Eulogy for the East River Waterfront

A few days ago I posted on the forthcoming exhibition, Preservation on the Edge, at the Urban Center in New York. As an accompaniment to that exhibition, this Tuesday, June 27, the Municipal Art Society is presenting A Eulogy to the East River's Industrial Waterfront. Various excellent speakers, including the Municipal Art Society's Frank Sanchis and historian Jeffrey Kroessler, will "eulogize" six buildings that have either recently disappeared or are in imminent danger of disappearing. Yours truly will present historical background on the six buildings. The event lasts from 6:30 to 8:30 and there will be wine. (That's what usually tips me toward attending an event.)

The buildings are: the Sohmer Piano factory in Astoria, Queens (endangered); the Long Island City Power Plant in Long Island City (altered); the Greenpoint Terminal Market ("mysteriously" immolated) in Greenpoint, Brooklyn; Cass Gilbert's Austin, Nichols warehouse (not gone but a goner) in Williamsburg, Brooklyn; the Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg; and the Waterside power plant in Manhattan (gone).

Cass Gilbert's "Egyptian"-style Austin, Nichols warehouse from 1913, the same year as his Woolworth Building. Its well-deserved designation as a New York City landmark was overturned by the city council. Its stretch of Williamsburg waterfront has been rezoned for high-rise residential construction.

Brooklyn's Domino Sugar Refinery, a vast complex including several 1880s Romanesque revival buildings reminding us that sugar refining was one of the principal industries that made New York great. With the plant's closing in 2004, the following year was the first year in 275 years that there was not a working sugar refinery within the present boundaries of the five boroughs.

The Waterside generating plant in Manhattan, the one that made it into Henry Hope Reed's Beaux-Arts Architecture in New York, as it looked then...

...and as it looks now.

A lot of our industrial architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, even some of what has been considered proto-"modern," was in fact designed in traditional, including classical, styles that had, dating back to Roman times, been considered apposite for utilitarian buildings. Each of these buildings was or is beautiful, and an object lesson for today's and tomorrow's architects in how to design utilitarian buildings that embody such time-honored precepts as that the eye should be allowed to come to rest naturally upon some well-proportioned formal feature, or that, indeed, proportion, overall, as defined by the ancient tenets of the Greeks and Romans, matters, no matter the purpose of the building. Each of these buildings, whatever its rugged simplicity, ennobled the heavy labor of the legions who toiled in the often noisome industries that once defined--more than did finance, or the law, or media, or advertising--New York as a great city. We eulogize these buildings for two reasons. First, each might admirably have been adaptively reused, indeed perhaps spectacularly so, yet has fallen prey to a real-estate megalomania of historic dimensions. Second, some of these buildings remind us that though contemporary classicism has succeeded in the realm of residential design, it truly will have vanquished its doubters when once again it becomes the lingua franca of the most utilitarian of urban buildings. And unless we keep the best examples--and each of these buildings is a best example--around, we won't have the study cases we may one day need if we are to succeed in the long-term mission of restoring an elemental humanity to our urban environments.

So please join us in this eulogy.

Preservation on the Edge

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.