If you’re in Manhattan for August, you’re lucky: The next two Saturday mornings offer the city’s best opportunity for a do-it-yourself architectural, historical and economic tour from the middle of Park Avenue.
For most of the past 15 years, through its Summer Streets program, New York has shut down Park Avenue for the first three August Saturdays, from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. — or, rather, opened Park Avenue to cyclists, walkers and joggers.
Summer Streets is the only time you’ll get to take in a panorama of Manhattan’s building-scape.
From a bike or your feet on eight-lane Park Avenue, you get a full three-way view and can take in the height of (almost) any building as well as compare each with its neighbors.
If you’re starting around Grand Central, the first marvel is that stretch of Park itself.
Park isn’t an asphalt roadbed but the roof of the Metro-North train tunnel to northern suburbs.
Not much longer than a century ago, the train tracks, owned by the monopoly New York Central, were exposed, causing danger to pedestrians and dissecting Manhattan.
Prodded by city and state government, New York Central buried or covered over the tracks.
Modern Grand Central, opened in 1913, became the anchor of a business hub.
The area’s oldest buildings — the ones that aren’t made of glass — are from this Terminal City era.
Summer Streets is a chance to bike or walk over Grand Central’s lacy green viaduct from the south and get a full-on view of the terminal’s façade, then go under the Helmsley Building.
Going north, you get a visual of New York’s post-World War II economic bet: The future would be white-collar office workers, not factory workers.
The mid-rise glass-and-steel towers in the 50s blocks, including the Lever House to the west at 54th, welcomed hundreds of thousands of management and finance workers in the 1950s and 1960s, forming New York’s modern tax base.
North of the office district are pre-war limestone-and-brick apartment buildings, built for financiers, investors and executives.
These buildings represent optimal density (which is why they’re so expensive): Residents benefit from being near other rich people and the business district.
But they’re not so packed that they can’t see the sky in all directions, and they’re not so high that they’re removed from street life.
Above 97th, the Metro-North train tracks emerge, and Park Avenue becomes public housing as well as cheaper private rental housing.
An urban paradox: Hide the tracks, and wealthier people would want to live there, pricing out the working class and poor. Don’t bury them, and you’ve got cheaper land for affordable housing — at a lower, though not unlivable, quality of life.
Summer Streets detours west.
From Central Park North, catch a glimpse south across the park of New York’s mostly empty supertall condos on 57th Street.
Enjoy your close-up views of Harlem’s renovated brownstones and mid-rise apartment buildings, a success story starting in the 1980s of both private investment and Koch administration public investment.
A few glass boxes are thrown in, signaling “luxury” to newcomers.
Turn around at 125th and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard.
Soon back on Park Avenue heading south, you can appreciate the variety of New York’s real estate by juxtaposing the 1960s-era MetLife building, once reviled, against the Beaux-Arts 1920s-era Helmsley Building.
Don’t miss the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, east at 50th, and the Roosevelt Hotel, west (from the viaduct) at 45th.
Neither is currently a hotel: The Roosevelt is New York’s migrant center, and the Waldorf is being converted by a now-bankrupt Chinese company into luxury condos, years late and over budget.
(Draw whatever conclusions about New York’s future from these fates.)
South of Grand Central, Park becomes Lafayette and Centre streets, past the original MetLife building and its early-20th-century clock-face tower near Madison Square, past the Union Square market tents, through Astor Place and the poster promises of a new Wegmans supermarket to replace the old Kmart (adaptive reuse!), down through Chinatown’s restaurant-supply shops and, finally, the court and local-government district near the Brooklyn Bridge.
Many of this last area’s Renaissance-style confections were built more than a century ago with Tammany Hall’s dollars because the tax base could support corrupt Tammany.
Brick against glass, rich people not far from poor, Harlem hair-braiding shops a few miles from Chinatown’s dim sum, government not too removed from the companies and people that support it.
This is the physical evidence of a successful city (so far) because everything is in balance.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
