Piecework

Stillness, in fact, is probably the only condition that will allow the city’s beauty to reveal itself. You can’t experience it from the window of a careening taxi, or rushing from subway to office. Time must be taken, imagination engaged. I’m convinced that one of this city’s greatest architects was a Brooklynite named Ernest Flagg, who died in 1947 at age 90. He designed the old Mills hotel, on Bleecker Street (the Village Gate is on the ground floor), St. Luke’s Hospital, and the Flagg Court housing complex, in Bay Ridge. He had a long, productive career, living in a house of his own design at 109 East 40th Street and on an estate on Staten Island.

Today, he is almost completely forgotten — except for two masterpieces. One is the “little” Singer building, at 561 Broadway, near Prince Street, complete with wrought-iron railings, its façade sheathed in orange and blue terra-cotta. The other is the Scribner bookstore, at 597 Fifth Avenue. His greatest masterpiece, however, is gone. This was the Singer tower, at 149 Broadway, a Beaux-Arts extravaganza full of decoration and briefly the tallest building in the world when it went up in 1908. I used to visit there when I worked downtown at the old New York Post; the building was a romantic affront to all the reigning dogmas of the Bauhaus. I loved it. Then it fell into the hands of United States Steel and was, of course, demolished.

And yet the eclectic, imperialist confidence of that old building made it part of New York in a way that many newer buildings will never be. Sometimes I go downtown to look at the “little” Singer building (now the Paul Building), which is a more handsome example of Flagg’s work than the tower, and I wonder what New York would be like today if his vision (and those of his contemporaries) had prevailed, instead of the bullying blankness of the International Style. Certainly this would be a more visually interesting city. Flagg’s buildings have detail, ornament, proportion, and, most important, surprise. The eye can move from floor to roof of the Singer/Paul building and be at once assured by the proportions and surprised by the decoration. Are Flagg’s buildings functional? I don’t really know; I’ve never worked in one of them. But if the function of a bookstore is to sell books, then the Scribner shop is certainly functional; I can never enter that store without buying a book.

The great triumph of the International Style gave us an architecture of planes, textures, proportions, devoid of ornament. Form must follow function, we were told, over and over and over again. Conveniently, this message coincided with the desire of real-estate men to get maximum bang for the buck. Ornament, stonework, detail cost money; get rid of them, create an aesthetic that makes such cost cutting appear to be a form of modernism, and the result could be an instant fortune. In schools of art and architecture after World War II, an entire generation was instructed to bow before the creations of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. Today, I’m convinced that the entire movement was a gigantic mistake. No wonder that the graffiti artist gazes at the dull, blank, almost totalitarian surfaces of the International Style and begins to decorate. His decorations may be ugly, acts of vandalism, but the urge to impose a human presence can be understood.

I realize that I’m speaking here for unfashionable values. Yes, I can look at the Seagram Building and realize what Mies was driving at. On rainy days, I can enjoy the atrium of the Ford Foundation, and I’ve even spent some pleasant hours among the lavish Vegas-isms of the Trump Tower. But nobody can tell me that the latest version of Madison Square Garden is an improvement on the old Penn Station any more than I can be convinced that the mucky color and primitive draftsmanship of Willem de Kooning are an improvement over, say, John Singer Sargent. The new is different, but it isn’t better; to say it is, given the evidence, is preposterous. Less is rarely more. Less is more often merely less.

Forgive the arrogance, but I believe that most New Yorkers share those sentiments. One reason we live here, instead of Los Angeles or Phoenix or Houston, is that the past is intricately involved in our lives. Like some residents of New Orleans or San Francisco, among American cities, we feel personally damaged when a hunk of the past is removed. We don’t like change. We want the places we loved when we were growing up to be there for our children. Yes, everything changes; this is one reason nostalgia corrodes so many New Yorkers and always has. The anonymous author of the 1866 guide to New York called New York as It Is begins his book with these words: