The Brasserie restaurant will soon be gone from the Seagram Building along with The Four Seasons, just as we predicted a few weeks ago.
Sheldon Werdiger, head of marketing and design development for Aby Rosen’s RFR Realty, told us by e-mail: “The Brasserie wants to terminate their lease early. With their departure we have the opportunity to reprogram all of the restaurant spaces in their entirety and reinvigorate the dining experience in New York’s two most iconoclastic restaurant spaces.”
We’ll assume Werdiger meant “iconic” rather than “iconoclastic.” But he wasn’t doing us a a favor in confirming my report. It was part of a lengthy, polite rebuttal to my somewhat impolite June 7 essay where I called Four Seasons co-owner Julian Niccolini, who’s accused of sexual abuse, and Rosen “pigs” for bringing the landmark restaurant to ruin.
Now, Rosen has mostly been a more-than-worthy landlord of Seagram and Lever House, another landmark he owns across the avenue. I was honored to first report his plans for a sculpture garden and restaurant at Lever and an 11th floor terrace at Seagram.
But at Seagram, while art-collecting Rosen clearly appreciates Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s International-style masterpiece, he seems to think it’s on the dull side and needs to be hipped up.
Check out the scary sculpture resembling a pile of turds currently on the tower’s normally very welcoming plaza.
As for The Four Seasons: Nobody expects him to gut the place in the dead of night once its lease expires in July 2016. (The space will no longer be called The Four Seasons after that, when Rosen is expected to install a different restaurant.)
But fear of a slow, gradual nibbling away might be what prompted the LPC to block what he’s called “minor” changes — a characterization with which some architectural critics agree while still strongly opposing them.
To take RFR’s beefs with my column in turn:
Werdiger took exception to my writing, “Rosen hopes to mess with Philip Johnson’s classic design.” He claims RFR and architect Annabelle Selldorf “are working under the advisement of the Landmarks Preservation Commission” on “restoration” of the space.
Well, they have no choice but to deal with LPC, which has legal authority over proposed changes.
As for Werdiger saying the LPC rejected very few of 100 changes Rosen wanted, the two it nixed were of the essence: It barred making upper walnut panels which separate the Pool Room and mezzanine “operable” (meaning they could be folded back as lower panels can be) and “to restore the original Philip Johnson 1959 screen design in the Grill Room.”
Retooling the walnut panels to make them seem to disappear would undercut the room’s character, as a host of architects told the LPC.
Moreover, Rosen did not propose restoring an “original” screen which separates the Grill Room’s bar and dining area. The opposite: he wanted to eliminate the crackled glass and bronze screen divider, now in place, for movable planters — a variation on planters that were part of the 1959 design, but which worked so poorly that Johnson himself replaced them with the screen in 1983.
Despite the LPC’s firm rejections, Rosen inspires no confidence in this week’s New Yorker magazine, where he’s quoted as saying, “We can change everything,” and, snarking of the glass divider, “It’s a loose item, so you can pick it up and move it anywhere you want.”
Werdiger didn’t like my saying either that Rosen has long given Niccolini and Four Seasons co-owner Alex von Bidder “fits,” and blames them for not maintaining the place properly. But Rosen had for several years made them feel increasingly unwelcome and depicted them as out of touch.
The landlord’s icy blasts, an open secret in the restaurant world, undercut them precisely at a time when they needed support in an increasingly competitive Midtown dining scene.
Yanking the beloved Picasso “Tricorne” curtain mural last year was just one way to remind Niccolini and von Bidder who was boss.
Although Werdiger defended its removal as “a right provided under the lease,” and Rosen claimed the Picasso was endangered by a steam leak, it didn’t speak well that Rosen in February 2014 first intended to remove it at 3 a.m. on a Sunday — until the independent Landmarks Conservancy, which owns the “Tricorne,” got wind of it.
I’d also written that Rosen would “have us believe that replacing certain walnut panels with Andy Warhol prints” could improve on Johnson’s works.
“Inaccurate — we never proposed such a thing as you describe,” Werdiger scolded me.
Point to Werdiger: I should have phrased it differently. But the effect of swinging the panels open to reveal Warhols on the wall sure looks like what I described. And it looks like Rosen’s heart is more with Warhol than with Johnson’s walnut