USA > New York > New York City > New York panorama : a comprehensive view of the metropolis > Part 22
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Of the row of city dwellings originally adjoining Government House,
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there remains only Number 7 State Street, now used as a rescue missio! Its tall full-height columns, arranged in a picturesque if awkward curv] are supposed to have marked the termination of the row, of which MI Comb is reputedly the architect. The exceptionally handsome interior ( this house is unfortunately closed to the public. At Number 9, the hou: once immediately adjoining, Lafayette was given his great New York ri ception on the occasion of his return to the United States in 1824.
Had the seat of Government remained in New York, the city migl in time have acquired some of the breadth and dignity of planning asso ciated with the capitals of great states-such as the L'Enfant Plan a tempted to secure for Washington. There might still have occurred di putes about the appropriateness of geometric monumentality in the layou of a city, but it seems impossible that New York would have develope as it did in almost defiant crowding on part of the tip of an island.
In the early years of the 19th century, Joseph Mangin, a French eng neer, with John McComb as partner, created one of the finest buildings i the city-the present City Hall. Few buildings in America of any peric are as gracious, as beautifully poised, and as felicitous as the City Hal The two wings are nicely balanced against the central section and th handsome cupola, now fortunately restored after being for a time replace by an ugly dome. The windows are large and beautifully proportione The detail has a Gallic liveliness and deftness; due to Mangin it savo somewhat of Louis XVI instead of the grave King George. The interic should not be missed by the visitor to the city; the rotunda contains beautiful circular stairway, while the upstairs rooms not only display th felicitous interior style of the building but show a good many of Ne York's early treasures of art and furniture.
On April 3, 1807, a commission was appointed to lay out a city plan On March 22, 1811, it submitted its report, with a map by John Rande Jr. Its recommendation drew the hand of a heavy fate upon New Yorl for it proposed the gridiron street system. The commission decided thi "a city must be composed principally of the habitations of men, an straight-sided and right-angled houses are the most cheap to build and th most convenient to live in."
Elsewhere in the present volume is discussed the effect of this plan o topography and traffic; we confine ourselves here to its effect on arch tecture. It permanently limited the shape, the outlook and the surround ings of every kind of future building. It meant, to begin with, that fc. better or worse every house was to be fitted to a lot, regardless of suc
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nsiderations as sunlight, prevailing winds and view. The plan divided e city into uniform building lots, always 100 feet in depth, easy to trans- r and to speculate in. Consideration of the stages whereby this made tional building more and more difficult instead of simple must be left the section on housing; suffice it to say that only within the past few ars has it been possible for a few large-scale enterprises, usually in out- ing sections, to cut across the gridiron plan in the interest of restoring modern terms the rational type of building that prevailed before the ischief of the plan began. A second effect has been that only rarely does building in New York possess a vista; so that, paradoxically, in just the ty of the United States where the greatest amount of "architecture" has en produced, that architecture is most difficult to see. The skyscraper chitect must compromise on embellishing the entrance visible from the reet and then apply himself to that part of the mass which will be visible rom a distance if it towers above its neighbors. A corollary is that in New York the conspicuous buildings are not the high ones but the low nes, especially those low ones favored by a few feet of open space-such ; the Public Library and the City Hall.
Besides the examples already mentioned, the Federal era has left a prinkling of other buildings worth attention, especially because they pre- erve the architectural record. There are a few late Colonial houses, such s the charming one with its fan doorway at the end of Cherry Street built about 1790), and a scattered group (to be described more fully in nother context) that survives in Greenwich Village. Another monument ; the famous St. Paul's Chapel on lower Broadway, by James McBean. It ; perhaps one of the best of the American churches modeled on James Gibbs' work, and is very handsome with its grayish stone hall and tall ively spire.
When we come to the Subtreasury Building on Wall Street we are con- ronted by a totally different trend from the Colonial. Though no longer he capital, New York continued to share in the architectural ideals of the oung republic. Just why these turned to classical models, first Roman and. hen Greek, is a scholars' dispute. Some believe that it was political en- husiasm for the Roman republic and for the 1821 war of independence of the Greeks; others believe that the Greek, at least, was purely a turn of aste. At any rate, whether the American felt like a Greek or had nerely decided to dress like one, Latrobe's Bank of the United States in Philadelphia, with its Doric temple porticoes, built in 1799, took the ountry by storm.
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In New York the old Custom House, now called the Subtreasury Build am ing, shows this somewhat heavy classical hand. It is a crude version of thing Parthenon, with changes for the sake of windows. It was erected durine the period 1834-41. At the same time on the opposite side of Wall Stree nd the Merchants Exchange was built, fronted by another colonnade, cor Lar siderably more refined, above which a second was later imposed when story was added for its present occupant, the National City Bank.
Churches diverged somewhat from the common mode, since Classic?
ve Revival churches were soon followed by Gothic Revival ones, and bot kinds were built, according to preference, at the same time. The bed known Gothic Revival churches are the late ones, built just before cca shortly after the Civil War and therefore belonging to a rather later time They are Grace Church (with an elaborateness that drew the ire of Whitth man), Richard Upjohn's Trinity Church, and St. Patrick's Cathedral b James Renwick. However, there remain numerous other and older ex amples. On the lower East Side, four old churches typify the two paralle architectural trends. The old St. Patrick's, at Prince and Mulberry Streets is the earliest example of the Gothic Revival; designed by Joseph Mangist (the interior and upper part of the wall were rebuilt after a fire later), i is "terrible but big." Another more pleasing pointed-arch church, built 1817-18, stands a block east of Knickerbocker Village on Market Street and has been recorded in detail by the Historic American Buildings Sur vey. Two of the Greek Revival instances are the Church of St. James (probably by Maynard Lefevre), on James Street east of Chatham Square and the Marinist Temple just off Chatham Square. On West Thirteenth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues stands another example, with { Greek Doric portico in granite.
American houses built at this time resembled Greek temples to a degree never approached in Europe. New York shows very few such houses en- tirely surrounded by columns; but precariously surviving on Lafayette Street is a part of a Colonnade Row, a block-long series of dwellings erected in 1827, with a Greek Corinthian colonnade across the whole length.
Another once extremely handsome row, built in the 1830's and linger- ing now in disrepair, is found on Richmond Terrace, Staten Island, near Westervelt Avenue, New Brighton; it sadly reminds us that our fore- fathers knew how to make the waterfront of what is now the dirty Kill van Kull a handsome and stately drive. In the opinion of Professor Talbot
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Buil imlin, a special authority on the Classic Revival in New York, the finest of gle example in existence is the old merchant's house on East Fourth durineet between the Bowery and Lafayette Street. But the most accessible Stree e, col when d best preserved group in the finest setting is the splendid collection of insions existing both singly and in connected rows on Washington uare. The example on the eastern corner of Fifth Avenue is of noble nplicity. It has no porticoes or pediments, only a modest Ionic canopy lassinger the door, three stories of well proportioned and beautifully spaced I bonestration, a simple wooden entablature painted with a Greek fret, and er the plain cornice a simple balustrade: yet one might search far for calmer or more felicitous statement.
Whi be Young Industrial City
New York of the early 1800's was rapidly finding new ways of earning very handsome living. When Washington bade farewell to his Revolu- onary officers at Fraunces Tavern, the removal of British restrictions on ade made a rapid commercial expansion certain. Not so many decades iter, New York became, among other things, the chief builder of the iperlative Yankee clipper ships and operator of the Black Ball and other cean packet lines. From this glorious period date the few remaining sail- ofts and ship chandleries on Front Street, then South Street.
One of the next phases in the development of New York's history was he growth of industry in the wake of commerce. By 1820 New York Iready had a desperate housing problem, which helps to explain the building boom that carried straight through into the panic of 1837.
The effects of manufacturing and immigration on the architecture of New York ever since the first quarter of the 19th century have been be- rond calculation. Therefore, instead of following the usual procedure, and expounding the decadence in residential and public building that followed he classic revival-a dreary subject-it might be wiser to speak of one ype of structure, still existing by the hundreds, which though usually awkward and unlovely nevertheless marked the inception of a totally new technique in the old art of building.
We refer to the despised "cast-iron front." Lewis Mumford in The Brown Decades ascribes the introduction of cast iron as a material not only for interior columns but for the façade of buildings, to Bogardus in 1848. The exact date or architect is of minor importance, however, for
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the use of iron had long been increasing-first in ugly sheet-iron cornic retain as well as handsome wrought-iron fences, then in "tin" roofs supplantir bus ac wooden shingles.
With a kind of naive surprise, those of us who have been told a gre deal in recent years about a new architecture of metal and glass-as there had been a hiatus between the Crystal Palace and the recent 19200 -walk along lower Broadway and the streets heading from it to the wesbump ward, noting one after another of these "cast-iron fronts," built not lon lhouse "spe after the Civil War, in which the proportion of glass to frame compar favorably with present-day standards. After viewing these early example Broo
liparve even our "glass houses"-such as the new one by the Corning Compar. on upper Fifth Avenue-seem a little less than revolutionary departure to st
What put a stop to the "cast-iron front" was the hazard revealed by thetype Chicago fire-that the iron, unprotected by masonry, would warp in ir tense heat. Nevertheless, here was the beginning of the great moder surge toward a strictly industrial building technique, since neither the iro The nor the glass could be found, like wood or stone, in a natural state, bu had to be fabricated.
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It is curious to note that among architectural critics only the Germar Werner Hegeman, has thus far had a kind word to say for the "cast-iro." front." Hegeman declared a preference for the Stewart Building in Ner York (now the older part of the Wanamaker store) to the vaunted Fiel Warehouse by H. H. Richardson in Chicago, on the score of "greater sim plicity and less pretension." Whatever may be the opinion of other ob servers on the point of taste, it is clear that in efficiency, lightness, airiness and simple order the Stewart Building is on the more progressive side
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fo It is this type, rather than the heavy fortress of Richardsonian Roman esque, that lies in the direct line of modern building.
In contrast with their industrial and commercial structures, the house of the men who brought industrial preeminence to New York were not o: the sort to inspire architectural history. The exotic residences of the early get-rich-quick Wallingfords represented every sort of opulent excess Moorish castles, Gothic fabrics, mock Italian villas, Swiss chalets, what- ever fancy might desire. Inside, these monsters were decked out with nooks and alcoves marked by wooden spindle screens, ottomans, what- nots and sentimental statues. One picture of a "millionaire's parlor". shows even the legs of the grand piano tied up in huge bowknots of rib- 2 bon a yard wide. hi
Hotels are among the structures readily accessible to the public which
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etain some of this exuberance; and a good measure of gilt and voluptu- us accessories will be found in such a house, for example, as the Ansonia. In English visitor to a New York hotel during President Grant's admin- stration, when asked by his wife why he did not put out his shoes to be hined, replied that he was afraid he would get them back gilded in the horning. Some of the energy of those times is carried over today in the umptuous lobbies and auditoriums of the more overpowering movie houses-the Paramount, for example, of which it was said that its owners spent a million dollars and made every nickel show." Houses of the parvenu, Victorian and romantic types are perhaps more numerous in Brooklyn or on Staten Island than in Manhattan, a good Brooklyn district o study being the one surrounding Prospect Park. The drab brownstone types here were chiefly speculative residences that mushroomed during the 870's and later. They may be found on almost any downtown cross-street.
rodThe Great Bridges
Brooklyn Bridge was the greatest achievement in New York architec- ure after the Civil War. At a time when the architects were producing brownstone fronts, Victorian Gothic churches, and strangely stiffened and distorted Renaissance post offices and court houses, the only fresh blood seemed to flow in the veins of an engineer. When the bridge was com- leted in 1883, the event was celebrated as a national holiday. The Presi- dent attended the dedication. The city was hilarious. In their desire to venture out on this "eighth wonder of the world," the citizens rushed forth in such crowds that a moment's panic on one of the first days after the opening caused two people to be trampled to death.
The bridge represents an American epic of heroism. Everyone knew hat throughout 12 years, while the bridge was being built, the chief en- es fgineer had lain partially paralyzed on a bed in Brooklyn Heights. Every- one knew that the lady to take the first drive across the new structure was his faithful and highly capable wife, who had acted as the engineer's in- ermediary throughout the whole tedious work.
The bridge was not, as a matter of fact, designed by Washington A. Roebling, the man who actually built it, but by his famous father, John A. Roebling-an energetic, careful, hard-driving man, pitiless with himself and with his children, a student of Hegel who had written his own "View of the Universe" but who with the same thoroughness devised a ropewalk on his Pennsylvania farm, inventing designs, methods and organization as
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he went along. In the Brooklyn Bridge, John Roebling drew up the las ple and best of his bridge designs; his son was there to carry on when out stupid accident caused the fatal infection of the father's foot with tetanus De Despite increases in cost and numerous delays, the bridge eventuallym emerged, a triumph of the engineer's art. And even though thoughtfuleng critics had fault to find with the somewhat stiff and bluff use of Gothicno forms in the towers, the artists loved it from the very start and continue to celebrate it in prints and paintings today. The soundness and sincerity: of Roebling somehow managed to come through.
The Manhattan Bridge, with steel towers instead of stone, is jus matter-of-fact; the Williamsburg Bridge, with towers like contorted peach gr basket masts from a battleship, is aggressively ugly; the Queensboro cantitthi lever bridge is merely quaint. Indeed, the Queensboro structure, with it b romantic cast-iron pinnacles, stands at the opposite pole from the threcon sober bridges located around the bend, and crossing the Harlem River Both the Washington Bridge of 1889 (not the George Washington Bridgegr across the Hudson) and the High Bridge consist of large steel arches irin the central span, joined to a range of solid stone arches on land at they abutments. The High Bridge is quite narrow; originally it was of stoneda all the way, and carried the famous Croton Aqueduct across the Harlem tec River. The third Harlem River bridge is the steel one now being doubles decked for the Henry Hudson Parkway.
New York takes especial pride in two great recent bridges-the Georges Washington and the Triborough. Both won the medal of the Institute of Steel Construction as supreme architectural achievements in their respectivene years of completion. The George Washington Bridge with its central sus-IG pension span of 3,500 feet has been surpassed in length by the Goldenth Gate Bridge of San Francisco; but the citizen of New York is still will- ing to pit it against the Coast bridge, asking no favors on the point ofan design. Curiously, its towers were intended by Cass Gilbert, the architect, thi to be clad in stone, a fact that explains the arches and the big hooks stillM protruding from the concrete foundations; but the plan was defeated ont the score of cost, and the city is happier with the steel of Amman the engineer. Since the completion of the Henry Hudson Parkway, this colos- sal and magnificent bridge has come into its own, for there is scarcely anm architectural landscape anywhere else in United States to vie with thefo river, the Palisades, the escarpments of Riverside Drive, and (tying it all together ) the grace and majesty of the George Washington Bridge.
The Triborough has a setting that will vastly improve with the com-
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letion of the West Side Highway. It is really a series of bridges, clean- ut and exciting in the operation of its functional units; for it has a sus- ension span, a lift-bridge span, and a third span that is cantilevered. A all mall point, but an important one so often and irritatingly overlooked by ngineers when they build bridges, is that the railing is safe yet low hi nough to allow the automobile occupant a view of the horizon.
kyscraper Background
The skyscrapers are the children of the bridges. Few realize that the greatest school for steel construction was the bridge school, and that to tithis day the beams and trusses for tall buildings are fabricated in the ittbridge shop." From the bridges, then, we might step to their off-spring reon the shore.
er Among these, Rockefeller Center is the largest and most spectacular ggroup. The Empire State is the tallest single building, though it is equaled inn cubic content by the R.C.A. Building at Rockefeller Center. The old heWoolworth Building, opened in 1913, perhaps ranks as the most famous; nelated or not, its soaring proportions and fine detail stamp it as an archi- emtectural masterpiece. The Municipal Building, largest of the city's admin- le strative units, with its tremendous street colonnade, its fussy and dispro- portionate circular tower, represents one more effort to prove the classical tyle adaptable to tall steel-cage construction.
of Why are skyscrapers built? The reasons generally given have been busi- veness reasons, but underlying these are others of a less abstract kind. Cass s-Gilbert, the architect, liked to tell how Frank Woolworth came to put up enthe tallest building in the world at a time when the New York skyline Il- vas still dominated by the Metropolitan Tower. The Metropolitan Insur- offence Company had refused Woolworth a loan, and in so doing had roused this ire. He happened to see a postcard from Calcutta with a picture of the ilMetropolitan Tower-its fame as the tallest building had spread all over he world. Woolworth made a survey to determine the Metropolitan's hexact height, and then ordered his architect to exceed it. Many sky- S- crapers, large or small, owe their origin to similar rivalries; and the unarch of the bigger-and-better white elephants, goaded along by such efortuitous competition, was not halted until two or three years after 1929. Il On Lexington Avenue between Forty-Third and Forty-Fourth Streets, one block beyond the enormous Chrysler Building, it was found profitable 1. o erect a three-story structure that houses a Childs restaurant. This is a
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direct outcome of the usual "skyscraper economics," which are too com Br plicated to explain in a brief analysis. One fact, however, can easily by understood: the comparatively enormous expense of skyscraper buildingloc A 30-story building costs not merely ten times but often 30 times as muchea as a three-story building. The foundations alone, going down to bedrockof are extremely costly; the earth and rock removed to prepare for the Emigra pire State Building weighed three-quarters as much as the building itself Te Other costs increase in proportion.
The age of the various skyscrapers can be roughly gauged by theialt height. Just as, generally speaking, the youngest mountains are the high set est, so the very tallest of the skyscrapers are the latest. Fex
New York and Chicago
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The skyscraper originated not in New York but in Chicago. Apart fromthe its early introduction of the cast-iron front, New York contributed to thede skyscraper only one indispensable element-the elevator. The first com Str mercial passenger elevator installation, in 1857, was in a building on the corner of Broadway and Broome Street, though the honor is claimed fo Cooper Union and others. The old Fifth Avenue Hotel was famous fo its "vertical screw railway," installed by Otis Tufts in 1859 as the firs passenger elevator run by steam. The "screw" was a hollow grooved tub surrounding the whole car and revolving around it on the principle of worm gear. The first office-building elevator installation was in the firstole Equitable Building on Broadway, designed by George B. Post and com 42 pleted April 19, 1871. This installation cost $29,657. Its success wanyo infectious.
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The first skyscraper, it is now generally conceded after violent controR.( versy, was the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, designed by Williar. E. LeBaron Jenney and erected 1883-4. The New York architect George Ed Post made plans in 1880, accepted 1881, for the Produce Exchange Build ing in New York, which was finished simultaneously with the Hom Ten Insurance Building, but used metal framework only in the inside court: New York's building code-then as now a source of anger to the prcithe gressives-forbade the use of metal framing in outside walls. Not untiestre 1892 was this code amended, permitting New York to limp along afterthe Chicago; and not until 1899, with the erection of the St. Paul Buildingalte could New York claim a structure taller than any in Chicago.
The St. Paul Building, still standing east of St. Paul's Chapel on lowe
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Broadway, showed the complete ineptitude of the first attempts in New York City to stretch the classical formula over vertical buildings. It nglooks like a series of one-story structures piled on top of one another, ach with its own pilasters and cornice. An even more glaring example f inappropriate design is found in the American Telephone and Tele- graph Building at 195 Broadway (not to be confused with the New York elf ['elephone Building on Vesey Street).
When these landmarks were erected, Louis Sullivan of Chicago had Iready proclaimed the gospel of the skyscraper as a single soaring unit, etting up his own world-famous Wainwright Building in St. Louis as an xample. But New York passed Sullivan by. Of his work the city possesses only a minor example, the building at 65-69 Bleecker Street. Saarinen emoved the last horizontal emphasis left by Sullivan-the flaring roofline. He allowed the vertical piers to run to the very top of the structure, where rome simply cut them off. A good later application of this method is evi- thalent in Howells' Pan-hellenic Building at First Avenue and Forty-Ninth om Street; while an even more daring example is the Daily News building on theEast Forty-Second Street, by Raymond Hood.
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