Big Book for a Big City

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Simply put, Robert A. M. Stern’s “New York 2000,” together with its four preceding volumes, represents the fullest and finest historical account of any city ever attempted. In all, these volumes constitute more than 5,000 full-sized pages and more than 10 million words, consecrated to the architectural and urban development of New York from the aftermath of the Civil War to the present day.

For Mr. Stern, an internationally renowned architect, and for his several co-authors (Jacob Tilove and David Fishman in the latest volume), the secret to success is that there is no secret at all. You look in vain for any trace of parti pris, any causes to promote, or scores to settle. Instead the authors start at Battery Park, make their way uptown, and then to the outer boroughs, describing in a fluent and co-ordinated narrative each noteworthy building they encounter, so long as it falls within the chronological constraints of their respective volume. More than just a gazetteer of individual buildings, however, the book begins its discussion of each of the city’s districts with a magisterially detailed and insightful inquiry into the larger historical context of that part of the city, before it proceeds to the specific projects.

The evolution of Mr. Stern’s magnum opus on New York was no more straightforward than that of the city it covers. It began in 1983 with “New York 1900.”Representing the most thorough single-volume treatment of Gotham architecture between 1895 and World War I, it was nevertheless a far humbler and smaller undertaking than the volumes that followed. After that came “New York 1930,” which covered Gotham architecture between the wars. Almost double the size of its predecessor, its sheer mass represented a leap into a categorically higher level of urban historiography. But it was only with the next volume,”New York 1960,”which covered the history of the five boroughs from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s, that the authors hit upon the formula that would guide all subsequent volumes: a staggering and oceanic immensity that puts before you, with an anatomist’s minuteness and an astronomer’s wide-angle view, the entire architectural record of this great city. The success and the cultural consequence of that volume were such that the authors went back to write “New York 1880″and forward to write this latest volume (Monacelli, 1,520 pages, $100), which takes us up to 2006.

Now most general histories of New York, or of any other city, have traditionally limited themselves to the biggest and flashiest monuments and to the broadest outlines of urban development. In those narratives, dull buildings that are not attributable to a major architect or a major historical circumstance, become invisible. They are not part of history: They evaporate into their functionality and are never quite seen. The genius of Mr. Stern’s project is to understand that every building is interesting, if not architecturally, then surely historically.

Consider how this book treats the Upper West Side, an example I choose arbitrarily. Most books on contemporary New York would limit their discussion to the new Time Warner Center and the Rose Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History. Both of these are surely included in the current volume. Indeed, the former has its own chapter, more than 30 large pages, with more than 40 illustrations, treating in detail the contentious genesis of the design, the finished project inside and out, the competition for the revamping of the fountain in Columbus Circle, the collateral issues of 2 Columbus Circle, and the refacing of the Gulf & Western Building. But as it moves up the West Side, the book’s sweeping purview includes not only Lincoln Center, Columbia University, and Trump Place, but also the smaller, less conspicuous projects that really define the urban fabric of our city: Apartment houses like Costas Kondylis’s 279 Central Park West and Frank Williams’s Alexandria on Broadway and 72nd Street; public institutions like the Jewish Community Center at 334 Amsterdam Ave. and Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School on West 93rd Street, and various urban renewal projects around 100th Street.

In their concentration of less “iconic” buildings, these five volumes represent more than an education: They represent a revolution in the way readers perceive and even inhabit a city. Each artifact of the urban landscape, from the humblest row house to the tallest skyscraper, from the design of streetlamps to the width of road-beds, seems to have been zapped with the lifeforce of intentionality. In a city, everything, for better or worse, is there for a reason. Everything represents a conscious and deliberate decision and coalesces, with 20 million other details, into a unified and legible, if not entirely systematic, totality. That is the unspoken “idée mere” that is enshrined in this latest volume, as well as in its four predecessors.

Put into practice, this approach to cities will be experienced by New Yorkers as a series of shocks of recognition. Just sifting through almost 2,000 illustrations (most in full color) the reader is apt to be jolted by the sight of hundreds of fixtures of his daily life that he had imagined to be almost acts of God, structures of no importance, that were simply “there.” In addition to such major architectural monuments of the past 30 years as Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building and the new Museum of Modern Art, these less visible projects are illustrated with lavish citations from contemporary critical, journalistic, and cultural commentary.

Let it be said that this latest volume departs from its four predecessors in the way the authors have allowed themselves on occasion a not unwelcome trace of sarcasm that was not there before: In a subchapter on critics, for example, the authors quote at generous length from a parody written in the style of Herbert Muschamp, formerly the architecture critic of the New York Times. They conclude by noting that “No one could parody Muschamp better than the critic himself, even if he did so inadvertently.”

The one glaring and obvious omission from this volume is ground zero and the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site, whose earlier incarnation was so ably discussed in “New York 1960.” Clearly the authors found the CREDIT subject too fluid, too massive, and too proximate to be undertaken at this time. Indeed, they make almost no mention of September 11, 2001, and its aftermath, except for a brief epilogue in the last three paragraphs of their narrative. Beside a nocturnal image of two beams of light rising above the skyline of Lower Manhattan, they write that “After the attack on the Trade Center, the grieving city stumbled, but soon enough began to rebuild itself and move on. That story of the city’s rebirth is for others to tell.”

One hopes they will change their minds and revisit the subject in “New York 2030.”

jgardner@nysun.com


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