Ada Louise Huxtable's New York As a rule, there are few things as stale in literature as yesterday's news columns anthologized. A 1,000-word essay prepared for immediate consumption usually doesn't read very well years later. Ada Louise Huxtable's words, however, cut through the decades cleanly. They form an astonishing continuum. It began in 1963, when The New York Times appointed her its first full-time architecture critic -- making her also the first at any daily newspaper -- and ended last month, when she filed her last column as architecture critic of The Wall Street Journal. Ms. Huxtable died Monday at 91. The photograph of her in pearls with a 19-cent pen says a lot. She cared about beauty and about utility. To Ms. Huxtable, the best buildings served the people who used them. Otherwise, no amount of marble, crystal or stainless steel sufficed, no matter how cleverly wrought or masterfully packaged. She started her career believing this and ended it that way, a half century later. Her convictions would have counted for a lot less, though, if she hadn't been able to distill them so memorably. Following are some of the keener and funnier observations from her writings about New York, where she lived all her life. They come from The Times and a few of her 11 books. Our selection stops short of her recent work for The Wall Street Journal. The Journal is planning a full page of excerpts in its Leisure & Arts section on Wednesday. For those in positions of power, architecture has no redeeming value; it is a frill to be eliminated as a virtuous, cost-cutting, vote-getting measure; it can be abandoned without regret. It took today's mean mentality to see cathedrals and courthouses as 'waste space.'" - "The Unreal America" (1997). On the demolition of Pennsylvania Station: "It's time we stopped talking about our affluent society. We are an impoverished society. It is a poor society indeed that can't pay for these amenities; that has no money for anything except expressways to rush people out of our dull and deteriorating cities." - The New York Times, May 5, 1963. On the discarded sculptural elements from Penn Station: "Tossed into the Secaucus graveyard are about 25 centuries of classical culture and the standards of style, elegance and grandeur that it gave to the dreams and constructions of Western man. That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump." - The Times, May 26, 1968. On Marcel Breuer's plan for a tower over Grand Central Terminal, which was ultimately rejected by the Landmarks Preservation Commission: "Mr. Breuer has done an excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it weren't awful." - The Times, June 20, 1968. On zoning that rewards developers with greater building density for providing public amenities: "The city presides over this blockbuster zoning-roulette in a planning charade, routinely endorsing the pop-up Frankenstein towers after a ritual display of concern and compromise." - "The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered" (1984). As much as we need open space, it can be as destructive of an urban pattern in the wrong place as it can be beneficial in the right one. As usual, it will be calculated not by planners but by profiteers." - The Times, March 21, 1965. On the CBS Building, 51 West 52nd Street, by Eero Saarinen: "It is not, like so much of today's large-scale construction, a handy commercial package, a shiny wraparound envelope, a packing case, a box of cards, a trick with mirrors. It does not look like a cigar lighter, a vending machine, a nutmeg grater. It is a building, in the true, classic sense: a complete design in which technology, function and aesthetics are conceived and executed integrally for its purpose." - The Times, March 13, 1966. On the nearby Hilton New York, 1335 Avenue of the Americas, by William B. Tabler: "A look that suggests that one might put change in at the top and get something out of the bottom." - The Times, June 30, 1963. "The history of the despoliation of parks and the loss of precious urban open land can be charted by good purposes." - The Times, March 24, 1968. "Without variety of function and humanity of scale, the city becomes monstrous and insupportable." - The Times, Feb. 12, 1968. "Absurdity is destiny in New York." - The Times, Nov. 16, 1975. On the Gallery of Modern Art, 2 Columbus Circle, by Edward Durell Stone: "The new museum resembles a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops. It begs for a canal or garden setting." - The Times, Feb. 25, 1964. On Mr. Stone's General Motors Building, 767 Fifth Avenue: "Behind the marble cladding and bay windows, architecture, like the proverbial thin man in the fat man's body, is signaling wildly to get out." - The Times, Oct. 1, 1968. "It has taken modern corporate taste to produce the cheap monument." - The Times, Sept. "I was not brought up on Disney; nothing at home wore ears." - "The Unreal America." "Doctors' offices are where Danish modern went to die." - The Times, March 5, 1981. On the Ford Foundation Building, 320 East 43rd Street, by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo: "Ford will never give most New Yorkers anything except this civic gesture of beauty and excellence, and that is a grant of some importance in a world where spirit and soul are deadened by the speculative cheapness of the environment." - The Times, Nov. 26, 1967. On the Staten Island housing boom that accompanied construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge: "A haphazard abandon that could not be better calculated to destroy the countryside if it had been planned by enemy action." - The Times, Aug. 9, 1965. "The peculiarity of New York is that while the avenues are its show, the side streets are its soul." - The Times, Oct. 6, 1968. On the Westway highway and landfill project along the Hudson River, halted in part by environmental objections: "The striped bass were the only winners." - "Architecture, Anyone?" Co-op City is an example of a singularly American, or New York, product. Its size and scale are monumental; its environmental and social planning is minimal." - The Times, Nov. 25, 1968. On the World Trade Center, by Minoru Yamasaki: "Who's afraid of the big, bad buildings? Everyone, because there are so many things about gigantism that we just don't know. The gamble of triumph or tragedy at this scale - and ultimately it is a gamble - demands an extraordinary payoff. The trade center towers could be the start of a new skyscraper age or the biggest tombstones in the world." - The Times, May 29, 1966.