The Skyscraper is King, but the Streets Are for Strolling

“New York is a catastrophe, but it is a beautiful catastrophe,” observed the great French architect Le Corbusier after his first visit here in 1920. if he was disturbed by the confusion of the city, he was exhilarated by its energy, moved by its passion and thrilled by its obsession with the new.

And these things still hold. New York is, quite simply, the most awesome man‐made environment in the world. Beside it every other American city, whatever its charms, pales as a physical sight; cities all over the world that are determined to thrust themselves into the modern age take their model from New York's skyscrapers.

Few cities, particularly cities settled as long ago as 1625, have 20th‐century wonders of technology as their symbols, but somehow it is altogether appropriate that the Empire State Building should stand for New York. Like the city itself, the Empire State's great tower pulsates with energy, yet beneath that energy is an object of dignity and even grace.

If the Empire State has been surpassed in height by the World Trade Center, the symbol still holds; New York is tough, but it is also sentimental.

New Kind of City

Chicago correctly claims to have invented skyscrapers, but it is New York that quickly made from them a new kind of city. Futurist and Expressionist artists and film makers of the 1920's and 30's were the first to see the city's towers, rising like Mont St. Michel out of the sea, as an inspiration for fantasy visions, and still today the physical form of the skyline suggests something that is strange and wild, surely not real.

Part of this is due to the lost New York architectural tradition of giving the imaginations of architects freedom when it came to the tops of their buildings. Thus the New York of the 20's and 30's was a village of bizarre spires. A Gothic crown here, a Renaissance lantern there or a wholly invented modernist burst such as that atop the Chrysler Building; rules mattered little, so long as the result was visually pleasing.

Part of the city's physical identity comes from its insistence upon having everything at once not only the new, but also the old, spread out like a smorgasbord. In New York you can see not only a Gothic church, but Gothic details freely borrowed for modern skyscrapers; not just 20th‐century imitations of Renaissance palaces, but Renaissance details topping off steel‐frame towers. Historical styles, by New York custom, are resources for pleasure and wonder, few were the architects who, like their Chicago brethren, argued in favor of styles having moral values.

To get a sense of the physical city, begin with the big picture. Observatories have sprouted atop skyscrapers in many cities in recent years, but New York's tradition of elevated viewing goes back to the erection of a 300‐foot tower called the Latting Observatory in 1853, and this is still the city in which views are taken seriously. There are four public observatories today, and each provides a different way of looking at the city.

The Empire State Building, at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, is right in the center of town, and the view is richly varied in all directions north to midtown and Central Park (and upstate on a clear day), west to the garment center and the Hudson River, south to the financial district, and east to Murray Hill and Queens.

From the Empire State you are high enough to perceive the city as a totality, yet enough in the middle of things to feel the pulse of the streetscape. Go on a clear night if you can; the lights of the city are one of the few man‐made sights anywhere that can bring on the sort of stunned hush most people reserve for places like the Grand Canyon.

The Empire State Building observatory is open every day from 9:30 to midnight. Admission is $1. 70 for adults, 85 cents for children under 12.

Like a Plane in Midair

From the 107th floor of the World Trade Center, New York is a different experience altogether. in a sense it is like viewing the city from a plane frozen in midair; looking north, midtown Manhattan rises in the distance, and becomes visible as a unit.

The view alters dramatically to the east, however, as you look toward the trade center's immediate neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. Now, you are looking not at a distant city, but almost directly down at a cluster of skyscrapers a block or two away. The angle is sharp, and you can stare down at the fanciful tops of such skyscrapers as the Woolworth Building of 1913 and 70 Pine Street and 40 Wall Street of early 1930's.

The greatest thrill, however, is the trade center's roof‐it is the only place in New York from which you can see an uninterrupted 360‐degree view, and the only place in which your own eyes will be able to perceive the shape and entirety of this island city.

The observation deck and roof are in the southern of the trade center's twin 110story towers, and are open from 9:30 A. M. to 9:30 P. M. every day. Admission is the same as at the Empire State Building: $1. 70 for adults, 85 cents for children.

RCA Building

From the 70th floor of the RCA Building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Rockefeller Center, the city is more immediate, more graspable, yet less complete; you are thrust into the midst of midtown Manhattan, close enough to create the illusion that you can reach out and touch the tops of nearby skyscrapers. One of them is that fine building top that no one has ever managed to see from the Empire State Building. that of the Empire State itself.

The RCA Building observatory is open from 10 to 9 every day. Admission is $1. 50 for adults, 85 cents for children.

Little known even to native New Yorkers is the Williamsburg Savings Bank's tower observatory at 1 Hanson Place, Brooklyn. The Williamsburg's 28‐story tower was built in the 20's in a loosely Romanesque style, and its pinnacle offers an expansive view not only of Brooklyn, but of lower Manhattan and the New York Harbor. it is open from 10 to 3, Monday through Saturday, and admission is free.

If the city is best initially perceived from aloft, its details reveal themselves only on close inspection. For all of this city's preoccupation with newness, it has never quite taken to the automobile, and the way to understand New York best is to walk in it. The city's buildingsmost of them, at least‐are scaled to the pedestrian, intended to be seen by strollers rather than by motorists.

The Idea of the Street

Indeed, the very idea of the street is as crucial to New York's architecture as the idea of the tower. in a city, the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and on the city's best streets, such as Madison Avenue above 57th Street or Fifth Avenue in midtown, individual buildings defer to the overall environment. on upper Madison—which is arguably the pleasantest pedestrian street in the world‐there is just enough variety in the boutique and gallery windows and in the brownstones and apartment houses above them to create visual interest, yet enough continuity to pull the entire place together.

What makes Madison work is not the easy unity of a lot of identical buildings, but the much more subtle unity of varied, lively places working in harmony. And Fifth Avenue is almost as good: An ideal, if long, walk would be from the Empire State Building at 34th Street, up past Altman's (the most imposing of New York's department store buildings), Lord & Taylor, and the great BeauxArts mass of the Public Library at 42d Street, then on to Rockefeller Center between 48th and 51st Streets.

Rockefeller Center, now more than 40 years old, was the model for all the postwar multi‐skyscraper groupings in cities around the world, but its quality has never been surpassed. The taut composition of buildings, the sense of 1930's elegance combined with 1970's street life, all make Rockefeller Center a source of continued joy to New Yorkers.

Fifth Avenue is a spate of fancy new Italian shops farthat uptown; one is in Olympic Tower, the combination retail‐office‐apartment complex at Fifth and 51st that is intended to lead the way for continued mixed‐use construction. And at. 59th Street, just short Hot Central Park, stands the l Plaza‐the 1907 French Renaissance fantasy wildly beloved by New Yorkers, and yet serious enough as a piece of architecture to have earned the admiration of Frank Lloyd Wright, who lived there for many years.

Central Park itself, from 59th Street to 110th Street, is one of the most famous parks in the world, and it is important for reasons that go well beyond its role as a green oasis in a concrete city. The design of the park in the mid‐19th century by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, with its enormous variety of different landscape experiences and circulation systems intricately worked into 840 acres, is a model for urban park designs all over the world. At 72d Street in the middle of the park, the elegant and formal Bethesda Fountain is viewed against a different and totally rustic landscape; the contrast is typical of park experiences.

The park is lined with expensive apartment houses jostling for valuable frontage; the confrontation between the green acreage and the masonry towers is dramatic and oddly beautiful. Be certain, if you are in the neighborhood east of the park along Fifth Avenue, to wander in and around the elegant blocks of town houses between Fifth and Lexington in the 60's and 70's; they will remind you that New York is not all glass boxes or Times

Square sleaze.

Cast Iron in SoHo

There are some urban experiences that are uniquely New York's; one is a walk through the rich stock of 19th‐century cast‐iron structures filling SoHo, the neighborhood south of Houston Street. The cast‐iron method of construction was an early form of prefabrication, but instead of stamping out identical dull boxes, the cast‐iron architects made palaces with facades full of ornate Italianate detailing. Once industrial buildings, the cast‐iron structures now house new life as art galleries and studios.

The East 42d Street area contains a group of structures that, individually or together, could also exist nowhere but in New York. The United Nations complex on the East River, designed by an international consortium of architects in the late 1940's, was the city's first glass curtainwall structure, and it is now a splendid period piece of early modern design. A new version of the glass wall has just gone up across the street at 1 United Nations Plaza, the hotel and office complex by Kevin Roche, a building of stunning elegance in its exterior design and unusual shape.

Just around the corner at 320 East 43d Street is Mr. Roche's Ford Foundation, whose 10‐story garden atrium continues to evoke a mild gasp even in an age used to John Portinan's vast hotel courts. And down 42d Street at the corner of Lexington Avenue is the Chrysler Building William Van Alen's eingxuberant fantasy spire of the 1930's, but a building as notable for its fine period lobby as for its top.

Just down the block from Chrysler is Grand Central Terminal, itself a virtual symbol of the city. The BeauxArts facade was designed in 1913 by Warren & Wetmore, with the overall terminal design by Reed & Stem; the mammoth interior concourse has all the power and sense of adventure a great train station is supposed to offer, and if the 20th Century Limited is no longer leaving from a red‐carpeted platform, the recent cleaning of the great interior space, which now looks stunning, makes up for it.

New York is, of course, a water city, and the fact that most New Yorkers tend to ignore this does not make it any less so. Boat rides on the Circle Line (563‐3200) circumnavigate the island of Manhattan in three hours, leaving from the foot of West 43d Street; shorter and almost as much fun is the city government's own famous boat ride, the Staten Island ferry. Both trips offer a lively look at the harbor and the incomparable drama of the view of the towers of Lower Manhattan appearing, to soar out of the water.

Bridges for Walking

If it is tun to sail in New York's waterways, it is perhaps best of all to walk over them. The Brooklyn Bridge, downtown at the east end of Chambers Street, is, like Central Park, not a building but one of the city's truly great works of architecture nonetheless, and the best way to see it is to stroll across its free pedestrian walkway. From there you will have a fine view of the weblike pattern of the cables of the 93‐year‐old bridge, not to mention the fine harbor and skyline view.

A little less accessible, but just as exciting, is a walk across the George Washington Bridge, at 179th Street in Washington Heights, whose exposed steel towers are the 20th century's answer to the Gothic structure of the Brooklyn.

Perhaps the ultimate way to see New York from above the river, though, is something so new that New Yorkers themselves are only beginning to explore it the Swiss‐built aerial tramway across the East River to Roosevelt Island. The tram leaves from a station at Second Avenue and 59th Street, and it provides a joyous fourminute ride up over skyline, highway and river, part Disneyland, part Swiss Alps, and all for the price of a subway token.