Missing the Boat On Columbus Circle
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.
Columbus Circle has long been one of New York’s problem children. Such an opportunity for urban grandeur! Yet such a disaster.
The architect John Barrington Bayley proposed in the 1960s that the circle be surrounded by colonnaded buildings with concave façades. Though an entirely sensible suggestion, few took it seriously. They preferred the circle to remain a great missed opportunity. Now Columbus Circle has become chic. The Time Warner Center, designed by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, was completed in 2003. It replaced the New York Coliseum, which, when Robert Moses built it in 1954, served as the city’s convention center. It was banal, distinguished only by three large medallions on its façade, each of which was designed by Paul Manship. One medallion was the seal of the City of New York, one was the seal of the State of New York, and one was the seal of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. Don’t even ask what the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority was doing at Columbus Circle.
In the 1980s, developer Mortimer Zuckerman commissioned Moshe Safdie to design Columbus Center. Critics said it was too large and would cast outsize shadows across Central Park. In addition, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s sale of the site to the highest bidder, overriding the site’s zoning, was called into question. The Municipal Art Society successfully sued to keep Columbus Center from being built. (The Manhattan Transit Authority acquired the site when the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority was merged into the MTA in the late 1960s.)
The planners for Columbus Center must have envisioned a gargantuan building since the Time Warner Center is colossal. The mixed-purpose structure dominates the circle as no building has ever done. I’m turned off by the knife-edge imagery of its architecture, but concede that, for the first time in my memory, Columbus Circle is, more or less, pedestrian friendly, and that has a lot to do with the concave street wall of the center. Its indoor shopping mall is dull, despite containing some of the city’s most expensive restaurants. The best thing about it is the view from its fourth floor.
Looking out on the circle, one sees, on the left, the previously largest building on the circle, the Trump International Hotel & Tower. Formerly the Gulf & Western Building, the hotel and apartment complex was created by Philip Johnson and Alan Ritchie. It’s still an inelegant building, if not as drop-dead ugly as it was before. To the right, 2 Columbus Circle, by Edward Durell Stone, is busily being reclad by Brad Cloepfil as the Museum of Art and Design. Stone’s building was the only one on the circle that made any attempt to relate to it in a meaningful way.
The greatest thing in the circle is the magnificent rostral column topped by a statue of Christopher Columbus. Designed by the obscure Italian sculptor Gaetano Russo, the column was dedicated in 1892. The circle’s recent redesign to afford easier access to the column is wonderful. But it’s not wonderful how the circle’s buildings have consistently failed to take their cues from this marvelous column, and in the process made a mess of the city’s finest opportunity for grandeur.
