451. People-watching

BROWDERBOOKS

Friends and followers, I need your help.  The ebook of my new nonfiction title, New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You, is now temporarily available from Amazon's Kindle store at a bargain price of .99 cents (regular price $5.99).  Puleeez buy a copy and review it.  The first six or seven may even get it for free, except for tax (Amazon's doing, not mine).  But if .99 cents strains your budget, I will cheerfully reimburse you to the tune of one whole U.S. dollar ($1.00).  

Maybe, like me, you prefer a print copy for reading.  Do not buy the paperback now; it may have flaws.  It will soon be available free of flaws ($19.95 plus shipping).  But first, I need ebook sales and reader reviews.  You don't have to read the whole ebook; just read the introduction and one or two chapters and do a review, based on what you have read.  But if you like the ebook version (one advantage: you can adjust the size of the print), by all means read on.

IMPORTANT: Your review can and should be brief.  By "brief" I mean really brief: two or three sentences, or just a few words.  You can sign your review with (my preference) your full name (John or Jane Doe), or an abbreviated name (John D., Jane D.), or a fictitious name (BookFreak, Feisty Sal, bookguy29).  In the review don't tell me what you think I want to hear; tell me what you honestly think.  And don't be surprised if I quote from your review.  So puleeez, go here to buy the ebook (not the paperback) and do a brief review.  You will earn the author's boundless and undying gratitude.  Once I have a number of reader reviews, I will announce the paperback version (free of flaws) and make it available, too.

All my books are available here.

And now, on to people-watching.

                         People-watching

On a recent Sunday afternoon I went to a local restaurant, the Hudson Hound (formerly the Dublin Pub) on Hudson Street, where they put me at a small table for two wedged in between other tables.  As usual, I was the only patron dining solo, and having no cell phone and nothing to read, I people-watched.  And as usual, the other patrons were either talking loudly or glueing their eyes to a  smart phone or a tablet.

          [A personal aside: I take great pride in never having owned a car, a television, or a cell phone, and lately the lack of this last has proved aggravating.  I have usually done without PayPal, but somehow got involved with them and was recently informed that I would be dropped unless I renewed.  Renewing involved sending them a selfie exhibiting an I.D.  Their assuming that everyone today does selfies with a smart phone infuriated me, so I took great delight in ignoring their pleas to renew, and in their announcement of my suspension.  

My enemies.

          Similarly, to advertise my new e-book on Amazon, Amazon expected me to photograph both sides of my driver's license with a smart phone and forward it to them, which I of course could not and would not do.  This was awkward, for I had planned to advertise with them, but of necessity I bade them a bitter good-bye.  Then, belatedly, I realized that a friend -- Silas, who backs me up at book fairs, comes equipped with a smart phone and can do the photo for me, without my having to acquire a gadget that I delight in doing without.  End of aside; now back to people-watching.]

          On this recent occasion at the Hudson Hound, I people-watched three nearby tables in particular.  To my immediate right was a young couple, a deep-voiced, dark-haired young man, rather intense, with a young woman who, being seated next to me, I couldn't see too well.  And to my immediate left was a somewhat older married couple with two little girls: a young family.  And seated two tables over on my right were two older men whose talk and hearty laughter resonated.

          The young couple on my immediate right I didn't speak to, fearing to violate their privacy.  As the family on my left prepared to leave, I asked the mother, "How old are they?"  "Three and eight," she said, smiling.  "I'll bet they keep you busy," I said, prompting a roll of the eyes and the answer, "Do they ever!"  The eight-year old then approached me with the palm of one hand upraised, and I, reading her signal, greeted her by smacking her palm gently with the palm of my right hand.  As they left, she waved good-bye.

          As for the two older men on my my far right, I didn't interact with them, nor could I make out any of their conversation.  But in them, and especially in the older of the two, I sensed knowledge, money, and power.  As they got up to leave, the older one donned a quilted white jacket with a hood (it was fiercely cold outside), and I noticed that he was wearing plain old jeans.  This didn't prompt me to revise my impression of knowledge, money, and power, since in our time, unlike in the nineteenth century, money, and especially old money, doesn't always parade itself; it often dresses down, scuffs about in jeans and sneakers.

          My final take on my neighbors: three ages of life (1) the courting young, (2) the young marrieds, and (3) the older set, experienced, knowledgeable, mature.  Lacking only was (4), the elderly, until I realized with a laugh that I myself constituted that category, making the cast complete.  It was today's ultra modern equivalent (or perhaps distortion) of a nineteenth-century series of Currier & Ives prints showing the four seasons of life -- cheery, vastly idealized views that ended up on parlor or living-room walls of urban brownstones and rural dwellings alike.

Currier & Ives, The Four Seasons of Life.

Old Age: The Age of Rest.

Somehow, I don't relate.

          But I have yet to mention the star of my recent occasion. Standing across from me by another table I saw one of the hosts, a young woman with blond hair and a low-cut dress revealing a tattoo on one shoulder.  The tattoo alone proclaimed her a "swinger," a very "with it" young woman, liberated, free-living, cool, unsquare, the very opposite of bourgeois.

          Yet she was not the star of the occasion.  With obvious delight this supposed "swinger" was holding a tiny infant that she had borrowed, I assumed, from the party at that table, who were fussing gleefully over the child.  But then she walked off with the infant and made the rounds of the tables, garnering smiles, coos, and waves.  "Yours," I asked, when she came near me, "or Rent-a-Kid?"  She smiled and gestured toward a group at a front table blocked from my sight by a partition; they, I assumed, were the parents.  "How old?" I asked, prompting the answer, "Born in October."  A quick calculation: four months old at most.  I waved to the infant, a little girl who looked at me and everyone with tiny brown eyes of wonder.   

          After that, the blond hostess restored the child to her parents, who were dining near the entrance with a large party, and resumed her role of hostessing.  As I left the restaurant, I waved again to the infant, whose parents and friends were all young Asian-Americans.   One of the women in the group then asked me with a smile, "How was your cappuccino?"  The hostess must have mentioned me and the coffee that I had with dessert.  "Delicious," I replied, and with another wave and smile to the little girl, departed.

          Such was my recent people-watching experience.  I think of people-watching as very Old Worldly, remembering how patrons at outdoor tables in Parisian cafés years ago would people-watch, eyeing passersby and other patrons at tables nearby.  

Outdoor tables at a Paris café, made for people-watching.

          New Yorkers are too intense, too in a hurry to do much people-watching, but it is an old Midwestern tradition as well.  I grew up in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago, and the spacious old late-nineteenth-century or early-twentieth-century homes down near Lake Michigan had big front porches from which you could watch the neighbors coming and going.  And when driving with relatives through old towns in Indiana, I have seen many homes of similar vintage with similar wide front porches, often with a big swing hanging from the porch roof with chains.

          In sharp contrast with these Midwestern homes, and indeed with the Parisian cafés so conducive to people-watching, were the private homes in the Parisian suburbs and the provinces.  Those homes were tight little fortresses, ringed by tall stone walls topped with broken glass, and signs that said CHIEN MECHANT (Beware of the Dog).  Which reflected the French family's concern with privacy and security.  The French were far less likely than Americans to invite a stranger into their homes, so when they did, as happened to me more than once, it was a rare and meaningful honor, indicating a more-than-casual degree of acceptance.  

          So much for people-watching here and abroad.  If I had a smart phone and was addicted to it, I doubt if the subject would ever have occurred to me.  

Coming soon:  Sensual, preceded by Hate.

©  2020  Clifford Browder

450. A Magnificent and Abominable Woman: Liar, Flirt, Animal, and Muse of Genius

BROWDERBOOKS

For the multi-plagued new book, things are finally looking up. Soon I'll have an announcement to make. Meanwhile, for my other books, go here.

A Magnificent and Abominable Woman:
Liar, Flirt, Animal, and Muse of Genius

Yes, she has been called all those things, and more.

• The passionate muse of a string of geniuses.  (Undeniable.)
• Liar.  (True enough.)
• Feminist before her time.  (It has been argued.)

• Flirt. (Every chance she got.)

• Anti-Semite.  (Yes, alas, even though she had two Jewish husbands.)
• Romantic.  (Convincing.)
• Narcissist.  (Very self-involved, even while inspiring her geniuses.)
• "A big animal," according to her surviving daughter Anna. "And sometimes she was magnificent, and sometimes she was abominable.”

The she/her of this discussion is Alma Mahler, the wife or lover of (among others) Gustav Mahler, Oskar Kokoschka, Walter Gropius, and Franz Werfel.  Not all at once, of course, though her affairs did at times overlap. Which makes her the Muse of Modernism, having inspired undeniable masters of music, art, architecture, and literature.  Which, for one woman in one lifetime, isn’t bad. In fact, it’s flat-out astonishing. How did Alma Mahler do it?

Wait a minute, what’s the New York connection?  This post is supposed to be about New York. The connection: after a long life elsewhere, surprisingly she ends up here.  As many do. Think of Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and Montgomery Clift, after years in Hollywood. See my book Fascinating New Yorkers; they’re all in there. (The link is to my post BROWDERBOOKS; scroll down to Nonfiction.)

She was born Alma Schindler in fin-de-siècle Vienna in 1879. Her father was a struggling, debt-burdened landscape painter trying to make ends meet and support his family.  Watching him at work, young Alma came early to revere both art and the artist. And when he gained recognition and attracted paying students, Alma promptly lost her heart and her virginity to one of them, Carl Moll, and later, after her father’s death, married him.  Not a genius, this first one, but she was off to a good start. Moll and the painter Gustav Klimt were among the founders of the Viennese Secession, a movement of artists and architects, and Alma promptly fell in love with Klimt. Significantly, the main subject of Klimt’s art was the female body, and plenty of eroticism went into it.  When Klimt made physical advances and suggested “complete physical union,” young Alma held up a volume of Goethe’s Faust and quoted from it, “Do no favors without a ring on your finger.”  Alma at this point was a charming mix of innocence and savvy. But the innocence wouldn’t last long.

Alma in 1899.

Fin-de-siècle Vienna was feverish with art and music and genius and passion and sex.  Though no one knew it at the time, this was a glorious last stand of the soon-to-be-dismantled Austro-Hungarian empire and the Hapsburgs who had ruled it for centuries. As for feverish, Anna fitted right in.  When Moll got Klimt to stop trying to seduce Anna and Klimt departed, Anna was so devastated that she even stopped flirting … for a while. Feeling a deep urge to “fall at someone’s feet,” she soon flirted with an architect and then an opera tenor, and so it went.  There were plenty of feet to fall at, and if at first she realized that Klimt’s “physical union” was similar to what dogs do, and therefore disgusting, she at the same time was fascinated by the bulge in the trousers of men who were drawn to her. (How do we know all this?  Because of her candid tell-all diaries, often graphic, not always trustworthy, but revealing even so.)  

What was the secret of her charm?  Her daughter said that when Alma entered a room, you immediately felt an electric charge.  She could enchant people in a matter of seconds. Her intense belief in art and genius endeared her to men to the point that they didn’t think they could survive artistically without her.

Then, at a dinner party in 1901, Alma met the composer Gustav Mahler, ditched her other suitors, and within two months she and Mahler  were engaged. Mahler was older than her, 41 to her 22, and Jewish, but he answered her need for love, music, and genius; she had met her man at last.  But at a cost: herself a gifted and aspiring pianist, he demanded that she give up any artistic pretensions of her own to be his adoring, faithful, and compliant wife, which, not without keen regret, she did.  She saw herself as an artist who out of deep love was sacrificing herself to an artist, a genius for whom she had “the holiest feelings.” In 1902 they married.

Gustav Mahler, 1909.

(A personal note: It was through my deceased partner Bob that I discovered the late German Romantics and developed a taste for their haunting, brooding music.  I especially love Mahler’s Das Lied von Der Erde [The Song of the Earth], which, given a choice, I would like to hear on my deathbed.  Likewise Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs.  And for a joyous tribute to life, I especially esteem Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos, juxtaposing as it does the poignant lament of Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos, with the Commedia dell’arte flirt Zerbinetta, a deft charmer who teases a trio of admirers, only to run off with another.  As for the teary Ariadne, all changes when Bacchus arrives, singing triumphantly and claiming her rapturously for himself. Those late German Romantics, whether death-haunted or celebrating life, knew a lot.)

Here now are the highlights of the busy and often turbulent career of Alma Mahler and her geniuses.

• Passionately in love with Alma but fearing insanity, Mahler consulted Freud, thus making the cast of fin-de-siècle Vienna complete.  On a walk together Freud wondered why Mahler hadn’t married a woman named Marie, since that was his mother’s name. Mahler replied that Marie was Alma’s middle name, thus gratifying the Oedipus-obsessed Freud.
• When Mahler, who wrote Alma love poems and smothered her slippers with kisses, learned that she was having an affair with the young architect Walter Gropius, later the founder of the Bauhaus, Mahler sprawled on the floor, weeping, then invited Gropius to his summer home in the mountains and left him and Alma alone, so the lovers could decide what to do.  (Only after Mahler’s death in 1911 did Alma and Gropius finally, in 1915, marry, the four-year interval being filled with other lovers.)
• During her three-year affair with Oskar Kokoschka, during which she had an abortion, the jealous artist painted the bloody, murdered children of his supposed rivals; did a sketch of Alma spnning with his intestine; and once whispered into her ear so weird a text that she screamed, wept, and swallowed a toxic dose of bromide.  Fortunately, Kokoschka summoned a doctor.
  

  

  Oskar Kokoschka, 1919.

Alma Mahler, by Oskar Kokoschka, 1912.

• Wanting to rid herself of Kokoschka, when the First World War came, she taunted him into joining the cavalry, then broke off the relationship while he was at the front, where he was badly wounded and erroneously reported in the Viennese papers as dead.

• Alma married Gropius while he was on leave from the Austrian army in 1915.  But while Gropius, rescued after being buried under a building’s rubble after a grenade killed every other soldier present, was in a field hospital, Alma attended a performance of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, where she met the writer Franz Werfel.  She described him as a “stocky, bow-legged, somewhat fat Jew with sensuous, bulging lips and slit, watery eyes! But he wins you over.” They exchanged glances, left at the intermission, and you can fill in the rest.
• In 1916, after a night of rough sex with Werfel, Alma, who was pregnant, gave birth to a boy two months prematurely.  Was the father Gropius or Werfel? She didn’t know. The child, who resembled Werfel, soon died. This was too much for Gropius; they divorced in 1920.
  
  
  

  

  Alma and Gropius with their daughter Manon, 1918.

• Meanwhile, obsessed with Alma, Kokoschka in 1918 commissioned a life-size doll of Alma that he could touch and make love to.  The result was a weird, furry creation bearing little resemblance to Alma, but he made drawings and paintings of it, as well as photographs.  Now cured of his infatuation, he threw a raucous farewell party for it where the doll was exhibited, and he and his friends got drunk. Then he beheaded it in his garden and broke a bottle of red wine over it.

What did Alma of the prewar years look like?  A circa 1908 photo in my source (see below) shows a well-bosomed woman of about thirty in a fancy dress falling to the floor, her dark hair topped by a broad-brimmed, high-crowned black hat three times the size of her head.  Under that monstrosity her expression is serious, her gaze at the camera direct. But no camera can convey the well-attested magic of her presence, her ability to charm and enchant.

The postwar years brought drastic changes.  Vienna was now the capital, not of a vast empire, but of a small republic. The waltz gave way to the Charleston, and long dresses were supplanted by Coco Chanel’s petite robe noire, a knee-length or slightly longer cocktail dress still wearable today.  The skull-hugging cloche hat supplanted the towering prewar monstrosities, and bosoms were out, a boyish look most definitely in.

Did Alma adjust?  I have no photos of her from the 1920s, but she did get around to marrying Franz Werfel in 1929, and this marriage stuck.  Not that Alma, now in her forties, was faithful. Artists and high society flocked to her salon, providing more feet for her to fall at.  And she gave lavish parties, flirted, and had a fervent affair with a well-connected Catholic priest. What her husband was doing all this time I don’t profess to know.  Perhaps writing poetry. Perhaps, once Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, lamenting the fact that rampaging Nazis were burning his works, condemned because the author was Jewish.

Franz Werfel, circa 1930.

Yes, Hitler came to power, and the 1930s were a somber decade indeed.When he seized Austria in 1938, Alma and Werfel decamped for France, and they left there only in 1940, after France collapsed and much of it was occupied -- no place for a Jewish author or his wife.  They escaped with Heinrich Mann, his wife, and a nephew, traipsIng across the Pyrenees to Spain, with Alma, now 61, encouraging her younger husband, while lugging a suitcase stuffed with jewels and the original score of Bruckner’s Third Symphony.  From Spain they made it to the U.S. and ended up in, of all places, Hollywood.

(Another personal aside:  Werfel has told how, while crossing the Pyrenees even as German troops closed the border, they took refuge in Lourdes.  There he vowed that, if their escape to America was successful, he would write a book about Bernadette Soubirous, whose visions of the Virgin in 1858 led to her later sainthood and transformed Lourdes into a site of miracle healings.  They did get to America, and the result was Werfel’s Das Lied von Bernadette (1941), which was translated as The Song of Bernadette.  It became a bestseller, and when my mother, meaning to return it to the library, put it on a table by the door, I grabbed it and, seeing that it wasn’t due yet, read it.  And when, in 1943, Hollywood made a movie of it starring Jennifer Jones, I saw that, too. So I encountered Werfel’s name early, but only years later would I hear of Alma Mahler/Werfel.)

In Hollywood Alma entertained the émigré artistic elite, feuding and flirting and drinking heavily, and enraging Werfel with her anti-Semitic comments, calling the Allies “weaklings and degenerate,” and Hitler and the Germans “supermen.”  And when reports of concentration camp horrors reached her, she declared them fabrications by refugees.  

Los Angeles was not the Vienna of her youth, and she was not now the Alma of those fin-de-siècle days, being described by one ungentlemanly observer as “a bag of potatoes veiled in flowing robes,” though still “imposing, regal, radiating authority.”  The much-abused Werfel escaped her by dying there in 1945, whereupon she went back to the name Alma Mahler. In 1951 she moved to New York -- a curious choice for a rabid anti-Semite. What she did here and where she lived, I don't know. Given her age, her few years here cannot have been brilliant. And here she died in 1964, age 85. I was in the city then, teaching French at St. John’s University in Queens; I doubt if I even noticed. 

What can one finally say of such a woman and such a career? Her life makes the most turbulent doings of grand opera look tame. She and her lovers are a dazzling spectacle of Romanticism run wild. She fascinates me, but I wouldn't want her in my life, though maybe, if I had enemies, in theirs. Muse of Genius, r.i.p. But not here; she was shipped back to Vienna in 1965, and is buried near her first husband, Gustav Mahler.

Source note: Many of the details in this post are from "It Had to Be Her," Cathleen Schine's review of Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler," by Cate Haste, in The New York Review of Books, January 16, 2020.

Coming soon:  Deutsche Bank: it helped build Auschwitz and make Trump president.

©   2020  Clifford Browder

449. Can Super-Talls Survive?

BROWDERBOOKS

WARNING: Do not order a print copy of my book New Yorkers from Amazon.  It has misprinted pages yet to be corrected.  Wait until I can report those pages corrected.

I’m sure that viewers of this blog are as tired as I am of my new computer woes, so I’ve decided to list the positives as well as the negatives.  For positives there are, even if, two days ago, I was in the nether depths of despair, because Amazon was threatening to lock up the manuscript of my new book, New Yorkers, and never publish it.  Amazon’s objection: it thought my book might contain material that I had no right to publish.  For how that worked out, see below.  Here, first, are the negatives.  The positives follow.

Negatives

• When I transferred texts from my old computer to the new one, they were all in Microsoft Word and couldn’t be used, unless I paid to install Word.
• With the help of at least eight Word technicians, I tried, but I couldn’t install Word in my new computer.  One technician spent over an hour and a half trying, but failed.  And no one knows why.
• My downloads were slow, so I bought a new modem, but the Verizon technician who promised to help me install it by phone never phoned.
• When Amazon, one of my two printers, sent 20 copies of my book, all 20 had certain pages botched.
• When I returned the 20 copies for a refund, UPS made me take them to a pickup site.  Believe me, 20 copies are heavy.  This happened not once but twice.
• IngramSpark, my other printer, locked the files my book, and blocked all my attempts to unlock it.  I was about to give up on it, even though it can sell your book in many countries abroad.
• As noted above, Amazon demanded that I prove I have the right to publish all my book’s content.  Otherwise, it would refuse to publish it.

Positives

• I found a way to bypass Word and have access to my files.  I can copy them, edit them, even submit them as a Word document, without having installed Word.  Good riddance, Word.
• I installed the modem on my own, without help.  So much for you, Verizon.
• Yes, with great effort, I managed twice to haul the botched 20 copies to a pick-up site.  Whew!  It wore me out.
• IngramSpark finally let me unlock the files, so my book can be printed as a paperback and an e-book.
• I convinced Amazon that I have the publishing rights for all my book’s content, so that Amazon can sell it.

So now it looks like the book will be published, in paperback and e-book format, by both Amazon and IngramSpark.  This is desirable, because Amazon dominates online sales of all items (not just books) in the U.S. and pays a higher royalty, whereas IngramSpark has a much broader reach internationally.  But two mysteries remain:

• Why can’t I install Microsoft Word on my new computer?  No one knows.

• Why can’t Amazon print my paperback without botched pages?  Is it the fault of my design team (as Amazon suggests), or, as I suspect, the fault of Amazon?  Until this is resolved, I can’t offer my book for sale on Amazon, where most domestic online sales occur.

And so, bruised but not demolished, I stagger on in the ongoing adventure of self-publishing.  Now let’s change the subject.

                Can Super-Talls Survive?

“Megalo-MoMa” is the title of an article by Martin Filler in the New York Review of Books of December 5, 2019.  It chronicles the Museum of Modern Art’s evolution over the years through a series of expansions, and reviews the latest of these transformations, seen both outside and in.  The newest MoMa, costing a mere $450 million, involved a byzantine transfer of air rights from nearby buildings to MoMa, who then transferred them to the Houston-based property developer Hines.  The resulting structure, a presumed masterpiece by the renowned French architect Jean Nouvel, is, for the moment, the seventh highest of Manhattan’s super-talls, a status sure to be challenged in the near future.  Once known as the Tower Verre (verre = “glass” in French as in un verre de vin, “a glass of wine”), it lost this touch of poesy upon being rechristened 53W53, which in these grubby times is no doubt more marketable.  And marketable it must be, since MoMa occupies only the second through fifth stories, the rest of the structure being given over to — you guessed it — luxury condominia, more of which Manhattan is obviously in dire need of.

Based on sketches of the projected tower, I had hoped for a suave knife-like structure topped by a tapering glass pinnacle bathed in light, a marvel with a different appearance at different times of day, and when seen from different angles — a veritable tower of light.  But according to Martin Filler, Nouvel’s creation, made possible by Mayor Bloomberg’s loosening of the city’s building code, is a behemoth lacking the dazzling lightness and delicacy of the best super-talls.  In short, it’s a clunker, and it adds to the darkness besetting the densely overbuilt area around the museum.  

MoMa's façade, 2009.
Some find it stern and dull; I agree.
Wikipedia Loves Art participant "The_Grotto"

Fortunately, the condos aren’t selling, prompting two of the project’s backers — Goldman Sachs (whose greasy fingers are in every financial pie conceivable) and the Singapore-based Pontiac Land Group owned by the billionaire Kwee family — to challenge Hines legally regarding reductions in rent offered to induce buyers.  All of which is murky high finance, with hints of oversaturation and a reminder that these gargantuan projects aren’t homegrown here on Wall Street, but involve an international hookup of visionary designers, financial slight-of-handers, political connections, and plain, old-fashioned greed.  

And who are the prospective buyers of the condos?  We don’t really know, since that is strictly hush-hush, but we can well imagine Chinese billionaires, Saudi princes, and even a stray Russian oligarch or two fancying a pied-à-terre here in Manhattan, a nice, cozy little penthouse with a wrap-round terrace giving magnificent views of Central Park and beyond.  Not a home crowd, presumably, though a Trump or Cheney crony might show up.

MoMa and garden, 2005.  Before the tower.
hibino

  I shan’t pursue Martin Filler’s appraisal of the new MoMa’s interior — he gives it a mixed rating — for I am more concerned with the museum’s perennial commitment to Bigger and Better, which usually means Newer than New, the unquestioned assumption that today’s Newest New, however costly, has to be better than yesterday’s Newest New.  And the assumption that expanded facilities will better accommodate the legions of visitors pouring in daily, whereas in fact each expansion seems to entice still more visitors, creating a congestion that will incite yet another hyped-up demand for yet another costly expansion.  MoMa feeds on its own success, feeds greedily, and always wants More.  And from it I get a smell of too-muchness, of something high and foolish that is doomed in time to fall.  Not the tower itself, but everything that it embodies, its perilous excess.

Not that MoMa is the only one stabbing a new spike heavenward in Manhattan.  This is the age of the super-talls, skinny soaring monsters, often ugly, pushing skyward and casting their blight of a shadow on the lowly edifices and pedestrians below.  For several years I have kept a file of these endeavors.  A full page glossy color ad on the inside front cover of the Magazine Section of the Sunday Times of October 7, 2018, boasts how the real-estate developer Extell is “redefining the New York skyline,” promising “unparalleled amenities and endless views.”  A bird’s-eye view of the city identifies as theirs the soaring towers of 330 East 72nd Street, 1010 Park Avenue, 995 Fifth Avenue, others elsewhere and even in Brooklyn, with the tallest of all at One Manhattan Square.

A similar full-page color ad, this one in the Magazine Section of October 18, 2015, shows a perilously skinny needle of a building at 111 West 57th Street, dwarfing its neighbors and offering full-floor condos starting at $16 million.  Yes, its uptown or northern face offers dazzling views of Central Park, but it makes me nervous just to look at it.  It isn’t beautiful or graceful, just plain skinny-tall.  Again, the smell of too-muchness, of perilous excess.

Manhattan, April 2019.  One World Trade Center is the tallest.
Lots of big clunky boxes among the lower buildings.  The tall ones at least aspire.
Armando Olivo Martín del Campo

An article in a special section in the Sunday Times of June 9, 2019, noted that for years the city’s skyline was defined by the Empire State Building (1250 feet) and the Chrysler Building (1047 feet), both dating from the early 1930s.  But for the last decade or so, the city’s horizon has been in flux.  As of that date, June 9, 2019, there were nine completed towers over 1,000 feet high, seven of them built after 2007, with another 16 such towers planned or already under construction.  And with soaring heights came soaring prices.  In January 2019 an apartment at 220 Central Park South, with a superb view of the park, reportedly sold for a (then) record $238 million.  But in these surging spikes you can’t even start residential occupancy below the twentieth floor, because the view is blocked by other structures.  Height + view = sale.

One of these towers, One World Trade Center, set a record new height (with the help of a spire) at 1776 feet, when it was completed in 2014.  It’s the only super-tall that I relate to personally, since its lighted silhouette greets me at dawn, and sees me to bed in the evening; I call it  my Tower of Light.

One World Trade Center, August 2019.
Tall by day, magical at night.
Matthew Bellemare

Of course the tallest building in the world is not in New York.  It is the Burj Khalifa, a concrete-and-steel monster of a tower completed in 2009 in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.  Rising with setbacks from the flat desert floor, it tops out at 2717 feet, with 163 floors.  The point of it?  To get international attention, make Dubai a place to visit and invest in, and thus realize the local sheik’s plan to diversify Dubai’s economy, hitherto dominated by oil.  The architect?  Adrian Smith, a Chicago-based American influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright.

The Burj Khalifa, November 2019.  It just screams Tall Tower.
 But to what purpose, other than screaming?
Jpbowen

No one, so far as I know, is challenging the sheikh and his tower in Dubai, but New York is another story.  Here in this (by American standards) old city, fighting the towers surging everywhere are various landmark preservation groups.  Prominent among them is the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation (GVSHP), which I take an interest it, since it is trying to protect my turf, the West Village and adjoining neighborhoods.  Their Winter 2020 newsletter announces in bold type

PLAN  FOR  HUGE  TOWER  ON  LOWER  FIFTH

The newsletter warns that a developer is out to demolish historic buildings and replace them with a tower 4 times their height, a luxury residential tower 244 feet tall — puny compared to the super-talls, but high enough to blight an old neighborhood of historic value.  The project has been put before the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, the outcome uncertain.

And the Real Estate section of the Sunday Times of January 19, 2020, warns that projected new towers on Fifth Avenue could block out some of the most majestic views in the city.  At certain points along Fifth, one can enjoy unobstructed uptown or downtown views of the Avenue and renowned city landmarks, and these views are at risk.  When crossing Fifth Avenue on 4th Street, I myself have noticed that I can look downtown and see the Woolworth Building, my favorite skyscraper, and look uptown and see the Gothic spire of Trinity Church.  Many such views have already been lost to development, and more are threatened now.

So what does REBNY, The Real Estate Board of New York, have to say about all this?  Its announced goal: “to protect, improve, and advance the business of real estate in New York City.”  At its 124th annual gala banquet on January 16, 2020, well attended by 2,000 jacketed members (with a few open collars) and their fashionably attired spouses, it gave awards to members, celebrated their risk-taking  profession, and hobnobbed with assorted politicians, but made no official statement regarding local real estate.  Yet far from exuding confidence in the real estate market, a REBNY press release of November 17, 2019, noted the continuation of a multi-year decline in asking rents.  In other words, the market is experiencing a correction: commercial rents are down, not up.  So is REBNY worried?  Not at all.  Declining rents present opportunities for real estate operators.  “Activity continues to be strong in today’s market,” REBNY’s president announced.  “New experiential concepts will continue to buoy the market moving forward.”  Cautious optimism, perhaps, but optimism nonetheless.  No suggestion of a disastrous downturn.

So much for the lords of real estate.  How about the economy, and that bellwether of American moods and prosperity, the stock market?  The economy is doing quite well, thank you, in spite of a few sourpuss commentators, some of whom even suggest that the stock of Apple, Inc., and a few other surging high-tech behemoths might be overpriced by 25 percent.  But stock prices generally are bumping against their all-time highs, with no hint of an immediate major decline.  And unemployment is at a record low, which means that jobseekers are happy and not inclined to vote against the sitting president, who, like all his predecessors, takes ample credit for the current good times.  This is a Trump economy, big and noisy and booming.

So would I, a small-time investor at best, invest in this market?  Buy at a high?  Are you crazy?  The time-tested rule is, buy low, sell high.  This is time to sell.  Or, if you have a good long-term investment plan, sit tight.

(Caveat:  On the basis of what I just said, please don’t panic and sell all your stocks in anticipation of a market downturn.  I am no market guru, no financial adviser, no predictor of market trends.  I speak only for myself, can’t advise others.  I just know that this market is way, way up, and that what goes up comes down.  I don’t profess to know when the downturn will come.  Today? Tomorrow?  A year hence?  Sorry, I haven’t a clue.  But come it will, whenever.)

From burgeoning super-talls and the deadening shadows they cast, and from the worrisome algebra of height + view = sale, and from the surging economy (with the pockets of dead-end poverty and despair that Trump played well to, and that got him elected), and from Apple stock jolting ever upward, I get again that smell of too-muchness, that stink of perilous excess.  

          Before a major downturn in the economy, usually there is some kind of visible excess, some kind of feverish speculation.  This doesn't seem to be the case now in the stock market, with investors cautious, leery of a dramatic decline.  But debt -- both public and private -- is another matter.  With interest rates low for many years, income-seeking investors and companies have often abandoned U.S. Treasury securities, the safest of investments, for riskier bonds with higher yields, bonds whose ratings verge on junk bond status.  If the economy should fall into recession -- not an immediate threat, according to most analysts -- the value of those bonds could plummet, taking all the financial markets with them.

Are we building towers of Babel, inviting the rage of the gods?  Is American optimism — that bubbly upbeat mood ingrained in our bones and gut, and up till now usually justified — about to be fatally punctured?  And what could puncture it and bring down those super-talls?  The coronavirus now spreading in China?  Climate change, with rising seas eating away at the land, in time threatening even the underpinnings of The City That Never Sleeps, not to mention that monster tower in Dubai?  Or something else, totally unforeseen?  Dunno, dunno, dunno.  Maybe I'm just one of those downbeat sourpusses perennially pooping the party.  And maybe not.

Coming soon: ???  

©   2020  Clifford Browder