The East River and Kips Bay
The American Copper Buildings, which Michael Stern’s JDS Development Group built beside the East River, are twin towers joined 300 feet up by a three story skybridge, the first skybridge in New York City in 80 years. This cluster covers the shore they stand on and the history of bridges between buildings.
For a century this stretch of the river was industrial. Con Edison’s predecessor built Waterside Station in the Beaux Arts style to make both electricity and steam, and Tudor City Confidential records that it burned coal until 1958, ran for 104 years and was shut down in April 2005 before its demolition in 2007.1
Housing reshaped the blocks inland. Kips Bay Towers, an early housing commission for the architect Pei, placed a pair of 21 story slabs on a ten acre superblock, formed when two crosstown streets between First and Second Avenues were eliminated; SAH Archipedia ties the project to federal Title I funding and to the displacement of the tenements and lofts that stood there before.2
The skybridge has its own local ancestry. In 1925 Gimbels linked its Herald Square store with a newly bought neighbor over 32nd Street, spanning the gap with a copper span, itself three stories high, the work of Richmond Shreve and William Lamb before they worked on the Empire State Building, and the Bowery Boys note that the copper has since turned the green of the Statue of Liberty.3
The entries follow the same order. Waterside Generating Station covers the power plant, skybridges in New York traces the city’s links between towers, and the East River waterfront follows the shoreline and its esplanade. Two entries study The American Copper Buildings directly: how the skybridge was originally described and what the made ground of the shore around them holds.
- Tudor City Confidential, New York Edison's Waterside Station
- Society of Architectural Historians, Archipedia, Kips Bay Towers
- Bowery Boys History, Inside Gimbels traverse
Entries in this subject
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BuildingThe American Copper Buildings
Two bent towers in raw copper on the Manhattan shore of the East River, and the bridge that meets them where they lean closest.
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The East River and Kips BayThe American Copper Buildings Skybridge
A three story room hung between two copper towers, as a magazine saw it in 2016 and as the city's older bridges frame it.
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The East River and Kips BayThe Ground Under the American Copper Buildings
Fill, rubble, coal smoke and a surge off the river: what the Manhattan shore east of First Avenue is made of, and how it behaves.
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The East River and Kips BayWaterside Generating Station
A coal fired giant on First Avenue that lit Manhattan for a century, then left four blocks of cleared ground beside the river.
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The East River and Kips BaySkybridges in New York
Who strung rooms and passages across New York's streets and between its towers, and what each of them was after.
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The East River and Kips BayThe East River Waterfront
Eighteen blocks of Manhattan riverbank on foot, from a park that began as a cement yard to a pier that once served a power plant.