Theo Harrison
New York City
04/05/2025
New York City
04/05/2025
Ventilation shafts along the West Side Highway
Each weekday, I take the Seventh Avenue Express to Penn Station. It takes me the better part of an hour, which means I spend a considerable part of my week underground. A lot of people find the subway to be an anxious space. It’s certainly understandable. Underground, we’re cut off from our natural orientation: the sun, landmarks, our sense of time. Our experience underground is largely defined by how quickly we can pass through it. This makes it an ideal space to put things we prefer not to see- things like infrastructure.
The existential dilemma of infrastructure is that it’s designed to disappear: it is failure, rather than function, that pulls it into view. This makes it hard to grasp the true scale of infrastructure, both underground and on street level, where tensions arise between the city’s identity and the infrastructure needed to support it.
One example sits on a quiet street in Brooklyn Heights. In the middle of a block of expensive townhouses sits a Greek Revival brownstone originally built in 1847. The MTA purchased the brownstone in 1907 and gutted it to provide an exhaust system for the Joralemon Street Tunnel, which today carries the 4-5 train into downtown Manhattan. The original details have been preserved quite well. The stoop and the pediment above the door are perfect. The cornice features a typical dentil molding, the kind that look like teeth. It’s almost all there. But the transom window above the door has been replaced with a grill, and the windows have clearly been painted black.
In the West Village, we can find another one of these “brownstones”. At the corner of Mulry Square sits a ventilation shaft for the 1-2-3 line, one that is certainly less graceful than its counterpart in Brooklyn. It is comprised of a blocky concrete mass, with a brick facade loosely hanging off the front. The facade features no detailing, just 18 window-sized punctures. The whole thing has a 2D, set-like quality to it. I pass by this building almost every day, and I can’t help but find it charming. Where Jorelamon Street attempts to faithfully recreate its surroundings, Mulry Square offers a shrug. Not only is it unable to pass as something it is not, it’s attempt to do so makes it stand out even more. What could be more human than that?
Both of these structures highlight a strange contact point between architecture and infrastructure, where the former serves to distance us from the latter. The existence of these fake buildings suggest a psychological weight to what lies beneath the surface of the city. Consider our most primal associations of descending into the earth: burial, disintegration, loss of self. Does minimizing the underground allow us to avoid confronting our own material decay?
Our inclination to bury infrastructure suggests another anxiety, embedded in infrastructure itself: the realization that our survival is bound to each other. Oftentimes, architecture serves to simplify this explanation, allowing the spaces around us to remain digestible and reassuring. This seems to be easier the further we build up. But in overlooking what is beneath us, we risk disconnecting from the systems that sustain us. As supertalls for the megawealthy carve further upwards, the underground becomes even more crucial as a unifying plane.
“The Irresistible Romance of Travel”
(1995)
Jane Greengold
Terracotta and bronze
58 Jorelamon Street
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