Astor Place's Gleaming New Face

Eight years ago, I wrote a book in which I made the following observation: "Despite a brush with celebrity in the early eighties, the East Village has largely resisted gentrification, unlike SoHo and Chelsea. No one is on the make in the East Village. The artistic movement known as the East Village Scene, which was this area's one moment in the sun a few years back, quickly fizzled out, returning the place to those eccentrics, minorities, and working class families who had inhabited the area long before the graffiti artists ever showed up."

Boy, was I wrong! Now that gentrification is rampant in the East Village, it is clear that I had failed to grasp the one essential fact of New York real estate: that its unbridled rapacity takes all before it.

You will find no more emphatic proof of this than the new building, designed by Charles Gwathmey, that has just been completed on Astor Place at the crossroads of Fourth Avenue and Lafayette Street. For decades, this place was a void, a parking lot, a blight upon the neighborhood. Then the builders moved in, and for about two years, it was a living hell: A chaos of scaffolds and a racket of jackhammers overwhelmed one's senses. And now? All is peace. A silvery building arises confidently above the freshly paved sidewalk, and the pedestrians pass by in all their wonted oblivion, as though the building had always been there, as though providence had appointed it to occupy this very place.

The resulting structure is quite good by the standards of most cities, and downright excellent by the standards of New York. A curtain wall curves around an irregularly cylindrical shaft that rises to the 16th floor, where it yields to a trapezoidal setback that is itself crowned by a curving lantern. This curvature is echoed in the diminutive lobby along Fourth Avenue. Here you find those rich spatial legatos that have long been favored by Mr. Gwathmey, to judge from such projects as the Public Library on Madison Avenue and 34th Street and the International Center of Photography on Sixth Avenue and 43rd Street.

Perhaps the best single element of this new building is a heavy metallic canopy protruding from the entrance into the street. It has drama and a sculptural presence. At the same time, the overall result would have been somewhat more satisfying if the curtain wall were a bit more sheer: There is a roughness to its surface that contravenes, or at least does nothing to help, the general tone that the architect was seeking.

Yet another testament to the change that has been visited upon this area is the fact that the entire ground floor, facing St. Mark's Place, is occupied by a branch of Chase Manhattan Bank. Imagine that! In the very heart of New York's grunge bohemia, amid the tattoo parlors, the head shops, and the purveyors of subversive comic books, a gleaming new bank has taken up residence. Bank branches, which are altogether too numerous in Gotham, may uphold the dignity of an area, but that's the most that can be said for them. Beyond that, there is a dreary safeness about them that causes us, or should cause us, to lament their having the money to commandeer the most imposing sites in the city - especially this space, one of the few that comes close to the monumentality of Haussmann's Paris.

Under the circumstances, it is some consolation that Tony Rosenthal's "Alamo," that great, pivoting cube that has occupied the triangular median just across the street for almost four decades, was reinstalled Friday after a thorough overhaul. The relation of this unusual object to the Gwathmey building to the south and the Beaux Arts subway entrance to the north makes for one of New York's more interesting urban interactions.

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I wish I could be more kindly disposed to the new academic center that Cooper Union is about to build just a stone's throw from the Gwathmey building. Unfortunately, a rather pleasant two-story Neoclassical building will soon be demolished to make way for a nine-story white rectangle, designed by Thom Mayne and his ohso-contemporary firm Morphosis.

One of his bright ideas is that the new facility will serve as a "vertical campus," full of connective spaces spanned by sky bridges. But this notion, pioneered by Kohn Pedersen Fox, was already attempted with some success two years ago at Baruch, in a building that is more interesting and elegant than this newest structure promises to be.

According to renderings, as well as a model lodged, perversely, in the very building that will be demolished to make way for the new one, Mr. Mayne conceives the exterior as a huge white presence of curtain walls whose rectangular mass is harassed by irregular facets and fissures. Somewhat pointlessly, it is adorned at ground level with a series of diagonal pylons that look too frail to support the massive structure that seems ready to come crushing down upon them. Further adornments include those razor-sharp, fin-like protuberances that can be found in a number of new buildings around the city and that have never yet shown any compelling reason to exist.

Madame de Sevigne once remarked that young people, as long as they are not positively deformed, have something attractive about them. And new buildings, as long as they are in conformity with the regnant style of the day, have some provisional interest by virtue of their contemporaneity. But once that style has passed, how paltry those buildings seem that can boast no other aesthetic value than that they were once of their day. I strongly suspect that, by the time the first students take their seats in this new building, it will already have been out of date by several years.