Men at work

The dance of construction around the High Line

Derailed by the death of my mother and a few work projects, I took my eye off this blog for awhile, and have only now begun the process of revising a few pieces that fell out of date. First: the “What’s That Building?” guide. I’ve updated this feature to include many new buildings that have popped up around the High Line in the past couple of years, and also re-formatted it so the photos are larger. In the process of updating I removed the “glimpses of architecture” we can see in the distance — towers, spires, domes — and created a separate page that identifies them; it too is (roughly) organized from south to north. “What’s That Building?” is the most trafficked piece on the site, so I’m happy to have it back in good shape. Thanks to the readers who wrote and gently nudged me.

Writing about new buildings in my neighborhood is tricky because the presence of so much heavy construction is extremely hard on the nerves. I find myself hitting the delete key more often than usual in an effort to maintain composure and objectivity. There are several large projects on my block alone, and we must endure the noise, dirt, blocked traffic and fumes from idling vehicles all day and also (incredibly) late into the night. Developers in this town have so much power and influence that they are able to routinely get permission to work long hours; in our case, work begins at 7am and continues until 11pm, six days a week. And we are lucky; the developer (Albanese in partnership with Vornado) has been extremely responsive to complaints and requests from residents, and the crews are polite and highly focused on worker and pedestrian safety. But there’s only so much they can do. Modern construction requires gigantic machines, sky-piercing cranes, massive flatbed trucks, endless parades of cement mixers, and brutally intrusive, never-extinguished LED klieg lights that cast a creepy, bone-white glow in bedrooms across the street and down the block.

It can feel sometimes that no one cares about the actual people who live on these blocks that are being re-made all over the city. My downstairs neighbor has a small child whose bedroom window looks out on the construction project. Who cares about the late-night disruption to a toddler? Does the Mayor? The Buildings Dept.? The developer? The truck driver? Probably not; their interests are to make the city (and their pocketbooks) hum, one way or another. And so the rest of us suffer through it, doing our best to be good citizens who somehow see, and celebrate, the benefits of all this “progress.” It would be so much easier to accept if at least half of all this new construction were devoted to affordable housing. We would still suffer the long, ugly barrage of construction, but at least, at the end of it, our neighborhoods would retain the diversity that drew most of us here in the first place. But that is a subject for another post. [continue reading…]

Peter Lugar truck at J.T. Jobaggy on Washington Street

When I was a kid, back in the days when freight trains ran along the High Line, we used to trek to Brooklyn for very special occasions: a big steak at Peter Lugar’s. Until this morning, when I happened to pass by a van loading up sides of beef at the J. T. Jobaggy meatpacking plant, it never occurred to me that my special dinner had traveled down the old New York Central line on a viaduct now packed with more than 100,000 plants and even more humans.

The old dance continues, but today it all happens by truck. The Meatpacking District surely ain’t what it used to be — witness the fashionable woman strolling past the Peter Lugar van below — but the butchers are still here, continuing the work that’s been ongoing on Washington Street for more than a century. The last remnant of the meatpacking business still in place on the High Line is the series of meat hooks hanging from a conveyer belt below the Standard Hotel. That building — once the warehouse of the Manhattan Hotel Supply company, whose motto was “Fine Meats for 4 Generations” (italics included) — will surely be torn down soon and replaced with something new, but for now it stands as a fine reminder of the business that gave this neighborhood its name. [continue reading…]

These guys are swimming on land. Or, more precisely, on landfill.

Men working in the Hudson River/59th Street

And, on an unseasonably warm December day, they seemed to be enjoying themselves as they went about their business repairing giant piles that help support a roadway that’s shared (and not always so nicely) by joggers, bikers, bladers, pedestrians, baby strollers, cars and giant garbage trucks on West 59th Street. Let me illustrate this spot a bit more clearly:

West 59th Street, courtesy Google Maps

I was riding my bike downtown when I stopped to see what was going on.  After being told about the pile repair, I remarked that we humans are re-asserting our claim to this patch of “land” once occupied by the Hudson River. One of the workers replied that the Hudson River was actually the one doing the reclaiming. It was, after all, part of its watery domain before we came along and started filling in the edge of our prosperous island. Have another look at the same spot, courtesy of Oasis, the mapping organization that works in cooperation with the Center for Urban Research at CUNY to provide the richest source of community maps for New York City (as always, click an image to enlarge it):

Manhattan Island with the 1609 shoreline. Courtesy of Oasis & the Mannahatta Project.

[continue reading…]

El Anatsui’s “Broken Bridge II” reflecting the West Chelsea landscape and the High Line

Last week, men in helmets attached to climbing ropes rappelled up and down the east wall of 510 West 22nd Street, once a parking garage owned by Time Warner Cable and, for the past year, temporary home to the magisterial artwork Broken Bridge II by West African artist El Anatsui. Of all the many superb works that Friends of the High Line has installed in and around the park, this one — among the first curated by the new head of High Line Art, Cecilia Alemani — has become my favorite.

I’ve lamented the loss of inspiring artworks many times on this blog — most especially Stephen Vitiello’s unforgettable sound piece, A Bell for Every Minute, and Sarah Sze’s architectural magnet for wildlife, Still Life With Landscape (Model for a Habitat) — but this one was different. In part that’s because Broken Bridge II was such a perfectly site-specific piece, and it so brilliantly inhabited and reflected — simultaneously — the landscape it occupied for twelve months. El Anatsui’s tapestry of pressed, rusting tin and mirrored panels fit in perfectly with the steel and glass buildings that are going up all around the High Line, but its mirrors also caught the 19th century water towers around it, those “silent sentries” that define the New York City landscape. [continue reading…]

Here’s a picture that’s worth a thousand words: the High Line past (rusty old viaduct); present (restored railing with its modern light fixture on top); and future (one set of pipe-rails painted and signs of construction all around).  The northern end of the park is a flurry of activity, both on the High Line and on the streets below.  But the fading sunlight still manages to find its way between all the new buildings that are rising faster than seems possible, with their giant cranes constantly circling overhead. You just have to be there at the precise moment to snap your shutter before it’s gone.

501 West 29th Street, standing defiant

A couple of weeks ago my cousin Antoinette and I took a walk along the High Line. When we arrived at the construction scaffolding that now overstretches the park at 30th Street, I pulled out my phone and showed her the photograph above, which I had taken almost exactly a month earlier from the roof of the Ohm apartment tower on Eleventh Avenue. At the time I thought I was taking a photo of the green roof — now white with snow — atop the Morgan Mail Facility, one of my favorite buildings along the High Line. But when I got home and downloaded the picture I noticed something poignant and surprising that I hadn’t seen when I composed the shot on the windy rooftop: that former tenement at 501 West 29th Street, standing defiant and alone with a huge crane looming above its roof. When Antoinette and I arrived at this spot on December 7, the new construction had already reached beyond the second floor of tenement; it was storming past the north-facing windows of the dwelling’s inhabitants as it went.

A mixed-media artist who’s deeply fascinated by the role of fiction in art, Antoinette immediately thought of Roland Barthes and his book Camera Lucida. That tenement, she commented, is the element Barthes would have called “the punctum”: the detail that jumps out from the main subject of a photograph and surprises us. That tenement is what this photograph is really about: a group of Manhattan residents who apparently said Hell no, we won’t go, even as their windows disappeared and a concrete behemoth rose up beside them.

Below is a photo of 501 W. 29th Street that I took today from the High Line.

29th Street Tenement on December 17

When I got there, a light was on in the top-floor apartment, which is just hours away from being completely subsumed by the new construction. I found the scene heartbreaking, and what passed through my mind were Romeo’s last words in the crypt: “Eyes, look your last.” Maybe that seems overly dramatic, but my relationship to this place has always been something of a love story, so I’m going to let it stand.

Indeed, this is a dramatic moment in our neighborhood, though it’s by no means a unique one. I walked from stem to stern along the High Line today and counted 11 active construction projects in immediate proximity to the park, meaning I could land a baseball right in their middle of their work space.*

I try to take the long view about the extraordinary pace of change we are seeing in this area. (See here my response to Jeremiah Moss’ controversial piece in the New York Times about the High Line’s role in the changing landscape of West Chelsea.) But Barthes-like, my camera caught another truth hiding in plain sight: the huge advertising banner on the Morgan — the first in an apparent series — speaks to an irony that the residents of 501 West 29th Street surely know best of all. We are not sleeping easy here; on the contrary, this rampant change is what keeps many of us up at night.

I don’t know much about the history of 501 West 29th Street. I suspect that this structure, like so many other 19th century tenements along the waterfront, once housed the families of men who worked in the maritime trades: blacksmiths, ropemakers, riggers, haulers, carpenters. This area was, as Kevin Bone described in his excellent book The New York Waterfront: Evolution and Building Culture of the Port and Harbor, “a horizontal city of pier sheds and terminals, of railroad structures and industrial facilities…It was a gateway village between the metropolis and the sea. For many, this tidewater frontier town was the only New York they knew. It had its own hotels, bars, and brothels, as well as at least one floating church.” There were also iron works, foundries, lumberyards and factories in the blocks around 501 West 29th Street, and buildings like this are where the workers lived. There are still a few former tenements left along the High Line — including two on opposite sides of 17th Street and Tenth Avenue — but they are coming down fast. Some of these buildings have perfectly marvelous architectural details that one never really noticed from the street; today, from the High Line, we can all appreciate what was once a private architectural museum for train conductors of the New York Central Line.

In a 2010 forum about the High Line at CUNY’s Graduate Center the writer Malcolm Gladwell quoted someone who said that a great university is a place with “an engineered capacity for surprise.”  This quality remains, for me, the enduring and abiding joy of the High Line. I visit the park almost every day, sometimes more than once; every time I go there I observe something I haven’t seen or noticed before. Every visit presents some sort of surprise, large or small. Today was no different, except I didn’t love what I was observing for the first time: the fact that you can now hear a constant thrum of construction from one end of the park to another. Even in a city this big, it seems unusual that you could walk for an entire mile and hear — uninterrupted — the sound of building: jackhammers, beeping tractors, scratchy voices emanating from distant walkie-talkies, whistles and toots, the sounds of men barking orders. Up and down the Line, from 30th Street to Gansevoort, this is the unabating soundtrack during business hours.

And yet: birds land on railings and tweet (the old-fashioned way). Babies cry, taxis honk, helicopter rotors whirl. The bells at General Theological Seminary call a community to worship. Yes, the city’s growth overwhelms us; it creeps past our windows and changes the way the light falls in our rooms, and therefore our lives. But as Gladwell also remarked in the CUNY talk, “this is the business we are in.” This is what we do in New York, and in all great cities: we engineer change. We can only hope that the surprises we encounter will be, for the most, meaningful or at least interesting.

In the meantime, get thee to the High Line and appreciate the views that are disappearing so fast.

501 West 20th, with a copy of “Love The One You’re With” near the front door

* Note: due to a recent a shoulder injury I’ve had to teach myself to throw lefty, so my range is about 75% of what it used to be, but I DO NOT throw like a girl. In my count I have not included the half-dozen projects that are clearly out of my range: those that are either east of Tenth Avenue, like the new Seminary condos, or closer to Eleventh Avenue, like the one near Edward Tufte’s gallery. But Derek Jeter could hit ’em! Also note: I’m not counting sites that have been cleared and are ready for construction, only those where there are men at work. I counted the Whitney Museum and the new headquarters for Friends of the High Line as two separate projects. 

I’ve been preparing myself for the transition from construction site to park. I was basically ready to say goodbye to the good old days of guys in hard hats and welcome the throngs of tourists who are about to replace them.

But then I look out the window and what do I see? Guys in hard hats erecting a scaffold.

So something’s up, though I have no idea what.

One thing I’d like to note, in these waning days of construction-guy appreciation. Take a look at those stanchions (click on the image if you want to enlarge it). When did you ever see building materials laid out so artistically? These guys are impeccable.

Meantime, there’s a lawn to be mowed.

So work proceeds. I’m baffled by the pace of construction projects. There are dramatic phases that go so fast — like adding an entire floor, which took just a few weeks at Our New Neighborhood Condo next door — and then long, interminable lulls where nothing seems to happen. (Wallboard installation, probably. Very boring.) A notable consequence of this “progress” is the loss of The Rat. He is now shielded from my view by the emerging 3rd floor of the condo, but I know he’s there because the horns continue to honk (labor guys in solidarity) and every time I cross 10th Avenue I have to wade through a mass of listless men drinking coffee and hanging about.

Lest we forget, here is Mr. Rat, with his friends.

Meantime, progress continues on the High Line. You can see hints of it in the photo above, but you have to look hard to discern the greenery that has been planted along the eastern edge of the pavers. Evergreens, grasses and little shrubs sit quietly in place between the concrete and iron. It’s still quiet down there on my little patch of unconstructed High Line, but periodically a man walks by and tips his hat to The Rat, or a new machine appears (see above; this one has its own little mat). The view from the northernmost spot that’s open to the public — on 20th Street, looking north through the chain link fence — is more promising, and shows the tremendous progress that has been made. Any day now I expect to look out my window and see an actual park emerging. I took the photo to the right with my phone, so it’s not great, but you see what I mean.

One of the things I love about the High Line is how it reveals all the new architecture in our neighborhood. There’s the tilting glass building on 23rd Street — you can see it in the distance, to the left (west) in this photo — for one. But walk along the High Line and you see it everywhere, above, below, and to either side. New buildings that curve (IAC) or dance with their colored panes of glass (the new Jean Nouvel building) look out over (but never seem to tower above) older ones. The red roof of the old Guardian Angel School building, which sits across the street from Clement Moore Park (and the fabulous 192 Books) is an anchor in time. Every time I walk along the High Line I see something new, or I see something old differently. Watching it unfold before me is a wonder.

Today’s New York Times reports that our section of the High Line will open in Spring 2011, which sounds about right, given the rate of progress.  It’s exciting to see the plants in place — a number of large trees and shrubbery abounding. None of it has reach the spot outside my window between 22nd and 23rd, but it’s close. If I stand in the middle of 22nd Street and look up at the stretch of High Line that crosses the street I can see leaves poking above the metal sides. Meantime, it’s quiet; the High Line guys are north, I think, doing whatever it is they are doing.

No such luck with the condo. Car horns continue to blow, although the protesters seem to be running out of steam. Maybe it’s the heat. Looking out my window I count ten men amongst the rebar. They move slowly, carrying heavy loads in the oppressive humidity. It seems that it’s even too hot for The Rat, who appears to have gone elsewhere, maybe for a swim at Coney Island.

Every day I look out the window and try to imprint a memory of the scene below, because soon all I’ll see is construction, then some new building. We can only hope that it’s not one of those ultra-modern confections that looks like it’s made from paper clips and Reynold’s Wrap. I’m a bit rueful as I watch the taxis glide by. Already I’ve lost a lot of street view, and one more story of this building and most of it will be entirely gone. That’s what happens in the City. So we have to rely on our memories and photographs to retain the old images of the streets we’ve grown to love.