Chapter 6 The 1910s

The decade of the teens saw significant building and—more significant by far-- the introduction of zoning. A good part of the construction during this decade conformed to rules that antedated the Zoning Resolution of 1916, but the terms of that measure changed the city’s planning and architecture after the First World War. Among other things, it mandated the setback forms for tall buildings that characterized New York’s architecture for decades until the rules changed in 1961.

The New York Public Library and Grand Central Terminal opened in the early years of the decade, in 1911 and 1913 respectively. New structures on Forty-second Street that were built or officially approved before 1916 included tall and slender office buildings, more theaters, Stern’s department store, and a new Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled which had moved east after the eastern expansion of the railroad terminal. The Commodore Hotel was built on part of the former hospital property. Most of the new office buildings that rose between Grand Central and the theater district were conservative in form and style, being boxes often of u-shaped plans to provide ventilation to offices and adorned by historic ornament rather than slabs or towers or buildings with setbacks.

The areas farthest from the subways saw little change during the decade. The blocks from Tenth Avenue to the Hudson ferries, or those at the East River waterfront remained homes for the poor even if some tenements were new. These blocks were locations for industry, including gas works at each end, and breweries near the Hudson.

(Fig.1 East end of the street, with tenements, an administrative building, and shacks. Men were laying trolley tracks near the river. Photo: Municipal Archives,bpm_0684-c2, Dec. 7, 1917. Public domain.)

(Fig. 2 From Tenth Avenue to the Hudson River, with philanthropic houses by Flagg at left, then Loewer’s brewery commercial buildings. Photo: Municipal Archives bpm_1130-5 June 20 1937. Public domain.)

(Fig. 3. Byron Company, West 42^nd Street, looking east from 42^nd Street ferry, 1915 or 1916. Photo: Museum of the City of New York, 93.1.1.17213. Public domain.)

A large warehouse for grocers Park & Tilford at 529 West was simply the newest of the industrial facilities, built in 1913 on property owned by the Russell family. It contained a manufacturing plant, a warehouse, and executive offices, although it is now an apartment house.

(Fig. 4. The Park & Tilford warehouse is the large dark building with vertical lines on the right (north) side of the street, as seen from west of Tenth Avenue, June 20, 1937. Photo: Municipal Archives bpm 1130-6. Public domain)

(Fig. 5. The Park and Tilford, now Armory building from west in 2023. Photo: Author.)

As of January 1917, the north side of the westernmost block was altered to add fifty feet to its west end, perhaps in anticipation of the elevated road that was not built until the 1930s. (66 John St. Block 1090 N side, and map.) At the same time, re-paving and track work went on at the east end of the street, on land that sloped between tenements, industrial installations, and crumbling walls toward the river.

(Fig. 6. Between First Avenue and the East River, January 28, 1932. Photo Municipal Archives bpm_0684-a. Public domain)

But near the center of Forty-second Street, most land values had risen dramatically in a decade, with more increments anticipated. (For land values, NYT 1 12 1913, p. X17 and many other similar articles in the years from 1900 to the First World War.) The combination of improved transportation via the subway and the new Terminal, and the movement of elite retail north of Thirty-fourth Street gave new cachet to the central parts of Forty-second Street, while theaters expanded on the west side.

Modernization and change were often allied to technology, which advanced rapidly. The country was linked in this decade not only by the railroads but also by the Lincoln Highway that stretched from the west coast to Forty-second Street.

(Frank Schmid, The Lincoln Highway Route: it’s [sic] ideals and purposes: a connected improved highway extending from New York City to San Francisco, Fort Wayne, the author, 1914. A sign identifying its end was put up only in the 2000s).

After 1915, electricity increasingly replaced gas for heating and lighting, so most midtown buildings used electricity by the start of the Great Depression. (David E. Nye. Consuming Power. A Social history of American Energies, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1998 p. 166) Electricity was welcomed especially in theaters, as it was less prone than gas was to explode or ignite. The General Electric company promoted the idea of the electrically illuminated “Great White Way” at Times Square., and colored neon was invented in 1910 although not brought to the United States until 1923. (Neon Facts from Wikipedia 6 19 2020) Production of Portland cement and of sheetrock advanced during this decade, too. Subway construction expanded, and trolley cars became electrified rather than horse-drawn, but as yet there was no system of electric traffic lights along the length of Forty-second Street.

1911 saw several proposals for eliminating the spur of the Third Avenue elevated railway that turned west to end at Grand Central. It was an eyesore and kept land prices low between the Terminal and Third Avenue until demolition started in 1923. The initial proposals were part of a street improvement program for Fifth Avenue and selected crosstown streets. On Forty-second Street there would be a fifteen-foot widening instigated in 1910 between Park and Eighth Avenues, followed by a petition to add the section in front of Grand Central. An entertainment impresario named L. Lawrence Weber wrote to the Times in 1910 proposing to widen the entire street, and take down the spur of the El, but that was too foresighted. (NYT 6 12 1910, p. 12) Widening the roadway entailed the further removal of stoops in front of formerly private houses that were turning into apartments. and the destruction of porches, gardens, and other additions. The Knickerbocker Hotel took down a balcony and a vaulted entrance, and theaters removed canopies that extended to the street.

Bryant Park, too, had to be reduced by seven and a half feet, Workmen moved its iron fence to align with the parapet of the Public Library. At the end of 1910, the National Academy of Design asked to encroach upon the western end of the park in order to build an exhibition gallery, but there was serious opposition to that idea. Some critics pointed out that the park was going to be narrowed and was already too small for the number of working people who took their lunch there, or for a densely packed neighborhood in general. Moreover, opponents remarked that if the Academy had so much public support that it warranted being built on city land, it should be able to raise money to build elsewhere. The park remained a park.

(Preservation Archive Project website, Charles Starks, “New York’s Pioneer of Planning and Preservation. How Geoge McAneny Reshaped Manhattan and Inspired a Movement, “2016, pp. 39-41; NYT 6 12 1910, p. X12; 7 22, 1910, p. 14; 12 25 1910, p. 4).

In 1912, the second subway line, proposed around 1902, was scheduled to cross the IRT at Times Square. Theater patrons, by then numerous, would be coming to Forty-second Street and the idea was to provide efficient connections for them by eliminating stairs and tunnels between the lines, whenever possible.

The newcomer was the line of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company; after 1923 following bankruptcy and receivership, it was called the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation, or Broadway line, or just the BMT. The intersection of the two lines called for an express station. The Times on October 13 1912, summarized the problem that creating a joint express station would pose. (p. 18) The downtown station at Times Square occupied nearly “all the space at the junction of Forty-second Street and Broadway, and its uptown station leaves no room for any other railroad construction on the first subway level at Forty-third Street and Broadway.” At least the subway foundations were coordinated with those of the Times Building. The planned extension of the Steinway Tunnel to Queens required connections to the other lines, too, although the plan for doing that was as yet not formulated.

Suggestions were made to solve the problem of overlapping routes and uses. The Broadway line station could be placed south of Times Square and a new express station for the IRT could be built on Seventh Avenue from just south of Forty-second to just north of Forty-third Street. On December 29, 1912, the Times published a proposal by the Broadway and Times Square Association for a mezzanine or concourse with the Broadway line trains underneath it, a solution for connecting the lines that exists at present in somewhat different form (NYT 2 6 1914, p. 3). One advantage of the concourse linking several lines and streets was that “ladies in evening dresses, would be able, from the proposed station, to walk a considerable distance, protected from the cold, rain, and traffic to the theatres to which they are bound.” (NYT 10 13 1912, p. 18.)

The essential idea was that there would be concourses at two levels, one above the Broadway line and another above it for the IRT line. This was formulated by the civil engineer and surveyor, Henry G. Opdycke. (NYT 4 21 1913, p.12; his article “Why Times Square Needs Express Stop”. See also 5 6 1913, p. 8.; 12 12 1913, p. 20 and 12 26 1913, p. 5) and endorsed by other traffic engineers including William Wilgus. Engineer A. L. Drum of Chicago suggested revisions as did the Broadway Association of property owners and businessmen three years later before final plans were approved. (NYT 5 27 1914, p. 8; 3 18 1917, p. RE1) No project of this degree of complexity is the product of only one mind. The Public Service Commission adopted the plan for a wide mezzanine with convenient access and transfer potential (NYT 4 8 1917, p. RE1). Soon thereafter, on April 15, 1917, the Times published a nearly unintelligible map of the existing and proposed subway lines, impressing readers rather than explaining the complexities of the subway system and its plans.

On the east side, enlarging the still privately-owned subway system presented other problems. For the extended Park-and-Lexington line, several traffic experts wanted to place the new subway station at Grand Central on a diagonal between Lexington and Park from Forty-third to Forty-fourth Streets. That would connect to the IRT station by extending the mezzanine floor. The alternative location would be at Forty-second Street, prolonging the crosstown line a block or two to connect to it. In August, 1914, the final plans were submitted to the IRT directors by the Public Service Commission, which had approved them. Users objected to creating an east-west shuttle between the east and west north-south train lines because the shuttle required a transfer to those trains rather than the formerly smooth ride from the upper west side to City Hall, but at least the shuttle would be at the same level as the mezzanine of the new station. The shuttle itself had to be closed for a while because too many people rushed simultaneously to use it when the extended Lexington and Seventh Avenue lines opened. (NYT 8 3 1918, p. 1)

The First World War delayed the start of extended service along Seventh and Lexington Avenues because materials and signal equipment for military use had been taken by the Federal Government, but the United States entered the war only from April 6, 1917 to its end on November 11, 1918. A. W. Warner, representing the IRT, expected that when the express stop at Times Square was completed, it could enable more people easily to reach certain department and specialty stores, among them Stern Brothers on West 42^nd Street. Grand Central’s express stop was more convenient for Lord & Taylor at 38^th Street and Fifth Avenue, for the Arnold, Constable department store two blocks north, and for the men’s furnishings shops of Brooks Brothers, Rogers Peet and F. R. Tripler which logically moved to the vicinity of Grand Central, its hotels, and the men’s clubs nearby. Mr. Warner noted that the recent growth of the Grand Central district, as it was known by then, was due not only to the Terminal but also to the northward movement of the city’s population, accelerated by the Els and subway that transported workers of all levels. He emphasized that while the old depot and station had existed for decades without stimulating much building nearby, it was the subway that created a market for high-rental shops. (NYT 6 9 1918, p. 92. This opinion precedes Jason Barr’s insights about the development of midtown) Moreover, the glamorous new Grand Central was an attraction on its own, as its predecessors had not been.

Times Square benefited from traffic both to its immediate neighborhood and to some distance south of it, because it had been the southernmost station of the initial west side rapid transit route. It became even busier after work was completed in 1918 to make it an express stop. The west side line was extended south of Forty-second Street and the BMT intersection and plans were finally confirmed for the mezzanine connecting the lines and the shuttle. The New York Times paid more attention to the west side station, probably because the newspaper’s headquarters stood on top of it. It also published theater news, and by 1918, theater building had burgeoned on and even north of West Forty-second Street at Times Square in part because the two lines made theaters easy to reach. Businesses flourished near the stations, to judge from photographs taken in connection with subway extensions. The area also saw open prostitution, formerly well organized and prosperous but by 1916 “furtive, disorganized, and unsuccessful” according to a report of the Bureau of Social Hygiene. Rooming houses were closed to prostitutes between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, Thirty-seventh to Forty-second Streets. (Gilfoyle, op cit., p. 311) That did not stop the business, of course.

In 1916, the Rialto theater opened, designed by Thomas Lamb, to replace the not-even- twenty-year-old Victoria. As Oscar Hammerstein had an office on the third floor that he hoped to visit during construction of the new building, it appears that the new theater was just a substantial remodeling of the older one. (NYT 4 4 1916, p. 24) The swift pace of theater construction and theater changes of name, ownership, buildings, and forms of entertainment came about because of the inherent instability of commercial arts and because motion pictures had appeared while the popularity of vaudeville and burlesque had begun to wane. These gradual changes became fixed after the introduction of sound in motion pictures in 1923 and the first full-length talkie in 1927, so that plays and films dominated the entertainment industry in the long run.

The new Rialto owed its inspiration to Roxy Rothafel. This theatrical entrepreneur and producer is most famous now as the instigator of Radio City Music Hall and the Rockettes precision dancers; they were earlier called the Roxyettes. But in the 19-teens, he was already well known in the entertainment industry, and theater operators hired him as the managing director.

The Rialto’s exterior was undistinguished architecturally, being mostly plain brick pierced by office windows, but the center had an arched sign ten feet in diameter with the Rialto name. Lights below and above the letters succeeded each other, giving the effect of Roman candle fireworks.

(Fig. 7. Rialto Theatre, Thomas Lamb, 1916, façade. Photo: www.nycago.org Public domain.)

(Fig. 8. Rialto Theatre. Interior. Orchestra and stage. Photo: www.nycago.org. Public domain.)

Since the façade feature drew attention, it didn’t matter that it had no coherent relation to the façade design. Neither did the cigar store at its corner, but smoking shops and theaters were obviously commercial properties meant for pleasure. Cigar stores, in fact, occupied many corner sites for decades, thanks to the foresight of an industry leader, David Albert Schulte who understood real estate as well as he understood the tobacco industry; he sold Aeolian Hall (see below) for a million-dollar profit after owning it for only two years.

(“Business: Schulte & Specialities,” Time, Nov. 29, 1937, http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,758501,00.html accessed 3 6 2022).

Film shows at the Rialto in the 19-teens included live singers and musicians, even an orchestra, and after 1922, a Wurlitzer organ. The interior with its one balcony was broad enough to seat 1,960 people, all of whom could leave the theater in three minutes in case of emergency. The stage performances had intermissions, when patrons could send postcards from writing tables, or men could withdraw to the smoking room, a feature common in theaters for decades. The decorative scheme was based on eighteenth-century European models. Audiences faced a broad stage with enough room for the orchestra. The back wall was decorated with three landscape murals. Colored lights set the mood for each presentation. The films, shown in front of the central mural, were at first produced by the Triangle corporation, but Paramount-- under its original name of Famous Players, or Lasky Corporation--took over the theater and presented its own productions there. The Rialto lasted only until a new and smaller replacement opened in 1935.

()http://www.nycago.org/Organs/NYC/html/RialtoTheatre.html; Stern et al. New York, 1930, p. 252, Martin Treu, Signs, Streets, and Storefronts: A History of Architecture and Graphics, Baltimore, JHU Press, 2012, p. 60. Mary C. Henderson, The City and the Theatre; http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/16666 accessed 12 23 2019)

Other new theaters included several leased or built by the Selwyn brothers, Archibald and Edgar. First came a lease of the National at 254-258 West, originally built for Oscar Hammerstein and renamed several times. Arthur Westover designed it in 1904 for a site of 67 x 98 feet, holding nine hundred spectators in the orchestra, two balconies, and boxes. By August 1911, Herts and Tallant had remodeled the box office and entrance when the City widened the street and made interior changes. The Selwyn brothers focused on three later theaters—one of 1918 named for themselves at 229 West designed by George Keister, and the Times Square and Apollo theaters opened in 1920 that had a common façade at 215-219 West, adjacent to the Lyric Theater’s entrance to the east. The Selwyn rose behind the brothers’ six-floor office building and had 964 seats. The interior, decorated in blue and gold, had large murals and assorted moldings in what was called the “Early Italian Renaissance” style.

(Fig.9. Wurts Bros., Apollo and Times Square Theatres, 1920, photo June 11, 1922. Eugene DeRosa with George Keister. Photo: Museum of the City of New York, C2010.7.1.5567 Public domain)

The fraternal façade of the Apollo and Times Square theaters was the work of Eugene DeRosa of the firm DeRosa & Pereira with George Keister as consultant. The Times Square has a loggia above the rusticated ground floor, akin to the facade of Colonnade Row on Lafayette Street. The loggia terminates in bays with arches over rectangular windows, flanked by pilasters. Its slender columns delicate ironwork and grottesche frieze evoked the taste of the Adam Brothers. One marquee served both theaters. The Apollo (originally the Bryant of 1910 with a different façade and briefly called Margaret Mayo) had its main area on Forty-third Street so a long corridor from Forty-second Street was required for access to it. The Apollo’s color scheme was unusual, using black, silver, gray, and green. That the carpets were black and must have shown every speck and footprint may explain why the decoration was later altered. In order to minimize noise from the street for over a thousand patrons in each interior, the theater designs included a corridor or “air cushion” along both streets

(www.dorothysebastian.com/apollo.html, Henderson Ten Theaters pp. 72-74, id. with Alexis Greene, Story of Forty-second Street, pp. 195, 215-216; NYT 9 17 1917, p. 13; 6 22.1919, p. 104).

Another theater, The Empire, so called after 1964, was the former Eltinge built in 1912 to the design of Thomas W. Lamb at the center of the block and named for a well-known female impersonator named Julian Eltinge who did not actually perform there. The façade was unusual in having a very large round-arched window, three stories high, under a fourth floor for offices that served as a cornice to the composition.

(Figs. 10 a & b. Anthony F. Dumas, drawing of Eltinge Theatre, 1912.Thomas W. Lamb, architect. Liberty theatre, adjacent at left. Photo: Museum of the City of New York, 75.200.57 and Wurts Bros., Eltinge Theatre interior, Photo Museum of the City of New York, X2010.7.1.10674 c. 1910 Public domain.)

In its original complete form, the Eltinge was distinctive for having seats suited to slender, medium, and stout members of the audience. It is now most famous for having had its pale arched facade moved in 1998 one hundred seventy feet west to serve as the front and lobby of the AMC Theater. The owner at the time, Bruce C. Ratner of the Forest City Ratner company, proposed to take it down stone by stone and move it westward to allow for new commercial entertainments on its existing site. But the building elements that could be moved were made of terra cotta which cannot be taken apart that way and rebuilt. Architect Frederick Bland, architect at Beyer Blinder Belle collaborated with Anthony J. Mazzo, senior vice-president of the Urban Foundation/Engineering Company, recommended by engineer Robert Silman. The theater façade and front element of the building, 7.4 million pounds of it, were moved 168 feet on rail tracks and thousands of German-made stainless-steel ball-bearings on March 1, 1998. According to a report in the New York Daily News on March 8, the move cost $1.2 million.

(https://www.proquest.com/docview/2236231926/9AF2B50FCE244F99PQ/3?accountid=12768&sourcetype=Blogs,%20Podcasts,%20&%20Websites. Frederick Bland memoir “Here at Beyer Blinder Belle” unpaginated copy, s.v. Forest City Ratner/42nd Street. Northwest Florida Daily News 3 2 1998, p. 1A. NYT online 2 28 1988: “The Theater’s on a Roll.)

In 1909, Midwestern investors laid plans for a new building opposite the south face of the Times tower on a site owned by the estate of Charles A. Coe who had obtained it at an auction in 1885. The customers of older hotels there had become lesser members of the theatrical profession who could not pay high prices for their food and drink. The new building, had, like the Times tower across the street, a low but broad base—this one of marble-- and a tower, but the new tower was only about 28 feet square, not usable for most offices. In fact, it was intended as a framework for advertising signs.

(Fig.11. Heidelberg later Crossroads Building, 1910, Henry Ives Cobb. Building shown with tower under construction. Photo: Building Progress Magazine, 1910. Public domain.)

(C.Gray, “Streetscapes,” NYT 4 26 1998, XI, p.7)

(Fig.12 Heidelberg later Crossroads Building, lower levels, east end. Photo: The New York Historical, Bracklow collection. Public domain.)

The base of what was named the Heidelberg Building had two stories of large windows and four more office floors with three windows per bay on one side, five on the other, a parapet roof with corner turrets, and in the center, the eleven-story tower. An illuminated sign ringed much of the third floor. Architect Henry Ives Cobb assembled eclectic stylistic details and a mixture of surface materials but he was sufficiently up-to-date to use steel post construction and fireproof terra cotta cladding. He also created a grand metal marquee at the building’s principal entrance on Forty-second Street. Clothiers rented space at ground level, as did a café and a ticket office for the Lackawanna Railroad. Tailors, a furrier, and entertainment-related businesses occupied the second floor. Rathskeller owners from Buffalo took over the basement, calling it the Steuben Tavern which lasted until at least 1940, and was later replaced by the Crossroads Restaurant. (The New York Historical, photograph 3A88353) Fragments of its lower parts are visible behind the Times tower in many photographs of that more conspicuous building. A photograph of the building being demolished is at the Municipal Archives.

(Fig. 13. Heidelberg building being demolished. Manhattan Municipal Library and Archives REC0022_01_1984_027_10; see also REC002201_1984_028 Photographers Paul Rice and Leonard Boykin.)

The Heidelberg Building overall was financially unsuccessful and apart from the restaurant, stood empty after 1923. One problem was that no one walking on Forty-second Street itself could see the advertising tower, as it was set back and nearly invisible from below. It was hard to see from anywhere, with the Times tower partly blocking it from view. The owners were asking high rates for advertising space but had to lower them later; even then, few advertisers were interested and only one large sign ever appeared on the tower. The building’s moment of fame arrived in 1912 when Harry Houdini escaped from a straitjacket while being suspended over the building’s edge.

(http://www.nysonglines.com/42st.htm; NYT 2 5 1961, pp. R1, R5; “Streetscapes: 42nd and Broadway,” 4 26 1998, XI, p. 7; https://www.wildabouthoudini.com/2018/05/houdinis-first-outdoor-stunt-in-times.html. Accessed 1 9 2021 Meyer Berger, ‘About New York,” NYT 4 13 1953, p. 29”; NYT 4 26 1990, p. RE7; 5 16 1909, p. 11, 3 18 1911, p. 18. Variety vol. 24 #9 Nov. 4, 1911, p. 1. Derek C. Satchell, “At the Stroke of a Brush: Painted Architecture as a Preservation Alternative,” M.A. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, Historic Preservation program, 1994, pp. 27-28, posted April 29, 2014, https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1260&context=hp_theses )

From 1911 to 1913, Asa Candler, the inventor of Coca-Cola, and his wife Lucy assembled property on West Forty-second Street in the 200 block between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. A substantial part of the site had been occupied by the Central Baptist Church which was probably glad to be paid to move from a decreasingly religious area. A tall office building, named the Candler Building, was largely finished by 1913. At 220 West, it was erected to the design of Willauer, Shape and Bready.

(Fig. 14, Candler Building, Willauer, Shape, & Bready. 1913 Photo Exhibitors Herald, November, 1920. Public domain.)

They sacrificed some square footage at the east and west sides in order to assure that offices along the depth of the building to Forty-first Street would have windows and therefore yield higher rent per square foot than artificially lit or light-well-lit spaces would do. Above five bays at the 75-foot-wide four-story base is the slimmer twenty-four story elevation with three bays, and then an even narrower shaft from the eighteenth floor to the green tiled roof. The elevation anticipates the setbacks mandated under the zoning rules of 1916. Arches at the top echo those at the base. The facing of the steel-framed building is of white glazed terra cotta with some details said to be of Spanish Renaissance style. That designation meant a hybrid of Renaissance and Baroque ornaments based on pictures of Spanish buildings. The decorative flourishes were largely invisible anyway, being concentrated near the top of the tower. Candler’s family crest was placed on various metal elements including doorknobs and mailboxes. There was nothing remarkable about the loft-space interiors. It was the exterior that counted in the cityscape--340.92 feet to the roof, and then a 36-foot flagpole. More important for the occupants, however, was a fireproof stair tower, perhaps the first one in one of the city’s office buildings.

(Henry W. Frohne, American Architect and Building News, May 7, 1913 nyc-architecture.com/MID/MID112.htm accessed 10 28 2016; https://www.bdcnetwork.com/candler-building-short-history accessed 10 29 2016, https://www.bdcnetwork.com/candler-building-short-history. Stern et al., New York 1900, p. 547; C. Gray; “Streetscapes,” NYT 3 31 1996, p. RCW7. Henderson & Greene, The Story of 42nd Street, p. 159)

Adjacent to it stood a theater on the former site of the George Bruce Library. With the development of the Public Library and its Carnegie-sponsored branches, the Bruce building had become less important to the area. The theater was also built by the Candler family which gave it their name. Thomas Lamb provided the overall design, Arthur Brounet the interior in an assertive style evoking no particular era. This was planned as both a cinema and a legitimate theater. When Samuel Harris and George M Cohan bought it, they changed it to a legitimate theater and named it for themselves. Harris then gained control of the property and renamed it for himself alone. Once again it became a cinema after the Shubert brothers bought and sold it, and it remained a movie theater into the 1980s though it was derelict by the 1960s if not earlier.

The broad lobby was decorated with tapestries by Alfred Herter showing Shakespearean scenes The tall auditorium could be simply decorated, as movie patrons were going to be in the dark rather than being seen in lavish surroundings at theater intermissions. The height and a wide proscenium projected an impression of spaciousness to 1200 audience members. To avoid visual intrusions into sight lines, it had a single cantilevered balcony, and just one box on each side. A problem was the lack of adequate fire exits, but no tragedies occurred.

(Fig. 15. Byron Company, Candler Theatre, interior. Thomas W. Lamb, 1914. Interior decoration by Arthur Brunet. Photo: Museum of the City of New York 93.1.3.14441 Public domain.)

Like other theaters in the area including the New Amsterdam, this one had its auditorium at the cheaper Forty-first Street end of the building.

(The New York Dramatic News and Dramatic Times, #516, 1914 for details of the interior. Henderson Ten Theaters p 56)

A closer combination of auditorium and office building went up at 33 West in 1912. Aeolian Hall replaced the West Park Presbyterian Church on the site of the former ill-fated Latting Tower. The church had had wealthy patrons during the last part of the nineteenth century, and as late as 1902 the vestry hoped to replace its Victorian façade and build a parish house. But while the Reverend Dr. John R. Paxton had been a popular preacher, his failing health and his sermons inveighing against the very rich displeased some of the members, among whom several qualified as robber barons. What’s more, most of the congregation no longer lived in Murray Hill but had moved uptown and west of Central Park. The time was ripe to sell the church and amalgamate with the Presbyterian church at Amsterdam Avenue and West Eighty-sixth Street. A demolition permit was issued in June 1911, and the new Aeolian Hall was swiftly constructed, opening in October 1912. It was the tallest building between Sixth and Madison Avenues for a short time. The newcomers had bought one of the only sites in these blocks that was not held by long-time landowning families.

The sponsor of the new building was Frederick G. Bourne, president of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, and also a director of the Aeolian Company, which since 1887 had manufactured musical instruments-- initially mechanical self-playing organs. It became especially prosperous by making several types of player pianos and organs and by acquiring other musical instrument manufacturing firms, even expanding to Germany and England. Over the years until its termination in 1985, its products grew to cover roll music for player pianos and organs, sheet music, records, phonographs, and normal pianos.

https://www.lindebladpiano.com/library/aeolian-and-aeolian-american-corporation https://www.artdesigncafe.com/aeolian-company-design-history NYT 10 13 1912, p. XX2; Warren & Wetmore pp. 194-195

The company engaged Whitney Warren and Charles Wetmore to design the new building on a lot with seventy-eight feet of frontage on both Forty-second and Forty-third Streets. They were at the end of their work at Grand Central and could by then design a new building eighteen stories high in a sober classicizing mode. When it opened, it dwarfed the low brick and stone buildings at each side---buildings that would soon be replaced.

(Fig. 16. Wurts Bros., Aeolian Hall. Warren & Wetmore, 1912. Photo; Museum of the City of New York X2010.7.2.14652, 1920. Public domain.)

Above three basements dug into hard flint rock, the smooth and sober lower floors were faced in granite with large glass windows. Additional floors were clad in terra cotta, in groups of nine, three, and one as the building ascended. A final partial story had larger windows. A dignified façade on Forty-third Street evoked the French Renaissance for critics at the time. At that location was the fire escape of the kind then called balanced---that is, automatically horizontal when not weighted down by a person; it rested discreetly behind a balcony.

The principal feature of interest inside was a concert hall at the north end of

(Fig. 17, Aeolian Hall, auditorium. Photo: aeolianhall.ca tagconcerts.jpg Public domain)

the third floor where eleven hundred listeners could experience an intimate feeling, according to remarks common at the time. The stage could accommodate an entire symphony orchestra, but the acoustics suited small ensembles and soloists as well. The design of the auditorium was the architects’ version of eighteenth-century classicism. An artistic arrangement of organ pipes decorated with delicate swags at the top of the pipes focused attention on the stage. There were adjacent amenities including a clubroom for the musicians and a green room in the basement next to four dressing rooms, each with a complete bathroom. Another area in the northern part of the basement housed a phonograph salesroom and soundproof rooms with glass partitions, where customers could test the sound of records on their potential purchases. The third floor, decorated in restful blue, was largely given over to the sale of player pianos, which could be heard in thirteen soundproof rooms. Another area at that level was devoted to pipe-organ sales, and yet another, with Pompeiian red walls, to pianos new and used.

Among the important---and at the time sensational--- musical events held there was the first performance in 1924 of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which conductor Paul Whiteman billed as an educational event--an “Experiment in Modern Music” with the composer at the piano. Another unprecedented event was a recital of jazz-based works by William Grant Still two years later, sung by Florence Mills, who was a well-known African-American performer on Broadway. Famous musicians who appeared at Aeolian Hall included composers Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Ferruccio Busoni, violinists Jascha Heifetz and Misha Elman, and singers Maggie Teyte who performed at the opening concert, and Emma Calvé. The building became the first home of the New York Chamber Music Society. Aeolian moved out of the building in 1926; the last concert was given in May by violinist Leon Goldman.

(Walker and Pennoyer, Warren & Wetmore, pp. 194-195; Charles Matlack Price, “The New Aeolian Hall, Warren and Wetmore, Architects,” Architectural Record 32, 1912, pp. 530-551).

Minor investments continued, too. A small marble-clad building at 18 East is a rare survivor from 1912, named for the initial tenant, Hallet, Davis & Company, piano manufacturers in Boston since 1835-- although the letters on the façade say 1839-- and in New York since 1852. This firm was the initial tenant in 1913 and did not move away until 1926. The slender building is six stories high, with a neat geometric design and large windows. The developers were Isidore S. and Max S. Korn, active in real estate since at least the 1890s especially on lower Fifth Avenue and on West Seventy-fifth Street. They were the first people of eastern European Jewish origin to develop property in an elite part of East Forty-second Street, although there were people of that ethnicity active in the theater district. They engaged Harry Leslie Walker as their architect; he also designed 2-10 East and 22 and 24 East between 1913 and 1916, as well as church, civic, and commercial buildings; he took part in the design of the Williamsburg Houses in Brooklyn during the 1930s.

(NYT 5 16 1893, p.7; 4 3 1896, p.12; 4 14 1911, p.16; 7 28 1931, p.20. Laws of the State of New York, 101st Session of the Legislature, Albany, 1878, p. 523.. For Walker: https://prabook.com/web/harry_leslie.walker/1041668 accessed 6 2 2020)

The piano makers had as neighbors the Rogers Peet men’s clothing branch at 14-16 East, opened in February 1915 as both a shop and a building with offices for rent. Among the tenants were the Pomeroy Company that supplied surgical appliances, and the Pavell Laboratories. Ten stories high, taller than its marble-faced neighbor, this is a brown brick building with thin stringcourses dividing the stories between its base and the top two floors that form a terminus to the design; the two stone-faced floors above the ground floor shops show simple Renaissance ornament. Like the contemporary Bush Tower and the slightly later Wurlitzer Building, as well as the earlier Murtaugh Dumbwaiter Company building, this one had a large sign near the top of its side wall to advertise its presence on both Forty-second Street and around its L-shaped extension on Fifth Avenue. Remnants survive of a later version of the sign, visible above the piano company’s lower premises. Those who recall the clothier’s dignified atmosphere will find it either sad or amusing to see a fast-food restaurant at the street level of 18 East.

Two substantial new buildings were finished by 1915, one at the northeast corner of Forty-second Street and Broadway, and the other at the southeast corner of Forty-second and Madison. (NYT 3 31 1912, p.XX1) The former, called the Longacre Building named for the company that owned it, was a monumental twelve-story structure above the subway station, designed by Clinton and Russell and built in 1911-12 on a site owned by the Astor family. Two floors were clad mainly in plate glass. The remaining elevation was designed with another floor faced in pale stone or terra cotta, separated by a molding from nine more clad in brick. Two stringcourses separated the terminal floors, one of which had a stone or terra cotta surface, and then a low parapet. Marking the corner, larger-than-normal sash windows protruded on three sides of an octagon.

(Fig. 18. Longacre Building in 1926, Clinton & Russell, 1911-12. Photo: Brown Brothers, NYPL Image ID 717484F https://digitalcollections.nypl. Public domain.)

The second building, at Madison, by Albert Buchman & Mortimer J. Fox, rose from 1913 to 1915 on the site where the two Doctors Smith had assembled property more than a decade earlier. They and the next site owners were thwarted by one holdout. Finally, when an owner called the Johnson Syndicate acceded to a nearly extortionate deal for the property, the architects proposed a 23-story boxlike building of a type common at the time. This example, named for the National Carbide company initially, lasted until its demolition in 2001. The shape was seen with different proportions at the Longacre Building: a distinctive base of a few stories, a floor or two in a design different from that of repetitious stories above, and several terminal floors of another design, evoking the conservative idea of a base, a column shaft, and a capital. At the Carbide building, there was limestone at the base and toward the top and in between, a dozen identical brick-faced stories with rectangular windows in an even rhythm. A cornice above an attic floor concluded the design. While many people would notice the base and the top of a building, they would hardly pay attention to the repetitive middle floors. (NYT 12 13 1913, p. 24.)

(Fig. 19. Carbide & Carbon Building. Buchman & Fox, 1913. Photo: Museum of the City of New York, 93.1.1.16709, dated 1927. Public domain)

A smaller office building, called the Vanderbilt Avenue or Vanderbilt Concourse Building finished a year later, was a six-story palazzo designed by Warren & Wetmore at the northwest corner of the Forty-second Street intersection with Vanderbilt Avenue. J. Clarence Davies was the developer. He had many investments in Manhattan and the Bronx, and was a prominent broker; later, the industrialist August Heckscher became the owner for several years under the name of the Anahma Corporation. With 68 feet on Forty-second Street but 200 on Vanderbilt, the building could accommodate more tenants than the façade on Forty-second Street suggested. The elevation featured a ground floor with commercial premises, four stories separated by projecting smooth strips of stone, and a final story separated from the others by a molding. A salient cornice completed the rigorously geometric composition although the roof had a protective barrier.

(Fig, 20. Arthur Vitols for the Byron Company, Vanderbilt Avenue Building, first stage Warren & Wetmore 1913. Photo: Museum of the City of New York, 93.1.3.532., ca. 1920. Public domain)

(Fig. 21. American Art Publishing Co. postcard, H. Finkelstein & Sons, Vanderbilt Avenue Building at right, behind part of Grand Central Terminal. Hotel Manhattan behind it. Across the street, the tan building is the Lincoln storage and warehouse building. Behind (west of) it is the Carbide Building. In the left distance, the Candler Building. Postcard ca. 1925. Museum of the City of New York, X2011.34.3554 Public domain.)

In 1915, the Astor Trust, after various mergers, proposed a new banking and office building to cost a million dollars for the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street on a site then assessed at $1,510,000. It erased a building erected five years earlier which had replaced the Columbia Bank and Safe Deposit Company headquarters on the former Rutgers Female Institute site. Since the lot faced two broad streets, had an alley in back, and had only the low, older seven-story Depew Building on its east side, all four sides could offer light to office tenants. The Oceanic Investment Company bought the site, probably from Felix Isman who had bought it in 1906; A. E. Thorne, was president of the investment company as well as of the Forty-second Street Association, established in 1919 by businessmen with interests on the street. The building was also known as the Bankers Trust Building. Mr. Thorne himself had bought in 1914 three lots across Forty-second Street---properties of the Morton. Sturgis. and Schley estates, including the Schley and Telfree houses, and a stable; he refitted them for business purposes and in 1919, leased them for forty years to the Mirror Candy Company whose Martha Washington Candy Shop had been there since 1912. (NYT 10 27 1906, p.5 for Isman; 3 27 1924, p.32; 5 11 1928, p.49).

The new design for the Astor Trust was commissioned from Montague Flagg II-- not the eponymous brother of Ernest Flagg. (Ernest’s older brother, Montague, who was not the architect, died in 1915; the architect of 501 Fifth Avenue died in 1924.) As a gesture to the windows of the library, Montague Flagg designed a building with prominent arched windows marking the three-story main banking floor, levels two through four. The ground floor gave access both to the main bank and to the basement safe deposit vaults. The limestone-covered building was not otherwise distinguished, just a calm presence as it is today. In that respect, and in its pale stone exterior, it was akin to Aeolian Hall, although the latter had more unusual smooth lower floors and designs of harps just above them.

(Fig.22. Astor Trust Building, 1917. Montague Flagg. Photo: Museum of the City of New York X2010.7.1.5037. Public domain.)

(Fig. 23. Top of Astor Trust Building. MNY 245482 X 2010.7.1.11935 Public domain.)

For fourteen stories, the Astor Trust building offered the same design of single windows at each end and three sets of paired windows in between, with occasional shallow stringcourses. At the top two floors, there was a colonnade in relief between the end windows, and along with the slightly-projecting cornice, it gave a satisfying conclusion to the design. Although its lowest floors were clad in dark granite in the 1960s, they were restored a century after their construction by the Abramson Brothers, Inc., owners at that time. Interior details in the lowest floors were carefully designed. The neat rectilinear design of the bronze tellers’ compartments, for example, was the work of Charles E Birge, architect of several Childs Restaurants, some of which were then on Forty-Second Street. The New York Times heralded the construction of the Astor Trust Company Building by illustrating beside it a view of the area sixty years earlier, when the reservoir and isolated houses dotted an area entirely without anything tall except the short-lived Latting Observatory on the next block.

(https://nyrej.com/abramson-brothers-inc-begins-restoration-of-501-fifth-avenue-hires-architectural-firm-bohlin-cywinski-jackson-for-renovation NYT 8 29 1915, p. XX1.)

By 1919, the tax assessment on the block had risen to $13,650,000.

(Sweeny recte Sweeney NYT 1 4 1931, p.RE15; for the expansion of banking in this period, see NYT 8 29 1915, p. XX1)

In the same year, 1915, the architects Frank J. Helmle and Harvey Wiley Corbett designed a fireproof office building at 130-132 West for Irving Bush and completed it in December of 1917. When few buildings close to it were even half its height; it dominated its immediate area. Bush was an international shipping magnate and the proprietor of the 250-acre Bush Terminal Market in Brooklyn, through which international trade circulated. (NYT 4 16 1916, p. XX6) His building on Forty-second Street was designed to have club-like facilities and display rooms for merchants with international trading businesses. The Times confirmed on October 28, 1917 (NYT p. RE11) that there was considerable demand for office space in the Grand Central zone, as there had been for several years. Bush’s facilities in Brooklyn were full, with applicants for space waiting in line even though rents had risen there by 25% since the fall of 1916; that increase may have been due to shipping connected to the war effort. While the many buildings at the Terminal were remote and confusing, buyers from around the country and even beyond it would find the office building on Forty-second Street convenient to reach.

(Fig. 24. Bush tower from east., Manhattan Post Card Co. photograph before c. 1919, Bush Tower from the east, Museum of the City of New York F2011.33.1689. Public domain)

(Fig. 25. Bush tower from west. Helmle & Corbett, 1917. Photo: NYU Department of Art History. Public domain. Knickerbocker Hotel at far right.)

Some manufacturers who were tenants in Brooklyn rented space at the new midtown building, where their executives and other members could enjoy the easy chairs and thick carpets of a Jacobean-styled International Buyers’ Club on the lower floors. These luxurious accommodations, however, lasted only three years after the building opened in 1918. Interruption during the war and economic uncertainty after it may have resulted in their conversion into offices and then a Childs restaurant in 1931, called the Old London that could reuse the English historical details. A Childs restaurant had been at Sixth Avenue and Forty-second Street in 1916, serving sandwiches of oysters, fried eggs, or sliced chicken for ten cents and tenderloin steak for fifty-five, and its chain of restaurants proved popular especially with business employees; another Childs at 47 East opened by the 1920s. Bush himself sponsored an arcade of shops that survived only briefly.

(The building was named officially the Bush Terminal International Exhibit Building and Buyers Club. For the menu, see http://menus.nypl.org/menu, pages 66197 and 66199. accessed 5 31 2020. Images of the arcade’s façade and interior are at the Museum of the City of New York.)

Corbett, trained initially as an engineer, explained some of the features of a tall but thin building, particularly the matter of bracing using heavy plate girders and strong knee braces at each column as constructed by the Thompson-Starrett Company. (American Architect 112, Oct. 19 pp. 288-291) Another problem to be overcome was the extension of the building to Forty-first Street, resulting in two long north-south sides where windows could be darkened by any adjacent building of equal height. The solution was to fill the interior with display rooms where artificial light and ventilation posed no problem, and to have a recessed air shaft part way toward the south which could allow for small interior windows. The air shaft is visible in Fig. 24.

Only fifty feet wide but thirty stories high, counting every element, the Bush tower’s proportions suggested a Gothic-inspired vertical treatment of the exterior. The façade emphasizes slenderness and verticality. Prominent but thin verticals mark the location of interior columns, with shallower verticals rising between the sash windows. These lines terminate in a first cornice: a two-story succession of openings and verticals with lantern turrets at each corner. Above, receding from the main tower, six more stories with chamfered corners end in a single-story band that substitutes for a cornice. Finally, the water tank and the elevator machinery are concealed in a tower-like element. The practical solution to the problem of a narrow site, where height was required for a tower built to the building line, aroused the admiration of many critics. So did the subtlety with which the tower receded, since after the Zoning Resolution took effect, other tall towers would have to be set back, too.

(Niven Busch Jr.,“Profiles: Over Babel,” New Yorker, March 25, 1927, p. 26 ff. Landmarks Preservation Commission Oct. 18 1988, Designation List 210 LP-1561, with further bibliography; http://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/1561.pdf accessed 5 25 2020. Andrew Dolkart, Guide to New York City Landmarks, Washington DC, Preservation Press, 1994, p. 70 states that the aesthetically motivated setbacks were unrelated to plans for the Zoning Resolution)

The middle of the decade saw the erection of another unusual office building that also presaged some effects of the Zoning Resolution. At the Heckscher Building at 50 East, finished in 1915, a twenty-seven-story tower recedes from a five-story base, forecasting the setbacks that were required for tall buildings after 1916. The advantage to the owner was that August Heckscher, unlike Irving Bush, could offer airy and well-lit business premises to his small and medium-sized commercial tenants. The lot size is 118.5x. 98.75 feet, partly bordered by an early extension of the Lincoln Savings Bank to Forty-first Street, and originally adjacent to the former Devonshire-then-Athens Hotel by Nathan C. Mellen, which was being enlarged when the Heckscher Building went up. (The hotel disappeared by the early 1920s, its site used for an extension to the Lincoln building.)

Christopher Gray, author of memorable “Streetscapes” columns in the New York Times, understood that Heckscher had made the best of a difficult site constraint. The Madison Avenue part of his site had been host to five small houses to which he could not secure title, and one of them, at 315 Madison, required the portion above it to be self-contained at the end of the lease. In order to avoid the expense of duplicating fire stairs, plumbing, and other expensive space-consuming constructions, Heckscher asked architects Jardine, Hill, and Murdock, and supervising engineer Russell B. Smith to create a low base that covered the leasehold sites and then extended along Forty-second Street. If the house owners someday required it, he could sever the part of the base along Madison Avenue from the rest of the building. The tower therefore starts east of the leased properties rather than being symmetrically disposed on the lot.

(Fig. 26. Heckscher Building, Jardine, Hill & Murdock with supervising engineer Russell Smith, 1915. Photo: Wikimedia. Photograph by frog17, uploaded 2021.)

One of Heckscher’s tenants was the Waterproofing and Construction Company, which used its special type of cement on 50 East. With a personality that mixed business acumen and charitable donations, Heckscher was alert to practicalities like this and also to handsome decoration. A setback portion near the top of his building had no ornament as it was invisible from the street, but lower down, there was fine ornamental ironwork by the Wells Architectural Iron Company, and a bronze chandelier in the coffered lobby made by the Gorham Company. A squash court twenty-three stories above street level pleased athletic tenants, and views from high terraces pleased the less vigorous. Ornamental exterior lighting at the top of his tower was also a good advertisement for his building. (C. Gray, “Streetscapes,” NYT 1 20 2002, p..XI 9; Stern et al, New York 1930, p.547 ff.)

This parade of office buildings must halt for further comments about zoning, a measure related to city planning. Potentially ruinous periodic boom-and-bust building cycles, the density of building, consequent congestion, and other matters seemed to call, at last, for some principle that would regulate future building activity. Potential builders and landlords wanted to assure some measure of equity and predictability for businesses and neighborhoods. A document providing for these benefits was resolved by the city legislature in late July, 1916. The word ‘resolved’ refers to the fact that while this measure was eventually deemed to have the force of law, it had not been passed into law by a legislature.

The Zoning Resolution, as the document was named, had been preceded by the work of several committees. One, the Commission on Congestion of Population, appointed in 1910, criticized the building of skyscrapers and proposed immediate height restrictions. In 1913 came a second committee, appointed by the Board of Estimate and chaired by the civic-minded George McAneny, who held several positions in government and reform organizations. A Heights of Buildings Commission did its work between February and December of 1913, with members representing a variety of commercial and legal interests. Among its professional leaders, and one who signed the report, was a lawyer and former legislator, Edward M. Bassett, who was prominent in matters concerning the subway system and Brooklyn. The purpose of the committee’s wide-ranging investigations had to do, as the report said, with the “seriously increasing evil of the shutting off of light and air from other buildings and from the public streets, to prevent unwholesome and dangerous congestion both in living conditions and in street and transit traffic, and to reduce the hazards of fire and peril to life.” The lowering of property values caused by the intrusion of factories and stables into high-class commercial areas affected those areas adversely. More important, perhaps, was the decrease in the city’s tax collection from buildings that were losing value. These were matters of increasing concern, given the development of tall buildings in the Wall Street area where narrow lanes dating back to colonial times were being overwhelmed by construction of tall elevator buildings. Streets, still accommodating horse traffic with its attendant nuisances, and now traversed by automobiles and trucks, were also jammed with office personnel. In workplaces, light and air were cut off by adjacent buildings. Had serious fires broken out, not everyone could have escaped in time down multi-story fire stairs, and firefighters could not have put out fires high up in tall buildings. Until the advent of standpipes and high-pressure hoses, fire engines could not raise water to be effective higher than eighty-five feet. (Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown on fire safety pp 114-131). There was additional economic danger because while the first tall building on a block benefited from light and air and prominence, a second building adjacent to it reduced the first one’s light and air, prestige and taxable revenue, creating an inverted pyramid of value along a city block.

The municipality’s interest in sustaining building values did not appear in the high-minded introduction to the document although financial considerations came up later. The introduction also ignored the selfish interest of department store owners who wanted to cleanse the areas near them of the factory personnel who actually made the clothing sold in the stores; the owners apparently assumed that their customers would not want to share sidewalks with garment workers whose principal languages were Yiddish and regional forms of Italian. Since 1912, the Fifth Avenue Association had been worried about having garment factories close to elegant shops. In early 1916, banks, realtors, and retailers published an advertisement in the Times that threatened boycotts against manufacturers who invaded the streets north of Thirty-fourth and caused “congestion from influx of workers” as well as reduced land values. While those matters affected the final report of 1916, dozens of citizens-- representing business interests, landscape design, medical opinion, the real estate industry, banking, architecture, engineering, and other occupations-- addressed matters moral, commercial, aesthetic, and economic in their testimony of 1913 and later in meetings and letters to newspaper editors. The goals of the final document included “prevent [ing] the selfish individual from spoiling the other man’s game” and eliminating problems that destroyed the stability of investments in property. The report itself, produced by the Commission on Building Districts and Restrictions, named people who had produced the previous document. The new one was ready for adoption by the Board of Estimate in July, 1916. The document’s inadequacies in some people’s eyes resulted from Bassett’s focus on fortifying the resolution against lawsuits. But it provided the desired segregation of spaces and regulation of wanton building by dividing the city into zones where various heights and various uses would be permitted.

(For zoning: Report of the Heights of Buildings Commission to the Committee on the Height, Size and Arrangement of Buildings of the Board of Estimate and Apportionment of the City of New York, December 23, 1913, p.1). New York. Board of Estimate and Apportionment, Committee on the City Plan, 1916. Building The Zoning Resolution is also included in the Building Code of the City of New York as amended to May 1, 1922, pp. 270 ff. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044091847210&view=1up&seq=272 accessed 5 27 2020. The rules were often amended. See also. Revell, “City Planning versus the Law: Zoning the New Metropolis,” Building Gotham, pp 185-226. For protective measures against factories north of Thirty-fourth Street, see NYT 1 30 1916, p. 16 with the significantly nasty title “The Invasion of Fifth Avenue.” On the same day, page XX5, the language was more explicit, referring to a “Factory Menace on Fifth Avenue.” For the quote, see NYT 2 6 1916, p. XX4. For the boycott threat, see NYT 3 5 1916, pp. 5,15. See also 3 12 1916, p.13. For the resolution as passed by the Board of Estimate on July 25, 1916, see NYT 7 26 1916, pp. 1, 4. Stern et al., New York 1930, pp. 31, 34-35 offers a succinct discussion of important matters related to zoning. Fogelson, Downtown, gives a clear account of the initiation of zoning, attendant controversies, and the reasons for its adoption,. esp. pp 157-166. Michael Kwartler, “Zoning as Architect and Urban Designer,” New York Affairs 8 #4, 1985, pp. 104-119; also Seymour Toll, Zoned American, NY, Grossman, 1969, esp. pp. 322-323, 345-346; Mel Scott, American City Planning Since 1890, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1963, pp. 152-161 and more recently, Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham, pp. 172-178.)

Zoning was deemed by the Supreme Court in 1926 to have the force of law (Village of Euclid vs. Ambler Realty Co., 1922, 272 U.S. 365) although it was not a law but a resolution. Since it restricted the use of private property in a city built for business, it would have had great difficulty passing scrutiny by the city’s legislative body to become a law, and no one backing the new measure wanted to risk having it turned down. The City declined to restrict buildings to the ten stories that some people proposed in the interests of either civic beauty or provision of light and ventilation; that restriction would have diminished tax revenue. Some people also testified about the likely result of a ten-story limit: a boring city. The Resolution therefore proposed differing height and bulk restrictions for specific zones. That meant commercial areas, residential areas, and unrestricted ones where factories, gas works, and slaughterhouses could be built--even next to houses, as could be seen on the far west side of Forty-second Street. Existing uses would be allowed to continue, but new shops such as those at the base of tenements on crosstown streets would not be permitted in residential zones. The final version also safeguarded unrestricted zones from tall office buildings, thereby preserving unrestricted areas for industrial purposes and—as it turned out--- even fashionable residences such as Tudor City that rose in the later 1920s.

The Zoning Resolution of 1916 established that the zone where the tallest buildings could rise lay between Thirty-fourth Street and Central Park, and between Third and Eighth Avenues. El trains delimited logical boundaries between high-class offices, shops, and hotels and those at lower economic levels, although the Sixth Avenue El interfered with the desired elegance and consequently stymied property development on the avenue for decades. On Forty-second Street, this meant that office buildings attached to industrial facilities, such as publishers’ printing plants, had to be east of Third and West of Eighth Avenues. Few if any new apartment houses would be built on Forty-second Street within the prime-area boundaries because office rentals brought in more money. High class commercial buildings would therefore cluster in that zone.

The Zoning Resolution regulated both use and size. It established rules in each district for allowable height and bulk. In the most privileged commercial zones and on the widest streets, a building could rise vertically from the sidewalk to two-and-one-half times the width of the street.

(Fig. 27. Zoning rules, from Commission on Building Districts and Restrictions. Final Report. June 2, 1916. City of New York, Board of Estimate and Apportionment. Commission on the City Plan, pp. 258-259.)

It would then have to set back along a diagonal extended from the middle of the street to the top of the vertical rise and tuck itself under the extended line With some later modifications, the rules stated that once the building had receded to one quarter of the lot size, a tower could be built to the limit that the owner desired; the idea of a quarter-lot tower is usually credited to Ernest Flagg, who had published his ideas in the previous decade. (“Is New York Becoming a City of Canyons and Ravines?” NYT 12 29 1907, p. M5) The owner would, of course, calculate the expected rental return against the cost of construction. The calculations produced few quarter-lot towers because they tended to have little space for offices. Businesses were consolidating as they had been doing since the end of the nineteenth century, and few large companies wanted their employees spread out on many small floors. Employers wanted personnel close at hand and coordinated on large floors. Only a developer with a desire for publicity, or with a huge site that would allow for commodious tower offices would build a 25 percent tower like the Chrysler’s while the 1916 rules were in force---as they were until 1961.

Not far from Aeolian Hall, at 115-122 West, another building with a recital hall was completed in 1919, becoming one of the first tall buildings to comply with the city’s new rules. Rising just east of the Bush building, it gave the impression of being Bush’s brother, similarly slender, tall, and Gothic in inspiration. This one was erected for the Rudolph Wurlitzer Company and designed by architects Robert Maynicke and Julius Franke; perhaps chosen because of a common German origin. The building had only sixteen stories, so it did not have to step back more than once. It rose to a height of 177.21 feet, accommodating office personnel for producers of organs with electro-pneumatic action. Various models were suitable for homes, houses of worship, theaters, civic buildings, radio stations, and for those who might need an instrument that could produce the sound of galloping horses, birds, or fire gongs.

(Fig. 28. Wurts Bros, Wurlitzer Building, with Bush and Candler Buildings west of it, and Remington Building opposite. Photo ca. 1928, Museum of the City of New York, X2010.7.1.3265. Public domain)

The building’s façade emphasized verticality above the second floor, in a mode considered Gothic, and its top floor emphasized this connection by having pointed windows and a crenellated roofline. Just below the top floor, individual decorative panels framed the windows and, with the top level, terminated the view as seen from the street. The side walls were blank for some distance into the northern part of the lot, accounting for the possibility of neighboring construction and leaving room for the building’s name in dark brick. At the south end of the Wurlitzer Building, paired and single rectangular windows lit offices. As with the Aeolian Building, the principal attraction was a concert hall, this one in a heavier, more-or-less Georgian taste, with a small stage and separate chairs rather than connected seats. Late in the building’s life, for about three years in the later 1960s, it housed the New Cinema Playhouse that showed innovative films including those by Andy Warhol, but the quality of offerings deteriorated. In 1970, the police found about thirty-five mostly well-dressed middle-aged men watching a pornographic film being made on the second floor, where a sign advertised this entertainment. (NYT 10 2 1970, p. 36.)

For a long time, Forty-second Street had hotels intermittently along its sides. Most of them were small, occupying perhaps two or three lots, sometimes only one. Most are known to us only by name, such as the Penn on the east side, but there were larger ones as well by 1910, such as the Belmont and the Knickerbocker and the Manhattan. As the new ones were tall, steel-framed, and made with fireproof construction, they were related to the skyscraper office buildings that stood nearby. The newest one in the 19-teens was the enormous Commodore.

(Fig. 29. Arthur Vitols for the Byron Company, Commodore Hotel. Warren & Wetmore, 1919. Photo 1927. Museum of the City of New York, 93.1.3.1562. Public domain.)

Probably no more striking contrast could be found than that between the West Shore Hotel and the Commodore Hotel just east of Grand Central Terminal. A low-rise building perhaps partly as old as the 1860s, the West Shore turned the southeast corner of the intersection of Eleventh Avenue. It catered to travelers with small purses and provided long-term room rentals, apparently mostly to men. Of four and five stories in various parts, it had its entrance at the corner beneath a broad wooden porch that shielded most of the ground floor. The effect was that of a rural hotel somehow brought to the city.

(Fig 30 West Shore Hotel, postcard from internet www.cardcow.com. Postcard image in public domain.)

The contrast was also great between the huge Commodore and the modest five-story Ennis of 1913 at 152 East that faintly resembled a Renaissance palace with large ground floor shop windows. It was partly hidden until 1923 by the El extension, and once freed of noise and darkness, survived into the early 1950s as the Pershing Square Hotel after the 1930s.

(For the West Shore, a postcard view is the principal source, and there are distant views of it from the east in the City’s photographic collections. There are occasional sentences in the Times about guests, crimes, and leases. An unfinished book about the hotel begun by a resident writer and caricaturist, Carlo de Fornaro, noted in his obituary (NYT 8 26 1949, p. 20) has not survived in his papers preserved in the National Arts Club archives at the Archives of American Art. For the West Shore and the Ennis, see New York Historical hotel file including clipping from the New York Herald Tribune 7 28 1934 about the Ennis.

(Fig. 31. Hotel Ennis. Photo: Roege #981, 1915, at The New York Historical. Photo: Valentine’s Manual, l928. Public domain.)

The Commodore at 109 East was like neither of these but rather a massive hulk that dwarfed Grand Central Terminal, as it still does in its later guise as the Grand Hyatt though it may yield to something far taller (see Chap. 16). The Commodore was not an independent agglomeration of small buildings as the Grand Union across the street had been. Instead, it was a single building, one of several hotels erected on railroad-controlled property to support the station financially, such as the Biltmore, Barclay, and Roosevelt. Like others in the area, the Commodore was built by and became part of the Bowman-Biltmore Hotels group. Employees of several of its hotels could shop at a cooperative grocery store on the Commodore’s premises.

(Fig. 32. Byron Company, Commodore shop for staff. Photo:Museum of the City of New York. 93.1.1. 6067.Public domain)

The Commodore, obviously named for Vanderbilt, still exists in its structure under the present glass cladding. Warren and Wetmore designed a massive base that stretched around the block, with shops under two limestone-faced stories and another very tall level faced in buff brick decorated with pilasters. Each of its over two thousand rooms had its own bath---a significant improvement over other hotels. Its very large lobby was elevated above street level because there were train tracks below it.

Lobbies and banquet halls filled the interior spaces. Its ballroom alone could seat three thousand people and the hotel boasted that it was the largest hotel ballroom in the world. The hotel investor John M. Bowman staged a circus there with elephants, clowns, and pink lemonade (NYT 10 28 1931, p. 12). The large skylit main lobby had enormous chandeliers and international flags on either side at mezzanine level over arched passageways to the vestibule on one side, the elevators on the other. The lobby was described as Italian, probably because of the arcade, and was decorated in early years with many potted palms. A restaurant at the northwest had a large seating capacity, but there was also a more intimate dining room at the southeast, adjacent to another commodious dining room, and separated from the palm room by a small vestibule. The hotel could therefore accommodate banquets of various sizes. A men’s writing room occupied the southwest corner of the lobby floor. The hotel also had a men’s dining room and a grill room, both decorated with heavy plasterwork and elaborate ceilings featuring painted beams. A supper room, perhaps intended for women or families, had gentler, lighter décor. Below grade were direct entrances to the subway and to Grand Central so that arriving and departing guests would not need to walk in the rain. Far above, on the flat roof, a multitude of cooks had to exercise under the leadership of the master chef; there is no report to say how long this requirement lasted.

(Fig. 33. Byron Company, Chef Leoni requiring cooks to exercise on the Commodore’s roof, 1920. Photo: Museum of the City of New York 93.1.1.6074 Public domain.)

Above the public rooms, the sleeping rooms occupied two wings around a connecting tract, filling the perimeter of the site on the east and west. On Forty-second Street itself, the large cavity between the wings allowed the building to conform to the zoning rules. Architectural grace hardly existed; the building conveyed an impression of forceful calculation. Other hotels in the Grand Central zone might attract a richer and more refined clientele; this one was designed to be convenient, impressive, and affordable for the prospering middle classes or business owners who could deduct convention expenses from their income taxes. It was certainly imposing, especially if seen from the east above small hotels, restaurants, and commercial buildings, but probably no one including the architects ever thought of it as beautiful or graceful. It had the misfortune to open shortly before Prohibition was enacted, but having devoted relatively little space to bars or a rathskeller (an amenity by then probably considered passé) it survived the dry era of 1920 to 1933.

(Architecture and Building 51 #4, April 1919, pp.119-139, illustrated. Walker & Pennoyer, The Architecture of Warren & Wetmore, pp 159, 163-169, see also American Architect 115, March 5,1919)

One consequence of building a hotel adjacent to the expanded Grand Central was the removal of the Hospital for Crippled and Ruptured Children to less expensive land nearer the East River. The railroad had coveted the hospital’s site since 1909, and the hospital was torn down starting in January 1913 for removal to lots east of Second Avenue on the north side of Forty-second Street. Members of the Vanderbilt family participated in this transaction; Cornelius II had been a patron of the St. Bartholomew Mission nearby and was a member of the hospital’s Board of Managers. Not coincidentally, he led negotiations for the sale and relocation of the hospital so as to complete the Terminal’s expansion. (NYT 6 5 1909, p.5) The new site was closer to the slaughterhouses and tenements, but those buildings did not affect the work inside the hospital or the air outside any more than increased traffic near the Terminal had done. Several adjacent row houses retained or improved their respectability as a result of having a good neighbor. York & Sawyer designed a smooth-walled hospital block with protruding wings, allowing for an entrance driveway. The unadorned design for a 250-bed facility gave an impression of sanitary efficiency.

(Fig. 34. Irving Underhill, Hospital for Ruptured and Crippled, 303 East 42^nd Street, 1912. Photo: Museum of the City of New York, X2010.28.653. Public domain)

Another charitable enterprise was the Ozanam Association, established in 1908 and named for the nineteenth century founder of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, Frederic Ozanam. It aimed to improve the spiritual welfare of Catholic boys by providing sports facilities and reading rooms, a newspaper, and an employment service. Some boys trained for minstrel shows in the city’s theaters; the performers were evidently white and the supervising clergy racially insensitive. One of the four clubhouses was a house at 336 East, given rent free by Joseph P. Grace who was the Association’s vice-president. (NYT 2 25 1912, p. 5)

Perhaps some of the guests in the newer hotels shopped at the Stern Brothers department store (NYT 2 16 1912, p.18) which announced its plans to move from a huge cast-iron- fronted building on Twenty-third Street to an eight-story building on Forty-second Street facing Bryant Park. Fifth Avenue frontage may by then have been too expensive, and Forty-second Street was clearly being redeveloped. Office staff might be expected to shop at lunchtime. The Stern’s site absorbed the former Harmonie Club, the Spalding Building, 35-41 West and former houses that by 1911 had been turned into business lofts–altogether 130 feet on Forty-second Street. (NYT 1 11 1912, p.21) Stern’s could not buy the site but signed a long lease on a lot of about forty-thousand square feet.

(Fig. 35. Stern Brothers department store. J.B. Snook & Sons, C.T. Willis, Inc., c. 1910, Museum of the City of New York X2010.7.1.1629. Aeolian Hall at the right. Public domain.)

The rectilinear façade design of Indiana limestone, simple but not memorable and much like a warehouse, had a giant order of Doric half-columns and various classical details such as pilasters and carved Corinthian capitals. Publicity notices stressed the fireproof construction and the number of elevators for shoppers and for freight. The developers planned to have a carriage--or automobile--entrance on the Forty-third Street side. It is not clear that the building had revolving doors, but this device, invented just at the end of the previous century, prevented strong drafts from entering tall buildings, equalizing the air pressure between outdoors and inside. All the other features were realized by John B. Snook’s sons who had maintained their father’s architectural practice. (For revolving doors: C. Gray, “Streetscapes,” NYT 12 1 2002, p. XI 5.)

The Stern brothers benefited from light and air, as the store overlooked Bryant Park. But it took a few years before the park became a place where shoppers might want to sit and rest. The east end was controlled by the Library, which had a “ramble” planted just behind its building, but the rest of the park, controlled by the City, had lost some young elms to street-widening, and neglect had led to a situation in which people trampled the grass near the monument to Dr. Sims. Trees recently planted were failing and some needed to be removed. In May 1913, flowering shrubs were planted to keep people walking on pathways, but the improvements did not lead to broad public use of the park. Instead, it became the resort of homeless people and some suspected thieves. One evening in July 1914, 167 people were arrested in a police sweep of the park, with no evidence that most of those hauled away had done anything to warrant arrest. This embarrassed the Police Commissioner who proposed to enlist his staff and charities to provide social and medical resources for those in need. (NYT 7 2 1914, p.7)

There was better news from 1915 onward. By June of that year, trees had been trimmed and new elms and catalpas planted to replaced neglected ones. A few surviving old trees looked fine but were at risk, but grass, rose bushes, and shrubs were flourishing. Contractors building the Catskill water aqueduct shaft at the west end had cut down six young trees but they were going to plant replacements in the fall. (NYT 6 12 1915, p.11). Predicted tree failures caused the Park Commissioner to order their removal in October of 1917, however, and a water main break in late April uprooted two trees, but overall, the park had improved.

After early 1917, the park became home to patriotic measures designed to assist the war effort. An event in January featuring an actress, officers’ wives, a military band, and a recruitment station at Sixth Avenue failed to entice any men to sign up for the army, but after the United States entered the war on April 6, 1917, the park saw better-planned military activity. First came a pageant featuring several hundred women members of the Patriotic Service League. Then came the Eagle Hut, modeled on a prototype in London---a building that offered refreshment, advice, and amenities to Allied service personnel. New York’s version of it was erected by the YMCA with resting and writing rooms, a canteen, a room for table games, toilets, and advice about the city for the armed forces. Wealthy members of prominent families sponsored this installation. The Hut had a painting meant to inspire the military personnel. Alfred Herter depicted the Chevalier Bayard, a “fearless and faultless” Renaissance knight known to schoolchildren at the time. Herter tinted the figure’s banner to suggest the colors of the American flag.

(Fig. 36. Eagle Hut, Bryant Park. 1917-18. Erected by the YMCA. Photo: Bain News Service, at Library of Congress LC-82-4616-11. LC-DIG-vrg-19222 Public domain.)

A campaign in front of the library sought to provide books for soldiers. (NYT 1 30 1917, p.9; 12 17 1917, p.1 ff; 5 11 1918, p.15; 6 16 1918, p.32) Other parts of the park were used to exhibit the Browning gun in connection with selling war stamps, drilling of recruits, and enlistment.

A “war garden” planted in the park by June of 1918 produced vegetables for consumption by soldiers--surely not many--while the city mounted a campaign to encourage home gardening and the contribution of surplus to the war effort. (NYT 6 28 1918, p.9)

(Fig, 37. People reading farming information, Bryant Park, 1918. Photo: Library of Congress, Frances Benjamin Johnston, photographer. pnp-ppmsca-16100-16152. Public domain.)

(Fig. 38., Man observing demonstration garden, Bryant Park, 1918. Photo: Library of Congress, Frances Benjamin Johnston Photographer. pnp-ppmsca-16600-16688. Wurlitzer Building and Bush tower in center background. Public domain)

The movement for home gardens continued even after the Armistice, when a cold frame was set up in the park in March of 1919. In the following August, the Eagle Hut still stood and there was also a white and green building “with Dutch porch seats and white cottage curtains” as the city’s headquarters of the National War Garden Commission. By this time, the garden itself was known as a Victory Garden, a name that endured through the Second World War for domestic food planting. Along with the vegetables, it displayed flourishing tobacco plants. (NYT 3 10 1919, p. 20; 3 16 1919, p.36; 8 17 1919, p. 28; 10 12 1919, p. 2; 10 18 1919, p.12)

One consequence of the war was deferred maintenance of some subway and El lines and the continuation of the nickel fare. This was an early manifestation of the neglect of the transit system. No politician wanted to raise the nickel fare that lasted until 1948 when inflation had seriously devalued the nickel. Some surface lines replaced their trolleys with buses that cost ten cents, but that was not something that the City itself would do for subways at the time. (Tony Hiss, The New Yorker, March 6, 1989, pp. 84-85).

Private interests took care of themselves. In 1919, the 42^nd Street Property Owners and Merchants Association, Inc. was established, with directors overlapping with those of the Merchants Association that looked after the well-being of midtown and its businesses. The new Association published a journal called Activities, in which land values, new rentals, biographies, and building descriptions provided good public relations and useful information for anyone contemplating a move to the street. The organization monitored the growing threat to legitimate business from prostitution and bawdy theatrical presentations on the west side, but not only there. The publication also recorded property assessments, which continued to rise despite the undesirable activities on part of the street.

At the end of the decade, the block from Park to Lexington Avenues, between Forty-second and Forty-first Streets, was proposed for a plaza, to be named in honor of wartime general John J. Pershing. The plans came and went quickly, given the increasing value of building sites. (NYT 2 9 1919, p.12) The same fate had quickly befallen proposals for a plaza adjacent to Grand Central a decade earlier. At the same time, from 1917 to 1919, the west passage of the viaduct around Grand Central was built to connect lower Park Avenue with the portion north of Grand Central. Its steel girders are cantilevered from granite piers. The broad arches recall features of the Parisian metro system and Parisian bridges. This was not surprising, since Warren and Wetmore were inspired by studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The viaduct carries northbound traffic through Depew Place and southbound traffic through part of Vanderbilt Avenue. And while it is no parklike plaza, today the block underneath the viaduct has been given over to pedestrians and a popular café. (C. Gray, “Streetscapes: The Grand Central Viaduct,”” NYT 10 29 1989, p. RE1. For the café, see Chap. 12, Figs 7a,7b. The east passage was built in the 1920s. See also Wikipedia, s.v. Grand Central Viaduct, accessed 12 31 2025.)

(Fig. 39. Grand Central Terminal. Viaduct crossing over 42^nd Street at right, roadway for vehicles southbound at left along Vanderbilt Avenue northbound at right near edge., for Depew Place. Unattributed postcard in author’s collection, ca. 1929. Similar to colored image ezgif-com.-gif-maker-1024x663.avif)

(Fig. 40. Grand Central Terminal viaduct crossing over 42^nd Street. Photo: Eugene de Salignac, Feb. 10, 1925, Municipal Archives, Department of Bridges, and Department of Plant and Services. REC0124_01_197_09442)