" As it happens, no subway comes into В attery Park City, and the shops of Radio Row were obliterated long ago by the World Trade Center. In fact, both quotes, meant to celebrate the ongoing spunk of New York, read like unconscious valedictions: in Whitman's case, for the bustling port whose demise led to this tame, provincial replacement, with its echoes of Baltimore Harbor; in O'Hara's, for the 1950s Manhattan street that generously threw up casual surprises-such as still exist across town, but nowhere near the suburban mall premises of the adjacent World Financial Center. Battery Park City's World Financial Center consists of four homoge mmbo towers, thirtyfour to fifty stories high, comprising 8 million neous juni uare feet of office, retail, and public space. The original guidelines by Alexander Cooper for this commercial office development had called for even or eight buildings of a more slender, classical skyscraper form, all done by different architects. However, in 1979, Olympia and York, a Torontobased realty firm (and at that time the largest developer in North America, before it came to grief in another newtown waterfront project, London's Canary Wharf), pledged to build the entire World Financial Center. This major financial commitment, more than anything else, allowed Battery Park City to take off. The drawback was that it also consolidated too much land under one developer, who hired a single architect for the whole project. Cesar Pelli, an international star, had evolved from bolder projects in the 1970s, such as Los Angeles's bluewhale Pacific Design Center, to a suavely discreet, latemodernist style, the architectural equivalent of Giorgio Armani. The first financial giants who signed on to the World Financial Center-MerrillLynch, American Express, Dow Jones, Oppenheimer & Company-demanded huge, unbroken 40,000 squarefoot floors; and Pelli obliged with a design that would accommodate these widebodies, at the same time trying to minimize the beefiness by a filmy curtainwall skin with flat little windows and maroon or dark blue squares, which suggest a child's peeloff blocks. The resulting structures are like Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons, airless yet taking up considerable room-much chunkier than the old filigreed skyline of lower Manhattan. As it is, the World Financial Center resembles nothing so much as an office park in Houston, like the FourClover Center, which Pelli also designed. It employs the same corporate campus vocabulary: a superblock; four object" skyscrapers separated by uncomfortably large distances from each other and turning their backs to the street; a politely suburban grass slope; raised bridges between buildings to circumvent the weather; retail shops buried inside; and an overall visual monotony. Pelli has topped each °f the towers with a different geometric configuration-mastaba, dome, Pyramid, stepped pyramid-but essentially they are all the same building.