NOKD

A place where even Photoshop can't help you.

I've been wondering for a few months when we were going to hear news on the future of 34 East 62nd, the site of last year's most Fountainhead-ian event of architecture an urbanism: the townhouse that was blown up by its inhabitant, a rather shady-sounding dentist (?), who would rather blow up his home than let it fall into the hands of his ex-wife. The pudgy doctor, removed from the ruins of his house on a stretcher, provided a fitting form for my feelings about Howard Roark . . . but I'm getting lost on an Anti-Anne Rand tangent here.
One of the special things about this site is that it is right in the middle of the Upper East Side Historic District, an entity I feel just about as warmly as I do the darling author mentioned above. I'm still slightly shocked by the successfully self-righteous hysteria that its denizens used to squash the Norman Foster tower last year. Here they are about to get one of the most sophisticated architects in the world to slip a tower onto the top of a completely undistinguished limestone box that has been putting the neighbors to sleep since it was installed in the '50s, and all they can do is run around crying bloody murder because it will cast a shadow on the Carlyle Hotel, a location dear to the heart of every Upper Eastsider as the home of the fifty-dollar check for tea and cakes.
Clearly, I'm just itching for someone to try to stick something modern up their noses on 62nd Street. What has shown up Colonel Cathcart frame of mind--to wit, is this a feather in our cap, or a black eye? Because what we got is a modernist townhouse that is irritating the bejesus out of the folks next door at the Links Club, like someone poured a cup of sand into both Weejuns. The problem is that is also irritates the hell out of me because it is such an insipid example of a modernist townhouse, complete with every tired trope from the eroded corner windows to the quote-unquote gravity-defying slab of the facade hanging above the entry.
Because of the general lack of imagination on display in this project, I was getting ready to side with the stuffed-shirts over at the Links Club, until I got to the little part where the neigbors on the Community Board chimed in with their version of an Amicus Brief, or perhaps tighty-whities, that declared the proposed new building a poor fit.

The 91-year-old Links Club, Community Board 8 and several leading preservation groups are less sure. Playing an advisory role, the Upper East Side community board voted 27 to 5 last month to disapprove the plan on the ground that it is “not in keeping” with the historic district.

Nothing gets me more frothy in a urbanism discussion than that little gem. Ossified preservationists and other assorted cultural conservatives use it fearlessly as if it were some sort of trump card for their issue, as if they would love to have a building like this if only all of the other buildings already matched it, but, since they don't, it's aww-shucks-too-bad. In reality, all I can hear is some mother worth four or five points in a Punch-Burberry game telling her cute-in-pearls five-year-old that these buildings are simply Not Our Kind, Dear.