The three of us boys looked at one another awhile in silence, considering the question, before Kyle brightened a bit and asked Dani, “Charming pigs?”
20
THE OLD CITY WAS ATTACKING the new city. Fighting back in the only way it could. Under assault for decades, yielding block by block to boxy modern towers with no surface ornament to speak of, no imprint of the individual, the old city now discovered that being genuinely over the hill gave it a potent new weapon unavailable to it in middle age.
The first salvos of the resistance went unnoticed. A rust-ravaged Italianate iron bracket, murder on its mind, loosened itself from the lavish façade of the B. Altman dry goods store’s erstwhile home on Sixth Avenue and Nineteenth Street; it plummeted forty-four feet but landed harmlessly among some trash bags at the curb. A few days later, a cracked terra-cotta rosette hurled itself from the sixteenth story of an elegant prewar Riverside Drive apartment house and dented a mailbox near the corner.
This was the story of the city’s decay my father told me over spare ribs, again and again, in the weeks after I’d gotten my nose smashed. I couldn’t remember him ever reading me fairy tales when I was little, so I was not unhappy to let him play catch-up now. Each time he told it he added new details of location and architectural style, until the story itself became so encrusted with ornament that there was barely room for more.
Before long, such violent potshots from above could no longer be ignored. In architecturally lush sections of town, at unpredictable intervals, hunks of exuberantly crafted nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ornament hurtled streetward from the skies. In Morningside Heights, one-third of a pressed-zinc Beaux Arts cornice dropped off the former Home for Indigent Gentlewomen and ripped straight through the fabric roof of a Barnard sophomore’s Triumph convertible. In Murray Hill, another wayward strip of cornice—this one copper, Florentine-influenced, and cantilevered majestically eight feet out from the façade—plunged eight stories from the top of the Gorham Silver Company’s former showroom on Fifth Avenue, killing a passing librarian.
Landlords all over town were roused from their slumber. Consulting their innermost hearts, most of them immediately concluded that any flicker of responsibility they might feel toward the crumbling Victorian and Beaux Arts architecture under their care was trumped by their distaste for expensive repairs. Phone calls were made. Supers and their odd-job cousins were dispatched. From the warehouses of TriBeCa to the row houses of the South Bronx, from the commercial palaces of Ladies’ Mile to the grand apartment buildings of the Upper West Side, hundreds and hundreds of vibrantly embellished façades were stripped of cornices, corbels, pediments—any projecting ornament, really, that might harbor ambitions of shaking loose and bludgeoning a pedestrian.
The story, of course, was true. My father made sure I understood that. And though a few enlightened owners did turn their minds to restoration rather than amputation, not many did so with anything like the sensitivity he felt the old buildings deserved.
This was the gong he had been banging for weeks, every time I visited him downtown. He had a lot of time to get riled up about all this stuff, too, because we weren’t rescuing architectural sculptures anymore. Why not, I wasn’t quite sure. There was a sense in his studio of things about to happen, of needs pent up for too long. But it was hard to know if the change we were waiting for lay outside in the city or inside Dad.
Even DeCarlo was wondering what was going on. “Thanks but no thanks, Deke,” I heard Dad saying into the phone. “I’m just not doing any harvesting right now. Though I know I still owe you a cooler.”
I didn’t ask Dad about this big pause in operations. My broken nose and raccoon face were almost healed—finally—and I wasn’t in any hurry to give the city another crack at hurting me.
The best part was that we now spent our time together doing normal father-and-son things. We built a model of the Andrea Doria. We went to Little Italy and devoured a couple of zeppole so rapaciously that the sugar powdered our eyebrows white. We went to the movies. Dad was nuts about the silent-film comedians, especially Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd; he wanted to share them with me. We’d take the subway up to Midtown and laugh our asses off inside the Carnegie Hall Cinema, a wonderfully crummy theater that was tucked like a shabbily dressed stowaway into the humid basement of the legendary concert hall. You went in through a seedy side entrance on Seventh Avenue near Fifty-Sixth.
Then one Friday night I showed up at Dad’s studio to find him and Zev on their toes, hollering into each other’s face.
“I swear to God I’ll kill you if we miss our shot at those tourelles, Zev!”
“I get it, all right? But we can’t rush this. We need—”
Zev stopped short when he saw me in the doorway.
“Maybe you can talk some sense into Ahab here,” he told me, throwing up his hands. “He certainly doesn’t listen to any of us anymore.”
Zev grabbed a fistful of paperwork and headed for the door, turning back just long enough to add, red-faced: “Look, Nick, I know you’ve got the guard in your pocket and everything. But this isn’t just any old building—that’s all I’m saying. We need to be more careful than usual.”
I stepped aside so he could get by. When he was safely gone, I asked Dad what all the hullabaloo was about.
Dad chewed on his lower lip awhile in thought. “Here, I’ll show you.”
We climbed the two stories to the uppermost floor of the warehouse. At the top of the darkened stairwell, a ladder was bolted to one wall. Dad went up it, shoved a cover off the square roof hatch, and climbed into the night. I followed, rising through the square hole from darkness into darkness: black tar roof, moonless overcast sky, Dad a breathing shadow I could sense more than see.
“Look,” his voice said. “Turn around.”
I did, blinking dumbly at what I saw. Amid all this downtown darkness, illuminated from below by a necklace of blazing floodlights, a soaring slender cathedral pierced the sky, its creamy surface rich with ornament and shimmering with mist. It was several blocks away, but against the great building’s brightness I could make out tiny workmen on hanging scaffolds, wielding what must have been high-pressure hoses. The mist they made seemed alive. It billowed as the wind caught it, gathering up the light and moving in wet waves across the tower’s magnificently textured façade.
“What is that thing?” I asked. “A skyscraper church?”
“No,” Dad said, chuckling. “Or sort of, I guess. It’s an office tower; it only looks like a church to you because Gilbert—your old friend from the New York Life building—designed it in a flamboyant Gothic style. He was hired to create the world’s tallest building, which it very much was when it went up in 1913.”
“How tall is it?”
“Sixty stories; it dwarfed absolutely everything when they put it up. But its design didn’t come easy to Gilbert. When he was planning the tower, he found himself struggling with the problem of how to ‘clothe it in beauty,’ as he put it—how to give the great city the great building it deserved. Architects gave a shit about things like that back then.”
Gilbert, Dad explained, settled on Gothic because he was going for that surging verticality that cathedrals manage so well. “In fact, a local bishop even nicknamed the building the Cathedral of Commerce during his speech at the Woolworth’s dedication dinner.”
“A bishop ate at Woolworth’s?” It seemed ridiculous. I imagined the miter of a pink-faced holy man tilting over the Woolworth’s lunch counter on Eighty-Sixth Street as he carefully sipped the top half inch or so from his coffee cup without spilling it.
“No, no,” Dad said, laughing. “That skyscraper is called the Woolworth Building. It was commissioned by Frank Woolworth.”
“As in Woolworth’s Woolworth?”
“That’s the guy, king of the five-and-dime. It was a huge deal at the time. Huge. All the papers had the Woolworth Building on the front page, and the president, Woodrow Wilson, opened the skyscraper by
pressing a button in the White House that lit up the Woolworth with eighty thousand lightbulbs in one go. Not too shabby.”
I asked Dad if this was the same tower he’d told me about the night I got my nose broken.
“Yeah, it is,” he said. “For my money, it’s the most spectacular terra cotta in the city.”
I looked again at the delicately fringed skyscraper, ablaze with floodlights against the black backdrop of Lower Manhattan, and recognized it for the first time as the same tower I had admired, from farther away and under far less dramatic lighting, while standing atop the Good Humor truck on the pier.
“But what are they doing to the building now?” I asked. “I mean, besides cleaning it. What’s with all the scaffolding?”
“They’re restoring it, or at least that’s what they claim. But Zev has been getting the inside scoop from this young architect he knows over at D.D.&M.—they’re the firm running the job—who says they’ve been cutting all kinds of corners. See, they did this huge survey of the building’s surface, and they concluded that twenty-six thousand pieces of its terra cotta were so shot they couldn’t even be saved.”
“So isn’t it good that they’re fixing everything up?”
“It would be if they were doing it properly,” Dad said. He spat out these last three words with a sudden hostility I didn’t understand, until I noticed that Zev had climbed through the hatch and joined us on the roof. Dad’s anger was directed at him.
“But instead of casting terra-cotta replicas of Gilbert’s ornaments,” Dad said fiercely, “the Neanderthals have been replacing those thousands of marvelous originals with—you’re not even gonna believe me when I tell you this, Griffin—precast concrete. Concrete!”
“Why would they do that?”
“Well, I’m sure I don’t know,” he said, giving his voice a sardonic edge. “Why don’t you ask Zev here? Old Zev thinks it’s a perfectly swell idea to turn a masterpiece of skyscraper design into a five-and-dime knockoff of itself by cladding it in concrete.”
Zev exhaled a weary breath. “What do you expect them to do? The terra-cotta industry’s basically dead. The world has moved on, Nick. No one makes this stuff anymore.”
“Bullshit. What about Gladding, McBean in California?”
“No way. You know damn well the modern forms they’re using don’t allow undercutting the way the old sand molds did. And even if they could pull off this job, it’d be way too expensive.”
“That’s just what I’m saying! Woolworth’s is too cheap to do the right thing.”
“They’re not cheap,” Zev said. “They’re doing the best they can with a building that’s basically rejecting its own flesh. It’d be a whole lot cheaper for them just to strip the entire tower of ornament and be done with it. But instead, Healey told me, they’re shelling out twenty mil for the restoration. Now, I know that doesn’t guarantee you’re gonna like all their choices when you see them up close, but if you could just hold off till Monday to go look—”
“Oh, good God, Zev! Tell me you didn’t follow us all the way up here just to keep badgering me into waiting on those goddamn tourelles!”
“Yeah, I did,” Zev said. “I was able to get Herm on the phone just now; if we can hold off a couple days, he says he can get loose from that bank demo in Philly by Sunday. And Curtis’ll be back from Rochester by then, too. Just give me two days to pull a crew together. Two days. Those tourelles aren’t going anywhere between now and then.”
I was tired of listening to them argue.
“What are tourelles, anyway?” I asked. They sounded like hip-swaying, sequin-gowned fifties backup singers: Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to our very special musical guests…Frank Woolworth and the Tourelles!
Dad gestured at the gleaming tower of the Woolworth Building, which surged skyward from its broad, ornate base. The tower was crowned by a pyramidal roof with a delicate unlit lantern at its pinnacle. The jewels of this crown, Dad said, were the four little towers, or tourelles, at its corners, each one about five stories high and intricately adorned with vivid terra-cotta decorations in a rising rhythm of textures and colors. I couldn’t make out any of this detail, though, because you could only see three tourelles from the studio roof, and all of them were obscured. Two of the three were ringed with scaffolding. The third one was concealed, too, its bottom part behind more scaffolding, and much of its top under a shroud of black netting.
“You have to see them, son. Every inch of these things is encrusted with terra-cotta ornament, glazed in absolutely gorgeous blues and golds. It was all modeled by an Italian sculptor, who finished off each of those tourelles with the most marvelous gargoyles you’ll ever see: peculiar, old-soul creatures of such vitality you’d swear they were alive. I used to sit on the roof of my old studio near Washington Market with binoculars and watch the clouds move across those tourelles—and I’d watch those gargoyles watching me. Made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.”
I stood alongside Dad and squinted at the scaffold-caged towers.
“Drives me crazy I can’t see what the contractor’s doing under there,” he told me. He was bouncing on his toes. “I have to get up there.”
It looked like there was still a pretty clear way to avoid getting involved in all this. Sunday, when Zev would have his crew together, was a school night; I’d be safe in bed uptown.
“Sure, Dad,” I said. “But really, if you’ve waited this long already, what’s the rush?”
There was a long, uncomfortable silence, during which I could’ve sworn I felt the rising heat from Dad’s face fill the space between us.
“Well, Zev?” he barked at last. “Tell him! Tell him what Healey told you today.”
Zev sighed. He pulled up a plastic milk crate for me to sit on, and sat down himself on the parapet. Dad remained standing.
The ornament on the Woolworth Building, Zev explained to me, got more elaborate the higher up you went. The tourelles, then, were about the biggest pain in the ass on the entire restoration job, precisely because they were so intricate. Parts of them were also in horrendous condition. One of the four tourelles had originally been an open-topped, coal-burning chimney, which had spewed filth on the building’s crown for decades, damaging the terra cotta. So at the outset of the restoration project, the architects at D.D.&M. simply wrapped all four tourelles in black-mesh safety netting and left them alone. For two years, while they cleaned the rest of the tower from the thirtieth to the sixtieth floors, and then replaced thousands of its simpler terra-cotta blocks with precast concrete, they agonized over what to do with those tourelles.
Now, as I could see with my own eyes, they had moved on to cleaning the base of the building, the lower twenty-nine stories. But they had also finally begun tackling those tourelles way up top.
“The head honchos at D.D.&M. finally settled on an affordable restoration plan,” Zev said. “That’s why they started scaffolding the tourelles all of a sudden last week. But even my guy doesn’t know what exactly they’re doing up there. They’re keeping it all very hush-hush.”
“Which I don’t like at all,” Dad grumbled.
“But we don’t even know if it’s a problem, Nick! I mean, if they’re doing a faithful restoration, you may just want to leave all that terra cotta right where it is, let the next generation enjoy it. But if they’re prepping it for even a limited demo, believe me, the pickings are gonna be so rich that you’ll be thanking me for hiring you a full crew to carry out all that material.”
In the end, Dad grudgingly acknowledged the wisdom of sitting tight for a couple of days. He sent Zev home and whipped me up an American-cheese omelet on his hot plate. It was illegal to live in any of the lofts or warehouses down here, so Dad had to make do with equipment that could be justified to fire inspectors as work-related; in the case of the hot plate, he told them he used it to heat rabbit-skin glue for his antique-frame restoration. As for bedding, he slept on a horsehair mattress on one of his half-dozen vinta
ge four-poster beds. It was his only mattress, so whenever I slept over I shared that bed with him, covering my ears with pillows against the elephant-seal roar of his snoring.
On this night, though, he never came to bed. And I can’t say I was entirely surprised when he woke me around two and told me to get my clothes on.
“C’mon, kiddo,” he said, a lumpy army duffel slung over his shoulder. “We’re gonna get a bit of fresh air.”
21
BY THE TIME WE REACHED the far side of Broadway at Warren Street, sky and skyscraper had swapped lighting. The Woolworth’s floodlights were extinguished now, the building a looming shaft of shadow above the tree-edged wedge of City Hall Park. But a bright scythe of moon hung above it, silhouetting the tower’s pointed peak and tourelles.
The sidewalk, dry on every other block, became an obstacle course of puddles as we approached the building. On the park side of Broadway, across from its entrance, stood a construction trailer and a skinny plywood sentry box shaped like an upright coffin. I peeked through its scuffed Plexiglas window to make sure there was no Rent-a-Cop in there—there wasn’t—but Dad barely gave it a glance. Instead, he led me across the street, straight under the tall carved arch of the skyscraper’s entrance, and through the front door, which he seemed to know would be unlocked.
No matter how old I get, I’ll never forget walking into that building that night, how radically different it felt from the circumstances under which I left it just a couple of hours later. I’ve been back to that block a lot over the years. There’s a terrific little hole-in-the-wall restaurant called Sole di Capri nearby on Church Street, where Quig and I meet, when she’s in town, to devour pasta made by an Ecuadoran man who cooks like an Italian grandmother. The number 2 subway I take from Brooklyn lets me out right at the foot of the Woolworth, but only once in the past forty years have I been able to bring myself to set foot in the building again.
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