A Landmark Nod to Bond Street

The city this week approved a northern extension of the NoHo Historic District, which was originally designated in 1999. The extension, given the nod by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, includes buildings on Bond, Great Jones, 4th, and Lafayette streets, as well as the Bowery. Included is the block of Bond, between Lafayette and the Bowery, that has lately received a great deal of attention for its new architecture, pre-eminently 40 Bond St. by 2001 Pritzker Architecture Prize winners Herzog & de Meuron of Switzerland.

Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron began their firm in 1978 in Basel. They were already widely admired in the Modernist architectural world for such works as their signal towers for Swiss National Railways and their Ricola cough-drop factory, both built during the 1990s in Switzerland. The firm became a household name in 2000 for its retrofitting of London's Bankside Power Station as the Tate Modern museum. The Pritzker came on the heels of the extraordinarily popular success of Tate Modern. Soon thereafter, New York hotelier and developer Ian Schrager signed Herzog & de Meuron together with the Pritzker winner Rem Koolhaas of Holland to design a hotel on Astor Place at Lafayette Street. That project fell through, but Mr. Schrager did finally team with Herzog & de Meuron for the condominium building at 40 Bond St., completed in 2007. The Swiss architects are also designers of the Beijing National Stadium — also known as the Bird's Nest — which is the centerpiece of the forthcoming Summer Olympics.

Directly across the street from 40 Bond stands 25 Bond, by New York's George Schieferdecker/BKSK Architects, also built in 2007. Considering this wealth of new architecture together with Tuesday's Landmarks ruling, I thought it time to revisit Bond Street between Lafayette and the Bowery.

In the 1830s, Bond Street was the epicenter of fashionable New York. Lafayette Street was then Lafayette Place and boasted some of the city's finest homes, such as the white marble La Grange Terrace, where row houses stand back behind a screen of beautiful Corinthian columns. The row, truncated and badly deteriorated, still stands on the west side of the avenue between Astor Place and 4th Street. Bond Street, too, boasted elegant town houses. At 26 Bond stands a stately Federal-style house, with intact stoop, doorway surround, lintels, and dormers, dated as circa 1829-32. A Greek Revival house at 52 Bond, from circa 1836-38, though much decayed, miraculously retains its iron stoop railings with their anthemion forms splendidly intact. But it was a short reign of fashion on Bond Street as the northern faubourgs beckoned the rich, and by the 1850s the stately houses of Bond had been converted to stores or rooming houses. By century's end, most had been replaced by loft buildings.

Today we marvel at how much artistry went into the façades of these utilitarian structures. Buchman & Deisler's 21 Bond St. (1892-93) is a six-story Romanesque Revival beauty, with gorgeous brickwork and nice terra-cotta accents. It mounts with ineluctable logic to a joyous fifth-floor arched window framed by exquisitely patterned brick.

As for the new buildings, I like 25 Bond St. by BKSK, a firm founded in 1986. The screen of Jerusalem limestone works because it doesn't look cheap. All the randomly placed piers are anchored by the high side walls of the roof, which lend a kind of Neoclassical solidity that makes all the more plain the architect's bow to buildings by Paul Philippe Cret — the first thing I thought of when I first saw 25 Bond was Cret's Federal Reserve Building of 1937 in Washington — and, of course, works by Cret's student Louis Kahn, such as Erdman Hall (1960-65) at Bryn Mawr College. I like that 25 Bond, while it's plenty glassy, presents a masonry face to the street.

Across the street, 40 Bond has an upper façade that's all glass, but about as different as can be from the many other all-glass façades put up around town in recent years. Here, green glass — likened to Coke-bottle glass — has been made into tubular shapes that form a grid, and depending on the light can look like any number of materials, from metal to inflated vinyl. It's certainly eye-catching, as is the cast aluminum screen at street level, probably the most exuberant bit of ornamentation in a Modernist building this side of Morris Lapidus. Apparently inspired by graffiti squiggles, it puts me as much in mind of patterns from some Abstract Expressionist paintings by Jackson Pollock or Mark Tobey.

I'm intrigued by these two Modernist buildings that rose in the same year on the same block — and wouldn't have gone up had the landmark designation come earlier. At the same time, neither architect, it seems to me, drew from the rich patterns abounding in the block's older buildings. As much as I love 21 Bond, I could stand to see it go — so long as I knew its lessons hadn't been lost on today's architects.