The Building That Isn’t There, Cont’d

(Page 2 of 2)

Mr. Stern went on to characterize the museum as one of Stone's "masterworks," along with the embassy in New Delhi and Stone's own town house on East 64th Street in New York, whose entire facade was grillwork.

Lever House and the Seagram Building "represent the epitome of the correct, the orthodox in postwar Modernism," said Mr. Stern, while Stone's Huntington Hartford museum "pushed the envelope very far toward what would become Postmodernism. This building is a landmark in the history of architectural taste." He closed with an appeal: "Preserve this landmark whole. Preserve this public provocation, this embodiment of artistic risk-taking."

The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission preserved Stone's own town house, by landmarking it years ago, but refuses, despite constant appeals, to so much as hold a hearing on the museum. From the day the museum became eligible for landmark status in 1994, the commission's behavior puzzled me and many others. Naïvely, as it turned out, I had been thinking of landmark status in aesthetic and historical terms. The game proved to be about something else entirely.

In the hog-eat-hog economy of the 1990's, big porkers kept getting eaten up by bigger ones, and Gulf & Western, the first commercial buyer of the museum after Mr. Hartford's financial troubles, disappeared down the gullet of Viacom , and Viacom gave the building to the city in 1994 in return for tax breaks.

The landmarks commission seemed to be getting a clear message from City Hall: lay off 2 Columbus Circle.

The city envisioned a bidding war. It would sell the property for hundreds of millions to a developer and on top of that wind up with a big corporate taxpayer or two on the Department of Finance hard drive. From that day on, every time the question of a hearing on 2 Columbus Circle came up, the landmarks commissioners, as I see it, dove under their desks, clapped their hands over their ears, cried out to their secretaries to shove history and the concept of landmarks preservation itself through the shredder, and hid.

The fantastic bidding war, however, never occurred. By November of 1998 there were only two interested parties, Donald Trump, who wanted to demolish the museum and build something new, and the Dahesh Museum, which wanted a home for its collection of 19th-century academic art. Then Mr. Trump pulled out. The city's dreams of a tax-paying bonanza were over.

At this point the American Craft Museum moved in to challenge the Dahesh. Being far better connected politically, with a former chairwoman of the landmarks commission, Laurie Beckelman, on the payroll, the craft museum renamed itself the Museum of Arts and Design and flicked the Dahesh aside like a dead Taiwanese watch battery. In came Architect Brad Cloepfil and Ephemeralism — which brings us to where we are today, awaiting, unless the plans change drastically, the first example of the old peekaboo, I-see-you-game ever built on Columbus Circle.

Soon, during the next few days, weeks, months at the most, an appalling smack will be heard throughout New York. It will not be hostile fire. It will be the sound of the landmarks commissioners hitting the deck once more . . . while one of the most important buildings in the history of 20th-century architecture is vaporized and small urban creatures sniff the stench that's left in the air.

Well . . . one can always hope the Museum of Arts and Design's retro trek back to Ephemeralism will be "fun" at least:

In yesterday's polluted air

I saw a museum that wasn't there.

It wasn't there again today.

O how I wish it would go away.

Postscript: It so happens Stone had a vision for the Circle itself that was never realized. He wanted to eliminate the traffic lanes that ran through it, make it whole again and ring the outer edge with three-story-high Doric columns salvaged from the Seventh Avenue facade of Pennsylvania Station, whose demolition had begun barely four months before the Gallery of Modern Art was completed. He had two things in mind: creating a proper stage for the towering monument to Christopher Columbus at the center — and a proper memorial for Penn Station, a masterpiece of New York architecture by the great architects McKim, Mead & White, that had been sold to the highest bidder and destroyed, columns and all, and fed to the Jersey marshes in a senseless but innocent-by-reason-of-uncontrollable-cupidity act of vandalism.

The what-have-we-done shock that followed led directly to the creation of the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1965. As the French say: "Après la mort le médecin." After death, the doctor shows up.

Tom Wolfe is author of "A Man in Full."