Quote of the Day (Zadie Smith, on Manhattan)

“When I land at JFK, everything changes. For the first few days it is a shock: I have to get used to old New York ladies beside themselves with fury that I have stopped their smooth elevator journey and got in with some children. I have to remember not to pause while walking in the street—or during any fluid-moving city interaction—unless I want to utterly exasperate the person behind me. Each man and woman in this town is in pursuit of his or her beach and God help you if you get in their way. I suppose it should follow that I am happier in pragmatic England than idealist Manhattan, but I can’t honestly say that this is so. You don’t come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn’t a strong aspect of your personality. ‘A reality shaped around your own desires’—there is something sociopathic in that ambition.”—British novelist-essayist Zadie Smith, “Find Your Beach,” in Feel Free: Essays (2018)

I took the photo accompanying this post in Times Square in September 2011—what feels like a century ago now. (In a change from the prior 30-plus years, when I commuted into the city Monday through Friday, I have only ventured into New York twice since the start of the pandemic.) How the city of striving that Smith celebrates will survive an economy increasingly geared towards a remote or hybrid workforce remains to be seen.

Photo of the Day: The Knickerbocker, Times Square, NYC

In the whole time that I have been passing through Times Square and its environs, I had never taken notice of The Knickerbocker Hotel till yesterday, when I had a few minutes to kill before a show on 42^nd Street. Between the plaque at ground level, and what I saw looming above me there on 42^nd Street, I was intrigued enough not only to take this photo, but also to look into this site’s past history.

When I got back home, however, I was thrown for a loop. My well-worn, weather-bitten architectural reference, BlueGuide New York, referred to the Knickerbocker as having been “converted to an office tower.” But the site I saw—also on 42^nd Street—was, I could have sworn, a hotel. What was going on?

I forgot that the copyright of that book was 1983 and that, in the last two decades particularly, the landscape of the city had changed markedly—even if it meant, as in this case, reverting to something like its original form.

In 2015, after a two-year, $240 million renovation, this space reopened as a hotel—and, in a sign that it wanted to reclaim its old glamour, under its original name. Its heyday under that name was less than 20 years, but it would enter the Gotham legend.

In May 1905, John Jacob Astor IV took over control of a shell of a building (left unfinished by the prior owner’s financial collapse) and hired architects Trowbridge and Livingston to finish the job. Over the next 14 years, the Knickerbocker would enjoy a number of distinctions:

* Opera singer Enrico Caruso lived in the hotel from 1909 until his death, always using the same set of cutlery in the hotel restaurant;

* Another musical giant, theater jack-of-all-trades George M. Cohan, was another long-term resident;

*Woodrow Wilson spoke here while still president of Princeton University;

*Another person associated with Princeton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, visited and set a scene from his debut novel This Side of Paradise here;

*House bartender Martini di Arma di Taggia is said to have invented—what else?—the martini.

Prohibition spelled the end of the first incarnation of the Knickerbocker. Astor’s son Vincent, sensing that little good would come of a hospitality enterprise under such adverse conditions, converted the hotel to other uses in 1921. Thankfully, he left the hotel’s distinctive façade unchanged, but he transformed the bottom floor to retail and the upper ones to office space.  (In the 1940s and 1950s, the structure became the Newsweek Building, after its most important occupant.)

In the 1980s, the building housed residential lofts for a short while before being rented as showrooms and studios for companies in the Garment District. After the turn of the millennium, it passed through several more hands before the real estate investment trust FelCor Lodging Trust acquired the building and transformed it back into a hotel a few years ago.

Photo of the Day: Worldwide Plaza, NYC

The image accompanying this post is an urban space located within Worldwide Plaza, a mixed-use project located on West 50^th Street in Manhattan. Coming upon it yesterday after attending a play in the area, I took this picture of people taking a break from the humidity and rain of the last few days to enjoy their food (or merely breathe) in the open air.

Photo of the Day: Season’s Turning, Riverside Park, NYC

This afternoon, on my day off, I strolled around and took pictures in Riverside Park in Manhattan. Thiry-eight years ago, in my freshman year at Columbia University, taking a jogging class that called for circuits loops up and down from Riverside Drive toward the Hudson River, I had grown somewhat familiar with the area of the park around 116^th Street—but today I went somewhat south of that, from 79^th to 99^th Streets.

Autumn is not at its height yet, but I was able to find a few spots where the colors of fall are beginning to appear, like here.

Photo of the Day: Waiting Out the Storm, NYC

I had been hearing all day about a major storm coming our way. A few blocks from my office late this afternoon, the long-predicted downpour arrived. I made it across the street from where the musical Hamilton is playing and, with the handful of people in this photo I took, waited for the precipitation to abate.

I can’t say that when it was all over, the storm was worth it: much of the mugginess lingers in the air even several hours later.

Photo of the Day: Church of the Incarnation, NYC

In the middle of this past week, I happened to be in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan to meet some college friends when I decided to take a quick walk around the neighborhood. As soon as I approached the building you see here, I knew it was worth a photo, and snapped away.

The Church of the Incarnation was founded originally in 1852 on Madison Avenue and 28th Street; a dozen years later, when Murray Hill was flourishing, this Episcopal congregation moved up seven blocks on Madison to its current site. Architect Emlen T. Littell described the style of the new building as “Early Decorated Church Gothic.”

Even from the outside, the church looks impressive enough to earn its designation as a New York City Landmark. But its placement on the National Register of Historic Places comes not just from this, but from a perhaps even more stunning interior featuring stained-glass windows, paintings, sculpture and decorative works by the likes of Daniel Chester French, Henry Bacon, John LaFarge, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Louis Comfort Tiffany, as well as some of the richest, most famous and most powerful New Yorkers who worshipped here, including the Morgans, Admiral David Farragut and Eleanor Roosevelt.