Blues, haints and bayous: snippets from the Deep South: Much ado about Upper Midtown

We have downloaded a brilliant App which ensures we don’t get lost and it solves our transit routes. We punch in where we want to go, it finds our current location, sorts out the nearest bus or subway option within the next few minutes, clarifies how far we need to walk, if at all, and tells how long our trip options will take, and the precise time that we should arrive at our chosen destination. All so easy.

Today we are in Upper Midtown, for no other reason than it is Uptown instead of Downtown and we have been Downtown twice, so far, and want to see the difference. Though, we are singing Billy Joel’s song, Uptown Girl, so have a pretty good idea. Upper Midtown looks much taller and a lot more glamorous than our humble red brick tenement remnants of yesterday. Just as interesting, though.

To start with, the Citigroup building, that we come across after coffee, with its razor sharp aluminium edges, has a church beneath it, believe it or not. Why so? Because when it was built in 1977 it wanted to utilise the space that St Peter’s Evangelical occupied. But, of course, St Peter’s wanted to stay there, too, but like many churches at the time could have done with extra funds that a project such as this might bring.

So, many meetings and many concessions later, St Peter’s accepted $9 million dollars, along with a cutting edge modern glass and aluminium replacement church set up beneath four imposing ten story columns, at the base of the Citigroup building, which gives everyone a lovely courtyard space and a feature waterfall to boot, but also holds up the Citigroup tower. A wonderful solution, pleasing all parties. Even passing tourists.

As we cross the next intersection at Lexington and 52nd we walked over the grate where the air from a passing subway tunnel beneath the street blew Marilyn Monroe’s white dress up, billowing it around her legs, during the filming of the 1955 shoot of the Seven Year Itch, thus creating one of the most iconic photos of all time. Marilyn said, much later, that she wore two pairs of undies for that shoot, so it was not exactly a risqué accident.

More likely, it was very thoroughly planned. Plus, there are many variations of that photoshoot showing photographers had lots of earlier takes, and the time for those takes would have allowed a good sized viewing audience to congregate on this very spot around the little figure in white surrounded by so many cameramen. So, all up, the perfect recipe for much needed advance publicity for the movie, I would think. And a wee bit clever. Albeit that the next day Marilyn was photographed trying to cover up bruises. So not many weeks later it was not a surprise when she filed for a divorce from her husband, Joe DiMaggio, citing mental cruelty. Barely nine months after their marriage.

The General Electric building on Lexington caught our eye, next. We love its Art Deco style and the fact that the architect bothered to reference his clients’ actual business on the facade as he was designing it. There are striking lightning symbols on the front, no doubt representing electricity, and electrical sparks seem to shoot right out from the crown atop the building.

Another considerate gesture the architects made was to integrate the existing streetscape by using reddish-brown coloured bricks to nicely complement the existing church of St Bartholomew’s in the same block, albeit accessed from the street behind. A good move.

The Waldorf Astoria was next on our walk with its gilded entryway that could tell millions of secrets if only it only it could talk. This was not the original Waldorf site. That was down on 33rd, where the Empire State Building is today. It was there because William Waldorf wanted to annoy his rich and snobbish aunt, Caroline. Caroline was the notorious social arbiter of the time who counted among her guests only those who came from “the 400” as worthy of her social time and effort: the fashionable ton of money, power and influence.

William thought that having guests other than those crossing her mansion sidewalk daily, in order to enter his hotel right next door, might irk her in the extreme. It did. Their relationship became even more volatile after that, and William, eventually, had to relocate himself across the pond to live in London. William’s cousin, and Caroline’s son, John Jacob, built a second hotel right beside the old Waldorf and called it the Astoria. Unfortunately, John Jacob did not get to enjoy it too long, as he met his demise along with the Titanic. The hotels were combined, though, and came to be known as Waldorf=Astoria.

When the hotel was finally moved to its current location in 1931 its eight-faced lobby clock came with it. The clock had been built for the 1893 Chicago World Fair and stands today where all the guests file through to reception, including many of the rich and famous, and most of the presidents of the United states, as well as Marilyn Monroe, along with a pair from the other side of the globe, Peter and Annie Holley, friends of ours, who stayed here just a year or so ago. For fun. The same lobby clock ticks on.

We love the era when this hotel was built. Again, the Art Deco touches are lavish, particularly in the downstairs ladies room. Here are the most simple, most elegant curved stair balustrades, leading up from the powder room to dainty separate loo cubicles. Loved it all—the clean space, the straight lines, the perfect symmetry, the contrasting decorative chandelier. All so beautiful.

On this Good Friday, St Bartholomew’s Church is becoming crowded when we arrive. We climb the stairs where several attendants are busy handing out copies of the upcoming service to parishioners queuing for the Passion, later today. It was here that Dudley Moore stood up his bride-to-be in Arthur. The streets of New York can be found in so many movies. The red-brick frontage looks quite traditional, but St Bart’s tale is anything but. Since the church was built on this spot in 1919, varying congregations have made continual improvements: an expensive and imposing central dome atop the lot in the 1930s, not the least. It is seen here above the blossoming pink Magnolia tree.

To raise more funds for their continually ailing coffers, St Bart’s, thinking differently than most, turned their community hall space into a high-end restaurant, Inside Park, visible today under all that white canvas. This caused turmoil enough. But, when a developer sought to buy that same piece of land for a skyscraper, many in the congregation reacted with glee, thinking all their Christmases had come at once, for, now, at last, they might be debt free.

But no. In 1967, the City had declared St Bart’s an historic site so development such as this would not be approved, they said. St Bart’s tried to have that historic certification repealed. They lost. They appealed, again, then on to the Supreme Court. They lost. The entire process took them 11 years and cost millions upon millions of church dollars in the doing. It decimated the congregation. Many parishioners left. The high-end restaurant lives on, no doubt still attempting to defray yet more debt. A peek at the books might tell.

During this walk we found a little piece of eccentricity that we have seen more than once, today. It is a bronze plaque, embedded into the pavement, and says: Private Propery. Permission to cross revocable at will. We wondered who it was meant for: vagrants? And by whom it was posted: a corporate threat?

We had no idea, but at the end of the day we discovered that such plaques are posted as legal protection for the rightful owner, against a law that stems from an old English ruling that has outlasted, even, the American Revolution. Evidently, if someone is able to use your land over a long period of time, even without permission, they might be able to effectively establish a case for ownership after ten years of such use. So, placing such a little bronze marker, where folk can read it, reaffirms that that land is not available to be ceded to the public. The sign is a protection for the owner.

On to the Trump Building. Which has signs all over it. In gold, not bronze. We are seeing stuff all over Manhattan, actually, with the Trump name on it, so, it is getting a little old with us already. And rather tragically needy, in our view. Though one local, today, enlightened us that a lot of this stuff is just a marketing ploy. Many of the so-called Trump labels, are not, actually, Trump owned, he informed us. Other developers own them but think they can make more money from them if they market them as Trump enterprises. For which Trump gets a percentage of the cut. All rather pitiful. This one appears to be owned by The Donald. He even had to negotiate with Tiffany & Co to buy their air rights so he might have his private hotel suite in the heights above them. The building is actually 59 stories high, but is promoted, oftentimes, as being 68 floors. The variation, we puzzled out, might be an attempt to take account of the six-storied atrium built out of the very dark marble that Ivana Trump reportedly handpicked in Italy. But, evenso, these exaggerated figures don’t quite add up to the marketing tally. But then, much of what the Trumpeter says doesn’t, so we chose not to dwell too long on it. Or in it. Beauty was not in the eye of these beholders. The gold was too yellow and cheap; all that marble quite dreary and tasteless.

We finished our day by popping into Tiffany & Co, because it was close and an easy visit before we headed home to put our feet up. As we stepped through its distinctive front entrance, designed by the same architect who did the great Art Deco General Electric building, we had a long chat with a Pommie doorman about his Tiffany tie being slightly off-colour. Too green, he agreed. It needed to have more of the Tiffany blue of this necklace, he said. He had apparently made a complaint about it but was still waiting to hear the outcome.

Tiffany’s was busy, but with tourists, rather than customers, occupying much of their space: wandering, looking. There were an extraordinary number of Tiffany staff behind these glass counters, too, but only two attending potential clients, who were looking at pieces from under the glass shelves. The displayed items were all quite spare and quite sparse. But we imagine more lucrative transactions would happen in quieter rooms, away from the public glare, as the few interchanges we saw would hardly have covered morning coffee costs, let alone the staff wages, in just this room, alone.

So many staff. The mark-up on jewellery items would need to be enormous if it is to cover the wages of all these staff just standing around staring at all these tourists, who, in lieu of anything else, are staring back at them. Time to go home.