Not Quite Before, Not Quite After

A building that was discussed at great length at last week’s Office To Residential Summit was 25 Water Street. Old Structures has no connection to that project, but it’s a block from our office, so I’ve been watching the progress. Here’s what it looked like last December:

It was completed in 1969 as back-office space called “4 New York Plaza” and the lower floors had so few windows because they were designed to house mainframe computers. That form of masonry-faced brutalism was reasonably common in New York in the late 60s and early 70s, and in my opinion has aged less well than “real” – i.e., concrete-faced – brutalism. Obviously, more windows were required for the conversion, and the picture above shows the rather laborious task of cutting out sections of the lower facade. The single new window, with the white frame on the right top of the cut area was, I believe, a sample used to test the fit process and/or waterproofing. The angle of this photo gives a good view of the underside of the steel deck used to build the floors in this steel-frame building.

Here’s this April:

The cutting is done and the new windows are going in. This is a small thing, but I like the way the new windows work around the notches in the facade from the former inset window plane. This angle also gives a view of the framing for the additional floors that were put on top.

As is inherently true of all such projects, the final appearance of the building is probably not what the architects would have designed for a new building. But a compromise between the existing reality of that behemoth looming over Water Street for the last 55 years and a blank-sheet design is not necessarily bad.