Walking along the eastern edge of Yorkville, I am reminded of Faulkner’s comment that the past is never dead; it is not even past. Though few areas of Manhattan have more efficiently pulverized the material evidence of its past, the spirit of the Second Avenue El malingers here like a toxic trace, engendering monstrosities several generations after its removal.

Which is to say that the El, which went up in the 1880s and was dismantled as part of the war effort in 1942, is ultimately responsible for the latest crop of poor architectural product that has arisen or is arising not only along the avenue it once dominated, but also along First Avenue. For it was the misfortune of First and Second avenues that, because of the cheapening, coarsening influence of the El, they became, even before the Great Depression, one of the most blighted sections of the city.

Because the El came down almost exactly at the moment when cheap housing was most needed, Second Avenue was the natural place for developers to turn to. Where once the El train had blighted the neighborhood with endless darkness and unceasing riot, there arose a crude mass of high-rises quite irredeemable in their ugliness. Even Third Avenue, whose El came down in 1941, can boast such relative embellishments as SOM’s Manhattan House, or such recent marks of gentrification as the Siena and Robert Stern’s Hampton Court.

In fact, all things considered, Third Avenue has much improved over the past decade. But on Second and First it is a different story. With only one decent building along its entire length on the Upper East Side – Robert Stern’s Seville at 77th Street – the building stock is quite as insipid as it was in the 1960s and 1970s. Those were the years when, as indicated by Neil Simon’s play “The Prisoner of Second Avenue,” the place became synonymous with the concrete jungle and the middle class’s mass exodus to Westchester.

Into this illaudable context now comes a new Marriott, designed by Vijay Kale, on 92nd Street. It can fairly boast that it is the only hotel in this part of the city. That is not surprising, when you consider that this area is probably the last place most tourists would think to visit. I have it on good authority, however, that this Marriott is the closest hotel in Manhattan to LaGuardia Airport. And though it will be some months before the interior is finished, it already feels like an airport hotel away from the airport.

This 15-story slab, which will also contain the Gillen Brewer School’s special-needs preschool program on the first two floors and a medical center on the third and fourth floors, will surely look better when it is completed, but not by much. Its uniformly banal massing is disrupted only by a slight and somewhat illogical protuberance at the base, along a curtain wall that extends from the second to the fourth floor. Meanwhile, green tinted glass, though overused in recent Manhattan architecture, gives a touch of class to the gray architectural concrete infill that drably frames the building.

This modicum of redemption is emphatically absent in its neighbor to the west, the River East, at 410 East 92nd, designed by SLCE Architects. Though this 33-story high-rise by the same developer, Madison Equities, will doubtless function effectively as a residence, with admirable views, a health club, and a swimming pool, it is a banal, copper-colored shaft that does nothing whatever for the neighborhood.

I would also question the desirability of glazing it in brown-tinted glass – as if any sane person would want less light rather than more, and it were somehow an embellishment to see the world edged with dusk even on the brightest day. There is, I believe, a tackiness to this brown glass very much in keeping with the genius loci, as men used to call it, the presiding spirit of First and Second Avenues: a sense of gracelessness never more pronounced than when, as here, a building goes through the motions of pretending to be “a cut above.”

This bizarre choice is reflected as well in another recent and nearby building, the Post Toscana, a 31-story high-rise at 389 East 89th, whose predominantly brown shaft is covered in parts by yellowing concrete boards at the base and up most of its length. The beveled edges that interrupt its rise merely communicate a sense of inconsistency. The architectural firm responsible, according to the invaluable Emporis Web site, is Ismael Leyva Architects, which has worked on several more distinguished structures, among them the Random House Tower on Broadway and 56th and Gwathmey-Segal’s new residential tower on Astor Place.

To end on a positive note, let it be said that a whiff of distinction will be found in the Electra, designed by Van J. Brody Architects. Completed in 2003, this 22-story block occupies the southwest corner of 91st and First in a solid and self-confident way. The cladding is a simple, white stone facing that somewhat resembles ashlar. Especially at the base and in the lobby, you find a quirky, personalized variation on the feeling of early Viennese modernism that makes this building standout from its context.

This architectural firm is responsible for another better-than-average building, of which I wrote several months ago, the NYU Second Street Residence is, in its subtle way, equally idiosyncratic. You have the sense in both these buildings, as you do not with any of the others discussed, that within his narrow compass the architect does indeed have an eye and a certain independence of spirit.