Apple Store Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree
The spanking new Apple retail outlet on West 14th Street, at the intersection of Ninth and Hudson, occupies the eastern third of what was formerly known as the Western Beef Building — a landmarked, yet fairly undistinguished, three-story affair of tan brick, reddish brick accents, and insistently mullioned windows. The place has been entirely gutted and transformed by Cook + Fox Architects, the firm that has designed the soon to be completed Bank of America Building that overlooks Bryant Park. The result is one of the largest Apple Stores in the country, and the largest of the three in Manhattan. (There is talk of a fourth opening in Brooklyn.)
The architectural circumstances of this latest project prohibited the energetically imaginative use of space that was required by the spatial oddities of the Apple flagship site, at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue. Clearly, there was no possibility of anything like the spectacular two-story cube that rises in isolation from a granite plaza, nor of a sprawling, one-level store entirely submerged below grade.
Instead we get three largely uniform stories, the first having substantially higher ceilings than the others. There is nevertheless considerable similarity in the conception of both stores, which, if the truth be told, are as uniform as any number of McDonald's or Burger King outlets. Apple's fortunes are founded, in no small part, upon design, but it must be their design, rather than that of anyone else — in this case, an outside architectural firm. Shiny uniformity is the secret to the aesthetic, and their newest store suggests the hierophantic, antiseptic visual chastity that characterizes their Macs and iPods.
And so it is that here, as in the uptown store, all three levels consist of loft spaces punctuated only by long, simple, wooden tables flowing north to south and a series of steel-gray pillars in the center of each space. That same gray dominates the site, thanks to the smoothed slate floors. The only other dominant hue is the white of the wares and of the walls, where they are not enlivened by flat-screen displays.
The one flourish that this austere store vouchsafes itself is a powerful spiralling stairway at the entrance that forms a perfectly cylindrical silo of light. A similar structure occurs on 59th Street, and even has an elevator rising in the center that is "really neat," to invoke the favorite words of the chairman of Microsoft. In compensation, the 14th Street version is entirely visible and exposed, so that the full glory of its glass turret is prominently on view.
By this point in the evolution of Lower Manhattan, the resurrection of the meatpacking district, which would have been unimaginable merely a generation back, is old news. But if, to take a page from our structuralist brethren, the Meatpacking District is conceived as a text, what new meaning is generated by the insertion into it of this gleaming new purveyor of elegant and expensive commodities? At the most elementary level, Apple's arrival indicates a good degree of confidence that the large amounts of glass along the façade — and in the staircase that spirals up the three stories of the entrance — will not be smashed to bits, which would have been a fairly likely outcome only a few years ago. Let it be said in passing that, despite the gritty name of the place, there is probably a higher percentage of herbivorous salad-and-tofu eaters in this tiny parcel of the city than in almost any other, and most of them are armed with nothing more lethal than irony.
But then, one wonders, why is this store in the Meatpacking District in the first place, since it is not a place to which people would ordinarily flock to purchase or repair their computers, and since there are very few residents in this part of Manhattan? Like the people who flood through its doors in order to see and be seen, the Apple Store is best understood as a three-dimensional billboard, every bit as immaterial in its way as the real Apple billboard that sits on the roof of the building, a thoroughly superfluous inclusion intended, one supposes, to allude to the Meatpacking District's gritty, populist, and now vanished past.
The Apple corporation has long understood the power of marketing its wares to the upwardly mobile, of suggesting that they incarnate anti-establishment cool, and of asserting that those who are not part of their orbit are somehow drab and reactionary. That, in few words, is the entire ethos of the new Meatpacking District, which is why, as improbable as this might seem on paper, it and the new Apple outlet are a perfect match.
jgardner@nysun.com
