The first thing I noticed in New York was how dense it is. I’d forgotten, after a month on the empty streets of Portland, what a seething mass of humanity actually looks–and feels–like. For all its urban growth boundary and population of 500,000+, I just don’t see that many people here. The trip from my house to wherever I might be going –across the Burnside Bridge to Powells to pick up a Dillard or down 28th to Hawthorne to beg the guys at Veloce to take just one more look at my screwy wheel — might involve one or two or three moments of interaction with another person. But because chances are that I’m on my bike and they’re on theirs, we don’t run into each other, jostle, hit, bump.

There just isn’t that constant flow of people, that river that sweeps you up, the crowd you have to jog through and move through and jab your way in and out of just to survive. I stayed mostly in Chinatown this trip, and I felt that inexorable pull of crowd logic, driving me away from Grand and towards Canal. In New York, you develop this sixth sense for where something’s happening, this ability to see that peoples’ faces are turned in one particular direction over another, the desire to see what it is they’re seeing, the willingness to put yourself in their perspective for just a second. Because everything you want in New York is just over there.

In Portland, everything is right here. I don’t feel that same group hunger, that collective drive. Buildings in New York go up, starting from the ground, high. Buildings in Portland focus inward; in a lot of cases, their structures already exist. They’re just being gutted, renovated, changed. You stand in the street in New York, waiting for the light to change so you can run across so you can get there (where?) faster. You wait on the sidewalk in Portland. What’s the rush? You’re just going inside, internalizing, adopting whatever part of the city it is you’re seeing.

Cities do that to us. We adopt their characters, make them our own. I stepped on the New York subway and my muscle memory kicked right back in. Stepped out of the subway and breathed that nasty New York August air, walked down the sidewalk and dodged and weaved, forcing myself to say to myself, a mantra I had to repeat every ten steps: “You don’t live here anymore.” It seems ridiculous that I had to remind myself, but my body knows better than I do what it considers home, what it considers where it’s supposed to be. I was terrified coming back to Portland, thought about changing my ticket, changing my flight, changing my whole entire plan of living in Portland for at least a year because when a city exerts that kind of pull over you, how could you ever stand to leave?

But that’s why I left in the first place, and so I caught my flight, and I landed, and the air hit my skin and the green hit my eyes, and yesterday afternoon I got back on the bike and flew down the empty streets. I didn’t see another person for minutes — whole, entire minutes, think about the last time that happened in Manhattan — and I loved it. Because now I’m in Portland post-New York, and everything has blended together into one big urban experience that just happens to have two facets: one west coast, one east.

These two cities express everything I’ve ever wanted in a life. New York is for when I don’t want to sleep, for when I want to be surrounded by people but still manage to feel histrionically lonely, for when I want to feel like the only reason I’m alive is so that I can keep living more. And Portland is for when I want to read, and think, and be alone, and be okay with it. New York is a shot of mental meth; Portland a slow-drip IV. And it’s a good thing they aren’t antidotes.

Eva: Hello!

Thanks for meeting me here

Alec: Hello. And here’s to Charles Gwathmey, who faced shame for the crime of designing the building his clients wanted on Astor Place at the exact moment when architectural snobbery became a sign of cultural cachet.

Eva: Oh, I like the way you start this

Because, this morning, when I got the news (via Twitter), and said OHFUCK, not knowing what else to say, and my roommate wondered what had happened, all I could say was “You know, Gwathmey… he did that piano building on Astor Place.”

So — will he be vindicated in death?

I am a Gwathmey ignoramus

Alec: I hope we can find a Faster Times reader who lives in “Sculpture for Living.” Does she like it there? Does it have sunlight, etc?

Eva: (You hear that, Readers?)

So what did you think when you heard?

Alec: Gwathmey’s obit sums it up. But unlike, oh, four of the five with whom he consorted, be worked hard to make his clients happy. He let go of dogma pretty readily. And other developers, who hadn’t hired him, made sport of beating up on him in the past few years.

Eva: Why?

(four of the New York Five? Eisenman, Hejduk, Meier, and…Graves!)

Alec: I think it’s heretical to make a rep as a modernist and then try to make a living doing apartment buildings. Or because he didn’t fully grok the excess those developers equated with taste.

Now. Graves executed a brilliant move into products. Eisenman did the mannered Denkmal in Berlin and the overbearing, Speer-ian stadium in Phoenix. Meier, you know, did all-glass on West Street.

My question to readers is this: were any of these moves more aesthetically pure than Sculpture for Living? Or did they just involve cleverer marketers as clients?

Eva: What was the problem with SfL?

I just didn’t like it formally

It felt awkward and I don’t really like buildings with sinewy curves

But people were freaked out about the sellout factor?

Alec: Sure. I don’t much like it either, because it violates the principle of the street wall with no real sense of uplift. But yes- purists called Gwathmey a sellout, and I’ve never understood the logic.

Eva: It was unfortunate that a Chase went in on the ground floor but that’s developer shenanigans…

So, spotcheck

People today: suddenly regretful or sanguine about the passing of history?

Alec: His last project, SoHo Mews, appropriated a British townhouse grammar. It was perfectly linear, and to my mind pretty tasteful. But it never caught a spark with the self-appointed cognoscenti.

Eva, which people are you spotchecking?

Eva: Soho Mews sent me a garden in a bag as a press trinket

Alec: Well, that wasn’t the architect’s choice.

Eva: People in our world — the critics, the journalists, the ones who make these really quick-and-dirty statements

(yes, of course not architect’s choice!)

Who are so quick to say What It All Means

Alec: It’d be productive to ask how Meier’s West Street buildings are, as designs, more provocative or disruptive or classic than Gwathmey’s.

Alec: Or to ask: did the theories that made Modernists embrace glass in the 1960s lose meaning and/or force when the modernists started using glass as a marker of expense on big condo projects?

Eva: I just talked to Roman & Williams for a little piece on 211 in Wallpaper

and they were pointing out the ridiculousness that brick = old and glass = modern, when, really, glass is REALLY OLD

Glass became material, then cue, then shorthand, then cop-out

Alec: Sure. By the way, folks, 211 = 211 Elizabeth Street, an archly antiquarian condo in lower Manhattan.

Eva: (thank you.)

So, you said you’d gained some affection for Gwathmey

Why?

Alec: Just as a personality. He took phone calls. He referred to himself as “Charlie.” He walked you through the floorplan- with overblown language, sure, but never with the suggestion that some of his generation make about his work being too inspired to discuss in practical terms.

This is totally uninformed, but he always struck me as analogous to Michael Caine- highly accomplished, influential in his way, but never content to stop working.

Eva: Whoa. Whoa. That is amazing - because I just yesterday was talking to a writer friend of mine about the self-mythologizers versus the workers - and Michael Caine came up as an example of someone who did acting as a JOB. So, maybe, Gwathmey was the workaday architect, someone who wasn’t so freaked out by his own myth of the possibility of his genius… but who did really good work every so often anyway

Alec: We’d have to hear from his clients and his peers. But consider Meier and Eisenman. Can you imagine either taking the time to articulate a condo’s circulation logic? And can you argue that either produced more idealistic or more ideologically pure work?

Eva: That’s a really good point… I remember when Eisenman was teaching us, he said once he just wanted to live in an easy apartment where he could drink wine and make love to his wife (this was shocking; we were seniors) … but never could I imagine him talking to us about circulation

I don’t know enough about Gwathmey’s work to talk ideology

Do you think he’ll be remembered most for Sculpture and the Rudolph building?

Or will we chalk this up to later years and go back to his parents’ houses, etc?

Alec: As for Gwathmey’s legacy, I would expect weight to shift backward over time to his earlier work as distance from SfL grows. Certainly many crasser towers followed SfL, but the case weakens that Gwathmey was the one who legitimated Havana aesthetics in Manhattan.

And the arrogance! What kind of apartment would make it hard to drink wine or make love to your wife? One with a rusting floor and no corkscrew, I suppose.

Eva: Or House X

With the cut-in-half bed

Which Roy McMakin did a genius and lovely and warm and wonderful and affectionate iteration of for the Trues’ house in Seattle…

Alec: Sure. A house for students. For us laypeople who learn about each other through architecture, Gwathmey was neither a prophet nor a fiend. He was working.

Eva: Good for him

what was your favorite project?

Alec: I admire those houses in Long Island. And I’m contrarian enough to like the addition to the Guggenheim. It smacked Wright upside the proverbial head by gently wedging the museum’s spiral back into the street wall.

Eva: I like the houses too… and the Guggenheim, it’s fun when buildings start engaging with each other

Alec: Now that I think about it, I like the addition to the Guggenheim intensely, especially compared with more egocentric work of the same era. Consider Philip Johnson’s Sony tower. What does it do for the urban experience? It creates a toy. As Scully would say, it interacts with the skyline. Gwathmey’s buildings interact with their users.

That’s architectural historian Vincent Scully, not Agent Scully.

On a parallel note, The Faster Times’ consumer-rights correspondent, Fred Bernstein, wrote the New York Times obituary of Gwathmey.

Eva: Not Gillian Anderson?!!? And this whole time I’ve been misled…

Yes, I saw it was our dear colleague…

Alec: So I think readers should check his obit and slideshow and chime in when they can.

Eva: I agree. Hi readers! Please leave your thoughts, comments, etc

And thank you Alec!

Alec: Thanks. I’m out.

The second thing I noticed about Portland was the city’s division into four quadrants.

And the third thing I noticed about Portland was the way those four quadrants are connected.

This is a city of bridges. And because my mental map still has a few holes—Alberta is … sort of that way-ish??—I’ve decided to just focus on the river. It’s central, it runs mostly north-south, and it’s fairly straightforward to figure out which direction you’re going in, versus which direction you’d like to go in.

The Broadway Bridge has become my default. I leave my house on my bike, get some speed rolling down Tillamook, take a quick jag across busy MLK, and then fast fast down to Vancouver. I hang left, zip down to the bridge, and spend thirty exhilarating seconds in a traffic/bike lane. A little green-painted swatch on the road links that traffic/bike lane to the sidewalk/bike lane, so I follow it, stand up on the bike, and pedal hard to get up the bridge.

It’s a really high bridge. When my chain fell off the other day and I couldn’t pedal forward, I had a moment after I’d fixed it—giving myself points for getting covered in bike grease—where I played the tape of an alternative scenario in my head. Rather than gracefully and gradually slowing, my bike had suddenly stopped. In this case I would have flown over the handlebars. Right over the siderail. And right into the water. That’s why my roommate doesn’t bike the Broadway.

He likes the esplanade down to the Hawthorne, which is a couple of bridges down from Broadway, past Burnside and Morrison—more of a freeway than a pedestrian bridge, as I discovered to my friend Brian’s chagrin—and bright and light where Broadway is burnished, painted international orange or Golden Gate red. Wikipedia tells me that the Broadway Bridge accommodates 2,000 bicycle crossings a day, which, being responsible for about twelve of those, I can believe.

There’s also Ross Island Bridge, further south, which I haven’t crossed yet and which the brilliant and inspiring local urban thinker Mike Houck is thinking about. And the Steel Bridge, and the St. Johns Bridge, and Sellwood Bridge, and Fremont Bridge, which reminds me of a bridge I used to see from Brooklyn. A friend of mine has a calendar of all the bridges—there’s only ten, but Oregonians can somehow stretch that out to a year—and when I rode the tram with him down from the hilltop campus of OHSU, we saw the city unfold as a connected web of freeways and bike lanes and sidewalks and bridges.

The bridges are crucial. They connect the two halves of the city, link the industrial neighborhood just to the east with the commercial and semi-anodyne downtown just to the west. They connect my neighborhood—kind of a nothing neighborhood on its own but an everything neighborhood because of its proximity to everywhere—with 23rd Avenue to the northwest, and the Pearl District just before it.

I keep wondering why the bridges seem so new and amazing when I’ve lived on an island for the last six years. And I think it’s because the bridges in New York are so iconic, so spectacular, and so expensive to cross by cab, that I don’t really register them as anything but a) an architectural landmark and b) something not to look over the side of and c) a bigger hole in my checking account.

And so it’s remarkable to see these bridges as what they’re really for: softening a divide, connecting a city, and turning a series of neighborhoods into one big town.

Photo by Useful Guy

I landed in Portland at 8:45 Monday evening. By 5pm yesterday, I was picking spinach, chard, and lettuce out of a neighbor’s yard and transporting it home by bike. By 8:45pm last night, I was buying bulk muesli at the local Whole Feeds and taking it home in a backpack, no plastic in sight. Environment, it seems, is everything.

I’ve been pretty reactionary towards the whole green thing for a long time, but it’s different when the whole green thing isn’t just a thing. In New York, I’d get press release after press release about this green building or that green building, about how this one was LEED-certified and state-of-the-art and aiming for a platinum and recycling graywater and moving towards environmental considerations. I learned that most of the time that was code for “Sorry our building totally sucks design-wise. Please write about it anyway!”

When I was trying to figure out if I should move to Portland or not, I had lunch with a friend. He’d lived in Seattle for four years. I was surprised; he’s so entrenched in New York, on the board of the Met and the MoMA and the Drawing Center. But he’d lived in the Pacific Northwest, and lived to tell about it. What he told was about the environment, about how once you live in a place like this you’ll never throw a plastic bag away like you used to, never casually toss a bunch of paper in the trash because it’s just easier than sorting through it one last time. I tried to act like this would work on me too but really I believed that it wouldn’t. Once a not-environmentalist, always a not-environmentalist.

Which is why it was weird to find myself buying muesli in bulk and actually contemplating the “save and reuse your plastic bulk bag!” suggestion. Strange to put everything I’d bought right into my backpack, without first dumping it in a bag. Odd to look at a collection of plastic bags and see them as the trash that they are, rather than the helpful necessity I’ve so long believed.

Portland’s environmentalism runs deep. Even better, it runs obvious.

There are bike lanes everywhere. Crossing over onto the west side via the Broadway Bridge, there’s a dedicated bike lane with its own bike light. And then crossing back over Hawthorne and going up the esplanade, there’s another one that brings you back into the heart of the east. When I biked home last night down Tillamook Street, I saw what I know is going to become a familiar sight - two-wheelers criss-crossing blocks and blocks ahead, creating a rhythm for the city the way the subway rumbling under my Manhattan apartment used to do. 

It changes the feeling of the city to know that people are getting themselves around, changes the scale to know that it’s all manageable so long as you’ve got a little energy. I got a little lost a few times yesterday, but all I had to do was find the other bikers and get in line with them. They led me to the right place. And when I lost them, I just turned around.

People here don’t need to identify as bikers, the way they do in New York. It’s just how they roll.  

Photo of naked Portland bikers (who I haven’t found yet but plan to soon) by GregNotCraig

One of the more fortunate side effects of our economy’s falling off of a cliff - one of the only fortunate side effects, some might say - is that it affords us a lot of opportunity for unselfconscious marvel at What Was OMG Totally Upon Reflection the Insanity of it All.

During the Insanity, I had no idea that it was the Insanity. It was just the way things were. As my father told me as we compared recent (there are some last vestiges, I’m finding) Insanities - he’d just played a stadium festival in Germany and been given an obscenely nice fruit and cheese plate; I was calling him from the balcony of the new W Fort Lauderdale, to which I’d been invited to check out Clodagh’s design - the problem is not that it seems weird and strange to suddenly find yourself in the Insanity. The problem is that it takes about three nanoseconds before you think that this is reality.

It isn’t. Things were nuts for a while there - breakfasts, lunches, endless slideshows of a new museum/sports hall/library/ that most of us probably weren’t going to write about, but given over perfectly cooked halibut at some midtown private backroom so who were we to complain? We were invited to launches and unveilings of buildings that all of us sort of knew weren’t going to be built, but we went anyway. It’s part of the game, of course, the machine that keeps us all in business. The architects design something; we look at it, and marvel, and ooh and aah, and then we talk with some vague sense of detail about future plans and moving forward and things in the pipeline and on schedule and excited for future bricks to be laid, but we kind of all know that it’s not what’s going to get built. That doesn’t matter, though. What matters is that we suspend our disbelief for a minute and go out there and, just for a few seconds, hours, or days, trust.

And so I thought I’d share five moments that were emblematic of those good old days, that expressed New York’s architectural boom in a way that only those who were there might recognize, but in a way that all who weren’t should see.

Ground Zero

This was the first story I ever reported, followed, covered. I could not tell my butt from my elbow in terms of writing a news story, but I had a good mentor and I just hung around until people got used to me and then eventually gave in and gave me assignments. Ground Zero was the original clusterfuck. It was also the first time I heard the phrase “off the record,” and also the first time an architect made absolutely no sense to me. I was interviewing Daniel Libeskind, masterplanner and nominal architect of the Freedom Tower and trying to get a sense of what he did all day. It was like a really excited version of “who’s on first,” with him deflecting and talking about his father’s early career on Stone Street and the lights and how this masterplanning is not glamorous but is just moving feet, and inches, how this is about freedom, and America, and he loves America and his father worked on Stone Street and this is not glamorous, and my playing slow and asking him to repeat just one more time the situation with the bathtub and the grade and how does the waterfall go from below grade to above again and where are the streets just explain it to me like I’m five? And there were the tens of LMDC-organized press conferences like the one where we looked at Calatrava’s stegosaurus of a PATH station - it looks like a child! Like  a bird! Like a bird releasing a child! No! Other way around! - and endless iterations of the Freedom Tower, which he wasn’t even really designing - it’s tall! It’s really tall! It’s a little slanted! Nope! Now it’s an obelisk! Still tall!- and we all maybe wanted it to be happening the way it seemed to be happening. But it wasn’t. And it confused me. Still does.

HL23

This was right before it all went apeshit. Scene: Tom Colicchio’s Craftsteak, 10am on what was probably a Wednesday. Everyone I’d ever met in New York was there. Neil Denari, SCI-ARC theorist and architect I remembered only from the time I’d worked as an intern at Storefront for Art + Architecture and been “in charge of” going through the archives and come across an exhibition Denari had done that I seem to remember was about television and color (but not color television), was unveiling his tower. Denari had, famously, never built a ground-up building. But here he was, showing off a really tall tower on 23rd Street over the High Line (get it?) that bent at least eleven zoning codes (long live exceptionalism!) and looked a little bit like what might happen if Jonathan Ive got his hands on some CAD. It was impossible to build, even more impossible to engineer. But it was totally gonna happen. Totally.

Also good breakfast sandwiches.

The Esquire Apartment at the Sculpture for Living

I love Esquire. I came to accept the Sculpture for Living. But the Esquire Apartment at the Sculpture for Living was just overkill. The magazine - which, seriously, I love love love, especially Stephen Marche’s monthly A Thousand Words About Our Culture - had asked designers to make different rooms for one of the Astor Place apartments. They turned out a little anodyne-tacky is the only thing, which was way worse than the bare bedrooms we’d all seen on first-look walkthrough of the building. Also - designing an apartment that no one’s going to live in and only editors who look at this jazz all day long are going to see? Insanity, definition of.

The 20 Pine Launch

For about half a second I worked in various peripheral ways with Lockhart Steele of Curbed. During that half a second, he was invited to the launch of 20 Pine, a collection of way downtown residences designed by Armani Casa. Or maybe he wasn’t invited and eight of us just went and faux-crashed the party. You could do that kind of thing if you were running around with Lockhart Steele of Curbed. (You probably still can. Lock? Call me.) What I remember is an insane crush of people and John Legend. Yes. Shvo had hired a recent Grammy winner to sing some songs and play the piano while PR people and journalists complained about the length of the bar wait and ate little cookies that had 20 Pine engraved on them. The idea was that we were supposed to be really really stoked about Armani/Casa’s design. Can you imagine this happening now? No. I can barely imagine that it actually happened then.

My Print Career

This was really the ultimate Insanity. I came to New York and wanted to write about architecture and it was not only possible, but it went fairly well. Magazines had pages. They needed to fill them. The first thing I ever heard was that editors were as hungry for stories as I was for food. I pitched, and pitched, and pitched, and eventually a few of my ideas were accepted. Some of them even involved travel - and the magazines were cool with that, and paid, and covered my hotel expenses (I was careful, of course), and then even paid me for my words on top of that, usually on time and definitely once I’d asked. A few of the stories that I wrote didn’t end up running but I still got paid for them. All I had to do was go look at stuff and come up with some hopefully entertaining things to say about the stuff I’d seen, and write it down, and be as friendly and approachable as I could be write a few edits here and there, barring that one time the comma got moved. It was lovely and amazing, and I never thought it wouldn’t last.

Photo by Erik Charlton

There’s this spike I’ve been carrying around for a few years. No, newly arrived readers, this isn’t suddenly Buildings: The Sectional Therapy Hour (swear), and I’m not speaking metaphorically (although, okay, I could be.) It’s a real spike, a little piece of train track-building equipment, about seven inches long, heavier than it looks, a little rusty all around except for one shiny polished part that’s inscribed with something like The High Line 2005. (It’s in a box in my dad’s upstate New York basement and I’m on a German train, or I’d check.)

It’s from the groundbreaking for the High Line, an event I went to one cold and windy early morning something like a few years ago. Kevin Bacon was there. So was Barry Diller, whose Gehry-designed IAC was under construction on the West Side Highway. So was his wife Diane von Furstenberg; her store, brilliantly designed by WorkAC, was about to open or had just opened, time is like a construct when all you have is your then-addled memory. Point is, famous people were there and everyone was jazzed.

We were there to acknowledge that one day this would be a park. I had absolutely no doubt in my mind that this would never be a park. There seemed absolutely no way that there would ever be enough funding or permission to turn this stretch of land running above Chelsea into the Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed James Corner-landscaped park it was supposed to be. No way. None.

I ate my hat a few weeks ago. I know, I know, everyone’s written about the High Line. Old news. What-ever. To me it was thrilling news when I happened to be wandering around Chelsea trying to kill a few hours. I’d read that the High Line had opened but I couldn’t even fathom what that meant. I remembered the train tracks being really hard to walk on. Then I thought about the renderings I’d seen here and there. None of it seemed like much of a park.

But I thought I’d give it a shot. It was a little confusing to find the entrance, but eventually, right underneath Polshek’s cracked-open book of a Standard Hotel - whose Roman & Williams-designed lobby I had to check out and immediately fall in love with - I found a set of stairs that led me up to, um, one of the coolest parks in the world. Maybe it was a falling in love kind of day, but I was (elevatedly) floored.

The landscaping was spare, not sparse; the walkway - it’s a linear park — had little remnants of the tracks here and there, tracks that the kids I saw were skipping over and following and jumping on, and moments where a series of raised lines mimicked the train maps of New York. There were benches that people were actually sitting on, then lawn chairs that people were actually lying on.

Tanned and improbably healthy-looking Parks Department employees were weeding central beds, ensuring the sparseness. I saw three ladies for whom lunch is a verb picking their way up one block-length of the park, and they seemed thrilled.

And then the coup d’etat, DiScoFro’s framed box overhanging Tenth Avenue that does for the cityscape what their ICA in Boston does for the harbor.

And because of that move, we have to go there. There’s something to be said for getting all post-critical on this shit and talking about the frame. It seems like an easy device - frame something and make it art by naming it so! - but it’s hard to pull off. And Liz and Ric and Charles nailed it. There is something profoundly delightful about being in a space you’re not usually supposed to be - viz: the charms of the five-borough bike tour where you get to ride your bike in the middle of the FDR!!! - and the avenue-overhanging viewing platform just kicks that pleasure center right into overdriven gear. I sat down and just looked out the window. And couldn’t stop smiling. Neither could anyone else.

It’s nice when architecture makes you happy. Even nicer when it’s outside. So go look for the kinked hotel building, stop at the van Leeuwen truck for a pistachio cone, and head on up the stairs. And go with as closed a mind as you like; the park won’t care.

Photo by Dan Nevill