Plenty of students and faculty on the university campus of staid red-brick buildings have ideas on how to put the money to good use.
Warren & Wetmore designed many relatively staid buildings - including, in 1916, 927 Fifth Avenue, at 74th Street, the Renaissance-style apartment building where the red-tailed hawks have been nesting.
New York is jam-packed with these visual grace notes: chromatic terra cotta inlays, ornate second-story grilles, fanciful water towers, staid buildings that end in grandiloquent Mayan or Babylonian crowns, cast-iron fronts with elegant patterns.
Harry could actually discern the fronts of staid, old-fashioned buildings that loomed indefinitely up into the blackness.
Previous incarnations on the site were more impressive - this version, after a fire, is a rather staid official building, but the appeal is the surrounding gardens: a gorgeous scene of grass, flower, trees, ponds - all free to wander.
The final seconds of the game were accompanied by pandemonium at a decibel level never before achieved in that staid old building.
The staid, red-brick building with dark green trim is two blocks from Aspen Ski Company's Silver Queen Gondola, so it does not offer the ski-in access of its closest rival, the Little Nell.
The cab stopped outside a staid old Georgian building of some pale-colored stone.
But opponents, including civic groups, architecture critics and some local politicians, called the buildings too staid and too foreign to Times Square, as well as too tall and too bulky.
I loved the staid old building and its sense of Scottish responsibility.