Moment to Moment

The Clock of Life

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by Robert H. Smith, copyright 1932, 1982

The clock of life is wound but once,
And no man has the power
To tell just when the hands will stop
At late or early hour.

To lose one's wealth is sad indeed,
To lose one's health is more,
To lose one's soul is such a loss
That no man can restore.

The present only is our own,
So live, love, toil with a will,
Place no faith in "Tomorrow,"
For the Clock may then be still.

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Regular postings return soon. Next up: #2 - Vertical Transportation.

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Going Down. Also, Up.

#1 - Steel

Skyscrapers' Sine Qua Non

~ Read the Post, Tackle the Questions ~

Click the Pictures and Watch 'em Grow (maybe)

Steel is old hat. Without understanding exactly why, people have known for thousands of years that iron can be toughened by variously processing it under intense heat. "Look what I made!" the Geico cave guys might have proudly pronounced as they pulled glowing red lumps of proto-steel out of some big fire. Then they'd hammer the crude little bits flat, cool them by plunging them into a nearby creek, then stab and bludgeon each other to death with them. Ahh, progress.
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And so it remained, until 1855, when Henry Bessemer patented an industrial (that is, reliable, consistently repeatable, and -- most important -- scalable to any size) process for manufacturing steel in huge quantities. At last, steel wasn't just for killing any more. (Indeed, now it was for mega-killing, but that's another story.)
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By the end of the 19th Century, people had figured out how to fashion the stuff into beams, rivet the beams together, assemble the riveted beams into frames, and hang masonry on it. They discovered that submerging cages made of ribbed steel bars (reinforcing bars, or "rebar" for those who speak portmanteau) into freshly poured concrete would greatly strengthen the stuff.
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Before this industrialization of steel, as buildings made purely of stone rose from the earth, their bases needed to be thickened proportionally to support the weight above. The 16-story north half of the Monadnock Building (1891) in Chicago, the tallest conventional stone building in the United States, rests on 6-foot-thick solid masonry walls. The structure is so massive that it settled nearly 20 inches into the ground during construction before, to the relief of its architects Daniel Burnham and John Root, it finally stabilized. Today, mostly without knowing why, the Mondadnock's visitors need to step down from the sidewalk to enter its sunken ground floor.
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Steel is lighter, stronger, and cheaper. There'd be no skyscraping without it.
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A casualty of the September 11 terror attacks, the Deutsche Bank Building (1974, 40 stories) at 130 Liberty Street (above, at the south edge of the World Trade Center's site, it's the abandoned black building wearing the American flag), was ripped open across twenty four of its floors by falling debris from the collapse of the South tower.
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Framed in a photo (below) by Trinity Church's steeple (right) and the American Stock Exchange (left), you can see the square black top of the Deutsche Bank building, about a half mile to the northwest, partially clad in plywood as its upper floors are prepared for demolition.

After years of political and legal wrangling, the Deutsche Bank Building is finally coming down. Here's how, explained in an animation that shows the de-construction of its steel skeleton:

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Meanwhile, farther Downtown, the rigid steel frame of the William Beaver House pokes skyward -- according to plan, soon to be the swank home of some modern-day stock-trading cavemen, a comfy little place for them to play at, umm, hiding their bones.

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Q&A

• What's the point of tall buildings anyway? Aren't most people afraid of heights? Have you ever heard of anyone who was afraid of widths?
• What's the highest you've ever been in a building? What's the highest you'd be willing to go? Now quick, without thinking: what's the lowest you'd be willing to go? (That's what we all really wanna know.)
• The clever architects of early skyscrapers liked to adorn the tops of their buildings with appropriate statues or monuments. What kind of monument do you think they should, umm, erect on top of the William Beaver House?
  
  
  
  

Going Up!

Starstruck Bricks

~ Read the (Short) Post, Tackle the Questions ~

(Thanks to Cousin Joe, who clued me in on those bars at a, umm, bar.)

You can click the picture if you want, but don't blame me if nothing happens.

What are those strange black stars adorning the stern brick face of that old Downtown building at #211 Pearl Street? Are they decorations? Insignia? Oooo, maybe they're embematic of some secret Masonic ritual?*
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Naah. Described in a previous post (with, like, maps and everything), that's William Colgate's first soap and candle warehouse, whose historic (1832) facade is slated to be preserved as part of a brand-new residential construction project. You don't see too many buildings like this around Lower Manhattan any more. Only a handful survived New York's Great Fire of 1835.
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Those stars (other shapes, too, here and there, like "X" and "S") were once affixed to the ends of heavy wrought-iron bars that ran through the entire length of Colgate's warehouse, at floor level under each window. Why? Well, as buildings made of brick rise above the street, their walls naturally tend to buckle outward. To prevent this, those star-capped iron rods (sometimes called "straps") tug them back into plumb and keep the building from collapsing. As a bonus, the rods also provide a little extra support for the load a warehouse's inventory can bring to bear against its wooden plank floors.
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Of course, Colgate's warehouse isn't the only starstruck brick building in New York. Pretty much every brick structure built taller than four- or five- stories pulled itself together with wrought-iron tie rods... up until the 1850's, that is, when an industrial process was invented for making a certain something.
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* Masonic insignia may, in fact, have been found inside the building, in this strange pattern made of, umm, masonry. Certainly not for lack of trying to find one, no clear explanation has yet emerged of the cryptic writing on this particular wall.

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.I'm devoting my next several blog posts to some Big and Tall Downtown buildings, focusing on the cool stuff that made them possible. So, bone up on these quiz questions:

Q&A

• Before the discovery of psychopharmacology, Doctors whose patients had trouble pulling themselves together would drive small cast-iron tie-rods through their skulls, capping them off in front and back by screwing on little black stars until the fit was nice and tight.
  
  No kidding, I'm totally serious. (Or, am I? I've lost track.)
  
  Question is, do you think drugs are better?
  
• Okay, you've had some time to think: what was that "certain something" that came along in the 1850's, making it possible to build big brick buildings without using wrought-iron tie rods to keep their walls from buckling?
  
• Okay, now name some of the other things that needed to be invented before the 20th century's skyscrapers could be built.

WTFNYC #5

"This is The End of the Line..."

~ Guest Questions by Doug Pascover. Have at 'em! ~

Pictures too small to see? Click 'em and watch 'em GROW.

Ornamental tile work at the
South Ferry Subway Station

"...Passengers May Exit Only From the First Five Cars of the Train."

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Strange Instructions...

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I rarely take New York's old #1 subway anywhere. From Downtown, there are several more efficient ways to ride the subway north into Manhattan: express trains, with fewer stops.

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Still, one day, with nowhere in particular to go, I hopped onto an Uptown-bound #1 local train at its southernmost origin in Bowling Green/South Ferry... because, well, just look at that cool station house. (They were, and still are, referred to as control houses, where passengers come "under the control" of the Metropolitan Transit Authority, or MTA for short).

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This is the South Ferry #1 subway train station. The Staten Island Ferry terminal is a few blocks beyond to the south, and Battery Park is to the right (west).

This is the South Ferry station looking north. The New York Customs House (now the National Museum of the American Indian) is at right (east), and Bowling Green Park is behind the station to the northeast.

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My train bounced along past a few stops: Rector Street, Fulton Street, Park Place. I got off a short way up the line at Chambers Street, stepped across the dusty gray concrete platform, and boarded a Downtown-bound #1 to head back to South Ferry. I suppose I had a self-satisfied been-there-done-that grin on my face, the brief ride having satisfied my curiosity,
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Or, so I thought.

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As I approached my round-trip's starting point, the end of the line back at South Ferry Station, I heard a garbled announcement over the train's scratchy public address system advising that, in order for passengers to get off the train, they would need to move to one of the first five of its ten cars.

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What? I just couldn't have heard that right. How, umm, curious!

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Curiously (of course), I looked around my subway car and, sure enough, eventually spotted an awkwardly worded placard confirming what I couldn't believe I'd heard, that passengers should hustle up to the front of the subway train in order to get off at South Ferry.

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We were getting close to the station, and I wasn't even sure which car of the subway train I was in. What would happen if I didn't follow the strange instruction? Would I be turned 'round and dispatched back Uptown against my will? Would I be imprisoned for hours -- (gulp!) forever? -- alone in the musty hind cars of that old #1 train? Or, worse (gasp!), might I end up lost somewhere in Brooklyn?
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I wasn't all that curious, so I lurched from my seat on the moving train, grabbed a nearby pole, then the back of another seat, then a ceiling bar, next a hanging strap, then another pole, and, hand-over-hand in this manner, I clumsily lumbered my way forward. I've gotten pretty good at this "subway surfing" over the years, and can now handily pass from car to car in a rolling subway train, lurching through the creaky steel sliding doors at each end. I hardly ever lose my balance these days, and almost never canon-ball myself into some poor somebody's hapless cup of (*uggh*, sorry, Neva, too bitter for me) Starbucks anymore. (Almost.)
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It felt different this time, though, moving between the old cars as we rumbled into the South Ferry Station. I could see that we were making an unusually tight turn alongside its sharply curved platform, and the old train's metallic banging, groaning, and whining, echoed and amplified within the walls of the narrow tunnel as I moved from car to car, jarred me more than usual.
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Stepping off the train and onto the platform, I could see that the station was too short -- only long enough, in fact, to meet the doors of the train's first five cars. Any passengers who remained in the last half of the train were still in the tunnel, looking down five or six feet at naked track. I wondered: might someone asleep, or stupid, or drunk, be left behind back there? I looked up the tracks and spotted an MTA conductor dutifully patrolling the back of the train to make sure it was empty. Those bureaucrats at the MTA think of everything.
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...For A Strange Old Train Station
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They broke ground for the New York Subway more than a century ago, way back in 1900. The first subway line, known at the time as the Interboro Rapid Transit Company (or, IRT), started service in 1904 carrying passengers between City Hall in Lower Manhattan and the Upper West Side. Eventually, to the delight of latter-day Yankees fans, the IRT line was expanded all the way up into the Bronx.
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Philadelphia-born MIT-trained architects George Lewis Heins (1860–1907) and Christopher Grant LaFarge (1862–1938) won the contract to design the first phases of New York's subway system, and, perhaps given their prior experience designing churches and municipal buildings, we shouldn't be too surprised by their Romanesque conception of its early stations, like the one at South Ferry. Built in 1905, it's one of only three of its kind left standing. Another is partially boarded up on Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Street in Brooklyn, (possibly) awaiting complete restoration; the third is on Verdi Square at 72nd and Broadway, still busily greeting passengers traveling to and from Pia Savage's posh (sorry, Pia, but its true) Upper West Side neighborhood.

This 1938 map shows the two-track terminal loop under South Ferry Station (dark red line at left, under Battery Park). The double lines to the right show the intersecting routing for the IRT's Lexington Avenue Line, which was built ca. World War I, and carry the 4/5 subway trains today.

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Unique within the New York Subway System, the South Ferry Station is part of one of its earliest and most claustrophobic terminals. The single-track loop below South Ferry Station could accommodate passenger platforms no larger than the relatively tiny trains of its day. Over the years, to improve operating efficiency, New York's subways cars have become somewhat longer and are now strung together into ten-car trains -- much longer than were found in the system in 1905. Still, everything new works just fine everywhere throughout the enormous old New York Subway System -- except here at South Ferry. Hence, the bizarre passenger instructions.

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Q. How do you cram a ten-car #1 train into the five-car-long South Ferry Station?

A. You kinda can't.

A 1 train pulls into South Ferry Station's weird curved platform in this YouTube video.

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Personally, I think the South Ferry Station is quaint, cute, adorable, and I don't mind stumbling through a rattling train to get off there.
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But, hey, evidently that's just me.
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The MTA has a mind to fix it -- and money, and a plan. Happily, their hip new 21st century station will preserve that old early-20th-century South Ferry control house. Look for it standing atop a couple of parked ten-car subway trains, with passengers coming and going through every single one of their doors, by Christmas 2008.
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It's gonna cost the MTA a couple hundred mill -- but, on the bright side, they'll be able to fire that conductor guy who rousts the drunks from the last five cars of #1 trains.

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Q&A

• Have you ever knowingly got onto a train just to ride it and, if so, how are you better than a common hobo?
• If a train leaves Times Square with 10 20-foot cars, heading south at 30 miles per hour, how many drunks will be on board when it reaches South Ferry?
• Should a New Yorker even consider using a word like "Adorable?" If so, under what circumstances?
• Extra credit: is that odor you smell on a New York Subway platform while you're waiting for your train what you think it is?

A Tale of Two Weekends

"The Fleet's In!"

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~ Read thePost, Tackle the Question ~
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Click the pictures to make them bigger

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Whoo-ah!

It's Fleet Week in Downtown New York!

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(Okay, okay, I know: technically speaking, it's Fleet Week all over town -- but, well, we've got New York Harbor, so there.)
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About Fleet Week
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As it has around the Memorial Day of almost every year sinced 1984, New York celebrates the sea services this week, welcoming thousands of Sailors, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen arriving on hundreds of ships both great and small -- plus planes, and jets, and helicopters, and just about all other manner of military conveyance, many of which are opened to the touring public this week.
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A flat-top steaming upstream into the Hudson from New York Harbor,
its crew, umm, ready for action. That's Downtown in the background
- but you knew that, didn't you?
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In fact, Fleet Week is one of the grandest of public relations programs run by the U.S. Navy, and a great opportunity for the ocean-going military to fraternize with the general public. Fleet Week attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists from all over the City (indeed, the Country) to its dozens of demonstrations, parades, and parties, which are staged all over New York. Fleet Week is a lot of fun, generates lots of good will, and certainly swells the ranks of the U.S. Armed Forces with more than a few bright-eyed and eager new sailors and marines.
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In popular culture, of course, Fleet Week is a gigantic salmon run.
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(Remember: "The Bronx is Up and the Battery's Down." You'd be surprised how many people get that wrong.)

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This photo is from episode #67 of "Sex and the City", mis-entitled "Anchors Away."
-- Grrrr... it's "Aweigh" -- *sigh* dumb broads.

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Seamen Sniffing for Pheromones in New York's Times Square ___________________________________

Cute Matey Performs a Mating Dance at Chelsea's Brite Bar
(where "you're always well-lit" Oh-kay...)
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Lest We Miss the Point

Certain special folks -- parents, brothers and sisters, daughters and sons, friends and comrades -- make a pilgrimage Downtown on Memorial Day to spend some quiet time with their loved ones.
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That's because Downtown New York's Battery Park is home to five memorials:

(1) Naval technology inventor (and one-time New Yorker) John Ericsson, statue by Jonathan Scott Hartley, 1903.
(2) Dewey Memorial, medallions designed by Daniel Chester French, 1898; reproduced for this memorial in 1973.
(3) East Coast War Memorial, eagle by Albino Manca, architects Gehron and Seltzer, 1961.
(4) Korean War Memorial, Mac Adams, 1991.
(5) American Merchant Mariners' Memorial, Marisol Escobar, 1991.

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Unique among Battery Park's many monuments and statues, the American Merchant Mariners' Memorial recalls the more than six thousand sailors who, pressed into auxiliary naval service to transport troops and materiel, sacrificed their lives during World War II. Based on a photograph taken from the deck of the German ship that dispatched one of these vessels to the bottom, Marisol Escobar's easily overlooked sculpture in Battery Park captures the essential horror and despair, as well as the heroism, of war.

From the Merchant Marine Act of 1936: "It is necessary for the national defense... that the United States shall have a merchant marine of the best equipped and most suitable types of vessels sufficient to carry the greater portion of its commerce and serve as a naval or military auxiliary in time of war or national emergency..."

Letting go... the ineluctable pain of loss, the mourning of a stolen future, the cold echo, lingering forever, of a final goodbye -- nowhere else will you find this more vividly or touchingly portrayed.

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Q&A

• How are you planning to spend Memorial Day?
  

Seeing and Believing are Two Completely Different Things

"When You're A-lone,

and Life is Ma-king You Lone-ly

You Can Al-ways Go..."

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~ Read the post, answer the questions ~

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It's a short one this week. You're very welcome, I'm sure.

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Click the pictures to make them bigger.

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A certain well-known credit card company (oh, why be coy? Its Visa) has been running TV ads lately that depict the high-fashion rescue of a plain-looking young woman who, as she was stepping out of a Downtown subway station, broke the heel of one of her tragically sensible shoes. Here's the full-length, one-minute version of their commercial:

The ad purports to show typical activity at the intersection of Spring and Greene Streets in Lower Manhattan's hip SoHo neighborhood. Here's where you'll find that intersection:

But you don't have to go there, because here's what it really looks like:

The "real" Spring and Greene is a bit less colorful than the ad's fictionalized location. No singing cops, no dancing cab drivers, just the usual Downtown Street Symphony for Horn, Siren, and Jackhammer.

The trendy one-of-a-kind super-high-end shoppes (note, not just [uggh!] "shops"), on the other hand, are very real -- and, as seen on TV, they indeed employ cohorts of straight-faced yet often gay young men, uniformed in black suits and ties, to carry their ultra-expensive garments and accessories back and forth between their well-heeled shoppers and their unseen (and very cramped and, like, totally dingy) stock rooms. Bring your Visa card! And make sure its got plenty of headroom left.

Here's one such joint, named after a friend of mine:

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Q&A

• Name something that, while stunningly gorgeous on TV, in film, or on-line, disappointed the holy hell out of you when you encountered it in real life.
• True or False: Credit Cards are Good.
• What do you suppose a store named "Diesel" in SoHo would sell?
  - Auto parts.
  - Home heating oil.
  - Halloween costumes.
  - Motorized sex toys.
  - Overpriced clothing for women with more money than brains.

Unreal Estate

A Conflict of Some Interest
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~ Read the Post, Tackle the Questions ~

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The pictures can be enlarged by clicking them.

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Take a walk north from Battery Park, along Battery Park City's meticulously manicured Esplanade, and, looking west across the Hudson toward New Jersey, you'll see the Colgate Clock.

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Erected in 1924, this fifty-foot-wide octagonal (ahem, soap-shaped, no kidding) clock (the Largest Clock in the World, or so I'm advised by Google - hmm, imagine the typo that drew me to that fact...) faces Lower Manhattan's western shore. Aside from its service as a practical advertisement for the proportionally huge Colgate-Palmolive Company, the Colgate Clock recalls the heavily industrialized manufacturing days of these here parts, once dotted on both sides of the Hudson with busy factories, bustling railroad terminals, and jam-packed warehouses.
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The Colgate Clock, as viewed from Battery Park City's
Esplanade.
The 50-foot-wide clock has a surface area of 1,963.5 square feet, swept by its 25-foot-long minute hand and 20-foot-long hour hand. Accurate to within one minute, the clock's
mechanism is like that of a traditional electric wall clock, its weights and wheels driven by twenty-eight high-voltage batteries that are continuous recharged.

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But, hey! What are we doing in New Jersey? Let's hop back across the Hudson River to Downtown New York... and, while we're at it, back in time about two centuries, too.

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In 1807, William Colgate (1783-1857), freshly immigrated from Britain in 1804, launched a modest starch, candle, and soap business on Dutch Street in Lower Manhattan -- the tiny seed from which the mighty Colgate-Palmolive consumer products empire would eventually grow.
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His company's first print advertisement, appearing in a New York paper back in 1817, lists the wares of his "Soap and Candle Manufactory" as "Soap, Mould and Dipt Candles of the First Quality."

A pioneer of many of the mundane scientific advances we completely take for granted these days -- perfumed soap and packaged toothpaste, just to name a few -- his business grew, merged, then grew some more, profiting greatly by cleaning and deodorizing several generations of the unwashed hoi polloi over two lucrative centuries.

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The sprawling Colgate-Palmolive Company moved its manufacturing operations from New York to the Paulus Hook section of Jersey City in 1847, where, at that time, manufacturing space was relatively plentiful and cheap.
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Clocks may stop (Colgate's has, now and then, for months at a time), but time inexorably marches on -- and, about a century and a half later, so had the area's labor and real-estate costs. Once more, to protect their profit margins, Colgate-Palmolive moved their manufacturing operations out of Jeresey City in the 1980's -- probably to some third-world venue where the local workers, having little use for them, might be less inclined to steal personal hygiene products off the assembly line.
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France, maybe.
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They left their cool-looking clock behind, though -- along with a little something else.
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Take a look at these two Greek-revival five-story warehouse buildings, located at 211 and 213 Pearl Street, where it crosses Fletcher just north of Maiden Lane. They date back to the early 1830's, a time when this part of Downtown was the Mecca of Mercantile in the United States.
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William Colgate built the one on the left (211 Pearl Street), to store the goods he manufactured in his by then hugely successful starch, candle, and soap business on Dutch Street, just a few blocks to the north.
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The pedigree of the building on the right (213 Pearl Street) has been lost, but here's the thing: people live here, two families in all, in rent-controlled apartments.
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Among the very few Downtown structures to survive New York City's great fire of 1835, you can see from the photo (you're looking southeast) that they're flanked on either side by vacant lots.

That's because there's a large-scale condo development project underway all around these two buildings. As you can see in this photo facing northwest, it's already claimed all of 211 Pearl Street except for its facade.

For years now, the City, the residents of 213 Pearl Street, the developer, the City's lawyers, the residents' lawyers, and the developer's big-time lawyers have been tussling over the disposition of this tuny chunk of Lower Manhattan.
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The upshot of all this conflict? The facade of the empty building on the left, #211, will be preserved by the developers, incorporated somehow into the design of their new condo building. Imparted significance by the long-dead William Colgate, #211, at least in part, shall live on.
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What of the building on the right, #213, the one with the people in it? Well, populated by the insignificant living -- like the rest of us, daily users of the descendents of Colgate's soaps and perfumes -- it's toast. Good thing I took a picture, huh? It'll last longer.

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Q&A

• The developer will probably offer a settlement to the remaining tenants in #213. How likely is it to be sufficiently large as to allow them to buy one of their brand new condos?
• What would your life be like without toothpaste and soap? More important, what would our lives be like trying to live with you?
• All that's left of Colgate-Palmolive in Jersey City, the Colgate Clock now stands all by itself on its little concrete pad. What recently constructed building stands just to its north? What's the big deal about it?