble and plant flowers.  The flowers would attract bees, their honey would attract bears, and the bears would kill any new developers who threaten their idyllic hill of rubble, flowers and bees.

And if, God forbid, even that turns out to be asking too much, maybe I'll just order the Sanitation Department to stop trucking garbage out to fill every hoot 'n holler in the country, and start flinging it over the fence of hole-in-the-ground developments, like the one in Williamsburg below.

One Madison Pencil Dick

Angled building photos, like the one to the left, of 105 Madison Ave., seem perfectly natural to me.

Frontal shots -- like the one just below, where Madison runs into 23rd St. at the base of that tall, skinny condo -- are fine if they're not too closed-in or artificial.

I don't know if this one looks artificial because of the composition or because The Pencil Dick* makes everything at its feet look like a plastic Toy Town.

At any rate, it turns out that The Pencil Dick is one of those rare buildings it makes sense to look at sideways, as it is below.


* Developers invent neighborhood names to market them to plastic people, so damned if I'll help them out and use the names they give their luxury towers.  To me, the new Gehry tower is "the Gehry tower," not "The Spruce Goose" or whatever they've changed it to now.  "The Trump SoHo" is the "Trump Is Such a Whore" building.

And the skinny luxury tower featured here (my runner-up superfinger long ago) is not "One Madison," or whatever it was before it went bankrupt, it's "The Pencil Dick."

When I think of the slick, arrogant Wall Street types who move into these towers to celebrate their financially engineered potency, I'm reminded of a TV wrestler who mocked his steroid-pumped opponents as "two-bit pencil-neck freaks," all beefed up to mask the little weasel inside.

So sure, they can afford to live in a towering phallic symbol, but... it's a pencil dick!

I'll Poison Their View

An ugly condo just went up dead-center in the one patch of sky I could see out my window, with a penthouse patio where residents can lounge and booze it up while they watch me like buzzards.

So I bought some middle-finger and "tavern angel" candles (right & below) for the window, and a dozen of the creepy Little Joseph candles above (by Maxim Velcovsky), to ring the room like heads on stakes in "Heart of Darkness."

I'll light the candles at dusk, then sit inside the flickering ring in my favorite pair of ventilated underwear, with a three foot submarine sandwich draped across my bulging oiled belly, flanked by huge beer steins placed on the heads of the pair of life-sized plaster hyenas that flank my living room lawn chair.

I will sit there every evening, munching my sandwich and drinking beer while I watch TV, looking like the bloated and deranged lovechild of Marlon Brando, Colonel Kurtz, and Homer Simpson.

The bastards poisoned my view, so I'm going to do the same to theirs -- they'll be disgusted to look at me, but they won't be able to look away!

It will be like their eyeballs fell out of their heads and down a well, and now bob on the surface of the water staring straight up, with nothing to look at but me and my hyenas enjoying ourselves in the festive ring of fire -- eating, drinking, and laughing our heads off all night long!!

Globe Slicers

Above, globe slicers on Bowery -- oops, I mean below.  Or maybe both, since the slick, ostentatious Sperone Westwater Gallery (above left) arrived to help the New Museum (above right) blaze the Luxury Trail down Bowery and connect the Soho luxury mall to the coming LES luxury mall.

Sharpening slicers, mixers and grinders across Bowery from Sperone
Yes, seeing high-end art outposts preen on the Bowery, clueless as slumming debutantes (or clueless as the Vogue India editor who had "colorful" people at the bottom model luxury goods for people at the top, like she was dressing up monkeys) still pisses me off.

Sure, the top end of the art world has been a luxury industry since the Pharaohs, but it's galling to see supposedly sensitive art types help erase every trace of the Bowery with buildings and institutions that would fit in just fine with the luxury flagship stores up at 5th and 57th, or on the ground floors of any new luxury tower in NYC.

I don't care how many Salvation Army bunk beds Sperone can fit into the massive red elevator it flaunts on the street like a Rolls Royce hood ornament.  I don't care what the New Museum shows, serving an already spoiled clientele a few feet away from a rescue mission that's likely destined to become a $1000 a night flophouse-themed boutique hotel sometime soon, for people who can afford to enjoy the warm glow radiated by misery and erased history, along the event horizon where places go "poof" as they're sucked into the stainless black hole of Luxury.

And further down Bowery, below, evil Anthony Hopkins looks happy as hell, no doubt imagining carrying out the rite the ad promises on the inhabitants of the new condos on Kenmare behind him.