So much of this gridded city must inevitably turn into background music for the preoccupied stroller. Chicago has more fourstar architectural masterpieces than New York, but New York is the greater built environment because it possesses a vaster, more continuous urban web, which is composed largely of background buildings, that is to say, barely noticeable, mediocre, or simply average types holding up their end of the streetwall agreement. Background buildings are grunts enlisted in a great war against the horror of emptiness. The heyday of the background building was 18801950, when New York City's expansion required thousands and thousands of modest edifices that would do their part. Still, the question arises: Is the designation "background building" a rationalization after the fact for failed ambition, or something intentional? When a background building was first thrown up, did its owners know it was only going to be ... a background building? Certainly, if it was a brownstone or a sixstory walkup or a twelvestory apartment house or an ordinary speculative office building, they must have suspected they were not making architectural history. But they were content to do a little business, make a bit of money, using the stenciled formats that had proven successful. Occasionally, sure, they would sport a decorative touch that betrayed impatience with background status, a plinth or gargoyle or entablature of engraved stone; the persistence of vanity. The background building is like a good supporting actress, 1 с с Д PIERS AND TR0CCH1LAND 121 c H E L S t « ottpr or Eve Arden, who is not above stealing a scene with a sin Thelma Kittei ш Щ JJ reading of arch skepticism. The supporting actress knows she's a £ Aground character, but does the character she plays know it? A building mutate from splendid provocation to background status to landmark veraj generations. Such has been the fate of the StarrettLehigh, hich designed by Cory and Cory in 1930, was praised at its inception by Mumford in a New Yorker "SkyLine" column ("Here a cantilevered front has been used, not as a cliche of modernism, but as a means of achieving a maximum amount of daylight and unbroken floor space for work requiring direct lighting. The aesthetic result is very happy indeed."), only to have its miastnilmoderne charms fail to register on a new breed of glass wallMiessmitten modernists, then get rediscovered several decades later as a prototype of restrained elegance, "a landmark of modern architecture" (according to the AIA Guide to New York City). Its forlorn beauty could not help but exert, in time, a hip appeal on the imaginations of design firms, shelter magazines, and dotcom entrepreneurs, and what is more apposite, it had huge floors of belowmarket raw space to offer, at a time when Manhattan commercial real estate prices were going through the roof. So tenants like Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and fashion manufacturer Hugo Boss and SmartMoney.