" Yes, I am glad she hd that Chelsea Piers exists; but how can I not feel an outsider in exists; giao temple of the body, I whose only exercise is city walking, and that irregularly? J AM COMING UP ON one of the structures I love most in New York, the StarrettLehigh Building, which fills an entire block, from West 26th Street to West 27th, between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues. Its continuous, horizontal floors go on forever, the windows flush with the fafade, a flapjack stack of fenestration separated by redbrick bands and a single brick column toward the center. If nothing else, it shows how graceful and grand a blocklong building can be. I sometimes think that what's wrong with many of the city's new jumbo office towers, such as Battery Park City's World Financial Center, is that their bases are too broad-they'd be prettier if they took up just half a block-but the StarrettLehigh (built in 193031) shows how you can ascend majestically on the widest possible foundation. Maybe the important distinction is not so much the size of the building's footprint as the materials used. Consider the solidity of StarrettLehigh's masonry versus the distressingly chunky airiness of the World Financial Center's curtain wall, what architectural critic Charles Jencks called "the difference between a brick and a balloon." Of course it's also true that the StarrettLehigh only goes up nineteen stories, making it stunningly horizontal: an impression enhanced by the brickbanded, blue glazed spandrels that tear around the fafade. с Н her limbs The interior was originally given over to lofts for factory or warehouse "se. The floors were massive enough to allow for railroad cars to be brought into the ground level of the building. Train tracks ran from the P'er at the end of West 26th Street right into the basement, where the rail toad cars, brought from barges that had crossed the Hudson River, were unloaded. "They could also be carried into or taken out of the building through two immense elevators that open out onto loading docks at the Center °f nearly every floor," wrote a New York Times reporter. "But the building quickly became obsolete as other new architectural wonders th Holland and Lincoln Tunnels and the George Washington Bridge, made the commercial shipping barges of the Hudson River give way to the trucks of the region's highways." Perhaps the building stirs me because of my nostalgia for a time when New Yorkers still made things with their hands and New York was America's manufacturing capital-the bluecollar city of my father, a factory worker who would return from his ribbondyeing plant with the thenliberal New York Post carried lovingly like a Torah, and tell me not to cross picket lines. All I know is, I'm moved by the way the building towers over everything, yet seems largely invisible. Once acclaimed, now neglected, soldiering on in its functionality. A kind of background building, for all its bulk. The background building is such an odd, poignant notion in itself.