Friday night, around 7 p.m.: Actor Jim Dale, historian Gordon Wood, journalist Christopher Hitchens, architecture critic Paul Goldberger, and the president of the New-York Historical Society, Louise Mirrer.
Architecture critic Paul Goldberger focused on the rapid pace of change in New York Friday night at the New-York Historical Society's Chairman's Council Weekend.
Here are the highlights of his remarks, which I recorded in my reporter's notebook while covering the event:
Not long ago, in a meeting in a relatively new midtown skyscraper, I spent much more time than I should have looking out the window. I do this often, as an architecture critic, so nobody thinks I'm a daydreaming instead of working.
Two-thirds of what I saw was built after 1972. In 1972, Lever House was not yet 20 years old. Rockefeller Center was 35 years old, the Seagram Building, 14 years old, and the Empire State Building was younger than Lincoln Center is today. ... We don't realize how much history we're living through ourselves.
In 1972, New York was smaller. If you were an upper middle class white person, your city was relatively confined to south of 96th Street. Maybe you got to the Lower East Side as a historical curiosity. You were unlikely to go to Chelsea or Times Square. ...
We tend to view change in the city as something that happens in a long arc. But the New York of our time is also different from the New York of our own time. The city changes out from under us at dramatically and powerfully. Each of us has already experienced several New Yorks.
Old New York is the city of Edith Wharton, the city of John Lennon, and the city of Peter Stuyvesant. The city we lived in a short time ago, that is Old New York. There are hedge funders who weren't alive when Lennon lived in the Dakota buying new condominiums in Williamsburg.
The city of our memories is the city of the past.
So now, to put now into context. Will the change be for the better? If it changes too much, it will live, but it will be empty of meaning.
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