One of my favorite things about Southern California is the architecture and the signage frozen in time. And having recently rewatched The Karate Kid, I like this site that revisited the film’s locations and found little had changed in 22 years. Daniel’s new apartment building (shown as “a dump” in 1983, mind you) and his high-school (the real-life version of which has since closed) look exactly the same. Must be the lack of humidity.

Better living through geometry: that’s inventor-visionary-crackpot Buckminster Fuller, in a geodesic nutshell. The man was bursting with ideas, most predicated on the idea that geometric symmetry is a form of perfection and, specifically, that the tetrahedron was “the most fundamental, structurally sound form found in nature.” The shape appears in most of his designs, including his best known, the geodesic sphere or dome, readily recognizable as Walt Disney World’s Spaceship Earth within Epcot Center; Wikipedia alleges the sphere’s shape and name were inspired, uncredited, by Fuller.

He believed in low-cost, easy-to-assemble structures that could be mass produced. Sensing kindred spirits in the folks at the Butler Manufacturing Co., mass-producer of grain bins (my grandfather had two such “Butler Buildings” on his farm in Delphos, Ohio), he partnered with the firm to develop squat silo-like housing for the military during World War II. The government approved Fuller’s design and the Army put a few hundred to use as operating rooms and houses, but steel rationing killed the project.

After the war, his thoughts turned to all that aluminum that was no longer needed for planes and developed Dymaxion Dwelling Machines, housing for the new suburban masses. On view at the Whitney Museum of American Art within a scale model of an idyllic cul-de-sac, the shiny aluminum spheroids are banded with florescent light. They resemble glowing alien hamburgers. Two people could assemble one in two days; only one was ever produced.

Most of Fuller’s projects unfolded this way: a passionate process of brainstorming and sketches, models and patents, resulting in little practicality. That didn’t stop him, though, and it didn’t stop the seeds of his ideas from sprouting later. I see a connection between Fuller’s Butler and Dwelling Machine plans and the suggestion today to use surplus steel shipping containers as affordable housing.

A black-and-white video of Fuller, standing stiff and blinking in a three-piece suit, shows him discussing the features of his large 4D House, which was suspended from the ground and shaped like a child’s toy top. On tape he doesn’t appear to be the wacky-inventor personality I thought he’d be, but professorial, monotonic and dry. Although that makes for unintentional entertainment when he rattles off selling points, such as how children, should they fall in a 4D House, would literally bounce back from the “pneumatic floors.” They could also, Fuller added, play baseball inside; the tetrahedral windows of the domed enclosure were constructed of certain materials connected so solidly that they could withstand tornadoes and an airplane crash. (Fuller doesn’t mention the impact playing baseball inside his domed home would have on the residents’ furniture, presumably not constructed with roughhouse-resistant geometry.)

Fuller wasn’t all spheres and symmetry: unsatisfied with the distortion in the Mercator projection world map, he developed the Dymaxion Air-Ocean World Map, which resembles an unfolded piece of complicated origami. And parked in the Whitney’s lobby is an energy-efficient, three-wheeled Dymaxion car, looking very like a whale and, as evidenced on video, moving very like an agitated fish.

The exhibit features little evidence on the popular reception of Fuller and his ideas (nor popular architectural trends concurrent with his timeline, which would have been useful for purposes of comparison) although I enjoyed the clever acrostic written by avant-garde composer John Cage for Fuller’s 85th birthday. How did those two men connect: Cage, master of chaos, and Fuller, master of order?

Spotted serendipitously on the subway afterwards, a quote from Galileo served as the sum of Fuller’s philosophy:

The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Its symbols are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is impossible to understand a single word; without which there is only a vain wandering through a dark labyrinth.

On the 110 between downtown Los Angeles and LAX, a car will pass at least six cell-phone towers poorly disguised as trees. At freeway speeds, they blur into the background. When I joked about them to a lifetime Southern Californian, he admitted he’d never noticed. I pointed to one and by the time he’d turned his head, we’d passed it.

Although the cell-phone towers have been decorated to resemble conifers, they’re stiffened by right angles where a real tree would branch at random. They stick out among the palm trees, which are real but in silhouette at dusk resemble giant lollipops.

Are birds fooled? Will they roost or nest in these antennae, warmed by the man-made surfaces and invisible waves? Do people living nearby consider them more acceptable eyesores than undisguised cell-phone towers or other NIMBY elements, like substations, towers and lines for electricity? I categorize them among facework, implants and fake hair, other common sights unnoticed here or accepted without comment as real.

If I had to describe Los Angeles in one word, that word would be “concrete.” It clads the earth as slabs of highway. Concrete columns, dwarfing those of the Parthenon, hoist overpasses. It’s the material of choice for wide streets, seldom used sidewalks, parking garages, swimming pools, runways and tarmac. The hotel I’m at, the Westin Bonaventure downtown, is mostly concrete, inside and out, a weathered artifact from an era when the material stood for the strength of bright, modern promise.

Related: “The New Face of Downtown Los Angeles”

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has sued Frank Gehry for leaks, mold, masonry cracks and drainage problems in the architect’s Stata Center, which opened at the university in 2004 with a price tag of $300 million. Gehry, in his characteristic low-bullshit manner, has told the press that problems in a building as complex as the Center were inevitable. In other words, there will be problems with most any Gehry building.

When Gehry’s Peter B. Lewis Building opened on the campus of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, I recall reports of snow and ice collecting in the roof’s strange nooks, then shooting off to narrowly miss pedestrians below. M.I.T. echoes this quirk with the Stata Center, noting that “sliding ice and snow from the building’s window boxes and other projecting roof areas” have caused structural damage and blocked emergency exits.

And in the classic example that I recalled when watching Sketches of Frank Gehry, Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles had a skin so shiny and angled so perfectly that on sunny days it would temporarily blind passers-by and heat adjacent sidewalks to molten temperatures.

Critics argue Gehry favors form over function. Gehry argues that clients such as M.I.T. are cheap, having rejected building elements that would have prevented design malfunctions. (Although in the case of the Disney Concert Hall, he paid handsomely to have the super-shiny surface sandblasted.) I don’t know which side is right, but when you’re dealing with an architect who has modeled buildings from crumpled wads of paper and has (proudly?) likened the Stata Center to “drunken robots,” you’re bound to get projects with quirks.

I attended a panel discussion tonight at Cooper Union, produced by the New Museum and the Cooper Union School of Art that attempted to answer the question “Is provincial a bad word?”

It was billed as a “Hot Button! panel” and that to me conjured something different and exciting, but it was a standard panel and not even much a discussion. As part of their introduction, each panelist was allowed to talk about themselves then go off on their own prepared tangent about provincialism, so the introductions alone took over an hour. What that left was little time for actual debate or interaction between the panel. The moderator, who was the chief curator of the New Museum, didn’t do much moderating, although I was amused when he used the phrase “every cliché in the book,” which is a cliché itself. I will admit that I spent most of the time in the lecture hall proofreading and editing a printout of Dana’s letter of intent for grad school.

Some of the most thought-provoking points were made by Nicolai Ouroussoff, the New York Times architecture critic, who argued that the world’s capitals “have become playgrounds for the rich” and morphed into safe, sanitary and generic archetypes, where there may be little difference between Times Square and Shanghai. (His line of reasoning reminded me of William Gibson’s statements about the erosion of the “specificity of place,” which he made during an interview I attended about a year ago.) Ouroussoff directed much of his spite toward New York City, which he says has completed its architectural history and isn’t interested in adding to it, unless it’s cookie-cutter design or monuments like the Freedom Tower, the design of which reveals “more about our paranoia than our best values.” (He was a proponent of the original Freedom Tower design and has done little to mask his disgust with the concrete-buttressed stronghold currently on the drafting table.) He added that, ironically, provincialism is “never an issue in this country except in the mind of New Yorkers.”

Instead, “tertiary cities,” mostly in Europe, are the best in which to “relocate creative energy” for architecture, while some of the best work in this country is being put up in Los Angeles (although Ouroussoff suggested much of this had to do with that city’s freedom from the sort of land constraints that bedevil development in New York).

Something another panelist mentioned in passing that intrigued me (and which I hadn’t heard of despite my real estate background) was Orange County, China, a replica of American suburbs built in China for the rich. It reminded me of the philosophy behind Celebration, Florida as an improved re-creation of small-town American life that may have never existed.

If the first explorers of this landmass had showed up 500-some years late this Sunday, sailing up the Hudson and docking in present-day west Chelsea, I think after disembarking a few avenue blocks inland, they would have named their new world “Brunchland.” (Maps would further indicate “Here there be condo construction,” crude illustrations of long-necked cranes poking through the clouds.)

What I’m trying to say is, in this piece of Manhattan, there are many choices for brunch, a meal with a compounded draw when unseasonably balmy weekend weather makes visions of bacon and flapjacks dance in one’s hypothalamus. How to choose a place? Serendipitously, I had earlier come across a local girl’s Flickr page featuring artful macro photos of brunch entrées and accoutrements tagged cookshop. I looked up the place. The website was designed well enough, I liked the cut of their logotype and the menu enticed me, so I hit OpenTable and made a reservation.

I had the cornmeal pancakes with lemon butter and pear compote, rounded by a plate all-American bacon and a cuppa coffee. Yeah! The food was fine and I really liked the atmosphere of the place. It’s on a quiet, unassuming block of 10th avenue, a thinly trafficked neighborhood of townhouses and churches to the east, while to the west lie the warehouses and light industrial buildings of numbered days near the High Line, which I could see from my seat.

The restaurant’s interior is large and open, with cream-colored walls and industrial-style waxed poured-cement floors. The tables are close but not right on top of each other. Décor and furniture feature clean, simple lines. Best, the entire southern and western walls are floor-to-ceiling windows that let in the morning sun and perk up the atmosphere. On a bright day like today, everyone and their food was sexily softboxed. Two British ladies at the table to the left of mine spoke of scones, herbal flu remedies and Amsterdam while across the way, young Turks in Chucks downed coffee and expelled excited chatter.

The waitstaff weren’t bothersome or wankish, dressed in jeans and light-blue Oxford shirts, with long white aprons tied around their waists. Mine managed a trendy new shoulder grasp so natural I wasn’t unnerved by it.

I heartily recommend Cookshop as a prime brunch destination, whether by yourself, with friends or family. It’s bustling but not oppressive, conducive to conversation and people-watching, and priced well enough.

But enjoy it while it lasts, maybe, for this is a neighborhood in transition, with grand plans to revitalize the High Line as a pedestrian parkway, flanked by upscale residential, retail, restaurants and hotels, and new home to Frank Gehry’s first building in Manhattan, the near-completed headquarters for Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp, located only a few blocks from the restaurant. Ten stories or so of concrete wrapped in a curiously gradated white glass facade, it’s meant to conjure a ship in full sail. (Hard starboard! AMF Chelsea Piers Lanes off the bow!) Mainly you notice it because it’s A Frank Gehry Building, with strange surface materials and funhouse angles, sprouting from the bland landscape. As I’ve noticed with photos I’ve taken of previous Gehry buildings, this one, when framed without scale-establishing or other surrounding elements, resembles a rendering or sci-fi structure.

Cookshop

• 156 10th Avenue (at 20th Street)
• (212) 924-4440
• Meal 3 of 52: cornmeal pancakes ($12), bacon ($5) and coffee ($2.75).

Hanging out in SoHo this afternoon, I walked by 11 Spring Street, which has been overtaken by the Wooster Collective for this weekend only. In an unlikely collaboration of art and real estate, the development company that purchased the vacant building has allowed graffiti artists and street artists to use it as a canvas, inside and out, before restoring it for residential sale.

It’s a beautiful building, with or without the art. Built in 1888, the 14,000 square foot palazzo has more than 60 arched windows and was once a horse stable. On the outside, it’s long been known to feature some of the most intriguing art in the city, including stickers, posters and graffiti. Every time I’d walk by, something would be slightly different.

And the outside was all I got to see today; the wait to enter and see the art there was over 2 1/2 hours when I walked by at 3 p.m. A volunteer broke the news to those at the end of the line that because the exhibit was only open until 5 p.m., they needed to break it up and try again tomorrow.

What I like most about 11 Spring Street is that at least the art inside won’t be destroyed after Sunday but walled over during the redevelopment process, preserving it as if in a time capsule that may be rediscovered someday.

My electrical-engineer dad would have enjoyed the tour I took today as part of the annual Open House New York weekend. It was of IRT Substation #13, designed to generate power for the New York City subway and one of the oldest.

It opened in 1904, the same year as the first subway. The mayor, governor and, apocryphally, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, among other dignitaries, arrived at the substation-warming party in horse-drawn buggies.

Old #13 has operated continuously since and today powers the 1 line, which old-timers still call the IRT. Although it houses sinister-looking modern equipment, the substation serves as a de facto museum because it contains original machinery, the centerpiece of which is the Westinghouse 1,500 kilowatt rotary converter. Incredibly, this 50-ton wheel didn’t go offline until 1999.

Our guide, a chief overseer of the city’s transit substations with the foresworn duty “to preserve our electrical history,” as he said, was an amiable bearded fellow by the name of Bob. It was big of Bob, a 37-year MTA veteran, to even give the tour because about the same time it started, a building in Corona, Queens collapsed, narrowly taking a chunk of the 7 line with it, so he likely had other matters on his mind.

Bob used a lot of electrical-engineer talk, but as a seasoned guide he let the kids on the tour flip old switches and offered everyone entertaining bits of trivia. One of these, confirmed by MythBusters, is that it’s safe to pee on the electrified third rail of the subway track, but only if you’re more than six feet away, as one of the show’s hosts learned the hard way.

We were also told those blue lights in subway tunnels mark the location of an emergency power switch. Anyone can pull it to deactivate the third rail, a potentially lifesaving maneuver if someone falls or leaps to the tracks. Bob said these oft-fatal actions happen much more often than you’d think: two or three times a day. You only read about them in the Post when they involve a pretty white person or are particularly gristly.

The substation is located on West 53rd Street, directly behind the Ed Sullivan Theater, where the entire back wall and stage floor are grounded to shield Dave and his guests from electrocution.

Here’s a back corner of the substation where the walls bristle with old-fashioned signals, switches and signage.

Nearby, Bob demonstrated where workers could light cigarettes on exposed bits of metal coursing with 600 volts. After checking with someone over his walkie-talkie, he popped an active circuit breaker (13F11, if you’re keeping track at home), an action that arrives with a heartstopping BANG.

After breakfast at Edgar’s Cafe in my previous Upper West Side neighborhood, Mom, Dad and I walked through Central Park to the Met for the exhibit Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde. Great works by those two artists, among others by Gauguin, van Gogh and Redon. Because it’s a show focusing on Vollard, a dealer, the placards burst with anecdotes about money changing hands and implied how to become a successful art dealer:

1. Befriend the artist when he and his art are unpopular and buy his paintings cheaply.
2. Offload the paintings when the art/artist becomes popular.
3. Profit!

It was oddly refreshing to have so much of the exhibit concern the intersection of raw talent and raw commerce instead of airy ruminations on artistic method and inspiration. Y’all know the story of van Gogh cutting off his own ear. Well, van Gogh thanked his doctor for that incident with a painting, Portrait of Doctor Felix Rey, one of the works in the exhibit. Rey’s parents hated the thing and used it to patch a hole in their chicken coop. Vollard saw it differently. And now, well, it’s worth millions and hanging in a world-renowned museum.

We checked out Grand Central Terminal, then walked to the Empire State Building. The lines there were aggravating Dad and for good reason: a line to go through security, a line to get tickets, a line to get on one set of elevators, a line to board another set of elevators, a line to take the elevators back down, etc., all the while loud men attempt to sell you package tour deals and audio commentaries. (We could’ve gone to the Top of the Rock, with its newness, better organized lines and timed ticket system, but I heard the voice of Marge Simpson: “It’s wall-to-wall landmarks! The Williamsburg bridge! Fourth Avenue! Governors Island!”) At some point, we upgraded to express passes, which at least allowed us to skip the elevator-related lines. Haze limited the views from the 86th floor observatory to a half-mile, but we could still see Queens, New Jersey and most of Downtown. I pointed out landmark buildings, tried to pinpoint the non-landmark one in which I work and attempted to call Andrew and Jess on Dad’s cellphone just to say, “We’re calling from the top of the Empire State Building!”

Back at street level, we shouldered our way though the wedding party getting its photo taken in the lobby then walked over to Macy’s to check out the wooden escalators. On the subway uptown to dinner at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, Dad had a brief moment resting his eyes that proved the only way to capture him in the wild without having him jerk away from my camera in annoyance.

After dinner we purchased cabernet sauvignon and Jameson 12-year to drink back at the apartment where we reviewed photos from our most recent European jaunts: my trip with Dana to Rome and Mom and Dad’s trip to Ireland.

The architectural highlight of Rome for me was the Pantheon. Like much here, that thing is old; it’s not even the original Pantheon and it was built circa 125. But what blows my mind, particularly as Dana and I stood inside, directly in the center, and looked up, is that modern structural engineers can’t fully explain how the fuck the temple’s 5,000-ton dome stands up. If you were to hire a team of burly men from New Jersey to recreate it using modern building materials, it would collapse under its own weight.

Eggheads theorize the Romans used different grades of concrete, starting with the dense and heavy stuff at the dome’s base, graduating up to lighter composites, then topping it off with a pumicelike substance. (It’s beyond me why someone can’t just X-ray the thing or something to find out definitively.) There’s also a hole centered in the top of the dome, which helps disperse weight and in a perfect balance of form and function, lets in light majestically. It also, of course, lets in rain, but the Romans covered that by secreting several drains in the marble floor below.

We toured the Pantheon early this morning, which was a fine idea, because there was no one there except a few early risers and a wandering elderly priest cassocked in white, probably assigned to provide a colorful local human element for tourists’ snapshots.

Raphael, who died in 1520, was buried at the Pantheon on request and his epitaph is the most conceited I’ve yet read; I love it.

Ille hic est Raphael timuit quo sospite vinci rerum magna parens et moriente mori.

Here lies Raphael. When he was alive, Nature was afraid to be bested by him. When he died, she wanted to die herself.

Later in the day, wandering around near the Tiber River, we happened upon the Mouth of Truth. Dana gave it a try and managed to retain her hand. It’s strange that a manhole cover could become a talisman and tourist attraction, but I’m sure the Audrey Hepburn association doesn’t hurt.

We had trouble locating Domus Aurea, a.k.a. Nero’s house, but found it closed for renovation, a curious status for a ruin. We scaled the lunkish Castel Sant’Angelo, a onetime fortress near Vatican City. Via a secret tunnel, the pope could flee to the stronghold if the Vatican came under siege.

We dined on the Piazza Pasquino at Cul de Sac, foremost an enoteca with an astounding 1,500 varieties of wine, most of which line the walls inside the narrow dining room. Tiny rope nets run the length of the lowest shelf, presumably to prevent bottles errantly nudged over the edge from conking a diner on the head. I had deliciously browned and savory involtini, beef rolls that reminded me of the ones my mom makes, right down to the toothpicks that hold the shape.

If you ever plan a trip to Rome, the most time-saving tip I can offer concerns the Colosseum, which, as you know, was famous for drawing 500,000 bloodthirsty fans for the spectator sport of Billy Joel‘s world tour-concluding concert this July 31st.

The tip is to buy your eight euro ticket for the Palatine a few hundred feet away, an attraction with curiously short lines for ruins representing the oldest part of the city on the centralmost of its Seven Hills. That ticket will gain you admission not only to the ruins but to the Colosseum, where the lines are bafflingly disorganized and long.

Other highlights were the Roman Forum, the Musei Capitolini, where an evil woman shouted at us in Italian to check our bags, and the Spanish Steps, which, unless I’m missing something, are famous for being sat on by crowds of tourists.

I had pizza for dinner and although I’d never tasted the signature Italian alcohol, I insisted on Campari apéritifs from a bar near our hotel. That stuff’s too bitter even for me. The eager-to-please bartender first served it straight up (too bitter); added orange slices, shook it in a Martini tumbler, strained and added fresh orange slices (too bitter); and finally dashed the drink with grenadine and re-tumbled (still too bitter). I gave up on mine although Dana drained hers.

One of the reasons the view across the Hudson River from Linden Terrace at Fort Tryon Park is so unspoiled, as the story goes, is that when John D. Rockefeller, Jr. bequeathed the land to the city in 1931, he also bought hundreds of acres of the Palisades to prevent it from becoming developed. Well played, Johnny. Now you can sit, relax and look at the river, the George Washington Bridge arcing off west and a bunch of densely forested New Jersey, which is often better to look at than other kinds of New Jersey.

I was checking out the view up there late this morning for the Fort Tryon Park Trust’s “Pancakes in the Park” benefit. It was the first such benefit staged by the Friends Committee of the 25-year-old Trust and it reminded me of the “spaghetti supper” events from church basements and school cafeterias of my youth. It was a bunch of chatty Mom-types selling $10 meal tickets at the base of the terrace. Set up on the terrace under a tent was a catering service dishing out steam-tray scrambled eggs, fresh fruit, sausage, sweet rolls, orange juice and coffee, and pancakes that were being made one at a time on griddles, and could be topped with blueberries, sugar or a grilled onion-vegetable medley.

The maximum turnout while I was sitting there on a bench eating my brunch was maybe 50 folks, seemingly a solid half of them young children. I’m bad at guessing ages, but these were in the range of stroller-bound up to that age where they’re running all over the place, and even when you shout, “Cody, stop it! Get over here!” they ignore you and keep darting about.

A yard sale was part of the breakfast although the intermittent rains made it a challenge to sift through the macramé owls and World’s Best Dad coffee mugs that had been carefully arranged atop card tables. It was an actual yard sale, and paired with the pancakes, it made me momentarily nostalgic for the suburbs.

Later in the afternoon, sitting out the drizzly weather in my apartment, I came across a tidbit in a New Yorker article from 1926 mentioning that the Morris-Jumel Mansion, at Edgecombe Avenue and 160th Street in Washington Heights, had on exhibit the only mastodon bones ever found in New York City, unearthed on Dyckman Street very near where live. I certainly had to check this out, but the problem with not having home internet access (yes, it’s down again) is an inability to fact-check. I should have figured an 80-year-old article might not have contained the most up-to-date information available. When I showed up at the mansion, there were no bones in sight, other than the sour old woman who admitted me, seized my $4 admission and told me she’d be closing the house promptly at 4 p.m. Then she retreated to the gift shop to read her romance novel.

Sitting atop a rise on a neatly landscaped plot, the house contains period furniture, drapery and other old-time decor. At just over 240, it’s the oldest house in Manhattan and has really creaky wooden floors and probably a few ghosts. George Washington, when he was commander-in-chief of the American Army, made the house his headquarters for the Battle of Harlem Heights during the American Revolution.

Not everyone loves Frank Gehry. The architect’s most recent project is an unenviable task: forming the skyline of Brooklyn. On Friday, with developer Forest City Ratner, Gehry unveiled his model of the borough’s Atlantic Yards Project, a 22-acre plot of glass, brick and metal skyscrapers that would poke up over historic, low-rise neighborhoods, the residents of which aren’t universally happy.

Opponents say he’s painting a gloss over ’60s-style urban renewal and have demanded he alter the density and size of his project. Although the developer has committed to contract the plan by about five percent, Gerhy said Friday that he had been “paring back” the design himself. “It is a process,” he added elusively, according to The New York Times.

This process is a strange one, although you can glimpse it in Sydney Pollack’s new documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry, which I saw this afternoon.

And begin with a sketch it does, loping and loose, like a drunken scrawl on a cocktail party napkin. Models are next. Gehry can’t or won’t use computers, and instead we see him as the film opens, paunchy, white-haired and plain-spoken, seated at a table with a pair of Fiskars scissors, Scotch tape and sheets of thin, silvery cardboard. He has half a model before him, and he cuts, folds and places panels here and there, moving some, adding others, cutting holes. He contemplates and fiddles some more.

“It’s so stupid looking, it’s great,” he says, suggesting later he’s not fully satisfied unless he’s tweaking something. Touring one of his own creations soon after its completion, he says wryly, “By the time I get to the finished building, I don’t like it.”

Gehry is defined several times as an artist or an artist-architect, with the baggage the name may imply: ego, form over function, a drive to perfection, the creation of beauty.

At an early age, Gehry is praised for his masterful sketches and later takes a ceramics class that foreshadows his architectural career; in his statement for the 1980 edition of “Contemporary Architects,” Gehry writes that he approaches each building

as a sculptural object, a spatial container, a space with light and air, a response to context and appropriateness of feeling and spirit. To this container, this sculpture, the user brings his baggage, his program, and interacts with it to accommodate his needs. If he can’t do that, I’ve failed.

Perhaps his first great project is his own house, a container within a container. Gehry is told the pedestrian Los Angeles bungalow he buys in the late ’70s is haunted, and he decides by “the ghosts of Cubism” as he builds an angular shell completely encompassing the original structure. He pays tribute to artist-contemporaries he admires—Johns and Rauschenberg—by using industrial materials out of context, such as chain link fencing and corrugated sheet steel. A shot of Gehry’s kitchen shows its rear wall is the front of the original house, siding and windows intact. Shaving one morning in an upstairs bathroom, he becomes disgruntled by a lack of natural light and punches a hole in the roof with a hammer to let in the sunlight.

After his alterations are more or less complete, the president of a local real estate firm visits Gehry at the house and is flabbergasted the architect would live there but take comparatively pedestrian commissions. Gehry changes his ways of working to be self-reflective and since then has brought well-monied clients and the public his curves and unusual angles, uncommon materials and most famously, his sprawling, undulating roofs and panels of metal.

A fascinating segment of the film occurs when Gehry discusses the unobvious entwining of art with his work. Pulling from an office wall a color laser print of Hieronymus Bosch’s 500-year-old painting Christ Crowned with Thorns, Gehry shows that the shape, position and contrast of its central characters directly influenced the floor plan of the Jerusalem Museum of Tolerance, Center for Human Dignity, in Israel.

Just as art informs his architecture, Gehry’s high-powered clients describe his buildings in unarchitectural terms. Ex-Disney chief Michael Eisner doesn’t hesitate to compare the roof of a Gehry hockey arena in Los Angeles to breasts, while Barry Diller speaks of panels from a project he commissioned as boat sails. Gehry himself has defined a centerpiece element of his Brooklyn project as a bride’s veils. When Pollack asks him if he thinks of the surfaces of his structures as “painterly,” Gehry disagrees. Pollack proves him wrong with a montage of Gehry surfaces absorbing and reflecting light, sky, earth and water, resembling materials unlike themselves: iridescent fish scales or a copper desert floor at sunset.

Only one detractor gets significant air time and offers the instance of Gehry’s most famous work, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, as an example of architecture overwhelming art. The artist Julian Schnabel, surely having some fun clad in a white terry cloth robe and shades as he sips a brandy and dangles a cigarette from his other hand, counters that if Gehry’s surroundings are said to devour art, maybe that art’s just not good enough.

Praise is lavished thickly in Sketches of Frank Gehry, not much time is devoted to any one project and physical failures of Gehry’s work are completely ignored; there was a well-publicized problem, for instance, with the roof of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, which until it was sanded, blinded people on sunny days and heated adjacent sidewalks to 140°. But the film works well as a talk between two old friends, interspersed with bits of the architect’s history, personality, drive and creative process.

Happy belated 75th birthday, Empire State Building. (It was yesterday.)

Not only is my news out of date, so’s my photo; May 1 through 8, the ESB will be lit up all in “classic” white.

This story from today’s New York Times blows my mind, that there could be a secret room inside the Brooklyn Bridge, one of the most recognizable landmarks in the U.S., that had somehow become forgotten more than 50 years later.

Also, I am amused by the phrase “All-Purpose Survival Crackers.”

Inside the Brooklyn Bridge, a Whiff of the Cold War

By Sewell Chan

For decades it waited in secret inside the masonry foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge, in a damp, dirty and darkened vault near the East River shoreline of Lower Manhattan: a stockpile of provisions that would allow for basic survival if New York City were devastated by a nuclear attack.

City workers were conducting a regular structural inspection of the bridge last Wednesday when they came across the cold-war-era hoard of water drums, medical supplies, paper blankets, drugs and calorie-packed crackers—an estimated 352,000 of them, sealed in dozens of watertight metal canisters and, it seems, still edible.

To step inside the vault—a dank and lightless room where the walls are lined with dusty boxes—is to be vividly reminded of the anxieties that dominated American life during the military rivalry with the Soviet Union, an era when air-raid sirens and fallout shelters were standard elements of the grade-school curriculum.

Several historians said yesterday that the find was exceptional, in part because many of the cardboard boxes of supplies were ink-stamped with two especially significant years in cold-war history: 1957, when the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite, and 1962, when the Cuban missile crisis seemed to bring the world to the precipice of nuclear destruction.

“Civil defense agencies were building fallout shelters all over the country during the 1950’s and stocking them with supplies of food and water and whatnot,” said John Lewis Gaddis, a historian at Yale and a pre-eminent scholar of the cold war.

“Most of those have been dismantled; the crackers got moldy a very long time ago. It’s kind of unusual to find one fully intact—one that is rediscovered, almost in an archaeological sense. I don’t know of a recent example of that.”

The Department of Transportation, which controls the bridge, has moved to secure the site while figuring out to do with the trove of supplies.

The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has been contacted to handle the drugs, which include bottles of Dextran, used to treat or prevent shock.

City workers commonly find coins or bottles when repaving streets, fixing water mains or probing sewer drains, said the transportation commissioner, Iris Weinshall. “We find stuff all the time, but what’s sort of eerie about this is that this is a bridge that thousands of people go over each day,” she said. “They walk over it, cars go over it, and this stuff was just sitting there.”

The room is within one of the arched masonry structures under the main entrance ramp to the bridge, not far from the Manhattan anchorage. Three city officials gave a brief tour of the room yesterday—taking care to step gingerly over broken glass and fallen wooden boards—on the condition that the precise location not be disclosed, for security reasons.

The most numerous items are the boxes of Civil Defense All-Purpose Survival Crackers. Printed in block letters, on each canister, was information about the number of pounds (6.75), the number of crackers per pound (62) and the minimum number of crackers per can (419).

Joseph M. Vaccaro, a carpentry supervisor at the Transportation Department, estimated that there were 140 boxes of crackers—each with six cans, for a total of some 352,000 crackers.

The officials would not open any of the supplies because of safety concerns over germs, but Mr. Vaccaro said that one of the canisters had broken open, and inside it, workers found the crackers intact in wax-paper wrapping.

Nearby were several dozen boxes with sealed bottles of Dextran, made by Wyeth Laboratories in Philadelphia. More mysterious were about 50 metal drums, made by United States Steel in Camden, N.J. According to the label, each was intended to hold 17.5 gallons and to be converted, if necessary, for “reuse as a commode.” They are now empty.

For the officials who gave the tour, the discovery set off some strong memories. Judith E. Bergtraum, the department’s first deputy commissioner, recalled air-raid drills—“first it was under the desk and then it was in the hall”—at Public School 165 in Queens. Russell Holcomb, a deputy chief bridge engineer, remembered watching Nikita Khrushchev pounding his shoe at the United Nations in 1960 on television.

Several of the boxes in the room have labels from the Office of Civil Defense, a unit of the Pentagon that coordinated domestic preparedness in the early 1960’s. State and local governments often appointed their own civil-defense coordinators, said Graham T. Allison, a former assistant secretary of defense who teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

Dr. Allison acknowledged that fallout shelters would probably have been ineffective in the event of nuclear war but that the precautions were comforting.

“At least people would think they were doing something, even if it didn’t have any effect,” he said.

In 1950, the city’s Office of Civil Defense, the predecessor to today’s Office of Emergency Management, was formed to prepare for a possible atomic attack. In 1951, during the Korean War, floodlights and barbed-wire barriers were set up on and around the city’s bridges, and bridge operators were organized into defense batteries, as part of an overall civil-defense strategy aimed at deterring sabotage.

Mayor Robert F. Wagner, who served from 1954 to 1965, appointed several civil-defense advisers. In 1959, a federal report concluded that two hydrogen bombs dropped near the Brooklyn Bridge would kill at least 6.1 million people.

Kenneth T. Jackson, a historian at Columbia University and a former president of the New-York Historical Society, said he was curious about how the stockpile got there. “Is this a secret cache of supplies the city was trying to put together, without warning the community of a serious threat?” he asked.

“What surprises me,” he added, “is that we have all these little nooks—that in this huge city with people crawling everywhere, we can find rooms still filled with stuff, 50 years after the fact.”

I headed over to the Avalon nightclub tonight for a concert by Mogwai, five Glasgow lads that make long, rock guitar-driven suites, mostly without vocals. It’s updated prog rock, which I know can smack of wankery, but I’m a fan. For several years, their 2001 album Rock Action served as my favorite music to relax or fall asleep to, despite the electronic noise, sharp drums, distortion, vocoder bits and quiet-then-suddenly-loud structures. Mogwai songs are robot dreams of abandoned planets.

Getting past the security checkpoint at the entrance was fun. I had a run in with a large bouncer as he patted me down for illicit goods and I kept recoiling with snickers.

Bouncer [exasperated]: C’mon, guy, it’s Monday, I’m not even supposed to be here tonight.
Me: Sorry, man; I’m ticklish.
Bouncer: I’m ticklish, too, but not when another guy’s grabbin’ at me.

I didn’t know how to respond to this. I wanted to get into a discussion with him about whether tickle-response is physiological or sociological, but it was neither the time nor place, so I replied with a Jimi-style, “Right. Right.”

The venue was sold-out packed, mostly trendy 20-somethings, and the band played for an hour and a half. The setlist included two of the best songs off Rock Action, “Take Me Somewhere Nice” and “You Don’t Know Jesus.” (Like their name, which is a nonsensical reference to the critters in that movie, Mogwai pick random phrases as song titles). I saw at least three PowerBooks, including a spunky 12-inch pulsing with the Flurry screen saver, cracked open onstage and utilized for audio effects. The sound was loud, Pantera loud, but I’m not (yet) too old. As the band blasted, my scalp rattled and the electric guitar-generated breeze ruffled my pants. During one violent quiet-to-loud shift, you could feel the air sucked in by the amps and blasted back over the crowd.

Avalon is a converted gothic-revival church and couldn’t be much hipper, although with the cleanliness, red velvet curtains, waitresses in snug garb trawling for drink requests, bars on each floor and black lights, I felt residual elements of House of Blues chain-club cheesiness. Forgotten NY notes the original structure, the Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion, was built between 1844 and 1850 by Richard Upjohn, architect of the city’s grand Trinity Church. In the 1980s, it became the Limelight Disco and a deade later, the owner was busted for the rampant drug-dealing inside; under its new name, it’s been sanitized for clubgoing protection. The building’s architecture, however, hasn’t changed much at all. The exterior looks the same as it does in this photo from 1940.

For a peek inside, here are some photos from the firm that redesigned the interior. It still has the high gothic arches and wood parquet floors, although steel framework now supports a wide catwalk (great views of the stage and a way to avoid the packed dancefloor), along with several tons of rigging and lights.

Setlist from bright light !:

1. We’re No Here
2. Hunted by a Freak
3. Friend of the night
4. Take Me Somewhere Nice
5. Yes! I am a Long Way From Home
6. Travel is Dangerous
7. You Don’t Know Jesus
8. Acid Food
9. Folk Death 95
10. Killing All The Flies
11. Stanley Kubrick
12. Xmas Steps
13. Glasgow Mega-Snake

Encore

1. Mogwai Fear Satan

As promised and just in time for the holidays, the New Yorker hotel has lit its giant new red sign, though it looks orangeish in my photo because of the slow shutter speed.

My company produced a real estate conference yesterday at the Roosevelt Hotel, inevitably described as a grand old place because it appears as if they stole your grandmother’s carpet and wallpaper patterns.

Delivering our keynote address was developer Larry Silverstein, famous in real estate circles for completing the largest real estate transaction in New York City history. Unfortunately for him, it was a 99-year lease signed in July 2001 for the World Trade Center. He’s now paying rent on a hole on the ground.

Since 9/11, he’s wrangled with insurers over the Twin Towers’ payout, planned reconstruction of the site and, most recently, soothed fears of safety and high rents to get potential tenants interested in his nearby 7 World Trade Center building. That project opens in April, and in his speech, Silverstein reviewed its technological and construction advances (“the safest building ever built”). But I was more interested in a comment he snuck in about the artwork that will appear in the building’s lobby: a flashing-LED art installation by Ohio-native artist, Jenny Holzer. This had been announced last spring, but Silverstein qualified his comment noting it would be Holzer’s largest permanent installation in the world.

Like the work of many conceptual artists, Holzer’s seems to me more arresting in theory than in fact. She’s best known for a project, ongoing since 1979, called Truisms. They’re just that: truisms, or true statements weakened by repetition, that she reproduces on T-shirts, postcards, signs, billboards and flashing LED signs in public places.

Curiously, Silverstein also made a point of specifying that Holzer’s sayings on the 7 WTC installation will be “real American, motherhood, apple pie.” Although many of her Truisms I’ve read are of Reader’s Digest quotability, an equal number, if not more, are more realistic. Sayings like “Even your family can betray you,” “The desire to reproduce is a death wish” and “The family is living on borrowed time” don’t seem like they’d fit the bill for Silverstein’s lobby, nor would other Truisms of hers that would be particularly appropriate for a building intertwined with 9/11: “War is a purification rite,” “Anger or hate can be a useful motivating force,” “Freedom is a luxury not a necessity.”

I’m hoping the installation really isn’t watered down by jingoism and that Holzer can sneak some truly personal or thoughtworthy phrases into her piece. She could see it as falling in line with other great commissioned art turned subversive, like Diego Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads mural for Rockefeller Center, although I’d wish for Holzer’s artwork to have a happier ending.

During the past few weeks, the James Farley Post Office has been under construction, its facade veiled in a huge off-white drapery.

It’s like a utilitarian version of Christo’s Wrapped Reichstag project from 1995.

I traveled this afternoon to Washington Heights, the neighborhood just south of mine, to check out Trinity Cemetery. It was once part of the farm of that painter of birds, John James Audubon, who’s now buried there. So is the guy who wrote “A Visit From Saint Nicholas,” and on Christmas Eve, carolers visit his grave.

Trinity reminds me of a smaller version of another great garden cemetery from the late 1800’s, Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland. There are steep, heavily wooded hills, crooked stairways of rough-hewn stones, twisty paths, an exquisite collection of both mausoleums and headstones, and a compact urban setting. It’s situated on a steep incline from Riverside Drive up to Amsterdam Avenue between W. 153rd and 155th Streets, with vantage points of New Jersey across the Hudson River. It’s a great time in general to be visiting cemeteries, with the leaves vibrant colors and acorns and buckeyes scattered on the ground, much to the delight of the frisky gray squirrels I saw.

When one thinks of Manhattan, one doesn’t think of farms, but the place was once crawling with them. In the 1920s, they began disappearing, and by 1930, the last had shut down. It would have been located in my neighborhood in the northernmost tip of Manhattan, because, as I’ve learned, the subway system’s creep north at the turn of the century served as a herald for urban development. For a brief point, the farms and the subways would have coexisted and it amuses me to think of emerging from a station in the middle of a field or right next to a nonplussed cow chewing its cud.

There’s still a farmhouse in my neighborhood, the Dyckman Farmhouse, located a few blocks northwest of my apartment, and it’s carefully billed as Manhattan’s sole surviving “Dutch colonial style farmhouse,” but I think it’s safe to say it’s one of the only complete farmhouses still standing here, period.

It was built around 1784 by William Dyckman (who has a main street and two subway stops in my neighborhood named after him) and housed three generations of his family, then was donated to the city and first restored in 1916.

Because I’m an Ohio boy myself, my first question for the volunteer guide inside regarded crops. What kind of farm was this, exactly? Most guide books definitively list the Dyckman Farm’s crops as cherry and apple orchards, but if there’s public-record proof of that, it has yet to be unearthed. While not discounting the romance of a fruit orchard, extant public records suggest the Dyckmans sowed more pedestrian crops of corn and turnips. Whatever the crops, the British burned them down during their occupation from 1776 to 1783.

The farmhouse is downright inviting, snuggled on a half-acre corner on Broadway at West 204th Street, and it’s enough to whisk you away from the not-go-greatness of the urban environs, including the gas station across the street in the front and the brick apartment building visible through the trees in the back. The farmhouse features Dutch doors, white clapboard siding, wooden shingles, and two porches, each running the width of the house’s front and back. I noted the doors to a storm cellar on the one side of the house, and on the south side, there was a summer kitchen; detached from the house, such kitchens were built in pre-air conditioned days to dissipate cooking heat during hot weather.

Inside are relics and furniture from the period. The collection is slim and several rooms remain closed because the place is still under renovations and building upon its collection—it only reopened November 17th after having been closed since 2003 for heavy-duty restorations.

Out back, not exactly serving to downplay the crop uncertainty, is a large black cherry tree. There’s also a garden, a smokehouse, and, incongruously, a small Lincoln Log-style hut, of the sort that Hessians would have camped in during the British occupation.

My friend Tina, who moved to Florida recently, was in town on business, so I stopped by to visit her, appropriately enough for a toy inventor/designer, at the International Toy Center, a two-building complex at 200 Fifth Avenue and 1107 Broadway connected by an enclosed pedestrian bridge on the 9th floor.

The 1107 Broadway segment was built in 1911, and at 16 stories tall, was one of the highest buildings in New York. (This record means little as it was being broken rapidly at the time; the nearby 21-story Flatiron Building, for instance, was completed in 1915.) But the timing coincided with an influx of German toy manufacturers to the U.S. prior to and during World War I, shifting the industry from a European one to an American one by the end of World War II. By then, most toy companies were headquartered in the Madison Square area and New York was the toy capital of the world.

Of course, that’s far from the truth today. Lately, the building has served as temporary showroom and office space for toy manufacturers and suppliers in town for the Toy Industry Association’s trade shows held every October and February at the Javits Center, the International Halloween Show and the American International Toy Fair.

Then, in January, real estate developer The Chetrit Group bought the complex for about $360 million with plans to turn it into apartments starting early next year. (In March, a similar fate hit the 1 Madison Avenue complex located across Madison Square Park from the Toy Center. SL Green Realty Corp. bought it for $918 million and plans to convert its signature 50-story building, topped with a clock tower modeled after the one at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, into luxury condominiums.)

When I checked in with the security guard in the Toy Center lobby, telling him I was there to see Tina in 1510, he squinted at me like I was an idiot. I saw why after I got off the fancy elevator (depicted above): the building now is mostly vacant in preparation for the gutting. I passed bank after bank of deserted offices, the sound of my footsteps echoing off the walls as I walked down the unlit hallway. I saw through some windows that the adjoining Toy Center building was empty, too. Tina had a small, unfurnished office in the back that she was using as a showroom for a new project and with all the packaging and the samples and prototypes of toys strewn about the room, it looked as if a children’s birthday party had exploded.

We headed out to a simple little restaurant with cozy booths, Mustang Sally’s, a block away from the Fashion Institute of Technology, and frequented by Tina during her time there. It was halfway decent, with a standard salad, sandwich and steak menu. I had a burger and fries, which were rather costly. Tina had the salmon and shrimp Caesar salad, which she said was tasty.

Parting at Penn Station, Tina gave me her paperback copy of The Inner Circle by T.C. Boyle. Because she’s on the Long Island Railroad much of her time in New York, she reads a lot and shockingly revealed to me that sometimes, as she finishes reading a page, will tear it from the book, so by the end, all that remains is a limp cover with a jagged paper spine. Less to carry that way, she explained. I was glad such a fate didn’t fall Inner Circle because so far, it’s a good read, even with the shrieking infant on the 1 train and his father who shouted shut up! enough that even the jaded New Yorkers were getting a little shifty in their seats.

Mustang Sally’s

• 324 Seventh Avenue (at W. 28th Street)
• (212) 695-3806
• Meal 28 of 52: Mustang Burger ($9.95) with sautéed mushrooms ($1.50 extra), fries ($3.95) and a Diet Coke ($2.75).

For my second day of Open House New York, I decided to hit the cemeteries in the East Village. Cemeteries in Manhattan? There used to be many—Houston Street was once lined with them, I’m told. But as the city sprawled, many plots were relocated and by the nineteenth century, legislation forbade further cemetery development in Manhattan.

But a small handful of the originals survive and, surprisingly, are still active, like the New York Marble Cemetery. Located on Second Avenue between E. 2nd and E. 3rd Streets, it’s billed as “the first non-sectarian burial place in New York City open to the public.”¹

If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was a courtyard. There’s a handsome iron gate set at the entrance and high mortar-and-stone walls boxing in the plot, city buildings just beyond looming on all sides. It’s a rectangular, grassy half-acre featuring shrubbery, trees and that vaguely surreal air of rural environments in urban settings. When I walked in, some guy was throwing a twig around, playing fetch with his dog.

The first burial in the cemetery was in 1830 and, to date, it contains the remains of 2,060 people, although the most recent burial was in 1937. But if you can prove you’re a descendant of any of the dead, you can be buried there, too. Ever the city of real estate, in order to save space and speed decay, you can’t be interred in any earthly container, whether it’s a ceramic urn or a coffin. To further conserve, there are no headstones. Instead, imbedded in the walls framing the cemetery are blocks of marble engraved with the family name and dates of death. Time and the environment haven’t been kind to these stone plaques, which now resemble limestone, the carved surfaces like the face of a worn penny.

Directly in front of each plaque and ten feet underground, the bodies are burried. They’re not interred in catacombs, as I had thought, but sealed in marble vaults the size of small rooms that can only be accessed by a gravedigger.

The marble cemeteries had fallen into disuse as recently as five years ago, overgrown with weeds and littered with garbage, and the surrounding walls had caved in spots. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission bestowed landmark status and therefore protection from beady-eyed real estate developers and other such vandals. But the designation also imposed new challenges, according to the guides who were on-hand to answer our questions. (Most-asked question: “Are people buried in the walls?”) Everything must be approved and done in a very specific way. One of the collapsed walls, for example, had to be rebuilt the “right way,” by an old-world mason, who was required to consult a “before” photo of the wall and put every stone back where it originally was.

The savvy cemetery personnel have devised clever ways to generate additional cash to fund this meticulous and costly upkeep. They recently rented out the cemetery for a wedding ceremony and they’re also letting people throw cocktail receptions and community theater events there. The only restrictions are nothing at night (there’s no electricity) and nothing on Halloween (they don’t want to project “that kind of image”).

¹ Confusingly, the New York Marble Cemetery has a “sister” cemetery, located a block away on E. 2nd Street between First and Second Avenues, called the New York City Marble Cemetery, but the two don’t seem to be associated officially. The New York City Marble Cemetery’s claim to fame is that President James Monroe was buried there from 1831 until 1857, when his home state of Virginia got bitter and had the body dug up and returned. [back]

Once upon a time a little lighthouse was built on a sharp point of the shore by the Hudson River. It was round and fat and red. It was fat and red and jolly. And it was very, very proud. Behind it lay New York City where the people lived....

Hildegarde H. Swift, The Little Red Lighthouse and the Big Grey Bridge, (1942)

Like last year, I was determined to take advantage of Open House New York, which for one weekend a year offers free tours of New York’s monuments, museums, private residences, churches and other landmark and historically significant structures.

Unlike last year when the weather was gorgeous, it was cold and incessantly rainy all weekend. But I had already decided earlier in the week where I wanted to go for the Open House, so I packed my provisions and set out for the Little Red Lighthouse, taking the A train up to W. 181st Street to stop by Fort Washington Park.

Known officially as the Jeffrey’s Hook Lighthouse, the vibrant red beacon was erected in 1880, but it wasn’t until 1921 that it was moved to its current location and shone its light to prevent freighters from dashing against the shore.

When the George Washington Bridge was completed in 1931, it took over lighting the way for the Hudson River’s mariners. Convinced the bridge was a worthy substitute, the Coast Guard deactivated the lowly lighthouse in 1947 and was ready to dismantle and sell it until a public campaign intervened. At the heart of the efforts was Hildegarde H. Swift’s children’s book, The Little Red Lighthouse and the Big Grey Bridge, which I’m told native New Yorkers of a certain age have a strong memory of and affinity for.

Thanks to the public outcry, the Little Red Lighthouse is still lit and is now the only one left in Manhattan. In the fall, a festival features tours of the light, a reading of the book, photo displays and food.

Seeing it for the first time, I was struck by how incongruous it is to see such a squat little thing sitting under the massive aluminum-colored cable-and-steel-beam bridge.

Through the front door, a tightly winding iron staircase elevates you to a landing where you can peer through the lighthouse’s portals. You can then take a very steep ladder through the ceiling, very nearly cracking your head on something blunt and rust-colored, to the tip where the light is kept. Crouching through a square hatch in the side, you emerge onto the narrow balcony at the top. The view wouldn’t be described as spectacular, as the lighthouse is probably only about 25 feet high, but it’s a strange and wondrous vantage point nonetheless.

On my way to work, I pass the New Yorker, the sprawling brown-brick Art Deco hotel that sits regally on Eighth Avenue between W. 34th and 35th Streets. It’s about 40 stories tall and takes up the whole western half of the block, so to depict the building and its iconic signage, I had to stand way over by Madison Square Garden to take this photo.

The New Yorker has a storied history as one of the city’s largest and tallest hotels when it was built in 1930, with 2,500 rooms, the nation’s biggest private power plant and, according to the AIA Guide to New York City, boasted during its heyday 92 “telephone girls” at the 41st-floor switchboards and a 42-chair barber shop with 20 manicurists. The ballroom is famously grand, hosting Benny Goodman, Woody Herman and the Dorsey Brothers back in the day, and filmed by Woody Allen for scenes in Radio Days and Bullets Over Broadway.

Majesty aside, the hotel’s newest news can be found high on its backside, where its signature signage began lacking letters recently.

In the current issue of Time Out New York, Katherine Pushkar explains that the hotel is replacing the sign, letter by letter, with one that will shine red at night, starting in mid-November. Hotel spokesperson Tom McCaffery claims, “It’ll blind people in New Jersey,” and having taken the Circle Line boat tour last summer, I can report that even unlit, the sign is fully visible from the Hudson River, despite the density of the skyline.

Posted in 1941, the original sign shone red from 1945 until the hotel fell on hard times in the late ’60s and closed in 1972. Four years later, Sun Myung Moon’s World Unification Church snapped up the building for worship purposes, but in 1994 reverted part of it to a hotel. Run by Ramada, it’s now promoted as a low-cost, centrally located place for tourists to stay.

Happy 75th birthday New Yorker! This new sign will be the candles on your cake.

The building on Fifth Avenue that houses my dentist’s office has some cool old-style faceplates for the elevator buttons.

There’s a reason great scenes in New York-based movies take place in the Main Concourse of Grand Central, instead of that terminal’s Midtown brother, Penn Station—Grand Central is beautiful. Hundreds of bustling commuters there suddenly start waltzing in The Fisher King, while in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a couple in love rushes through the concourse as people in the crowd around them disappear one by one.

Meanwhile, Penn is a workhorse, serving 500,000 commuters daily as the busiest public transport station in America. It’s also confusing and ugly, inside and out. I should know; I’m in it daily to get to and from work. But the original Penn Station, built in 1910, was as grand, if not grander than Grand Central. Look at these beautiful gelatin silver contact prints taken circa 1935 by Berenice Abbott and you will agree. Click each one to view a large version in a separate pop-up window.

Foremost, you’ll notice the massive steel uprights, with lighter steel tracery, arches and vaults above. A close second are the marvelous windows and skylights. None of that is present in the current Penn Station. Not even close. If ever there was a station deserving the stereotype of an underground pit packed with dreary crowds blinking under harsh florescent lighting, it’s Penn. “One entered the city like a god,” architectural historian Vincent J. Scully wrote of the station. “One scuttles in now like a rat.” Governor Pataki recently characterized Penn as “horribly inadequate,” while others have referred to it as “a bland hub” and “a large basement.” I’d say the structure it most closely resembles is a parking garage, with all the wamth and character that implies.

So what happened? Blind civic ambition and a misguided attempt at renewal.

In 1963, the station building, which spanned two full city blocks from W. 34th to W. 32nd Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, was demolished to make way for the Penn Plaza office skyscraper and Madison Square Garden.

Only now is the city moving forward to right this wrong. Just west of the Garden sits the James A. Farley Post Office, New York’s largest, and designed by the same architects, at the same time and in the same style as the original Penn Station. On Monday, after about 10 years of financial and logistical bickering, the state named the development team that will combine half of the post office and an improved version of the current station into a new Penn Station, its design mirroring the old. The new version, for instance, will feature tall, steel arches atop which will rest a huge, lightweight skylight. The front of the post office, boasting a grand staircase and a long row of 53-foot-high Corinthian columns, will serve as the new station’s main entrance.

It’s expected to be completed by 2010 at an estimated cost of $930 million, serving as the new catalyst for West Side redevelopment now that the $2.2 billion plan for the Jets Stadium has been squashed. My hope is that the station will bring back some of the area’s architectural beauty.

On the subway to work this morning, I read an article in amNewYork about the ongoing renovations at The Strand, the best bookstore in New York City, and therefore the world.

If you haven’t been there in the past year, you’d be surprised at the sudden changes, which I believe began without fanfare sometime late last year.

First, they’ve completely replaced the stairway between the ground floor and the basement, and added an elevator to bring the building up to code. The stairway’s now a standard wide-width, with sturdy handrails and steps covered with non-slip rubberized grips. For those who’ve never had the treat, I should explain that the old staircase at the Strand was like one out of a horror movie, creaky and twisty, and you would wonder whether you’d make it back up alive. Only one person could descend or ascend at a time, which lead to games of “chicken” at the halfway-point landing. The only way the old staircase could have been less accessible to the handicapped or elderly would have been to coat the steps with Crisco.

Also new is a loft area on the ground floor. The Strand is in an old building of very high ceilings, typical for that part of town and beautiful to behold, but when you get down to it, a waste of space, especially in a bookstore. Well, now, near the new elevator (which itself is right by the new stairs), is a mini treehouse-like loft that houses books of some genre I must not be interested in, because I’ve never been up there.

According to the amNewYork article, the Strand’s owners are in the process of adding even more sale space (although the author doesn’t specify how or where), as well as air conditioning for the ground floor. In the old Strand, on a summer day like today—86 degrees with 80%-90% humidity—the place would heat up like a Nazi crematorium, only not quite as comfortable. I don’t know how the old or the obese survive in there on a day like today. For me, and perhaps others, the lack of air conditioning was an invaluable sales tool for the store. After a sweaty trek throughout the ground floor, I’d stumble down the rickety stairs because there’s a drinking fountain down there and it was a good 20 degrees cooler in the basement, even though it was also teeming with review copies of books no one wants and the occasional cockroach. I’d spend enough time recouperating down there that I’d end up buying stuff I wouldn’t have otherwise.

I’m glad to have experienced the Strand in “before” mode, unlike many other landmarks old-time New Yorkers like to gripe about, like Times Square and the Chelsea Piers. It sounds as if the place will still contain much of its grubby, cut-rate, crowded, largely unorganized charm, so I can’t complain much about the renovations. In fact, I think the place will become even more popular because of them.

A year ago this weekend, I stood several stories beneath the streets of lower Manhattan, in an enormous pit where the World Trade Center once stood, as the cornerstone was lowered for the building that would take its place, the Freedom Tower. It was hot and sunny and before the ceremony began, there were restless children playing and scampering around on the hard-packed dirt floor. I tried but failed to grasp the fact that some 2,700 people had died on the spot.

Today, city officials unveiled the revised plans for the Freedom Tower. The original design, distinctive in its architecture, was rejected last month because of its vulnerability to attack. News stories this afternoon reported that the new version of the skyscraper will be “straighter and more conventional,” set further back from the street and set atop a three-foot-thick concrete and metal base designed specifically to repel a truck bomb attack.

In February 1993, a truck bomb went off in a parking garage beneath the World Trade Center. Six people died and more than a thousand were injured. In hindsight, The 9/11 Commission Report noted, “although the bombing heightened awareness of a new terrorist danger” in the U.S., there remained a “widespread underestimation of the threat.”

I have two opposing thoughts. One is that we are resistant to change only until catastrophe of a certain magnitude. We live under a comfortable assumption of safety and well-being that’s nearly unshakeable. When destruction does occur, our memories of it are short.

My other thought seems supremely cynical but I believe it to be true. It was rekindled during Bush’s re-election campaign when he pledged to keep Americans safe from terror. No, he can’t. And no one can. It’s impossible to foresee; the methods and means and targets and the number of countries and groups in the world that aren’t so keen on America are far too great a number to possibly patrol.

That three-foot-thick base will look impressive and while we’re admiring it, someone somewhere will be cooking up some plans involving dirty bombs or biohazards or planes again or public transportation.

After I moved to New York, the book I wished I hadn’t read, particularly as I rode the subway to work every weekday, was Underground, novelist Haruki Murakami’s oral history of the sarin gassing in the Tokyo subway system in 1995. A dozen people died and thousands were injured. It was surprisingly easy to enact and there isn’t anything practical we could do to prevent something similar from happening here.

What to do? Press on. I’ll take the easy way out of the corner I’ve painted myself into by quoting from a story I’ve mentioned here before—Gene Weingarten’s exceptional Washington Post article from last summer, “Fear Itself: Learning to Live in the Age of Terrorism.”

You are not afraid of terrorism, really. You have weighed the facts and have concluded, rationally, that even if terrorists strike again in this country, the chances are negligible that you or anyone you know will be killed or injured. You feel no special tension when you place your seat tray in the upright position. You are old enough to have lived through other supposedly apocalyptic times, or you've surely heard about them—most famously, the silly spectacle of 1950s-era schoolkids giggling under their desks in anticipation of The Big One.

The recent warnings about terrorism during the election campaign have ratcheted up your concerns a little, but so what? You are going on with your life not as an act of defiance so much as a celebration of rationality. You will be fine.

Since seeing it last summer, I’ve wondered about the history behind the parachute jump tower at Coney Island. Sure enough, in today’s City Section, the New York Times printed a brief history of the landmark in an article by Jake Mooney entitled “Famed for What’s Up Above, Fixing What’s Down Below.”

The 262-foot-tall tower, originally designed to train military paratroopers, opened as a ride at the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens. After the fair, the owners of Steeplechase Park bought it for $150,000 and moved it to Coney Island. The park shut down in 1964, and the parachute jump stood unused on an increasingly desolate stretch of land. The Landmarks Preservation Commission’s decision to designate the tower a landmark in 1977 was overturned, but the status was restored in 1989, and it stuck.

The city’s Economic Development Corporation completed a $5 million restoration of the tower in 2003 and last week, the Coney Island Development Corporation announced a winning design for the “Parachute Pavilion,” a shopping and visitor center that would be located under the jump, which won’t be reopened as a ride. I have mixed feelings about this project, which is a small part in the much larger effort to revitalize Coney Island as a tourist attraction. The place surely is dumpy and worn, but therein lies its seedy charm. Scrubbing it down and gussying it up for the tourists will only stamp out the spookyness and magic.

Today’s New York Times has an article about the newest plans for the High Line, the 1.5-mile-long elevated train tracks that run from the Meatpacking District to Chelsea. For those who prefer the Line in its current unadulterated state (like Dana and I, who visited last September), the article saddens. They plan to add lighting, seating, video cameras for security, eight-foot walls where the line passes over crosswalks, and access points that likely don’t involve skulking around a fenced-in tractor-trailer parking lot, which is how you get up there at present.

And what of keeping the Line transcendent from the city’s blare and clutter? Therein lie some merry contradictions; on one hand, as one of the architects says:

“We’re trying to keep this as uncommercialized as possible, to keep it simple and natural and not to overwhelm it.”

But on the other hand:

The designers are beginning to consider how the High Line will pass through or abut various new buildings, including a 15-story André Balazs hotel [....] and a building designed by Frank Gehry[...].

and:

[One access point] is to feature a large glass-encased area that may be used for a restaurant directly underneath the High Line.

Oops! Good luck with that uncommercialization, guys.

Of course, with the ever-more-likely Jets stadium and convention center, the Far West Side will never be the same. And I didn’t think I had lived here long enough to be one of those crusty locals that grumbles about how the city ain’t what it used to be.

Following up on a post from last month in which I compared a current photo of my apartment building with one taken in 1910, I’ve put together another then-and-now duo from my neighborhood. In a pop-up window, you can view both photos side-by-side.

If you head two blocks east from my apartment building, then turn around, you’ll get the view in these photos. The original shot, from the New York City Apartment Building Living, 1880s-1910s gallery in the New York Public Library’s online collection, depicts the Euclid Hall apartment complex in 1910, 10 years after its construction. Each of the dozen apartments, two of which comprised the second through seventh floors of the building, had a parlor, library, dining room, a hallway, at least one bathroom, a kitchen, a servants’ room and from three to six other rooms.

Euclid Hall now houses 292 low-income, single-room apartments and serves as our neighborhood’s voting location. You’ll notice the ground floor has been converted to various shops, including Broadway Farm, an overpriced grocery that is nonetheless appealing because it’s the only area grocer open 24/7. Other shops in this stretch include a florist; a Ray’s Pizza that’s open very late and favored by Andie and I for a post-drinking slice; a dry cleaner; a framing shop that was just closed to make way for a Jamba Juice; a Tasti D·Lite, which sells a popular frozen-yogurtlike dessert; and an Aldo where Andie has found many a footwear bargain. Just around the corner on West 85th (not quite visible in these photos) is our laundromat.

I’m not sure how New Yorkers made do in those days without streetlights or signs, but I imagine Broadway wasn’t as busy then as it is now. At least for a long stretch on the Upper West Side, Broadway remains a two-way road divided by a landscaped median strip, as shown in the photos.

Browsing the New York City Apartment Building Living, 1880s-1910s gallery in the New York Public Library’s excellent online collection, I was surprised to find a photo depicting my apartment building.

Inspired by New York Changing (1997-2001), a series in which Douglas Levere rephotographed shots from Changing New York, a series taken by Ohio-born WPA photographer Berenice Abbott from 1935 to 1938, I decided to recreate the photo of my building with my digital camera. In a pop-up window, you can view both photos side-by-side. (Geometry and spatial relations are not my strong suit, so was a pain for me to get the angles in the photos to even somewhat line up.)

Taken in 1910, the original photo’s chief subject is The Lancashire, the apartment building just west of my own (which you can see squeezed into the right-hand side of both photos). You’ll notice not much has changed externally in 95 years. On-street parking is slightly different—I’m amused that the lower-left hand corner of the older photo shows what appears to be a wagon (horse-drawn?) while the newer photo shows an SUV-ish vehicle. You’ll also note the removal of the adornment that used to hang the length of The Lancashire’s roof. The World’s New York Apartment House Album, the book in which the original photo was published, includes a description of the building and its apartments:

The Lancashire

353 West 85th Street

An absolutely fireproof building of the highest class, offering to people of discrimination a home with every modern convenience. The location being the most convenient and select residential section of the city.

The building is eight stories high and of thoroughly fireproof construction, with concrete sound-proof floors and partitions, solid porcelain fixtures throughout, including kitchen. The lighting fixtures are of an original and exclusive design, with ample outlets permitting any desired effect in lighting.

The suites are trimmed in hardwood throughout, beamed dining room ceilings, wainscoting paneling, Dutch shelf mould. The parlors are of mahogany and white enamel, bedrooms and bathrooms being finished in white enamel or hardwood. Parquet floors in every room, including private halls and chambers.

Vacuum cleaner: A permanent efficient plant for which there is no extra charge.

Each apartment has wall safes and long distance telephone connection.

Men Servants’ Quarters: Special arrangements for men servants in upper story of building.

Apartments comprise seven and eight rooms and two baths.

The New York City Apartment Building Living gallery contains more nearly century-old photos taken in my neighborhood and in the near future, I hope to post additional then-and-now shots.

I finally got around to seeing the new-and-improved Museum of Modern Art today, with my friend Sherry. Although I purchased a membership back in mid December, I’ve received neither my card nor the list of specific benefits I was promised, so I didn’t know what to expect. A shame, really, because one of the benefits of membership is bypassing the line of 500 tourists patiently waiting to photograph The Starry Night and talk loudly about how small The Persistence Of Memory is.

So we waited in line in the gray cold for 20 minutes, only to find out when we got inside that we actually needed to go to “that desk over there,” where we waited in line to discover that, no, we wanted that other desk, where we were curtly informed that my “temporary membership card,” otherwise known as a grungy folded-up receipt in my wallet from mid-December, “expired” today—whatever the hell that meant, seeing as I’m pretty sure when I forked over a stack of greenbacks to become a member for a year, that meant I’d actually be a member for a year.

Anyway, what it boiled down to was, Sherry got in for a mere $5 as my guest, and I got in free, a nice savings over the $40 it would have normally cost.

The newly expanded building really is a site to behold. Yoshio Taniguchi, who designed the renovation and expansion as his first project outside of Japan, is said to have told the board of MoMA in 1997: “Give me money, and I’ll build you good architecture. Give me more money, and I’ll make the architecture disappear.” Taniguchi won the design competition and his version of the museum opened on November 20, 2004.

You can see what he’s talking about the moment you enter any of the galleries. The art takes center stage; there’s no architectural detail competing for your attention. The galleries have extra-high ceilings, light wood-paneled floors, white walls, and many galleries are subtly lit and opened up by sheer floor-to-ceiling windows made of tinted glass. You can look out and see the buildings of W. 53rd and W. 54th Streets at eye-level, eavesdropping on the interiors of apartments that you’re not likely to afford in this lifetime. Occasionally, in halls and especially in the stairwells, which, like the galleries, are also wide, open and sumptuous, there are large rectangular portals in the walls, where you can see people walking in other galleries or up other flights of stairs.

The collection itself, of course, is top drawer, and in two hours, we only managed to check out a small fraction of it. What we saw included the Picasso & Friends gallery, the Brancusi sculptures, most of the Post-Impressionistic stuff, and the Mondrian section, which Sherry, who works in graphic design, finds inspirational. In a few rooms, we played a game of carefully checking out every painting, then explaining which was our favorite. Whichever room it was, in one room, Sherry’s favorite was Le Château Noir by Paul Cézanne, for the color and the asymmetry, while mine was La Bohémienne Endormie by Henri Rousseau, for the mysticism and the narrative. The defense of our selections was more detailed than that, but you get the idea.

Tired, hungry and unable to find the exit, yet lulled into a warm sense of well-being by the architecture (companies that build obnoxious megamalls would be wise to retain Taniguchi), we eventually escaped and, disappointed by the neighborhood brunch options, went uptown to that old reliable, the French Roast. Sherry got the French toast and I got the Belgian waffle with fruit, and we discussed the sort of things people discuss whilst enjoying brunch.

Despite the wonderfully cool and sunny weekend weather, quite a few New Yorkers chose to spend the day indoors for the second annual Open House New York. One hundred monuments, churches, private residences, museums and other landmarks throughout the five boroughs were open for free tours, conducted variously by park rangers, architects, historians and other experts.

I wish I would have known about this event earlier because tours of the more popular locales, such as Governors Island and the Waldorf-Astoria, required pre-registration. Also, looking at the schedule, it becomes obvious advance planning and plotting is necessary, because the locations are not only scattered all across the city, but only open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Because it’s only a few blocks north of my apartment, I went and checked out the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, a Grecian temple-like tribute to Civil War veterans that overlooks Riverside Park and the Hudson River beyond. It’s only ever open once a year, in part because of a lack of funding; the park ranger/tour guide inside pointed out the water collected on the marble floor from leaks in the dome that they can’t afford to patch. A sad end for a monument that for years served as the endpoint of the City’s annual Memorial Day parade.

Then I took the subway up to W. 168th St. and walked through the barrio over to W. 172nd and Amsterdam to view the High Bridge Water Tower, a stone citadel overlooking the Harlem River, with panoramic views of Upper Manhattan and the Bronx. It’s only open for a handful of days each year. Tim Burton would really dig this place. Inside, wood plank floors and Neo-Gothic wrought iron railings spiral up. Built in 1872, it used to be part of some sort of water pressure equalizing system, the inner workings of which are lost on me.

I’ve posted a new photo gallery for the trip Dana and I took on September 6 to one of New York’s endangered treasures, the High Line. It’s a disused elevated railway, overrun with vegetation and non-pigeon bird life, that passes through some beautiful industrial decay on the far West Side.

The entrance lies in a tractor trailer parking lot on W. 33rd St. between 11th and 12th avenues, where the tracks come down to grade. The portion of the line still standing is 1.5 miles long and once you’ve reached the end, where it suddenly drops off near Washington St. and Little W. 12th in the Meatpacking District, you have turn around and walk back to the W. 33rd entrance to exit. But it’s worth it. It’s surreal to be literally and figuratively elevated above the city to such wilderness; the High Line is very much New York’s Secret Garden.

What’s more public are the developers that have been eyeing the land on which the High Line stands. In a front-page article of today’s New York Times Metro Section, the far West Side is called “the last frontier” of Manhattan real estate, with the Bloomberg administration labeling it “a blighted wasteland ready for radical transformation.” The aerial photo accompanying the article, taken from a helicopter over the Hudson, even depicts the High Line amid the cityscape, as if to imply its days are numbered.

The Line aside, that part of town is a wasteland ripe for development. As a pre-emptive strike, Friends of the High Line has been lobbying to convert the Line to a pedestrian walkway in lieu of its demolition. Such conversions have had success in other cities, the Friends argue. But the stumbling block of “best use” and the dozens of squabbling property owners in the shadow of the Line would seem to cloud such a vision. And as much as I admire the Friends’ attempt to convert the structure, it really needs to be experienced as it is now, in its state of grace, before it either gets knocked down or scrubbed down, ending up like Times Square or the Chelsea Piers. Catch it while you can.

Update: Design Observer reported in mid-August that a pair of architects have won a competition to redesign the Line, but there are no details as to whether this means the renovation is a done deal. I notice a conspicuous lack of vegetation in their cheesily futuristic rendering.