Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan by Phillip Lopate Read Free Book Online Page B

passionate city!” rhapsodizes Whitman. Frank O'Hara's wised-up voice tells us: “One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a radio store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.” As it happens, no subway comes into Battery Park City, and the shops of Radio Row were obliterated long ago by the World Trade Center. In fact, both quotes, meant to celebrate the ongoing spunk of New York, read like unconscious valedictions: in Whitman's case, for the bustling port whose demise led to this tame, provincial replacement, with its echoes of Baltimore Harbor; in O'Hara's, for the 1950s Manhattan street that generously threw up casual surprises—such as still exist across town, but nowhere near the suburban-mall premises of the adjacent World Financial Center.
    Battery Park City's World Financial Center consists of four homogeneousjumbo towers, thirty-four to fifty stories high, comprising 8 million square feet of office, retail, and public space. The original guidelines by Alexander Cooper for this commercial office development had called for seven or eight buildings of a more slender, classical skyscraper form, all done by different architects. However, in 1979, Olympia and York, a Toronto-based realty firm (and at that time the largest developer in North America, before it came to grief in another new-town waterfront project, London's Canary Wharf ), pledged to build the entire World Financial Center. This major financial commitment, more than anything else, allowed Battery Park City to take off. The drawback was that it also consolidated too much land under one developer, who hired a single architect for the whole project. Cesar Pelli, an international star, had evolved from bolder projects in the 1970s, such as Los Angeles's blue-whale Pacific Design Center, to a suavely discreet, late-modernist style, the architectural equivalent of Giorgio Armani. The first financial giants who signed on to the World Financial Center—Merrill-Lynch, American Express, Dow Jones, Oppenheimer & Company—demanded huge, unbroken 40,000-square-foot floors; and Pelli obliged with a design that would accommodate these widebodies, at the same time trying to minimize the beefiness by a filmy curtain-wall skin with flat little windows and maroon or dark blue squares, which suggest a child's peel-off blocks. The resulting structures are like Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons, airless yet taking up considerable room—much chunkier than the old filigreed skyline of lower Manhattan.
    As it is, the World Financial Center resembles nothing so much as an office park in Houston, like the Four-Clover Center, which Pelli also designed. It employs the same corporate campus vocabulary: a superblock; four “object” skyscrapers separated by uncomfortably large distances from each other and turning their backs to the street; a politely suburban grass slope; raised bridges between buildings to circumvent the weather; retail shops buried inside; and an overall visual monotony. Pelli has topped each of the towers with a different geometric configuration—mastaba, dome, pyramid, stepped pyramid—but essentially they are all the same building.
    The interiors follow the same pattern of discreet corporate pomp: black columns, marble floors, rotunda lobbies that quickly dead-end. It's ironic that something grandiosely self-styled “the World Financial Center”should show so few public signs of the business activity ostensibly taking place within its walls. You come to a complex with such a name expecting to see, smell, or hear evidence of “filthy lucre” passing hands; and all you are given are boutiques, bookstores, temporary art exhibits, restaurants. At the very least, it would have been nice to have a public viewing gallery overlooking one of the trading floors, such as the New York Stock Exchange offers. Compared with