Cities, like people, are genetically predisposed to certain conditions. Something in their DNA, a law maybe, leaves them prone to smog or bad rush-hour traffic or nice bike rides or mind-altering taco trucks. Sometimes it can be hard to tell whether the condition is a disease or not.
Two things to keep in mind about New York City. First: it has been America’s financial center for so long that the concept of finance is named after one of its streets. And second: since the demolishing of the original Penn Station in 1963, New York has been unusually strict about protecting old buildings. Put these together, and you begin to see why my city has so many hundred-year-old neoclassical slabs with a retail chain inside.
Banks bloomed here for decades. When the corporate consolidation of the twentieth century came along, most of them shriveled up and died, leaving big marble husks across the city. These couldn’t be torn down, thanks to the efforts of groups like the New York Landmarks Conservancy, but their new buyers had to put them to use somehow. Which explains how the New York Savings Bank Building (completed 1896) ended up a CVS; and the East River Savings Bank Building (completed 1927) became a CVS, too; and the U.S. Mortgage & Trust Building (1922) became an Apple store; and the South Brooklyn Savings Institution Building (also 1922) became a Trader Joe’s. Outside, Corinthian columns and Roman domes and balustrade parapets. Inside, sticky plastic shopping carts and Bruno Mars and I can take the next customer. The formal term for this is “adaptive reuse,” but I can’t be alone in finding it funny and slightly grotesque, in a Jeff Koons sort of way.
A few months ago, I paid a visit to that Apple store to buy a charger. A chirpy, neckbearded guy attended to my needs in five minutes, tops. Noticing me eyeing the marble pilasters, the guy asked if I wanted to take a look downstairs. Indeed, I did. The bank vault that once guarded U.S. Mortgage & Trust’s cash reserves was still there in the basement with its door ajar, having nothing left to guard. On the other side of the room were headphones in every color, laptops with soft wabi-sabi curves, customers waiting to pay for complicated repairs: all symbols of the new economic order.
Almost too perfect, no? The clash of styles in the Apple store at 940 Madison Avenue is so cartoonish it’s like an architectural version of the buddy comedy where the goofball and the square have to go on a road trip together. The banks of a hundred years ago were designed to connote total reliability, the better to convince customers to trust them with their money. Hence all the Parthenon knockoffs in New York, which say with their facades what bankers were trying to say with their loans: we’re solid, we’re serious, we’re not going anywhere. The modern retail chain thrives on the opposite set of metaphors. It’s quick and casual; it barely knows the meaning of the word “grand.” Heaviness is a thing to be escaped from in an Apple store, which makes building one in a bank an oxymoron on a par with putting a helium balloon in an anvil.
I’ve only lived in New York for fourteen years, but even if I’d just stepped off the bus, I would feel qualified to say, That’s the way it goes here. Every-body knows this about New York. The rate of change is too rapid for anything but the oxymoronic. There are too many moving parts and too many competing interests. The question isn’t whether a neighborhood will stay the same—of course it won’t—but how much will be allowed to remain. Either the New nibbles parasitically away at its host, or the two organisms find some way of living in peace together. I think this, fundamentally, is what fascinates me about retail chains in banks. They may be absurd, but there is nothing fundamentally wrong with them, and depending on how open you are to such things, they may even offer some advice for surviving in a big city. Such as: don’t try too hard to fit in, don’t waste time worshipping your new home, just go about your business until one day it dawns on you that nobody else belongs here more than you do—everybody here is absurd together.
There is always that moment in the buddy comedy when the goofball and the square realize they’re not so different. Banks are neither grand nor trustworthy, of course, which is why so many of them went belly-up after the Twenties. And retail giants, much as they try to affect a laid-back, jeans-and-New-Balances image, are hulking empires beyond the New York Savings Bank’s wildest dreams. Put one inside the other, and both turn out to be imposters, which at least means neither has corrupted the other—both were corrupt to begin with, in the sense of being bold and insolent and maybe kind of glorious. I would use the same words to describe the city I live in, which is probably why, when I walk by a Walgreens in an old bank, I get the feeling New York itself is a giant version of the same thing.
Don’t take my word for this, please. Instead, go to 60 Spring Street, New York, NY 10012. Notice that, unlike most Walgreens pharmacies, this one is housed in a Beaux-Arts masterpiece with chandeliers and limestone. “The Spring,” as it’s known, was designed for the East River Savings Bank by the great architect Cass Gilbert in 1924, and much like Gilbert’s most famous creation, the Woolworth Building, it’s a handsome mutant, retro in ornamentation but modern in height and footprint. The easy point to make would be that it was a terrible betrayal of good taste to put a modern store in a century-old masterpiece like this. Maybe so, but then plenty of people said much the same thing about the Woolworth Building when it first darkened Lower Manhattan in the early 1910s. Tawdriness has a way of aging into grandeur, and when you visit the Spring, you feel both feeding off of each other. A building like that can’t ever fit in, which, in New York, is another way of saying it fits perfectly.
Jackson Arn is a critic living in New York. His novel In the Velvet Garage is forthcoming from Coffee House Press.