Taki
Already a subscriber? Log in
Those were the days. Apart from wearing a well-cut suit and dress, the lovers-to-be could actually go to the roof of a skyscraper and make whoopee to their heart’s content. Golden Boy is not a particularly good movie — he gives up the beak-busting business after he kills the Chocolate Drop Kid in the ring — but for the quaint notion of a boxer also being a violinist, and a woman leaving a rich older man for a poor younger one. Many years later, Bill Holden got up on stage and gave a wonderful speech thanking Barbara Stanwyck for giving him his break. (She had insisted he play the part of Joe.) She was a major, major star who always talked Brooklyn and went on acting until old age. But back to the art deco.
The New York skyline is the most photographed on earth. It began with the mine-is-bigger-than-yours quest for stature by architects hired by tycoons whose ego knew no bounds. The exquisite Chrysler building and Rockefeller Center come to mind. The superlatives piled on when the Empire State Building reached for the sky. One small plane during a storm hit it somewhere towards the upper end, and a large gorilla perched himself in its turret, otherwise the structure was fine except for the record number of suicides jumping off it year in year out. (No longer. The place is easy to get into, but impossible to jump off from.) Then came the twin towers, two box-like monsters who rose up during the ghastly Seventies along with flared trousers, long hair, droopy moustaches and words like ‘man’ and ‘dude’. And women with hairy armpits. I always thought the twin towers typified the lowest period of the city — the race riots, the breakdown of law and order, and the encroaching proletarian brutalism. After 9/11 the towers became a shrine.
At the beginning of the last century the first commercial towers boasted steel frames and limestone, as distinctly New York as the slate grey rooftops are Paris. The high-rise forest that became the city followed the stock market’s fluctuations, dipping low south of 34th street in Manhattan during the Depression, reaching for the sky north of midtown. During the late 1980s curving glass horrors appeared, and they continue to sprout, dark, impenetrable, cold, undeniable symbols of ugly money and of dark dealings.
Once upon a time you had 740 Park, with its Candela-designed limestone façade and undeniable scent of old money. Then came Trump Tower, vulgar yes, but not as ugly as Olympic Tower, next to St Patrick’s Cathedral, ordered by Aristotle Socrates Onassis himself. They both look like brand buildings compared with the latest horror going up across Carnegie Hall, a bit like constructing a strip joint next to Notre-Dame. When the ‘thing’ is completed sometime next year it will stand 1,005 feet, and will be the tallest non-commercial structure in the Bagel. It will be inhabited by white-collar criminals of the billionaire persuasion, mostly Chinese, Russian, Arab and other such flash. Tradition will be a word punished by immediate expulsion from One57, the moniker the horror goes under. The penthouse, on the 90th floor, was bought by a vulgar Canadian whose wife I sat next to one evening. When I asked her what language she preferred to converse in, she replied Belgian.
Ninety million big ones is the price quoted for the penthouses, with a Nigerian fatty among the purchasers who wish to remain anonymous. Very few of the buyers will use the place as a permanent residence. We all know what is going on, something once upon a time related to the Chinese favourite mode of labour. A former CEO of Citigroup, Sanford Weill, not exactly an Errol Flynn lookalike, recently sold his apartment on the upper west side to a 22-year-old daughter of a Russian for 88 million big ones. When Barbara Hutton and Doris Duke were considered the two richest girls in the world back in the Thirties, they wouldn’t have dreamt of treating themselves with such over-the-top extravagance. Yet the Weill pad was purchased by the father, parking his daughter inside while trying to keep his gains from her mother’s eager hands. If ever I move to Brooklyn, it will be to get away from the scum Europe, Africa and China is disgorging on Manhattan’s shores. Joe Bonaparte and Babs, where is that roof of yours now that we need it!
Also in Society
Also by Taki
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in