When in Rome… Plate from Alexandre de Rogissart’s Delices de l’Italie (1709).
As summer comes to a close, many people are returning from sojourns abroad or across the country, sneaking in one last waterside weekend, or seeing a few last sights. No matter how far they are traveling, they are all engaging in what Marco D’Eramo calls “the most important industry of the century:” tourism.
Architecture has a funny relationship to tourism. In certain instances, tourism is the constituting factor of architecture. In The World in a Selfie: An Inquiry into the Tourist Age, D’Eramo remarks how “it would be interesting to know how many fewer buildings would be built if it were not for tourism.” Las Vegas is the urexample of this, the definition-bar-none of a “tourist city…a novelty peculiar to modernity” where the city’s entire infrastructure is oriented towards tourist usage.
But architecture is fundamentally constitutive of tourism. One must only think of the oft-discussed “Bilbao effect,” which spurred Joan Ockman and Salomon Frausto to coin the term “architourism” in 2002. But on an even more fundamental level, what are the “sights” to be seen when one goes “sightseeing” if not “sites,” as in
buildings and landscapes. Even in “nature,” the architecture of tourist infrastructure creeps in through roads, rest stops, wayfinding devices, clearings, lookouts, trails, walkways…
Tourism is also fundamentally constitutive of architecture. The aristocratic and bourgeois appreciation of architectural antiquities on the Grand Tour forms a foundational element of Western architectural history—to put it provocatively and simplistically, is architectural history a touristic guidebook made by and for ruling-class taste?—and travel, whether as a study abroad trip (a nouveau Grand Tour), or as a studio site visit taken during education, quickly familiarizes architects-to-be with the “tourist gaze…a watch that is literally ‘out of place.’”
This week, Skyline presents travelogs from what might be called petit tours, radiating outwards from New York’s touristic heart, Times Square and landing as far away as Kosovo. Read on to see where our writers take you.
— Nicholas Raap
TRAVELOGS
Times Square Marriott Marquis
1567 Broadway, New York, NY 10036
Despite having never booked a stay, I can easily imagine a first-time-in-NYC arrival at the Times Square Marriott Marquis. Walking toward the Hudson River down W 46th St amidst the crowd of tourists, one would miss the unassuming first entrance and walk past the second, thinking it was a parking garage for the Marquis Theatre. The “front” of the building on 7th Avenue would provide few means of of wayfinding, since it’s mostly obscured from the street by characteristic billboard advertisements and ground-floor retail. It’s a massive hotel in the middle of the city, and it’s almost hidden.
At its 1985 opening, critical reception of the John Portman-designed hotel was less than positive, understandable given its impractical and decadent atrium oozing with what was then already dated 70s cliché. The fortress-like exterior recalls the urban crime panic of times past. But today, the interior is an otherworldly respite right in the center of the busiest part of Manhattan: an analeptic oasis with power outlets, climate control, clean bathrooms, commodious seats, and a perfectly inoffensive hotel bar. They all make an environment so labyrinthine and anonymizing that it’s hard to imagine ever being asked to leave the lobby.
The Chase Sapphire® Lounge
19 Fulton St, New York, NY, 10038
https://newyork.substack.com/p/s-k-y-l-i-n-e-escape-from-new-york[1/6/23, 1:54:58 PM]
Image courtesy Kevin Ritter.
For seven years, I worked in Manhattan’s Financial District at the visitor experience department of the South Street Seaport Museum. Each summer, a parade of tourists would visit the museum to learn about the neighborhood’s mercantile history: the stevedores, printers, and workers who built New York City into a global metropolis. About halfway through my tenure at the museum, the Howard Hughes Corporation erected a pavilion in the middle of the pedestrianized Fulton Street. The pavilion was soon home to a pricey bar—a swarm of finance workers in light-blue button-downs and fleece vests clustered around it on weeknights. Next to the bar, ropes sectioned off an area verdant with potted plants and sumptuous with cushioned patio furniture. This area was called the “Chase Sapphire® Lounge,” a section of a public street available only to Chase Sapphire® cardholders.
In the lounge, you sit adjacent to early 19th-century buildings, once warehouses for goods unloaded from the incoming ships or hotels for sailors. To sip a tiki drink on their special furniture, you’ll flash your Sapphire® card, a metal rectangle that seems an artifact from a new economy: one increasingly reliant on financialization and digital transactions.
On one wet fall morning, two people emerged from the Greyhound looking for work unloading fish from the boats that used to dock there. They looked stricken when I said the fish market had closed around a decade ago. “But what do people do for work down here now?”
Kevin RitterThe Noguchi Museum
9-01 33rd Rd, Queens, NY 11106
https://newyork.substack.com/p/s-k-y-l-i-n-e-escape-from-new-york[1/6/23, 1:54:58 PM]
Image courtesy Anna Talley.
Although in Queens, the fact that the Noguchi Museum is not directly off a subway line puts it sufficiently out of the way to call it an urban escape. The museum’s bright, intimate galleries are often sparsely occupied by anything other than the mid-century sculptor’s works, allowing visitors to experience modern art sans a sardine can–like atmosphere. In the outdoor garden, paper birches grow alongside Japanese flora. Cut off from the noise on Vernon Boulevard by lofty stone walls, the space is so quiet you can almost hear Noguchi’s basalt and granite sculptures. It’s the kind of silence you’d usually have to go upstate to find. But if, like me, you find the Hudson a bit overrated, rest assured you only need to go so far as this stop off the Q102 to find a few trees and tranquility.
Anna Talley
Jacob Riis Beach and the former Neponsit Beach Hospital
157 Rockaway Beach Blvd, Rockaway Park, NY, 11694
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Source: Christina B. Hanhardt, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the
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Politics of Violence (2013) p. 215.
Every summer, I am haunted by the memory of the queer piers of Manhattan’s West Village waterfront. Following the demise of New York as a major port, the network of piers that once lined the island’s waterfront drifted into abandonment, and, in certain section, became essential queer urban space. People met at the Christopher Street Piers to cruise, party, and in some cases, to live in the deteriorating structures. These were difficult places to be. While lawlessnes allowed queerness to flourish, it was surrounded by rampant violence, dangerous disrepair, and the strench of assorted bodily fluids. Nonetheless, queer and trans people, especially youth, continued to gather there.
In 2022, we sit on the precipice of another possible seismic shift in the city’s queer space: the demolition of the former Neponsit Beach Hospital complex— designed by McKim, Mead & White and completed in 1915—which frames the queer section at Jacob Riis Beach. On August 18th, the Municipal Arts Society of New York held a panel discussing the beach’s history as a queer and trans social hub stretching back to its opening in the 1930s, as well as its future: the city owned buildings are scheduled to be demolished at the end of the summer beachseason. The fringe location, as well as the general neglect, likely created this idyllic queer space, which many many fear will soon be erased, just like the Christopher Street Piers were, to make way for new development. I often think of the intrepid young people of the FIERCE! coalition, who organized doggedly to stop the piers’ replacement with Hudson River Park. FIERCE! proposed analternative, pictured above, of what a city prioritizing queer and trans kids could look like. That dream was never realized, and nothing in the Hudson River Park mentions the vibrant queer history of the site. Speakers at the MASNY event expressed fears of a similar erasure befalling Riis. “No other park, no other recreation space, is for us other than Riis Beach,” said Ceyenne Doroshow, founder of Gays and Lesbians Living in a Transgender Society (GLITS). “That beach is our utopia and there shall be no more unless we protect it.”
Sus Labowitz
Copenhagen Copenhagen, Denmark
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Ascending the Round Tower, Copenhagen, DK. Image courtesy Emily Conklin.
Ten days in Copenhagen? Many people were surprised, if not dismissive, of my use of time all in one place. For me, that singular focus is the luxury currency of travel, a small taste of what an ideal everyday life could be. Coming from New York, I equate cities with noise: police sirens late at night, the voices that bounce down an avenue. Most people I know would rather walk ten blocks back home to retrieve forgotten headphones than brave the city without them.
While the bicycle culture of Copenhagen seemed the most obvious thing to savor on this first visit, what really drew me in was the cool layer of quiet that covers the city. I cherish a quiet morning, and that space of calm that’s so rare in a city like New York makes me feel automatically “on vacation.” The Danes didn’t even raise voices when bikes were piled back for blocks awaiting a crossing blocked temporarily for an IronMan race. Practiced gestures for right, left, and stop were all we needed to navigate the obstacle.
Arriving home today I was greeted by an A train subway car filled with the music of a single man’s massive bluetooth speaker, worn across his body like a satchel. That made me smile and feel the rush of energy and messiness that defines New York. But Copenhagen challenged my assumption that there cannot be a better balance.
Emily Conklin