Boringization

It was nearing eleven o’clock on a Monday morning in early March, and I was at a demonstration to oppose a planned lobby renovation. I overheard Liz Waytkus, the executive director of Docomomo US, going over talking points with a colleague:

“I’m going to invent a new word: ‘boringization.’”

“What’s that?”

“That’s what’s happening to New York City—everything is becoming boring, dumbed down.”

She turned to me. “Glad you’re early… this might not last long. Ownership is also in attendance,” she said, eyeing the men in suits standing in the opposite corner of the lobby with their arms crossed. As demonstrators set up their sign, two men in yellow security vests walked over to ask, “What’s on our radar?” A PETA demonstration? Occupy Wall Street, Part II? Nope—a lobby renovation.

In the 1980s, Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo designed a distinctly postmodern tower for JP Morgan. At its base stood a triple-height, column-studded, publicly owned private space (POPS) wrapped in mirrors and white marble. At the time, Paul Goldberger panned it as “an ice-cream parlor blown up to monumental scale.” Last year, the new owners asked KPF to cook up a distinctly bland plan to modernize the place. Now a coalition of architects, preservationists, and critics, including Deborah Berke, Adam Nathaniel Furman, Robert A. M. Stern, Alexandra Lange, and Goldberger himself, was asking for a historic designation to prevent that plan from going forward. At the demonstration, Christopher Marte, a New York City council member, captured the argument, pointing out that while the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings may once too have been considered “boring and tacky,” they are now icons.

After the demontrators gave statements and took questions, I walked over to the men in suits to see if they wanted to comment. They did not. So I made the rounds with the people sitting inside the POPS. One woman, sitting in a corner, was a fan: “I love this lobby.” She thinks it would benefit from a yoga studio. Then I walked over to a man speaking industriously into his phone. He laid out his position to me: “I’ve seen the renderings, and it ain’t going to work out. They should hold on to it.” His reasoning, however, had little to do with Roche and Dinkeloo: “This is the only place homeless people—and mind you, I’m not homeless—can sleep, and they don’t bother you. There are clean bathrooms. Sit here from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., and they let you rest.” A security guard approached us. I asked him for his opinion. Although he had only been working there a few months, he liked it, too. That said, he was pessimistic about its chances for survival. “Big money is behind this, and you can’t stop big money.”