Via Forgotten New York:
That’s the old Lone Star Cafe up above, at Fifth Avenue and 13th Street, with its signature iguana sculpture on the roof. Personally I wasn’t a fan of the club, but I liked the iguana. The semipseudoclassical building below it had been a Schrafft’s restaurant originally, and was reused as have been a number of others from that chain.
When people talk about the character of New York changing during the recent years of growth, what do they mean? I doubt many people actually miss high levels of street crime or subway platforms badly lit by widely-spaced incandescent bulbs. The most obvious thing that has changed that’s worth missing is diversity of the built environment and of the associated building uses. In short, weirdness. That iguana was an ad for a business, but it was not one that had been okayed by focus-group testing or, for that matter, liked by its neighbors. This kind of weirdness cannot be planned on a scale any bigger than individual buildings, since large-scale decisions kill the spontaneity that make it work.
New York has had close to three decades of extreme pressure on real estate. The easiest way to visualize may be to simply look at the official population, which had gone from 7.3 million people in 1990 to 8.1 million in 2010 to an estimated 8.5 million in 2015. Or we can look at tourism, which went from fewer than 30 million visits per year in 1990 to 56 million in 2015. Or the number of people employed in the city, which has gone from 3.6 million in 1990 to 4.2 million in 2015.
In much of the country, preserving old buildings means fighting primarily against time and decay and only secondly against the actions of people. In New York, preservation includes a large helping of proving that old buildings can serve the needs of a growing and active population. The replacement of old buildings with new almost always results in a loss of weirdness, and that process over twenty-five years is noticeable. It’s a lot easier to have certain types of gray-area spaces – ad hoc nightclubs, squats, informal art studios – when parts of the city have abandoned buildings and worthless land. There is, now, literally no part of the city immune from real estate pressures and therefore no part where weirdness can thrive on its own.
In writing this post, I’ve more or less accidentally come up with the next crusade for historic preservation: save the weird!
