Given our nostalgia for “Mad Men”-era Manhattan, it’s surprising that the people at Chock Full O'Nuts, who just opened a new, revival location on West 23rd Street, didn’t try to recreate the sleepy, inward, atmosphere of that classic city diner.

The coffee at the new Chock isn’t bad, and the donuts are great, but the interior, with it’s blank walls, and small wood tables and chairs, looks like the inside of any chain coffee shop.  Why didn’t the designers build a long counter along the length of the shop, at least, and light the place with neon?  The only part of the store that feels right is the cake display, a vitrine filled with voluptuous cream pies and layer cakes that really do look like they’re from another era.

(Photo by Michael Evans for The New York Times, 1969.)

A very fine $20K house prototype, from “Small Scale, Big Change” at MoMA.

from Planet-mag.com

($20K House VIII. Newbern, Alabama. 2009. By Rural Studio, Auburn University. Image: Timothy Hursley.)

An essay in the Op Ed section of Tuesday’s paper celebrates the funky, functioning chaos of Penn Station, without any regard for the gorgeous, old demolished building.  Could there have been a way to have both?

Nowadays there’s a citywide contempt for new hi-rise/mixed-use/condo buildings, perhaps because so many of the existing ones remain half-occupied.  Nonetheless I’m thrilled about Frank Gehry’s new tower under construction at Beekman Place.  It won’t replace the still-startling absence of the Twin Towers, but it will bring a much-needed super-tall figure to the landscape south of Canal Street.

When seen from the Manhattan entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge the structure, clad in crenelated metal panels, is a singular, majestic presence.  And when seen from Brooklyn, beside an array of Wall Street towers, it’s the loveliest of them all.