The Bowery Mission.

“This is a street that predates Manhattan. It has been one of the finest addresses in the city and it has been skid row, and now it’s changing again,” said Bill Wander, offering an extremely brief history of the Bowery.

We were standing with Mr. Wander, historian for McSorley’s Old Ale House (yes, McSorley’s has a historian), in the Bowery Hotel, surrounded by other historians, preservationists, punk rockers, poets, Italian bakers and many a downtown bar veteran who had gathered to celebrate the Bowery’s recent listing in the National Register of Historic Places.

As it happened, the Bowery Hotel was a very fitting place to contemplate the past, present and future of the formerly gritty thoroughfare. With its dark wood, velvet furniture and red-tasseled room keys, the hotel capitalizes on the nostalgic leanings of its well-heeled clientele, evoking a faded opulence that seems plausibly Gilded Age. But the hotel, which opened in 2007, is only emblematic of just how quickly that past is receding.

A historic photo of the Germania Bank Building at 190 Bowery.

The Bowery of old was a place where a person found a flophouse rather than a $400-a-night hotel, a knife fight instead of the Crime Scene Bar & Lounge. Or, as Mr. Wander put it when we asked: “I’m not quite sure what it’s becoming. But 20 years ago, drinking on the Bowery involved a brown paper bag, and now it involves a sommelier.”

It was, at this point, rather difficult not to feel self-conscious sipping the evening’s signature cocktail—“The Bowery”—a vodka, elderflower syrup, lemon juice and splash of club soda concoction served in a champagne coupe. But, we reminded ourselves as we took a sip, the occasion was a celebration. Even if it sometimes felt like a dirge.

Last month, the Bowery was added to the National Register, a designation that provided long-overdue recognition for a street that has shaped, and been shaped by, every era in Manhattan’s history—from its beginnings as a Lenape foot trail to its years as an entertainment district and, later, a punk rock mecca. The designation, however, offers little in the way of practical protections from the luxury condo era—something that neighborhood groups say is essential to preserving not only the diverse, low-rise architecture that lines the street, but the creative, freewheeling character of the Bowery itself.

“The ferocious pace of development on the east side of the Bowery is destructive,” said David Mulkins, who heads the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors, the community group that is leading the preservation effort alongside Two Bridges Neighborhood Council.

“I think the planning commission at this point has not considered the Bowery as a whole, they’re not considering it as a place,” said Kerri Culhane, an architectural historian and the associate director of Two Bridges.

After years of seeking, and failing, to get city landmark status for even small, largely intact, stretches of the Bowery, the groups have recently intensified efforts to convince City Planning to create an overlay zoning district that would cap building height on the eastern side of the street to 85 feet, reflecting zoning restrictions that are already in place on the western side of the street. “To do justice to the Bowery, you really need to do justice to both sides of the street,” said Ms. Culhane.

The effort has attracted supporters among local businesses, restaurateurs, museums and even Martin Scorsese, who last week penned a letter to planning chair Amanda Burden. The filmmaker wrote that “having grown up on Elizabeth Street, the neighborhood and residents of the Bowery became clear catalyst for turning me into a storyteller. Whether it’s Mean Streets or Gangs of New York, the influence of the Bowery—the grittiness, the ambiance, the vivid atmosphere is apparent.”

A zoning change won’t do much to preserve the grittiness, we’re afraid, but it could protect a lot of the old buildings. Preserving a neighborhood’s architectural character isn’t quite the same as preserving the underlying emotional character—but the two are entwined. And over time the Bowery has proved, if nothing else, to be both protean and resilient.

“We’re talking about one of the oldest stretches of America before it was America. It was a highway for humans that goes back no one knows how long. This is where the mores and culture of America were established, the cradle of pop culture,” former Landmarks Commissioner Kent Barwick told the Observer. “There’s probably no stretch of New York that has more history per inch than the Bowery.”

Indeed, if the Bowery has been anything, it has been everything: a Native American footpath, a Dutch farm road, the place where George Washington stopped for a drink before watching British troops leave the waterfront, and where Abraham Lincoln gave the anti-slavery speech that got him the Republican presidential nomination. It has been home to both Astors and drug addicts, a place of circuses, movies and brothels. It has nurtured tap dance, vaudeville, Yiddish theater, Abstract Expressionism, Irving Berlin, Patti Smith and punk rock and now ... well, no one really knows what comes next. Just that the thoroughfare should remain as central to the New York experience as it has always been.

“It was always so quintessentially New York—a little bit naughty, the underside of the city, the underside is always the real city,” reflected Mr. Barwick. “The Bowery still has that sense of being the real New York, something special, the place where talent is more important than connections. But it’s on life support.”

kvelsey@observer.com

Huxtable, everlasting. (Getty)

“Whatever Philip Johnson’s legacy turns out to be, it will not rest on his buildings,” Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in her obituary of “the king’s architect” in The Wall Street Journal eight years ago. Mr. Johnson had once told Ms. Huxtable of his desire to work for royalty. Not finding any, Ms. Huxtable concluded, he crowned himself king and kingmaker. In his way, he reshaped the world, and so too has she.

Ms. Huxtable, who died in Manhattan on Monday at the age of 91, may not have set out to be the people’s writer, but that is what she became. She just wanted to share her ideas about the city where she was born, what was wrong with it and how it ought to be made right, but probably never would be.

“She was extraordinarily proper and quiet and dignified,” said Paul Goldberger, her protégé and successor as the Times’s architecture critic, a job she created and held for two decades, winning the first Pulitzer for criticism along the way. “She loved to get together and talk, and she was not above a certain amount of gossip, but at the end of the day, what you remember her for was her writing, which is how she wanted it to be. She was not a sort of quirky, unusual character about whom you would tell stories until the end of time. She wanted to be remembered by her work, and she is.”

Yet whatever Ada Louise Huxtable’s legacy turns out to be, it will not rest on her writings. Thanks to her tender heart and often-biting words, Ms. Huxtable played perhaps a bigger role than any scribe before or after—and bigger than most politicians, planners and town elders, too—in the shaping of New York over the past half-century. She taught us how to read the city the same way she did.

Regarded as the inventor of architecture criticism and reportage as it is practiced today, she was heralded for her ability to spot a trend, though she never hewed to them. The one thing she did stand by was the city, celebrating what came before and what was yet to come. She had as sure a hand as her contemporary Jane Jacobs in launching both the preservation and the modern urbanism movements, standing up to modernism and urban renewal as it attempted to bulldoze everything in its path. Still, this never prevented her from celebrating the new.

"I think her greatest interests were preservation, not so much for the sake of saving old buildings but for the sake of saving the texture of the city," said Robert Stern, the Yale architecture dean and celebrated architect. "She thought that the texture of the city, as I do, and I think many do, was the concatenation of many different things from many different periods and many different scales."

Like every New Yorker, she was never satisfied by what the city had become, but she was always enlivened by what it could be, and she fought to make it so.

Mr. Stern had actually met Ms. Huxtable back in 1963, just as she was joining the Times, when the then-Yale dean Paul Rudolph gave Mr. Stern the keys to his car. "He instructed me to drive her around and show her all the new buildings, the Art and Architecture Building had just opened, and we had a grand old time," Mr. Stern said.

The two did not always agree—she was generally not a fan of the referential (she might say kitschy) post-modern architecture often associated with Mr. Stern and late-period Philip Johnson (there was a certain sense of betrayal there)—but all the same, Mr. Stern and Ms. Huxtable remained cordial. "She would let you know when a building or a conversation had run its course," Mr. Stern said.

Even as the times changed, and not just the buildings but the means of writing about them, Ms. Huxtable remained engaged. She might not have written as much as we wanted, or needed, her to. "But when something big happened, there she was, showing us how it is done," said critic Alexandra Lange, who was inspired by first reading Ms. Huxtable at 16 to go into the field. She has been an inspiration to countless female writers.

Up until the end, she was writing, and writing so well. It has been much remarked upon that she penned a clarion rebuke to the New York Public Library for its pending plans to redesign the landmark building on 42nd Street, a proposal from the ballyhooed British Pritzker winner Lord Norman Foster. Ms. Huxtable rebuked the library, for "it is about to undertake its own destruction," in her view. I had thought the proposal quite exciting, given that I rarely went to the Schwartzman Building, spending more time in the Mid-Manhattan Library across the street, but upon reading Ms. Huxtable's challenge, I felt converted, if also a little foolish for being wooed by a sexy fly-through.

"She read every article, tracked remote blogs, engaged in discussions about the need to consider the implications of some new zoning code in emails sent at 2:00 am.," recounted Julie Iovine, a fellow critic for the Journal and former editor of The Architect's Newspaper. The two got to know each other over an acerbic article about another greatly hyped designer, Santiago Calatrava, that Ms. Iovine had written for the Times in 2004.

Yet for all Ms. Huxtable's apparent taste for red meat, as both chef and connoisseur, she was in person a quiet presence. Everyone recalls being invited over for tea to her stately apartment on Park Avenue, where she might show off a piece of dinnerware her late husband—an industrial designer who also photographed many of her eight books—had designed for the Four Seasons.

Kent Barwick, the long-time director of the Municipal Art Society, on whose board Ms. Huxtable had served, recounted how upon being honored with the society's greatest prize, she refused the typical thousand-dollar-a-plate fête that came with it. Instead, an intimate party with friends and MAS board members was held at the old Urban Center, where the society used to have its headquarters. "It was little more than a potluck, and still, of all those dinners, it remains one of the most memorable," Mr. Barwick said.

While her work may not have always made it plain—the work itself certainly was never plain—Ada Louise Huxtable was concerned with the intimacies of life. The city has a way of forcing such closeness on us, but she taught us all that it ought to be embraced, an embrace made all the easier by a beautiful building or a well planned street. She was always striving to make the city better, warts and all, and so must we strive in her absence. For the city and for the future.

The occasion was the Municipal Art Society’s 2008 MASterwork Awards, which, according to the program, “honor the year’s top projects for their excellence in architecture and urban design, and their contribution to New York’s built environment.”

A motley assortment of New York boldface names showed up for the event, including Diane Von Furstenberg, there to receive a Best Historic Preservation award for the DVF Studio Headquarters at 440 West 14th Street in the meatpacking district.

So did developer extraordinaire Jerry Speyer, who served on the awards committee and who presented the Best Building awards; and Ann Buttenwieser, who accepted a Best Neighborhood Catalyst award for her Floating Pool Lady, that pool-in-a-barge parked last summer at the foot of Brooklyn Heights.

Her remarks were short, and appropriately idiosyncratic: “In my experience, people with obsessions are either excoriated or punished. How refreshing that I should be [honored] for mine.”

The other award recipients included:

The New Museum, which took the other Best Neighborhood Catalyst award; the IAC Building and the new New York Times headquarters, which took the Best Building awards; and the Museum at Eldridge Street, which took the other Best Historic Restoration award.

“All of the awards given tonight are in what might be considered bad neighborhoods a few years back,” said Kent Barwick, the society's president. “It’s a testament to the vitality of New York that every inch of this city is being reclaimed. We’re living in one of the most exciting times in the history of New York.”

MAS President Kent Barwick couldn't say whether it would be as large as the Moses ones now under way in three separate venues (Jacobs would be the first to say that size doesn't matter), but he will certainly feel the pressure to make it as good.

"It was a complete coincidence that we are doing this at the time that the Moses shows are going on, but a great coincidence," Mr. Barwick told The Real Estate. "We are really enjoying the opportunity to work with scholars and revisit Jane Jacobs and to look at her with fresh eyes. This is not so much to weigh in against Bob Moses."

Asked for his own opinion of Moses, Mr. Barwick said, "That's like saying, 'How do you like the Himalayan Mountains?' It is a very big subject."

- Matthew Schuerman

-Matthew Schuerman

- Matthew Schuerman

- Max Abelson

- Max Abelson

-Matthew Grace

-Matthew Grace