Warm Water Hudson

In case you're already sick of winter, some springtime shots across the Hudson to Jersey City.


And as a bonus, upstream from the two-fer-tecture below, another set of Jersey twins.

New Bloomberg City

Like wide screen TV, but $1000 a month to maintain
I think it's time we quit fooling ourselves, and rename NYC New Bloomberg City, or NBC.

Rinse off the stench of
wealth at ABC Home

The city's transformation is nearly complete, as Bloomberg Preferred Citizens^TM -- bankers, developers, and other people with Wall Street incomes, and the drones who furnish them with the regular and stainless amenities formerly found only in upscale suburbs -- have firmly taken control and, like arrogant weeds, are sucking up all the air that used to allow for the cultural and economic breadth and depth that made this huge village special.

Today's reminder that we live in two worlds: People who spend six figures on aquariums for their $16.9 million apartment as an alternative to a big screen TV.  Watching the bright, swirling trails of captive fish soothes the owner, and lets them imagine they are rinsing the filthiness off their wealth, transforming it to beauty and meaning.

Spend to Transcend ^TM*

I suspect that washing off filth via home furnishings and improvement is what a lot of people with too much money do.

From the window displays at ABC Home (above and right), where Spending is Transcending ^TM, to Jean Nouvel's "Vision" luxury tower in Chelsea, that had the normally egalitarian critic Nicolai Ouroussoff enthusing over interior details, as if the city is enhanced -- not by what anyone can see from the outside and the way a building meets the sidewalk but -- by imagining we were invited into one of those luxury apartments to enjoy the precious details and the way they express the owners' sensitive and complicated relationship to wealth.

And now, as usual, the rest of us are left to watch the Elect, those who gave their souls to Mammon, live the high life in their pretty fish tanks strung like pearls along the High Line, and let the enjoyment trickle down on our imaginations.

[ Previously: A Tale of Two Economies ]

* This ABC Home display, though up during Black History month, always made me think of a home makeover by the Manson Family.

The Ugliest Buildings in NYC

Several Top 10 Ugly lists have been plucked from the American Institute of Architects' most recent "Guide to New York."  (By, among others, Curbed and Gallerina.)

Well, I don't have to refer to any stinking guides.  Though I avoid posting straightforward photos of ugly buildings -- why spread suffering? -- I've picked the ugliest from photos here (7 for now*, maybe more after my stomach's settled).

First up, to the left, on 6th Ave. near Vandam.  The building on the left aspires to Class on the first floor, then slumps into an Edge City Budget facade as it rises, and finally erupts in a splashy crown of sheet metal pipes combed over the bleak bald lumps on its head -- designed to suggest labor camp cottages downwind of a Hershey's factory?  From West Side Eyesores.


To the right, the Trump Soho at Varick & Spring.  It takes some doing to make a reflective building this ugly, and it's even worse close up.  The cutouts / lumps that define the building give it the look of an evil robot, and every time I look at them I think of people inside the lumps remarking "Hey!  We're inside one of those lumps!"  From 7 WTC's Clear Complexion 2.

To the left, the World Financial Center, on the Hudson west of the World Trade Center site.  This is the most flattering shot you can take of the complex.

Its surface looks like brown plastic mailing tape, and the "grand entrance" on the complex's south side should come with a warning that -- like Lot's wife leaving Sodom -- bad things will happen if you take a good look at it.  From 7 WTC's Clear Complexion 1.

To the right, on 31st St. off 5th Ave.  It's the top of this building that's ugly -- they replaced the original, ornate top with something that looks like a cinder block septic tank with windows, or a prison-issue shaved head.  It's part of a shortsighted, cheapskate trend that's stripped cornices and ornamentation off way too many old NYC buildings.

It's especially cruel since this building was the original home of Life Magazine, and the now-naked top was full of bachelor apartments that served as the magazine's "esthetic maternity ward."

To the left, the orange building on the right, which sits at 34th St. and Park Ave. South, is pretty putrid.  (Meanwhile the green Tyvek, exposed for 3 years now, makes the building it covers on the left look better.)


To the right: Almost any NYU dorm could make an Ugly list, including this one on 14th St. just west of 3rd Ave., where there are more ugly NYU dorms.

Education is big business, and ambitious self-serving colleges devour their host cities; NYU warehouses its students in hulks so thoughtless they practically spit on their surroundings.

To the left, architect Karl Fischer's heinous 20 Bayard, on McCarren Park in Williamsburg.  On the left in the picture, what must have been Karl's inspiration.

The building's empty clock face, its vaguely Transformers shape and puny robot head, the kitchen slicer & dicer entrance... It all adds up to make 20 Bayard The Ugliest Building in NYC if not the world.

Note that I have improved and used this monster a few times: 20 Bayard a la Frank Gehry; 20 Bayard a la Rick James.

* Note that when it comes to Ugly in NYC, this is just the tip of the sh*tberg.  There's an endless supply, but just a few reasons the buildings exist:

- Developers and their architects don't care how their unsightly pile of crap affects others -- they would put up a 5 story used cardboard box if they could get away with it.  This is where crapitecture [Queens Crap] and the Budget Hotel Look comes from, and it likely accounts for 90% of the ugly buildings in NYC.

- They may care a little, but they are inept.  Humble or arrogant, with their student architect cousin or a million dollar "starchitect," the developer is blind to the difference between wearing an ugly shirt once in a while and planting a massive, ugly building that poisons its surroundings for decades.

Gateway to Tourist Hell

Speaking of hell, summertime 8th Ave. above 42nd St. always seems like the gateway to tourist hell, with hot, humid exhaust blowing up 8th from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, a cluster of Soviet-scale package-tour hotels, and crowds of sweaty tourists lining up for tour buses or staggering out of nearby Times Square, blinded and wrung out from their journey to the Heart of Blandness and its scorching, Burger King-scented emptiness.

Greeting them here on 8th near 47th, left-to-right in the photo below right, and in the other photos: a tour company Statue of Liberty lost in a faded orange theater front (formerly Hollywood Twin Cinemas); a lonely porn holdout; a bar full of sharks in suits from nearby office towers; and on the right -- warping the photo below right, if not spacetime -- the Ismael Leyva designed winner of my Superfinger award.


The Leyva finger seeks to blend into the neighborhood at its base, above right, but still comes off like a plastic dominatrix.  And the rest of it, below, still looks like a place built by aliens to slice & dice humans, not house them.


[ Welcome to Hell ]
[ In Search of Superfinger ]

Welcome to Hell

I mean Welcome to Summer in NYC.  Above, the flag at Apex Tech on 19th St. at 6th Ave. signals defeat, brittle as a mummy.


Above left, on Delancey, the Bedbug Express Van heads for the Hamptons again.  Above right, phone lines are sacrificed to the sweaty buzzards that circle above Provost in Greenpoint.

Below, at the Court Square subway station in Long Island City, the crew puts out the battle-tested communications equipment, in case the high tech stuff wilts in the heat.


And below, on the West Side Highway in Chelsea, maybe the way Frank Gehry's building "meets" the sidewalk like a cheap windshield makes sense.  It seals out the heat along with the humans, and is consistent with what the building as a whole suggests: a plastic iceberg, proud to be likely the last iceberg on earth.

7 WTC's Clear Complexion 2

Above, 7 WTC from the Manhattan Bridge on a foggy day.

Left, from 6th Ave. in the Village, a 7 WTC wannabe (the "Trump Soho") that proves a reflective surface cannot redeem crappy design.  Note how the charcoal cutout up top helps suggest an overlord gazing down on his realm.  And note 7 WTC in the distance to its left.

Below left, 7 WTC from the Williamsburg Bridge.  Below right, from Trinity Place, across the Twin Towers site.


Both below are from near City Hall Park to the east.


And finally, the shot below is from a ways up the West Side Highway.


[ 7 WTC's Clear Complexion 1 ]

7 WTC's Clear Complexion 1

The surface and detail of a building can affect viewers in the same visceral way size and shape do.  So even a huge box like the World Trade Center's 7 WTC, above, can avoid crushing its surroundings if it has a good complexion.

Of course a reflective surface that mirrors the sky and other buildings makes that easier (and if too many buildings were reflective the city would turn into a giant light-amplifying death ray) but 7's surface is not just reflective -- it has a translucent depth that embodies the thought put into it.


An example of a thoughtless, ugly surface is right across the West Side Highway, at the World Financial Center (WFC), just above and below left.  Its surface looks like brown plastic mailing tape, and the "grand entrance" on the complex's south side, above right, should come with a warning that -- like Lot's wife leaving Sodom -- bad things will happen if you take a good look at it.  You will turn into plastic.

The WFC towers look best when light hits them at the angle below left, but still worse than the most clichéd shot of 7 WTC, below right.


Even 7 WTC's corrugated chrome looks good, below.  Note the speeding pigeons near the bottom left.


[ 7 WTC's Clear Complexion 2 ]
[ The See-Through Skyscraper, City Room ]

Cooper Union Cooper Square

Cooper Square is a hotbed of controversy, from the new Cooper Union building above and below left, to the Cooper Square Hotel in the remaining photos.

The NY Times' Nicolai Ouroussoff mainly admires the Cooper Union building, for its boldness and the way it wears its construction material on its sleeve.  The Times ran some excellent photos with the article, but I like the one I took yesterday, above, that captures the armored, war elephant essence of the building.


The Cooper Square Hotel wears its decadence on its sleeve.  I'd wondered what it would be like for the crotchety hold-out owners of the two old buildings at its base -- with cavorting jet setters and cocaine music thumping till dawn a few feet above -- until I figured out that they've been absorbed into the hotel.  Note the space-age awning that skewers out the side of the old building, below.

I've had mixed feelings about both buildings all along.  I agree with Ouroussoff that (thoughtfully) bold design is good, and I make a distinction between buildings built for schools and those built for Masters of the Universe.  With my weakness for spectacle, I've enjoyed watching the Union building's construction, especially the scythe-like shapes captured above left.  And I like the crumpled parts of its veil of steel.  But I miss the view of the beautifully colored buildings behind (east of) it, and from the east the Union building doesn't pretend to care -- I've seen more consideration in proposed garbage barn designs.


And though I see the hotel as a bookend to the New Museum further down Bowery -- anchoring the conversion of yet another distinctive swath of NYC into something (Bloomberg and) the yacht club set can enjoy -- I admire its fetishistic finish and space-age look, and the honesty of its arrogance.  Where Donald Trump's erections hide amid the skyscraper grass of Midtown, the Cooper Square lords over the puny East Village like a mammoth alien sexual appliance shot from space -- Battlestar Dildactica? -- a monument to the penile enhancing power of unapologetic greed, and decadence that is an end in itself.

[ Rome Burns at Cooper Sq. Hotel, Jeremiah's VNY ]
[ Civic Value of a Bold Statement, Nicolai Ouroussoff, NY Times ]

Scrutiny on the Bowery

The Bowery Goes To Hell
Nothing represents gentrification of the Bowery like the New Museum.

I finally visited a few weeks ago, and just noticed that an upcoming show will let you watch drugged young women sleep, as in the photo, left.  [via C-Monster; photo Henrike Schulte]

I'll leave you to figure out how close this idea can get to creepy without crossing the line.  I'm sure that, being under the control of art professionals, no harm will come to the volunteers -- beyond the YouTube video evidence of their nightmares, blurted confessions, and other nocturnal emissions.  And if you're squeamish about being part of a formal exercise, I'm sure you can still find drugged people sleeping nearby, outside the museum, for free.  But that's not art.

When I visited the museum, right, nothing struck me so much as how hard it tries to convey that "contemporary art museum" atmosphere, like the Guggenheim, where the art can seem secondary to what it really sells: a chance to share the world weary attitude borne of having too much money on too small a planet, and skipping from one exclusive island of wealth to another, each different but basically the same.  From the ticket lines to the luxury condo view on top, to the work of Elizabeth Peyton, who specializes in paintings of jaded pretty people -- everything's tuned to exude that empty, shiny atmosphere.

So yeah, I liked the New Museum better before it got rich and moved to the Bowery.

People who tout the architecture of the building -- like those who admire the luxury condo tower Blue, nearby on the Lower East Side -- not only ignore the context, but the purpose of these buildings.  The purpose of Blue is to house very rich people; it basks in the glow of history while it helps erase it.

And the purpose of the big new New Museum?  I didn't really sense one, beyond the desire for a higher profile, though I'd guess it fits right in with Blue and the luxury condo boom, and is helping turn another unique corner of New York into just another bland island in the global archipelago of wealth.

Bari's across the street, and a standout at the museum, its stairwell

In Search of Superfinger

The Finger Building was born in Williamsburg, but they exist wherever developers seek to lord over the existing skyline and poke the eye of God with luxury condos.

Manhattan has a few new ones you can't help but notice, even though it's already chock full'o fingers.  (And even though its fingers must feel totally emasculated by the vertical pipe being laid in Dubai, like the Burjfinger.  [via C-Monster])

I've been looking at One Madison Park, above right, for months and -- forgetting for a moment that it's destined to house a few hundred people so rancidly rich (min. $7.5 mil. move-in) that they expect to have a self-cleaning chrome toilet in the park across the street -- I like what I see.  If you're going to build 60 stories, skinny is a good way to go.  (I take that back if it winds up looking as crappy as the rendering, right.)

But I have to give my Superfinger Award to the relatively puny 42 floor Ismael Leyva design at 785 8th Ave., top left, left, and below, for being the scariest finger in town, like a malevolent alien spaceship, a gargantuan Gillette razor, or the creepy condo tower in the Sharon Stone bomb Sliver.  And especially for looking like a dark, futuristic illustration, even in real life -- I haven't doctored the photos here at all.