The End of a City I Loved

Part 1

March was the month when the cracks in New York City showed all at once.

There was the much-commented-on publication of this Citizens Budget Commission 2023 survey, interpreted to mean that only half of all New Yorkers planned to remain in the city in the coming years. The same survey pointed to a widespread dissatisfaction with most quotidian quality of life barometers: schools, safety, public services, not even mentioning the urban jungle’s increasingly unaffordable simple, bare necessities. The survey's release was shortly followed by more murders on the subways, generating more safety hysteria, usually from public officials who have tied their electoral fate to perceptions about crime.

The greatly reduced and mostly dormant New York Times' metro desk was even roused to some halfway solid reporting on the city's public mental health crisis. The New York Review of Books— though not especially known for localism—got in on the act and published a piece on high rents.

It's true there have been days recently when the city seethes with aggression bordering on mass psychosis. (And this despite or because of the bud and blossom-filled incipient spring, the time a friend likes to call "the week of white flowers.") On the subways, even non-phenotypically crazy people were muttering aloud about the regular delays and overcrowding, about other people listening to music without headphones, and the police officers now stationed at every subway stop. "Fuck the Police!" one guy said, loud, jerking his head, as he passed a trio of cops on the West 4th Street platform.

A peaceful, confident city does not require its populace to be placed under armed guard; a restive city that feels itself on the skids looks at these mostly neutral cop faces—now of all genders and colors—studies their midriffs weighted down with guns, tasers, zip ties, radios, and body armor, and girds itself for confrontation.

We’re seeing more masks underground, again. Rather than warding off contagion, they now seem to be used as much to give people a way to make themselves disappear. Eye contact is minimal. A certain type of more well-off person, the remnant straphanging middle class, handles the subways by operating in a cloud of total disregard: earbuds, sunglasses, maybe also a mask. One of these, a well-dressed woman, entered the car in front of me the other day and stopped just inside the doors. There was plenty of room behind her as well as to the side, no obvious nuisances, even a few empty seats. Her eyes focused on some vague point over my shoulder. She didn't answer to "excuse me." I pushed past.

The very wealthy have grander ways of becoming invisible, paid access to a parallel city of private clubs, private transportation, private equity. Compared to them, American Psycho's Patrick Bateman seems like a solid community board member. At least he speaks to homeless people. But what I have started to think of—somewhat vaguely, somewhat grandiosely—as "the privatization of reality" is not only an aspect of the current New York malaise, but a long-term enduring trend. It goes back to what many New Yorkers are now starting to romanticize as the golden years of the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations, those heady early days of widespread gentrification and falling crime rates. The seeds of our current crisis were all planted by choices made then.

I wasn’t part of the survey, but the place where I most keenly feel the violence and inhospitableness of this new urban era is in the buildings. Every age produces the architecture it deserves, and 21st century New York City has no shortage of metonymic monstrosities to choose from: Hudson Yards, the "Eye of Sauron" tower in downtown Brooklyn, the shoddy "safe deposit boxes in the sky" that have defaced the once iconic Midtown Manhattan Skyline, the walling off of the North Brooklyn waterfront (which I've written about in the past). I would even include the seemingly tasteful yet spectacularly vapid and behaviorally policed High Line. Pick pretty much any of these and you can produce a cultural history of decades of dumbed-down development and blinkered greed.

This is not a story of “decline,” nor am I pining for a mythical golden age, but each of these structures tells a story about choices that were made when other and most-likely better outcomes were possible. New York City isn’t “dead,” but many potential New Yorks have been killed off and are being killed off daily by callow generations of elites and dubiously credentialed urbanist "enthusiasts" whose imagination of what a city should be were fed by "Sex and the City" and "Friends" instead of "Good Times," "Taxi," or "Seinfeld."

The building that really broke my New Yorker's heart, however, is the recently completed "John A. Paulson Center," named for the hedge fund manager who shorted subprime mortgage-backed securities and helped collapse the economy back in 2008. It was designed by the local Philadelphia firm Kieran Timberlake, who made their name in the 1990s (I deduce that they watched “Friends” on Thursday nights) with some semi-famous woodsy, glassy, tricksy houses—full of conceits that made sure you knew someone had authored them—and advanced in the usual way to gloomy museums and thrifty collegiate halls.

Outfitted with some $1.2 billion, courtesy of “The Big Short,” Kieran Timberlake have now birthed New York University's new gymnasium, dormitory and office complex, a 700,000 square-square-foot black steel and black-mirror glass megalith that stretches the length of the west side of Mercer Street, from Houston up to Bleecker. Armored with unnecessary cantilevers and pointy little bay windows that resemble medieval tower defenses, the thing—it looks like a server farm or a Borg outpost—casts an uncanny penumbra of jagged shadows and piercing beams of reflected sunlight and heat over what had long been a restful block just off the bustle of nearby Broadway.

The building isn’t just run-of-the-mill bad in itself, it’s bad with dark genius in a way that damages not just the neighborhood around it, but also, as we’ll see, desecrates one of New York's truly great remaining pieces of humane modernism.

Back in 2007, when the center was first proposed, it was only one part of NYU's plan to demolish most of four city blocks of central Greenwich village and replace them with very big boxes. In a way, it might have been better if they had got away with that, since the compromise—only the old two story gymnasium would be demolished and all NYU's ambitions would be shoved into this one volume—concentrates NYU’s recent architectural negligence, even malevolence, into one singular superblock.

The old gym building marked for this sacrifice was an innocuous beige brick. It didn't need to call attention to itself, and was even endearing, sited several additional feet from the sidewalk in a way that made that particular corner of Mercer and Bleecker feel both roomier and cozier than your average city block. A regular person could breathe there, even if they weren’t allowed to go inside. Mostly I remembered the quaint purple-painted jogging track, some batting cages and tennis courts on the roof, open to the elements. I used to watch students run in circles and hit balls off tees from a friend's apartment.

That friend is a professor at NYU who emigrated from the Soviet Union as a teenager, learned English at 16, and now teaches philosophy. His apartment, awarded by sheer luck of the draw, before he even got tenure, happens to be on the 15th floor of the southernmost of three towers—designed by I.M. Pei in collaboration with his partner James Ingo Freed—that occupy the rest of the plot—from Mercer to LaGuardia Place, and from Houston street to Bleecker.

Commissioned by the university and built in 1965 during what now seems like a golden age of responsible "private public partnership," two of the towers were set aside for NYU faculty, the third, occupying the western side—between Wooster Street and Laguardia Place—served as affordable housing for neighborhood residents whose tenements were demolished or compromised in the construction, and remains such to this day.

Set back from the street to let both street and tower breathe, the towers were positioned around a central grassy and cobblestoned courtyard with a monumental edition in ferroconcrete of a late Picasso maquette of the usual woman’s head, rising a couple stories high at the center, a jet-age obelisk.

It wasn't just that the towers were graceful, simple buildings in themselves, whitish concrete ascending atop shaded colonnades, but Pei and Freed had succeeded where the original, problematic visionary of “towers in gardens”, Le Corbusier, had failed: by refining the proportions of the towers from ponderous slabs down to fin-like rectangular spires, and adjusting their scale toward the human—and toward the density and complexity of Greenwich Village. It was a kind of public housing project done beautifully in an era of horrendous public housing done not just on the cheap but with active malice—behind the fig leaf of a Corbusier precedent. Pei's towers endured as a kind of shaming rebuke to anyone who might think that public housing high rises were doomed to fail because of their own internal contradictions. Also a reubke to those who’d forgotten about the vitalness of the commons, and what happens to a society when they’re pillaged.

That commons includes the neighborhood, the streetscape, and also the natural elements. Pei and Freed had designed each of their towers to hide behind the others, so as to leave as much sky open as possible and not loom quite so much over the low-lying Greenwich village. This had been accomplished by arranging them in a pinwheel. Their exact positioning was determined by trying to make it seem, when you were walking or driving along Houston Street, that there were only two towers, that a third would always be behind the two that you could see. Before CGI, this had been done with scaled models, balsa-wood and glue, to get the perspectival effects. Cleverness deployed in the cause of modesty.

I used to spend a lot of time at my friend's place taking in the views facing east from the bedrooms over the rooftops of the lower east side, and then more panoramically to the south and west down the remaining length of Manhattan, with a hint of chemtrail orange sunsets over New Jersey. Sky, like air and water, is one of those basic goods that New Yorkers have learned to covet, restrict, and commodify: "And the best part is you didn't have to kill anyone to get it," my friend's mother, born under Stalin, told him when she first visited. That was the promised land they'd set out for, not having to kill anyone.

Normally, I liked to approach the Pei towers from the west, taking the steps up from LaGuardia Place in the middle of the block, and arriving at a concrete flagstone plaza between two community gardens, dotted by benches with rounded corners and planters where I'd pause and let the city move around me.

Continuing along the path, I'd come to the cobbles of Wooster Street, which cut through the complex but was closed to traffic except for necessary deliveries. Here, facing the central courtyard, came my favorite part: a low concrete wall of no apparent use except to demarcate the boundary of the courtyard square and a little stretch of lawn on the Bleecker Street side. This was an urban, modernist version of a pastoral stone wall that worked a modest magic of making the whole square feel more spacious than it really was, another tiny stroke of modest genius, like the pinwheel design. And where we have become used to hostile architecture, the wall was kind: wide enough to lie down on and take in the sun.

It’s a wall that does all the opposite things of what a wall does: it’s a place to be open and it makes its enclosure bigger instead of smaller. My friend and I would lunch there often and wander into long conversations about metaphysics, ethics, and literature, but it had been many years since we’d done so. He was in Berlin a lot now; I was in Brooklyn. So it wasn’t until I arrived at our old lunch spot recently that I felt something was off. The light was wrong, the courtyard felt as if it had been shrunk. It was almost oppressive.

That was when I looked up and saw how the new black steel and dark glass office tower of the gym complex had confiscated everyone’s share of the sunrise, both in the eastern and southern towers. The entirety of the new structure dominated in this way and displayed a callous disregard for human flourishing. Cold LED lights blazed in the windows even during the bright daylight of a clear day. So fully did it refuse any conversation or play with the spaces and buildings around it that it seemed to wear a mask.

This is hardly the worst of human atrocities...but something about its stupidity and carelessness felt gratuitously wounding. Not architecture, it was an act of hostility against civilization in its root sense—the habits of cities. Or it announced the triumph of a new civilization: thrusting, dismissive, cruel—Sure these types of buildings have been cropping up all over and we have grown used to forms of hostile architecture meant to keep non-paying customers from loafing or otherwise feeling at ease. Mostly these are in midtown and along the waterfronts of Queens and Brooklyn and the far West Side. But that sort of thing could be rationalized as the products of the real-estate developer class: men like Trump and Stephen Ross and whoever hides behind Vornado Realty Trust. From them one could expect only the cynicism of "everything shall be monetized." This, on the other hand, was a betrayal at the heart of what should have been a civic space.

Looking at the building, I felt like I was watching a crime committed against the city by the university that bears its name, and against every resident of that city. But the cruelest and most proximate betrayal was against those very people—the faculty—who made the university what it was, who were supposed to instill in their students a love of knowledge and truth and beauty and a desire for the good; or at the very least instruct them in how tall buildings in a small urban space can be made to feel as natural and majestic as a sheltering stand of Redwoods. How a city might become something better than it was.

The worst feeling was the knowledge—always latent in these moments, but it burst out of me: the building could not be unbuilt. A bad book can be thrown away, a bad film will stream forever unwatched, but a bad piece of billion dollar non-architecture will endure well past whatever expiration date of the civilization that made it. This is what being on the “wrong side” of history feels like. A possible future had ended, and a much worse one had arrived.

It was also like watching the murder of a beloved friend. But unlike a murder, which could happen only once and would leave a psychic stain after the blood had been washed from the streets and the police tape taken down, this crime scene was perpetual and recurring in every moment, and it would go unpunished.

To add to my cycling emotions of rage, pain, and powerlessness, there came a note of self-contempt: I understood a time would come, maybe quite soon, when I would walk past this new hideousness and—without exactly ignoring it, without exactly accepting it—realize I'd become accustomed to its presence. Accustomed to the murder of a friend!

This was already happening when I returned to the scene of the crime to take photos for this little essay. I completed my old walk—west to east. And where I'd stopped dead in my tracks before, now I went along the winding path from the concrete wall toward the corner of Bleecker and Mercer. I noted half-heartedly that they'd tried to keep the old setback from the corner but had put up a barricade of CityBike stalls where a walker used to have the freedom to cut a diagonal path against the grid. I looked into one of the lobbies, a cross between an auto dealer's showroom, an office park, an airport lounge. My autopsy was nearly complete. From certain angles, the photos even made it look okay, or look like something that was part of a streetscape.

I'll put one here for you:

You can say it's not that bad. Even though it pushes up against the Eastern Pei tower, it seems to be trying to harmonize with it. The rippling reflections of the buildings across the street, at this light and this time of day, almost make you feel like the Paulson Center's purpose is to act as a giant, vertical reflecting pool, an expensive bathroom medicine cabinet with a mirror. That impression wouldn't be wholly wrong: For all of the mismatched, “casual,” stacked box aesthetic and all those fake hatchways that look like open windows but aren't, the Paulson Center is mostly just a flat, two-dimensional building, in the way that MFA workshops speak of "flat" characters. It's like a person with no inner life. It confuses mirroring with openness.

Which brings us back to the idea of a university and the idea of a city that the building betrays. Both the city and the university, in different ways, were supposed to have been dedicated—at least in the modern era—to cultivating and sustaining people's various and multifaceted inwardness. This is done for its own sake, but also, to better allow us to practice a public-facing outwardness that does not lead us to shove our fellow human beings in front of onrushing subway trains, or freeze into apathy in the face of others’ suffering, or refuse to countenance expressions of inwardness different from our own.

A civilization that creates only flat surfaces and screens and calls it—as the architects of the Paulson Center do with Orwellian doublespeak—“an eclectic mix of spaces designed to encourage connections and community engagement” has forgotten how both individuals and cities thrive. As a vision of both city and world it has little to recommend it, and probably can’t last much longer. It doesn’t matter how many police are on the subway platforms.