An Irishman always tips his hat when leaving a room.

While his handiwork graces the skylines of most major metropolitan areas, we were fortunate enough to see the fruits of his imagination here on ours more than most.



Eamon Kevin Roche died on March 1st having bitten off the better part of ninety-six years and, least of his many many achievements, lighting a fire under a good portion of my architectural curiosity.

Perhaps the word to best describe his oeuvre? Unpredictable. His expertise spanned any number of styles. And he used his command of that breadth to constantly surprise one of the most diverse portfolios of clients in architectural history. He was loved by corporate heads, museums, hoteliers, and the private sector with equal enthusiasm. He seemed far more interested in how each project could fully manifest given the particular coordinates it would inhabit than any commitment to an architectural movement. In his characteristic humility the internationally known 'starchitect' described himself as a problem-solver in construction, "I think about where you're going to hang your coat."

But he never lacked for style. He sat high up as its arbiter. When Eero Saarinen died, Roche finished what would become the last word in 60s chic, the landmarked and soon-to-open-as-hotel TWA Terminal 5 at JFK. 

Out of the starting gate on his own in the firm he founded with John Dinkeloo (1918-1981) he gave us a glass and concrete terrarium of a building, a California forest dropped down on 42nd for the Ford Foundation. It is so unexpected, so strikingly gorgeous a structure I couldn’t find that one picture, so pictured: Three to even slightly convey its actual presence.

The soft-spoken Dublin-born New Yorker quashed any notion of ego when he stepped out of his due spotlight and subtly built a new home for one of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s most storied and sought-out residents, the Temple of Dendur. His simple yet distinctly Egyptian angles frame the masterpiece, and the miles of glass do less to call attention to itself than they do flood the room with a Nile-like sunlight, glorious part of the day, somber others.

He became a kind of architect-in-residence at The Met and other than Calvert Vaux and Richard Morris Hunt, it is his imprimatur that defines our experience of the space. His other work in the vast expansion of The Met during a full four decades in the late 20th Century carves out spaces of quiet contemplation, courtyards and conduits that give us context, the time needed to organize all the art racing around our heads. 

His Millennium Tower across the street from the United Nations looked one block to the north (one block to the right in the photo), saw the angled doorway on the diminutive building, and turned that small embellishment into some kind of colossal gesture. It too lacks ego, but is a statement of a tower nonetheless, and one that suggests all buildings be good neighbors, nodding to the least of those on the block.











By the way, its surprising external geometry surprises on the interiors with equal drama. Though I always wonder if guests bang their skulls in there.

I have to admit I do not like his 60 Wall Street. A classic column blown up to postmodern proportions, it is busy and bulky, banded and random in the way I find much of postmodernism to look in the rear view mirror. And its tactile yet scaly forest of interior columns feels alien and slightly disturbing. Worse, perforated and lacy-looking as the columns are are, they don't evoke the strength one might want in such a supporting role. 

But don't go by me.

I once loathed his 750 Seventh Avenue, often dubbed the mobile phone building for its columnar rooftop antenna. It was an early entry into the revitalization of Times Square and I felt it missed the mark. After the 1911 Equitable Building stole more than its share of the sky on its downtown neighborhood, zoning laws have focused on volume of a building with respect to its footprint. Should a building want height, as 750 did, typically setbacks were required to keep volume in check and the sun shining down into the caverns of Manhattan. Roche hoped to give his setbacks some dynamism by placing them in a graduating helix up the building. I remain confused why this is such an utter failure in execution. Ironically, it feels unusually static for a building that aimed for the opposite outcome. But its ceramic black and grey glazing I once found lumpy and ominous? I couldn't love it more these days for the way it conjures the 80s so specifically, a specifically fun epoch in my life whose aesthetics I never appreciated in their moment. 750 Seventh  stands there all goth in Gotham. Well done!

And his success at the Jewish Heritage Museum alone would have put any other lesser architect on the map of greatness. A six-sided six-story pyramid of a hexagon, it intentionally calls to mind the underestimated six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. It stands protected by a bulwark of a building that highlights the astounding array of Jewish achievement after their near obliteration as a people just sixty years ago. 

And finally, rising on the Manhattan skyline at the much ballyhooed Hudson Yards is number 55.  The nearly finished 55 Hudson Yards' finishing touches may, in fact, beat this blog to publication. I didn't know it was Mr. Roche's design when I saw it up close first about four months ago. Coincidentally, I had just snapped a photo of 165 Mercer Street, a cast iron bit of splendor that went up in SoHo in 1870 and blogged about just the other day ( Then, now in SoHo.) 

55 Hudson Yards went through several iterations. But it landed on the one that despite all the changes, opened early, despite all its blue glass glossy neighbors went a bit gray and matte, and despite all the forward-looking designs it stands among, references its history in an all-out unabashed love letter, the last it would turn out, from Mr. Roche to all his predecessors,  to architecture. 

Kevin Roche said goodbye with a building that Louis Sullivan himself would have designed. It elicits all the rows of warehouse windows each framed individually, in SoHo and Sullivan's Chicago in iron, here in steel. It resembles a skyscraper that might have been born had technology advanced to this point but the 140 years of intervening architecture hadn't. 

The texture is so sensual, completely comforting, retro to the 1870s but, too I keep thinking, like the television sets we spent so many comforting hours in front of but whose shape no longer populates our homes. Only an artist of supreme confidence and maturity would be capable of this kind of genuflection. Roche's talent allowed for his twist. He goes meta on us, and where the frames open up in larger windows, he doubles and quadruples the frames. It's a window of a window on to architecture, these windows that inhabit the skin of his utterly satisfying bit of artistry. 

So we say good-bye to Kevin Roche only because we must. It is sad we will get no more from him. But by tipping his hat to the past in gratitude, he tosses a gauntlet forward that dares the next generations: Match me if you can. And I'll be comforted by the monuments to him sprinkled all over Manhattan by virtue of his stylish Irish eyes. 

Then, now in SoHo.

1870 was a busy year for Henry Ferbach. He had four cast iron spectacles of his design simultaneously rising from the streets of what was then called southern Greenwich Village in the years before the acronym SoHo carved out the neighborhood’s new identity.

Its enormous window sashes, gradually decreasing in height in each story to give the building the illusion it is taller, were topped with graceful arches and iron keystones, each separated by simple stately Doric columns and each row articulated by rich overhanging cornices, the roofline crowned with dental molding. It is the sheer repetition of elements that makes the building so satisfying, and the high relief of those elements that make it so engaging.

Its stated function on opening was factory. Its role in the fur trade, the trade that put this island on the map, is both a testament to the industry’s historical breadth as it is a final punctuation mark to a dark chapter in America’s gluttony for the product.

In 1871, buffalo pelts were in high demand. The furriers of 165 Mercer Street were doing the equivalent of three to six million dollars a year in sales. By 1884, the American buffalo population (bison, in actuality) had put the species on the endangered list. Tens of thousands of the majestic animals that once roamed the vast plains of America’s interiors had dwindled to a few hundred.

Thereafter the building was quickly converted into a garage, an incarnation that would span the transition from carriages to automobiles. After a brief stint as the front for a rum-running operation during the years of Prohibition, it returned to its legal pursuits actually fixing cars.

As NYC fell into dysfunction in the 1960s, the neighborhood was largely abandoned. A plan to put a multi-laned multi-level highway through the heart of SoHo would have spelled the demise of 165 Mercer Street and all its brothers and sisters from Ferbach’s drawing board and those of his contemporaries. The loss architecturally would have even incalculable.

Fortunately with the death of Robert Moses, the man who proposed the highway, died the dream of that dumb project and the influx of artists brought wealth back to the once wealthy streets of now, SoHo.

165 Mercer has been lovingly restored to better condition than frankly it ever was. Research matches the original cream color, high tech offices replaced the fumes of broken automobiles, and, set back so as not to ruin the original lines

of the perfectly proportioned facade, now sits a tony glassy penthouse for some guzzillionaire to enjoy the air on top of his kingdom on one of the most sought after street addresses in the world.

The forgotten twins.

My parents always call them the ‘tubes,’ to this day, even though I’ve known the system as PATH my whole life.

But before there was an Oculus, before there was the new World Trade Center, before there was an original World Trade Center, before those twin towers stood, two other twin towers stood on nearly that same spot, the terminus not of the Port Authority Trans Hudson lines, but the terminus of the Hudson Tubes.

Three underground levels of platforms led to the street level on top of which stood two nearly identical 22-story buildings in close proximity to one another and rock solid with Indiana limestone, brick, and fireproof terra cotta.

Their thick-walled Romanesque Revival architecture added to their air of invincibility.

They would house the offices of the Hudson and Manhattan Railway and any number of other businesses in shipping and finance.

The Hudson Terminal Buildings had nearly 900,000 square feet of rentable floor space accommodating 10,000 tenants. It’s 39 elevators carried 30,000 riders a day. Its 16 million bricks, 13,000 lighting fixtures, 5,400 doors, just as many windows, were something of a miracle for 1907, the year the first office workers arrived.

Ridership on the tubes peaked in 1927 at 113 million, but as the automobile tunnels and bridges began to open to this new mode of traffic, ridership in the tubes decreased substantially to a 1958 low of 26 million.

The terminal buildings center left, blackened by years of coal smoke. Many buildings in this photo still hold their ground, notably, the Woolworth Building, the Municipal Building, the Sinclair Oil Building, the Trinity Building, The old Equitable Building, and dominating the foreground, Cass Gilbert's 11 West Street. The most valuable player missing, the Singer Building, standing center as it did until 1967.

The terminal buildings were deemed obsolete. But obstinate. It took several years in the late sixties to bring them down as land for the first World Trade Center was cleared.

Their memory is shrouded by an interim history.

But they should be remembered too, the first twin towers, monuments to public transportation. And perhaps a fair tribute to them would be to report this happy news: Ridership on the PATH Trains was up over 86 million last year!

How the sewing machine gave NYC a beautiful block.

For every penny attorney Edward Cabot Clark may have spent on his JD, he likely parlayed each into at least a grand.

He partnered with Isaac Singer to obtain patents for Singer's vastly improved sewing machines, marketed the devices for home use, and conceived 'installment plans' that allowed hundreds of thousands of units to be sold to a customer base previously shut out of the market. Sales skyrocketed. As did Mr. Clark's wealth.

Not content to sit on his fortune, Clark put it to work, purchasing property on the very frontiers of Manhattan's civilization in the 1880s, today's Upper West Side. While the invasion of the Upper East Side was well under way and by some of the wealthiest families the world had ever known, the Upper West Side remained a bit of a backwater, built more on spec, the Upper West Side for the Upper Middle Class.

As magnificent as it turned out to be, both architecturally and by virtue of the star power writ large in its residential rolls, Clark's Dakota Apartments were never quite pitched towards the monied elite for whom the idea of apartment dwelling was still rather inconceivable. That's important to remember when one walks the blocks off the Park and around The Dakota, many of which were purchased for future development by Mr. Clark and his heirs. There is a freedom of form in the architecture, with more dramatic chances taken, many more whimsical elements added, and far and away more far away exotic references used, say, Scandinavian, the Turkish, than one would ever see over there on the east side of the Park. They were far too cowed by the terror of a social misstep.

Edward Clark died in 1882 before The Dakota ever opened its doors. The lots he owned on the south side of West 74th Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue transferred to his grandson Ambrose. Who was one-year old.

By the time 1903 rolled around, Frederick Ambrose 'Brose' Clark was a 21-year old English-styled, jodhpur-wearing championship horseback riding, tweedy all-around gentleman, thoroughly swept up in the allure of Anglo-American fealty. It would have been no surprise, then, he chose a very little known architect named Percy Griffen to helm the project that bears the Clark family name these one hundred plus years later. Griffen had recently designed the East 51st Street home of wealthy attorney John Stevens Melcher, grandson of millionaire hotelier Paran Stevens. It was the first home to reject the all-cosuming French influences that had captivated New York Society and our premier architects for two decades. Griffen was drawn to the cleaner lines of an emerging neo-Georgian style.

It happened again later in the 1970s I recall, a love affair with the Georgian, the warmth of red brick in flemish bond, offset with the off-white of limestone, a Greek-like love of symmetry and straight lines, but in 1903, something that would have been quite new, christened the American basement.

Percy Griffen designed a series of eighteen stately but sumptuous townhomes, numbers 18-52 on West 74th Street. They all bore nearly identical proportions, at five visible stories each, the fifth dotted with a nod to the style Beaux-arts, copper-cladded dormers. It was the basement that shocked, before becoming de rigeur. No lofty flight of steps hovering over an English half basement, servants stooping under the stoop. The three small stairs here were utterly American, welcoming, equalizing, deemphasizing class, possessed of simple elegance.

What I find most stunning about the block is the nuance in design that keeps the eye dancing while maintaining a cohesion rarely equalled in Manhattan. (I'm thinking of Hudson View Gardens, Strivers' Row, Pomander Walk, and Tudor City to a lesser extent.) While there is much repetition from townhouse to townhouse, look closely and see there is always at least one magnificent variable that lends individuality to each. Many compare it to Mayfair in London. If that reference wasn't intentional on the part of Mssrs. Clark and Griffen, it certainly would have pleased them.

The Clark Estate Houses as they came to be known have housed golden Guggenheims, heavy-hitting retailers named Saks and Gimbels, schools for the blind, a nursing home for singers from the Metropolitan Opera, and recently, the grandson of a movie mogul and a 'ghost'ly actor in his own right, Tony Goldwyn. They were lately all repointed as well. I can't imagine they've ever looked better.

Take a walk up there if you can. I'll take you! Or do it in your own living room on Google Maps. It's one of NYCs hidden treasures, sitting in plain sight.