It was not yet full, though some tenants were in place — one of them, Gear Patrol, describes itself as a publication for “young affluent men seeking inspiration for a life well lived.’’
In a more innocent time, buildings went up, tenants moved in and the typing and squabbling and clock-watching that characterized a day that predictably began at one time and concluded eight hours later got underway. But now work happens all the time, deceptively, under an aesthetic pretense of wellness — the white walls, the dispensers of cucumber water, the blond wood, the furniture arranged to facilitate healthy sociality.
When so many professional spaces are meant to look like a spa in Sonoma, California, or a hotel lobby in Helsinki, Finland, anyone in the position of bringing a new property to the commercial real estate market is forced to do something that might marginally differentiate it from everything else.
Absent of what the developers ultimately came up with, there would be little reason to pay too much attention to 236 Fifth Ave., just north of Madison Square. The 11-story building belongs to the Kaufman Organization, an enterprise that dates to the Lower East Side in the 1910s. Michael Kazmierski, the company’s director of acquisitions, explained to me that its latest address needed to “articulate a story,’’ to “bring something that is authentic.’’
The real estate industry, so often responsible for eviscerating the past, also theatrically exploits it when it suits its own agenda. For this project, Kaufman hired a historian — not a Ken Burns kind of historian but a man named Kevin Draper, who runs an outfit called New York Historical Tours. He also has a sideline business consulting to real estate interests.
The story — the authentic thing — would be a 100-foot mural that paid tribute to the neighborhood as it was more than 100 years ago. It would feature a famous, turn-of-the-century pinup girl named Evelyn Nesbit on the south side of the building, an image easily seen from the park just a few blocks away.
At the time of Nesbit’s fame, the area just north of Madison Square was known as the Tenderloin: a place of corruption, vice, sexual exploitation. It bumped up against the wealthiest residential neighborhood in the city, where Edith Wharton lived and found her richest material.
A somber portrait of what inequality looked like during the first Gilded Age might have been one way to adorn the building. But that would have proved an unlikely draw for high-end leasers. Instead, developers commissioned Tristan Eaton, a muralist, to dress an image of Nesbit in a kaleidoscope of local, historical references from the early 20th century.
Nesbit had a long history of being used. The chorus girl and actress who was the model for the original “Gibson girl” had even appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair. A butcher in Pittsburgh used her picture to sell sausages, never seeking her permission.
Famously, Nesbit met architect Stanford White, in New York, when she was 16 and he was 47. For years, writers described White’s “seduction” of her, equivocating on whether Nesbit had in fact been assaulted even though the difference in their ages should have ended the debate. In his 2018 book, “The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing,” Simon Baatz, an academic, refused to proceed in a similar vein, establishing that White had raped her. White had behaved as practiced abusers do, cultivating Nesbit’s mother first and then sending her out of town so he could more easily access her daughter. He kept a special apartment near Madison Square, away from his family, for the purpose of luring women. White got Nesbit to his apartment on the pretext that he was having people over and then plied her with Champagne. The parallels to what was described during Bill Cosby’s trial are vivid.
Nesbit, who stayed with White for a long time, eventually married a rich, controlling depressive named Henry Kendall Thaw who murdered White in one of the many buildings White had brought into existence, a building near 236 Fifth Ave. The courtroom proceedings following the 1906 crime are still referred to as the “trial of the century.’’
When I asked the artist how he thought about Nesbit’s past as he created the mural, he told me he liked bringing her to her “original glory,” that “something felt right about that.” But what is the original glory of a woman shown in her early 20s who was sexually assaulted as a teenager and pushed to cater to male attention by an impoverished mother who sought to profit from her daughter’s beauty?
The use of Nesbit’s image is not a teaching moment, asking us to keep thinking about the abusive powers of celebrated men. It is a selling moment, confirming that victimization can be ignored and commodified, that the vulnerable — long after they have suffered and died — can still be prey.
The day after I went to see the mural which was near completion, I received an email from the publicist working with the developer that said the following: “Thought you might be interested to know that the building has seen an uptick in leasing inquires thanks to the mural.” Kaufman had just signed a fashion accessories firm on the ninth floor.