The Austin Corbin Building was designed by Francis Kimball and opened on Lower Broadway and John Street in 1888. Only 20-feet across on its Broadway edge, it floats down John Street in a magnificent arcade. For decades, it held the offices of Mr. Corbin's banking interests, offices for steam pipe makers, watch makers and sellers, lighting fixture manufacturers, and, notably, diamond whole sellers.
It fell into dark times, forgotten, neglected and filthy. As the rest of the block was replaced by miserable low buildings in the 1960s, architectural critics noted it looked like a bookend holding up nothing. After 9/11, as plans were drawn up to turn the entire block into an ancillary hub to the new transportation building at the World Trade Center, the fate of the Corbin Building seemed certain: The wrecker's ball.
Fortunately, the ever-heroic New York Historical and Preservation Commission saw the diamond-in-the-rough and successfully lobbied for the building's elevated status as a cultural landmark. They succeeded. And nearly a decade of restoration began.
Look at how the thousands of pieces of applied terra cotta were cleaned and fixed, the brownstone cleaned, the cast iron window bays painted, and perhaps most triumphantly, the pyramid finials in each tower restored giving the building its original flair and pluckiness once more!
It is a beautiful building, an arcade of Romanesque revivalism and richness, a symphony of materials, and its survival has been protected for many generations to come.
After a night of nightclubbing in Lower Manhattan, in love with the city and the quiet it can surprisingly produce at 4AM, unexpected and dense like a blanket that fell from your mother's arms, I stumbled upon this view. It was the early 1990s and I was unstoppable. But these towers stopped me dead in my tracks with a mighty awe, these quiet mountains of glass and steel standing guard over the end of the island and my false sense of impenetrability. As will do the moon, sometimes things just look enormous in the night sky. And that night, these buildings looked bigger than my imagination. I felt so safe in their presence in a dark city that was in those days still a bit dodgy and dangerous.
Nobody ever much liked Towers One and Two of the original World Trade Center. The most that many could say of them was that they looked like the boxes the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings arrived in. But that is unfair. They were a benign presence of simple elegance and they defined our skyline for thirty-three years. Tomorrow, I'll remember the people. But thirteen years ago today was the last day of these buildings. And while I'm rather a cheerleader for the new World Trade Center in a much larger field of critics, today, I'll miss this view, the view of my youth, and miss these mountains that took me by surprise one night as we yielded to the unbearable morning, the twins who made me realize my place in the world, tiny and vulnerable, important, sure, but cut down to right size.
