New York City has many “privately owned public spaces,” mostly lobbies or courtyards of commercial buildings that, by agreement, anyone can use. They’re a nice amenity for the public and relative chump change when you consider the tax breaks developers and corporations get in return. One of these spaces—the lobby atrium at 60 Wall Street—is in a 47-story postmodern skyscraper that its owner plans to renovate. After a year-long effort by various individuals to landmark both the 1989 building and its lobby that serves as a subway entrance, the city said no; the owner can tear the thing down.

The atrium is a kooky shrine to 1980s excess that has strangely managed to survive almost intact for 33 years. People have called this Cocaine Décor, I suppose after the esthetics of Scarface. But that’s about a decade before this place went up. When I saw the atrium a decade ago, I thought of it as The Bonfire of the Vanities lobby, a mashup of previous mashups. It feels like an initiation into something, with octagonal Egyptian-columns covered by marble tiles resembling Mughal design. The towers erupt into a bric-a-brac mirrored ceiling, framed with more white and trelliswork, with walls adorned by rock sculptures over which water at one time flowed. The white effect has been described as a “winter garden,” which to me conjures Chekhov and wicker chairs, not an airport hanger. Although the various froufrou (including Miami Vice plastic palm trees that have replaced the original Ficus trees) could be taken as garden ornaments, the giant deco columns quash that idea.

What didn’t make sense to me about 60 Wall Street was that its architect, Ken Roche, was part of the duo (with John Dinkeloo) who designed the Ford Foundation headquarters (finished in 1967) and the addition to the Met (started in 1967), both elegant and understated modernism and both notable for impressive indoor gardens. You can tell that 1967 was their time, their inflection point.

I knew Roche’s work because his firm had been hired in 1989 to redesign the corporate headquarters of Corning Inc., the glass manufacturer in my hometown. Corning remains an oddity in south-central New York because it never moved its corporate headquarters to a big city. The campus of what was called “the Glass Works” until 1989 and its world-renown glass museum was designed in 1951 by Wallace K. Harrison, architect of the Metropolitan Opera House and U.N. Headquarters. We called it the domino building, Building C, and it gave Corning unearned architectural prestige that people didn’t want to lose.

Because Roche had co-designed Ford and the Met, I assumed people would like whatever he came up with (which they did when his Frank Lloyd Wright/Japanese garden-inspired project was finished in 1993). But if I had also known about 60 Wall Street, I might have expected something worse.

Roche’s company began designing 60 Wall Street in the mid-1980s as the headquarters of J. P. Morgan. He went big with deco motifs, along with Greek revival, neoclassical, and a bit of postmodernist Candyland. The entire building is fixated on columns: the exterior glass design suggests corner columns, and a bunch of double columns crown the tower. What are all those columns doing at the top of a building, like a woman wearing sausage curlers? Columns also run bigly across the entrance façade.

Maybe Roche’s column obsession came from spending so much time at the Met with the salvaged Temple of Dendur. He was a protégé of Eero Saarinen, whose father, Eliel Saarinen, designed the iconic palm stalk floor lamp in 1928, reflecting the decade-long Egyptian influence after excavation of Tutankhamen’s tomb. One of our most lasting symbols of deco are those torchiere floor lamps erupting upwards. (Everything in the 1920s was going up, right? Nothing coming down.) And that floor lamp found its way to the younger Saarinen in the base of his iconic white table.

You have to wonder if Roche meant 60 Wall Street to mock the deco revival of the ill-fated 1920s, or maybe he was mocking the pastiche of the 1980s. Most likely he was just pleasing the customer—J. P. effing Morgan after all!—giving a bank another temple to itself. It is often the case that something people take to symbolize an era appears precisely when that era is already fading. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s satirical novel, was published to much buzz in 1987, but the 1990 movie bombed, probably because by 1989, a lot of the cartoon thrills seemed less fun. Jogger Trisha Meili was raped and beaten in Central Park on April 19, 1989, and on May 1 Donald Trump took out his infamous newspaper ad demanding “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing was released on June 30, and David Dinkins was elected as New York City’s first Black mayor on November 7.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and China killed demonstrators before flooding the world with cheap stuff. You can’t escape the irony of 1929 deco denoting the crash of free-market capitalism, whereas 1989 deco celebrated capitalism’s final and ultimate conquest of communism. Everything should’ve gone great, right?

After the September 11 attacks, 60 Wall Street served as the office for Deutsche Bank employees who’d worked in the World Trade Center. In September 2021, the bank (which just happens to be Donald Trump’s lender of last resort) vacated the space for midtown. The offices are empty and so are the lobby storefronts; the rock waterfalls have gone dry and the marble is dirty.

I’m usually in favor of landmarking things, especially with the blinders of “presentism” nudging us to trash anything from history we don’t like. But 1980s architecture was hopelessly terrestrial. In the decade of Trump the builder, architecture seems to have broken itself. “Postmodernism” doesn’t really say anything except that the train has run out of track . . . that jolting juxtapositions of very different things (the exotic and the familiar) is all we could come up with. Its functionless forms often wasted structural resources and ignored local climate challenges. Although people are OK with giant Yayoi Kusama things in museums, they generally don’t want that stuff in their architecture, preferring the ethereal Norman Foster vapor of an Apple temple or the blinding shards of Hudson Yards.

After the millennium, architecture no longer suggested fungibility; it only suggested immense wealth. It was all about the disembodied. Like an AI lover, architecture was whatever you imagined it to be. If it started looking like a meme for digital technology, that’s because that’s what it was built for. That’s why those lifeless gleaming shafts keep erupting in Dubai, the UAE, and Qatar. Amid so much carnage and destruction in the Middle East, the billionaires are like the Whos in Whoville shouting: “We are here! We are here!”

Though I’m usually pro-landmark, I don’t know what the 60 Wall Street Lobby of Big Shoulders would offer us culturally. I suppose a landmark to the 1980s would remind people of Donald Trump’s go-go years in Manhattan, when he mastered the art of the façade right before all of his ventures tanked. But then his own esthetic trademark has always been Latin American Dictator Provincial; his taste for gold-plating prevented him from embracing the whimsical Frank Gehry architecture of the corporate brand. That’s the look that you associate with the new money of Wall Street, and Trump always steered clear of it. There is nothing brazen about promoting property deals, but nowadays that’s something that people’s grandfathers do.

The era of the public knowing and caring about real estate “developers” is long gone. The returns on corporate real estate are dwarfed by the exploits of Silicon Valley and crypto financiers. The one constant from Donald Trump’s 1980s to today is the hedge fund billionaires and the men at the top of private equity and asset management. They have a lock on the boldfaced names, a seeming constant thanks to the four-decade run of Ronald Reagan’s casino capitalism. The great tsunami of wealth-making in the 1980s has yet to trickle down to working people in America, the ones Donald Trump and his MAGA operation feed off of. Like the rock fountains at 60 Wall Street, that artery is bone dry. §