01. OUR MEN IN HAVANA: Buildings by New York architects in Havana include the central station by Kenneth Murchison, shown in 1913.

Havana’s central station, shown about 1913, was designed by Kenneth Murchison, who did the Erie-Lackawanna Terminal in Hoboken, and various buildings around New York.

02. Holy Trinity Church, now demolished, was designed in 1905 by Bertram Goodhue, the architect of St. Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue and West 53rd Street. The image is from “Great Houses of Havana,” by Hermes Mallea.

03. The Havana branch of the National City Bank of New York is by Walker & Gillette, who designed the Fuller Building at Madison and East 57th Street. It was built in 1925 of coquina, a rough, shell-studded rock.

04. The Hotel Sevilla-Biltmore with its 1924 multistoried addition. The hotel was made over by Schultze & Weaver, who did the Waldorf-Astoria.

05. The Roof Garden of the Sevilla-Biltmore. The image is from “Hotel Sevilla-Biltmore, Habana, Cuba,” published in 1924.

06. A vintage postcard view shows the 1914 mansion of the Marqueses de Avilés, left, in the Vedado section of Havana. Designed by Carrère & Hastings, it is much more splendid than their comparable Frick Mansion in New York.

07. The 1918 pool house at the residence of Pablo González de Mendoza in the Vedado is by John H. Duncan, the designer of Grant’s Tomb.

08. The 1930 Hotel Nacional as it looks today. It was designed by McKim, Mead & White.

09. The Bank of Nova Scotia, shown in 1916, is by Arthur Lobo, born in the West Indies and trained at Columbia. He designed the apartment house at the southeast corner of West End Avenue and West 96th Street.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Cuban capital was spectacularly rich, Newport-rich, with a large cadre of highly trained local designers. In 1902 The Real Estate Record and Guide gave some idea of the sophisticated level of regulation; cornices, balconies, ornament and even colors required approval, and the architect had to present an elevation drawing of the entire block, to make sure the house was aesthetically agreeable.

One of the earliest buildings by a New York architect was Bertram Goodhue’s Episcopal cathedral, designed in 1905 and architecturally optimistic on a very Roman Catholic island. Goodhue, a recognized master of ecclesiastical architecture, was firmly a Gothicist, but for Havana developed a Churrigueresque design, a flowery version of the Spanish colonial. Where it stood is unclear, but it is gone now.

The oldest section of the city, Old Havana, fronts on the Bay of Havana, with narrow, almost medieval streets. But in the early 20th century the section around Obispo and O’Reilly Streets was home to so much bank construction it was nicknamed “little Wall Street.” In 1913, Arthur Lobo, born in the West Indies and trained at Columbia, worked out a lush neo-Classical facade for the Bank of Nova Scotia at O’Reilly and Cuba Streets. Shoehorned into a tight intersection, Lobo’s bank rounds the corner, making a sheltered half-circle vestibule of double height.

Copyright Christopher Gray, NYT.

The white snow, the goodwill and gemuetlichkeit, the iceskating, parades and lights make it the best place for an adult or child.

Following are some architectural expressions of that-

The Empire State Building has many different color schemes thru the year, but Christmas is instantly recognizable.

Midtown follies

Snow descends on to Times Square

The Rockefeller Center, with its tree and ice-skating, is the epicenter of Christmas in New York.

Fifth Avenue.

Radio City Music Hall

The tree outside the Stock Exchange

Grand Army Plaza

Merry Christmas from New York

The Port Authority has yet to announce a permanent home for the battered 22.5 ton sculpture “The Sphere,” the iconic memorial to the tragedy of Sept. 11 that now resides in Battery Park. But renderings prepared for a possible presentation, obtained by the Trib, show the Authority’s concept of how the sculpture might look in the future Liberty Park—near the World Trade Center site but not on it.

The renderings show two optional locations for “The Sphere” on the elevated park, to be constructed above the Vehicle Security Center on Liberty Street. Acording to one image, the sphere would be visible from the Sept. 11 Memorial Plaza across the street.

Whether the renderings will become part of a formal presentation to the community is unclear. A Port Authority spokesman declined to comment to the Trib on its plans for the sculpture. “We are in ongoing discussions with family members about the placement of the Sphere,” Authority spokesman Steve Coleman said in an email statement. A spokesman for the National Sept. 11 Memorial & Museum responded with a similar statement.

Fritz Koenig’s “The Sphere,” which has stood in Battery Park since March 2002, must be moved by next summer to make way for construction. No one involved with the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site—not the Port Authority, the National Sept. 11 Memorial & Museum nor Silverstein Properties—has expressed interest in returning the sculpture to the World Trade Center site, its home for 30 years.

But some victims’ family members continue to advocate for bringing it back to what they see as its rightful place. Michael Burke, the brother of a firefighter killed on Sept. 11 who leads that movement, said he has gathered 7,700 supporters in an online petition.

“It survived the terrorist strike, the terrorist attack upon civilization and humanity and world peace. And now we are moving it somewhere else, because somehow it disturbs the integrity of the Memorial design,” said Burke, who was shown the renderings by the Port Authority and rejects Liberty Park as a site for the sculpture. “Well, what does that tell us about the Memorial design?”

According to its renderings, the Authority appears to be choosing between two locations within the new park. The “West Side” option shows the brass-and-steel sphere near the Liberty Street bridge. The “Center” option places it closer to the site of what will be the rebuilt St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church. Though a rendering indicates it can be seen from the Memorial plaza, Burke said it will hardly be noticed from there.

“If it is visible, it sure as hell won’t be prominent,” he said. “It will be mildly noticable, perhaps, when the trees are bare. But no one is going to notice it.”

Not having received a presentation by the Port Authority, Community Board 1 has yet to weigh in on where “The Sphere” should go. Catherine McVay Hughes, chair of the board’s World Trade Center Redevelopment Committee, said she is not yet taking sides in the controversy but calls the artwork a significant reminder of what happened at the World Trade Center. “It’s the largest unvarnished artifact that will be open to the public,” Hughes said. “It’s important that people can see it.”

Copyright © 2011 The Tribeca Trib.

BY CARL GLASSMAN, Tribeca Trib, December 20, 2011
————–

History

The Sphere is a large metallic sculpture by German sculptor Fritz Koenig, currently displayed in Battery Park, New York City, that once stood in the middle of Austin J. Tobin Plaza, the area between the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan. After being recovered from the rubble of the Twin Towers after the September 11, 2001, attacks, the artwork faced an uncertain fate, and it was dismantled into its components. Although it remained structurally intact, it had been visibly damaged by debris from the airliners that were crashed into the buildings and from the collapsing skyscrapers themselves.

Six months after the attacks, following a documentary film about the sculpture, it was relocated to Battery Park on a temporary basis—without any repairs—and formally rededicated with an eternal flame as a memorial to the victims of 9/11. It has become a major tourist attraction, due partly to the fact that it survived the attacks with only dents and holes.

The Dutch designers of a pair of South Korean skyscrapers were facing criticism after claims the buildings look like the burning World Trade Center. Picture: Courtesy of MVRDV

A SOUTH Korean developer says it will not alter the design of a twin-tower project despite complaints in the United States that it mimics the explosions at New York’s World Trade Centre in 2001.

The towers, one with 54 floors and the other with 60, are designed by Dutch architects MVRDV and will be built at the entrance to Seoul’s redeveloped Yongsan business district by 2016.

The towers will be connected midway up by a cloud-shaped bridging section that will house amenities including sky lounges, a swimming pool and restaurants.

But families of victims of the 9/11 attacks see a marked resemblance between the project known as The Cloud and the clouds of debris that billowed from the World Trade Centre after hijacked airliners ploughed into the towers.

“Allegations that it [the design] was inspired by the 9/11 attacks are groundless,” said White Paik, spokesman for the Yongsan Development Corporation.

“There will be no revision or change in our project,” he said, adding that construction would begin in January 2013 as scheduled.

MVRDV said it “regrets deeply” any painful connotations.

“It was not our intention to create an image resembling the attacks nor did we see the resemblance during the design process,” it said in a statement on its website.

“We sincerely apologise to anyone whose feelings we have hurt,” it added.

Jim Riches, a retired New York deputy fire chief whose son was killed on 9/11, said he did not believe the architects.

“It looks just like the towers imploding,” the New York Daily News quoted him as saying. “I think they’re trying to sensationalise it. It’s a cheap way to get publicity.”

Source- http://www.news.com.au/world/skyscraper-design-looks-like-twin-towers-collapsing/story-e6frfkyi-1226220540181

Sanford I. Weill, the former chairman and chief executive of Citigroup Inc., has put one of the most celebrated postwar penthouses in Manhattan on the market for $88 million, saying that at a difficult period in the country’s history, it is “a pretty good time” for wealthy Americans “to be quiet.”

A photo of the interior of the Weills’ penthouse (Cary Horowitz)

Sanford and Joan Weill (Leandro Justen/PatrickMcMullan)

He said he intends to donate to charity the proceeds from the sale of the largest apartment in the one of the most sought-after new condominium developments in New York, a huge penthouse at 15 Central Park West.

After the sale, Mr. Weill and his wife, Joan, plan to move from the full-floor penthouse with a terrace and garden that wraps around three sides to a much smaller apartment they own on the sixth floor of the building.

“We don’t need as big an apartment as we did,” Mr. Weill said. “We are downsizing a little bit.”

If the sale of the penthouse closes for anything near that price, it would set a record for the sale of a Manhattan apartment.

The limestone building, which was designed by Robert A.M. Stern and developed by Arthur and William Lie Zeckendorf, was designed to echo the spacious apartment layout and traditional look of the grand prewar buildings that line Fifth Avenue and Central Park West but with up-to-date details.

When it opened in 2007, it immediately attracted a following among titans of finance and celebrities, including Mr. Weill and Lloyd Blankfein, Sting and Denzel Washington.

Given the soaring resale prices for some high-floor apartments at the building, brokers said a record-breaking sale is possible for Mr. Weill’s apartment despite the gloomy economic picture. Mr. Weill said New York remains a powerful draw for international buyers.

“It is a justifiable price based on what has been achieved in the building,” said Hall F. Willkie, president of Brown Harris Stevens, which is listing the penthouse.

The entrance to 15 Central Park West (Ramin Talaie for The Wall Street Journal)

The Weills paid $43.7 million for the penthouse in August 2007, or more than $6,400 per square foot, the highest-paid price per square foot at the time. The highest sale price in city property records also dates back to 2007, when the developer Harry Maclowe combined a group of seventh-floor apartments at the Plaza Hotel and paid $51.1 million.

Mr. Weill said he invited a Wall Street Journal reporter to his office on the 46th floor of the General Motors Building on Fifth Avenue—a vantage point from where he could see someone standing on his balcony across the park—to make several points.

He said he wanted it known that he was remaining true to his roots in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and wasn’t abandoning New York City.

“We are not leaving the city and giving up the wonderful opportunity to be New York City residents and New York City taxpayers,” he said. “New York has been very good to us.”

He also said he wanted to make it clear that “the proceeds of what we get will go to what we can give away to try to help make the world a better place.”

There are two separate buildings at 15 Central Park West. Mr. Weill’s apartment is on the top floor of a 20-story building closest to Central Park, with vivid views above the line of treetops in Central Park. The second building, closer to Broadway, is 43 stories high, with 360-degree views at the top.

The Weills’ 6,744-square-foot penthouse has ceilings as high as 12½ feet with soaring windows, sculpted moldings and two fireplaces. Floor plans show 19 glass doors opening onto a 2,077-square-foot terrace.

The floor plan

Mr. Weill, the chairman of the board of Carnegie Hall, said he has held parties for scores of guests in his 33-foot-wide living room, with the concert pianist Lang Lang performing.

There is an unusual, oval-shaped master bedroom, according to the listing by Kyle Blackmon of Brown Harris Stevens. Mr. Weill said he had asked Mr. Stern to redesign what had been a rectangular bedroom so that both he and his wife could wake up in bed with an unobstructed view of the sun rising over Central Park in the morning.

Jonathan Miller, an appraiser and president of Miller Samuel Inc., said 15 Central Park West has defied expectations ever since it went on the market. “It is in many ways its own market,” he said. “There is no pattern. I wouldn’t be surprised if it set a per-square-foot record.”

Mr. Weill mentioned four separate groups he and his wife support avidly: Carnegie Hall, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the Weill Cornell Medical College, and the National Academy Foundation, which supports career academies in schools across the country. He didn’t specify which of his philanthropic endeavors would benefit from the sale of his penthouse.

NYT NOVEMBER 10, 2011

By JAMES B. STEWART, NYT, October 15, 2011

WHEN the architect Peter Bohlin arrived for his first meeting with Steve Jobs, he wore a tie. “Steve laughed, and I never wore a tie again,” Mr. Bohlin recalled.

Thus began a collaboration that has extended from Pixar’s headquarters, completed in 2001, to more than 30 Apple Stores (and counting) around the globe, all with design work by Mr. Bohlin and his firm, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson — and Mr. Jobs himself.

The New York Fifth Avenue store, the most famous Apple store (soon to undergo a major renovation).

From above, showing the famous iconic curving glass stair.

“The best clients, to my mind, don’t say that whatever you do is fine,” Mr. Bohlin said last week, a few days after Mr. Jobs’s death. “They’re intertwined in the process. When I look back, it’s hard to remember who had what thought when. That’s the best, most satisfying work, whether a large building or a house.”

Just as Mr. Jobs transformed the notion of the personal computer and the cellphone, he left an indelible stamp on architecture, especially the retail kind, traditionally a backwater of the profession.

Apple Soho, arguably where it all began.

“No one in commercial architecture has ever channeled a product into architecture for a client the way Peter did for Apple,” said James Timberlake, a founding partner of KieranTimberlake, who is now designing the new American embassy in London. “Most commercial architecture is under-detailed, under-edited and under-budgeted. It’s gross and ugly, and most of it is an eyesore on the American landscape.”

The work of Mr. Bohlin and his colleagues for Apple, by contrast, is sleek, transparent, inviting, technologically advanced — and expensive. In many ways, the retail architecture is simply the largest box in which an Apple product is wrapped, and Mr. Jobs was famously attentive to every detail in an Apple product’s presentation and customer experience.

Apple North Michigan Avenue.

Apple Pudong.

The extensive use of glass in structures like Apple’s cube on Fifth Avenue, between 58th and 59th Streets in Manhattan, its cylinder in the Pudong district of Shanghai or its soaring market hall on the Upper West Side of Manhattan have become so distinctive that Apple is seeking to patent the glass elements. Mr. Bohlin’s firm has won 42 awards for its work for Apple, and Mr. Bohlin himself was awarded the American Institute of Architects’ gold medal in 2010.

In their years working together, Mr. Jobs and Mr. Bohlin, who is 74, appeared to have achieved a rare chemistry.

Mr. Jobs was “a very public person,” Mr. Timberlake observed. “That’s in contrast to Peter. He’s not a Frank Lloyd Wright or a Philip Johnson. He doesn’t sweep into a room and take over. You go to a design meeting, and it’s more like a fireside chat.”

Apple Ginza, Tokyo

A  TEAM led by Karl Backus at Bohlin Cywinski Jackson learned early on to approach Mr. Jobs with alternatives. “He liked to be presented with options and would often make very insightful suggestions,” recalled Mr. Backus, who lives in California and focuses full time on Apple work. “We all enjoyed the collaboration.”

The notion of glass as Apple’s signature architectural statement first appeared in the staircase in its store in SoHo, housed in a historic building.

“We had a two-story space, which is a great challenge to get people to go up or down,” Mr. Bohlin said. “So we thought of glass. Steve loved the glass stairway idea. He got it. You make magic. We made these stairs that were quite ethereal.”

Just as Mr. Jobs obsessed over Apple products, he pushed Mr. Bohlin to make the glass structures ever more refined and pure.

“We got James O’Callaghan involved. He’s brilliant, a British structural engineer with offices in New York and London,” Mr. Bohlin said. “Now we’re cantilevering the stairs from top to bottom.”

In the newest Apple store, in Hamburg, Germany, the stairs float in space, attached only at the top and bottom. The fittings are embedded in the glass, “so you get this magical sleek profile when you look up the wall.” Mr. Bohlin said.

“This is the kind of detail Steve wanted,” he added. “We’ve been driving for this, doing more and more with less and less. This has been a vision of architecture since earlier in the last century. Modernism, some people would argue, is doing more with less. Steve wanted us to push the edge of technology, but it had to be comfortable for people. Sometimes that idea got lost in modernism. It’s an interesting challenge, how to marry the two.”

Apple’s use of glass in retail architecture emerged as a design and branding element at its Fifth Avenue store, which opened in 2006. The site had the initial challenge of luring customers into an underground plaza that had been notoriously inhospitable as a retail destination. The solution was a pristine glass cube and staircase flooded with natural light.

“We came to the conclusion it had to feel inevitable,” Mr. Bohlin said. “The adjacent G.M. Building has a tall, narrow facade, and its best aspect is directly across from the Plaza Hotel. Everything in the area is rectangular. So we thought of a square of light. It looks easy, but it wasn’t.”

Apple Sydney

Customers started lining up 42 hours before the store opened, and lines have formed ever since, with crowd control often required to prevent overcrowding. The building is now being renovated and expanded. In keeping with Mr. Bohlin’s and Mr. Jobs’s never-ending quest to achieve more with less, a new cube will feature larger glass panes and fewer visible connecting elements.

Despite its popular and critical success, Mr. Bohlin and Apple have not simply repeated the glass cube in other cities. The new Apple store in Shanghai is a glass cylinder using huge seamless panels of curved glass. Like the cube on Fifth Avenue, it leads to a large underground space, but in contrast, the area around it isn’t rectilinear, and the most prominent local landmark, a towering television tower, is located at an oblique angle to the shopping plaza.

“We had the idea of a circle,” Mr. Bohlin said. “Steve said, ‘Why isn’t the entire plaza around the entrance a circle?’ I said that was a great idea, but that’s beyond our control. The plaza was already under construction. Somehow he got the developer to agree to redesign and redo it. I don’t know how he did it.”

More recently, Mr. Bohlin has used glass to create what he calls “great market halls,” such as the Upper West Side store at 66th Street and Broadway.

“We’re doing a number of those,” he said. “The glazed lid. Can it be detailed any more delicately? I’m not sure. We continue to press that. Steve was a great client in this regard. He would not discourage innovation that was within his vision of what Apple is or he is.”

FOR someone as fascinated — some would say obsessed — by design and architecture as Mr. Jobs, it’s surprising that he lived in a relatively modest Tudor-style house in Palo Alto, Calif., built by a developer, and never lived in a house he helped to design. That might have changed had he lived a while longer. He and Mr. Bohlin had been at work for years on plans for a new house when Mr. Jobs died.

“He was so busy and, of course, ill, so it was unlikely he’d ever live there,” Mr. Bohlin said. “But he loved the site. It wasn’t a very large house, and we don’t know if he thought we were finished. I remember when Steve first hired us, he said: ‘I hired you because you’ve done very good large buildings, and you’ve done great houses.’ If you’re doing houses, then you’re thinking about the subtleties of a building.’ ”

Mr. Bohlin continued: “I remember that so clearly, and I was impressed that he appreciated that.”

Apple’s glass-filled stores, like one in Hamburg, Germany, show Steve Jobs’s touch.

Link

http://www.bcj.com/public/projects/project/9.html

Timeline

1870- Tiffany building built at 15 USW. Steel and brick structure with cast iron facade (designed by John Kellum).
1903- Tiffany moved out. Building used as warehouse.
1925- Amalgamated Bank moved in.

1953- pedestrian killed by falling piece of cast iron. Cast iron facade stripped and building reclad in brick.

2008- 1953 brick cladding removed to reveal original steel staunchion structure beneath. The work at 15 Union Square West proceeds under black netting.

Steel staunchion structure.

————-

They didn’t demolishing all of 15 USW, but rather stripping off the entire facade which was added in the 1950s over the original 1870s Tiffany building — and then adding-on / re-doing for the “new” 12-story 185′ tall residential building.

Brack Capital Real Estate USA acquired the six-story, 80,000-square foot Amalgamated Bank Building at 15 Union Square West on the southwest corner at 15th Street for $80 million in 2006.

In an article in the July 2, 2006 edition of The New York Times, Christopher Gray wrote that “the politest thing to say about the blocky white blob of a building at the south corner of 15th Street and Union Square West is that it’s homely,” adding that “buried beneath the 1953 façade is the 1870 building of Tiffany & Company,” a cast-iron building designed by John Kellum. Tiffany moved from this location in 1903 to 401 Fifth Avenue at 37th Street and is now at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue.

The resultant interiors were quite impressive.

A giant 31-by-21-foot room with 16-foot ceilings and 17-foot low-iron impeccably clear windows overlooking Union Square would normally be enough to overwhelm your real estate senses. But then you’d see the 15-foot cast-iron stanchions. Left over from the building’s first life as the Tiffany & Co. headquarters, they curve toward the high ceilings like your own personal Roman aqueduct.Eran Chen, the architect and Brack Capital Real Estate, the developer, decided to highlight the stanchions, making them the focal point of the apartments on the building’s first five floors.

Chen, then with Perkins Eastman and now running his own firm, ODA, enveloped the stanchions in a glass structure, constructing a building within a building fronted by low-iron Austrian glass.
Chen also created a series of sky villas on top of the original building. Almost all of them have huge terraces with park views.

With interiors by New York’s Vicente Wolf, the homes have exquisite details like 2-inch-tall horizontal air slits, uniform shades that come down from the top and up from the bottom, claw-foot bathtubs, limestone and oak foyers and shagreen finishes – made of shark skin – under the master bathroom sinks. (Shagreen perfectly absorbs bathroom moisture and is easy to clean. Perfected by the master leather worker for France’s King Louis XV.)

The exterior of the building has recieved mixed reviews- some people believe that the new glass facade was too cudely detailed and that it didn’t expose the old Victorian structure well enough.
However, I believe that this building has the typical New York innovative flair that we all love.

———

Hidden beneath decades of modernization, the physical past often re-emerges to tell its story of old New York.

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

Rarely does it come with an aura of robin’s egg blue.

But construction at 15 Union Square West has revealed part of the cast-iron facade of the five-story building that housed Tiffany & Company during the glittering end of the 19th century.

“Just when you think the past is consumed, it rears its lovely head,” said Stephen E. v. Gottlieb, an architect who was among the first to recognize the Tiffany cast iron.

Don’t go looking for diamonds. All you will find is a white-brick building under black-shrouded scaffolding. However, there is a sliver of original architecture to be seen along the 15th Street side, where the 20th-century brickwork has been removed.

Perhaps most recognizable from the Tiffany era are the gently curving third-floor windows.

Tiffany, founded in Lower Manhattan in 1837, moved to Union Square in 1870 to keep pace with the seat of fashion. It built in cast iron, The New York Times reported at the time, “as a preventive of fire, in consideration of the vast treasures” within.

While the company was at Union Square, Charles Tiffany bought the 287.42-carat gem that came to be known as the Tiffany Diamond. But the store carried more than rocks.

“Wandering through Tiffany’s spacious galleries in Union Square,” The Times said in 1873, “and stopping to admire the marble or bronze copies of the antique, a piece of majolica, a Limoges enamel, or a superb set of Henry Deux brass work, it is difficult to realize the fact that one is actually in a place of business and that each and every one of the beautiful objects of art can be your own, if you only have the cash wherewith to pay for it.”

(That was a big “if” then. It is a big “if” today.)

Feeling that Union Square had coarsened, Tiffany decamped in 1905 for Fifth Avenue and 37th Street. Twenty years later, the Union Square building was taken over by the Amalgamated Bank. In 1953, after a passer-by was fatally injured by a piece of loose cast iron, Amalgamated had the structure stripped and reclad.

According to city permits now posted at the construction site, the plan is to remove the facade entirely, add seven floors and convert the building to apartments.

So keep your eye on 15 Union Square West. More will undoubtedly be revealed. This is New York City. More will always be revealed.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Nick Walker, the renowned British graffiti artist, painted “The Morning After New York” one night in October 2008 on the side of a building in the East Village.

“The image is an extreme twist on the saying ‘paint the town red’ and part of a series of works called ‘The Morning After’ where a vandal in a bowler hat takes a moment to admire his work from the previous night,” he tells me.

Before the Cooper Square Hotel
Speaking of 35 Cooper Square… the building, on the far left in the photo below, is the sole survivor here between Fifth Street and Sixth Street… the photo by rollingrck (via Flickr) was taken on Dec. 12, 2004 …

It’s an all too common story in New York; a beloved bar or restaurant can’t make the rent – see Max Fish on the Lower East Side whose owner was profiled in the New Yorker last week – and an icon’s gone. Or an old pre-war building is replaced with an anonymous glass high-rise in the blink of an eye. Manhattan landlords are never sentimental: go away on holiday for two weeks and you’ll find your local deli has been replaced by a Marc Jacobs store and all your neighbours have moved out.

Walker’s mural sits on the north side of 35 Cooper Square (which has been sold to developers for $8.5million), in an area that has always attracted art and literary types. Local residents are furious that the art work will be meeting death at the hands of a wrecking ball within the next two weeks.

The Bowery Alliance of Neighbours has been fighting tooth and nail to save the historic building, which was the first of four houses built by Nicholas Stuyvesant in the 1800s.

Walker is an artist in the mould of Banksy. He’s gone from graffiti-ing on the streets to being sold at auctions at Bonhams. In 2008, his “Moona Lisa” sold for 10 times its estimated price. Stanley Kubrick commissioned him to to recreate the heavily graffiti-ed areas of New York for Eyes Wide Shut. Walker’s “Vandal” character, an artist disguised as a “quintessential English gentleman in order to get away with artistic vandalism”, was featured in a Black Eyed Peas video.

Walker is stoic in the face of destruction: “It was good to have a painting up on a building with such an artistic history. I take my [bowler] hat off to the Bowery Alliance for fighting to protect it this far,” he says.

————–

After the Cooper Square Hotel…

Canada

European Union

Munich, Germany

Minsk, Belarus

Paris, France (US Embassy on right)

Prague, Czech Republic–”Liberty Bell”

Argentina

Pristina, Kosovo

Three minutes of silence in the Netherlands

Palestinians in East Jerusalem

US Embassy, Tel Aviv, Israel.  “Imagine all the people” -John Lennon

US Embassy gate, Japan

Zagreb, Croatia

Sweden

Germany

Also outside the US embassy in Berlin.

Connor O’Carrigan, 3, and his mother Charmaine, laying down some flowers outside the US consulate in Sydney.

.
Sydney: “God bless America–you will not be forgotten”

Vatican City

Prague

Outside US Embassy, in Moscow, Russia:
(On sign: “Americans: We mourn.”)

Wednesday, outside the US embassy in Stockholm, Sweden.

I5, Östersund, Sweden. (In Sweden soldiers don’t wear hats indoors, but always when outdoors … except when…)

American Embassy in Moscow, Russia

Soccer game in Germany: Schalke 04′s coach and assistant can’t take it anymore.  The UEFA order them to play, but for 75 of the 90 minutes of play, both teams played as if they were engaged in an active demonstration against UEFA’s order to play on…

American Embassy in Warsaw, Poland

Rome, Italy

Sikhs in Northern India

Volkswagen Autostadt Auto Museum, Germany

Canada

Ottawa, Canada  |   75,000 gather for memorial service

Koreas

Youth in Tirana, Albania

Kuwaiti’s giving blood  |  US Embassy

Beijing, China

Hong Kong

US Embassy, Oslo, Norway

Bangladesh

Cambodia

New Zealand

Peru

Gathering at the town hall, Copenhagen, Denmark

Outside US embassy in Denmark.

Lebanon

SIGN:  “Our deepest sympathy”                   |   Approx. 200,000 people attended “Solidarity March”   (Berlin, Germany)  |

Chile

London–US Embassy

Queen shedding a tear

South Africa

American Embassy, Skopje, Macedonia

Wolfsburg, Germany

Carpet of flowers, Frankfurt, Germany
(for image of entire carpet, click here)

Glasgow, Scotland

Duesseldorf, Germany

Taipei, Taiwan

Germany,  modeled after President Kennedy’s famous speech.

CRYING EAGLE by mswheelchair@coastalnet.com

“…And the flag was still there….”  (top right)
Photo by James Nachtwey / VII

“Freedom is never free”
(photo on right by Thomas E. Franklin, Staff Photographer, The Record)

The twin towers of the World Trade Center were more than just buildings. They were proof of New York’s belief in itself. Built at a time when New York’s future seemed uncertain, the towers restored confidence and helped bring a halt to the decline of lower Manhattan. Brash, glitzy, and grand, they quickly became symbols of New York.

Rockefeller Brainchild

The World Trade Center was conceived in the early 1960s by the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Development Association to revitalize the seedy “Radio Row,” dominated by electronic stores. Chase Manhattan Bank chairman David Rockefeller, founder of the development association, and his brother, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, pushed hard for the project, insisting it would benefit the entire city.

In 1962, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey began plans to build the center. Minoru Yamasaki and Associates of Michigan was hired as architect. Eventually, Yamasaki decided on two huge towers. Critics charged that a modern monolith would rob New York of character, ruin the skyline, disrupt television reception, and strain city services. However, the project was approved and construction began in 1966.

In order to create the 16-acre World Trade Center site, five streets were closed off and 164 buildings were demolished. Construction required the excavation of more than 1.2 million cubic yards of earth, which was used to create 23.5 acres of land along the Hudson River, now part of Battery Park City in lower Manhattan. During peak construction periods, 3,500 people worked at the site. A total of 10,000 people worked on the towers; 60 died during its construction.

Instant Landmarks

The north tower was opened in Dec. 1970 and the south tower in Jan. 1972; they were dedicated in April 1973. They were the world’s tallest buildings for only a short time, since the Sears Tower in Chicago was completed in May 1973. However, the towers were ranked as the fifth and sixth tallest buildings in the world at the time of their destruction on Sept. 11, 2001.

Four smaller buildings and a hotel, all built nearby around a central landscaped plaza, completed the complex. The mall at the World Trade Center, which was located immediately below the plaza, was the largest shopping mall in lower Manhattan. The six basements housed two subway stations and a stop on the PATH trains to New Jersey.

Some 50,000 people worked in the buildings, while another 200,000 visited or passed through each day. The complex had its own zip code, 10048.

Previous Bombing

In 1993 terrorists drove a truck packed with 1,100 lbs of explosives into the basement parking garage at the World Trade Center. Despite the size of the blast—it left a crater 22 ft wide and 5 stories deep—only 6 people were killed and 1,000 injured. The towers were repaired, cleaned, and reopened in less than a month.

Destruction

On September 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 and crashed it into the northern facade of the north tower at 08:46, impacting between the 93rd and 99th floors.

Seventeen minutes later, a second team of terrorists crashed the similarly hijacked United Airlines Flight 175 into the south tower, impacting between the 77th and 85th floors. The damage caused to the north tower by Flight 11 destroyed any means of escape from above the impact zone, trapping 1,344 people. Flight 175 had a much more off-centered impact compared to Flight 11, and a single stairwell was left intact; however, only a few people managed to successfully pass through it before the tower collapsed.

Although the south tower’s floors of impact were lower, a smaller number, less than 700, were killed instantly or trapped. At 9:59 a.m., the south tower collapsed after burning for approximately 56 minutes due to fire, which caused steel structural elements, already weakened from the plane impact, to fail. The north tower collapsed at 10:28 a.m., after burning for approximately 102 minutes.

Rebuilding Plans

In 2002, separate design contests were held for rebuilding the World Trade Center site and creating a memorial for the victims of the attacks. The first round of finalists for the site, unveiled in July 2002, were widely criticized as being too boring and having too much of an emphasis on office space, leading to a new round of finalists in December.

In Feb. 2003, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which was established by Governor Pataki to coordinate the various agencies and advisory committees involved in the rebuilding efforts, chose architect Daniel Libeskind’s design for rebuilding the 16-acre site of the former World Trade Center. The design included a hanging garden, a memorial, a cultural center, and Freedom Tower, which would be a symbolic 1,776 feet tall from the ground to the top of its spire.

In July 2003, David Childs was brought in as the new lead architect of Freedom Tower, although Libeskind remained in charge of designing the site in general. The two had different visions for the tower; a design combining the approaches of both architects was unveiled in Dec. 2003. It would include wind turbines in its spire, designed to generate as much as 20% of the building’s power.

On July 4, 2004, New York governor Pataki, New Jersey governor McGreevey, and New York City mayor Bloomberg laid the cornerstone for the Freedom Tower. The skyscraper, estimated to cost $1.5 billion, was expected to be ready for its first occupants by late 2008, while construction on the site in general is expected to last through 2015.

Just as construction was beginning, security concerns were raised, leading to a complete redesign of the tower. The new plans were released on June 29, 2005. The tower is to be moved further back from the street—and will have a cubic base the same size as each of the Twin Towers. The wind turbines have been eliminated. The design recalls that of the old buildings, while adding its own twists: starting with the square base, the tower’s design moves into 8 isosceles triangles, creating an octagon at its center. An observation deck will sit at the 105th story, crowned by a parapet at exactly the height of the original Towers. An illuminated spire enclosing a television antenna will rise to the final height of 1776 ft.

Now called 1 World Trade, the former Freedom Tower will include 2.6 million square foot of office space, tenant amenities, restaurants, underground retail spaces, and access to transportation. 1 World Trade is scheduled to open in late 2013.

by David Johnson and Shmuel Ross