The building of a legacy is a bumpy ride
Whether it’s the glorious Woolworth building or the glittery Chrysler, New York skyscrapers often carry the names of the men who built them long after they are gone and their companies have faded from prominence. It is also true that buildings are renamed when the company tanks or the building is sold. The hulk that I am looking at from my desk now says “Met Life,” but it will always be the Pan Am Building to me.
In the case of a pair of new 80-story glass towers overwhelming the southwest corner of Central Park, something wholly new has occurred. Like everything in the Internet Age, the process of changing marquees has accelerated: And so, even before the complex that was to be the AOL Time Warner Center opens, it has lost part of its name.
This winter, the $1.7-billion Time Warner Center -- the largest, most expensive development to be built in New York since Rockefeller Center was completed in 1934 -- is supposed to fully throw open its doors. It will house not only the media giant’s corporate headquarters and CNN’s television studio but massive amounts of office space; 210 luxury condominiums, including a penthouse that reportedly was sold to a London financier for more than $40 million; the 251-room Mandarin Oriental, New York hotel; several chic restaurants, a giant fitness center, a mall of fancy shops; and three jazz performance spaces run by nearby Lincoln Center.
In 1998, when planning for this posh urban theme park was underway, New York’s economy was bustling, the stock market was thriving, the tech world was flush with investors’ dollars, and the AOL Time Warner Center was to be a brick and mortar -- make that glass and steel -- expression of how a virtual company would dominate the new digital world.
Today, those towers may dominate Manhattan’s Upper West Side, but the expansive dream has come apart. For decades, Columbus Circle has been a municipal black hole: a place of relentless traffic congestion, ugly architecture and endless squabbling over real estate projects, big and bigger, that never came to be.
Finally, in the late 1990s, the city sold off a public parcel on the west side of this roundabout to a developer, who in turn began romancing a premier name of the Information Age as the anchor tenant. In the pitch to Time Warner, the developer put the value of panache ahead of that of real estate. “This is about showcasing your company,” he told Time Warner’s Richard Parsons, according to an article in Architectural Record. “The public’s got to know what you own, and there’s no better way to showcase it than here.” Time Warner executives agreed. They would own and occupy a third of the 2.8-million-square-foot project and would get the marquee as well.
During the last three years, the company’s travails have been well chronicled. They have also been showcased, so to speak, in Columbus Circle. The construction project has become a reverse metaphor for the company’s performance. Every time a new story went up, it seemed, the stock ticked down a point. And rumors swirled, like the wind that so often caused scaffolding to fly off the building, that Time Warner would never move into its new headquarters.
Did all this add up to some sort of corporate curse? Or was this just part of the complexities of business-as-usual on a mammoth construction project?
In 2003 alone, a construction worker on the ground was killed by debris flying off the Time Warner Center, a forklift driver died in an accident on the eighth floor, and a four-alarm fire in the building drew 200 firefighters and caused a dozen injuries.
Then there is the design, by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (better known today for his struggle with Daniel Libeskind over the shape of the Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site). Before Sept. 11, the Time Warner twin towers were seen as they were intended: to evoke the great apartment buildings built in the 1930s on nearby Central Park West.
But after Sept. 11, those 750-foot towers, only half the height of the World Trade Center towers, evoke for many an obvious uptown target for Mr. Bin Laden, who seems drawn to symbols of capitalism and Western pop-culture infidels.
And now the critics are weighing in: The buildings are ugly too.
“The architecture above the rounded base is dull and conventional,” the esteemed Paul Goldberger wrote in the New Yorker last month. “The towers are nicely shaped but banal, and the glass is far too dark.” About the only positive note Goldberger struck was for the performance spaces, which will open later next year. “Even now in their half-constructed state, they look terrific. A jazz hall with spectacular city views almost, but not quite, justifies the whole overblown venture.”
And then there is the neighbor across the street.
Donald Trump, whose name is so ubiquitous on Manhattan buildings that he makes the Pharaohs seem modest, has been fighting with Time Warner Center’s developers over how they are billing its location in relation to the park. This fall, after the Mandarin hotel began accepting guests and as prospective buyers trooped through $10-million condos at Time Warner Center, Trump dropped a giant banner from the Trump International Hotel & Tower across the way that reads: “See, your views aren’t so good, are they? We have the real Central Park views and address! Best wishes, ‘The Donald.’ ”
For all the speculation, bad luck and teasing, while Time Warner and its eponymous skyscraper are not as invincible as they seemed five years ago, the building is about to open and is almost fully leased.
And the price of TWX stock (known on the Big Board until September as AOL) is near $18, up 36.7% for the year. Those who managed to keep their jobs while executives quit or were laid off in droves are having the last laugh.
And this winter, they move into new offices with great views.
