Spotlights

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Is Metlife North the Most Interesting Building in NYC?

The MetLife North Building is situated at 11 Madison Avenue, between East 24th nd East 25th Streets. Begun in 1928 as the new headquarters of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., it was annexed to the historic MetLife Tower (completed in 1909, and modeled on the Venetian Campanile de San Marco) just next door, at the corner of East 23rd. Note the grand entryways at each of the four corners of the block, and the layers of stepbacks — quite a bit of design detail for an awkwardly proportioned, 29-story building.

It seems that the MetLife North was originally slated to be the tallest building in the world when ground was broken. Here’s a scale model of the original design (right), with 100 floors. But construction was stopped abruptly in 1933, as the Great Depression settled in and New York real estate ground to a near halt. After the war, the building was wrapped up at its current height — the tower was never built.

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Looking Backwards: the Kowloon Walled City


The WSJ has a neat documentary about Hong Kong’s late, great Kowloon Walled City, which was torn down just about 20 years ago this spring. The KWC has intrigued me ever since I saw a late-night documentary about its imminent demolition when I was about 10 years old. The KWC’s legal history is an interesting factor in how it came to be: The tiny plot of land that housed the neighborhood was a no-man’s-land of disputed territory, technically Chinese, though ungoverned by China or the Crown colony during British rule, until 1997.

The absence of a sovereign legal authority led to an almost purely laissez-faire development pattern, which, in the midst of an intensely competitive land market like Hong Kong’s, meant extreme density and a lack of both sunlight and adequate sanitation. But in addition to its infamous depravity, the KWC also spurred some incredibly resourceful activities, inexpensive shelter for a lot of people, and an intense attachment by many of its residents. Ultimately, the creativeness and mystery of KWC strike me as its most interesting elements.

What’s there today? A park.

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World Trade Center Update

Above is some video that I took of the September 11th Memorial around 5 pm yesterday. It was my first time seeing it, and also my first time walking through what used to be called Tobin Plaza, since 2001. What can be said? The architects and planners did good work. I thought the external Memorial’s effect was powerful, without being overtly depressing. I found it interesting that while the new Trade Center buildings are asymmetrical in design, the elements of the memorial Plaza — the pools, of course, but also the seating, the paving stones, the ivy beds, the lamps — are all very symmetrical, like a series of subtle echoes of the Yamasaki buildings that were lost. I don’t know yet if I’ll visit the museum, which opened this week to some, and opens soon to all.

Here are some still photos of the Plaza. The North and South Pools correspond to the footprints of the former towers, respectively:

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Spotlight: Cripple Creek, Colorado

From Wikipedia:

At an elevation of 9,494 feet (2,894 m) and just below tree line, for many years, Cripple Creek’s high valley was considered no more important than a cattle pasture. Many prospectors avoided the area after the misnamed Mount Pisgah hoax, a mini gold rush caused by salting (adding gold to worthless rock).

On the 20th of October, 1890, however, Robert Miller “Bob” Womack discovered a rich ore and the last great Colorado gold rush began. Thousands of prospectors flocked to the region, and before long W. S. Stratton located the famous Independence lode, one of the largest gold strikes in history. In three years, the population increased from five hundred to ten thousand by 1893. Although half a billion dollars’ worth of gold ore was dug from Cripple Creek, Womack himself would die, penniless, on 10th August, 1909.

For the past 16 months I’ve been researching local business regulations around the United States. In the course of the work, I talk with police chiefs and mayors, and I read a lot of municipal ordinances. Over time, it’s become a telephonic tour of America.

Cripple Creek, the seat of Teller County, is a great example of late Victorian frontier architecture and town planning. It almost became a ghost town in the 1960s, but it’s apparently made a comeback with gambling and historical tourism.

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A New Edict of Nantes, and a Trip to the High Line

Anthony Flint, writing in The Atlantic Cities, has a nice piece about sustainability — especially its environmental aspect — as a new way of branding mid-sized European cities for tourism and investment. Nantes, a mid-sized city in Brittany, has made radical changes to its transportation model and is actively pursuing an avant garde identity as the greenest city in France.

In tangentially related news (at least, on the topic of green cities), I finally had a chance to upload some photos that I took of the High Line this summer. For people who don’t know its story: the High Line began with an aging, elevated freight train trestle that runs down the West Side of Manhattan. The structure had been built by New York Central in the 1930s as a viaduct between the rail infrastructure surrounding Penn Station and the West Side Piers. It replaced Death Avenue, a surface right-of-way, dating from the 19th century, that had previously carried freight trains at street level through Chelsea and the West Village. The High Line was abandoned for most of the late 20th century, after the rise of containerized cargo caused the West Side Piers to be de-emphasized in the Port of New York and New Jersey. For years, the structure languished, overgrown with weeds and scraggly trees; there was a general consensus in the New York real estate community that it was an eyesore whose presence was a significant obstacle to redeveloping the Far West Side. Its images were used to add an element of city grit to movies and TV shows.

But a few people dissented from the crowd, noting the oasis that the High Line’s unplanned nature provided from the concrete jungle of the city. And in the late 1990s, activist planners began to study the High Line’s redevelopment potential. The dissenters turned out to be prescient, and the thoroughly landscaped and hardscaped park-in-the-sky is now a major attraction that has increased property values and created a major new green space while preserving an important part of the city’s industrial history. It is without question one of the great planning successes of the last decade. For a kid who grew up in this region during the 1980s and 90s — when the city was synonymous with too much concrete, too many steel doors, and an almost defiant hostility to nature — it’s been incredible to witness the greening of Manhattan over the last several years.

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Spotlight: Brick Church, East Orange

Here are some pics from the Brick Church neighborhood, which is situated between the Morris & Essex Line and Springdale Avenue, where Upsala College was once located. The section has a rich stock of large Queen Anne Victorians and early 20th century courtyard-style apartments. There are a lot of potential haunted houses in this neighborhood: Far too many structures have been neglected since the 1970s, when the aftermath of the Newark riots took a heavy toll on much of Essex County. For a while, East Orange had an astronomical crime rate, but it’s calmed down a little bit. And the physical beauty of the neighborhood remains: Its buildings are mostly arranged along wide streets, with parkways, deep setbacks, and hundred-year-old trees. As in other parts of Essex, gas lamps still remain on certain blocks. And, of course, the lack of telephone poles and suspended wires.

Here’s a map of the area’s street plan during its early 20th century heyday, around 1912:

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Patrick Geddes and Tel Aviv

White City, Tel Aviv. Photo: Google.

Esra Magazine has a nice piece about Sir Patrick G., and his role in planning the Israeli seaside city. Geddes had a special impact on what would become known as the White City– a coastal neighborhood with one of the world’s largest concentrations of ultramodern Bauhaus-style architecture. The combination of white concrete, modern lines, green desert brush, wide boulevards, and the blue Mediterranean make the White City a striking conceptual project in town planning. Sadly, a look around the newly released Google Streetviews of Tel Aviv shows that many of the structures in the neighborhood have not been well maintained over the years; worse, many parcels are occupied by ugly buildings that fail to realize the vision’s potential.