that staggeringly beautiful 5 Beekman Street

late to bandwagon, but in the parade
What the heck … I figure there is probably a 3% chance that any Manhattan Loft Guy reader has not already seen the Nick Carr photos of the City Hall neighbor 5 Beekman Street, one of the most beautiful and odd buildings in Manhattan. But the media keep piling on, so I thought I would comment. Oh, and if you haven’t seen the photos you are probably out of luck for now, as they have been taken down from Carr’s site, "at the request of building representatives". Darn!

Nick has the wonderful blog Scouting New York, where he regularly posts photos of buildings he has access to through his work as a film location scout. Wednesday he hit 5 Beekman Street, in a now-gutted post. Darn! I have often wondered about photos he posts of obscure buildings that eh does not own. My guess is that he ‘owns’ the photos for all purposes but the ethics of being a location scout make it a complicated situation if his ‘host’ does not want him to publicly post photos (or maybe there is a conflict of interest with his employer if he makes it less likely for a ‘host’ to let a producer use a space). Darn!

the last live links?
I saw the link on Curbed, but it seems to have been pretty much everywhere, including Huffington Post (where the old link now generates a "page not found" message, since that was a post by Carr). As of this instant, the photos are still up on the New York Magazine site, which also linked to Carr’s site. (I suspect it will not last, but click here to find out.) The Tribeca Citizen and the Business Insider still have it live, also, if NY Mag gets scrubbed. Gothamist has just one photo up. The original Curbed post is still live, with 7 photos.

The NY Times City Room Blog extends the ball a little further down-field, as it links to an April 19, 1998 article in which the daughter of long-time owners of 5 Beekman Street is "hopes to reopen the atrium as part of a long-term renovation. " (That didn’t happen.)

You might find more still-active links, but I am stopping here. My Google search for "Nick Carr, beekman location scout" generated "about 22,600" results.

some facts from The Journal
Today the Wall Street Journal’s Josh Barbanel (late, of the Old Grey Lady) has a piece about the building history that credits Carr, without a link.

BTW, WSJ has an odd on-line link policy. It will link to publicly traded companies mentioned in articles, such as US Bancorp, which appears in the last sentence of Barbanel’s piece, but it won’t hyperlink even when it says this:

Weird. This new media think-y is not so new anymore. But I digress….

Barbanel’s main contribution

t

o the knowledge about 5

Beekman

Street is to discover that settlement talks are underway to resolve a foreclosure, which could permit the building to be developed.

Thanks (anyway), Nick!

© Sandy Mattingly 2010