Building tops in downtown Manhattan offer little in the way of eye-catching spectacle—imagine, for a minute, that you’re staring down, not up, at one of those gargantuan fortresses of steel—and 77
But if you could manage a glimpse from above, you’d see its airplane.
For the past four decades, a World War I Sopwith Camel fighter has sat idling on a long green runway atop the building’s roof. A source of amused curiosity for the denizens of overlooking skyscrapers (as well as some initial trouble with the Federal Aviation Administration), the life-size model airplane has otherwise maintained something of a nonexistent existence. Not open to the public, invisible from the street below, it sits at the edge of its runway eternally poised for flight.
In March of 2008, Goldman Sachs put 77
Now after close to a decade, as the firm relocates its headquarters to the new 200 West Street, Goldman is finally closing several major deals in the building it never actually occupied. AT&T will take the largest plot at 100,000 square feet, followed by law firm Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith, UnitedHealthcare and OneBeacon Insurance Group. The rents were around $35 a square foot, according to Crain’s, with generous building allowances.
For a firm that trades largely in invisible things, especially if that firm holds secrecy as a governing covenant, real estate can sometimes offer a singularly corporeal history: gambles and doubling-backs, an artful dodge of a broader economic trajectory here, a negotiation of a political one there, all spelled out in concrete and stone. Between a roughly $40 billion government bailout, payout on its AIG debt, prodigious bonuses and the recent revelation that Goldman bet heavily against the very mortgage-related securities it peddled, it’s not surprising that an empty building in the Financial District has received little scrutiny. But the history of Goldman at 77
In the 1960s, Melvyn Kaufman, the developer of 77
It’s difficult to imagine many developers today apologizing for their buildings, even when the obscenities of those buildings are markedly apparent to the rest of us. But Mr. Kaufman did more than apologize. He constructed physical incarnations of his apologies from metal and stone. He commissioned art objects and whimsical public spaces in and around his obscenities, as if to cushion the blow. The result was a curious dynamic: mini-carnivals encased in glass-and-travertine tombs. On Third Avenue, Mr. Kaufman installed a giant game of chess. At 127 John Street, he commissioned Rudolph de Harak to create a neon-lit, corrugated-metal tunnel for an entranceway and a three-story digital clock. The American Institute of Architecture called it “a no-nonsense building with a happy nonsense-filled lobby and sidewalk.”
At 26 stories, the bland and economical 77