“True luxury has always been a rare commodity in Manhattan,” architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote in a 1985 New York Times article, “Defining Luxury in New York’s New Apartments.” Even in the 1920s, he claimed–the decade during which Rosario Candela was defining Art Deco grandeur on the Upper East Side–there were apartment towers bad enough to make Lewis Mumford grumble. The quality of glamorous dwelling had finally reached rock-bottom in the mid-1970s, when “luxury housing” meant nothing except cheaply built, boxy high-rises on Second and Third Avenues, buildings with tiny rooms, thin walls, and low ceilings,” the Times writer deplored.
By the 1980s, Goldberger thought things were looking up. Architecture was finally becoming a selling point in residential real estate. It wasn’t all exceptional, but he felt that a significant portion of the new work “represented a degree of architectural ambition.” For him, one such building was Trump Plaza at 61st Street and Third Avenue, a 39-story limestone-and-glass tower, designed by New York architect Philip Birnbaum. The critic found the building, which flaunts generous curved terraces with shiny brass trim, to be “chic in a particularly Latin way,” appearing like “it might be the finest building in Caracas.”
This was rare praise for Birnbaum, whom Goldberger considered to be one of the worst offenders of the “shoddy box” typology. These twenty- and thirty-something story buildings, many designed by Birnbaum and his equally nondescript contemporaries, were, as Goldberger wrote a decade earlier, “appallingly mediocre… Mr. Birnbaum’s office is efficient, of course, because it rarely slows down to consider questions of aesthetics.”
Birnbaum was born in 1907 in Washington Heights and graduated with a degree in architecture from Columbia, though not necessarily by choice. Accepted at Princeton, the university advised that as a “Hebrew,” he might not fit in. He eventually founded his eponymous practice, which benefited greatly from the post World War II housing boom. Developers loved him for his efficient apartment layouts–by removing interior hallways, he was able to maximize the number of units per building. Critics had nothing good to say about him. In his 1996 obituary in the Times, David Dunlap noted that “‘banal’ was among the kinder words used to describe his work.” Perhaps his biggest praise was from the Donald himself: “Not all [his buildings] were great but they all made money. And some were, in fact, very good.”
Despite his dullness, Birnbaum was commissioned to design more than 300 buildings across New York City, shaping residential neighborhoods throughout the boroughs over the course of four decades. With developer Alfred Kaskel, Birnbaum saw opportunity for growth in Forest Hills following the 1939 World’s Fair and built dozens of dwellings there–moderately-scaled, nearly identical red-brick buildings with Georgian-inspired details, lush common gardens and courtyards, and humble, yet dignified lobbies. These quainty communities, with names like “The Thomas Jefferson” and “The Maplewood,” were intended to be affordable; one original brochure summoned prospective tenants to “discover how very inexpensive it can be to live well and happily.” Birnbaum built similarly nondescript suburban-style apartment buildings in the Jamaica neighborhood with Fred Trump in the 1950s, and in Flatbush, Brooklyn Heights, and Prospect Heights through the ’60s.
Brochure for The Quaker Ridge, 1963 Image courtesy of Avery Archives
I grew up in a 1962 Birnbaum-designed building in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park neighborhood, on Third Avenue. Called “Quaker Ridge,” its architecture is boxy, bulky, and boring–quinteseential Birnbaum. The twenty-story structure is a product of the architect’s white-brick phase; he designed many others just like it–”luxury” apartment towers for a burgeoning middle class–throughout the East Side of Manhattan during the 1960s. My parents, a police officer and a hairdresser, bought their first apartment in the Quaker Ridge in the mid-1980s, and have lived there ever since. I enjoyed growing up there. The apartment was always flooded with natural light, and there were many walk-in closets for me to hide and play in. Despite the 264 units, I always felt a part of a small community–during the holidays, the residents, mostly young families and older couples, would have gatherings in the lobby, which, with its floor-to-ceiling glazing and various seating alcoves, felt like a big, bright living room. I loved the spring–the outdoor planters that lined the lobby façade bloomed with a kaleidoscopic array of flowers, like the street was our front yard. When I was in grade school, I used to visit a friend who lived in a 1970s Birnbaum apartment tower on the Upper East Side. I liked going there because it was fancier than mine, with its double-height lobby ceiling and large, verdant front plaza. Yet, it still felt friendly and familiar, like home.
In a 2014 Vanity Fair article, Goldberger reassessed the current status of luxury real estate in New York: a fleet of super thin skyscrapers, designed by world-renowned architects whose buildings now pierce the Manhattan skyline. It’s funny to think how the architecture of Birnbaum and his contemporaries, buildings the indistinguishably weave themselves through the predominantly brick and stone cityscape, were once scorned as imposing. We place so much importance on architectural criticism of the now, only to forget that today’s new buildings, too, will become dated.
Goldberger acknowledges the physical and socioeconomic divide that there new towers represent: they come “at the price of making Midtown feel ever more like…a place not for its full-time residents but for the top 1 percent of the 1 percent.” However, he is still willing to consider them as serious works of architecture. Viñoly’s 432 Park, he writes, is an “essay in pure geometric form,” whiel SHoP’s 111 West 57th Street, at nearly 1,500 feet, is a “subtle and graceful re-interpretation…of the stepped back ‘wedding cake’ towers of New York’s past.”
In a recent tweet, the critic lamented that Christian de Portzamparc’s 157W57, the very first of the super tall luxury towers, was now surpassed in height by three new ones. “When will it end?” he groaned. But why did it start? Surely the voices cheering on the luxury towers ushered in by Trump and company, and condescending Birnbaum’s middle class communities, did nothing to halt it. Maybe critics should place less value on the aesthetics of New York living, and more on the qualities that make the many ordinary buildings of yore happy homes for thousands today.