What’s My Favorite Building in New York?

In May 2015, New York Real Estate/Design/Lifestyle blog 6sqft – whom ArchDaily maintains a kind of loose partnership with – asked a bunch of writers, critics and whatnot to write about their favorite building in New York. I was in the odd position of being seemingly the only writer of the group who had never actually been to New York, but that didn’t stop 6sqft from happily publishing my opinions (though it may have something to do with my bottom-place billing on the final article). You can read the full article here, and my contribution below.

The Equitable Building, 120 Broadway, Financial District

New York is a fascinating city which means so much to different people; the long-time hometown of their family, the city where they found their calling, or the destination for their memorable honeymoon. But to the majority of the world’s population, myself included, who haven’t had the good fortune to visit, the city has a whole different meaning—because perhaps more than any other city in the world, New York has managed to collapse all of its complexity, its realness, into a matrix of icons and symbols. New York is the reference for what countless generic cities are expected to look like; it is a symbol of human civilization itself in films from Planet of the Apes to The Day After Tomorrow. What’s more, New York itself is a symbol made up of symbols: my own first encounter with the city came as a child watching the film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, where the Empire State Building serves as the symbol of New York, and New York as a symbol of hope and new beginnings.

For some eight decades then, the Empire State Building has lived a dual life as both a real building experienced by people, and as an icon to be seen around the world. But it could have been very different without one much lesser-known building: the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway. The Equitable Building was constructed in 1915 as a replacement for the earlier Equitable Life Building (itself a fascinating building as the “world’s first skyscraper” – a dizzying seven stories), and its sheer 40-story walls and overbearing physical presence instantly caused an uproar, with residents fearing that more such buildings would cause New York’s streets to become a maze of dark shadowy corridors. The existence of the Equitable Building led directly to New York’s famous 1916 Zoning Resolution, which set out rules requiring setbacks on buildings above certain heights, and these rules were absolutely fundamental in determining the shapes of the heroic buildings of the 1920s and ’30s. Without the Equitable Building, the Empire State Building could have been a plain, 400-meter-tall cuboid—it might have been completely unsuitable as a recognizable icon. The Equitable Building is therefore the missing link between the messy world of New York as a real city, with outraged residents and zoning laws, and the fantastical world of a young boy and his insect friends floating on giant fruit toward an idealized metropolis. For my money, that easily makes it one of New York’s most fascinating buildings.