Pictured in this photograph is a lovely home that sat, still but no longer, on the shore of leafy fashionable Union Square. The fashion tells you it was taken some time ago. The fashion’s dark palette may further indicate the mood—the kind of national grief our country had not yet encountered. This was the day lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed, the day the cortège winding its way from Washington DC to Springfield, Illinois and bearing the catafalque of the the first US President to be assassinated found itself in New York City. It found itself amid the hushed, cowed, war-addled, grief-stricken crowds lining its route here in lower Manhattan. It found itself under the window of a terrified six year old little boy. He sits here above the red arrow indicating his presence, the first US President to have witnessed the funeral of one of his predecessors. Theodore Roosevelt was the first from his storied wealthy Dutch merchant-class old American monied family tree to fall from the family business and, oddly, up, up into the heights of public service. We owe so much to him and the legacy his family left us, here in NYC, in these United States, and in the world at large. One wonders how much of that legacy can be traced directly to this very solemn shocking moment captured arbitrarily in one of the world’s very first photographs.
I was walking across 54th Street yesterday, stopped at 205, snapped a photo, and recalled a friend of mine had once moved into an apartment here some twenty years ago. I recall he was paying 1100.00/month. I recall recoiling at the price. Today 1100.00/month would be a steal. Especially as I know a bit more about the building.
Opened in 1902 as the Hotel Harding at a cost of over half a million dollars (over $20 million today), 205 West 54th Street was the most expensive hotel built in midtown at the time. Its two-story base of rusticated Indiana limestone rose around a monumental entrance of four pilasters topped with a Juliet balcony and an arcade of Romanesque windows, a centerpiece that echoed itself up the red brick and limestone trimmed facade. The ninth story was topped with a deep heavily articulated cornice and the tenth and eleventh were set in a mansard, the eleventh boasting eight richly dormered oversized windows.
I do not write from history. Its facade is perfectly preserved.
Like most of its contemporaries, it was both a transient and residential property. And its unique position on Planet Earth was perhaps partly responsible for the equally unique cast of characters who called it home.
Oweny Madden grew up nearby in the worst of the Irish slums of Hell’s Kitchen. He ran with a gang called The Gophers and was not afraid of a fight. In and out of prison most of his young life, he was released from Sing Sing in 1923 just as Prohibition was in as full a swing as Swing.
His buddy Larry Fay was running a speakeasy out of the basement of the Harding called Club Intime. Larry needed some muscle to keep the likes of tougher gangsters, particularly Dutch Schultz, at bay. Oweny, the man not afraid to use a fist, a pistol, a Tommy gun, or a bomb, was his man. In a secret distillery on 26th Street, Oweny brewed a bathtub beer he named for himself and Madden’s was the gold standard of the Jazz Age. Oweny Madden was the real life Gatsby. And soon, the Intime was the most popular speakeasy in a city full of them, perfectly situated as it was in a basement of a beautiful building between the kitchen called Hell and a glittering district of Theatre.
Installed at the door was one Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan. Born in Waco, her place of birth and larger than life demeanor earned her the honorific for which she was mostly known: Texas. Texas Guinan. Texas had been a silent film star, a producer, a working gal, if you will, and graduated to, let’s say, an entrepreneur. So oily was she from the law she survived dozens and dozens of attempts to shut her speakeasy down, and so snappy was she with a quip, she was an inspiration for perhaps my favorite fictional New Yorker, one Bugs Bunny. When Texas walked into a room you knew it. You heard her. You heard her yell her trademark greeting: Hello Suckers!
Texas and Oweny sat on thrones over a kingdom of Broadway stars, major politicians, distinguished authors, Gilded Age scions, rum runners, punks, and thugs. The two were meant for each other. And deserved each other. They drove one another crazy. It was amour fou, fever love, and had they not other outlets for their rage, like the murder of Dutch Schultz, IN the Intime, they might have killed each other.
Living upstairs at the time was another pistol with a lip, one Mary Jane West. You know her as Mae. Texas and Mae were birds of a feather and of course Oweny fell for her dubious charms as well. Out of love he produced her Broadway play and out of love they fell, both landing in the clink for its dubious title and subject: Sex.
Mae then fell and fell hard for Oweny’s bag man, a smooth talking hoofer with a head of slicked back black hair, one George Ranft. Until he was known as George Raft.
All of them would head up to Texas’ rooms for a string of seances, attended as well by Vanderbilts, a Whitney or two, Norma Shearer. Drunk on Madden beer, they’d chat with another black haired and slicked back screen idol, dearly departed as he was, one Rudolph Valentino.
The Great Depression was depressing and all this jazzy fun would finally come to an end. Harassed to no end at the Harding, Oweny and Texas took their ball and went to Harlem to run the Cotton Club and promote boxing on the side, the glittering stars followed the sun to Hollywood, and the Harding’s fortunes fell with the city’s in the dark last quarter of the 20th Century.
But no fortunes last, even poor ones.
Today the Albamarle, as it has been rechristened, never looked better. And a smallish one bedroom apartment is presently on the market for $620K.
And I think it would go for a lot more if potential buyers had but a shadow of a whisper of a clue as to the fast-talking glittering glowing brawling biting bombed and bombing ghosts roaming its halls and waiting for the next scheduled seance to air their century-old grievances.
The Metropolitan Life Clock Tower on the eastern shore of Madison Square Park took the crown of tallest building in the world in 1909. It would wear it until 1913 when the Woolworth Building snatched it away. The lessened Met Life Clock Tower had other bragging rights left, though. Most obviously, it stands as a more than loving nod to the famous and famously rebuilt Bell Tower in Venice, erected in its recognizable form in the Renaissance of the 1500s, damaged many times and the last major rebuild after an utter collapse at the beginning of the 20th Century.
And The Met Life Tower was not the only building to turn to Venice for inspiration. Just feast your eyes.
Early in the game, in the 1600s, the Slovenian town of Piran and the Croatian town of Rovinj gave us very true likenesses.
From there the design fanned out across the globe. Seattle has one.
Toronto has one.
The Brisbane City Hall in Australia, the Town Hall in Kiel Germany,
the Daniels & Fisher Tower in Denver, the Campanile in Port Elizabeth- South Africa,
Sather Tower at the University of California, Berkely,
the right-hand bell-tower of St. John Gualbert in Johnstown, Pennsylvania,
even another one in NYC at 14 Wall Street. But a not so secret secret. The Venetians themselves stole the design from the 12th Century Bell Tower at Forli! Still, it is the Campanile in Venice that delights the most. The bulk is a simple shaft with brick work that gives the building a fluted appearance. The bells are housed in a kind of majestic Venetian loggia topped with a cube two of its faces graced with the winged lion, symbol of Venice, and two others with Lady Justice, the female personification of the Queen of the Adriatic. A slender pyramid arises out of that and the Angel Gabriel perches above it all welcoming the world with his horn.
It is in all the copies that one appreciates the height of proportion achieved in Venice, to the extent that I’ve always been a little disappointed at our best effort in the arena. The Met Life Tower always looked a little bulky to me.
Turns out? Take a closer look. The original building had a slenderer column of a rise. Look at the photo on the right, taken in 1911, particularly where the loggia section begins. You can see how much the bottom of the loggia is protruding much farther than it seems to today.
In 1960, the tower was “fattened up” to give it more redundancy and exude more power as a corporate symbol. Perhaps that was effective. But the first version of the building was better aesthetically, and historically, truer as it was to its parent a world away. Finally, let's take a closer look at the top. It’s hard to get up there. And, surprise, it literally gave itself a crown for tallest building in the world it was those four years over a hundred years ago.
While his handiwork graces the skylines of most major metropolitan areas, we were fortunate enough to see the fruits of his imagination here on ours more than most.
Eamon Kevin Roche died on March 1st having bitten off the better part of ninety-six years and, least of his many many achievements, lighting a fire under a good portion of my architectural curiosity.
Perhaps the word to best describe his oeuvre? Unpredictable. His expertise spanned any number of styles. And he used his command of that breadth to constantly surprise one of the most diverse portfolios of clients in architectural history. He was loved by corporate heads, museums, hoteliers, and the private sector with equal enthusiasm. He seemed far more interested in how each project could fully manifest given the particular coordinates it would inhabit than any commitment to an architectural movement. In his characteristic humility the internationally known 'starchitect' described himself as a problem-solver in construction, "I think about where you're going to hang your coat." But he never lacked for style. He sat high up as its arbiter. When Eero Saarinen died, Roche finished what would become the last word in 60s chic, the landmarked and soon-to-open-as-hotel TWA Terminal 5 at JFK.
Out of the starting gate on his own in the firm he founded with John Dinkeloo (1918-1981) he gave us a glass and concrete terrarium of a building, a California forest dropped down on 42nd for the Ford Foundation. It is so unexpected, so strikingly gorgeous a structure I couldn’t find that one picture, so pictured: Three to even slightly convey its actual presence.
The soft-spoken Dublin-born New Yorker quashed any notion of ego when he stepped out of his due spotlight and subtly built a new home for one of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s most storied and sought-out residents, the Temple of Dendur. His simple yet distinctly Egyptian angles frame the masterpiece, and the miles of glass do less to call attention to itself than they do flood the room with a Nile-like sunlight, glorious part of the day, somber others.
He became a kind of architect-in-residence at The Met and other than Calvert Vaux and Richard Morris Hunt, it is his imprimatur that defines our experience of the space. His other work in the vast expansion of The Met during a full four decades in the late 20th Century carves out spaces of quiet contemplation, courtyards and conduits that give us context, the time needed to organize all the art racing around our heads.
His Millennium Tower across the street from the United Nations looked one block to the north (one block to the right in the photo), saw the angled doorway on the diminutive building, and turned that small embellishment into some kind of colossal gesture. It too lacks ego, but is a statement of a tower nonetheless, and one that suggests all buildings be good neighbors, nodding to the least of those on the block.
By the way, its surprising external geometry surprises on the interiors with equal drama. Though I always wonder if guests bang their skulls in there.
I have to admit I do not like his 60 Wall Street. A classic column blown up to postmodern proportions, it is busy and bulky, banded and random in the way I find much of postmodernism to look in the rear view mirror. And its tactile yet scaly forest of interior columns feels alien and slightly disturbing. Worse, perforated and lacy-looking as the columns are are, they don't evoke the strength one might want in such a supporting role.
But don't go by me.
I once loathed his 750 Seventh Avenue, often dubbed the mobile phone building for its columnar rooftop antenna. It was an early entry into the revitalization of Times Square and I felt it missed the mark. After the 1911 Equitable Building stole more than its share of the sky on its downtown neighborhood, zoning laws have focused on volume of a building with respect to its footprint. Should a building want height, as 750 did, typically setbacks were required to keep volume in check and the sun shining down into the caverns of Manhattan. Roche hoped to give his setbacks some dynamism by placing them in a graduating helix up the building. I remain confused why this is such an utter failure in execution. Ironically, it feels unusually static for a building that aimed for the opposite outcome. But its ceramic black and grey glazing I once found lumpy and ominous? I couldn't love it more these days for the way it conjures the 80s so specifically, a specifically fun epoch in my life whose aesthetics I never appreciated in their moment. 750 Seventh stands there all goth in Gotham. Well done!
And his success at the Jewish Heritage Museum alone would have put any other lesser architect on the map of greatness. A six-sided six-story pyramid of a hexagon, it intentionally calls to mind the underestimated six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. It stands protected by a bulwark of a building that highlights the astounding array of Jewish achievement after their near obliteration as a people just sixty years ago.
And finally, rising on the Manhattan skyline at the much ballyhooed Hudson Yards is number 55. The nearly finished 55 Hudson Yards' finishing touches may, in fact, beat this blog to publication. I didn't know it was Mr. Roche's design when I saw it up close first about four months ago. Coincidentally, I had just snapped a photo of 165 Mercer Street, a cast iron bit of splendor that went up in SoHo in 1870 and blogged about just the other day ( Then, now in SoHo.) 55 Hudson Yards went through several iterations. But it landed on the one that despite all the changes, opened early, despite all its blue glass glossy neighbors went a bit gray and matte, and despite all the forward-looking designs it stands among, references its history in an all-out unabashed love letter, the last it would turn out, from Mr. Roche to all his predecessors, to architecture.
Kevin Roche said goodbye with a building that Louis Sullivan himself would have designed. It elicits all the rows of warehouse windows each framed individually, in SoHo and Sullivan's Chicago in iron, here in steel. It resembles a skyscraper that might have been born had technology advanced to this point but the 140 years of intervening architecture hadn't.
The texture is so sensual, completely comforting, retro to the 1870s but, too I keep thinking, like the television sets we spent so many comforting hours in front of but whose shape no longer populates our homes. Only an artist of supreme confidence and maturity would be capable of this kind of genuflection. Roche's talent allowed for his twist. He goes meta on us, and where the frames open up in larger windows, he doubles and quadruples the frames. It's a window of a window on to architecture, these windows that inhabit the skin of his utterly satisfying bit of artistry. So we say good-bye to Kevin Roche only because we must. It is sad we will get no more from him. But by tipping his hat to the past in gratitude, he tosses a gauntlet forward that dares the next generations: Match me if you can. And I'll be comforted by the monuments to him sprinkled all over Manhattan by virtue of his stylish Irish eyes.
1870 was a busy year for Henry Ferbach. He had four cast iron spectacles of his design simultaneously rising from the streets of what was then called southern Greenwich Village in the years before the acronym SoHo carved out the neighborhood’s new identity.
Its enormous window sashes, gradually decreasing in height in each story to give the building the illusion it is taller, were topped with graceful arches and iron keystones, each separated by simple stately Doric columns and each row articulated by rich overhanging cornices, the roofline crowned with dental molding. It is the sheer repetition of elements that makes the building so satisfying, and the high relief of those elements that make it so engaging.
Its stated function on opening was factory. Its role in the fur trade, the trade that put this island on the map, is both a testament to the industry’s historical breadth as it is a final punctuation mark to a dark chapter in America’s gluttony for the product.
In 1871, buffalo pelts were in high demand. The furriers of 165 Mercer Street were doing the equivalent of three to six million dollars a year in sales. By 1884, the American buffalo population (bison, in actuality) had put the species on the endangered list. Tens of thousands of the majestic animals that once roamed the vast plains of America’s interiors had dwindled to a few hundred.
Thereafter the building was quickly converted into a garage, an incarnation that would span the transition from carriages to automobiles. After a brief stint as the front for a rum-running operation during the years of Prohibition, it returned to its legal pursuits actually fixing cars.
As NYC fell into dysfunction in the 1960s, the neighborhood was largely abandoned. A plan to put a multi-laned multi-level highway through the heart of SoHo would have spelled the demise of 165 Mercer Street and all its brothers and sisters from Ferbach’s drawing board and those of his contemporaries. The loss architecturally would have even incalculable.
Fortunately with the death of Robert Moses, the man who proposed the highway, died the dream of that dumb project and the influx of artists brought wealth back to the once wealthy streets of now, SoHo.
165 Mercer has been lovingly restored to better condition than frankly it ever was. Research matches the original cream color, high tech offices replaced the fumes of broken automobiles, and, set back so as not to ruin the original lines
of the perfectly proportioned facade, now sits a tony glassy penthouse for some guzzillionaire to enjoy the air on top of his kingdom on one of the most sought after street addresses in the world.
My parents always call them the ‘tubes,’ to this day, even though I’ve known the system as PATH my whole life.
But before there was an Oculus, before there was the new World Trade Center, before there was an original World Trade Center, before those twin towers stood, two other twin towers stood on nearly that same spot, the terminus not of the Port Authority Trans Hudson lines, but the terminus of the Hudson Tubes.
Three underground levels of platforms led to the street level on top of which stood two nearly identical 22-story buildings in close proximity to one another and rock solid with Indiana limestone, brick, and fireproof terra cotta.
Their thick-walled Romanesque Revival architecture added to their air of invincibility.
They would house the offices of the Hudson and Manhattan Railway and any number of other businesses in shipping and finance.
The Hudson Terminal Buildings had nearly 900,000 square feet of rentable floor space accommodating 10,000 tenants. It’s 39 elevators carried 30,000 riders a day. Its 16 million bricks, 13,000 lighting fixtures, 5,400 doors, just as many windows, were something of a miracle for 1907, the year the first office workers arrived.
Ridership on the tubes peaked in 1927 at 113 million, but as the automobile tunnels and bridges began to open to this new mode of traffic, ridership in the tubes decreased substantially to a 1958 low of 26 million.
The terminal buildings center left, blackened by years of coal smoke. Many buildings in this photo still hold their ground, notably, the Woolworth Building, the Municipal Building, the Sinclair Oil Building, the Trinity Building, The old Equitable Building, and dominating the foreground, Cass Gilbert's 11 West Street. The most valuable player missing, the Singer Building, standing center as it did until 1967.
The terminal buildings were deemed obsolete. But obstinate. It took several years in the late sixties to bring them down as land for the first World Trade Center was cleared.
Their memory is shrouded by an interim history.
But they should be remembered too, the first twin towers, monuments to public transportation. And perhaps a fair tribute to them would be to report this happy news: Ridership on the PATH Trains was up over 86 million last year!
