Image: Dean Kaufman

While Ian hobnobs somewhere that involves an airplane that doesn’t have wifi (or so says he all), Official Edificial Pinch Hitter Stephen Zacks steps in with a report from an Access Restricted lecture, held in the gloriously photographed space above, to which our access was certainly restricted. Read on for extremely illuminating ruminations on the state of the city, the building of architecture, and the reality of life. Not quite synecdoches, but close enough for now.

We were in J.P Morgan’s penthouse apartment on 14 Wall Street on Wednesday night drinking wine and gazing out over the Financial District while hobnobbing with a group of architecture know-it-alls, among them the esteemed Karrie Jacobs (once upon a time sandbagged herself as editor at Dwell, which we suspect is a healthy thing for the progress of both magazines and writers), who is getting ready to pitch her next top-secret book (on silence).

To the west we saw David Childs’ subtly angled 7 World Trade, with its James Carpenter-orchestrated radiant glass and its Jenny Holzer glowing mauve text. Across the way, the unstable Deutsche Bank building (which killed two firefighters two years ago) by Shreve, Lamb and Harmon (of Empire State fame) was being literally deconstructed from the top down. North of I.M. Pei’s World Financial Center, we saw the new 43-story Goldman Sachs building by Henry Cobb topped out and promising to be as tacky as its 1970s brother but expected to win LEED Gold anyway. (Do you lose points if you keep nearly killing people during the build?) And the Gwathmey Siegel-designed W Hotel was rising on Washington Street. Looking down, the spectacular neo-gothic Trinity church and its neighboring graveyard made us deeply question our reticence about the neo-traditional. And further west we saw the World Trade Center site slowly, slowly developing.

Which made us wonder where all the supposedly terrible architecture of the Oughts is that all of the weepy silver-linings-of-recession articles are referring to. Not that there’s any great architecture there, but is it any worse than the architecture that came before? Or is it, mostly, a bit better?

In any case, we were there for the Robert Neuwirth installment of the Access Restricted nomadic lecture series, in which the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council pulls a Rockefeller on Open House New York and brings (limited members of) the public into the rarefied heights and recesses of Wall Street. Neuwirth’s talk on the informal economies of cities goes where a few smart white people have gone before—the slums of Kibera, in Nairobi, Kenya; the trash heaps and débrouillards and street markets of Lagos, Nigeria; the shanjai, or fake brands, of China and Chinatown; the shantytowns and ad hoc infrastructure of Rio de Janeiro—but with the eye of a journalist and storyteller rather than an artist or designer.

We expect the resulting book to be more George Packer or Ryzsard Kapuscinski than Rem Koolhaas or Marjetica Potrc—though we love them all—that is, in the mode of great non-fiction reporting that has all of the funny anecdotes and describes all of the fascinating surfaces and appearances but also creates an engaging narrative. Neuwirth’s story begins with people like Dick Sears (yes, that Sears), who started off hawking watches on Chicago trains and built a retail empire, hawkers of pirated printings of Shakespeare who popularized the Bard in 17th century London, and Morgan himself, who apparently was a great admirer of privateers and had a sailboat called Corsair. The story continues on to the thievery of today’s formal economy, in which the likes of Enron and Bernard Madoff stole billions of dollars from investors and helped bring ruin to the entire financial system. In other words, what is the difference between the illegality of the formal economy and the informal one?

We appreciate the spirit but would just point out that both Enron and Madoff did things that brought harm to thousands of people and resulted in jail time. And we are skeptical of the implication that the legal apparatus that protects inventions and creative products and people from theft should be abandoned. We think that laws are the basis of civil society, and that when the laws don’t conform to the good they need to be changed. But we think this kind of close reading and reporting on the informal economy of cities is the best way to bring the law into a reasonable accordance with the actual lives and practices of people. It’s part of a trajectory of urban research and reporting that we hope will help bring better infrastructure and services to the shantytowns, regularize and protect the rights of street traders, and allow peddlers a clearer path to the middle-class, so that they can have the freedom to immerse themselves in enormous debt like us.