A Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsel Of Architecture!

We have looked into the eyes of the enemy and . . . found him refreshingly non-offensive, completely unlike the profination we expected:

And so it is now that Toll Brothers is making its presence known in at least three of the five boroughs, Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan. Until recently their name had not often been mentioned among the usual ranks of New York City developers. But outside of the city, where their presence approaches ubiquity, they are best known for creating luxury one-family residences.

A Google search of this firm, whose 2005 revenue was nearly $5.5 billion, turns up what amounts to a high-tech, digitized groan. Type in McMansion and chances are you’re only a few keystrokes away from a reference to Toll Brothers. They are to houses what Martha Stewart is to interiors — and you know what she’s like! Just in case you don’t: She endeavors to bring a whiff of spurious style, a soupçon of upwardly aesthetic aspiration, to the newly moneyed middle classes who raid her various ventures to fill their newly minted McMansions. Toll Brothers has been similarly assailed for cheapening the fabric of the hinterlands with the debased simulacra of true taste.

. . .

As such, it would be pleasant to dismiss [Toll Brothers’ One Ten Third] as worthless and unimaginative, but that, I fear, is not the case. True, a high-rise does not look especially apposite amid the generally lower building-stock. But Third Avenue doesn’t look especially good along most points of its career, so this new addition cannot be seen as a major profanation.

(Thanks, Brian.)