The Last Gasp of the Upper East Side
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.

There are many bad buildings in Manhattan, but most are cynically unexceptional. What partially redeems the latter, in the eyes of those who write about them, is that they are manifestations of an urban process that is invariably more interesting than they are. That, unfortunately, is the best that can be said for 96th Street as it stretches from Central Park to the East River. How, one wonders, has it turned out so much worse than 72nd, 79th, and 86th, the Upper East Side’s other major cross-streets?
Whereas East 72nd and 79th streets are models of residential gentility, especially west of Lexington Avenue, East 86th and 96th Streets are far less inviting places. But even 86th Street is redeemed by the mesmerizing vitality of its incessant movement. From the park halfway to Lexington, it is almost as elegant as its two cousins to the south. Things start to unravel as you approach Lexington, and once you hit the avenue itself, all hell breaks loose as the street-line fractures into a thousand mid-market clothing stores and electronics outlets, and one purveyor of papaya juice.
On 96th Street, that vitality is missing, as is the refined building stock that lends a somnolent charm to 72nd Street. There is only one truly interesting structure on this primarily residential street: the huge and rather beautiful mosque and minaret of the Islamic Cultural Center, completed in 1996 according to designs by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Facing Mecca, it is sited at an angle to the north ern side of 96th Street, and provides a welcome disruption of its monotony.
As has often been remarked, the change that occurs between 96th and 97th streets is perhaps the most abrupt in the entire city. One repre sents the northernmost edge of the fabled Upper East Side, while the other is the southern boundary of Spanish Harlem. The latter, with its bodegas, row houses, and street life, has a certain run-down enchantment. By contrast, most of the building stock on 96th consists of crude highrises from the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s that don’t aspire to anything more than the most basic adequacy.
Part of the reason for this is due to 96th Street’s proximity to Spanish Harlem. And let us not forget that 96th Street is the point where the submerged tracks leading out of Grand Central station suddenly hit daylight. When most of the buildings you now see were being erected in the 1970s and ’80s, developers hoped that by building up they could soar far above the grime and gracelessness of an essentially undesirable neighborhood. As so often happens, bad buildings engendered more bad buildings so that each subsequent generation begat high-rises as tasteless as its own.
For years, the eastern half of 96th Street between Second and Third Avenues lay fallow.Thus it is a relief to see that a new building has been topped out on the site and is now approaching completion. One Carnegie Hill, as it is pleased to call itself, is a 42-story hulk of a building, whose red-brick cladding is very inadequately inflected with an asymmetrical outcropping of curtainwalls to the south and west. This is the work of HLW International, a large and somewhat anonymous firm that collaborated with Cesar Pelli on Brooklyn’s new Federal Courthouse. The firm has also worked with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill on the Random House Tower in Midtown and is responsible for the moderately accomplished Harborside Plaza 10 in Jersey City, not to mention the headquarters for the Chamber of Commerce in Kuwait City.
As long as 96th Street remains within sight of Central Park, it can never forget that it is part of the Upper East Side; indeed, it is the district’s last gasp. That explains the slightly more ambitious and interesting 21 E. 96th Street, which has just begun to command the northwest corner of Madison Avenue. This is the work of H. Thomas O’Hara, a fairly prolific local architect who works primarily in the idiom of Postmodern Contextualism. He has collaborated with Michael Graves on the rather awful Impala on First Avenue and 76th Street, as well as on 425 Fifth Avenue. Somewhat better are two contiguous buildings in SoHo, 19-35 and 55 W. Houston Street, which imitate, respectively, the cast-iron and factory aesthetics of that part of the city.
Here on 96th Street, Mr. O’Hara has designed a 13-story brick-class building whose Anglophile limestone trim and base invoke the aristocratic vocabulary of Christopher Wren’s Hampton Court. (This aesthetic, several years back, also inspired Robert Stern’s much larger building, the Chatham on Third Avenue and 65th Street.) The detailing and the windows are rectilinear throughout, except for the penthouse, which is adorned with three arches. Along the avenue itself, the facade is a little too busy, almost chaotic, especially with its pointlessly recessed middle bay. But the facade on 96th Street is calmer and more dignified, such that it forms an adornment to one of the crucial corners of Manhattan.
It is not nearly enough to redeem the rest of East 96th Street, though. In fact, I doubt that can ever be accomplished. The high-rises have gone up and they are not coming down any time soon.And there is not much room left to build anything better than what we see today. The best we can hope for is that, through partial rezoning, more commercial space will be allowed on the ground floors of these buildings. The result, surely, will never be beautiful, but it may one day achieve the allure that accrues to anything that is not quite dead.