As soon as you enter the door, before even paying to get in there's a board with posters and such and a wish box! If you're around the area, stop by, write down your wish or wishes on a piece of paper which is already attached with the pen that's also attached. I'll be collecting the wishes soon!
I'm in complete shock. I hate to see this building go. The weird architecture somehow appealed to me as it did to so many others! This just made me so depressed; I have no further words except that I truly hope that the new building serves good to the community.
"When St. Vincent’s hospital finally swings a wrecking ball at the O’Toole Building—the endearingly awkward, formerly white, three-layered stack with tear-off perforations and protruding upper floors on Seventh Avenue and West 12th Street—it will be for the greater good of Greenwich Village. The medical tower that rises in its place will serve the community and fortify the hospital’s tottering finances.
But this improvement comes at the cost of eccentricity. Albert Ledner designed the slightly goofy exemplar of sixties modernism as the headquarters of a now-defunct National Maritime Union. (That’s how obsolete the building has become: It evokes a time when Manhattan was still a seaman’s base and an organized-labor town.) Part of the structure’s charm is its oddness, which seems to increase with age. As block after Manhattan block acquired a high-gloss sameness, the “overbite building,” as it is known, has remained a folly, one of those defiantly impractical structures that somehow survived in this city’s rugged real-estate ecology. Until now."
-Justin Davidson, NY Magazine
And another article from the NY Times.
