The architecture won't make any ne's heart skip-today's bricks look so much blander and flatter, the effect 's cartoonlike in comparison to the old apartment houses-but Charles Moore's extravaganza, River Rose, rises above the average, with its playfully chromatic art deco touches, and Pare Place, by Gruzen Samton Steinglass, holds its corner with a soberly majestic Upper West Side assurance. Ironically, while these buildings may strike a nostalgic New York chord, they have very little to do with their immediate context, the Wall Street financial district. The stately proportions of buildings on West End Avenue and Sutton Place developed much later than the narrow, corkscrew Dutch lanes of downtown Manhattan. The master plan's intention to "extend the grid" evades the fact that Lower Manhattan does not really operate according to the same orthogonal street grid that prevails above 14th Street. A second irony is that the fagades of these luxury apartment houses in Battery Park City deceptively suggest, by their historical references, the same roomy, highceilinged interiors one finds in preWorld War II apartment buildings. In actuality, most of the apartments' rooms are smaller, their halls narrower, their ceilings lower and walls thinner. "By putting more money into the skins of buildings," one architect complained in the magazine Progressive Architecture, "the developers cut corners on the interiors." The final, most telling irony is that Rector Place still feels like a stage set. It incorporates all the most uptodate urbanistic wisdom, but it's not folly alive. Like so much of Battery Park City, there's no street life, no random pedestrian flow. Rector Park, with its herringbone paving bricks and ornamental fence, may not be padlocked the way Gramercy Park, its obvious model, is, but it gives off the same signals. As the AIA Guide to New York City maliciously puts it: "Rector Park is veddy, veddy propuh, using the flnest materials very carefully detailed. Meant to be looked at, not played in." attery Park City's residents have often had to trek many blocks for necessities; yet the shops along the South End Avenue arcade haven't done especially well, languishing from paucity of foot traffic. Some blame the design of the arcade, a concrete "colonnade' dark and uninviting to walk under; but the real problem is the incomplete grafting of a city spirit onto this sedate landfill community. Shopping is an appetite stimulated by complex environmental cues; you can lay down a street and designate it "retail" and it still won't necessarily hop to that beat. Battery Park City-like Roosevelt Island, if to a lesser degree-feels cut off from the rhythms of New York. Its very aloofness could be an asset: there aren't many places so detached from the hurlyburly. When I walk about it at night, especially by the water, I sense the wonderful, moody selfcontainment of the place, its dignified composure, its idealistic optimism, and I am tempted to live there.