Oh, hello. Sorry, I didn’t see you standing over there. Not many people come through any more. Excuse me? The large table over there, with the tarp? The dusty one? No, no, there’s not much under there. I can pull it off if you like. It’s just a bunch of outrage; it used to be pretty sharp and urgent. Now…
It’s surprising how quickly it wears down. You ding the corners a couple times and it begins to look like shit. Then time passes, the glue fails, and it collapses into a sad pile of misplaced hopes and futile intentions. I have some notes somewhere, I could explain it to you, but I think the process would just depress me more. This seems irrational, I know, but even talking seems to make the remnants a little more worn.
Yeah, monologues, that is what we are reduced to. You want outrage? How about the fact that another arts organization has been shunted off the WTC site. Guess where it got covered? In the Times arts section. I didn’t see the print edition; I hope it fell beneath a review of Blades of Glory.
It’s not a badly written piece, and it covers all the high points, in that dry, house style, where you wonder if they see it as highly restrained commentary that the insightful will read ‘correctly’, or if they are just obtuse. Around here, we go in for a bit more muckraking, so here’s a fresh take on the steps to date:
Back in the day, an architect (Daniel Libeskind) came up with a ‘master plan’ the elements of which were expected to guide the long term planning of the WTC site. Though his actual building designs were pretty thoroughly rejected (and some even contest that his plan should have been chosen in the first place), every mouthpiece from Larry Silverstein to George Pataki reiterated how crucial is was to maintain the integrity of said plan, even though it appeared that every design decision made was contradicting the images people pretty readily embraced as the ‘idea’. If pressed, one might describe this plan as a memorial bounded by a L-shaped gathering of towers and cultural venues. Oh, and tower that was 1,776 feet high, a ‘symbolic gesture.’
Well, we still have all that, if one can believes that funding for a $700 million theater can be found, and if a knick knack kiosk for the Memorial constitutes a cultural venue. We certainly got the spec office space, and the bonus of a big mall. How did it all do down? After much jockeying and hand-wringing, four venues were announced (oh, a couple years ago): The Drawing Center, the Signature Theater, the Joyce (dance), and something called the International Freedom and Patriotism Conclave (or words to that effect). Architects were selected, and design efforts commenced, though no one was given a budget, or told how things would be funded, or even when they could expect occupancy.
The new kids on the block, Snohetta, were up first (Frank Ghery, a tricky old sot when it comes to commissions like this, still hasn’t offered a sketch). Thanks to a poorly chosen image of an exhibit for the first renderings, complaints from the architect who is buying a whole block of Park Avenue on the back of his fees from a nearby project, and cursory research into the kinds of shows the Drawing Center has mounted in the past, things went very south very quickly. Loyalty pledges were passed around, and the Drawing Center turned up their noses, right quick. Not having a lot of old skool patronage to back them up, they were pretty shown the door with the kind of alacrity reserved for ugly post-drunk-goggle hookups where everyone is wondering why those two got together.
Next up was the Freedom Center, headed by one of the preeminent fund raisers for President Bush a couple years back. Funnily enough, a center devoted to ‘freedom’ refused to sign at the dotted line. And they didn’t even play the irony card that hard. Snohetta was given the door prize (quite literally — they get to design the door to a below grade ‘visitors center’).
Meanwhile, Ghery toiled in relative silence, cocooned by the fact that his site and venues were decidedly less threatening, even though the programmatic requirements (which included stacking something like five theaters servicing two distinct tenants from a compressed footprint that was itself perched upon a sizable portion of the subterranean support areas of the Freedom Tower) had everyone shaking their head since the RFP.
Last week, everyone fessed up to the impossibility of this scenario, and the Signature Theater was shunted off site to the Fiterman Hall complex — a building that has sat for nearly six years in unattractive and potentially dangerous netting, having been partially destroyed by the collapse of WTC7. It has been undeveloped since the CUNY — which owns the building — was self-insured, and having just spent over $100 million developing it as a state of the art facility intended to shore up their downtown presence (the building hadn’t even opened when the attacks occurred), was loath to eat a eight to nine figure clean up bill and then still have to start the renovation process all over again. So yeah, that’s where the Signature is going. Larry will be happy since it means he now has at least the thin hope that one sites facing his Jeff Koons festooned drivelet for the rebuilt 7WTC won’t be a construction site in, say, eight to ten years.
We also get the parenthetical note that the Drawing Center will be moving to the South Street Seaport (though not Pier 17, as some particularly incisive commentators have argued), though, like everything in the article, it was qualified with uncertainties about funding, timing, you know, actual agreements. Ghery, who likely never got to the stage where he mushes around pencil shavings and calls it design, was happy to roll with the change order. Construction on the newly denuded Joyce can’t even start until 2011, meaning there’s plenty of room for progress invoices until Debra Burlingame finds out about the work of, say, Bill T. Jones.
Another brick in the wall (of course, of course).
In a very small victory for SoHo preservationists this week, an agreement was finally hammered out, resolving a five-year old dispute at 599 Broadway. The building, located strategically at Broadway and Houston, was finally awarded the right to install advertising via billboards to be located a street level, though they will be forced to reinstall and maintain an intrusive piece of site-specific art that has been preventing them from realizing the highest, best use for their property for over three decades.
Concerns that the planned 120-foot tall advertisement for Axe Body Spray can’t be repurposed for the compromised space have caused concern that the less attractive space can even be rented. Owners of 599 Broadway are looking into the viability of applying for Liberty Bonds, or possibly receiving Section 8 funds from HUD until an advertiser can be secured.
The battle, which has bitterly divided the retail-rich enclave for some time, leaves many wondering about the long-term legacy of SoHo. Many feared that the full restoration of the art would rend the already weakening notion of SoHo as incubator for hundreds of marginally talented, but corporately and family-funded “creatives”.
‘Raz’ Dipson, a former art director at BBDO, now running the boutique agency Pedophilia out of his 7,200 square foot loft on Greene Street, explains “For most of the nineties, our position here was secure. But the influx of financial services sector money, Europeans and celebrities means that we are being slowly priced out of the neighborhood. I spend so much time fighting with the Goldmans that I barely have time to finish the one painting a year I need to produce to secure my subsidized lease.”
The historty of advertising will always be hard to trace. Ad men are famously secretive about their inspiration. One anecdote holds that the ‘got Milk?’ idea was born during a cocaine-fueled binge of watching lactation porn in a loft on Broome Street. “Yeah, well, it was Goodby, but those guys come out here all the time” reports Raz. “I know, I know the Tampax ringtone concept was thought up when a guy was talking to his daughter over dinner at Kittichai.”
Allowing a six-story billboard to be installed would have cemented SoHo as the upscale shopping destination for status conscious New Jerseyites and currency-advantaged Europeans. “Sure, there’s plenty of advertising on that corner, but it’s all east of Broadway, which many don’t consider truly part of SoHo” says Dipson. “With this onerous requirement to display art, what if all these people come here thinking SoHo is filled with art galleries?”
Now, the future of SoHo is in disarray. There is some discussion about forming an alliance group, but the fraying of the community wrought by the influx of new residents makes it tough: “Between Aspen in the winter and the Hamptons in the summer, no one can get their schedules coordinated” complains Raz.
Locals look to icons such as Ron Pompei to marshal the troops. Pompei, a trailblazer (“He’s been here since at least the 80’s” reports Raz) specializing in themed environments, would seem to be natural figurehead, but he has been reticent to date. “I dunno,” grumbles Raz, “apparently he was a sculptor at one time, and he’s said ‘The Wall’ adds ‘pychographic value’. And I heard he’s been really busy working on a Coke kiosk for McMurdo Station.”
Perhaps, like many changes over the years, this transition is likewise inevitable. A certain resilience, in the form of mining any remnant of legitimate cultural expression for the base purposes of shilling, say, hand cream, would seem to forestall this shift. But no one is secure, no one is protected. Reports Raz, “I was thinking of doing a poster that riffs on that — what was it, a song from Schindler’s List ‘First they came for the… the…’ — anyway, that song. A friend of my girlfriend knows the guys from Fall Out Boy, and we were going to have them in the poster and perhaps do a song, you know, to show that the challenges of one generation are repeated anew. Then one of them asked me how much I paid in rent. Whatever. John Zorn wouldn’t even return my phone calls.”