[log in to unmask] writes:

<<  In which issue of the NY Times did Mr. Goldberger's article appear?  >>

Well, hell, it's 12:30 AM, the wife is in Martha's Vineyard, Vodka-breath is
in Alta - why don't we just violate those lil' old copyright laws?  --- CSG

July 29, 1983, Friday    Late City Final Edition
Section: C    Page: 1    Column: 3     Desk: Weekend
Desk    Length: 1826 words

AT SEAPORT, OLD NEW YORK WITH A NEW LOOK
By PAUL GOLDBERGER

  THE new South Street Seaport, which opened yesterday in Lower Manhattan, is
not quite little old New York, but it is certainly trying very  hard to be.
The complex of restored old buildings, cobblestone streets and carefully
designed new structures centered on Fulton Street beside  the East River is
as elaborate an evocation of the New York of the 19th century as we are ever
likely to see. What is most remarkable about it  is that it is an evocation
done, for the most part, with neither the literalness of Colonial
Williamsburg nor the cuteness of Disneyland. This  assemblage of several
blocks' worth of shops, restaurants, cafes and exhibitions is made up as much
of things that are new as of things that are  old - and surprisingly, instead
of breaking an illusion of 19th-century perfection, the new parts of this
place make it all the richer and deeper an  urban experience.  The South
Street Seaport Museum has been around for some time, of course, occupying a
number of older buildings in the neighborhood  and spreading out to the piers
on the East River, where its small but distinguished collection of older
vessels is berthed. But the Seaport  Museum that existed in the 1970's has
virtually disappeared now. Under the patronage of a trio of rich uncles, the
City and State of New York  and the real-estate concern the Rouse Company,
the museum has now become but the centerpiece of a large real-estate
development. In  Phase 1 of the job, two entirely new structures have been
built, and blocks of older buildings have been restored. The museum is still
there, but  it is now surrounded by a collection of fashionable shops and
eating places developed by Rouse.  It is an unusual project, most of all
Seaport food guide and map, C17 because it is not the sort of thing one
expects to find in New York. It  very much resembles the Quincy
Market-Faneuil Hall restoration in Boston or Harborplace in Baltimore,
complexes of shops and restaurants  set by the waterfront and intended as
gathering places or public squares. The Rouse Company created those projects
also, and in those cities it  was bringing a kind of activity to urban areas
that had relatively little of it to start with. But in New York, the streets
are already crawling with  life and vitality - and so there was the very real
question of whether this kind of neatly packaged urbanism would really make
any sense here.  It is too early to tell whether it will work financially.
What is clear already is that the seaport district has changed as
dramatically, in a sense, as  if all its little old buildings had been
demolished and replaced by skyscrapers. For the casual, disheveled air, the
sense of funkiness, that filled  these blocks until a couple of years ago is
now gone completely. The feeling the seaport blocks used to give, that of a
poor group of  19th-century buildings holding on for dear life against the
powerful march of the 20th-century city and its skyscrapers, has now
disappeared.  The seaport has come into money, and its buildings show it.
They huddle nervously no more. Intelligently Orchestrated Mixture  What the
seaport neighborhood has become is something that will perhaps be less
appealing to the passionate New Yorker, who loves the  messy, chaotic
vitality of the city, but that everyone else will probably love. For it does,
after all, come closer to containing the real energy of a  city than any
other such project anywhere else. Rouse, the city and the state, working
through the state's Urban Development Corporation,  have created an
intelligently orchestrated mixture of buildings and activities that, if
lacking in the spontaneity of the New York neighborhood  that is left alone,
still manages to have a lot of life to it for a place that is planned down to
the last square inch.  The seaport blocks brush up against the rest of Lower
Manhattan with considerable drama - more so even than a few years ago, since
now  the skyscrapers of the financial district come up to the very edges of
the seaport's 19th-century world. At the corner of Fulton and Water  Streets,
the formal entrance to the seaport, the tiny triangle of Titanic Park, a
memorial to the fallen Titanic, has been spruced up, and an  information
kiosk added, so that for the first time visitors will have a real sense that
they are entering a special district, not stumbling upon a few  blocks in
Manhattan that the realestate developers somehow overlooked.  That sense is
continued through cobblestone pavements, special lampposts and a system of
signs, all of which manage to create a feeling of  continuity within these
blocks without becoming too cute or too precious. It may be startling to see
the logo of Ann Taylor, the fashion shop,  painted in black on the heavy
granite lintel of a sumptuous Greek Revival commercial building, but that is
the next thing the visitor sees - and it  sets the mood precisely for the
experiences to follow. A Few Shops Are Cloyingly Cute  For the architecture
here, both new and old, is but a housing for commercial activities that are
almost all new. While the museum's own shops  and galleries fill most of the
Greek Revival and Italianate row along Water Street - as splendid a thing
architecturally as anything in these blocks  -inside of most of the rest of
the complex are stores and restaurants that are very much of this time. A few
are cloyingly cute (the  nautical-souvenir shop called Captain Hook's, a toy
store called Gepetto's), while some, like Ann Taylor, Sweet's restaurant and
a tiny branch  of the Lower East Side's celebrated Guss Pickles, are long
familiar to New Yorkers.  There are two major buildings that are new, and
both are impressive reminders that we have learned a lot in the last few
years about the  exceedingly difficult problems of designing new buildings to
fit into the midst of older ones. At the northwest corner of Fulton and Front
 Streets, the beginning of the seaport's Museum Block, is the so-called New
Bogardus Building, designed by the architectural firm of Beyer  Blinder
Belle. It is a four-story structure of steel and glass that is intended as a
homage to James Bogardus, the master of 19th-century  cast-iron construction,
whose Laing Stores was originally supposed to be re-erected on this site -
but was stolen in 1975 after it had been  dismantled.  The new building is
not literally like the work of Bogardus nor of any other 19th-century
architect - its facades have a rhythm of narrow poles,  exposed steel beams
and horizontal strip windows that evokes the industrial architecture of the
early 20th century as much as the cast-iron  buildings of the 19th. It
doesn't have much to do with the 19th-century brick architecture of the
seaport area - but its appealing texture and  correct scale make it fit into
its surroundings with considerable grace. The stylistic shift it entails is
not a clash - it is more an easy slide that ends  up enriching the overall
streetscape and helping to keep it from appearing too much a
Williamsburg-like re-creation. The De-Facto  Centerpiece  The same might be
said of the new building that is the de-facto centerpiece of the entire
project, the Fulton Market. Designed by Benjamin  Thompson & Associates,
architects of the Faneuil Hall and Harborplace projects, the Fulton Market is
a full-block structure of three stories  plus mezzanine and high, gabled
roof. The major material here is a handsome, deep-red brick, with granite
trim and metal storefronts and  canopies. The building does not pretend to be
left over from the 19th century any more than the New Bogardus Building does,
but neither is  there any modernist hubris here. The Fulton Market looks as
if it might have been an early 20th-century industrial building that was just
fancied  up a bit for the new Rouse marketplace - it could not sit more
comfortably amid its older neighbors, and it, too, enriches the structures
around  it.  If there is any architectural disappointment here, it is in the
restoration of Schermerhorn Row, the block front of Georgian-Federal
commercial buildings dating from 1812 along Fulton Street. One of the city's
real treasures, a vibrant pile of buildings that seemed almost to  pulsate
with the memories of the generations of riverfront commerce it contained, the
row has been turned by Jan Hird Pokorny & Associates  into something flat and
dull. The brick fronts have been sterilized, made so clean that all sense of
time has been wiped out; worse still, the  distinctions between the houses
that make up the row have disappeared, and so this block looks more like a
single, overblown mass of brick  than like a real 19th-century street.  There
is more comfort to the restorations on the west side of Front Street, the
Museum Block, where a stretch that extends over three  centuries, the 18th to
the 20th, has been restored with more of a sense of the continued presence of
time. Between the rear of these buildings  and the rear of the Greek Revival
buildings on Water Street, a new alley, Cannon's Walk, has been carved out of
an old yard, and it is a  pleasing, intimate space. A Casual, Messy Feeling
Right now, the seaport project stops at South Street itself, beneath the East
River Drive and just before the Fulton Fish Market - which happily  remains
in the midst of all this new prosperity, and by city agreement will be there
in perpetuity. The presence of the fish market is not to be  taken lightly;
it serves as a powerful counter to the forces of gentrification that, however
positive, might someday put an end to the  neighborhood's essential
qualities.  For right now, there is still a chance for balance. The
architecturally rich blocks just north of the seaport - between the Rouse
project and the  Brooklyn Bridge - have much the casual, messy feeling that
the whole area had just a couple of years ago, and right now are a perfect
counterpoint to the highly planned, precisely ordered mood of the seaport's
blocks. To visit both is to have a real range of experiences - to see  a
superbly executed, but artificial, urban place at the seaport itself, and
then an altogether wonderful older neighborhood left alone just beside  it.
It is worth doing quickly - for already under construction is Pier 17, a new
pier much like the Fulton Market in design, which will contain still  more
shops and restaurants; when this Phase 2 is finished next year, it will
expand the scope of the Rouse project considerably, and the  balance that is
now there may shift once again.