Imaginary Worlds - Time Travelers of Renwick St.

Episode Date: June 3, 2015

New York City real estate is not usually a hotbed of fantasy, except the fantasy that you could afford that $20 million condo 50 stories up. But an unusual ad campaign for 15 Renwick St. in Hudson Square defied conventional thinking and focused on a group of characters that span through time. Just don't call them Stempunk. I talk with the teams at MARCH and IF Studio who dreamed them up, and Hana Alberts of the website Curbed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. So I'm going to start somewhere today that is very deeply rooted in the real world. New York City real estate. Living in the city is all about being tempted by what you can't have. And you can't resist those temptations. You have to just enjoy the eye candy. Which is why I love reading the website Curbed. It's basically real estate

porn. They bring you inside those $50 million condos that have a Mount Olympus view of Central Park. I mean, bonkers is one of Curbed's favorite words. And because we're a blog, Bonkers is one of Curbed's favorite words, and because we're a blog, we can call it like we see it. We can say, this is ridiculous, this is nuts, this is mind-boggling. That's Hannah Alberts, senior editor for the New York office. Now, one of my favorite running jokes on Curbed is the way that they make fun of scalies. Scalies is architectural slang for the little people that show up in building proposals to give it a sense of scale, hence the nickname Scalies. Now, way back in the day, when new buildings were drawn by hand, there was an artfulness to these people.

Now things are digital. You can go on these websites where they sell, like, big packages of Scalies that you can buy and then just sort of cut and paste them anywhere, which leads to all sorts of awkwardness. One year for Valentine's Day, one of our sites highlighted the most sultry Scalys, for example. Oh, let me say this. I do remember seeing some Scalys making out. Sexy, steamy, sultry Scalys love an architectural rendering. I don't even know what that is.

It looks like a rendering of a park. Yeah, and it's two guys. Aw, they've got little hearts coming out of them. But you added the hearts. I'm pretty sure the hearts were photoshopped. We did. Or there was one building proposal where the Scalys were just so aloof, the bloggers at Curbed wrote dialogue captions for them. The woman says, oh, the galleries were wonderful today, weren't they, Adrian?

The man replies, shut up, Natalia. You know I hate it when you talk in the lobby. And no eye contact with the concierge. Then there's an image of the man moodily gazing out of a tall window. You've become cold to me, Natalia. Can it be that Miele ovens, sub-zeros, individual private storage, and floor-to-ceiling windows don't bring you happiness? My whole belief system is in

doubt. And you're right, the views are spectacular. Hannah thought she'd seen it all. And then she came across an ad campaign for these condos on Renwick Street, which is in an area called Hudson Square. It's right along the Hudson River on the west side of Manhattan, sort of sandwiched between the West Village and Tribeca. And the Scalys were not generic. They were distinct, custom-shot characters. A boxer with a big bushy beard, tattoo sleeves, but 1920s gym clothes. There was an astronomer who seemed to pale from the age of Benjamin Franklin. And there was an Asian woman who was wearing kind of an aristocratic French wig and corset, but sort of a punk rock attitude. Our headline for our first post about it was,

And then, to use one of Hana's favorite words, things got even more bonkers. Pictures of these characters started appearing around the city. At first, she thought they were ads for, like, Chanel No. 5. started appearing around the city. At first, she thought there were ads for, like, Chanel No. 5. In these ads where it's just them and the building isn't even pictured, which is quite unusual. Normally a scaley is there because it gives a sense of scale to the building, but to put a character by itself with no picture of the building with it

is sort of like now these people are stand-ins for the architecture. That's kind of interesting and weird and unusual. The models started showing up in costume at events to lure people to buy these condos. And then there's the picture of the building itself. The real Renwick Street is very short and narrow, but in the architectural rendering, these very modern looking condos are perched along an 18th century canal with like clipper ships and people wearing, you know, colonial garb. And I just learned this recently, the official term, like the official architectural term for the rendering of a new building is called the hero shot. Like the building is a superhero that you're looking up at. And in the case of the hero

of 15 Renwick, you've got a blimp just casually floating by tall ships and their masts that appear to be about as tall as the building. And I love also that the ear in is still in there with the neon sign. So at least maybe that's the time traveling portal that they use to get to never, never New Amsterdam land. Exactly. Now, I mentioned on this podcast that I love New York history. I always see layers of the past around me. Like I actually happen to know that Hudson Square back in the 1600s was farmland that was owned by the Roosevelt's. The Roosevelt's, the ancestors of Franklin, Eleanor, and Theodore.

So I became obsessed with this ad campaign, particularly because I'm not the target audience. I don't have a couple million to spend on a condo. So who came up with this? What were they thinking or smoking? We are adamantly opposed to these scalies that you're describing. We never put people in renderings We are adamantly opposed to these scalies that you're describing. We never put people in renderings because we think that people don't necessarily identify with the people and you can always, you know, they never look good.

So that's where Amy Frankel was coming from before she started working on this campaign for her company, If Studio. But then the team started doing some research in the area and they were impressed by how long it's been a hub of craftsmanship. And really the characters tell the story of these creative class people, these creative iconoclasts that lived there then and have lived there for all time and live there even now. Of course, in the last two decades, the area has gotten very expensive, and a lot of those bohemian craftsmen have moved out. But New York also has a very wealthy creative class that can afford to buy there and might find this ad campaign really fun. Jennifer Connelly, John Slattery, Daniel Radcliffe,

Sophia Coppola have all lived there. And it's not just Hollywood people. You know, in the West Village, you've got Annie Leibovitz, Calvin Klein, Julian Schnabel. In Soho, there's David Byrne, Alicia Keys, Laurie Anderson. Taylor Swift, when she moved to New York, was looking to buy a condo in Hudson Square, but she went with Tribeca. Or so I read on Curbed. But these characters weren't selling the idea of a super successful creative class. They were each created to personify a different feature of the building. So for example, the whole team together decided that rather than your basic gym,

they wanted to offer something that was more distinctive, so they decided to put a boxing gym in. So therefore, we have a boxer as one of the characters. One of the apartments has a beautiful terrace that overlooks, you know, the west side. So we put an astronomer in to tell that story. I want to read like the backstory, you know, I want to hear about the astronomer and his 200 years in Manhattan. Exactly, exactly. And those 18th century French wigs and clothes were not totally random, according to Athena Azevedo, project

manager. New Yorkers had, being a worldly city, had influence from the French. And when we did the research, we did see that, you know, American costume at the higher aristocratic level did have that French influence in it as well. Did you look at steampunk as well? Because there seems to be, in terms of contemporary... We did not look at steampunk. We weren't even considering the vocabulary of that word at all. Neither was Kevin Cimini. So, hey, I don't usually have mics in my face, but what's up? Kevin co-founded the company March, which designed these renderings.

He usually renders more, you know, normal, non-fantastic buildings, so he was totally psyched to work on this project. And by the way, their office is right below the Manhattan Bridge, so you'll hear the train rumbling above us. We were leaning over his computer and looking at all the different versions of the hero shot, which didn't make it. There was the colonial one, then there was one that felt a little bit more like Gangs of New York. It was a little more like wharf-y and gray and in like barrels and boats. Yeah, like I can imagine the boxer character would do very well in the Gangs of New York area, but I don't know about the astronomer. I think he'd get his telescopes done.

Yeah, probably, you know, it wouldn't have been as good for him or anybody. The boxer's really one, probably the only one that could have held his own. I was surprised they even considered a Gangs of New York background. I mean, the production design on that Martin Scorsese movie was awesome, but the Five Points was still a dangerous slum. And then this was the other runner-up. Which is this more bucolic scene

with cows grazing in front of the building. Are those British troops? Yeah. Again, it's what we found online, but troops from the past, yes. It's just funny because, I mean, Manhattan was occupied by the British during the Revolutionary War. Yeah, there's a lot, yep. In fact, those look more like the palace guards at Buckingham Palace.

There was an idea that we weren't just going to put, I don't know, red coats, and those were the British, and American soldiers. I mean, it was kind of this idea that they were good. If we use soldiers, it wasn't fighting soldiers. They're talking on the streets and they're wandering around. And it's meant to, again, it was meant to be more like fun and dreamlike. George Washington had his headquarters there at one point, we discovered when we did our historical research. Here's Athena Azevedo, the project manager. And we brought it to the meeting and we just decided, you know, we have to consider the times now in terms of we aren't at war with the British anymore and what is worth celebrating from that period of history. The hero shot they ended up with is totally adorable.

But not everyone loved it. When Vice had that article online about the wealth disparity and the craziness of New York real estate, these 15 Renwick images were the cover images and the ones that were referred to for obvious reason about this kind of aristocracy, I think. I reached out to that journalist from Vice, but she didn't respond. But I can quote you some of what she wrote in her article about the ad campaign.

She said, it's an absurd way of attracting attention to yet another gilded Manhattan development, but also a cogent reminder of the erosion of the American experiment and of the looming class war that could erupt at any point. All that's missing are towering cakes and peasants wielding pitchforks. Hannah Alberts gets why this may have struck a raw nerve. There has been a lot of criticism from New Yorkers who argue that building more luxury housing stock isn't going to help make the city more affordable for people who actually live here. They're just lining the developers' pockets. But while there is massive inequality in New York City housing, I don't know if just a super whimsical, silly ad campaign is the right thing to pin it on.

I mean, personally, I think the fantasy world they created was so appealing. It made the pain of what we can't afford hurt again. I mean, come on, we all know that rich get lots of space and great views. But it's like, wait a second, they also get to skip through time. Are you freaking kidding me? But Kevin thinks that fantasy should be democratized, should be part of every architectural rendering. Just in the same way that photography has reached a level of fine art status, like this should be as creative or more than that because you can create new worlds.

You can create things that don't, it can look like it exists, but you have the benefit of throwing money, gravity, anything out the window. You know what I mean? So, I mean, that's kind of what rendering in the real estate market is. It's like showing a future that's like one year away. It's like sci-fi, you know, 2016. It's not that interesting because most of it's just trying to show what's going to exist on that site in one year from now. But the cool thing about being able to create in these worlds is you can make it 100 years.

Because in the grand scheme of things, we're all Scalies. But it's a nice fantasy to imagine that wherever you live, you're the hero in your own hero shot. And if this group is going to create scalies with that much character, and Curbed isn't going to write dialogue for them, then I'm doing it. It takes too long to untie this corset, so I'm going to sit on the Matrix Granite bathtub and watch how the water reflects the herringbone pattern of the marble tiles. If only Ben Franklin were here. He had such nimble fingers. Don't give me that look, Marguerite. I'll have time to use the boxing gym and the fitness center.

And play backgammon in our wood-paneled lobby. Oh, Butch, you're being such a bore. Fetch me the horseless carriage in our private parking garage. I have a blimp to catch. You are so steampunk. We are not steampunk. How many times must I remind you? Well, that's it for this week's show. Thanks for listening. Special thanks to Hannah Alberts,

Amy Frankel, Athena Azevedo, Toshi Eide, Kevin Cimini, Jules Henderson, Matt Fidler, and Becca Forsman. You can like Imaginary Worlds on Facebook or leave a comment on iTunes.

I tweet at emalinski. The show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org, where I put images from the 15 Renwick ad campaign. Seems someone has been biting me. Fetch me my trousers at once. No, not those. Those are my time travel trousers. Those are my tea trousers. That's it. Those ones. My fighting trousers. One more thing. If you do a Google image search on scalies to see what these things look like,

the first thing that pops up, or even like, the first thing that pops up, or even like the 20th thing that pops up, are not little people in architectural renderings. Do you know what a furry is? Well, I've discovered that a scaly is like a furry, except it's a sexualized cartoon reptile. So you've been warned. There are some things you can't unsee.