How One Building can Transform a Waterfront : An East Sider’s Perspective

By Daniel Elman

Can you imagine the Manhattan skyline without the U.N. building? .

It’s one of the grand icons of the city and one of the institutions that make New York, in the words of E.B. White, “the capital of the world.”

The West Side stadium, with its integration into the Javits Center, its distinctive architecture and its surrounding public spaces, can help solidify and enhance that position.

You probably have to be older than 60 to remember that the 17-acre site occupied by the U.N. complex was one of the vilest stretches of modern-day Manhattan. That strip of waterfront was a center for stockyards, slaughterhouses and tanneries. Known as Abattoir Center, it also went by its more popular – and maybe more appropriate – moniker, “Blood Alley.”

The sights and stench were so bad that when Tudor City was built in the 1920s, virtually none of the development’s 3,000 apartments and 600 hotel rooms had a direct river view. Can you imagine a building going up today one block from the East River (or the Hudson River, for that matter) with its entire waterfront façade a brick wall whose tiny windows serve only to ventilate the hallways?

That tells you how crummy that stretch of the East Side waterfront was. Three thousand apartments, no river view – a view that today would make Tudor City co-ops some of the most valuable slivers of real estate in New York.

Yet the U.N. building almost never came to be.

Having arisen from the ashes of World War II, the fledgling United Nations sought a home for its headquarters. Secretary-General Trygve Lie’s first choice was New York. One plan proposed the World’s Fair site in Flushing Meadow (sound familiar?). But the United Nations would have much more of an impact, Lie believed, if it were in the heart of the city. It was Manhattan or nothing. Unfortunately, no suitable land parcel was available.

To make a long story short, just days before the United Nations was to select Philadelphia as its headquarters city, thirty-eight-year-old Nelson Rockefeller came up with a solution. He convinced real estate developer William Zeckendorf to sell the Blood Alley land parcel Zeckendorf had just acquired. At the midnight hour Rockefeller coaxed $8.5 million out of his old man, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The family donated it to the United Nations to purchase the land.

Within a few years the wretched waterfront site morphed into one of the mightiest symbols of our great city.

Now, I’m not saying the Hudson Yards district, even with its many blighted sections, compares to the iniquity of the East Side abattoirs. But the difference is only in degree. The similarity is what’s important. And the similarity is in the opportunity to shape the physical and economic future of New York on an order of magnitude we haven’t seen in a generation. The stadium will be the catalyst.

Imagine this underused, uninviting district permanently transformed into a gleaming symbol of international trade (the stadium’s extension of the Javits Center), environmental ingenuity (the stadium’s self-sustainability), urban design (the stadium’s surrounding parks and new access to a rejuvenated waterfront), architectural harmony (the stadium’s integration into the Hudson River landscape) and athletic achievement (the Super Bowl, the Olympics, the Final Four and, oh yes, the New York Jets).

Now envision the “convention corridor” on the West Side and the U.N. complex on the East Side as larger-than-life bookends. They frame and support the island of Manhattan, the heart of the world’s greatest and most international city. Imagine yourself walking with pride through the new West Side across to the Hudson, as East Siders do when they cross Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza and First Avenue and find themselves at the center of the world.

That’s what the stadium will mean to the West Side and to New York.

© WestSideStadium.org, 2004