I have made another secret discovery.

You could easily find millions of New Yorkers who have no idea that this spectacular structure at 8 Spruce Street exists or that it is the tallest residential structure in the Western Hemisphere. I would be included in that group. However, as I approached the building, I began to recall the media attention surrounding this highly applauded residential tower, formerly the Beekman Tower and currently known as New York by Gehry, designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry.

I made this secret discovery on a foggy Sunday evening while cruising lower Manhattan – one does not have to look hard to find a 76-story, 867-foot building. A foggy, stormy night is a great time for observing New York City’s skyscrapers. With their heads in the clouds, these towers provide all of the ambiance and drama of Batman’s Gotham city.

New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff called it “the finest skyscraper to rise in New York since Eero Saarinen’s CBS building went up 46 years ago.” New Yorker magazine’s Paul Goldberger described it as “one of the most beautiful towers downtown.” Goldberger compared Gehry’s tower to the nearby Woolworth Building, completed in 1913, and said that “it is the first thing built downtown since then that actually deserves to stand beside it.” These are extraordinary accolades from New York City’s premier architecture critics who are hard to please and prone to dissect and crucify. But the accolades are justified.

I circumnavigated it at nearby street level. However, I highly recommend seeing this tower from various vantage points, since one of the primary distinctions about this structure is its changing form when viewed from different perspectives. From the New York Times:

… once you see the tower in the skyline, a view that seems to lift Lower Manhattan out of its decade-long gloom. The building is particularly mesmerizing from the Brooklyn waterfront, where it’s possible to make out one of the deep setbacks that give the building its reassuringly old-fashioned feel. In daylight the furrowed surfaces of the facades look as if they’ve been etched by rivulets of water, an effect that is all the more dramatic next to the clunky 1980s glass towers just to the south. Closer up, from City Hall Park, the same ripples look softer, like crumpled fabric.

The building’s exterior is made up of 10,500 individual steel panels, almost all of them different shapes, so that as you move around it, its shape is constantly changing. And by using the same kind of computer modeling that he used for his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, more than a decade ago, he was able to achieve this quality at a close to negligible increase in cost.
But Mr. Gehry is also making a statement. The building’s endlessly shifting surfaces are an attack against the kind of corporate standardization so evident in the buildings to the south and the conformity that it embodied.

‘Tis a sight to behold 🙂

Other buildings and skyscrapers: New York Rockies, I’ve Got a Feeling, Where Sleeping Giants Lie,  All of These Pleasures, Color of Money, Trump Soho, Beacon of Hope, Towers, Pan Am Building, Crisis at Citicorp, Hearst Tower, Trumped Again, Time Warner Center

The territory north of 14th Street truly is a world apart. There is much behind the downtown mantra, I never go north of 14th Street. There is a stoic pride and conviction that virtually anything one needs can be found downtown and it is not far from the truth.

I cannot speak for other downtown residents, but I go north for specific purposes and so infrequently that going uptown is like a small vacation. I literally feel like a tourist. I walk a neighborhood, often craning my neck and standing in wonderment at the massive stone, steel and glass edifices built on the island’s bedrock of Manhattan schist.

The advent of the Internet had greatly facilitated price shopping for most products and services, including New York City hotels. Since that time, my family has been able to snag deals at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, which has become their residence of choice when visiting the city. I enjoy traveling and visiting the hotel during their occasional stays.

Next door to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel is the General Electric Building. The building is sometimes referred to as 570 Lexington Avenue to avoid confusion with the GE Building built later at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The 50-story, 640 foot Art Deco masterpiece was designed in 1931 by John W. Cross of Cross and Cross. Unable to lease the building profitably, in 1993, GE donated the building to Columbia University, gaining a $40 million tax deduction. Find more on the building here.

The base contains elaborate masonry, figural sculpture. On the corner above the main entrance, a conspicuous corner clock with the curvy GE logo and a pair of silver disembodied forearms. On August 25, 2006, I featured the lobby of the building – you can see it here.
Christopher Gray of the New York Times describes the building as a “suave fantasy of polished marble and modern metals.”

Its signature crown of lacy radio-wave figures is a well-known midtown landmark, but the decoration of the lower floors is just as startling. Here a shrouded mechanistic figure huddles in a modernistic cloister, there an armored fist grabs an electric bolt. The entire facade is of a lightly variegated orange brick, which plays to St. Bartholomew’s Church next to it on the Park Avenue corner.
See my photos of the church here.

When I visit the area, I am never able to resist stepping into Mr. K’s restaurant, an upscale Chinese establishment located at 570 Lex. The plush banquette seating, the lush art deco interior, soft lighting all seem so befitting of the building it is in. For a little vacation, I just take the 6 train. Uptown.

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