Ward's Bakery, Not 2 Columbus Circle, the Real Loss
Commenting on last week’s NY Times article The Missing Landmarks Commission, blog Noticing New York makes the case that Ward’s Bakery, not the Edward Durell Stone creation at 2 Columbus Circle, best exemplifies the dropping of the ball by LPC. “Unlike the eccentric Edward Durell Stone building at Columbus Circle,” writes NNY, “the Ward Bakery…
Commenting on last week’s NY Times article The Missing Landmarks Commission, blog Noticing New York makes the case that Ward’s Bakery, not the Edward Durell Stone creation at 2 Columbus Circle, best exemplifies the dropping of the ball by LPC. “Unlike the eccentric Edward Durell Stone building at Columbus Circle,” writes NNY, “the Ward Bakery Building was noncontroversially beautiful, fully functional, and had a long and important history in the neighborhood.” True dat.
my biggest issue with preservationists is that they are entirely clueless of the economics behind any given stituation. the way to save wards would’ve been to make up the delta in $ between preserving/converting the building and replacing it with something else. the temper tantrum route doesn’t work between adults.
“has no taste, no sense of what is truly distinguished and what is just crappy everyday construction.”
Yeah, inigo, like what’s probably going to replace it.
Preservation is not only about elitist love for buildings that Ouroussoff can wax rhapsodic over in his impenetrable prose; it should also be for the everyday building that has a sense of history behind it, even if the history is mainly just being there for a hundred years or more.
The problem with preservationists (and Landmarking) is that it’s so hung up on what’s deemed historic and in maintaining a building exactly as built. If we had a looser and more flexible determination of what it means to “preserve,” maybe we could keep more buildings from destruction.
magnificent example of beaux arts architecture?
man, what are you smoking? It was a bread factory clad in white terra-cotta.
One of the problems with the preservation movement nowadays is that it has lost all concept of comparitive quality. Every old piece of crap is “magnificent” or “unique” or my favorite “nearly unique”. There is no connoisseurship, which was the hallmark of the movement. Anyone who can equate this boring, ugly, bakery to say, the US Custom House, or the NY Public Library, or Grand Central Terminal, has no taste, no sense of what is truly distinguished and what is just crappy everyday construction.
The Ward bakery is/was tough to appreciate because the surroundings were so shabby and it had been not only neglected by its owners over the years but also added onto in ungainly ways. It’s actually not a brick building. Rather it’s still clad in its original white terracotta tiles that make it a companion piece to both BAM and the Audubon Boat House in Prospect Park. Properly restored, it would have compared to them in distinctiveness and grandeur. For those of us who enjoy looking beyond the contemporary urban context, it remains a magnificent example of Beaux Arts architecture.
Brick buildings don’t look so handsome painted. It would probably have garnered more support if it was not.
dunno about that. 2 Columbus circle grabbed people. There was something about it, you loved it or you hated it. The bakery was just another old industiral building. nothing special or thrilling.
Landmark does not equal – a very nice old building
Landmark means possessing special architectural, historical or cultural value. While it might be a nice building there is nothing about it that makes it architecturally, historically or culturally special (or unique).
Certainly there was a much greater case that the EDS building (2 CC) was architecturally (and potentially culturally) unique.