Sometimes it's the prospect of a new building that sends sparks through the city's neural circuitry: The lost bones of history get dug up, an anonymous slot of land is charged with a new geography, its thereness suddenly lit up like a flare. The 19-story V3 Hotel going up on Duffield Street in downtown Brooklyn, for instance, caused the demolition of a row house thought to be a way station on the underground railroad and released the sharp gasp of outcry.

Almost always in these cases, the development pushes on unabated (this is New York, after all). Still, amid the commotion--the aggrieved letters to the editor, the rallying cries of protest, the up-overnight Web sites--maybe some small historical inkling is incubated. It worries at the frayed ends of collective cognizance until action seems not just possible but necessary--by now a whole mass of thread has been implicated. And in the case of Duffield, maybe, possibly (we don't know yet) a museum dedicated to New York abolitionism springs forth.

But then sometimes memory works the opposite way: New York awakens to itself only to find the physical evidence already gone, appraised and paved over by the developers of decades or even centuries past. Which is more or less what happened on Lispenard Street, an abbreviated little lane sunk just below Canal Street. It was where David Ruggles--prolific abolitionist pamphleteer, radical newsprint impresario, steward of some 600 fugitive slaves to freedom, "the terror of Southerners visiting the Northern cities," as William Wells Brown called him--shot through New York like something cosmic, something revelatory, and it is where he disappeared from memory, too.

Ruggles bobbed up on the streets of New York in 1827, the 17-year-old son of freed black parents. He came, like many blacks of the day and like many others immemorial, with no money, no connections, but stirred by the prospect of New York, gambling on the nebulous juncture between anonymity and luck. He wasn't a fugitive per se (though by de facto street law, in which blacks could be kidnapped off the street at any moment and shipped South with virtual immunity, fugitive or free was often an arbitrary distinction), but he moved through the streets with the restless energy of someone outpacing things unknown. Sleepless was how people described him.

Ruggles opened a grocery store on the corner of Lispenard and Broadway. By the age of 23, he'd transformed it into a black reading room and lending library, and the corner quickly became a hub for abolitionist press. Ruggles had an uncanny instinct for selling newsprint, and he traveled widely, peddling subscriptions, first for the abolitionist paper The Emancipator and later his own Mirror of Liberty, the first magazine by an African-American. For a people denied the most basic liberties, Ruggles believed the press was a fierce rejoinder, one he said "we wield in behalf of our rights." Even those who couldn't read were often swayed by his impassioned appeal, handing over the $2.75 for an annual subscription.

Meanwhile, Ruggles' home at the other end of the block, a townhouse at 36 Lispenard Street, became a known terminal on the underground railroad, and through it Ruggles ferried, by his count, 600 runaway slaves to freedom. Among them was Frederick Douglass, who was also married at Ruggles' Lispenard Street house.

The relatively well-heeled street was mostly insulated from the racial violence endemic to the times. (Although Ruggles was never entirely immune, enduring several stints in jail and narrowly dodging a kidnapping attempt.) New York in the 1830s was a combustible jumble of abolitionist fervor and pro-Southern business. Its waterways placed it at the crux of trade between the South and Europe, and the lifeblood of its fast-inflating commercial sphere (the population, too, more than doubled between 1810 and 1830) was intimately tied to the slave economy. Southern masters frequently visited on business and sometimes kept homes in the city, bringing their slaves along with them.

Though technically by then slaves residing in New York longer than nine months were considered free by law, in fact this was a provision seldom enforced. Ruggles infuriated slave owners by appointing himself a kind of emancipator, and what's more doing so with an assiduously dispassionate reason. In one case, he entered the home of a South Carolina family residing in Brooklyn Heights and announced the freedom of a slave named Charity. After living in New York for four years, Charity had contacted Ruggles' antislavery organization to seek help. When a neighbor accused him of intruding, Ruggles charged the neighbor with intruding against the laws of liberty and the State of New York.

"I am here to remove a disorderly person," the neighbor said.

"Find such a person here, and I will aid you in his removal," Ruggles responded. "I was invited here to relieve humanity."

The first histories of abolitionism tended to be written by white men, and they tended, none too surprisingly, to privilege the narratives of white abolitionists, generally overlooking black leaders like Ruggles. (Graham Russell Gao Hodges' exhaustive David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City, out last winter, leaned against this trend.) But the omission also points to larger fissures within the movement. Ruggles was skeptical of the unequivocal, largely Quaker-derived pacifism espoused by most white antislavery organizations. He wrote, "We cannot recommend non-resistance to persons who are denied the protection of equitable law, when their liberty is invaded and their lives endangered by avaricious kidnappers."

Ruggles' brand of abolitionism was more confrontational, less spiritual and wary of rhetorical abstraction, targeting kidnappers with any combination of cunning, law and blunt force. He then trumpeted the tales of his run-ins far and wide through the press. And though he was said to excite the "liveliest emotions in every heart," his was more the gospel of a speedy-tongued wordsmith than a spiritual appeal. His audience, mostly black, had never needed the mandate of an ecclesiastical authority to condemn slavery.

After a bout of financial troubles and in deteriorating health, Ruggles decamped to Northampton, Mass., in his 30s. He left behind the house on Lispenard Street and the Mirror of Liberty, and exited New York the way he came--penniless. Spent by his work and close to blind, he took up the practice of hydropathy, the so-called water cure. By the time he died, he was completely blind and all of 39 years old.

The townhouse on Lispenard Street was demolished, as was the neighboring headquarters of the Mirror of Liberty. In 1927, in the midst of another economic boom, it was supplanted by a branch of the National City Bank of New York, now better known as Citibank. In The New Yorker, Lewis Mumford made note of the new building's "splendidly successful" modernism, and it would take decades more for historians to unearth its significance (though by then the bank would be--what else but?--a Payless Shoes store).

Meanwhile, another real estate skirmish has once again cracked open questions surrounding the underground railroad. Manhattan's last known underground railroad junction, a townhouse on West 29th Street, jutted through the racket of history a few years ago when its owner began illegally constructing a fifth-story penthouse, inciting a small storm of preservationist fury that continues today. To historians, the building's roof is an integral piece of its history. During the 1863 Draft Riots, the daughters of Abigail Hopper Gibbons, the abolitionist who sheltered fugitives in the house, escaped over the street's level rooftops.

Which is, of course, the strange boon we inherit in lieu of a historical vernacular: the incendiary messiness of all times at once. A kind of cracked mirror thrown back at us, it is a history without neatly delineated victors and vanquished, one more implicating of us all. It's also the real, irrefutable fact of daughters ascending across rooftops and fugitives seeking sanctuary, the prospect, again and again, of redemption.

egeminder@observer.com

But to Gary Barnett, diamond merchant-turned-real estate tycoon, the decidedly unglittery street is just waiting to be buffed to the high sheen of a superluxury trading center. Though his 34-story International Gem Tower has been slow in getting off the ground, Mr. Barnett is vowing that, in the coming year, its 11,000 tons of structural steel will finally go vertical.

SLIDESHOW: A trip through the Diamond District >>

Like many of the district's early founders who fled Europe in the 1940s, Mr. Barnett emerged on 47th Street in the 1990s by way of Antwerp's famed diamond trade. But as a developer, he's found himself at odds with many of the street's jewelers, setters, cutters, and polishers, who fear that the new tower, heavily subsidized by municipal tax breaks, will rupture their industry's crystalline equilibrium.

The International Gem Tower was recently declared a foreign trade zone by the federal government, and the state and the city have put forth $49.6 million in tax breaks tied to drawing new businesses—necessary, Mayor Bloomberg says, to make New York competitive with the global gem markets of Shanghai, Dubai and Las Vegas.

egeminder@observer.com

SLIDESHOW: A trip through the Diamond District >>

For a long-darkened building on Broadway, the Metro Theater still manages to incite sudden outbursts—impromptu manifestos, eager litanies of trivia, all but priestly intercessions—from its passersby. Stand too long gawking at its Deco lettering (one of its M's was recently felled by a snowdrift), and strangers will materialize out of the passing crowd to debrief you. "And did you know Woody Allen put it in Hannah and Her Sisters?" said a man speaking in skittish syllables and vaguely frantic gestures. "Now it's just sitting there."

A year ago, Michael Oliva's relationship to the Metro was more or less that of most Upper West Siders. He'd lived in the neighborhood for years and often passed the old movie house, which stirred in him the sort of fleeting curiosity chronic to New York life, the swift succession of bafflement and then forgetting. The building sat like a small, smooth gem sunk between the high-rises, a study in jewel tones and streamlined Art Moderne geometry, the twins of tragedy and comedy depicted in a giant medallion smack at the center. But the formerly gilded insides, Mr. Oliva could see, had been gutted. "Not just torn out," he said, describing the interior. "But it almost looks like it was torn out with violent intentions. It was more than gutting it to make retail space. It looks like 1980s Beirut."

Then a little over a year ago, Mr. Oliva moved directly across the street. From his top-floor apartment near West 100th Street, he could look straight down at the Metro, glowering like a dark hole in Broadway's morass of restaurants and retail. That was more or less when it all began, he says, though even he can't quite pinpoint the mainspring that transfigured him from a curious onlooker to something of a one-man cavalry for the Metro's cause. "I thought someone should do something about it," he said. "Then I saw that no one was going to and thought maybe I should."

Mr. Oliva would like to see the Metro turned into a functioning theater and community arts center, one where audiences could see live performances by night and where students could participate in arts and educational programming by day. First he must raise the funds for the building itself.

A former political strategist (he worked on two different public-advocate campaigns in 2009), Mr. Oliva is the sort of man who can opine about the soul of upper Broadway one minute and coolly dissect that soul into blocks and City Council seats the next. "For the most part, the west side and the east side of the street are different [state] Senate and Council districts," he said. Pointing to each of the four corners surrounding the Metro, he rattles off the names of their various elected stewards: Melissa Mark Viverito, Inez Dickens, Bill Perkins, Adriano Espaillat. Which complicates the matter of seeking municipal discretionary funds as a nonprofit, he says.

"But what if there was a BID for theaters?" Mr. Oliva ventured. "Then you can get funding from the person across the street because they're funding Broadway, not just their district. The micro component of the theater is the macro component of this district." 

THE METRO'S HISTORY has been a tumultuous one at best—a stint as a porn theater in the 1970s and '80s, followed by multiple doomed runs as a revival house and a succession of owners as labyrinthine as a Russian novel. When it was built in 1933, the Metro (then known, somewhat incongruously, as the Midtown Theater) was one of 18 movie theaters lining Broadway between 59th and 110th streets: the Circle Theater at 59th Street, the Regency at 67th Street, the Stoddard at 90th Street, the Olympia at 107th Street, to name a few. With the exception of the Metro, all have been demolished.

Though its facade was landmarked in 1989, the Metro itself has had a few brushes with extinction—or at least, it's been susceptible to the national brands lurching up the rest of Broadway. Most recently, to much community gnashing, it was almost turned into an Urban Outfitters.

But despite the plentitude of grocery stores and bank branches and retailers, Mr. Oliva objects to the idea that the neighborhood isn't lacking. First, he underscores the area's complexity, the fact that the Frederick Douglass Houses on Amsterdam Avenue are a very different place from west of Broadway. Second, he says, the area is entirely bereft of places to gather.

"There's a school on 100th Street, and what if those kids don't have a vehicle for anything imaginative not only because the emphasis in schools is on math and science but because so much of that has taken away from arts or anything creative?," he said, then harked back to his career in political campaigns: "So I can't elect someone who will give so much money to such-and-such program, but I can actually start my own."

Of course, even for someone schooled in the political art of "moving some energy around," as Mr. Oliva calls it, that proves easier said than done. He's communicated with Rocco Landesman, head of the National Endowment for the Arts and a longtime Broadway producer, but has yet to secure any major source of funding.

"There's no A, B, C, D," Mr. Oliva said. "There's no looking back, as the slogan says. You're stumbling around and organizing as you go along. And that might be the best way to do this because the traditional routes haven't worked for this place."

Broadway's now dissipated theater district emerged at a time when the huge, lavish movie palaces of the 1920s were giving way to the economy of space and design typical of Depression-era movie houses, when new sound technology was transforming how people experienced film. Appropriately, it was the dance sequence of Duck Soup, a Marx brothers film that opened the same year as the Metro, that Woody Allen's character watches in Hannah and Her Sisters and that reaffirms his will to live. He sits in the Metro's upper balcony and asks in voice-over, "What if there's no God, and you only go around once and that's it? Well, you know, don't you want to be part of the experience? ... Then, I started to sit back, and I actually began to enjoy myself."

In another era of economic upheaval and technological shift, it's unclear whether there's much room on upper Broadway for existential panic and the transportive capacity of art. But Mr. Oliva would like to think that you can look out your apartment window, chance upon a gutted anachronism of a building, and fashion it into something not unlike that old screwball trick, the boomerang jolt back to life.

PREVIOUSLY > GOOGLE'S $2 B. HOTEL: WHAT HATH THE INTERNET'S GOD WROUGHT ON EIGHTH?

egeminder@observer.com

The acronymic Dumbo was born from the same mid-1980s regenerative impulse as the neighborhood itself, at once industrial chic and irreverently ahistorical. But it was the denizens of Dumbo's newest incarnation who won the latest round. A campaign spearheaded by several of the neighborhood's digital start-ups (the city is currently cataloging just how many) effectively lobbied the city to embrace Dumbo's new history, one more about young entrepreneurs streaming code through their idevices and less about their analog forebears.

"Silicon Alley is dead," Mike Germano of Creative Carrot, a leading member of the new Dumbo digirati, said in a speech touting the district. Taking a cue, real estate agents have begun referring to the area as Silicon Beach, a claim-laughable even a few years ago-that reveals just how much New York is an epic of reinvention, big and small.

SLIDESHOW: Strolling Silicon Beach. >>

egeminder@observer.com

It is this lightness that's difficult to square with the nuts-and-bolts hardware that powers our virtual worlds, which is perhaps why we so often disregard the hulking, physical Internet in our midst. When Google signed a contract a week after Thanksgiving to pay close to $2 billion for a former Port Authority fortress downtown, the sheer numerical bulk of the deal made headlines: a block-size behemoth with more square feet than the Empire State Building, a footprint bigger than two football fields, the city's biggest real estate transaction of the year, perhaps the biggest single-property sale ever.

But more importantly, the deal represents a seismic claim on the fiber-optic highway coalescing around Ninth Avenue and Hudson Street.

In 1997, when developer Taconic Investment Partners bought the building, it sized up a new breed of tenant emerging on the skyline: tech companies seeking wide-open spaces and enough electricity to power their eternally chattering servers. On the crest of the tech boom, Taconic began hastily converting 111 Eighth Avenue into one of New York's largest carrier hotels, a digital crossroads where the nerve endings of virtual reality sizzled and sparked with their physical infrastructure. The building's square footage more than doubled in rent in a matter of years.

Carrier hotels (also sometimes called switch or telecom hotels) occupy an odd place in the real estate landscape of New York, booming for a few quick years, then largely dropping into the background, an over-speculated byproduct of the dot-com bubble's exuberance. They came about in the mid-1990s, when major telecom giants--the keepers of data-transmitting lines and cable--began renting out their connectivity to young start-ups and venture techies. Along long halls of locked rooms, one company's machinery sucked up power beside the next. They ferried electrons through shared networks of wires and pipes with all the communal anonymity of a hotel--a giant fiber-optic inn of servers and routers.

Though privacy was often guarded with spy-thriller zeal, with some companies employing handprint IDs and retinal scans, carrier hotels were largely inconspicuous places. Behind blank-faced facades, they hummed with the sound of massive air-conditioning units, necessary to cool their overheated hardware.

BUT TRAFFIC, EVEN the traffic of electrons, is never really a new story in Manhattan. It's not happenstance that today's tech corridor runs roughly parallel to a route demarcated by the Port Authority decades earlier. The 15-story building, originally known as the Inland Freight Terminal, was intended to relieve the tight-packed arteries of traffic that formed along the West Side tracks and the Hudson River. At its groundbreaking, in 1931, Governor Franklin Roosevelt vowed that the terminal would serve as a "post office for freight," allowing truckers to bypass their string of stops along the West Side piers and consolidate all their pickups and deliveries into a single location.

Many of the quirks that would later make the building attractive to telecom companies were the same qualities that made it a functional trucking hub. The structure was built to sustain roving trailer trucks, massive equipment and vast open spaces. On one side of the building, cargo came directly from the piers, and it was processed and sorted by the time it reached the truckers at the other end. Giant freight elevators heaved whole trucks up and down floors, and the floors were reinforced with concrete. At one point, helicopters were known to take off from the helipad on the roof.

Today, Google employees glide on scooters to conference meetings at the other end of the building's cavernous tundras. The Internet empire's $2 billion claim on the space moves it from the status of a very important New York telecom hub to an all but singular position in a much broader world, one whose invisible currents, whether we know it or not, are the stuff of our everyday existence.

Since Google first occupied a portion of the building back in 2006, its publicity-shunning operations have fueled all sorts of speculation about the company's ultimate goals. Was Google planting a server farm near downtown Manhattan? Creating a panoptic network to unseat broadband providers altogether?

But maybe it's the most prosaic aspects of Google's move that warrant the most scrutiny. Like any major company staking its claim on Manhattan, Google is compiling untold algorithms--financial calculations and political projections, play-by-play, choose-your-own-ending best estimates--into an approximate vision of the future. Only, in Google's case, it's the future of the real estate beneath the building that matters most: the largely unseen biosphere of pipes and cables and bandwidth, populated in the same heartbeat by fervent Tumblr outpourings and high-frequency Wall Street trades, by millions of electrons at once converging and invisible to each other.

egeminder@observer.com

Many of these invoke the ghosts of Harlem past, when Prohibition turned the neighborhood into a cultural spark plug of jazz and nightlife, dense with dance halls, supper clubs and speakeasies. The fancy way station of mixology, 67 Orange Street, for instance, taps into a continuum of black history in New York that begins in the Five Points area, the city's first free black settlement, and eventually moves uptown to Harlem. The name was the onetime address of Almack's Dance Hall, among antebellum New York's most prominent black-owned businesses. Five Points spots like Almack's, where the dance styles of blacks and Irish immigrants merged to form tap-dancing, are considered precursors to Harlem's Prohibition-era "black-and-tan" cabarets.
Of course, while edgy new restaurants are often the harbingers of good things to come, they don't exactly equate to cultural ferment in and of themselves. As the condos continue to rise, the so-called coming Harlem renaissance could gain from revitalizing its past as more than restaurant mood lighting.

2082 Frederick Douglass Boulevard
Behind its wine-dark drapes, 67 Orange Street is intended to summon a speakeasy cool, though the legacy of its name goes back even further. It's taken from the address of the notorious 19th-century bar, Almack's Dance Hall. Smack in the middle of the Five Points slum, the venue was among antebellum New York's few prominent black-owned businesses. Almack's music attracted governors, legislators and Charles Dickens, who noted a "corpulent black fiddler" and a dancer "spinning about on his toes and heels like nothing but the man's fingers on the tambourine."

2099 Frederick Douglass Boulevard
Bier International, South Harlem's new beer garden, is emblazoned with the word for "beer" in a far-flung smattering of languages, and its draft offerings are about as diverse. Though the focus is on the brews, on warm summer nights, the spot has also been known to host a pig roast or two.

2072 Frederick Douglass Boulevard
Ryan Skeen, the roving chef best known for his undaunted affection for all things pork, opened 5 & Diamond earlier this year (though he soon left). The restaurant is among the crop of downtown-sleek restaurants opening above 110th Street.

316 West 115th Street
Though no one is entirely certain, it is believed that the 25 wax figures of famous African-Americans that once constituted the townhouse's museum--everyone from Harriet Tubman to Magic Johnson to Fannie Lou Hamer--are stored away inside. The statues were the life's work of Raven Chanticleer, a fashion designer, a dancer, a storyteller and an all-around eccentric, who died in 2002.

2136 Frederick Douglass Boulevard
On Friday afternoons, Juma prayers at the narrow, brick Masjid Aqsa mosque often spill out onto the sidewalk, where women peddle West African DVDs, prayer mats and bags of dried fruit. Presiding over the scene is Imam Souleimane Konaté, who founded the mosque close to 15 years ago in the heart of what has become known as New York's Little Senegal. The congregation is raising the money to move to a larger space.

301 West 115th Street
Harlem has never exactly lacked for religion--by 1928, 160 churches had sprouted in the neighborhood--but the grand opening of the Livmor luxury condo-cum-church is a new development. The flat-screen-bedecked building, with amenities like a state-of-the-art gym and a flashy media lounge, will also host a 17,500-square-foot African Methodist Episcopal church.

278 West 113th Street
Just off Frederick Douglass Boulevard, in 1904, escape artist Harry Houdini paid $25,000 in cash for this 26-room townhouse--"the finest private house that any magician has ever had the great fortune to possess," he claimed. He added an 8-foot mirror to the bathroom, as well as a sunken tub for refining his underwater endurance.

In midtown, the Sheraton Hotel ballroom was transformed into a kind of government-run garage sale, part garish treasure trove (Ruth Madoff's 10.5-carat diamond engagement ring, a leather foot stool in the shape of a bull), part morbid extravaganza, full of sweaty bidders clamoring for bits of Ponzi-scheme memorabilia (cuticle scissors, Rod Stewart albums, the board game Sorry!).

Two days later, in a courtroom downtown, Madoff's former landlords were managing some artful financial alchemy of their own. Metropolitan Real Estate Investors, which bought the tower from Tishman Speyer for $648 million in 2007, defaulted on its mortgage in April. The Royal Bank of Canada, its primary lender, then sued to force a sale, and months of negotiations ensued.

Metropolitan's purchase of the landmark Lipstick Building--a complex configuration of equity and debt involving multiple parties, high-yield commercial mortgage-backed securities and faith in the ceaseless expansion of the financial universe--was a thing of its times, signed at the very precipice of the real estate bubble. Wachovia had originally agreed to finance 90 percent of the deal but rescinded its amply leveraged terms as the first tremors of real estate cataclysm crept across the system.

Metropolitan and its Israeli investors scrambled to find alternate funding to complete the transaction, taking a bridge loan from Goldman Sachs and selling a major portion of the land beneath the 34-story tower to SL Green, the city's biggest office landlord. (The land was then leased back to Metropolitan.) It was, in other words, a thing of staggering complexity and contingencies built upon contingencies. "There's assured rent growth," a Metropolitan vice president told The New York Times shortly after the deal. "It's not speculative."

The "Lipstick" moniker stuck almost immediately to Philip Johnson and John Burgee's round building, perhaps all the more so because it resonated with something quintessentially New York: gaudy and loudmouthed and occasionally smacking with a gloss of superficiality, a city once dismissed by Frank Lloyd Wright as "the biggest mouth in the world." The tower, glassy and rouge-tinted, tapers upward in three layers like a hulk-size retractable tube.

On an island brutally configured to transmute every gridded inch of property into profit, the elliptical building was, its architects claimed, the first of its kind. Johnson called it "an oval building in a square environment," though it was a distinction that didn't necessarily win fans--just a year after completion in 1986, the structure ranked fourth on New York magazine's list of top 10 "buildings New Yorkers love to hate."

Even so, the tower had no problem attracting tenants. Johnson himself installed his offices in the building, and Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities was one of the earliest occupants, moving from Wall Street in the late 1980s.

Much like the building's architect, Madoff had a highly specific aesthetic vision, occasionally veering toward obsession. His headquarters on the 19th floor, like his matching London offices and private jet, were a sleek black and gray; alternate colors weren't allowed. He was fastidious when it came to desk surfaces, stipulating that employees remove all papers before leaving at night. In his famously ovoid tower, Madoff had an aversion to curves, using square pencil holders and trash cans, even drinking glasses, eventually going so far as to redo the entire office in the shape of a square. Finally, in such a glass-bedecked edifice, Madoff insisted on blinds, which tape measure-wielding underlings ensured fell in perfect alignment with the glass.

But it was the unassuming 17th floor where the biggest Ponzi scheme in history took place. To the upper floors' streamlined superego, the 17th floor was the messy subconscious where all evidence of wrongdoing was hastily stuffed. It was staffed mostly by young women with limited financial experience, and for years S.E.C. officials were unaware the floor and its fake investment advisory business even existed. It didn't need to conform to the upper floors' governing palette because it might as well have been invisible.

For more than a century now, architects have been conjuring up glass utopias. In 1914, a semi-anonymous group of German Expressionists exchanged fervent letters in which they envisioned glass as a revelatory medium, a crystalline antidote for the pretense of the 19th century's mock historical facades. Collectively known as the Glass Chain, the collaborative was spurred by the works of Paul Scheerbart, a kind of glass transcendentalist, who begot a poetics of transparency and light that was almost spiritual.

The glass pavilion built that year in Cologne by painter and architect Bruno Taut, a Glass Chain member, was an attempt to elucidate his belief that glass could break down the space between interior and exterior, and in so doing bring about political transparency. It sparked a conversation that didn't reach its pinnacle until 1949, when--who else but?--Philip Johnson built his seamless, all-glass abode in New Canaan, Conn.

Today Manhattan is a clenched vessel of glass. The substance shows up in our daily lives as routinely as words like "transparency," flung about by politicians, corporations and property developers alike. Like glass, we've learned it can obscure as much as it can reveal.

The Lipstick Building, for all its round-peg pretensions, was just another office building glossed over with postmodern sheen, subject to the same quicksand of real estate, the same capacity for devouring and being devoured as all the rest of New York's giant mouth. New York, Frank Lloyd Wright went on to say, "appears to be the prime example of the survival of the herd instinct, leading the universal urban conspiracy to deprive man of his birthright (the good ground), to hang him by his eyebrows from skyhooks above hard pavements, to crucify him, sell him, or be sold by him."

The Lipstick Building's owners are reorganizing under the name New Lipstick LLC. "Vacancy rates have increased, making it more challenging to service the debt on the property. Renewal lease rates have also been lower than anticipated," said Jacob Abikzer, Metropolitan Real Estate president, in court documents. 

So much for assured rent growth. But the building is still one of its times, stuffed with the lingering spoils of the past several decades, its schemers and skyhooks and disappeared billions. Our buildings, like our politicians, have mastered the phrasing of transparency, rolled out its bizarre pageantries. Maybe in the century to come, we'll master some of its insights, too.

egeminder@observer.com

Roughly 60 percent of the city's produce is shuttled through the peninsula's food distribution center, the largest wholesale food market in the world and, since 2005, home of the historic Fulton Fish Market. Next week, the market's busiest of the year, hundreds of thousands of pounds of cranberries will pass through its arteries and out to grocery shelves.

Beyond the walls of the distribution center, the neighborhood is animated by its own set of rhythms and awakenings. Once a rural enclave where wealthy Manhattanites planted luxuriant estates and summer mansions (Tiffany Street is named for one of the early settlers, H.D. Tiffany, of the Fifth Avenue Tiffany & Co. clan), by the early 20th century, subway lines and the shuttled masses had disturbed the scenes of pastoral aloofness. In the 1970s, Robert Moses steered the Bruckner Expressway across the South Bronx, splitting the neighborhood and displacing residents.

But today, a more community-directed development is taking shape. Work began this summer on the South Bronx Greenway, a series of projects intended to connect the neighborhood streetscape to its waterways and create more livable streets.

VIEW SLIDESHOW > BLOCK BY BLOCK

The Puck Building, at Lafayette and Houston streets, is one of those curiously incarnated few: To most who pass, the Puck of its name has become self-referential, bearing little relation to the magazine that launched it more than a century ago. It's the sort of high-speed semantic drift that's hardly novel to New Yorkers, except that in this case an even older Puck, the Shakespearean woodland trickster that gave Puck magazine its name, has presided over the whole scene.

Each gilded and top-hatted, a crayon in one hand and a mirror in the other, the building's two statues gaze down at the street below with twin smirks of irreverence. It was Puck's line in A Midsummer Night's Dream--"What fools these mortals be!"--that became the motto stamped across each week's issue of Puck, a blithe summation of its unsparing, largely post-partisan brand of satirical ambush.

But Puck's real draw was always the darkly expressive lithographs that exploded across its pages in full color. The magazine's main American predecessor was Harper's Weekly, whose readership swelled during the Civil War, its graphic illustrations lobbing battle scenes into Northern homes with all the force of their finely etched immediacy. While Harper's depended on black-and-white woodcuts, an often cumbersome process, Puck's founder, Joseph Keppler, a Viennese immigrant, had been tinkering with new advances in chromolithography for years--a fact that pushed him toward a lucky juncture of technology and popular imagination.

Photography was quickly defining itself as a force in political life, and the graceful realism of Keppler's caricatures resonated with a public newly conscious of their leaders' every wrinkle and mole. (A New York Times profile of Keppler in 1890 noted that early in his career he was sometimes forced to make trips to Washington in order to sketch politicians by hand, a practice photography soon made obsolete.) Meanwhile, Puck capitalized on new innovations in printing, discovering that the lithographic press was a far more efficient tool for magazine distribution than wood engraving.

Harper's Weekly cost 35 cents an issue; Puck was just 10. By the early 1880s, a decade into its existence, Puck had a circulation of roughly 80,000.

THE IRON AND metal of this novel venture moved into the entire first floor of the massive building constructed in the Romanesque Revival style, starting in 1885. "It is the largest building in the world devoted to the business of lithographing and publishing," noted King's Handbook of New York in 1893, "having a floor-area of nearly eight acres."

Yet even as new technology was collapsing the time and space of geographical distance, Puck's real talent was for fusing a global canvas with a pinpointing exactitude for satirical dissection. The world was Puck's unending source for hypocrisy: Boss Tweed, the Catholic Church, city roadways, the trial of a Fifth Avenue abortionist, Republicans, Democrats, the bloated pageantry of partisan patronage and spoils. (For all Keppler's idealistic mores, he also derided women suffragists and dabbled in ethnic stereotypes.)

Remarking on the Shakespearean Puck's claim that he could "put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes," the New York Star commented, "Our Puck of New York has achieved greater wonders. He has encircled the hearts of millions with his influence; he has turned away the misdoer from the evil of his ways by the keenness of his wit, and promoted honesty in public life by the satirical slaughter of hypocrisy. This for every week of the year."

In 1884, Grover Cleveland narrowly defeated Republican James Blaine in a highly charged presidential election, a victory some attributed, in part, to Puck's editorial position. The Republicans, in turn, bought Puck competitor Judge magazine and hired off some of Puck's key artists. Puck, which some devotees felt had defaulted on its anti-partisan stance, declined in readership in the following years. William Randolph Hearst bought the magazine in 1917, and closed it entirely a year later.

The Puck Building, in the typical Soho arc, swung from industrial use to artists' lofts to offices to, most recently, its first retailer in more than a century. Recreational Equipment Inc., supplier of yoga mats and athletic gear, plans to open next year, joining other tenants that include N.Y.U. (The building's current owner is Kushner Companies, the firm of Observer publisher Jared Kushner.) In the 1980s and early 1990s, the building hosted a brief reprise of satire, housing the short-lived Spy magazine. Like Puck a century earlier, Spy was a private eye on the prowl for hypocrisies large and small (and a godfather to present-day blogs like Gawker).

Since Puck moved in more than a century ago, the building has added floors, demolished and rebuilt an entire facade and been scrubbed and polished by multimillion-dollar renovations.

But its original Shakespearean sprites have held on, still beaming their gilded mirrors down on the sidewalks below. Though Puck himself, it should be said, wasn't really a Shakespearean invention at all, but a borrowed mythology--because you never do know about the lives of symbols, or what new calls they'll heed in the centuries to come.

egeminder@observer.com

At the turn of the last century, Washington Street in Lower Manhattan was a dense carnival of Lebanese and Syrian peddlers, Egyptian merchants, Arabic newspapers and the smell of Turkish coffee. Little Syria, as it was called, was composed mainly of Lebanese and Syrian immigrants, most Catholic and roughly 5 percent Muslim. But amid the seemingly ceaseless debate over the proposed Park Place community center and mosque blocks away, it's difficult to imagine that the cavernous back street of parking garages and anonymous towers was once, without controversy, known, according to The New York Times, as the "heart of New York's Arab world."

In another strange inversion of time, the last decade's sky-high mega-towers and luxury condos stand, many of them, half-built, half-empty or in-some-part defaulted. The street's newly opened W New York Downtown Hotel and Residences is something of a glass-and-steel exclamation point of burst financing.

Developer Joseph Moinian, himself of Persian descent, having immigrated as a teenager from Iran, is the owner of the massive 56-story W. Mr. Moinian amassed roughly 20 million square feet of property in a boom-time buying spree, though he has lately been hastily restructuring multiple mezzanine loans, including recently defaulted debt tied to the Lower Manhattan tower

egeminder@observer.com

Washington And Liberty Street

In July, workers at the World Trade Center site unearthed the skeletal wooden boning of an 18th-century shipping vessel, a kind of fossilized imprint of the days when the area was more water than land. Marine archeologists believe the brigantine was a coastal vessel that likely shipped lumber to fast-growing New York City. Among other relics of a lost Manhattan, a well-smoked clay pipe was discovered beneath the planking.

155 Cedar Street

The battle over a proposed house of worship in the shadow of the World Trade Center? The Park Place community center and mosque may have company. Negotiations between the Port Authority and the diminutive St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church destroyed on Sept. 11 have been stalled since last year. The Port Authority had promised $20 million to subsidize the church's reconstruction, but issues over its size and new location caused the deal to fall through--a development that somewhat belatedly gained media and political traction in the wake of the proposed Islamic community center.

123 Washington Street

Joseph Moinian's massive, 56-story W hotel-slash-condo is outfitted with hypnotically undulating interiors and sleek metal sex appeal. It's currently the tallest residential tower in Lower Manhattan.

109 Washington Street

By the 1960s, the northern reaches of Washington Street were supplanted by the World Trade Center, while its southern tenements had been demolished to make way for entry ramps to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. Dwarfed by its neighbors, the four-story building is the sole remaining vestige of Washington Street's tenement past.

105 Washington Street

The wide, Colonial-style building was built by soap manufacturer William Childs as an immigrant community center. It later became True Buddha leader Sheng-yen Lu's temple, its bricks adorned with cross-legged Buddha medallions.

103 Washington Street

St. George slaying a dragon is emblazoned across this stone facade. Once the heart of Syrian Catholic Washington Street, today the interior of St. George's Chapel is mostly known for less pious retreats--since 1982, it's been home to Moran's Ale House.

99 Washington Street

Hotel lord Sam Chang has plans to add another vertically inclined hotel to the Washington Street mix, barely a block from the W. The site was once home to Sahadi's shop, full of jewelry, embroidery, liquors and water pipes. Like most Little Syria businesses, Sahadi's eventually decamped to the Atlantic Avenue thoroughfare of Brooklyn.