Pete Hamill - Piecework

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:

“The denizens of New York are such utilitarians that they have sacrificed to the shrine of Mammon almost every relic of the olden time. The feeling of veneration for the past, so characteristic of the cities of the Old World, is lamentably deficient among the people of the New.”

The condition and the protest remain essentially the same. But it is no accident that so many of the unseen beauties of New York are survivors from the past. Most New Yorkers have their own private places. Those places most often evoke the past. For example, I sometimes enjoy visiting the traffic island in Grand Army Plaza, in Brooklyn, with its dumb modern monument to John F. Kennedy and its wonderful Bailey Fountain (all Neptunes and Tritons and memories of the Piazza Navona). I walk around the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch, with its evocations of the Etoile, in Paris, and look at the fine bas-relief of Lincoln by Thomas Eakins, and then stare up at the rest. I know that the heroic statuary at the top of this and similar monuments is essentially rhetoric; it propagates patriotic myths; it glorifies values I don’t share. And yet, I prefer looking at it to gazing at Calder or Donald Judd. I not only think about the formal values of the work, the craft, the belief in the well-made thing, but also imagine the artist’s studio, his rough hands, his friends dropping in to chat, the delivery of the great piece to its present site. I wonder who was president at the time, and what the newspapers said, and what happened to the models.

Those are, of course, impure reactions. But in some peculiar way the work that provokes them is doing what great art does: It invokes a sense of continuity with the past, joining us to the generations that came before ours, forcing an obligation to the generations that will follow. When I show my daughters Nathan Silver’s Lost New York, or the “then” and “now” photographs in various books from Dover Publications, they are angry that they’ll never have the chance to see any of those vanished places. And I’m angry because in nearly every case the building that replaced the old was inferior in style, craft, and even function to the thing removed.

If there is a lesson in those pictures of the hidden beauty of New York, it may be this: Leave things alone. Give up the idea of constant renewal, that variation on the dream of perpetual youth. Seek what is truly valuable. Embrace it. Protect it. Love it.

NEW YORK,

December 26, 1983-January 2, 1984

T his is how a life can end: It is the tail end of the lunch hour, Tuesday, March 4, and I’m in a taxi with my daughter, moving downtown on Seventh Avenue. The sky is sullen, the color of gruel. In the garment district, traffic inches along, blocked by double-parked trucks, men pushing carts, buses heaving their great bulk across lanes. Horns blare; men curse. A tractor-trailer stands across 34th Street like a wall.

This is how a life can end: The huge truck moves, and the blocked downtown traffic begins at last to move. Usually, it’s like water rushing from a burst dam. Today, the rush doesn’t happen. The lights are blinking green all the way to 23rd Street, but there is no clear passage for traffic. On every street, pedestrians are crossing the avenue, ignoring red lights, jaywalking in the center of the block. A mustached young man comes close, allows the taxi to pass within inches, performs a capeless veronica, matador of Seventh Avenue. A black man snarls angrily as if the taxi were challenging his right to jaywalk. A sockless man with a Jesus beard stands in the middle of the avenue looking at the sky. Our taxi is at the front of the knot of traffic; the driver is in his thirties, lean and dark, anxious. He is beeping his horn, riding his brake pedal.

This is how a life can end: We slow down at 31st Street as a dozen jaywalkers hurry to safety. “These people are nuts,” I say. The cab driver shakes his head: “Now you know why cab drivers go crazy.” Dark laughter. A man eating a hot dog in the middle of our lane jumps back and curses. Then up ahead, we see a dense group of people crossing against the red light at 28th Street. The taxi driver crosses 29th, still riding the brake, clearing a path with his horn. We are in the second lane from the right. Most of the jaywalkers are young, and they hurry to the safety of the corners. But there’s a second group beyond the corner, in our lane. A tractor-trailer is illegally parked at a bus stop and these people are waiting for the bus. The driver slows, still making staccato bursts with his horn.