The Class Of Manhattan Glass - WFP That!

Carter Horsley’s Top 10 glass-clad Manhattan buildings: Carter Horsley is the editorial director of CityRealty.com and the former real estate editor and architecture critic of the New York Post. Previously, he was a reporter for the New York Times and architecture critic for the International Herald Tribune.

1. 100 Eleventh Avenue: (pictured above) Jean Nouvel is giving Frank O. Gehry and Herzog & deMeuron a run for the money for the design of the city’s most spectacular new building.  At 100 Eleventh Avenue, he has designed a 23-story apartment building with a razzle-dazzle, curved corner with myriad, tilted window shapes and sizes.

2. Chelsea Modern  447 West 18th Street: Audrey Matlock’s design for this new and sleek, residential condominium building in Chelsea for Robert Gladstone not only has a façade of  overlapping angled windows but also permits residents to open their windows by pushing out parallel from the building for ventilation.

3. Metropolitan Tower  136 East 57th Street: Harry Macklowe commissioned Schuman Claman Lichtenstein & Efron to design this dashing, forceful, dramatic, razor-sharp, angled, black, mid-block monolith. It resonates with the Post-Modern Carnegie Hall Tower designed by Cesar Pelli to the west and Citispire designed by Helmut Jahn across 56th Street in the city’s most vertiginous triple-tuning fork. The three close towers will soon be joined by a fourth “finger,” a taller, mixed-used tower across from Carnegie Hall by Extell Development.

4. 165 Charles Street: Richard Meier & Partners has the distinction of having had a developer commission him to build his third handsome glass apartment tower facing the Hudson River just to the south of two nearly identical towers he had just designed for a different developer at 173 and 176 Perry Street.  This fractured trinity ushered in the new era of reflective residential buildings in the city and even got Meier a bigger commission for a larger, and still elegant, glass apartment building, On Prospect Park, at the entrance to Prospect Park in Brooklyn.  Meier, of course, is still the architect for Sheldon Solow’s enormous unbuilt complex south of the United Nations along the East River.

5. Trump Tower: This dark brown tower is notable for its excellent stepped plan that creates an interesting form even with a flat roof and for its lavish atrium with tall marble waterfall. Despite some glitz, this mixed-use tower has élan and swagger and the tree-ed terraces at the 56th Street corner host carolers at holiday time, a very suave and charming touch for Donald Trump, the developer. Trump would follow this with other very slick and handsome glass towers at Trump International Hotel & Tower at 1 Central Park West and Trump World on First Avenue.

6. Time-Warner Center: This is a whole lotta glass.  The city’s most ambitious mixed-use building, its reflective glass facades conceal a marvelous Whole Foods in the basement, a curved four-story high atrium with several very deluxe restaurants, a jazz center, headquarters for Time-Warner, a Mandarin Oriental Hotel and a lot of not inexpensive condominium apartments in its thin, twin towers whose tops are illuminated at night.  David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was the architectural chef.

7. 497 Greenwich Street: Winka Dubbeldam designed this rather small but smashing residential condominium project whose attractive glass façade ripples up the north side of the street frontage and over an adjoining smaller building on the south with tiny little balconies separating the two sections.  This was the start of a new exciting era of façade experimentation in the city.

8. 40 Bond Street: Herzog & de Meuron took a gander at the cast-iron architecture of the surrounding neighborhoods and the graffiti-splattered facades of some nearby East Village tenements and, presto, blended one of the city’s most awesome small new residential projects for Ian Schrager and Aby Rosen.  Above the second floor, the façade is formed by large, deep, rounded columns of wonderful richly colored green glass, but the icing at the bottom of this very urban “cake” is the looping, aluminum “scrawl” gate that organically conjures a beatific scroll of graffiti.  Yazzer!  Wow!

9. Atelier at 635 West 42nd Street: No list of glass-clad buildings in the city would be complete without mention of Costas Kondylis, the city’s most prolific residential tower architect.  His projects are consistently good-looking and lately have begun to show some interesting experimentation.  At the 42-story Atelier on West 42nd Street he introduced the motif of “abs” that show off proudly the building’s robust and fine proportions with a touch of sculptural, that is, protruding, grace across the street from his twin silver-glass-clad towers for Larry Silverstein.

10. One Astor Place/445 Lafayette Street: The world’s greatest glass residential building is Lake Point Tower in Chicago, a very sinuous, free-standing tower with no setbacks. At One Astor Place, Gwathmey Siegel & Associates borrowed the sinuosity for the torso of this free-standing apartment tower that is very prominently located between Lafayette Street and the Bowery and Cooper Union. At 26 stories, it became an instant landmark for the new emerging skyline of the East Village and Lower East Side.

The Loneliness Of The Skyscraper Window Washer

 

The Loneliness of the Skyscraper Window-Washer: "He was strapped to a window frame just a few feet under the huge clock.  The cold of a November morning swept away from the gilded dome of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank above him.  He shifted his weight.  The wind snapped at the chamois strung around his neck. Below, toy-like cars and tiny figures wove a crazy pattern in front of the Long Island Rail Road station."

This vivid, poetic storyline from the November 16, 1952 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle describes not the antics of some real-life Spiderman, but rather the daily grind of one humble 34-year-old New Yorker, Ed Kemp.

Kemp was an employee of the Standard House and Window Cleaning Company, on 126 Broadway in Brooklyn; a window-washer with seven years experience under his belt.  His particular task at the Williamsburg Savings Bank was a cruelly sisyphean one - on the first of every month, he started cleaning the topmost window on the 43-story building, and slowly wound his way downward, washing window after window after window by hand so that, weather permitting, he would have cleaned all 1,100 windows by the end of the month.  His reward for completing this herculean task?  Starting over again at the top of the building for another long, spiralling descent.

Grease pencil marks the spot, as Kemp dangles hundreds of feet above downtown Brooklyn.

In its half-page story, the Eagle paints a surprisingly thoughtful portrait of Kemp and his solitary life in the sky.  Gone is the newspaper's usual brisk and boisterous tone, replaced in this piece with sometimes wistful, sometimes reverent prose. 

Describing Kemp, the Eagle reporter Vic Timoner, writes, "he only spoke when he was sure of what he was saying...he only moved when he was sure of where he was moving." Kemp emerges as a quietly heroic figure, a "husky six-footer" who without complaint braved dizzying heights in service to the strangers he saw only through a glass, darkly.  Gazing in on men and women working, talking, laughing, living, he remained always separated from them by those hundreds of window panes, suspended in his own quiet, windy limbo.

While Timoner portrays the work of a window cleaner as a grimly noble struggle against ambient dirt and pigeon dung, the job was also an inherently dangerous one.  As the pictures show, Kemp was held up only by a harness belt that clamped onto a window frame with no scaffolding or platform to support him.  Earlier Eagle articles show that even these meager safety measures were hard-won.
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A brief article from November 3, 1929 describes a protest march to City Hall, attended by five hundred unionized window cleaners. In addition to demanding a ten percent pay increase, they wanted the city to take action against building owners who had yet to install safety hooks on building exteriors. They had lost 84 members of their ranks to fatal falls since 1928.

Another article, from 1937, describes the harrowing experience of one cleaner, James Osman, whose safety belt broke while he was washing panes on a building in Manhattan. He dangled sixteen stories in the air, above a crowd of 2,500 gawkers, until a plucky telephone operator found a seven-foot pole to offer out the window to Osman. He was pulled to safety, and a generous superintendent gave him the rest of the day off.

Not so lucky was George Urban, who fell seventeen floors in January of 1944.  His lifeless body was found on a protruding extension of an office building on Tuesday the 18th, two days after his wife reported to police that he hadn't come home from his window washing job.  That same year, state legislators enacted a new, stricter safety code to protect workers.  This required old, rusted anchor bolts on the exterior of buildings to be replaced with non-corrosive ones, so that cleaners could trust the supports to which they strapped their safety belts.  Building owners had difficulty complying with the code, however, because of wartime shortages in materials.  A New York Times article from November 18, 1945 reported that skyscraper windows had gone unwashed since July of that year as window washers awaited the installment of safer anchors and hooks.  A dirty pall fell over the high-rises of New York City.

Even after buildings were brought up to code, the life of a window washer was full of hazards - not the least of which was human error.  In March of 1946, one Brooklyn cleaner fell four stories to his death after forgetting to fasten his safety belt. What of our man in the sky, Ed Kemp?  Did he harbor a fear of falling?  Ever stoic, he replied, "I wouldn't be up here if I was afraid."  It seems for him the greater danger was loneliness.  Kemp said of his job, "It's a good life.  Lonely.  But you see people, even if you don't speak to them.  They're sociable enough but they kind of look at you like they feel sorry for you."