Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (49 page)

I enter the park at the center of the complex. The sign says tudor greens, and there are actually two parks, like mirror images of each other, on either side of the ramps leading to 42nd Street. Well kept, with obvious pride, the greens are spacious, containing gravel paths and benches, tree-lined, wonderfully shady on a summer's day. A few new saplings are being planted. The gardener, a longhair moving briskly and purposefully about, has his own toolshed at the end of the park. I share a
bench with a squirrel, who looks unintimidated. Two workmen in construction uniforms are catching a rest: one, lying down on his bench, is looking up at the sky; the other, sitting near, talks to him in Spanish. An old woman with a walker enters the park and takes hesitant steps, her daily constitutional. A thin, scholarly woman in her forties, with grayish-blonde ponytail and sweat pants, is reading a book and underlining it intently, on a bench far removed from everyone. Everyone gives off an air—unusual for a big city—of feeling utterly safe.

And indeed, Tudor City is nothing if not an enclave, niched into various cul-de-sacs. Straight ahead of me is a fence with a dead end sign, on an abutment that overlooks the United Nations, First Avenue, and the FDR Drive below; at the southern end is another dead end sign marking a pleasant overlook. All the buildings face in, toward the greens, away from the surrounding metropolis. When the complex was originally built, slaughterhouses and a coaling station occupied the land where the United Nations now sits, which explains why the three river towers along Tudor City Place turn their backs so resolutely on the water: the smell must have been unbearable, and, without air-conditioning, people would have had no other option but to open their windows. (If you stand below Tudor City, on First Avenue, and look up, you will see the merest scattering of windows over otherwise unbroken brick walls.)

Tudor City perches on a promontory overlooking the East River—the same promontory, in effect, that shelters those other tony residential enclaves to the north, Beekman Place and Sutton Place. Tudor City was never quite as ritzy; most of the units were designed as start-up apartments for single people and young married couples without children, who were expected to move away when they raised a family or grew prosperous. The three easternmost towers, each twenty-two stories, were crammed with studios and one-bedroom apartments, and no one had a full kitchen, just a kitchenette. (This is still true today, though now all the units are cooperatively owned.) The only exceptions to this sardine arrangement were the apartments at the tops—duplexes and such that were truly baronial—and the shorter buildings on the north and south ends of the landscaped greens, which had more multiple-bedroom, family units.

James Sanders, an architect friend who grew up in Tudor City, told me, “The complex was a functioning example of mixing income groups, since the best apartments were probably five times more expensive than the cheapest ones.” James remembers Tudor City as the perfect accommodation for his parents. His mother wanted to be near the bright lights of Broadway, his father, enamored of garden cities, wanted a home overlooking green space. He recalls a strong community feeling: everyone knew and watched out for each other; the Tudor City kids played together in the
greens and, on snowy days, pulled their sleds across the turnaround. Partly because it stood on the water's edge, the complex got plenty of light and air—more so, in fact, than the luxury apartment houses on Park Avenue, with their gloomy inner rooms, reserved for the maid or the second child. Still, Tudor City seemed to be mimicking those broad, bulky Park Avenue apartment houses, especially in the way that service shops—a dry cleaner, a pharmacy, a grocery, a café—were discreetly tucked into the street level.

At the base of one tower is a storefront with toy dollhouse furniture and plastic fruit: “Lovelia Enterprise Showroom.” Somehow this business, with its trifling yet exclusive air, epitomizes the tweedy atmosphere of Tudor City. Like the London Terrace Apartments (1929) on West 23rd Street, or the Tudor-style Hudson View Gardens (1924) in Washington Heights, Tudor City looked to England for its aesthetic pedigree, at a time when most other Manhattan apartment courts were attempting a Parisian flair.

What strikes me most now about the design, done by H. Douglas Ives, French's in-house architect, is the studied ornamentation, which reinforces a solid impression of quality. The Tudor decorations on the façade make the massing of these very massive buildings less oppressive, as they work their way up from the stone at street level, to the brick in the middle floors, relieved by a variety of indentations, to the more-fantastic treatments of the roof apartments. There are allusions to the ecclesiastical (one building is called The Cloister), or feudal (turrets that recall a medieval castle) or academic (a lobby with leaded colored-glass windows and a reading nook, that suggests the parlor of an Oxford dormitory). All this is done, in retrospect, very lovingly, and seems poignant in its plea for dignity. One could never get away with it today, because modernist aesthetics wouldn't stand for that level of historicist ornamentation, nor are there enough poor, skilled Italian stone carvers around, willing to work for peanuts. Of course, there is something faintly fatuous about pumping up a Tudor three-story chalet to the skies, and running all those brown ornamental lines over their façades; it was architecturally reactionary even in its day. But no more so than those faux-Tudor high-rise apartment blocks in London, from the same era, which appear so graceful to the American visitor's eye. All in all, Tudor City remains one of the most distinctly civilized, urbane places in New York. Even its flashy Tudor City rooftop sign, which clashes with the restrained architecture, works, by injecting some necessary vulgarity into the picture.

The trees sigh in the breeze, and I think of closing my eyes and going to sleep here. Maybe if I were a resident of Tudor City I would, but being merely a visitor I sense they would shoo me out of the park if I started snoozing. Something else keeps me on edge. Across the park from me, at the base of one of the towers, is the Tudor Grill, and I'm vividly recalling with a knot in my stomach a birthday party I attended there one winter for a little boy: the child of my friends, a lovely couple, who had just turned three. The restaurant was closed for the private affair, with balloons and party favors and plenty of food. Waiters circulated with hors d'oeuvres, meat-carvers stood by. Since then, the boy has had to battle a chronic illness; the couple's marriage has collapsed and shattered under the strain. I can't see the innocent Tudor Grill sign without thinking of a charming, beautiful boy at three. So we fill out even the most benign spaces of the city with personal tragedy.

STANDING ON THE OVERLOOK, where Tudor City ends in a cul-de-sac, I gaze down at the United Nations headquarters, at the familiarly elegant, green-mirror-glassed façade of the Secretariat towering over the low-slung, saddle-shaped, off-white General Assembly Building. There is something not quite Manhattan about the UN complex, something more reminiscent of the 1939 World's Fair, with its trylon and sphere, out in Queens. “Blood Alley,” that old congeries of slaughterhouses and rendering plants which used to occupy the site, has been more than expunged; it has given way to a marvelously iconic, abstract composition of vertical forms balanced against horizontals, made all the more postcard-flat because you can only view it (unless you are on a boat) from the direction of the streets that look east toward the river. Because of its security fears, the United Nations has never permitted any pedestrian access to its water frontage in the rear (though it seems to me that a terrorist might do as much damage, lobbing a shell from a motorboat or from a passing car, as on foot). From time to time, the city has approached the United Nations with offers to cantilever an esplanade over the water, even one walled off from the complex, but the UN has always rejected the idea.

The 572-foot Secretariat Building looks better with each passing year. I have come to love that shimmering, book-shaped rectangle with two spacious glass sides facing the water and two thin stone sides at the edges, and
those intriguing grillwork strips punctuating the façade every twelve or so floors—though part of what makes it moving is that it has the poignant fragility of many early modernist masterworks, as if the panes were getting tired of shouldering their stoic purity. (It has 5,400 windows that actually open and close, and its energy consumption is enormously wasteful, by today's standards.) Neglected for decades because of the UN's budget constraints, it now needs a major overhaul, especially the interiors, which still have their original fixtures, obsolete telephone switchboards and wiring, and leaking air-conditioning vents.
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When the Secretariat was completed in 1950, it was the first postwar glass skyscraper done in the International Style, and fulfilled the fondest dreams of New York modernists. A committee of international architects, led by New York's own Wallace K. Harrison, who had worked on Rockefeller Center, had conferred regularly, while the lone genius Le Corbusier went off and developed the essential design. Later, Le Corbusier fulminated that he was not allowed to supervise the construction of “his” building; but in truth, he lacked the engineering skills to accomplish in hard materials the innovative free-hanging glass-and-metal curtain wall he had sketched with pencil; those practical refinements fell to Harrison, whom Le Corbusier disdained as a local hack, to figure out.

Harrison admittedly did not have Le Corbusier's rigorously elegant flair, which shows in the hodgepodge General Assembly Building
he
designed. Completed in 1952, its exterior is a mundane version of that spacecraft-landing architecture popular in the 1950s, further compromised by the absurd, dinky dome that a United States senator insisted be added to the top, to get Congress to pass its share of the construction costs. Its interior, dominated by the lobby, is a mélange of boomerang-shaped balconies
and ramps that suggest an airport terminal. One day I decided to take the tour of the General Assembly and Conference Buildings (the Secretariat, alas, is closed to the public). After several security checks, I joined a group and was led past hallways chock-full of donated national arts and folk crafts, most of it of the peace-kitsch variety, into a succession of delegate chambers done in variations of fifties Swedish Modern, and invited to imagine the United Nations at work—uplifting, in an anachronistic, One World sort of way.

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The whole United Nations headquarters complex requires an estimated $1-billion refurbishment to overhaul its aging buildings and deal with its intensifying space needs. One option under discussion would be to add ten stories to the Secretariat Building, a terrible idea. Another would be to erect several smaller structures on the seventeen-acre site. (Of course, the most logical course would be to expand south onto the Con Edison site, but it would bring in less profit for the landowners than private high-rise residences.) Though a billion dollars will be difficult to raise from member nations, such renovation makes more sense than the estimated $1.2 billion in maintenance costs, including emergency repairs and excessive energy bills, which would be required over the next twenty-five years.

A replica of the General Assembly's lobby was used in Alfred Hitchcock's
North by Northwest,
when the advertising executive played by Cary Grant, mistaken for a murderer, is forced to flee the United Nations building. Hitchcock told Truffaut in their interview: “The place where the man is stabbed in the back is in the delegates' lounge, but to maintain the prestige of the United Nations, we called it the ‘public lounge’ in the picture, and this also explains how the man with the knife could get in there.” If the United Nations could seem so logical a crime scene to the makers of thrillers, one can understand the UN's reluctance to let ordinary citizens wander along its waterfront side. Still, that this organization, dedicated to open, democratic debate in the resolution of conflicts, should have so averse a response to the public speaks to the strange lack of presence that the world's government has exerted on its host city. Anywhere else, such an institution would dominate the city's cultural life and cocktail gossip—but not in New York. The occasional tabloid outcries over driving accidents or illegal parking by UN personnel who enjoy diplomatic immunity only underscore this shadowy relationship.

The lack of engagement, or standoff, between New York and the United Nations finds embodiment in the curiously muffled way the city's streets meet the UN complex. First, there is the utter absence of ceremonial entrance: visitors come in through a side door. Second, along this particular stretch of First Avenue bordering the United Nations, the main car traffic has been diverted through an underground tunnel (an inspiration of Robert Moses when he was City Construction Coordinator), which makes sound security sense and promotes the dignity of the ensemble, but also gives the front of the complex the stiff, deserted air of a suburban corporate headquarters.

When the United Nations was first being built, there were calls for an entire city-within-a-city to be constructed for the organization's personnel. These ambitious plans never got off the ground, partly because any expansions would have encountered already-functioning city neighborhoods. One particularly dense public-private residential high-rise project, proposed in the 1960s, was resisted by populists such as columnist Pete Hamill, who objected to “the assumption that …somehow these freeloading diplomats assigned to the UN have some blessed right to live across the street from their job, while the rest of us have to come screaming into Manhattan on the subway cages.” So the decision—or non-decision—was made to leave the development of a UN district to the marketplace's impulses. Piecemeal, a mysteriously self-reflexive zone of glass-and-steel office towers and apartment houses arose north of the United Nations complex along First Avenue, which one might call “UNville.” It lay just south of the exclusive residential addresses of Beekman Place and Sutton Place, and partook of their prestige by proximity, attracting as residents not only UN people but high-society and entertainment types, though it remains repellent for walking purposes to the casual stroller who comes in on it from elsewhere.