The MTA’s Imposing Achievements

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

A strange structure is throwing its weight around West 54th Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues. Something medieval about its massiveness suggests the fortified keep of a castle or, better still, the Aurelian Wall in Rome. At certain times of the day, though, it has been known to assume the dour aspect of a quiescent dinosaur.


Go in there, if you happen to be in the neighborhood, and ask the guard what building this is. He will look you over several times, assess the situation, and then inform you that he is not at liberty to say. If you are lucky, someone in a less official capacity who has overheard will take you aside and allow that this is part of the MTA, but he will say nothing more.


At that point, if you put two and two together and have the patience to pursue the matter online, you will learn that here, for the first time, you are looking at a “centralized control center” for the entire New York City subway system.


“We shape our buildings,” Churchill once said, “and then our buildings shape us.” If the inmates of the building seem surly, it is tempting to believe that something of the architecture itself has rubbed off on them. If ever a building scowled, if ever it sought to belittle, intimidate, and overawe the hapless pedestrian, this is it.


What is even stranger, though, it that this is one of the better-looking, or at least more imaginative, buildings to rise in Manhattan in the past few years. A thin solitary ribbon of window, running the length of this broad, flat building, appears to be crushed between the anvil of its red-brick base and the hammer of its more prominent upper stories, clad in an uncertain material of gunmetal gray.


This section, like the brick base, is striated with horizontal lines that also run the length of the building and that recall the garb that convicts wore in former years. Meanwhile, the roof has a thin catwalk that looks for all the world as though it should be manned by a swat team.


Who dreamed up this building? And why, when so much mediocrity is built in Manhattan by preening developers without an ounce of taste, should this structure, whose entire point is to deflect attention, have turned out to be as prepossessing as it is? On neither account, despite my calls to the MTA press department, was I able to learn anything worth knowing.


Yet the mystery deepens. For some of the better Manhattan construction over the past year has been the architecture of infrastructure. And, in a context in which we must make the most of every grace-note we have, it is remarkable that despite the much talked-about interest in architecture that is newly abroad in the land, so few people have been paying attention.


Take, for example, the new facing on the Battery Parking Garage, a massive hunk of infrastructure at the base of Manhattan Island, under the jurisdiction of the Triborough Bridge Tunnel Authority. In the history of architecture, it is unlikely that custom-extruded aluminum louvers, set into a continuous grille system, have ever looked quite as dapper as this. So much so that one is apt to feel a little disappointed to learn that they have been pressed into the service of what is nothing more than a glorified six story garage.


As it is, infrastructure types tend to be a fairly sober-sided bunch, and the main benefit of this snazzy design, as enunciated on an official Web site, is the heady prospect of “sight-screening and static ventilation.” But that in no way minimizes the drama of this irregularly shaped greenish building, which is attached to a dreary, Moses-era structure of tawny brick that constitutes the hell mouth of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. The architect of this project, heretofore unknown to me, goes by the name of Urbitran Associates Inc., and specializes in such infrastructural work.


Another example of fine infrastructure is the new bus depot on Lexington and 100th Street. For this project the Pernini Corp. – better known (to those who have heard of it at all) for its casinos in upstate New York and its oil derricks in Iraq – has created a mighty attractive building, as bus depots go. This massive, four-square, four-story box occupies an entire city block, from Lexington all the way to Park. Clad in red brick, it still seems very light, thanks to a huge curtain wall of mullioned glassed along the facade, as well as the tasteful use, once again, of glass brick along the sides.


This project was greeted with understandable dismay when first announced a few years back. I can remember seeing it go up, and though I did not know its intended function, initially I found it auspicious that such an important structure would be built in a generally less affluent neighborhood. I was surprised, then, to learn that it was to be nothing more than a bus depot.


Bus depots do absolutely nothing for the neighborhoods in which they are placed. For that reason they tend to go up in neighborhoods that are vaguely seen as marginal or unimportant – one reason so many of the locals were dismayed by its arrival. Far better use, surely, could have been made of this block of real estate, whose invitation to gentrification in the past few years has been dealt a setback by the new depot.


Yet, though this will surely be small comfort to the locals, the depot looks about as good as anyone could possibly have hoped. And perhaps we should not be surprised by the high level of design attained by some of our least imaginative magistracies. The Port Authority tapped Santiago Calatrava for its new transit hub at Ground Zero, and that structure bids fair to be the most beautiful thing in Lower Manhattan.


The New York Sun

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