Good morning. It's Thursday. Today we'll look at a preservationist who is fighting potential changes to a landmark in Midtown Manhattan. We'll also find out how the nationwide dockworkers' strike is affecting the area around the busiest port on the East Coast.
Theodore Grunewald couldn't care less about the $230 ThermoBall Eco jackets or the $85 flannel shirts in "algae blue nano plaid" at the North Face store at 510 Fifth Avenue. But he is passionate about items in the store that are not for sale, like the 70-foot-wide sculpted metal screen and the "cloud" installation on the second floor. The two pieces of art came with the building. And Grunewald, a historical preservationist, is raising questions about changes that the next tenant wants to make, including moving the cloud sculpture. He says the two installations, by the artist Harry Bertoia, are "what redeem the building" after a renovation in 2010. The building itself is a steel-and-glass cube that Grunewald calls "one of the most significant examples of international architecture style in the world." Built in the mid-1950s, the Fifth Avenue building is sometimes mentioned along with two other famous modernist buildings, Lever House and the Seagram Building. The city designated as a landmark the exterior of the Fifth Avenue building in 1997 and added a similar designation for the interior in 2011. Now the retail chain Gu is planning to open a branch there after the North Face departs. Gu wants to move the "cloud" sculpture, a possibility that Grunewald called "alarming," even though the sculpture has been marooned since the 2010 renovation. Originally the building's escalators led the way toward the sculpture, as they slashed diagonally across the precise straight lines of the building. But the escalators were relocated in 2010, and an architect for Gu told the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission last week that the company wanted to move the cloud sculpture to a spot at the top of where the escalators are now, deep in the center of the store. When that relocation might happen was unclear: A spokeswoman for Gu said it was focused on a store that opened in SoHo last month and "did not have any information that we can share publicly at this moment" about the opening of a new store. And a spokeswoman for the North Face did not say when it was leaving. She said the company would be "expanding our footprint in the N.Y.C. metropolitan area" and would open additional locations "in the near future." Grunewald, who also appeared at the landmarks commission hearing last week, said that the bronze installation did not belong above the escalators. "That makes it like a chandelier, which it definitely is not," he told me. "It's not accessory." Worse, he said, repositioning the sculpture would also cause it to compete against Bertoia's wide gold screen, which the landmarks commission called "glittery" and "abstract" when it approved the interior designation. That was decades after the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable called the screen "the perfect accent for the polished surroundings." Those surroundings were designed to be not a store but a bank. Grunewald did not criticize everything about Gu's plans. He praised a plan to remove dressing rooms that were built behind the Bertoia screen during the 2010 renovation, when the building was converted to a store. Other preservationists who appeared at the landmarks commission hearing found other elements to like. Liz Waytkus, the executive director of Docomomo US, a nonprofit that works to preserve architecture from the postwar period, said Gu's plans for "refreshing" the lighting in the ceilings would make it more like "what it would have been in the '50s." She also said it was "fantastic" that the plans called for a wall to be removed, meaning that the building would have only one tenant, as when the building was brand-new. The private New York Landmarks Conservancy also weighed in on Gu's plans with small suggestions. "It's never going to be the pristine thing it once was, but it's important," Peg Breen, the group's president, told me later. "It's up to Gu to understand what a special building they're in and use that as a selling point. The more they honor the building and celebrate its roots, the better." WEATHER Expect mostly sunny skies with temperatures in the low 70s. Tonight will be partly cloudy skies with a low around 61. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING Suspended today and tomorrow (for Rosh Hashana). The latest New York news
We hope you've enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. The dockworkers' strike halts port operations in Newark
The busiest port on the East Coast has come to a stop. The nationwide strike by longshoremen has halted operations at Newark. My colleague Peter S. Goodman wrote that it had become a visual encapsulation of the challenge confronting the global economy. Cargo was marooned as the supply-chain ecosystem shut down. Cranes stopped lifting shipping containers off vessels that had just docked. Mile-long freight trains stopped ferrying cargo to and from the docks. Sean Murphy, who oversees a warehouse in northern New Jersey, said the scene was "eerie, like a ghost town." A truck stop nearby — where the regulars are mostly drivers who move containers between the docks and nearby warehouses — was also quiet. Isthian Thomas, who was working the register, generally supported the dockworkers and exuded blue-collar solidarity with the strikers, especially after the pandemic, when they all labored together despite the threat of Covid. But the few truck drivers who were on hand tended to be critical of the dockworkers, accusing them of jeopardizing others' paychecks in pursuit of raises that could total more than 60 percent over the next six years. "It's not realistic in this economy," said Joseph Green, a truck driver who was headed to Massachusetts, pulling a container he had retrieved from the port on Monday. After that, he expected to be without work. "I'll come back empty and wait until those guys finish negotiations," he said. METROPOLITAN DIARY At the Cookery
Dear Diary: I was visiting New York City for the first time in 1981. One place I wanted to go was the Greenwich Village restaurant the Cookery to see the blues singer Alberta Hunter perform. I had discovered her music in the movie "Remember My Name" and had then fallen in love with her album "Amtrak Blues." I was a scruffy 23-year-old, so I was seated way at the back of the restaurant. I ordered the cheapest thing on the menu. Ms. Hunter was sitting alone at a banquette nearby, sizing up the audience before her set. She was a tiny woman in her 80s, wearing a glittery dress and big dangly earrings that looked as if they weighed more than she did. At one point, as I was looking for the restroom, Ms. Hunter saw me looking confused and pointed the way. On my way back to my seat, I impulsively sat down across from her at her banquette and gushed like a fool. I asked whether she would be singing "I've Got a Mind to Ramble," my favorite song from the movie. "Oh, dearie," she said. "I'm afraid not." Later, toward the end of her set, she turned away from the microphone and said something to the band. Then she looked out to the audience and right at me. "Son," she said, "what song did you want me to sing?" Everyone in the place turned around to see whom she had asked. "'I've Got a Mind to Ramble,'" I said. "OK, boys," she said to the band, "Let's do that one." — Jeffrey Rotin Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Makaelah Walters, Steven Moity and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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N.Y. Today: A midcentury Midtown landmark
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