Trying to Rescue A Sunken Plaza

Abroad in New York

By FRANCIS MORRONE
May 24, 2007

A recent informal poll among real estate developers concluded that the General Motors Building, on the east side of Fifth Avenue between 58th and 59th streets, may be the most valuable office building in the city, commanding the highest rents. From the developer's perspective, the 1968 building is a masterpiece. The critics have not been so kind.

In 1968, Ada Louise Huxtable took architect Edward Durell Stone severely to task for sheathing his building in white marble. "Behind the marble cladding and bay windows," she wrote in the New York Times, "architecture, like the proverbial thin man in the fat man's body, is signaling wildly to get out."

The building's sunken plaza came in for even harsher criticism than the white marble. Ms. Huxtable, assessing the unbuilt design in 1966, wrote, "It may come off as a funny sight gag, or a kind of sick planning joke."

In 1961 New York City had rigged its zoning code to encourage more open space by allowing developers to build extra stories in exchange for plazas. It seemed like a win-win situation. With the General Motors Building, however, the "plaza bonus" seemed like a lose-lose.

General Motors's plaza, along Fifth Avenue, was sunk below grade, ringed by shops and floored by an Astroturf-like material. Even the most carefully designed sunken plazas, such as the one at Rockefeller Center, have proved failures. There, the sunken plaza failed to lure pedestrians to underground shops and was converted to a skating rink. Yet the dream of the sunken plaza persisted. And in the case of General Motors, failed.

Say what you will about Donald Trump, he has a flair for reclaiming modernist monstrosities. He made the awful Gulf & Western Building at Columbus Circle into something palatable. And when he partnered with Conseco to buy the General Motors Building in 1998 for $878 million, the first thing he did was raise the plaza to grade. It was a smart decision. The next smart decision came from Harry Macklowe, who bought the building in 2003 for $1.4 billion. Under Mr. Macklowe, the Apple Store opened in 2006. Designed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, the glass cube rising from the G.M. plaza serves merely as the entrance to an underground store on the footprint of the old sunken plaza. The recent poll conducted by the American Institute of Architects and Harris Interactive to determine Americans' 150 favorite buildings ranked this Apple Store at number 53.

The Apple Store may not be my cup of tea, and I believe glass should be used sparingly in cities. But sometimes a glass building can play off its surroundings in a pleasing way. I am above all glad that something — anything — got built on that plaza.

The other knock on the G.M. plaza has been that it deformed the open space of Grand Army Plaza on the west side of Fifth Avenue, between 58th and 60th streets. The best urban open spaces are confined, well-defined outdoor rooms. Peripheries of buildings form such spaces' "walls." A gap in the wall of buildings causes the space to "ooze," as some planners say. Then the space becomes less cradling, or comforting, and less welcoming. Grand Army Plaza took shape in the 1910s when the Pulitzer Fountain rose before the Plaza Hotel (which reopens in October), to the west, and the Cornelius Vanderbilt mansion, to the south. In the 1920s, Bergdorf Goodman replaced the Vanderbilt house. To the north, the plaza's border consisted not of buildings but of Central Park's trees.

The 29-story Savoy-Plaza Hotel, built in 1926 and demolished in 1964 to make way for the General Motors Building, contributed crucially to Grand Army Plaza's success, because the hotel came out to the sidewalk line, and lined up with the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, across 59th Street to the north, to form a fine east wall for the plaza. Just as important, when one stood in the plaza and looked east, the stately base of the Savoy-Plaza, like that of the Sherry-Netherland, fitted sensibly and elegantly into the plane of vision. General Motors not only deformed the plaza, but deformed the view as well, by the building's undifferentiated modernist mass, lacking any reasonable place for the eye to come to rest. The Apple Store partly rectifies that shortcoming. Its scale is visually ascertainable from Grand Army Plaza. I say "partly rectifies" because one need only glance to Schultze & Weaver's finely detailed Sherry-Netherland of 1927 to see just how it really should be done.

fmorrone@nysun.com