As recently as the 1950s the East River and Hudson River waterfronts of Manhattan and Brooklyn were among the busiest working waterfronts in the world. As recently as a few years ago a considerable amount of industry still took place along the rivers. This was vastly diminished from the days when New York led all the world's cities in industrial output. With the near complete disappearance of the port/industrial complex of waterfront work, New York is seeking to turn its tantalizing waterfronts to high-rise, high-end residential use and parkland. In the more than three hundred years of intensive industrial use of the waterfronts, however, it would be surprising if several buildings of distinction had not been built--buildings that are now threatened with demolition, or have been demolished. The whole business represents a crisis in landmark designation in New York, a crisis exacerbated by the city's starving the Landmarks Preservation Commission of funds, making it ever harder for the commission to act when it needs to. Recently the commission did act to designate Cass Gilbert's Austin, Nichols warehouse (.pdf), from 1913, on the waterfront of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, once one of the most intensively industrial areas in the United States. Given precedent and established standards, there was no question of the warehouse's designation-worthiness. But New York's city council voted--as it very seldom has in the past--to overturn the designation, in an act that sent chills down the spines of the city's preservation advocates. The warehouse stands on land that the city has recently rezoned to encourage massive redevelopment with luxury high-rise apartment buildings. The Cass Gilbert warehouse was in the way. The Preservation League of New York State has placed Williamsburg--all of it--on its "Seven to Save" list for 2006.
Just so, Consolidated Edison's Waterside generating plant on Manhattan's East River waterfront, at 41st Street, has been removed for yet another gargantuan residential development. New York is blessed to have several power plants of architectural distinction. This one made it into Henry Hope Reed's 1988 survey Beaux-Arts Architecture in New York. Reed wrote:
There is a passage in Geoffrey Scott's magisterial Architecture of Humanism on the role of standards in architecture. Writing on the Classical tradition, he comments that, when the standards set by great men are high, even unknown architects can do pleasing work. A good example of this is the Waterside Generating Station. We know nothing of the building's architect, yet his design commands respect.
Indeed, this power plant, with its rusticated walls, superb brickwork, and high chamfered arches, is a better building than Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's Bankside Power Station, which has been remodeled into Tate Modern, in London. New York's power plants, like London's, have been built on waterfronts. Their continued presence, under adaptive reuse, should long ago have been guaranteed by landmark designation.
These and other notable waterfront buildings that are gone or endangered form the subject of a Municipal Art Society exhibition at the Urban Center, 457 Madison Avenue, at 51st Street, in Manhattan. Preservation on the Edge: Our Threatened East River Heritage opens this Thursday, June 26 and runs through July 1. (See the Municipal Art Society's Death Notice page.)
These buildings remind us that the architects of the Beaux-Arts generation did not merely design high-profile civic buildings or plutocrats' mansions. Indeed, these architects' classical principles were applied in every area of the city, to every type of building, including public baths, model tenements, settlement houses, factories and warehouses, and, not least, power plants.
The best of the power plants is without question the former Interborough Rapid Transit Company plant, now Consolidated Edison, on Eleventh Avenue and 59th Street. Completed in 1904, it was designed by Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White.
Yes--Stanford White, at the zenith of his sybaritic lifestyle. This plant shows what classical architects are capable of in the design of utilitarian buildings. It might be pointed out that this one made it into Reed's survey as well. And, as well, it is not a designated landmark. If you're in New York, go see it.
Yes, as you say, Stanford White. Seen this elegant chapel of kilowatts during travails about Manahattan.
IIRC, the 1923 edition of Babcock & Wilcox's "Steam, Its Generation and Use" contains a fine litho of it as well.
See these architectural treasures while yet you can.
Paul Vincent Zecchino
Manasota Key, Florida
03 May, 2010
Posted by: Paul Vincent Zecchino | May 03, 2010 at 09:16 PM