New York panorama : a comprehensive view of the metropolis, Part 23

Author:
Publication date: 1938
Publisher: New York : Random House
Number of Pages: 630

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Cubes and Setbacks

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The Equitable Building, designed by Frank Graham and erected in 912, was the last great skyscraper of the pre-setback era. Its "cubage" is firstolossal in proportion to the ground it occupies; in fact, this structure of om- 12 stories carries the highest tax assessment of any real estate in New York-$29,000,000, exceeding the assessment on the 85 stories of rent- ble floor space in the Empire State Building, and that on the 70-story troR.C.A. Building. The Equitable roused fears that future skyscrapers iamnight cut off all light and air from the streets, besides reducing the value Bof neighboring real estate, if remedial measures were not taken.

ild New York devised the setback principle to provide at least a partial omdemedy. Under the law embodying this principle, the city is divided into arts :ones, each of which has its own individual requirements, though in all cases pro he rule is that at a certain height every building must recede from the nti treet, the degree of recession to be calculated in relation to the width of ftelhe street upon which the building stands. This law had a vast effect in inghultering New York architecture from a sheer vertical to a modified pyrami- lal shape. The setback rules are not entirely rigid, and slight differences wein interpretation have led to considerable variety along any given street.

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218 ARCHITECTURE

However, the uniform general requirements have brought about some semblance of order in the chaos of styles and mass effects characteristic of our buildings. The most famous of the early setback buildings is the ShellA ton Hotel, erected in 1924, in which the utmost care was employed in the designing and balancing of masses.

It has not generally been noticed, in the common preoccupation with copying setback effects, that Rockefeller Center embodies a still later printf ciple. The setbacks here are mere vestiges. The larger buildings rise sheer but with the radical difference that they do so at a distance away from the street line. There is perhaps the first step toward a possible future trans formation of the city, in which extremely high buildings might go up without a break, provided they were entirely surrounded by a sufficient amount of open space. This idea, promulgated by the French architec Le Corbusier in the early 1920's, would call for a degree and extent of centralized control over land holdings that not even a Rockefeller could achieve.

Skyscraper Groups

To describe even the most important of New York's skyscrapers indi vidually would require the space of a whole book; and therefore the pres. ent remarks will be confined to characterizing a few groups in variou: sections of the city. Each district seems to have its own special character in this respect: there is a distinct Wall Street skyscraper type and another distinct midtown type.

In the Wall Street region, the most striking impression of all-apar from the stalagmitic tower shapes-is that the whole agglomerate look !! not like steel but stone. These are lithic monuments. They aspire toward "monumental mass," with emphasis on the weight. Apart from the com petition of styles and detailed treatment, the chief long-range competitior seems to have consisted in seeing who could build a structure with the greatest appearance of stability and permanence. The street has gone be yond making its towers heavy and solid: it has decorated them with classic symbols, thus adding the lure of antiquity to the promise of safe invest ments. Hence the whole northern front of Wall Street from Broadway to Pearl Street is taken up by different varieties of classical treatment. Ever the Bank of the Manhattan Company, trying a venture in "modern," ha: retained an adequate repertory of free classical allusions. Here and there

BRICKS OF THE CITY 219

luring the last afterglow of the boom, in 1930 or 1931, a few lighter and nore business-like structures made their appearance, such as the North American Insurance Building by Shreve, Lamb and Harmon; but the amiliar, older type of the street is still predominant.

Among downtown buildings, the most interesting are the Woolworth with Building, still holding its own by virtue of its fine soaring quality and its tin ine subtly colored detail; the fortress-like Telephone Building at Barclay eenfind Vesey Streets, by Mckenzie, Voorhees & Gmelin and designed by the ans Ralph Walker; and No. One Wall Street, with its compact shape, and he remarkable effect of the fluted surface of its entire wall (this also by Ralph Walker, the firm having changed to Voorhees, Gmelin & Walker ). etfor vigor one might want to add the tower of the National City Bank and tecFarmer's Trust Company, if one could be excused from examining the base.

Bordering Madison Square is what might be called the insurance group, nore stately than the bunched towers farther downtown because arranged o be seen from across the park. This group includes the Metropolitan Tower, a handsome coronet-shaped new Metropolitan building to its rear on Fourth Avenue, and the New York Life Insurance building in a con- diverted "American Gothic"-one of the last works of Cass Gilbert.

es- In the midtown section, the buildings of Raymond Hood seem to ex- usbpress the aspirations of the region. On East Forty-Second Street stands his ter Daily News building, mentioned above, with its simple square-cut shape, erits few easy setbacks, its flat striped walls like giant curtains, and its bright orange window-shades that give the building a festive appearance at night, rtlike the paper illuminations in a parade. It was erected in 1930. On West ksForty-Second Street, Hood made another strikingly modern attempt in the rdvividly colored, blue-green, terra-cotta faced McGraw-Hill Building, with n- ts tan window shades, the windows in banks of four creating a decidedly horizontal emphasis. These two have the marks that in the 1920's were considered "modern": the bold color, the sharp outline, the uniform treat- e-ment of the envelope, the simplicity of massing, the avoidance of all tags icof the traditional styles. In cleanliness they vie with two other groups that tare perhaps still more successful because of greater openness in setting- othe great hospital aggregations at the Presbyterian and the Cornell nMedical Centers. Here we can see what the commercial skyscraper smight become, when its architecture is not conditioned by the high value elof restricted areas of land.

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ARCHITECTURE

Buildings for Industrial Work

A person accustomed to the factories of the usual industrial town might easily be baffled, in a hasty survey of New York, to know where so many of its people follow industrial pursuits. The answer is "in lofts." Fac. tories of the traditional type exist, to be sure-numbers of them border the route to Queensboro Plaza on Long Island, others are strung out along the Long Island Railroad, and so on. But in midtown Manhattan the ubiquitous garment and fur trades occupy anomalous loft buildings, some six or eight stories high, reaching back the full depth of the block with just room enough for an air shaft. The loft is "architecture" only when it- grows to vast proportions, becoming essentially a big ventilated box en- closing a series of huge floors. In such a loft building there are no light courts or other interruptions, because the lighting is artificial.

Some of these structures, such as the Port of New York Authority Building, though not especially distinguished architecturally, are enormous affairs, embracing far more acreage of floor space than any skyscraper. A frequent and traditional method of decorating these huge cubes is a modi- fication from old fortress structures such as the Palazzo Vecchio at Flor .- ence, Italy: a collar-band supplied in the form of a cornice or corbel table -as, for example, in the Furniture Exchange on Lexington Avenue at Thirty-Second Street, where the decorative details are actually geometric and modern. At No. 2 Park Avenue stands a variation, remarkable for the spangling of bright colors in its terra-cotta sheathing. For a time this was the city's chief exhibit of modernism.

Sometimes a cross is made between the loft type and the factory type. One of the most interesting structures in the city, from the standpoint of both function and form, is the Starrett-Lehigh Building on 26th Street at Thirteenth Avenue. Here smaller manufacturers may take individua. floors or parts of floors. The railroad tracks come into the building at ground level, and a highly ingenious interior system of elevators and load- ing platforms permits truck or rail shipment of materials and finished goods without the necessity for street transfer at any point in the process. Except for the tower at the entrance, the building has remarkably clean lines. As all the weight is carried by interior columns, there are no bearing members in the outside walls, but only an exciting combination of alter- nate full-length strips of horizontal glass windows and brick fill. No! even at the angles are the window lines broken.

In another version of the same basic design, the Cashman Laundry in

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22I

BRICKS OF THE CITY

he Bronx, the same architects (R. G. & W. M. Cory) achieve an even hore successful effect of lightness, the broad white wings being canti- evered from the entrance tower, which is treated in four vertical pilasters. Any account, however brief, of New York's industrial structures would e incomplete without mention of the monumental warehouse in South Brooklyn, built of reinforced concrete as an Army Supply Base in 1917 rom designs by Cass Gilbert.

Recent Public Buildings

As contrasted with some of the office and industrial structures, the re- ent public buildings of New York hold no promise of lasting fame. The hief group, around Foley Square, composes into nothing in particular, and ompetent mediocrity is the usual attribute in the public buildings in other listricts as well. There is, nevertheless, one very promising new trend, lamely that shown in Federal post office substations-as for example, at Fourth Avenue and Thirteenth Street, or again on Twenty-Third Street ast of Lexington Avenue. Compared to recent European buildings for imilar purposes, these American examples have a merit that must be called very mild; but compared to the kind of structure that most of the typical ubstations continue to occupy in America, or more specifically in New York, the advance is almost revolutionary. The new attitude seems to claim, for the institutions of the great American People, at least a fraction of the dignity and grace that are normally expected in the branch offices of a private city bank.

Colleges and Universities

Among the numerous attractive college groups in New York City there are two that have had an influence on college architecture: City College and more especially Columbia University. The uptown City College quad- rangle at 135th Street is a competently planned group, draped in late Gothic forms and made pleasing to regionalists by the use of a local mate- rial rarely employed in New York buildings-the Manhattan schist. The trim is equally unusual-a terra cotta so white that only the grime of the city has saved it from an appearance of jumping entirely out of the picture !

Columbia University was one of the earliest American institutions of learning to achieve a flavor of urbane maturity, attained through the con- sistent use (due to the notable architect Charles McKim) of exterior treat-

222

ARCHITECTURE

ment based upon the Italian Renaissance. Columbia's appearance of ma turity rested upon the fact that she did not seek to mimic whole Renais sance buildings but employed her chosen "style" rather as a decorative accessory, furnishing colonnades and uniform cornices to buildings tha were essentially a series of large cubes arranged around squares. In recen th years Columbia has lost conviction, so that her latest buildings are neithe: studied Renaissance nor clear-cut expressions based upon modern engineer ing. The older, domed library by McKim at the center of the university group was long a focal point of architectural discussion, alternately ad mired for its classical composition and criticized for its functional limi tations.

More serious than criticisms of this library are the criticisms that could be made of the layout as a whole. The university chose to surrender to apartment-house use its land holdings that extended straight to the escarp ments of the Hudson River, and in so doing let business consideration a destroy what was perhaps the most spectacular architectural opportunity that had ever been in the possession of any American university, an oppor tunity never to return.

Churches

The churches of present-day New York are too numerous for compre hensive treatment in limited space. It must suffice to present a note or tw on the examples that are outstanding by virtue of beauty, size, or historica associations. As to outstanding architectural beauty, few competent critic will be found to challenge the great claims of the Church of St. Thomas of Fifth Avenue, by Bertram Goodhue. This church is accounted by som authorities as one of the finest architectural achievements of any sort il the United States, by virtue of the remarkable combination of delicacy with great strength, by virtue of beautiful balance, and (in the interior ) by vir tue of the unprecedented effect of a magnificent reredos. Goodhue, a de signer whose personal romanticism gave individual character to all th Gothic studies he made, produced two other outstanding church building in New York, St. Vincent Ferrer and the Chapel of the Intercession.

Goodhue's warmth is lacking in the city's largest church, designed b the great master's surviving partner, Ralph Adams Cram. This church, th Cathedral of St. John the Divine, will when completed be one of the thre or four largest cathedrals of Christendom. (Statistics purporting to give i te exact rank, whether as "first in the world" or something else, are not reall H

BRICKS OF THE CITY 223

ecisive and must be interpreted with care. ) The fervor that has gone into aising this immense structure has a heavily intellectual cast, delighting those scholars who like to watch the solution of an intricate problem in Gothic, a problem which the architect set himself not as a copyist but as if le were a Gothic architect working in medieval times.

A church preeminent for a still different reason is the Riverside Church, n the building of which John D. Rockefeller was heavily interested. Though the Gothic architecture of this high-towered steel-skeleton pile has xcited no great critical approbation, there are certainly no Gothic vaults nd pointed windows in existence anywhere that house so complex a set of acilities of a social-service nature. The building is an architectural tour de orce putting the Gothic libraries and gymnasiums of our colleges to hame, by incorporating the essential facilities of them all.

Among Jewish synagogues, the outstanding example is the richly exe- uted Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue, by Butler, Stein and Kohn; the outstanding "modern" church to date is the First Swedish Baptist Church on East Sixty-First Street, by Martin Hedmark. The single district, how- ever, that is most rewarding to the connoisseur of church architecture is Brooklyn Heights. Here, within walking distance of one another, are churches of great interest and widely varying type. At one end is Plymouth Church, made famous by Henry Ward Beecher. Though designed in "con- re- gregational" fashion by an amateur committee, with an exterior somewhat barn-like, this building makes a deep impression by its "meeting-house" cal character: sunlit, chaste, democratic and withal graceful. The region bounds in interesting Gothic Revival churches, such as Grace Church. One other church building on the Heights must be launched at last into me architectural history-the modest Church of the Pilgrims. Designed by the ith well-known architect Richard Upjohn in a manner very unusual to him, and built with extreme simplicity in fieldstone, this church has been obliged to wait for both the classical and the Gothic Revival to lose their de- he force before being recognized as a remarkable precursor of the tendencies we now call "modern." Unfortunately, poverty has already lost for this &church its former graceful steeple.

Hotels

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New York is a city of big hotels. Nothing is left of the famous hos- telries that once marked lower Broadway, and perhaps the only house that recalls the orderly and quiet style in which the best of them were built is

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224 ARCHITECTURE

the Brevoort, on lower Fifth Avenue. Midway between the Brevoort and the modern hotels in respect to period is the Chelsea Hotel on Twenty. Third Street, with its picturesque tiers of balconies against a Victorian red. brick front. More characteristic of the country-wide type of modern hote. are the Pennsylvania, the Commodore, and the Roosevelt, built around ali system of long corridors running through a main building slab and it: E series of wings projecting at a right angle. c

What might be called the typical New York hotel is the hotel in ‘ Ist tower. This tower may take the shape of a broad truncated pyramid with

P intricate and interesting setbacks, like the New Yorker, or it may rise st sheer, like the Savoy-Plaza, the Sherry-Netherland, and the Pierre, stately group of big hotels at the Central Park Plaza. The older Plaza Hote 3 in the same setting is a fine example of relative restraint exercised upon the florid baroquish hotel style of the turn of the century.

Twin towers are to be found not only along the western boundary o. Central Park but in the most modern and perhaps the most pretentious o all hotels in New York, the Waldorf-Astoria. This edifice, apart from it lavish appointments, has interest as an engineering feat, since it spans the tracks of the New York Central, and makes use of this fact to furnish the Waldorf guests with private railroad sidings. The problem of carrying frame down through the track tunnel and still insulating the building against vibration was a formidable one. It calls to mind that all the big hotels have to solve still another spanning problem, of which the genera public is quite unaware. Over the ceilings of the large lobbies and dining rooms of the first floors lies the enormous weight of floor after floor o small rooms up above, with the result that the trusses over these first-floo ceilings are colossal.

"Genteel Houses" of the Middle Class

Architectural histories have generally dealt with the living quarters o only those New Yorkers who occupied houses very imposing or very old As a matter of fact, such structures have formed but a small part of th living accommodations of New Yorkers, and the really fascinating stor lies elsewhere. It is easily possible to find houses that trace a complet cycle of domestic evolution, beginning more than a century ago and con cerning the great middle class.

Though the oldest of these houses are to be found on Cherry Street where they were built very early in the 19th century, the largest numbe

BRICKS OF THE CITY 225

survive in Greenwich Village. Here is to be found a special type of early New York residence of the highest excellence, one that Fenimore Cooper referred to as "a species of second-rate genteel houses that abound in New York, into which I have looked in passing with utmost pleasure." It s a house two stories high, with an attic under the pitched roof above, which had two-or very rarely three-dormers; the frontage is only ex- ceptionally more than 20 feet, but almost never less. As originally con- structed by mechanics working from manuals rather than from architects' plans, this house sat behind a tidy wrought-iron fence, and showed the street a face of bright red brick above a basement of brownstone or occa- ionally marble. The details are exceedingly simple. The windows are inder plain stone lintels; but the doorways, though always chaste, show considerable spirited variety in the handling of classic details. These door- ways always have some form of transom light, sometimes a fan-light, in y ofaddition to side-lights, giving an effect of bright welcome and insuring Is of n it the the a well-lighted hall. The main doorway is always reached by a stoop; and this is important, for it relates to one of the most practical house-plans "for a modestly comfortable scheme of life ever adopted throughout large areas of a city.

The stoop was important because it neatly separated the formal en- "trance from the service or basement entrance, permitting the living quar- ters in a highly practical way to occupy two floors, while the whole house could be kept only two rooms deep. The apparently simple arrangement of these straightforward houses of the 1820's is remarkable chiefly be- cause, after more than a century, persons of modest means in New York are once more beginning to dream of living in new houses with every window freely open to unobstructed light, instead of facing a narrow alley or a "light shaft." The principle of city dwellings only two rooms deep, which a hundred years ago was taken as a matter of course, has be- come an "idealistic" demand of modern housing.

The basement of these old houses was a pleasant affair looking out on the small planted court in front and the garden in the rear. These base- ments are still considered desirable now that most of the houses are used as small apartments. In the original scheme, the front room of this base- ment was either the dining room or the family living room (in the latter case the dining room was upstairs) ; while the kitchen was always to the rear, deliveries being made through the side-hall. Guests could come up the stoop and be properly received in the upper hall and in the "draw- ing room" that opened from it, the latter being usually connected with

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226 ARCHITECTURE

the rear room by a wide doorway. The upper floors contained front and b rear bedrooms, with sometimes a third hall bedroom at the head of thelt stairs. A simplifying factor was the total absence in the house of bath-ig rooms; the "temples of Cloacina" were balanced at the two rear cornersit of the lot. Even the stairway in the house we have described was pleasant, for it began well back and had its own window at the landing.

Speaking of these houses, Montgomery Schuyler said: "They were more than decent; they were 'elegant.' The adjective cannot be applied to the contemporary small houses of Philadelphia or Boston. They were de- cent, in the one case with a Quakerish simplicity, in the other with a Puritanic bleakness; but they were decidedly not elegant." Schuyler con- sidered that a large part of the charm of the New York houses came from the visible roof and the dormers; but both these features tended gradually to be suppressed as the century progressed, until in the 1840's the full- fledged Greek revival demanded that the roof be concealed behind a cornice.

The Brownstone Front

The change to a cornice, and incidentally to greater severity of line, brought gradual deterioration; for the cornice was most frequently of tin, opening the way to the horrors of the brownstone and parvenu periods. Nevertheless, the first corniced houses, scattered examples of which may be seen on some of the streets opening westward from Seventh Avenue below Tenth Street, were chaste and dignified.

More ominous than the tin cornice was the concurrent shrinkage of the house front. It is no accident that the charming small dormered houses are still chiefly found in the irregular streets of Greenwich Village. When the planning commission of 1807-II made the standard New York lot 100 feet deep, it unwittingly struck a mortal blow at the comfort of the merchant or professional man who had been paying a rental of from $300 to $500 a year for his small house. Land became too expensive, and the only way out was to build houses with a narrower frontage. Contracted in width, the house required greater depth, with the result that the brown- stone and other later individual city houses, even of the well-to-do, pos- sessed an interior not only cavernous but wastefully arranged. As Lewis Mumford points out in his book, The Brown Decades, not even the stone itself was suitable for the use to which it was put. In the earlier houses it had been employed structurally in basements, and occasionally as

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New York panorama : a comprehensive view of the metropolis, Part 23

Author: Publication date: 1938 Publisher: New York : Random House Number of Pages: 630

Author:
Publication date: 1938
Publisher: New York : Random House
Number of Pages: 630