Modernize These Landmark Building Doors? CB1 Committee Slams Proposal

The 6th Avenue entrance of the former AT&T Building in Tribeca. Two revolving doors are flanked by two hinged doors. People who need help opening the door ring a buzzer at the far right door. Lobby personnel then leave their station to manually open it. The owners' proposal to redesign the doors includes automating a door for handicap access. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Update: On Aug. 12 the Landmarks Preservation Commission approved the overall door and interior lighting design changes pending certain modifications, which the architects are to work out with the commission's staff.

The 1932 Ralph Walker-designed tower at 32 Avenue of the Americas, the former AT&T Long Lines Building, is one of the great city-protected landmarks. Its bronze-and-glass doors at the entrances are no exception.

So when the architect for building owner Rudin Management Co., pitched a proposal this month to Community Board 1’s Landmarks Preservation Committee to replace those doors with modern, mostly glass ones framed by bronze, several on the committee were aghast.

“It just takes my breath away,” said committee member and architect Vicky Cameron. “It’s an enormous masonry building sitting on these toothpicks.” 

“I can’t support removing historic fabric,” noted Gerald Forsberg, who is also an architect.

“I couldn’t abide it,” Susan Cole agreed.

Architect Garrett Rock of the firm Fogarty Finger argued for Rudin that the building was not designed for the many tenants and visitors that now pass through those doors, “quite hidden,” he said, within their recessed porticos at both the 6th Avenue and Church Street entrances. He described going into the building as an unwelcoming experience that at night can feel unsafe.

“The existing entrances lack visibility and transparency from inside out,” he said.  

Accessibility is also part of the rationale for the redesigned entrance, Rock said. A person who can’t open the now door rings for a security person, who leaves their station to let them in. “Obviously, we don’t want [people] to have to wait to open the door, the way they do now,” he said.

Betty Kay, a member of the committee who is a wheelchair user, said she was “thrilled to death,” that the doors would become automated “because I’m one of those people who relies on them.”

Cameron countered that the current doors could be automated. “We’re not supporting the new doors and we’re telling them to make an accessible entrance. End of story,” she said.

The architect did not say whether he believed the original doors could be re-engineered for accessibility.

Rudin also wants to install new lighting in the landmarked Art Deco-style lobby, with its grand mosaic murals by Hildreth Meiere. Rock called the lobby’s current illumination “spotty,” and “kind of in your face” as you enter the building. Those wall-anchored lights “don’t celebrate the subtlety of colors that were used in the mosaics and the tiles,” he said. 

In 2002, when Rudin took over the building, the existing lights were made brighter, creating the current lighting condition. While members of the committee largely agreed that the lobby deserved better lighting, they didn’t like the proposed solution: one-half-inch “upright” lights installed flush in the terrazzo floor that Rock said would “wash” on the walls “as well as fill in the gaps on the ceiling, and create a nice, more even illumination of the murals.”

The committee favored finding an alternate, removable lighting system.

Alice Blank, CB1 vice chair who lives near the building and is not a member of the committee, called the Rudin proposal “overreach.” “I would work with changing the interior of the existing fixtures before I’d be drilling into the floor to have uprights,” she said.

Kenny Grossman, a project manager for Rudin, said his company would take the committee’s feedback into consideration. “We will work with you to make the most amenable revisions that we can,” he said.

The committee’s resolution rejecting Rudin’s plans, which is advisory to the Landmarks Preservation Commission, will be voted on at CB1’s July 26 full board meeting. The LPC is scheduled to consider the proposal on Aug. 9.

Comments? Write to carlg@tribecatrib.com.