Beauty at Scale

The Franklin Delano Roosevelt East River Drive hugs the east side of Manhattan from 125th St in Harlem to the Battery underpass at the southern tip of the island, a 9 1/2 mile roller coaster gone urban megastructure. Approaching from any of the bridges across the East River, the highway twists and bends, rises and falls, its back a striped mosaic parade punctuated regularly by taxi yellow. From the vantage of the Williamsburg Bridge in particular, hundreds of feet in the air and a half-mile or so away, we can see it as Robert Moses and his engineers did in the 1930‘s, before the first sections were actually built–silent, in miniature, a logical arterial for a congested urban grid. The road’s smooth curves follow the contours of the island; pedestrian flyovers caged in green-painted steel appear as integrated, logical parts of the evolving park along the river. When running along at grade, six lanes of width appear modest, and even when passing through space 20 feet off the ground, at this distance the highway does not loom.

The FDR looks and feels different in traffic, beneath the United Nations Center, or hemmed in by ancient stone retaining walls. In a moving car–and cars don’t always move, depending on the time of day–the moderate curves and ups and downs actually do recall the Cyclone, an old Coney Island wooden roller coaster. There are thrillingly narrow tunnels, with clearances so low trucks of any kind are barred from the entire route. Sweeping cantilevers extend out over parkland and buildings and Avenue C, keeping the weight limit down to 8,000 pounds, which is rather dainty, by major roadway standards: federal highways today stipulate a maximum tolerance of 80,000. With no semi trailers or city buses to worry about–at least not north of 23rd St–and the continually blasé NYPD traffic presence, the FDR often becomes a closed-wheel urban racecourse, as hard and unforgiving as a ‘70s NASCAR track. Slashes of automotive enamel on concrete barriers and twisted guardrails appear almost as frequently as potholes, and Lincoln Towncars seem to have a habit of shedding whole bumpers, which maroon tips-up along the nonexistent shoulders like black plastic rocking horses. Assuming peril is avoided and traffic is flowing, another angle of Bob Moses’s perspective on the whole edifice becomes clear: the FDR makes sense from behind the wheel of a car–or from the back seat, in Moses’s case, as he didn’t drive–especially if one lives on the north shore of Long Island, is inclined to use the RFK (née Triboro) bridge, and happens to work downtown. Generations of bankers and doctors with little cause to visit the West Side in their obscenely powerful German wagens unknowingly tip hats to Mr. Moses daily on their way to work, southbound from the Upper East Side at 80 miles per hour.

Up close on foot, it’s another story. The thing is truly huge, with at-grade sections 80 to 100 feet in width, and the unchecked velocity of traffic is such that pedestrian crossing must be accomplished above or below. The up-and-down dance of the highway might seem to make for an improved experience on the ground, unlike the monotony of the lower West Side Highway, which is crossed at-grade with the aid of traffic lights, but the volume of traffic and the sheer mass of the FDR make for unpleasant acoustics and atmosphere regardless. The individual is too small to make sense of the highway without mechanical aid: a car, at least, or a helicopter, perhaps. Standing stilted atop a bridge or tall building, distance amplifies you, and it feels reasonable again. Something similar happens with Frank Gehry’s Beekman Tower, which is nearing completion at 8 Spruce Street and looms over the lower FDR; from the east side of the Brooklyn Bridge, it looks fantastic, like a lustrous sheet of sail on the breeze. This is how Gehry ‘saw’ it, in renderings, as a model–with structures as large as the Beekman Tower there’s no other way. Viewed from the base, the cohesion of the Beekman’s curves is lost, its plan obscured by incredible height. The FDR is even bigger, and unspeakably more complex, and therefore that much harder to envision meaningfully integrated into its environment. A tall building impacts a large viewshed, but a relatively small footprint keeps its visceral presence local. A megastructure like the FDR materially affects a dozen neighborhoods and hundreds of cross streets, diverting thousands of pedestrians daily, breathing car exhaust into a million city windows.

The true beauty of the FDR, like any project of civil engineering, is intellectual. It is the beauty of technical achievement, the ancient appeal of the definitive, tangible resolution of man v. nature. Beyond any aesthetic qualities, a tower or a bridge or a cantilevered highway is beautiful because it doesn’t fall down, though animal logic tells us it should, and the conjoined bureaucratic harmony and civic responsibility involved in keeping these structures up in the air where they belong has a subtle beauty of its own. Scaled down to fit safely on a conference table, urban megastructures make for beautiful abstractions, emblematic of resources, influence and power. Life-size, installed in the messy and multifarious real world, however, they take special measures to appreciate.