« Pro-bike CB10 member not reappointed by lane foe Gentile | Main | It Won’t Be Pretty: Stopping The Eisenhower National Memorial »
June 9, 2011
New York by Gehry
Our columnist gets a tour of Manhattan’s newest addition to the high-end, high-rise rental market.
Metropolis Magazine
by Karrie Jacobs
A funny thing happened when my boyfriend, Ed, and I went to look at the apartments at 8 Spruce Street, the 76-story tower with the shimmery, crumpled stainless-steel skin being advertised as “New York by Gehry.” Afterward, as we strolled home through City Hall Park, Ed started calculating. Could we rent his nineteenth-century Soho loft out for enough money to cover his overhead and the rental price of a twenty-first-century Gehry apartment? The apartments were on the small side, with shallow closets, so we’d have to transfer the bulk of our stuff into storage (including all the possessions that I’d recently moved into his place and have yet to completely unpack). Clearly, there would be no room for his drum set.…
“You’re serious?” I said.
“Yeah,” he replied. “It would be a different experience of the city.”
Understand: we didn’t go there to rent an apartment. I couldn’t imagine writing a big monthly check to Bruce Ratner, the man behind the odious Atlantic Yards development, in Brooklyn (where Gehry was the master planner until he extracted himself or was booted out in 2009). We just wanted to look at the place up close to see how much of the architect’s exterior bling had found its way inside. Would living inside this glittery new beanstalk of a building be any different from, say, in one designed by Costas Kondylis, New York’s most prolific residential architect?
Fear not, Karrie Jacobs fans, she didn't succumb.
For a few hours, we were ready to pack our current life into storage and start clean. The fantasy offered by this building is a powerful one. But then, we wouldn’t just be living a life of quiet contemplation in the clouds; we’d also be living in close quarters with the occupants of 902 other apartments. And we’d still be in Manhattan, which means the tower is subject to the same real estate forces that created it. Sooner or later, a low-rise neighbor—I’d bet on Pace University, directly across Spruce Street—will decide it’s a good idea to build skyward. And New York by Gehry will begin to resemble New York by pretty much anybody else.
Image: Ashley Stevens/Metropolis
Posted by eric at June 9, 2011 10:19 AM