Time is the great optometrist: It changes how we see things. It chastens fashion and stifles shock. There is no point in being up to the minute when the minute has passed, no reason to be startled by the new when it is old and worn. In mid century a mid-century aesthetic swept the city. Buildings were reduced to rectangles; skyscrapers stopped scraping the sky (they no longer had points). It was Cadillacs and Lincolns, not the buildings whose feet they purred around, that (briefly) sported fins. Everything new was to be lean and clean, crisp and straight.
A lot of these structures were just plain dull. Simple, builders realized, was also cheap, so white-brick shoeboxes stuffed with apartments sprouted up and down the East Side. Office buildings were bigger — call them steamer trunks. (People just live in those other buildings; in us, they make money.) Tom Wolfe dubbed Sixth Avenue, corporate modernism’s Stonehenge, the Rue de Regret. But time shows that sometimes everything comes right.
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