Monumentality
What’s left after a bubble bursts? The greater city that was built by this, and every past, boom.
These are good times for moralizers. Pride goeth so obviously before a falling Dow that we’re lapping up sermons like there’s no tomorrow (which seems like a real possibility). We live surrounded by the emblems of hubris, glittering corporate skyscrapers arranged on the skyline like trophies on a mantel. What fulminator could resist the delicious irony of two high-rise financial headquarters nearing completion just as the corporations that erected them fall to their knees? Bank of America, the country’s largest bank, is putting the finishing touches on the city’s second-tallest tower, a gracious, twisting paperweight at Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street. And Goldman Sachs is quietly slipping a 43-story glass scepter into Battery Park City.
It’s tempting to see these projects as symbols of vacuous excess, like Saddam Hussein’s gilded pleasure domes. What are these two supplicants for taxpayer alms doing building crystal castles? With Manhattan’s office vacancy rate at 12 percent and climbing, there’s something decadent—isn’t there?—about opening more cubicle acreage.
Well, no. Even decline can contribute to architectural grandeur. The Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center both famously went up during the Worst Depression Before This One. So did the skyscraper that has just ceded its second-tallest title to Bank of America and bears another troubled brand name: the Chrysler Building. (Fortunately, the company and the building parted ways 50 years ago, so it can’t be rechristened the Fiat Building.)
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Monumentality
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