Category: Brick & mortar

Poor Dow Jones! First their first-quarter earnings tank , prompting today's shareholder challenge and all sorts of schadenfreude, and now they're losing their fancy-pants nameplates from their swanky downtown digs to a bunch of lawyers.
The NYO's Gabriel Sherman reports that Dow Jones had to remove its stately brass lettering from two of the three main entrances at 1 World Financial Center, replaced by "shiny new signs" signalling the proud residency of white-shoe firm Cadwalader, Wickersham and Taft LLP. Sherman quotes a staffer:

"The idea that they can tear your name off the building, it's just depressing," a Wall Street Journal staffer said. "This is a symptom of a larger problem. The Journal has no distinct physical presence. Look at the other great papers - they all have landmark buildings that signify their public presence and give their employees a sense of purpose and place."

In midtown, the Wall Street Journal's advertising office also plays bridesmaid to a blushing legal bride: White & Case, which has nameplates outside both entrances at the black art-deco building at 1155 6th Avenue and continues to gobble up floors within.

Related: DOW JONES REVOLT IN THE WORKS [NY Post]
Do as We Say, Not as We Dow [Slate]

You ride past it every day, so maybe it's appropriate that you check into where WTC leaseholder Larry Silverstein is at with (re)construction of the Freedom Tower, the cornerstone of which was laid last summer. Judging from the amount of drills not rending the air, we'd say Larry was behind schedule. So Fishbowl took a look at the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.'s labyrinthine timeline for completion. Turns out the design and the timeline are, to put it charitably, flexible. Now we know why poor Daniel Liebeskind wears black on black: The last drill will stop whirring in 2013. Which means we'll be able to have a hot dog in Memorial Plaza in something like 3,500 days. Or when our grown children file for their first divorce.

There was something ominous about yesterday, and we don't just mean hearing Dick Cheney speak stentorially about "freedom" and "terror" while visiting the death camps in Poland. As www.newcriterion.com reminds us in the most precise eulogy of its kind, the Swifty Lazar-spectacled architecture icon Philip Johnson died late Tuesday night at 98.

Pulling no punches, Criterion dwells as much on his Mies van der Rohe period - which gave this city most of its matchbox-shaped buildings North of Grand Central, including the AT&T building - as on his passionate flirt with National Socialism, which the slight dynamo never sought to deny. According to Criterion, he seemed more bothered by outing himself as gay, lest plum projects pass him by. (Fishbowl wonders if financial backers smile more kindly on people whistling the "Horst Wessel Song" instead of the theme to "Pippin," but never mind.)

Meanwhile, The Sun yesterday also celebrated the centennial of the birth of Ayn Rand, who gave voice to the way the younger Johnson viewed much of the world and the people who would use his buildings. Not coincidentally, both were inspired by the kind of strength-worshipping, uncompromising Social Darwinism from which poor Daniel Liebeskind would do well to borrow a few red blood cells before the NY Planning Commission has completely eviscerated him and his original Freedom Tower plan.

Because original architecture, designed to make a city a home to its people, has long eluded New York (and, no, Mayor Mike, we're not impressed with the Olympic pool you want to build in Queens). Judging from the boxy, soulless structures going up on the Bowery - where the City just gave the OK to raze historic dive McGuirk's Suicide Hall, effectively killing the last part of that old neighborhood - Johnson's invisible, 1930s hand still hovers over the Manhattan landscape. And somewhere, Howard Roark and Le Corbusier are both laughing.