Hello Gotham (goodbye 'Bar & Grill')

Who wouldn't take the opportunity to correct one's 'youthful indiscretions'?!*

(*by 'indiscretions' I mean Postmodernism)

I had written about Gotham's closing with a history of the project (scroll down) until, surprisingly, I got a message from Bret Csencsitz (the general manager for many years) that he was planning to reopen the restaurant with a few variations, hoping I would bless his proposed design changes (starting with making the restaurant fully accessible to all). He had all the right ideas and I was flattered that he even bothered to ask me to review them, and wished him well...

...until, as I was leaving he asked if I would take on the project as the (re)designer. Given his very limited budget and aggressive schedule I declined, mostly because I knew he couldn't afford me, didn't want to burden his budget with a relatively large design fee and because I wasn't sure I could spare the time.

But seeing the restaurant almost exactly as it had been 36 years ago, when I designed it, was thrilling. True, it was painted different colors, had art that was not my taste, and was looking a tad worn, but it was inspiring to stand in that space; the basic ideas still sang, but the fussiness of the details gave it a grandmotherly look that I would love to update.

Considering what another designer would do (and frankly what I might have done); remake it as an idea they could own. What was called for was a new version of the same design ethos:
If someone was going to fuck up Gotham it really should be me.

I could 'preserve and protect' the essential design and invent some new interpretations in keeping with the original intent.

Defining the Brief
The brief was clear; it had to feel as good as people's memory of the Gotham, and it had look as though it had been merely re-tailored, cut a bit differently of the same cloth. Gotham should be the successful remake of a classic movie and not, say, George Lazenby's James Bond...or worse, David Niven's.

The Biggest Problem Opportunity
When the restaurant opened in March, 1984 and for years, the famous 'parachute lights' (or 'cloud lights' depending on the metaphor at play) were the rather flaccid attempts I designed; the right idea in the wrong form.

I don't remember how I met Mary Bright, but I have never since met anyone who didn't adore her. Tall, cool, Scottish and striking, Mary was a milliner turn drapery guru who hated curtains (well, most curtains) and knew how to make things for those of us who did as well. If you saw the parachutes any time in the last 25 years you were looking at her work.

The first designer to take a crack at a new design was heading in the wrong direction, looking for an homage to the originals as opposed to a new iteration. The second was me; I had ideas but no way to make them on time or in budget. The third was David Weeks, a remarkable lighting designer whose fixtures have become fixtures in our lives.

His first question was 'what would the space look like without the original fixtures?'. It was the right question to ask. 

The parachutes lowered the very tall space enormously and didn't do much to hide the chaotic ceiling; David's take was that instead of the vertical emphasis of the parachutes we might need something more horizontal to 'raise the ceiling'. 

The result is a series of 20' long sails slicing across the space with a deft logic and soft internal lighting that transformed the rather 1980's generously roomy Donna Karen suit into a crisply tailored Tom Ford. 

The Rest
Elsewhere we attenuated the columns, removed a lot of ornament, covered the bar top in new stone that made eating at the bar less cumbersome, redesigned the coat room that never really worked, cleaned up the multi-pane windows and replaced the long banquet with 4 custom sofas in multiple colors of green (in both senses) leather. 

We created a new lounge area at the front window, with a bookcase filled with local writers, artists, patrons and enthusiasts books; and the bookcase itself is in the form of a map of the neighborhood. The local quality of the place (and the name) is celebrated in an E.B. White quote from "Here is New York" his 1947 appreciation of the city:
The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive. 

I preferred the Updike quote: 
The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

But some thought that slapping every out of town customer in the face the moment they entered the restaurant was not exactly hospitable (as in 'Hospitality Industry').
They may have been right.

The Backstory: A History of Making Gotham
There was a moment, long ago, when not a single project I had designed had been demolished or closed or destroyed. That momentary sense of permanence may have been more about how few projects I had built, but not unlike that first flight you miss (after which many are likely to follow!) there have been lots of ‘erasures’ since then.

The Gotham Bar & Grill lasted longer than the World Trade Center towers; it opened before the first Blockbuster; before “We Are the World”; before Microsoft Windows 1.0 and VH1, and it survived the most dramatic transformations of our lifetimes…almost. It was more than half of my lifetime ago that I designed it. I.M. Pei once said, during a panel with Philip Johnson and David Rockefeller, that longevity is the key to success (as his fellow panelists could attest).  Maybe, but popularity helps and the Gotham was genuinely loved.

Like most restaurants (before we couldn’t even figure out how a restaurant will open at all, in the age of pandemics and economic collapse) Gotham opened in 1984 with a few nights of ‘friends and family’ meals. That was before Alfred Portale (who brilliantly shepherded the restaurant through most of its years) when restaurant consultant Barbara Kafka defined the food and service, and anything else she considered within her expertise (i.e. everything). At that very first dinner a friend who wrote about design for the New York Times, Suzy Slesin, answered the one question I have never asked anyone since; “so, what do you think of it?”. “It’s very nice, Jim, but of course it won’t last” by which she meant that the design looked good at the moment, but wouldn’t age well. She may have been right, but no one noticed.

It was the first restaurant I designed, and it succeeded in part because of the incredible naiveté we brought to the project. Working for Paul Segal Associates (the first and only office I worked in before starting my own) we actually designed the entire restaurant before we even laid out the tables and chairs! No sane architect would ever do that (again).

I designed it shortly after a very long vacation, with my wife Carin Goldberg, in Italy and Greece. It was in the middle of a recession (at least it was in our office) and we decided on a long trip through Italy where I had spent months traveling and living on a fellowship a few years earlier. It might have been a bit early for us to spend that kind of time together after being a couple for only a short time, but it is now a well of great (appropriately photoshopped) memories. After a month, ready to return, I called the office and asked Paul how things were; “great! busy! really terrific!” (Paul was, and is, an incredible optimist, one of the many truly charming things about him). I asked to speak to a colleague for a less, um, ‘enthusiastic’ review; Michael said nothing had changed, work was still slow and told us not to hurry back. Asking him to put Paul back on the phone I said that we had decided to spend a month in Greece and would see him afterward. How, earning less than $30K a year, I could afford to take off 2 months, travel, still pay rent at home and not go into permanent debt I do not know. But we did.

It was with a head filled with centuries of architecture that I designed a restaurant based on the Italian ecclesiastical trilogy; Basilica, Baptistry and Campanile, but translated into a garden ruin. I know, it was an architectural non-sequitur in an age of big, theatrical NYC restaurants. But as a point of departure, with defined elements pinning down intimate places within a huge, rigidly defined loft space, it worked. People looked good in the Gotham, and the sound (adjusted with sprayed-on sound-absorbing ceiling areas) was just lively enough to be exciting, and just quiet enough to have an actual conversation without shouting.

The style (as Suzy verified) worked but was likely to age quickly. For me it did, and I tried several times to get the owners to redesign it to reflect the sophistication of the Portale regime. They declined and no one seemed to care. The design did help the restaurant last just long enough for the owners to find Alfred and for him to make the restaurant about the food, not the design. After that it could have been a coal mine and still succeeded. Alfred (and the extraordinary staff) were the restaurant, and like lots of odd places, weird names and bizarre designs, this one grew on you. I hated the name when it was first suggested by graphic designers Donovan and Green, and hated the logo even more. I imagined a play on 12 East 12th Street; 12/12 or 12 Squared, but of course I was utterly wrong. As Jerry Kretchmer said (while admitting that he thinks with his mouth, one of his most charming New York-isms) once it succeeds you could call it “Jerry’s Asshole” and people would still come. As in “meet you at Jerry’s Asshole” or “join us for drinks at the Asshole”. He was probably right, though he never tested his proposition.

We did a few tiny alterations after it succeeded; redesigned the bar, selected comfortable, upholstered chairs, reupholstered the floral brocade banquettes a few times, chose some colors, found an amazing milliner/fabric genius (Mary Bright, my fave Scot, who sadly isn’t around any more) who reshaped the ‘light clouds’ and more. The clouds, hanging billows of fabric that caught the light projected from a simple bare spotlight above, were designed to avoid the hassle of custom light fixtures (complicated and expensive at the time) by creating a diffuser separate from the fixture itself. The clouds beautifully softened, warmed and spread the light to create Gotham’s most important design feature; light that made guests look great. And Mary Bright made the fixtures truly elegant.

There were 4 original partners of the restaurant, none of whom had ever built or run a restaurant before, but all of whom were smart New Yorkers who knew how to make things and make things work. The brothers Rathe (Rick and Robert) ran Rathe Productions, an exhibition fabrication firm founded by their father Fred; Jerry Kretchmer, the uber-New Yorker, born in the Bronx, rising through politics to run for mayor after being the sanitation commissioner and running RFK’s NYC campaign; and Jeff Bliss, a fellow architecture student and Biz School grad who knew most of us in Paul Segal’s office and pointed the project in our direction.

This was in the midst of the large-scale, restaurant-as-theater, spectator-spectacle boom in NYC. America, Prix Fixe, Union Square Cafe, and a lot of others I can’t seem to remember (this was a time of drug-challenged memories) were redefining the NYC restaurant, all trying to be La Coupole (I think there was one of those in NYC too). Thematic design ruled, and sound levels were simply deafening.

With all the lack of experience on the team we needed at least one person who knew what she was doing, and that was Dame Barbara Kafka (also, sadly, no longer with us). Barbara was a tyrant, and as much as we fought I loved her tyrannical rule. When we were discussing dumbwaiters (the kitchen is in the basement) she said no serious chef would ever put their plated food in a dumbwaiter, but agreed “yes we will have dumbwaiters…as in ‘dumb waiters’, carrying food up and down the stairs!” She treated us all (and I was 20 years her junior, so I get it) like her slightly slow children, and was exasperated at just how food-ignorant we were, but especially how much we all knew we were 100% right. Including her.

This minyan of New Yorkers (and mostly Jewish ones) fought about everything imaginable, ultimately resolving and moving on to the next argument. It was the conflict theory of design team relationships. You never know (as Gene Kohn, legendary founder of the KPF architecture firm, said) which project will turn out to be the signature one. We had no idea, and while a few houses I designed have lasted longer, and there are projects I like more, none has been as beloved as the Gotham.

The details in the original photos (long since painted over, art changed, floor patterns sanded and worn materials replaced) give me a sense, today, of ‘WTF was I thinking’. But I recognize the intent in the red sandstone (a reference to NYC brownstones and to the color of virtually every building in Rome), the cast stone ornaments (from a garden catalog, and an obsession of those days), the splattered paint (Zolotone, which dates it as surely as carbon dating), the art (all Swiss posters, originally, another obsession) and the stenciled floor (don’t ask).

My favorite detail was the bar rail, a massive blackened oak cylinder tha turned the corners in a beautiful radius. I was stunned that they could make it so perfectly but Rick Rathe let me in on the secret (they fabricated a donut and quartered it) when he gave me one of the 2 extra ‘quarter donuts’. Alfred made the dining trays himself that nested on the curved rails and covered the gap that food inevitably would have slipped through. It was such a robust design that even 36 years of others changing colors, artwork, sanding off floor patterns, picking new fabrics, etc., couldn’t dent the overall image. 

Architects are so obsessed with ‘space’ (meaning the voids, not the solids), in part, because it is the one thing that survives a million decorative ‘improvements’. The sequence from sidewalk to door to vestibule to coat check to host stand to the grand promenade down the ‘nave’ all remained. All those baked-in aspects of the Gotham somehow added up to a place that everyone wanted to be. I haven’t been in ages, and was trying to have lunch there with Jerry just before it closed.  But I’m fine with the distant memories. After all, 100 restaurant years is a very long time.