com moved in, at first drawn to the solitary charm of this industrial relic, then appalled by the pokey elevators, cockroaches, unreliable heat, and poor ventilation. Workers complained of the distance from the nearest subway, deli, drugstore, or diner. It has always been thus on the waterfront, especially when one tries to make it perform like a downtown office center. One evening I attended the awards ceremony for the IFCCA (International Foundation for the Canadian Centre for Architecture) international design competition. The first site chosen for the triennial competition happened to be the western edge of Manhattan from 30th to 34th Streets, most notably the open railway cut and storage yards for New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Rail Road. In three years' time the architectural visionaries may be planning for Lagos or Singapore, but for moment they were invited to bring their most untrammeled, cutting 6dge lmaginations to Old New York. The winner, Peter Eisenman, a resPected ideologist for and practitioner of experimental architecture, had come up with a lofty scheme for a sports stadium over a platform extend ing into the Hudson River, which would certainly face decades of envi ronmentalists' litigation if it ever threatened to approach reality. The ceremonies were held high up in the StarrettLehigh Building, the perfect setting for such a theoretical exercise, I found myself thinking, because ' both overlooked the site under consideration and lived in a constant state of decaying futurist potential. Part of what makes the StarrettLehigh Building so impressive today is that it sits in lonely eminence, the only large building for blocks around It abuts the vast vacuity (for the moment) of the Penn train yards, rising above them like Gibraltar. In recent years there has been much talk of building a stadium, first for the New York Yankees, then for the football Jets, then for Olympics 2012 (should the city win its bid), and incorporating the facility as an extension of the Javits Convention Center. Meanwhile the land sits idle, a perfect foil to the StarrettLehigh's rugged, eminent sadness. It has long been my conviction that New York is the saddest of cities, though I have no argument to support the feeling. Ah right, let me try. It has something to do with its precise age and built environment. Were it older, it would be a picturesque, Prague sort of museum city; younger, a Disneyesque novelty. But the dominant look of Manhattan (forgetting its few remnants from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries), is Industrial to Early Corporate, 1870s to 1950s, the castiron architecture of S0H0, the manufacturing and medical giants near the water, the background buildings, the somberly intelligent Garment Center towers on Seventh Avenue, the art deco setbacks along lower Park Avenue, everything so massive, gray, ineluctable. All of it perfectly, melancholically contextual-a way of being taken for granted.