Singer Building--->One Liberty Plaza

I now work at One Liberty Plaza, (formerly the site of the Singer Building) which to those folks who don't know Manhattan very well means that if I gaze out of the window of this high rise, I am looking down at a huge hole which was formerly the World Trade Center.

The demise of the Singer Building (1908-1968) was not due to terrorism. No human lives were lost in the demolition of this Beaux Arts gem, but it was tragic nonetheless. What did in the Singer Building was--per usual-- simple dollars and cents. In this case, dollars and cents = square footage, and the Singer's decorative tower with 65 square feet per floor was no match for One Liberty Plaza's 37,000 per floor. There was talk that perhaps the lobby with it's artisan-carved marble and bronze features would be saved:

The lobby had the quality of "celestial radiance" seen in world's-fair and exposition architecture of the period, as the author Mardges Bacon described it in her 1986 monograph "Ernest Flagg" (Architectural History Foundation, MIT Press). A forest of marble columns rose high to a series of multiple small domes of delicate plasterwork, and Flagg trimmed the columns with bronze beading. A series of large bronze medallions placed at the top of the columns were alternately rendered in the monogram of the Singer company and, quite inventively, as a huge needle, thread and bobbin.

But it was not to be. It's hard to imagine now that as the Singer Building's Tower was coming down, the towers of the World Trade Center were going up.

Downtown Manhattan: close your eyes for a second and you'll miss something. For more on this building and other images of lost New York City architecture, visit www.nyc-architecture.com.