Visions of Hell’s Kitchen
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.

Hell’s Kitchen was renamed in 1959, but Clinton didn’t really stick. Clearly these are no names for the utopia that some of our most committed urbanists have started to envisage on the Far West Side. At a time when nothing has yet been decided upon, the 60 square blocks of real estate between Ninth Avenue and the Hudson, from 30th Street to 40th, have become a massive field of dreams through which the fancy is free to roam. Change is coming, but no one can say what form it will take. And so, for the moment, it remains a conceptual tabula rasa, an empty canvas to be spangled and doused with all the glitter-paint you please. And so, for the moment, money is no object and gravity itself might as well not exist.
“Anon, out of the earth a fabric huge / Rose like an exhalation,” Milton writes, describing the architecture of a very different Hell. “Not Babilon / Nor great Alcairo such magnificence / Equalled in all their glories, to inshrine / Belus or Serapis their gods!”
I thought of those mighty lines when I read an article in the latest issue of City Journal. The magazine’s editor, Myron Magnet, commissioned several architects of a classicizing bent to design skyscrapers for the Far West Side. With almost infectious enthusiasm, he conjures up visions of “columns and cornices … rustication and pilasters, urns, anthemia and pediments, with temples and colonnades high in the sky, topped by spires and finials.”
The good news, as far as Mr. Magnet is concerned, is that these ecstatic visions are not nearly as far-fetched as some might think. Whenever our municipality establishes stylistic guidelines for building complexes, it seems invariably to opt for classicist contextualism, of the sort that has inspired large new projects in Harlem, in Battery Park City and, best of all, in Trump Place, with 18 buildings overlooking the Hudson (and the West Side Highway) in the 60s.
But Mr. Magnet’s dream, as rendered by the seven architects he has called on (Robert Adam, Franck Lohsen McCrery, Peter Pennoyer, Richard Sammons, John Simpson Thomas Gordon Smith, and Alexander Stoddart), is really the shadow of a dream. He is less interested in classicism than in what another architect who has worked prolifically in this vein, Frank Williams, calls “New Yorkism.” By this he means the alchemical conjunction of classicism and mass and hard-nosed practicality that went into making the prewar Manhattan skyline, most visibly in the Financial District, with all its granite facades and zigguratted setbacks.
As for the glass-and-steel boxes that followed them, Mr. Magnet sees something anti-American – or worse – in their industrial efficiency. “There is a hint of something not just anti-humanist but antihuman, … a whiff of totalitarianism.”
The problem, for Mr. Magnet, is that the style he prefers – essentially that of Postmodern classicism – was much in fashion in the 1980s,but is now decidedly out of fashion among bien pensant architects. When municipal New York starts “paying attention” to matters of design, it tends to err on the side of either hackneyed mainstream modernism or fairly brainless, albeit “cutting edge” Deconstructivism. In the case of the WTC, queerly, it manages to do both in the same building of the Freedom Tower, by grafting the drab corporate aesthetic of David Childs onto the hysterical experimentalism of Daniel Libeskind, in such a way that each of these vices subverts, even as it accentuates, the other.
Fortunately, I have a hunch that the architectural community will sit this one out on the far West Side, as all their righteous zeal is expended on Lower Manhattan. That bodes well for the rest of us, I think, and Mr. Magnet may get his anthemia after all.
A very different vision for Hell’s Kitchen animates the Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute at Baruch College. Their approach to transforming the area begins with the observation (which seems quite obvious now that they have made it) that the Javits Center cuts off access to the Hudson from 34th Street to 40th. This state of affairs is likely to become even worse if the center is extended south or if the Jets Stadium is built as planned.
The bold proposal of the Newman Institute is to flip the (new) Javits Center on its side so that it extends from the river to Ninth Avenue from 30th to 34th Street, thus creating the nation’s largest convention center. Best of all, the street grid would be restored where it has now been plugged, from 30th to 40th, creating a series of magnificent prospects stretching down the side-streets from Midtown all the way to the Hudson. The plan goes on to envisage a Jets Stadium, though in a different location from the one now being discussed, as well as a park along the Hudson. The convention center itself would be a campus of buildings – as opposed to the dispiriting and undifferentiated mass of the present Javits Center – and would restore the through streets on 31st and 33rd.
The great merit of this proposal, of course, is that it entirely opens up a part of Manhattan, from Midtown to the Hudson, which, as far as I know, has never been open, certainly not in living memory. There is something imperious in the way the municipality decided to close off access to the river along that crucial stretch of the West Side. I am re minded of the way that most of the inhabitants of medieval London and Paris never actually saw the Thames or the Seine. The houses of the wealthy lined the riverfront, thus denying access, and even the bridges – like the Ponte Vecchio today – were sclerotic with buildings that denied all but the most fleeting glimpse of water.
If you reflect on the matter, it has been the quiet work of the past generation to re-orientate the city from the inner parts of Manhattan back toward the watery periphery that was so essential to our commerce and our sense of self right up until the middle of the last century. It is hard to state with exactitude the practical benefits of opening up streets and providing access to water. But humans, as currently constituted, seem to like that sort of thing, and the plan set forth by the Newman Institute holds out the promise of revolutionizing the way we see and use the far West Side. Their plan would transform it from a dead zone into a destination, and at that point the practical consequences would be manifest and incalculable.