Remembering the New York Coliseum

If you go to Columbus Circle, on West 59th Street next to the edge of Central Park, you'll find the blue twin towers of the Time Warner Center. This mighty structure is the home to numerous high end restaurants and stores and spas, luxury apartments and hotel rooms, the music venue Jazz at Lincoln Center, and the cable network CNN.

It's a true 21st century multi-use, multi-purpose behemoth. It's hard to believe that, twenty years ago, what sat on this very spot was an empty shell, the abandoned New York Coliseum.

The New York Coliseum was constructed in the early 1950s by the master builder Robert Moses. A huge post-war project, the building was a kitchy, tacky piece of 1950s nightmare architecture. It looked like an old-school television set without a screen, a boring lump of bad design.

In case you were wondering what I thought of it, I thought it was really ugly.

But for decades it thrived as a convention center, with events like the auto show, flower shows, home expos, and many others being held there every year. Then, after the Jacob Javits Center opened in the 1980s, the Coliseum went into a severe decline, closing in 1986 except for the very rare event.

As kid, whenever I passed it by, I was always amazed that this huge space was just sitting there, existing there, empty and largely abandoned. The only time I remember seeing it used was, once a year, when a bunch of bright red neon letters would be put over the entry, announcing the Coliseum as the location for the New York City Firefighters Annual Physical Exam. In the summer of 1996 I went to the Coliseum for the first and last time when there was a small exhibit about the New Deal (I got to see one of the microphones that FDR used for his Fireside Chats behind a glass screen). The exhibit was great but I remember thinking that the Coliseum was a depressing, sad, old building that was more than long in the tooth and probably doomed.

I was right. In 2000, a year before the original Twin Towers were destroyed, the Coliseum was torn down. By 2004 the Time Warner Center had risen to take its place. Columbus Center was reborn. 

And another piece of NYC passed into history, as unloved with its creator.