Faceless Warrens

Nothing makes a New Yorker happier than the sight of an old building rich in memories of the past--unless it is tearing the damn thing down and replacing it with something in chromium and plate glass, with no traditions at all. Last week, as Manhattan vibrated to its biggest building boom since the '20s, old landmarks were toppling all over town.

On Greenwich Village's Washington Square, the handsome Georgian houses built by Real Estate Magnate William C. Rhinelander in the 1830s were coming down to make way for a new apartment house. Over near the East River, acres of slums had fallen before the grim, brick-cliffed ranks of Stuyvesant Town and its corollary projects. Along Central Park, new apartment houses were rising, and ornate brownstones were falling.

Changing Face. The face of midtown was changing fast. The dark old stone mansion on Fifth Avenue, where for years old Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt stubbornly held her stately dinners within earshot of swirling shopping crowds and the snarl of Fifth Avenue buses, had been replaced by Crowell-Collier's new white office building. Next to Rockefeller Center, the Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas crumbled before the wrecking ball and plans for a new building for the Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. A great, bare office building was rising on the site of the Murray Hill Hotel, in whose Victorian lobby old men had drowsed among the aspidistras and memories of tenants like Grover Cleveland and Mark Twain.

Ambitious builders did not even wait for obsolescence. A fortnight ago, a firm took over the fashionable Ritz Carlton Hotel, announced that they would demolish it and build a more profitable 25-story office building on the site.

No Monuments. Most of the buildings would not even add a jag to the city's skyline. No one planned soaring towers like 1932's Empire State, or sumptuously spaced units like Rockefeller Center. Now buildings were built for quick profits. "We're not in this business to build monuments," said one contractor.

The new "baby-skyscrapers" averaged 25 stories. City regulations forced builders to set back the upper stories in a formula known as the building envelope; builders were packing the envelope as tight as a chorus girl's brassiere.

The result was a squat, dumpy ziggurat tapering toward the top and crowned with a concrete blockhouse containing elevator and air-conditioning equipment. High-minded architects referred to them scornfully as "wedding-cake modern." They were white and unadorned, faceless warrens comprised of layer upon layer of strip windows alternating with concrete, like stacked sandwiches. They looked appallingly alike.

The native New Yorker, still stubbornly seeking out the old, the fusty, and the slightly uncomfortable amidst the encroaching wilderness of stainless steel and blank glass, sighed a wistful sigh. The movers and shakers took no notice, determinedly pressed forward.

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