Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll look at what makes a landmark. We’ll also find out about an office tower in Lower Manhattan that has become a place for artists, designers and boutique creative agencies by day — and for attention-getting parties by night.
What is a landmark? What should a landmark be? Those questions have come up in different ways in the last few days, first in an essay by The Times’s architecture critic, Michael Kimmelman, then in an annual list by the Cultural Landscape Foundation, an education and advocacy organization. The list is a departure for the group. In the past it has zeroed in on “at-risk landscapes.” This time there’s a beach in Miami, a levee in Louisiana — and, in New York City, a park and a playground in another park. Not one of them is deteriorating or facing demolition. They made the list because they are places where protests unfolded — protests that the foundation says are in danger of being forgotten. The sites have “a unique power of place because they serve as reminders that they were the stages for those events where it happened,” said Charles Birnbaum, the president and chief executive of the foundation, adapting a line from the song “The Room Where It Happens” in the musical “Hamilton.” The foundation said that protests and civil disobedience at the sites on the list were “not only a defining part of our shared history since the colonial era, but they also continue to the present day on campuses, at political conventions and elsewhere.” The two sites in New York City were chosen because 2024 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Robert A. Caro’s classic, “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.” Both fit the foundation’s theme because in both places protesters mobilized — and the seemingly all-powerful Moses did not get his way. One is Washington Square Park, where Moses wanted to build a roadway that would have forever changed “the relationship between the public space and its value as a common green,” the foundation said. Over 23 years, Moses put forward three road plans, the foundation said, and community members stopped them “in a grass-roots movement that inspired historic preservation efforts throughout the city.” This was long before the demolition of the old Pennsylvania Station in the 1960s, an event that prompted the passage of preservation laws and the creation of the Landmarks Preservation Commission to prevent beloved buildings from being torn down at will. The other New York site on the list is the West 67th Street Playground in Central Park, which Moses wanted to turn into an 80-car parking lot for the Tavern on the Green restaurant. Mothers from the neighborhood “occupied the site along with their children and dogs” in 1956, the foundation said. “They set up chairs and refused to leave,” the foundation continued. Moses ordered trees to be taken down but relented after newspapers called the protest “the Battle of Central Park.” He eventually abandoned the parking lot plan; the site is now known as the Tarr-Coyne Tots Playground. “ ‘The Battle for Central Park’ represented a turning point in children’s recreation as the mothers successfully made their case for prioritizing children’s play areas over parking infrastructure,” the foundation said. That fight, in turn, led to further advocacy “on behalf of the city’s children and the appropriate use of public parkland,” it said. The foundation’s list seemed to dovetail with what Michael wrote about landmark laws: They “don’t always protect what we actually want to save.” His essay was adapted from a chapter in “Beyond Architecture: The New New York,” edited by Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, to be published next week by New York Review Books. Often there’s a disconnect between buildings that appeal to government officials and preservationists and the more neighborhood-oriented places that appeal to locals — the bodega or bookstore on the corner, or a farmers’ market. As he put it: “How do we treat less obvious or tangible things and values like the physical fabric of a community or a sense of place?” A city’s intangible heritage “need not be a building or place,” he wrote, before noting that “intangible heritage is the next frontier for preservation in America.” “In the end,” he wrote, the questions surrounding intangible heritage “come down to how we wish to define and enshrine our neighborhoods, our culture and ourselves.” And the discussion “is a crucial part of the preservation process.” WEATHER Expect a sunny day with a high near 41. The evening will be mostly clear, with the temperature dropping to around 30. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Dec. 9 (Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception). The latest New York news
The Arts
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It’s a 31-story building in Lower Manhattan, a onetime office tower. Now, in place of the insurance underwriters and claims adjusters who once worked there, it is starting to fill up with artists, designers and boutique creative agencies. And by night, it is the scene of splashy events that generate social media content and press coverage. Our writer Jessica Iredale says the building is owned by developers who received a $41.3 million discretionary tax break from the city to help pay for their vision for the building — and their $150 million renovation. The building, known as WSA, for Water Street Associates, seems to be trying a new version of strategy familiar to once industrial neighborhoods: Buy an old building, spruce it up and bring in creative professionals to make the area buzzy. Word of mouth, along with select invitations and bargain rents, have drawn the creative class to the 41-year-old tower. The economics appear to be daunting, but WSA has attracted the people it wants. The independent fashion designers Bode, Luar and Rosie Assoulin have space in the building. And the model Emily Ratajkowski co-hosted two parties there after the annual Met Gala, drawing guests including Kendall Jenner and the singers Lana Del Rey and Bad Bunny. When Jenner wanted to show the world that she had gone blonde, she posted photos taken there. And when GQ gave two dinners there, the guests included the Formula 1 champion Sir Lewis Hamilton, the novelist Min Jin Lee and Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook. METROPOLITAN DIARY Soft appeal
Dear Diary: It would have been easy enough to ignore the soft appeal for directions spoken to nobody in particular by a man who was walking alone in no hurry down the subway station steps, the concrete still puddled from the morning’s rain. I grimaced at the muffled grind of a train departing as we navigated the trudge of passengers dispersing into the city above. The man asking directions shuffled a few steps behind me, his ankle braced by a strapped-on cast. Introducing himself by his surname, he said he usually drove from Queens to his business in Manhattan but had decided on this day to travel by rail for a change. Parade crowds and street closings had caused the taxi he was in to abandon him with instructions to take a downtown M or F instead. But the M wasn’t running because of track work, so we waited together for the F. I knew his shop. Hand-painted signs in the window teased a museum of figurines, handicrafts and fabrics. He mentioned a gas explosion that had leveled a few nearby buildings and how the blast had shaken his basement. From the vantage of three decades, he talked about how the neighborhood had changed and how his tenants’ rent more than covered his mortgage payments. We waited about 20 minutes before a rush of air announced a train’s impending arrival. We said little after getting into a crowded car, but when we parted, I pointed him toward the opposite end of the platform. There were two sets of stairs for him to climb and then a few blocks to walk. He said to stop by his shop sometime, but that tomorrow he would be taking his car. — Sean Carlson Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Stefano Montali and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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