Chapter 7 The 1920s

(For this chapter in general, I have benefited throughout from Robert A.M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin, Thomas Mellins, New York 1930, Architecture and & Urbanism Between the Two World Wars, New York, Rizzoli, 1994 esp. pp 587-615; books of reprinted essays by Ada Louise Huxtable; Rosemarie Haag Bletter & Cervin Robinson Skyscraper Style, Art Deco New York, New York, Oxford University Press, 1975; New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission Designation Reports for Pershing Square, 500 Fifth Avenue, Grand Central, and the Chanin, Chrysler, Daily News, and McGraw-Hill buildings, Tudor City, and Bowery Savings Bank; Carol Willis, Form Follows Finance, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 81 etc.; Valentine’s Manual. i.e. Henry Collins Brown, Valentine’s City of New York: A Guide Book, New York, Valentine’s Manual Inc., 1920 describes hotels and skyscrapers on pp. 270-283, and 305; Federal Writers’ Project, New York City Guide, New York, Random House, 1939 for individual buildings).

The decade of the 1920s proved to be the most decisive one for the picture of Forty-second Street that many people still have in mind. By the time that the Great Depression halted most large-scale construction after 1931, a phalanx of tall buildings had risen from Bryant Park to First Avenue and a few west of the park, too.

(Fig. 1 View east from Park Avenue. At left: Commodore Hotel, Chrysler Building. At right: Pershing Square Building, Chanin Building tower. Photo: Library of Congress LOC 1242 70577 photo by Angelo Rizzuto., 1954)

Many of them are still there, albeit under different ownership and with interior modifications. Some exteriors were altered before the Landmarks Preservation Commission was established in 1965, but the changes did not affect the overall impression of density and power. The street west of Fifth Avenue experienced fewer changes by 1931, but the McGraw-Hill Building at 330 West exhibited an unprecedented combination of height, setbacks, green bricks, and horizontal bands of windows on all sides, while it included both a printing plant and exceptionally well-lit office floors.

By this decade, people could rely on the IRT, BMT, a subway line to Queens, and the shuttle as well as the Els to reach their workplaces, shops, and entertainments in midtown. Another technological improvement affected all the new buildings from the Tudor City apartment houses on the East River front to the McGraw-Hill Building west of Eighth Avenue: district steam, provided by the New York Steam Company. This ingenious system, developed steadily in the previous forty years, replaced the former individual building provision of heat for comfort, hot water, cleaning and other purposes. It eliminated smoke from coal furnaces in individual buildings, and improved air quality in the center of Manhattan despite the pollution generated by the riverfront steam plants themselves. Each building would no longer need its own furnace, coal bins, and chimney. Now it could have more space for rental or storage, and sport new designs on the roof. Steam from one building could be diverted to another in which steam service had been interrupted. While the steam pipes were located on Forty-first and Forty-third Streets, they served the new buildings on Forty-second that enjoyed convenience, cleanliness, and backup protection. The prominent architect Harvey Wiley Corbett remarked that American apartment houses, including those at Tudor City impressed foreigners who found the indoor temperatures remarkably comfortable, thanks to reliable steam heating.

(New York Steam Corporation, Fifty Years of New York Steam Service, New York, [The corporation], 1932, pp. 69, 75-77, map p. 106; for Corbett, p. 116)

The design of the new buildings, far taller and broader than their predecessors-- which were either broad or tall-- can be considered in two phases, one before ca. 1927-28 and the other just after that but aborted by the Depression. Both phases benefited from financial changes, such as the issuance to the public of low-denomination bonds which shifted the risk of failure to a broad base and thereby encouraged the entrepreneurs to think more grandly. By this time, white-collar office work had expanded with the consolidation of companies, rules governing municipalities, the growth of insurance and banking-- the latter fortified later by the Federal Deposit Insurance program--- and the growth of professional service organizations including those of architecture and engineering.

(Barr, Building the Skyline, chapter 9 for elaboration of these changes)

Until the late 1920s, distinguished but conservative architects designed massive buildings faced in brick trimmed with limestone, usually with some sort of tripartite elevation that evoked Roman columns with a base, shaft, and capital. The Pershing Square Building, seen in Fig. l, is representative. A few lower stories faced with stone would be separated by a stringcourse or other molding from a sequence of similar brick-faced office floors and terminated by a story or two above a stringcourse before a final cornice. The difference from buildings of the preceding generation had to do not with exterior cladding but with massing, a matter regulated by the Zoning Resolution. Most had as few setbacks as possible, since multiple floor plans would cost more than identical ones. When a new building was not on Forty-second Street itself, it might be composed with multiple setbacks so as to extract the maximum rents from the site, but the corporate builders and their architects on Forty-second Street, with more generous zoning allowances to begin with, hesitated to look parsimonious in that way.

At the end of the decade, after 1927-28, the need for competitive publicity on the one hand, and for clients’ ego satisfaction on the other, engendered the buildings for the Daily News, the McGraw-Hill publishers, and Walter Chrysler. They were dramatically different from their predecessors. McGraw-Hill’s green giant, and the light-crowned Chrysler tower show that their developers understood the value of publicity. In this, they followed the lead of the Chanin Building which is nevertheless as symmetrical as possible. The newer buildings would marry different kinds of innovative ornament to newly dramatic setback building forms.

The success of most buildings of the 1920s for their investors and for city tax revenue was celebrated in an article in the New York Times on January 4, 1931 (p. RE15). George W. Sweeney, who had been a partner in real estate firms since at least 1901, and then a hotelier and official of the area’s business promotion organization, emphasized during an interview that property values had risen markedly since 1919. The block between Second and First Avenues, for instance, was assessed for land and buildings in 1919 for $1,093,000 and in 1930 for $11,502,000 because Tudor City’s apartment houses had been built there on both sides of the street and the blocks themselves. As for the next block, assessments of the land and improvements rose from $3,522,000 to $16,813,000 thanks to the Daily News and Bartholomew Buildings. (St. Bartholomew’s Church had moved its mission and clinic closer to its new church on Park Avenue, thereby eliminating a tax-free lot on East Forty-second Street). Mr. Sweeney offered sentimental memories of Stearns’ wallpaper factory, Murtaugh’s dumbwaiter factory and offices, and even Farrell’s coal and wood yard, but he celebrated the new buildings. He fondly recalled the men who gathered to gamble, smoke, and discuss sports in bars of varying degrees of elegance, and the Bloomingdale Brewery at 145 and 147 where an old tavern had stood along the eastern post road long before. But Mr. Sweeney seemed not to mind that these souls had departed from the area. (The tavern’s triangular site, City property, had been sold on July 11, 1870; NYT 7 12 1870, p.6). Despite the lag in renting all the offices, owing to the Depression, the assessed value of the block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues had risen from $28,592,000 in 1919 to $62,800,000 in 1930.

(Sweeney in NYT 2 4 19311 p. RE15 where his name was misspelled; on Manhattan’s land values see also Frank W. Crane, “Manhattan Land Values Rise with Skyscrapers,” NYT 8 4 1929, p.XX6)

The most striking change in the values occurred in the blocks between Lexington and Fifth Avenues. For instance, Depew to Madison was taxed on $35,190,000 in 1919 and $75,650,000 in 1930. The block from Lexington to Depew was taxed on $8,599,999 in 1919 and $25,400,000 in 1930. From Lexington to Park taxes were $2,812 500 in 1919 but $26,320,000 eleven years later. The streets were crowded with trucks, taxis (noticeable since about 1923 when building revived), cars, and pedestrians. Some relief from foot traffic came from the entrances to office buildings that led directly from Grand Central, but. developers went right on adding to congestion in the 2020s.

By the early 1920s, Wall Street firms felt it necessary to have a presence in the new midtown commercial district. Publicity given to--or engendered by-- some of the new buildings and convenient transportation brought hundreds of occupants to each newly-built high-rise. The new construction in midtown therefore lowered real estate values in the Wall Street area where the new midtown tenants had previously worked. (NYT 3 17 1929, p. RE13 referring to “Little Wall Street in Midtown Zone”) Soon, the entire Grand Central neighborhood filled with places that businessmen might want to have at close hand---gentlemen’s and university clubs, haberdasheries, bars and restaurants, hotels where company banquets might be held or where visiting merchants could be housed, and lunchrooms where office staff could have midday meals. From the 1920s into the 1950s, the terminal building itself housed the very large balconied office of a financier named John W. Campbell; there he installed a kitchen and bathroom, a baby grand piano and a pipe organ, and his collection of Persian rugs, bronze animals, and petrified tree trunks.

Fig. 2. Wurts Bros., John W. Campbell Apartment office and living room, c. 1923. Photo: Museum of the City of New York X2010.7.2.24894 Public domain.)

The rooms survive today as a cocktail lounge, with eclectic details such as large multi-paned windows, a hooded fireplace, an English screens passage, a Gothic transom light, and a Spanish-Moorish ceiling. Another embellishment to the terminal was the statue of Vanderbilt, added in 1929 but created by Ernest Plassman in 1869 for a location downtown.

(C. Gray, “Streetscapes,” NYT 1 9 1994, p. R7; The architect was Augustus N. Allen. New York Transit Museum and Anthony Robins, intro. by Tony Hiss, Grand Central Terminal.100 Years of a New York Landmark, New York, Abrams, 2013, pp.190-191.)

There were so many people at street level at all times that in 1920, a surgeon who became an expert transportation analyst, John A. Harriss, invented and installed at his own expense manually operated wooden signal towers on Fifth Avenue from Twenty-eighth to Forty-second Street He was an unpaid Deputy Police Commissioner in charge of traffic, and predicted elevated highways, interstate bus traffic, one-way streets, and garages under parks, among other innovations. Unsightly wood-and-steel towers in the middle of Fifth Avenue at important intersections, including Forty-second Street, had two levels of cross-braced supports for a shed where a traffic director sat, high above the vehicles. These were replaced by expensive substitutes with marble bases in 1922, built to a more elegant design by architect Joseph Freedlander. (NYT 4 30 1935, p.19; see also 11 5 1922, p.110) Installed in the middle of Fifth Avenue, both types were cumbersome to operate and not sturdy, reducing traffic flow and impeding the movement of cars turning east or west. In 1929, at last, the city installed effective bronze traffic lights, also to Freedlander’s design, embellished with statues of Mercury. They lasted until 1964, when they were replaced by lights of a simpler form designed by Donald Deskey. By the 1930s, most of Forty-second Street had been equipped with traffic lights.

(Fig. 3 Second traffic lights. Architect: Joseph Freedlander. Photo Oct. 18 1923 by Eugene de Salignac for the New York City Department of Bridges and Department of Plant and Structures. Municipal Archives REC0124_01_174_08326)

(Harriss obituary: NYT 10.13 1938, p. 23; C. Gray, “Streetscapes”, NYT 5 18 2014, p. RE11); drawings of various generations of lights in NYT 7 9 2010, p. A23.) Steven Gembara, New York City’s Red and Green Lights: A Brief Look Back in Time, New York, Barnes & Noble Press, 2nd ed., 2021.)

Early in the decade, before many buildings were completed during the postwar business recession, a feature long familiar to New York’s white middle class appeared on the street: Schrafft’s, a restaurant chain in which African-Americans were unwelcome both as diners and waitresses. This business, established in the city for about a decade, built a new tearoom in 1923 west of Sixth Avenue in the middle of the north block. This was convenient to theaters without being actually among them. Proper ladies lunched there on sandwiches with the bread crusts removed. Waitresses in starched aprons served meals and afternoon tea in either bland rooms with rectangular wall paneling or in neo-Georgian interiors. If a Schrafft’s had more than one room, a men’s dining room would have leather upholstery and the darker colors then considered masculine. A major Schrafft’s, such as one at 141 West, might also have dining rooms with ample curtained windows, tablecloths, and chandeliers. All branches had a counter in front where one could buy the firm’s candies and other delicacies, or stuffed toy animals. Some also had soda fountains with tall stools at the counter. Charles E. Birge designed a good many of these restaurants. Later Schrafft’s opened at 13 East, as well as in the Chrysler Building. Any Schrafft’s was at the opposite end of the design and gentility range from the earlier lobster palaces.

(Fig. 4 Gottscho-Schleisner, Schrafft’s at 13 East 42^nd Street, display window. Photo: Museum of the City of New York, 88.1.1.5629, dated April 13, 1929. Public domain.)

(Fig. 5. Byron Company, Schrafft’s soda counter in the Chrysler Building, 1931. Photo: Museum of the City of New York 93.1.1.10775)

(Architectural Record, 54, Nov. 1923, pp. 539-541; photo collection MCNY; Seymour Durst’s Old York Library collection, Birge obituary in New York Times 11 23, 1942, Obituaries section p. 23.; Pencil Points 5 1924, p.91)

Schrafft’s was not at the opposite financial end, however. The Horn & Hardart Automat was cheaper. Its clientele was mixed--from lonely people who lived in rooming houses to tourists delighted to insert nickels in a slot, open a glass and metal window, and retrieve tasty main courses and pies, or pour a nickel’s worth of coffee from a sculpted spout. The Automats appealed to salesmen needing a quick lunch, or hungry families, actors, authors, office workers, and in the evening, gay men. The Automat was the great social mixer on Forty-second Street in its prime years of the ‘twenties to the ‘forties. An African-American customer would be served like anyone else either through the self-service window or in a cafeteria line, although cooks of color were concealed from public view.

(Fig. 6. Lumitone Press Photoprint, Horn & Hardart Co., New York, Automat at 1557 Broadway. Rows of food containers, coffee spouts. Photo: Museum of the City of New York X2011.34.3892 ca. 1935.)

But in 1920, the entire street was not yet sparkling with new theaters and new high-rise offices. Overall, the west side languished throughout the decade, as petty crime and prostitution were associated with the theater district, and the docks farther west were areas for laborers. A highway on Twelfth Avenue was being constructed, and photographs at the Municipal Archives show only dirt and rubble there. The Weehawken Ferry building at the Hudson shore suffered fire damage in 1930 and took some time for rehabilitation.

(Fig. 7. Weehawken Ferry Building as damaged by fire, 1930. Photo: Eugene de Salignac, March 18, 1930. Municipal Archives, Department of Bridges and Department of Plant and Structures, Rec0124-01-270-13040)

Fig. 8.Weehawken Ferry Building interior as damaged by fire, 1930. Same archive, date, photographer as fig. 7. RecO124_01_270_13037)

An artist named Waddell maintained a studio at 253 West, and a photograph of 1924 at the Museum of the City of New York shows it furnished with rugs, a chaise longue, and a table with chairs. Small restaurants abounded in the area, and men’s clothing and shoe stores occupied small shops. The old West Shore hotel with its various parts survived. Maybe some of the transient guests were there to buy oats, hay, chicken feed, and corn from Oscar J. Dennis’s little store just beyond Ninth Avenue where he had kept shop for fifty years. He had seen streetlamps change from oil to electricity, seen bright lights appear at Times Square, and seen fancy restaurants replace the only one near him in the past-- an oyster house on Forty-fourth Street and Eighth Avenue. (NYT 5 14 1922, p. 99). He might have had a fast, cheap lunch and an orange drink—not much actual juice-- at the sprightly white Nedick’s shop at Eighth Avenue, part of a chain of quick-lunch places. He may have had some meals at the cafeteria in the Woolworth variety goods chain store, a bare interior with tiled floors beneath tables for two or four diners. The modest level of investment on the west side is exemplified by 133 West, a five-story business building bought in late 1919 from the Franklin Trust Company of Philadelphia by a corporation headed by Elias A. Cohen. His Broadway-John Street Corporation intended to build an eight-story store and office building, or an office building, on the 20 x 100- foot site. The transaction is remarkable principally for the fact that a woman, Miss M. Frend, negotiated the sale. (NYT 10 26 1919, p. RE1)

At the other end of the income scale from Oscar J. Dennis, August Heckscher, having successfully initiated his building at 50 East, bought the fifteen-story Hotel Manhattan in 1916 from the heirs of James J. Belden, the wealthy former upstate Congressman who had built the hotel twenty years earlier. Heckscher held onto the property until 1920 when he sold the hotel’s furnishings. By then, as at the Knickerbocker’s and Belmont’s, the Manhattan’s hotel income had fallen victim to Prohibition. There was a greater demand for business premises than for bars, cocktail lounges, and rathskellers, all of which had earlier produced essential profit for hoteliers. All three hotels became office buildings.

In June 1919, General George W. Wingate proposed that the site of the Grand Union Hotel, demolished in connection with subway construction, should be turned into an exhibition hall, with facilities upstairs for swimming and other sports including riflery, and space for conventions, with a roof garden at the top. He proposed that the City pay for the site and that a private committee raise funds for the rest of the program, a procedure that had brought the Metropolitan Museum and the Botanic Garden into existence. (NYT 6 13 1919, p .10) This idea, like other fantasies at the time, went nowhere. In the first years after the Armistice, few buildings were erected on Forty-second Street, owing to a downturn in business.

One exception was the Liggett Building at 33-49 East that opened in early May,1921 as the New York City headquarters of the Boston-based drugstore company. The firm was building several new shops in New York City and even buying shares of the British Boots pharmacy company. (NYT 9 9 1920, p. 25) The site at the northeast corner of Madison Avenue, owned by the Milbank estate, had been occupied by Holy Trinity church and then by a two-story taxpayer with an L-shaped plan. The new high-rise was known also as the Liggett-Winchester-Ley Corporation Building, as its tenants included the offices of the Winchester munitions company and the Ley building company. Excavation to a depth of thirty-three feet was well under way in July of 1920. (NYT 7 11 1920, p. W1; 8 21 1920, p. 17)

Built to a design by Carrere & Hastings associated with Shreve & Lamb, the twenty-two- story commercial building was finished in one year, despite a general shortage of structural steel. It showed that traditional symmetry, the emphasis on a sense of firmness given here by turreted corners, and a sense of palatial sumptuousness could be retained in a new era.

(Fig. 9. Wurts Bros., Liggett Building, Carrere & Hastings, Shreve and Lamb, 1922, Photo: Museum of the City of New York X2010.7.2.643 Public domain.)

The timing of its construction was opportune, as business began to return to normal levels while the structure was going up. (NYT 3 25 1921, p.31) Among the tenants were an oil refining company and builders Marc Eidlitz & Son. (NYT 4 23 1921, p 22) but the most visible occupant was the men’s clothing shop of Weber & Heilbroner which rented premises with entrances on both Forty-second Street and Madison Avenue. (NYT 5 3 1921, p.36)

The Liggett Building formed a visual bridge from the red brick and mansards of the Knickerbocker Hotel, and what remained of the Bristol to more original buildings of the early ‘twenties that faced the Liggett across Forty-second street. The Liggett’s symmetry, its classically-inspired surface details, its red brick, its corner turrets at the first setback, its cornices and its finials echoed older buildings, but the broad glazed commercial floors at the base, the smooth walls, and the required setbacks looked to the future. While it obeyed the 1916 setback rules, it managed not to look innovative. After a fifteen-story rise from the sidewalk, it set back for two more floors and had a five-story freestanding pavilion set farther back at the top. It sacrificed some internal space in order to achieve its rigorous and expected symmetry.

Its austere main mass had corners on each side with two windows opening in a smooth wall. These walls seemed to protect the central eight windows separated from each other by brickwork that suggested internal piers and receding spandrels. The more intense design in the center made the eight windows there seem smaller than those at the ends, although they were of the same size. The building survived until 2016 when a journalist, evidently excited by the promise of a gigantic replacement, called it and its neighbor, the enlarged Vanderbilt Avenue Building “unremarkable-looking.” (NYT 10 17 2016, p. A16; for additional observations, see Stern et al, New York 1930, pp. 538-539)

The latter at 51 East, built in 1912 beside the Liggett site, was enlarged not very long after its construction by its original architects, Warren & Wetmore, for a new owner, Robert M. Catts. The foundations had wisely been built to support an increased load. To the small but imposing original building, the architects added twelve stories with paired windows that echoed the larger windows of the original portion. The top two floors above a stringcourse maintained this window pairing but pilasters between the windows and doubled at the ends provided a terminus to the design. The ornament was more appealing than the building; several panels of urns, wreaths, plants, and military heads---Greek through medieval---were rescued when the SL Green company demolished it and the Liggett in the 20-teens so as to build One Vanderbilt on their sites.

(Fig. 10. Edmond Vincent Gillon, Vanderbilt Avenue Building, as enlarged, at far left of this image of Grand Central Terminal, ca. 1975. Photo: Museum of the City of New York, 2013.3.2.1880)

https://www.6sqft.com/terra-cotta-figures-that-adorned-building-demolished-for-one-vanderbilt-construction-seek-a-new-home/ accessed 6 12 2020. Photographs of terra cotta ornament, https://www.6sqft.com/place/51-east-42nd-street/ by Michelle Cohen, accessed 12 12 2024. Compare chapter 5, fig. 2 to chapter 7 fig. 7.

Just to the west, the Manhattan Hotel was remodeled early in the new decade to provide offices for the National City Company at 15-17 East. The George A. Fuller Construction Company aided McKim Mead & White who altered Henry Hardenbergh’s facade slightly, changed the upper floors to offices, and created a “heroically-scaled and detailed lobby.” (Stern et al., New York 1930, p. 181) Marble columns and marble-coated square pillars separated tellers behind marble and bronze cages, officers, and the public. Officers sat at desks behind a low balustrade, as if inviting customers to converse. At lunchtime, the officers themselves could converse in the building’s top floor dining room. Ladies had their own consultation space, fitted with mahogany furniture and custom-made English chenille carpets. The Board of Directors met in a mezzanine with Spanish leather upholstered chairs and hand-carved door trim and cornices. A basement vault contained every security measure “known to modern science.” So did the elevators.

(Architecture and Building, 53 #7 July 1921, pp. 54-55 with three photographs and a typical office floor plan).

Street life, enhanced by many restaurants and small businesses, could be supplemented by grand public events, even beyond those at New Year’s Eve in Times Square. One event occurred after the sudden death of President Warren G. Harding in August,1923, when the Building Managers’ and Owners’ Association encouraged its members to display crosses of light in his memory. The narrow Corn Exchange Bank at 5-7 East, soon to be replaced, had one that was a single window wide along its entire eleven-story length. The Liggett building, one story higher, had a cross spanning the height and width of its lower portion. Farther west, the Candler Building’s cross, as tall as the building and with its horizontal arm at the twelfth floor, also attracted notice. The building owners connected this memorial gesture to the glorification of skyscrapers, which were about to develop rapidly. (NYT 8 10 1923, p.10)

Recalling the pre-zoning past, the twin-towered Pershing Square Building stands opposite Grand Central Terminal where a public park had been proposed. General Wingate’s and other civic-minded ideas for the site yielded to economic reality when the City sold the property in 1920 to Henry Mandel. This property investor formed a corporation with accountant Samuel D. Leidesdorf that sold 104.6 feet of the eastern part of the site to the Bowery Savings Bank and retained the rest for its own Pershing Square Building. Designed by John Sloan with York & Sawyer in 1921-23, the corporation’s building stands at 100-108 East on the east side of Park Avenue.

(Fig. 11. Pershing Square Building, John Sloan with York & Sawyer, 1923. Photo: The New York Historical, Roege collection 9293w. Public Domain)

This was the last building erected without setbacks because it was begun before 1916. When the subway expanded after 1913 following condemnation and demolition of the Grand Union Hotel, foundations were laid for a future tall building but not yet one with setbacks. Anything other than a box shape would have required new foundations difficult to fit into available space underground. Because the building was encumbered by an underground easement, it could not have a rectangular plan of unlimited height over 25% of its site, as the zoning rules allowed. (NYT 3 13 1921, p. S6) Without the option of either setbacks or a 25% tower, the owners appealed for exemption from the 1916 rules and were permitted to treat the building as if it had been begun before 1916. Its final height to roof level is 329 feet, and to the tip of the roof is 363 feet. Double-height floors later acquired mezzanines, and a HVAC addition after 1985 on the tile-roofed penthouse raised the number of stories to the present twenty-nine. (Emporis website, accessed 1 12 23)

The Pershing Square Building’s design was not distinguished, but it was appropriately better near the ground than in the air, and preferable to an earlier design with all rectangular windows published in the Times on March 13, 1921 (p. S6) By October 15 of that year, the owners were ready to have the Thomas Crimmins Contracting Company start excavation. (New York Tribune 10 15 1921, p.20). Homer G. Balcom was the consulting engineer.

The building has its own labyrinthine underground subway entrance which gives direct access to Grand Central Terminal with some shops along the way. Above a ground floor with more shops is a two-story arcaded level with single arches under each tower and three arches in a seven-story link between them. Pacific Bank occupied part of that level in 1924 and added a mezzanine. The remaining four lowest stories stretch across the entire Forty-second Street front, the fifth floor defined by cornices above and below it. Then come the towers, with slightly projecting corner bays and a pair of arches at the top. The scheme of towers receding into the lot above a low base is comparable to that of the Commodore Hotel, finished shortly before the architects planned the Pershing Square Building. A light court opens along Park Avenue. The steel skeleton was clad in brick of several colors and patterns, and in terra cotta roughened by the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company at the request of architect John Sloan who wanted a rugged texture. There are sandstone accents and framing elements; granite-clad piers at the east are later alterations. Other commentators regarded the brick designs as akin to woven fabric; perhaps that was a nod to Gottfried Semper’s theory about the origin of wall construction, likely known to the architects from their schooling. An implication of strength within refinement came from decorations of helmeted figures on the fifth floor, called “War Angels” in reference to General Pershing, each carrying a caduceus, an attribute of the Roman commissioner of peace-- a matter much on the public mind after the First World War and connected to the military commander’s achievements.

Sloan had an office in the building with T. Markoe Robertson, a partner after 1924, while they designed the nearby Chanin Building after 1926. York and Sawyer, too, kept offices in the building. Substantial industrial, transportation, and commercial companies took space there, and in late 1928 and for thirty years thereafter, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad installed a marble-clad Art Deco waiting room for the buses that brought passengers on ferries to Manhattan from its terminal in Jersey City.

(For the Pershing Square Building, see, Architecture and Building 55, June 1923, pp. 63, 140; F. S. Laurence, “The Pershing Square Building, its technique of materials,” American Architect [and] the Architectural Review 124, 10 10, 1923, pp. 319-324 NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission designation report LP-2556 Designation List No 490. City Council resolution 1363-2017 affirmed the LPC designation. The Wikipedia article, accessed at various times om 2022 and 2024 is excellent, with appropriate citations. https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=2948850&GUID=F9AA880C-F833-4E2B-95C2-95ED212E6C7B&Options=&Search= ; NYT 6 13 1919, p. 10; 3 13 1921, Section S, p.6;7 31 1926, p.13. It is now owned by SL Green Realty Corp. and renamed 125 Park. Architects Gertler and Wente altered the lobby, keeping the limestone walls and original elevator doors but making it more spacious with arches meant to recall the viaduct-- information from SL Green. For the B&O facility, see Herbert W. Harwood, Jr., Impossible Challenge, Baltimore, Bernard, Roberts & Co, 1979, pp. 252-254 and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York.)

Contemporary with the Pershing Square Building, and with a party wall between them, the Bowery Savings Bank rose eighteen stories at 110 East between 1921 and 1923, to the design of York & Sawyer.

(Fig. 12. Bowery Savings Bank, York & Sawyer, 1923, Photo: Wurts Bros. New York Public Library 1558217 https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e2-c340-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99. 1933 with annex, and with the main entrance being cleaned.)

Its through-the-block site allowed for an enormous banking hall 197.6 feet long, 80 feet wide, and 60 feet tall, reaching Forty-first Street.

(Fig. 13. Wurts Bros., Bowery Savings Bank, banking hall. Photo: Museum of the City of New York X2010.7.1.2681 c.1923. Public domain.)

Above are office floors intended for rent by other businesses. An initial consultant for the use of the site was Benjamin Wistar Morris, hired for his “expertise in planning complex projects” (Landmarks Preservation Commission 9 17 1996, Designation List 274 LP-1912) s-media.nyc.gov › agencies › lpc) who later devised initial plans for Rockefeller Center. The actual design of 110 East is attributed to one of the five York & Sawyer partners, William Louis Ayres. Edward York had earlier worked for the Bowery bank, and with Philip Sawyer had designed the Franklin Savings Bank branch at Eighth Avenue and Forty-second Street more than twenty years earlier; (Chap. 5 Fig. 28) since then, banks had become a specialty of the firm.

(In 1926, York & Sawyer enlarged the Franklin Savings Bank along Eighth Avenue in its same style. It was then that N. C. Wyeth executed a mural of Benjamin Franklin addressing a gathering at Independence Hall; illustration in http://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-lost-franklin-savings-bank-42nd-st.html Ayres’ middle name is sometimes given as Lewis. Another one of the five partners of the firm, Lindley Murray Franklin, was related to Mary Lindley Murray who rescued African-American children (see chapter l above) and to the Revolutionary War heroine for whom she was named.)

Engineer Homer G. Balcom knew how to place an office tower on top of the banking cavity, and the Eidlitz firm knew how to construct it. The heart of the building is the eighteen-story tower with annexes at the east and west—one low and broad, the other taller and narrow. Unlike the adjacent Pershing Square Building and York & Sawyer’s earlier banks, the Bowery forswore the Medici bankers’ Renaissance as part of its inspiration. Instead, it derived its idea of style and ornament from Romanesque models, widely known through illustrations and descriptions in Arthur Kingsley Porter’s recently-published Lombard Architecture (1915-17) or the volume on French Romanesque architecture and sculpture by Robert de Lasteyrie (1912): L’architecture religieuse en France a l’epoque romane Literature at the time refers to the architectural models as tenth-century Emilian but there were few remains in northern Italy of that era. No matter: A tower of any age might suggest a skyscraper. Later Emilian buildings probably inspired some ornamental forms. A fortress might suggest the safety of a bank. Perhaps the idea of something secure and strong and evocatively medieval came from the adjacent Manhattan Storage Warehouse, which survived until 1927. (Chap. 3, fig. 12). Italian Romanesque models required round arches and portal sculpture, as we see on Forty-second Street, not the fragile arches and thin members of Gothic that might seem to place one’s money at risk or to ally money with religion, Mammon with God.

The resulting design of the lowest floors has a central grand arch with polychrome voussoirs and interior shafts in a polychrome stone wall. There are pink granite colonnettes, verde antico granite (usually called marble) in the spandrels, speckled granite near the base, sandstone for much of the cladding, and bronze accents. An arched window, later replaced, opened above the entrance door. The mostly bare walls on either side have only small arched openings (now filled in) at pedestrian level, round wheel-traceried windows in the upper corners, and a stringcourse that marks the arch spring point. Above this austere composition runs a low arcade before the tower rises with paired windows between the supports. After a Lombard band and another stringcourse, a final row of eight windows terminates the office space. At the top, small arched windows light the attic

An office tower at the west side, one bay wide, repeats the design of the upper floors above its own entrance and a two-story pairing of windows. The entrance has a groin vaulted lobby, adjacent to stairs leading down to the subway there. At the east were the bank’s own offices in an annex of 1933, also provided by Ayres of York & Sawyer in a similar and complementary but not identical style; until 1924, the bank had been unable to obtain the site where a six-story car barn stood. On the annex, the single portal is replaced by a trio of tall arches that spring from half columns with decorative capitals. Shops at street level bring revenue.

On the original façade Ulysses Ricci and Angelo Zari carved sandstone figures and real and mythological animals representing a conceptual program related to the virtues of saving money. A squirrel, for instance, represents thrift, a rooster punctuality, a dog fidelity. Other familiar imagery symbolizes the wise use of time and resources. Figures of a guardian and a farmer represent industry and work. These were clichés rather than fresh thoughts for a new decade in midtown Manhattan, since few farmers deposited their money on Forty-second Street.

The external ornament captures attention, while the grand interior space overwhelms its carefully crafted details. The immense hall seen in Fig. 13 has arches on half columns adorning the side walls, as if they were remnants of a lost basilica’s colonnade. Above the arches are blind oculi; a dado runs behind the arches. The ceiling’s wooden beams in a multi-paneled design also evoke Italian prototypes, as does the mosaic floor with marble inlays in patterns suggesting those of the Cosmati workshops in medieval Rome. At the south end, a large arched window lights the room. Tellers’ cages and adjacent workspaces were enclosed in a framework that seemed almost lost in the vast interior but when the bank added tables for bank officers and customers, the room felt less overwhelming. The building offers other visual delights, such as delicately carved capitals at the base of the vaulting of the entrance passage to the office building, figurative brackets in the inner lobby, mirrored tesserae on the mosaic ribbed groin vault there, and geometric designs inlaid in the travertine floor. Not to be overlooked are the bank’s splendid polished bronze grilles, one of which now stands incongruously beside the subway entrance.

(Fig. 14. Bowery Savings Bank grille. Photo: Author 2023)

(Landmarks Preservation Commission designation report 9 17 1996. Designation List 274, LP-1912 with bibliography; for a major publication, see Architecture and Building, 55, Aug. 1923; https:/Wikipedia.org/wiki/110 East 42nd Street, accessed 2 27 22. For images, see The Architect 1, 1923-24, pls. I-V; Stern et al., New York 1930, pp.175-180; Wikipedia article, accessed also 12 12 2024)

A little newsstand, stylistically unrelated to the skyscraper, but charming, stood outside the principal entrance during the 1930s, manned by a vendor who seems to have been crowded out of his building. The publications shown at the side would hardly have fit into the structure.

.

(Fig. 15. Newsstand outside the Bowery Savings Bank. Photo: bpm_0758-k1 March 20, 1936 Municipal Archives Office of the Manhattan Borough President photograph collection REC069_03_36_0758-k1)

The Corn Exchange Bank had a short life on its original site on Forty-second Street near Fifth Avenue. The bank had initiated an acquisition program in 1899 to increase its presence in the city, and absorbed the Home Bank at 303 West, and three others. It opened a branch in what had been private houses at 5-7 East, and another in a low-rise building at 155 East. In 1919, the Mirror Candy Company had leased 1-3 East from the Oceanic Investment Company but sold its lease to the Bank, which planned to rebuild on a site 40 x 100.5 feet-- the former Levi Morton house and then other families’ properties. When Oceanic bought an interior lot, formerly a stable, it created a site large enough---40 x 100 feet-- for a new office building that the Bank rather than the candy vendor was in a position to build.

(Foe the Corn Exchange & Home Bank, see www.daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com’2014/03/the-lost-1888-home-bank-no-303=w=42nd-.html accessed 10 15 2017)

In January 1925, the bank announced a new building project. It would cost an estimated half million dollars, and would be designed by Cross & Cross, a firm known for its elite clients. John Cross, one of two brothers, was the design partner, Eliot the business partner and a principal in the Webb & Knapp Real Estate firm. The bank would occupy the ground floor and basement and rent upper floors to other companies. Those tenants could benefit from views from the windows over the former Morton house roof level, just above a projecting bracketed balcony on the façade. Construction ended in 1927 at which time a new type of secure night-time safety deposit chute earned more attention in the press than the building design did.

The architects created a design that survives, rarely noticed, that rises fourteen stories above the bank entrance arch. A photograph taken in 1927 shows it as a clarified and restrained improvement over the neighboring dark brick remnant of the Morton house at the west (by then called the Seymour Building), and the multi-storied Transit Building at the east.

(Fig. 16. 3 East 42nd Street, Corn Exchange Bank, Grand Central Branch, 1927, Cross & Cross, Museum of the City of New York X2010.7.1.12268. Public domain.)

Two smaller arches flank the bank’s principal one, with oculi well above the side arches. It is a much simplified---the architects might have said refined----echo of the Bowery façade nearby, but in a classicizing mode. Its details refer not to the Bowery’s Italian Romanesque models but to Florentine Renaissance rusticated palazzi. Pilasters separate the windows on the two floors below the balcony, and two levels of half columns at the top of the building appear below a dentil cornice. The sparse ornament on the façade terminates the office floor above the entrance arches with a frieze of fruit swags separated by oval medallions and rosettes above the swags. There is inconspicuous ornament in squares around the oculi, and an isolated curved bracket suddenly replaces the keystone of the large arch. Insensitive modernization has replaced the original openings under the façade’s three arches which now lead to the Taipei Economic and Cultural office.

At about the same time, the architects Alfred Fellheimer and Steward Wagner, successors to Grand Central’s Reed & Stem, executed two other banks for the Corn Exchange company. One, called the Commodore branch in reference to the hotel, was at 157 East Forty-second Street, on a site leased in 1922. This was a sober five-story building, fifty feet wide, with an identifying lettered frieze above the central rectilinear door. It replaced the Kaufman Hats shop which moved to 145 East, slightly closer to Grand Central, on a block improved by the removal in 1923 of the Third Avenue El spur to the Terminal.

(Fig. 17. 157 East 42^nd Street, Corn Exchange Bank, 1926, Fellheimer & Wagner, Photo: Museum of the City of New York X2010.7.1.6118, Public domain)

(Fig. 18. Demolition of the spur of the Third Avenue El, 1924. Visible at right (south) are the Bowery Savings Bank before its annex was built, a car barn on the site of the future annex, the Belmont Hotel, and at the left, part of the Commodore Hotel and the Grand Central viaduct Photo: bpm taken April 6, 1924. Municipal Archives record REC0069_03_06_0235-0010 Manhattan Boroug h President Photograph collection. Public domain.)

The ornament of the Grand Central branch bank was sparse here, too—faceted columns with vaguely Egyptian capitals at the door, company emblems at the ends of the identifying inscription in Roman capitals, and rosettes on the spandrels between the two top floors. Construction by the L. M. Neckermann company with a façade of Indiana limestone gave dignity and a sense of permanence to this reticent structure. The owners provided bronze doors and lighting fixtures, and botticino marble wainscoting inside the main interior room, but plaster elsewhere. The interior fittings were cold, pale, and geometric, relieved only by low-relief plasterwork panels on the ceiling.

(Architecture and Building 57, 1925, pp.71-72; NYT 9 1 1922, p 14; 9 7 1924, p. E11; 9 18 1924, p. 12)

The Corn Exchange Bank’s directors evidently had no interest in a consistent stylistic image. Their bank building on the west side, replacing the small Home Bank of 1888 at 303 West is taller, thinner, and L-shaped with part of the lot extending eastward to a 20-foot-wide lot north of the Eighth Avenue corner. Over a granite base, glass windows occupy ninety percent of the twenty-five-foot-wide façade; they are encased in rounded black moldings with small ornamental features and framed by limestone over the steel supports. The narrow façade would not have allowed for more than thin members if windows were to give enough light. At some point, the smooth-textured spandrels were painted yellow, a color that did not harmonize with the stone below. The side walls were clad in pale brick of two colors, later made uniform and at various later times, covered in painted signs and images. The colored brick suggested ribbon windows on its side walls, as these bare walls were visible above the taxpayer at the corner. In late 2018, new owners redeemed 303 West from an intermediate reputation as a center of pornography, transforming the interior into apartments, with a theater souvenir shop at street level.

(NYT 10 12 1926, p. 16; 11 14 1926, p. RE1; Stern et al., New York 1960, p. 468 attribute the building design to Fellheimer & Wagner)

By the mid-1920s, a midtown building boom was evident on Forty-second Street primarily east of Sixth Avenue. As Thomas W. Ennis explained in the New York Times, this was a decade of easy credit. Builders might have little or no equity in their buildings. The goal was to create as many offices as possible, usually small ones because corporate consolidation was not yet what it became a generation later. Leases ran for only four or five years, the result of calculations that also changed by the 1950s. (NYT 4 13 1958, pp. R1 R6)

The west side, marked at its best by theaters, was more generally the site of economy-minded buildings like the Corn Exchange branch. Some decline was setting in. Live theater was yielding to burlesque in some houses, and to movies in others, or to revivals of old shows such as “Ten Nights in a Barroom”. Movies were cheaper for customers and theater owners than live performances were, and when talkies were introduced, the appeal of movies began to overwhelm that of plays, especially those at levels below the best. No one frolicked anymore at the “Midnight Frolics” on the New Amsterdam’s roof; the Dresden Theater took it over, yielding by the mid’30s to broadcasting stations and a rehearsal hall. A chop suey restaurant’s sign obscured part of the New Amsterdam Theatre’s marquee—just one of the things to which Florenz Ziegfeld objected in the 1920s.

(NYT 7 4 1937, p H1 for both facts)

Prohibition did away with the lobster palaces. In 1921, Murray’s became home to the long enduring Hubert’s Flea Circus.

(Fig. 19. Outside Hubert’s Flea Circus, Photo: Library of Congress LC-DIG-ppmsca-69840 Call # LOT15144-F no.14, photo by Angelo Rizzuto, 1953).

During a fire in 1929, the insects were all saved by an alert employee whom the Times praised with condescension and incomplete research as “a little negro elevator operator, known…simply as Walter.” (NYT 3 25 1929, p. 18) Before patrons could see the fleas, they had to visit displays of German imperial coaches, Moroccan dancers who were probably not Moroccan, an electric machine that ignited gasoline torches, and other things less remarkable than costumed fleas jumping through hoops and performing other feats. The managers were acquitted of violating Sunday blue laws and carried on. (NYT 2 2 1932, p. 27; 2 10 1932, p. 26; 2 14 1932, p.2) Attempts to cleanse the immorality as well as trash from the street had no noticeable effect for the following half century, although the Flea Circus itself, the least salacious performance on the block, gave up some of its space to a cafeteria in 1933. (NYT 2. 2 1933, p. 34.) The insect performances survived the death in 1936 of William Heckler, their originator, (NYT 10 26 1936, p. 17) who passed the wand to his son, Roy. The shows lasted until the end of the 1950s.

(For a video of the flea circus, see https://metro.fandom.com/wiki/Metropolitan_Street_Railway/Railroad_(New_York_City) called “Lenny Bruce’s Favorite Flea Circus,” it was made in 1959 when even that comedian wore a business suit and necktie.)

The Elk Hotel nearby at 360 West was a far cry from the Commodore. or even the modest West Shore. It was built in the middle of the decade on a small site just east of Ninth Avenue. The Elk’s owner, Patrick Coon, born in Ireland, had owned a saloon at 600 Ninth Avenue, between 1910 and 1924. He may have decided that owning a hotel was a safer business for a married father of three children.

(Fig. 20. Elk Hotel, architect or builder unknown, 1920s., Photo: Author, 2023)

The modest four-story tenement-style building has a brick façade, no framing for the sash windows other than sills below them, and under the upper story windows, panels that were perhaps decorated when the hotel opened. This was not a hotel for theatergoers. Like the West Shore, it housed lodgers of modest income who would occupy a single room and share the two bathrooms on each floor. Eventually it had small restaurants at street level, and decreasingly respectable residents.

(https://www.14to42.net/42street4.5.html accessed 5 20 2020 https://untappedcities.com/2018/07/12/the-gritty-history-of-the-elk-hotel-one-of-times-squares-last-pay-by-hour-hotels/ with additional links, accessed 6 10 2020)

A building of a higher class replaced the forty-year-old Murray Hill Baths for Men, formerly the Times Square Baths for Women. The existing building had been the property of the Henry Schwarzwalder estate, and the buyer was Samuel A. Herzog, described as “a well-known operator.” (NYT 10 28 1930, p. 50) The new one, called the Remington Building, was erected in 1925 and 1926 at 113 West for investors Benjamin W. Axelrod and associates, joint owners of the 113 West Forty-second Street Corporation. By late 1925, the investors had secured the typewriter company as the named tenant with a lease for twenty-one years. It would pay an unprecedented rent of over $4500 a front foot for the store, mezzanine, and basement. (NYT 11 24 1925, p. 43)

The architect, Herman M. Sohn, better known for Upper West Side apartment houses, had to design a tall building on a narrow site only twenty-five feet wide, so he copied the solution seen at the Bush building across the street --which in 1921 had been extended to the south and had added a theater. Sohn’s tower had darker brick vertical stripes, but it imitated the general appearance of the earlier building’s façade—perhaps with a nod to the Wurlitzer Building’s more Gothic references. 113 West also had an open light well at the center, as the Bush tower had.

(Fig. 21. 113 West, Remington Building from the southeast, 1926, Herman M. Sohn, Photo: The New York Historical, Drucker & Baites photo. 175992d218e4 August 25, 1927, Public domain)

The building survived for about ninety years. When the Schwarzwalder estate sold the building three years after it was completed, the typewriters remained on display. The name Remington adhered to the building until a property investor and lawyer, Richard Maidman, renamed it for himself after buying the building in September 1950.

(NYT 11 24 1925,p.43; 2 14 1929, p 52; 8. 2 1929, p.41, 9 18 1950, p.44. For Richard Maidman, see “The 30-Minute Interview” Vivian Marino, NYT 3 13 2011, p. RE7. For William Maidman, see NYT 12 15 1999, p. B3).

The more prominent architects Sloan and Robertson were kept busy from late 1926 by work for Irwin Chanin, a developer of manufacturing lofts and various housing types, and owner of a construction business. Chanin had secured the large site at 122 East, on the southwest corner of Lexington Avenue, from J.C. and M. G. Mayer associated with Shroder & Koppel, builders. The Manhattan Storage warehouse had stood there from 1882 until its destruction in 1924-- a laborious effort as the storage structure had been built to withstand cannon fire. The Mayers and the builders had taken a 105-year lease on the property from the Iselin estate and had planned a tall new hotel or business building costing at least three million dollars but found themselves needing to sell to Chanin. (NYT 7 16 1925, p.33)

The site covered the entire west blockfront on Lexington Avenue, from Forty-second to Forty-first, 125 feet on Forty-second Street, with fifty more feet on the south side. In 1925 after dismissing one idea, Chanin, who was still evidently interested only in rentable space, hired the architects Rouse and Goldstone to prepare a tall square tower, but either he thought better of the idea since this was his entrée to a prominent neighborhood or else he was persuaded by advisors to engage Sloan and Robertson to design something more distinctive. Chanin himself had much to do with the outcome, as he had been exposed to architecture when he studied engineering at Cooper Union, and had thought of design in connection with house-building. He had visited the International Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, the “art deco” exhibition, and evidently brought home design ideas. The visit may have prompted the change of architects.

The resulting 56-story building, now a city landmark, was initiated in late 1926 and finished in 1929 but the actual structure took only one year to build.

(Fig. 22. Wurts Bros., Chanin Building. 1929. Sloan & Robertson. Photo from the east: Museum of the City of New York, X2010.7.2.12684. Public domain)

Chanin’s own firm did the construction so as to manage the exceptionally difficult process of coordinating material delivery on a site with very little storage capacity. The problem of massing also required expertise, because each of the building’s three exposed sides was subject to a separate zoning rule. The ingenious result presents symmetrical designs on both Lexington Avenue and Forty-second Street, but a different one for each side. The Forty-second Street wall rises seventeen floors and then sets back in the center before the tower ascends. On Lexington Avenue, seventeen-story projections frame the center, the northern one continuing into the Forty-second Street façade.

(Fig. 23. Wurts Bros., Chanin Building, Lexington Avenue façade at left, 42^nd Street façade at right. Photo: c. 1930 Museum of the City of New York 2010.7.2.22360.)

The base between the projections terminates above a stylized floral frieze. Ornamental buttresses three stories high then move the eye to a stretch of seventeen floors followed by a shallow setback and then the tower. Tan brick verticals articulate the surface above the floral frieze. At the corners of the principal sections, and near the top of the tower are ornamental panels with geometrically stylized human and bovine heads. Projections vaguely recalling pharaonic stelai above the windows at the top of the tower conclude the principal part of the tower. The final element is a ring of ornamental buttresses slightly set back from the tower. A structure placed on the roof for recent technical facilities now vitiates the air view of the tower but is invisible from below.

While most of the interior was simply office space, there were special attractions high above and even in the basement. Two floors just below the tower’s top were devoted to a theater for films, performances, and concerts; Chanin was also in the theater business. The owner’s offices occupied the split-level fifty-sixth floor where an area raised on five steps was more intimate and domestic in feeling than the rest. Bronze gates of complex and dynamic design delimited this area. In a private bathroom, the green, beige, and tan tiles, triangles, sun rays and plant fronds, among other motifs, would have pleased exhibitors at the Parisian Art Deco exhibition. An observation terrace wrapped around the tower was open to the public until the 1960s. Two hundred twelve floodlights lit the building’s top at night, although only a few of them remain. Below ground, a bus terminal with an efficient turntable for vehicles connected passengers until 1958 from Grand Central to the Baltimore and Ohio railroad line in Jersey City. This facility featured heavy and smooth white geometric art moderne forms, installed in the early 1930s.

(Fig. 24. Chanin Building Bus terminal, c. 1933. Photo: Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Co. Photograph Department. MY219723 X2010.11.5452)

The same level also contained a movie theater, and a passageway to Grand Central Terminal.

The entrances on Forty-Second Street and Lexington Avenue have been altered but retain their artistic decoration. In the lobby, red Altico marble-fluted pilasters frame sculpted bronze-painted plaster plaques of geometric figures above the abstract designs of bronze grilles. The idea was to represent the City of Opportunity, whether or not viewers understood the reference. The figures represent the Active Life and the Mental Life, both important for entrepreneurs. The light fixtures emphasize tubes; those just below the ceiling cast indirect light, a popular idea at the time and imported from Europe. A frieze that runs along the top of the walls and onto the ceiling has relief ornament atop shafts that give an effect of military standards. A frieze of setback skyscrapers between triangular motifs edges the ceiling where cross beams rest on tiered round light fixtures. Shop entrances from the lobby had floral and geometric frames and sometimes urns—often seen at this period--- at the top. Geometric forms on stylized eagles on the lobby mailboxes seem to recede in perspective. The terrazzo floor features angular arrowheads and diamonds. Everywhere in the lobby and owner’s offices, the designers mixed various types of decoration and shiny surfaces that people still consider ‘modernistic.’ Throughout the interwar years, as seen in civic murals, at Rockefeller Center, and in buildings erected by Walter Salomon, builders and the public expected to see recognizable images related to lofty themes on and within prominent buildings, even if the themes were barely understood by anyone but their creators and patrons.

Much of the credit for the building’s popularity is due to the sculptor René Paul Chambellan, and to Jacques L. Delamarre who designed the lobby, much of the ornament, and the stylish bathroom. At the Chanin Building, the spectacular façade tracery at the Pavillon du Bon Marché in 1925 reappears in modified form in the decorative grilles at lobby level and in Mr. Chanin’s office. The expo’s publications may have been in Chanin’s or the designers’ library as sources of inspiration, although magazine articles would have illustrated comparable forms.

On the Chanin Building’s exterior, the base included shops framed in bronze and encased in black marble. Above that level, a bronze frieze shows the evolution of life from marine creatures through fish and birds; it is sometimes said that since the theory of evolution was still controversial-- the Scopes trial of 1925 was still fresh in people’s minds-- it was prudent to stop before humans or even mammals appeared. Many of the images at this level are sinuous and irregularly disposed, as if the forms were swimming in primordial waters.

(Fig. 25. Chanin Building. Exterior ornament. Photo: Author. 2023)

Above, at the fourth floor, appear static stylized flowers executed in terra cotta. Here the forms are flatter and more geometric than natural. Between these two types of ornament are two more. In the metal window spandrels, a composition of a central plaque with a recognizable tree stabilizes masks of V-shaped and radial lines with concentric lines between them. The spandrels’ sides are framed by continuous small rectangles of the same metal; the bead-like forms rise along the vertical elements of the façade. In front of the steel structural columns, stone pilasters sometimes described as Norman because of their Romanesque breadth, have flutes carved into the sides, and carved capitals of compressed and writhing snakelike creatures. No one seems to mind that the abundant decorations, while engaging individually, fail to cohere aesthetically or conceptually. For many viewers, a combination of interesting things to look at and respect for elaborate craftsmanship suffices.

(Michelle Young, “Atop the Former Observation Deck of NYC’s Chanin Building,” Untapped New York, 3 30 2018 https://untappedcities.com/2018/03/30/atop-the-former-observation-deck-of-nycs-chanin-building/ accessed 6 20 2020; bus terminal photographs at Museum of the City of New York https://collections.mcny.org/Collection/%5BInterior-of-the-42nd-Street-Motor-Coach-Terminal-in-the-Chanin-Building.%5D-2F3XC5IAOJKY.html. Carter Horsley,“The Chanin Building,” https://www.thecityreview.com/42nd/chanin.html accessed 6 10 2020; Andrew Dolkart, “Chanin Building,”zz102020;https://archimaps.tumblr.com/post/65574451333/inside-the-lobby-of-the-chanin-building-new-york; Landmarks Preservation Commission Designation Report Designation List 120 LP-0993, Nov. 14, 1979; Niven Busch, Jr., “Profiles: Skybinder” The New Yorker, 1 26 1929, pp.20-24; Miller, Supreme City, pp. 216-17, 235-7. He noted that Mohawk building personnel, employed on this project, have no innate gifts of balance and fearlessness as is still sometimes asserted, but have trained assiduously for construction work. “Chanin Building. 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue,” Architectural Forum 52, May 1929, pp. 693-700. Dan Klein, ‘Splendor in the Bath,” Architecture Plus I, #9, Oct. 1973, pp. 40-41. The website called Newyorkitecture has many excellent photographs)

Dramatic as the Chanin Building was, the most extensive development on Forty-second Street in this decade is often overlooked because much of it is elevated at the eastern end of the street. As it is residential, most people have few reasons to go there. The Tudor City apartment complex occupies the east end of the block between First and Second Avenues, extending to Fortieth and Forty-third Streets, with private parks and play areas. Under various business aliases, entrepreneur Fred F. French quickly assembled the necessary property east of the Church of the Covenant and most of it on the high ground that few other people cared about. A few modest houses and commercial buildings remained along First Avenue below the ridge.

(Fig. 26: Industrial buildings and empty lots east of First Avenue and of one Tudor City building. Photo: Municipal Archives, bpm_0684, taken January 28, 1932) Fig. 27. Tenements along First Avenue in 1927 below Tudor City. Photo: New York Public Library. Public domain.)

The enduring Tudor City gives no hint that it was once part of Corcoran’s Roost or known as Goat Hill.

Located on the bluff overlooking the river, the Forty-second Street portions are not all accessible from the present sidewalk. Twin staircases now connect each side of the street to the heart of Tudor City. This impediment to easy public access gives the building complex the character of an exclusive urban enclave. Tudor City was not the only urban apartment enclave of the 1920s. Henry Mandel developed another British-referenced apartment complex, London Terrace, on the entire long block between Eighth and Ninth Avenues on West Twenty-third Street, but without the parks and river breezes in summertime or equal proximity to the most recent skyscraper office buildings.

Tudor City’s elevated location ensured tranquility for the tenants. Traffic across Forty-second Street was conducted below the housing, through the tunnel earlier cut into the bluff. (The tunnel is visible in Fig. 27 and in Chap.3, Figs 16 and 17) The tunnel’s top provided a walkway between the southern and northern parts of Tudor City. Harder to ignore was the fact that the property faced industrial facilities along the East River, especially on the northern part where there were slaughterhouses and electric and gas works across First Avenue. But the apartments start high above First Avenue and, depending upon the apartment, have either small windows or none that face the river. The idea was to have the largest windows facing west, toward the new skyscrapers, and down to the parks adjacent to the building. Private parks were unusual in the city and were attractions for prospective residents. Facing west did not mean extending to Second Avenue, where the El still made noise. Tudor City ended well east of it.

This project was built primarily from 1927 to 1932, with most construction finished by 1930. Its creator, Fred F. French, was a builder of office and apartment buildings who understood early the potential impact of Grand Central Terminal on the housing market. While members of the white middle classes had been populating the suburbs easily reached by commuter rail, they and their financial betters did not always want to go home at the end of an evening at the theater, opera, or dinner party. Single working people might not want to live in family-centered suburbs, fearing a reduced social life. Respectable working men and women could live in bachelor flats or in hotels for women, but the latter in particular had strict rules about visitors, and sometimes even curfews. Ideally, then, the single white-collar worker would find a compact apartment, within convenient walking distance of a job in new high-rise office buildings. Suburban part-time tenants would need only small rooms rather than the dining rooms and large kitchens required for the cooks and maids employed in a prosperous family’s regular home. Some apartments might not even need kitchens because French provided a food delivery service and a restaurant. Young families, too, might rent apartments, so French planned a mix of dwelling types. A first proposal shows apartment houses of perhaps eight stories lining the East River side, the row of them interrupted at the center by a skyscraper with the vehicular tunnel underneath it. Farther west, across a private street, would be lower houses, all with pitched roofs and some with turrets

(Fig. 28. Tudor City, preliminary plan for the Fred F. French Co., Courtesy Konrad Wos.)

. This yielded to a row of tall apartment houses with others planned to rise along Forty-second and adjacent streets.

(Fig, 29, Wurts Bros., Tudor City in 1935 Tudor City Place., the part of the project flanking Forty-second Street. C. Douglas Ives, 1927-29. Note the gardens, now abbreviated. Photo: Museum of the City of New York, 2010.7.2.6361)

For each of life’s activities, there would be on-site accommodation---a kindergarten, a liquor store, tennis courts (which could be flooded to create an ice rink), an on-site compact golf course, groceries, dry cleaners, a restaurant, and a florist. There were pleasant gardens and playgrounds---prettier then than now but welcome now anyway.

(Fig. 30. Wurts Bros. Tudor City, garden in the 1930s. Photo: Museum of the City of New York, X2010.7.2.23672)

Over time, the managers added or subtracted a theater-ticket agency, a nanny to watch the children in play areas, and a private primary school. When a hotel was added to the complex in 1930, residents could apply to use its swimming pool and other sports facilities. There were to be incinerators and refrigerators---no more iceboxes. A house-cleaning agency was available, too, and various services could be summoned by an intercom. An apartment in Tudor City would have many of the conveniences of a hotel but could also be a long-term home.

The method of financing was the ingenious French Plan. People could either become bondholders in Mr. French’s company or owner-operators. Instead of receiving a fixed return as bondholders did, the latter group would be entitled to net profits beyond the fixed charges, and additional payments if the property were sold. Since French had paid his investors in all his previously very successful commercial and apartment buildings, his Plan appealed to enough investors to create Tudor City.

There was also a policy, written or simply understood, of excluding racial and religious groups considered potentially damaging to rental possibilities. In this, French was not alone at the time. “Restricted clientele” and “churches nearby” were code words for exclusion there and elsewhere for another generation. The choice of architectural style was significant in this regard, since the United States had just passed a restrictive immigration law favoring---as French did---white Christians from northwest Europe. In consultation with his architect, C. Douglas Ives, he had his russet-brown brick buildings decorated with rows of pointed arches, Tudor arches, stained glass, carved heraldic animals and emblems, stone floors, marble fireplaces, inscriptions in Gothic script, pinnacles at the top, and other identifying British detail, much of it carved in limestone and sandstone. Low relief carving would not protrude and run afoul of city zoning rules. The first Gothic plaque commemorated the completion of Prospect Tower in 1927, one of the two twenty-two story apartment houses--with Tudor Tower--on either side of Forty-second Street. The thirty-two-story Woodstock Tower of 1929 at street level at 320 East Forty-second, and the Hotel Tudor (1929-31).

(FIG, 31. Tudor City, Woodstock Tower 320 East 42nd Street. Douglas Ives. 1929 Photo: Historic American Buildings Survey. New York County, New York 1833, Historic American Buildings Survey, Creator. Tudor City Complex, Woodstock Tower, 320 East Forty-second Street, New York County, NY. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/ny1293/.LOC:. HABS NEYO, 1220-1)

farther west at 304 East Forty-second Street, are, with the parks, the parts of the project on Forty-second Street itself.

(Fig. 32, 33 Hotel Tudor, from a brochure issued by Tudor City, 1931. Photo; tudorcityconfidential.com/2017/06/building-spotlight-hotel-tudor.html. Hotel Tudor, now Westgate, Photo: Author 8 9 2025.)

The 17-story hotel has a more modern design. Transient visitors did not need the social assurance of affiliation with Britain. Instead, Ives emphasized the Saxon aspect of Anglo-Saxon by creating a Forty-second Street façade of three bays with textured warm brown brick protruding in several neat patterns, akin to arts-and-crafts models or to northern German designs of the 1920s in Hamburg and elsewhere. The 598 rooms and suites had maple furniture, and there were air-conditioned restaurants that included a cafeteria, a cocktail lounge, a bar and an open-air dining terrace in the penthouse. In 1938, guests had the chance to see televised special events. (Corso Collection, New York Historical). The hotel, narrow on Forty-second Street, expands to an approximately square shape and is taller on Forty-first. It has undergone many changes of ownership since 1930, as well as internal remodeling but still caters to transient guests at below-premium rates. In the 2020s, it was called the Westgate New York Grand Central Hotel. After closing temporarily during the Covid-19 pandemic, it reopened, emphasizing its sanitary provisions.

(For Tudor City, see Lawrence R. Samuel, Tudor City with extensive references; Fred F. French, The French Plan, New York, Fred F. French Investing Co., 1928; Landmarks Preservation Commission, May 17, 1988, Designation List 203. LP-1579, John W. French and Fred F. French, A Vigorous Life: The Story of Fred F. French, Builder of Skyscrapers, NY, Vantage Press, 1993. Miller, Supreme City, pp. 51-62.) The steps up to two playgrounds were repaired in 2024. Corso Collection, The New York Historical for hospitality elements.)

One consequence of the Tudor City development was a remodeling of the Church of the Covenant as the local population changed. By the 1920s, its program of tending to the poor had less urgency, and the church could expect membership from the prospering middle class tenants of the buildings then rising. Times readers learned of plans to erect a parish house named for architect Cady on part of the property, funds for it having been raised in a few months. (NYT 5 7 1927, p. 21; 12 2 1926, p. 29. Architecture and Building 59, Dec. 1927, pp. 386-7) Adams and Woodbridge architects created the granite base in conjunction with the creation of Tudor City, and in 1927, architects and engineers Mayer & Mathieu created a building forty feet wide that they brought out to the building line so as to fit all the required elements onto the church’s site Among other facilities were an all-purpose recreation room with a stage and basketball hoops, school and custodians’ rooms, offices, and the new entrance to the church. Outside, the roughened red brick and limestone façade acknowledged the change in the church’s potential membership by including the then-fashionable Tudorish half-timbering.

(New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designation report: May 17, 1989, Designation List 203 LP-1579, Tudor City Historic District. pp. 12-14, 43)

(Fig. 34. Church of the Covenant and parish house, 1927. Mayer & Mathieu. Photo: Wikimapia.org/p/00/08/17/95/24_full.jpg accessed 8 11 2025.)

While nothing remarkable occurred west of Sixth Avenue in the 1920s before construction of the McGraw-Hill Building at the end of the decade, the Lane Bryant clothing company moved into the former Park & Tilford building at 529-541 West, as the grocers’ business had been subsumed into the Schulte Cigar Store organization. The market for ready-to-wear maternity clothing and large-sized fashions had grown so rapidly that the company needed a large building for its wholesale business and mail-order department. (NYT 11 4 1923, p. RE1) Nearby, George Ehret, a brewer with a reputation for charity and for supporting his employees during Prohibition, invested in smaller industrial buildings and tenements; at the time of his death in 1927, he was reputed to own more property in the city than anyone other than the John Jacob Astor estate. (NYT 1 21 1927, p. 15) There was, however, one substantial new building two blocks to the east-- a hotel then clubhouse then hotel and eventually a supportive-housing residence.

By 1925, investors proposed the hotel to replace tenements at 351-359 West next to Holy Cross Academy. Holy Cross church at this time had as its pastor Father Francis P. Duffy who had rendered heroic and compassionate service to his regiment during the First World War; not long before his death in 1932, he instituted a 2:30 AM mass for printers of the city’s major newspapers who worked late. (NYT 1 25 1932, p. 22). Ten years earlier, an investor named Charles H. Darmstadt had assembled most of the hotel site, formerly owned by his relative, Lewis Darmstadt, who was grantee in 1911 from Annis Mildred Sloane, philanthropic wife of a prominent building contractor whose firm provided woodwork at the Commodore. The new hotel, to be called the Preston, was intended for middle-class working women who would choose from three hundred thirty-nine rooms, each with a Murphy bed, large closet, refrigerator and serving pantry, and private bath; there were a few two-room suites. Amenities included a gymnasium and a dining room. The architects of the Preston were Deutsch & Schneider who built apartment houses on the upper west side. Construction proceeded rapidly in 1927, producing a building 197 feet high and 80 wide, its floors clad in tan brick.

\

(Fig. 35. Wurts Bros., Preston Hotel, renamed Commodore Athletic Club, later Hotel Holland, 1927. Deutsch & Schneider. 351 West 42nd Street. Photo: Museum of the City of New York X2010.7.2.2721. Public domain.)

An ornamental band runs above the ground floor which is given over to shops. Then, after another floor with low relief motifs separated from the rest by a heavy stringcourse, fourteen floors rise before the side bays set back in four steps, leaving the center bays to reach the building line. At the summit is a single story as a form of pediment.

By March of 1927, however, the women’s hotel had foreclosed on the mortgage. It became the Commodore Athletic club with seven hundred members who had taken a 99-year lease from the Elplee Holding Company. Alterations would provide a swimming pool, Russian and Turkish baths, handball and squash courts, indoor golf, billiard rooms, a ballroom, library and card rooms, and more. Members were in the entertainment business, but also in publishing, garment manufacturing, and in various professions; membership was not restricted by religion although it was probably restricted to men of European descent. The club took title at the end of October but it apparently defaulted by 1929 when the First Department of the State Supreme Court Appellate Division heard the club’s complaints against the landlord and then his defense of an order to dispossess the tenants. Once more, the building became a hotel, the Hotel Holland, advertising an exaggerated four hundred rooms all with bath and shower. a coffee shop, a cocktail lounge, a swimming pool, and a roof lounge. A postcard advertised the hotel as convenient for motorists, as there was parking available across the street. By the mid-1930s if not earlier, the coffee shop had stylish round stools with metal strips circling the seats, the dining room had art deco flourishes, and the cocktail lounge had some abstract and some angular décor and fashionable recessed lights over the bar.

(For the first hotel version: Hotel Gazette May 14, 1926, National Hotel Review 9 25 1926-- pamphlet postdating 1932 in Corso hotel collection, The New York Historical; for Darmstadt: NYT 4 22 1915, p. 20; For the lawsuit: State of New York. Supreme Court Appellate Division. First Department. Notice of Appeal. Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York, In the Matter of the Application of 351-359 West 42nd Street Co. Inc., plaintiff against Commodore Athletic Club, Inc and Centmille Holding Corporation, Defendants, 1929)

Farther east, just west of Fifth Avenue there arose two new buildings on the sites that Walter Salomon had been acquiring for some years. By then, this entrepreneur had become the less Jewish-sounding Salmon and gave his new name to a tower at 11-27 West.

(Fig.36. John Vachon for Look Magazine, in 1952. Midtown, with Salmon Tower at upper left. Photo: Museum of the City of New York X2011.4.12131.405)

.

(Fig. 37 closeup, Photo: Author 2025)

This is a thirty-two-story building designed by York & Sawyer, begun in 1926 when they were remodeling the Bryant Park Arcade building at the far end of the block. 11-27 West was finished in 1927. Clyde R. Place was the consulting engineer, Albert J. Wilcox the structural engineer, and Charles T. Wills, Inc., the builder. Its H-shaped plan provides eight corner offices on each floor, something that the experienced Mr. Salmon understood would appeal to corporate executives. This was accomplished, as in other buildings of the 1920s, by projecting the ends of the building at the two setback levels and leaving a space between this building and the Bristol Hotel site. It was confined on the west side by the Aeolian Building which instigated a drawn-out but unsuccessful lawsuit against the Salmon Tower’s courtyard wall.

The façade has shops at ground level, and two stories with broad windows before the office floors begin. The projecting end bays each with four windows have broader brick verticals at their edges and no internal emphases, while the wide area between them emphasizes the structural columns by projecting their tan brick covering slightly in advance of paired rectangular windows. The towers conclude with thin verticals between the windows and the center ends in a cornice before it sets back to a similar composition. A final tower of seven floors ends with a cornice. Mechanical installations or the water tank on the roof are concealed in a rectangular arcaded structure. The building contains about 950,00 square feet of gross interior space.

The Salmon Tower faintly alludes to the Romanesque style in its strong mural presence, by some arcading at each setback level, and principally by the entrance portals on Forty-second and Forty-third Streets.

(Fig. 38. Salmon Tower portal on 42nd Street. Edmond Amateis (?), 1927. Photo: Author, 2023)

The portals are rectangles created by pilasters at the sides and a frieze above but have round-arched openings. On each side of the arch and on the frieze above it, sculptures mix stiffened classical Greek figures with the Romanesque trait of fitting the subject to the available format. Each figure stands or contorts itself under a small arch. The people shown appear to be both real and allegorical, with tunics and body-revealing robes echoing Greek models, while the figures hold a T-square, books, and other objects. In the pilasters, each month of the year is labeled and represented by a figure fitted into a square field under twin arches which form frames for the figures’ heads. The figures are paired with the zodiac sign for each month--a medieval idea in more modern form. Eagles with sun rays over their heads flank the frieze and terminate the pilasters. The entrance arch itself with a chevron molding and small capitals evokes something English and Romanesque. The sculptor is likely to have been Edmond Amateis, who worked for Salmon at 500 Fifth Avenue, too, and used an academic style that mixed historic forms, elsewhere emphasizing early classical Greek ones. The attractive lobby continued a medieval theme, with hints of Gothic in its ribbed groin vaults with glazed tile webs. The pale, polished marble walls and polished terrazzo floor suggested the 1920s more than the 1120s or the fifth century BCE.

A short but dense article in Architecture and Building gave an extensive account of the decision-making that went into the design of the interior and exterior of a building meant to appeal to high-class tenants. Banks would not be welcome because they closed early and made the street front dull. Office ceilings needed sound-deadening materials to mitigate the noise of typewriters and of conversation. Defying superstition, the number thirteen would be included in the eighteen elevators. Waste paper collected from offices would be retained for two days, allowing people to retrieve work discarded by mistake. There were many other considerations, including the prohibition of mirrors over the sinks in ladies’ rooms, perhaps to speed the use of the sinks, and the provision of ceramic cuspidors so that no one would have to polish brass ones.

(A watercolor of it by E.H. Suydam credits Albert J. Wilcox with the design but he was the structural engineer “Salmon Tower Building, New York” Architecture and Building 59 1927, pp., 217-219, 225-230, which antedates the Bromley map of 1930. NYT says that the Salmon Tower was built from 1926 to 1927. with 518,000 square feet. 5 10 1931, p. RE1. For Mr. Salmon’s prowess in assembling sites: NYT 10 26 1930, p. RE10)

Walter J. Salmon’s other achievement came soon afterward when he built 500 Fifth Avenue adjacent to 11 West. replacing the Bristol Hotel and adjacent lots.

(Fig. 39. Wurts Bros., 500 Fifth Avenue. (The Salmon Tower at 11 West is to the left.) Shreve, Lamb, & Harmon, 1931. Photo: Museum of the City of New York, X2010.7.2.4701)

No longer primarily a hotel, the Bristol by then housed fabrics-related firms, a real estate broker, an X-Ray provider, and other businesses. Part of the delay in building on property leased from the Gerry estate had to do with a legal dispute with fellow investor Morton H. Meinhard who had provided half the money needed to lease the Bristol site in 1902 for twenty years, but who had not been made a party to the new lease of 1922. The resulting legal case, decided in Meinhard’s favor, is said to be a staple of law school studies. (For Meinhard v Salmon, NYT 6 2 1928, p. 19; courtesy Adrian Untermyer, Esq.). Salmon then wasted no time before starting to build. The city prohibited the C.T. Willis construction company and McClintic-Marshall, steel contractors, from raising steel on Fifth Avenue, so derricks and relay derricks had to be used on Forty-second Street. Several measures were taken to save time, including providing lunchrooms on several of the floors being built, and setting up a first-aid station on the premises, though no serious accidents occurred.

Although in theory a tower over twenty-five percent of the lot could go up to the clouds, calculations made by several rental experts suggested that builders who built more than sixty-six stories would lose money on additional floors. Construction costs, provision of elevators, and other considerations--not aesthetics, not ego--determined the calculation.

(William C. Hazlett, “The Limitation of Building Heights,” NYT 11 23 1913, p. XX2 who described only the economic height, omitting other factors such as those considered by Edward M. Bassett, chairman of the Advisory Committee of the Height of Buildings Commission; W.C. Clark and J. L. Kingston, The Skyscraper: A Study in the Economic Height of Modern Office Buildings, American Institute of Steel Construction, New York and Cleveland, 1930, for instance, calculated that the economic height was 63 stories. The RCA Building was later designed with 66) See also Nash, Manhattan Skyscrapers, pp. 70-71).

500 Fifth Avenue’s planners settled on a height of just under seven hundred feet, with fifty-nine stories including a penthouse. Richmond H. Shreve, well known for his planning calculations and work on the Empire State Building, wrote an article for Architectural Record about “The Economic Design of Office Buildings” (vol.67, 1930. Pp. 340-359). although he was not the only architect to do so. On Forty-second Street, planners had to account for the separate zones in which the property was located; setbacks would be required at different heights on Fifth Avenue from those on Forty-second Street where the initial wall could rise higher before the setbacks started. The final tower begins on Fifth Avenue on the twenty-sixth floor, but on the thirty-eighth on Forty-second Street. (NYT 9 14 1930, p. 178) Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon managed the design of the irregular silhouette, creating an imposing skyscraper that anchors the corner well. Faced in light brick as the Salmon Tower is, it almost suggests at ground level that the two buildings are one. Views of the upper parts reveal the symmetry of Salmon Tower and the asymmetrical skyscraping tower of 500 Fifth.

William Lamb, Shreve’s design partner, described the ground floor shops with bronze framing plate glass, and then wrote about the levels above, with limestone below brick with terra cotta spandrels, and slight projections. (NYT 10 26 1930, p. RE2) Dark strips, a device seen at the Bush building, run up the blank north wall behind the elevators. Either because Salmon would not pay for a distinctive element at the top of the tower or because the architects were then working on one for the Empire State Building and had to make this top different, the tower ends in a horizontal line of brick and terra cotta scallops that has reduced attention to the building. So has the pale brick used on the upper levels of both the Salmon Tower and 500 Fifth Avenue. Nothing bold or bright calls attention to them except the height of the latter’s tower.

An important consideration with any office building of the time was that workers disliked being more than thirty feet from a window, as few interiors as yet had air-conditioning and the necessary cool fluorescent light that together could assure proper ventilation, lighting, and comfort everywhere. The architects designed office spaces above the sixth floor to satisfy the thirty-foot requirement. In January 1931, as the Depression intensified, the owner’s problems had to do not with flaws in the structure but with filling offices, only some of which were occupied. At least the occupants who did move in were prestigious companies. (NYT 12 14 1930, p. RE4)

William Lamb described the entrance, which he placed on Fifth Avenue because that address carried greater prestige. “The entrance at 500 Fifth Avenue is of limestone with decorative pylons flanking each side of the doorway and a decorative, allegorical panel over them, the work of the sculptor Edward [recte Edmond] Amateis. It symbolizes the genius of the modern skyscraper and was carved out of a single block of limestone.” Pylons and their floral tops evoked to people at the time something Egyptian and therefore eternal. The figure holds a model of the building and a staff with a winged solar disk, but she is of Greek, not Egyptian artistic ancestry. Beyond the outer entrance, a long corridor clad in brown-toned book-matched marble leads to the elevator banks and to stairs near Fifth Avenue. A mezzanine rises at the far end of the corridor where a small café offers beverages and light meals to office workers.

In the handsome corridor, a square bay has recessed lighting in its ceiling and a frame that includes lotus-like forms, perhaps meant to continue the exterior Egyptian reference, under low-relief curves in the ceiling plaster. Polygonal lamps with angular forms around a circle faintly suggest Islamic models, while the ceiling panels have simple low-relief rectangular shapes that complement the panels of the walls. The bronze-toned elevator doors with reliefs,

(Fig. 40. 500 Fifth Avenue. Elevator bank, ground floor. Photo: Author, 2024.)

the bracket with a clock that reminds office staff to be on time, the original elevator dispatching screen, and letter chutes and original mailboxes give particular pleasure to those who work in the building today. Large framed photographs of the original construction now adorn the walls.

(Fig. 41. Chrysler Building, William van Alen, 1931. Photo: Ewing Galloway, 1934, Courtesy NYU slide collection. Chanin Building is at the left)

The Chrysler Building’s tower, in contrast to that of 500 Fifth Avenue, is so distinctive that it casts the rest of the building into shadow, so to speak, although the shadows were actually cast on its neighbors. This tower and that of the Empire State Building still characterize the allure of Manhattan and appear in innumerable photographs of the city. Tall entrances of black granite rising to the third-floor level call attention to the building at street level, but the view of it at the northeast corner of Lexington Avenue is partly obscured from afar by the recent One Vanderbilt that obstructs the view from the west and northwest.

The Chrysler Building originated with William H. Reynolds, a real estate broker prominent in Brooklyn, where he built the short-lived Dreamland amusement park, then invested in Lido Beach, and became a state senator. In 1921, he leased the land from Cooper Union for an eventual skyscraper and had architects Kirby, Pettit & Green combine several older buildings into a five-story office structure with ground floor shops, Chicago windows, and checkered ornament.

(Fig, 42, Building preceding Chrysler. Photo in 1928: Percy Loomis Sperr, New York Public Library w800.h533. Public domain.)

Although it wasn’t a mere taxpayer, given its decoration, ornament and cornice, it was an obvious target for redevelopment. Its tenants—a cigar store, a spaghetti café, a heating equipment company, a pretty little jewelry shop---could easily be displaced. In 1928, Reynolds called William van Alen, who had done earlier work for him, to collaborate with H. Craig Severance on the design of a spectacularly tall skyscraper. As of late February, they envisioned a building 808 feet tall, just under the limit that real estate consultants thought of as potentially economical. The final design terminated in an illuminated glass dome.

Then Reynolds defaulted, Severance left the partnership to design the Bank of the Manhattan Company at 40 Wall Street, and Reynolds, short of money, sold his interests in 1928 to Walter P. Chrysler, an automobile entrepreneur. At that point, van Alen modified his earlier design, collaborating with Ralph Squire & Sons on the structural design, and with Fred T Ley & Co. contractors. (NYT 10 17 1928, p. 1 ff.)

The building became the headquarters of the Chrysler Corporation which rented space there from the time it opened until the 1950s but the skyscraper was Chrysler’s own possession. Its shape is largely a product of zoning rules although van Alen made various preliminary proposals.

(Fig. 43. Preliminary designs for the Chrysler Building. Courtesy NYU Slide collection.)

The resulting building groups several floors in large heavy prisms stepping back six times under the feature that everyone cares about: the tower. Much of the design was related to the one produced for Reynolds. The prisms are not all rectilinear and the Forty-third Street frontage is almost forty feet longer than that of Forty-second Street because the colonial-era property-holding on its east side was directed true north, as the present street grid is not. Nevertheless, the building gives the impression of symmetry.

(It is usually said that a tavern formerly stood immediately to the east but the Randel map shows property lines there, with the Post Road nearer to Third Avenue.)

Three floors above the street-level are marble-covered; higher floors are clad in pale bricks with lighter lines running through them. The first group of floors above the fourth story is treated as more conservative buildings were: with dominant columns, subordinate spandrels, and small geometric forms to mark the first setback. Next comes a kind of crown of two floors topped by pinnacles with chevron designs. Above, a few stories stress horizontal continuity rather than dominant columns.

Then the fun begins on a service floor with a frieze of fenders and hubcaps executed in gray and white brick with aluminum accents. The corners at this level have winged hood ornaments evoking medieval gargoyles and Chrysler Corporation car decorations, but made of Nirosta, the brand name of a German rust-resistant chromium nickel steel called Enduro-KA-2. The gargoyles protrude, presumably to correct an optical illusion of compression but also to be noticed. Just above, on the thirty-first floor, the tower rises. Three central bays with paired windows ascend between corners with what would be wrap-around windows if the corners were all glass—as corners were in one of van Alen’s early designs for the building. At the penultimate setback, the corners open to balconies, and sport more Nirosta gargoyles, these of eagles.

The last part of the tower ends in a curve, the first of seven receding Nirosta ones with windows lit at night. The original lighting used softer 50-watt incandescent bulbs, not the cheaper cold white light used now. Finally, the spire erupts. The story of the crown and spire has often been told—one of competition for height with 40 Wall Street. Van Alen resolved it by having the Chrysler spire built secretly and installed in a square central cavity, lifted in five parts to the top of the interior, and raised in just a few hours.

The main doors on Lexington Avenue and Forty-second Street angle inward like compressed proscenium arches. Mullions create tent shapes above the doors. Pointed motifs crown the revolving doors, which originally had black glass panes above them. Many changes in detail have been made to the glass over the years. The entrances herald the splendid Y-shaped lobby.

(Fig. 44. Chrysler Building lobby ca.1980 with refreshed lighting. Photo: Courtesy Rambusch.com. 1980 rambusch.com/projects/chrysler-building-lobby-new-york-ny/)

African granite wall veneer, long light tubes integrated with the columns and other curtain-like wall ornaments surmounted the elevator passages. These and the use of stainless steel and intersecting cubist-influenced images on the ceiling testified to the client’s and the architect’s desire to design an ensemble that was unprecedented in the city. The lobby’s mural by Edward Trumbull, with figures depicting “transportation and human endeavor,” came with the kind of pompous but forgettable explanation common at the time: man’s application of energy in the service of construction. The mural was harder to see before the long-established Rambusch company of lighting specialists working with Kugler Ning Lighting designers installed LED uplights in 1980 that also saved energy while respecting the original design. Banks of elevators ran express to high floors; others were just high-speed for the time. The Chrysler’s are the best surviving office building elevator panels of the period, created in warm tones of exotic woods. Motifs came from historical models, mainly Egyptian, while others were geometric.

(Fig. 45. Chrysler Building elevator. Photo: New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission phorograph files, accessed 7 15 2025 nyclandmarks.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/view/search?search=Submit&dateRangeStart=&dateRangeEnd=&cat=0&q=Chrysler%20Building%20New%20York&sort=mediafileName&os=50)

For each bank of elevators, the designers, including L. T. M. Ralston, created separate designs for the walls, ceilings, and metal ceiling plates that conceal ventilation fans in each cab. They are minor landmarks, enhancing the large landmark that surrounds them.

The efficient interiors had some useful new touches such as under-floor wiring for electricity and telephones. Offices could quickly be reconfigured thanks to interchangeable partitions. The office floors were kept clean by a centralized vacuum system that expelled pollutants outside the building or into a distant collection container. Air-conditioning cooled the lowest three floors and the subway arcade.

(John B. Stranges, “Mr. Chrysler’s Building: Merging Design and Technology in the Machine Age” Icon 20 #32, 2014, pp. 1-19)

The lowest part of the building housed a two-story automobile showroom that was replaced in 1936 with a better design. Under the street level, besides the subway entrance, there were services for office workers, at various times including a barber, shoeshine, dry cleaner, optometrist, locksmith, a law firm’s gym, and places to buy lunch. A completely tiled room in the skyscraper housed a mechanism for filtering tap water that would then be available for the building’s water coolers. For junior executives at lunch, there was a Schrafft’s at street level.

The high floors were spectacular but have been closed for years. Only fifty-five floors held offices. On the sixty-first, photographer Margaret Bourke-White rented space for an apartment; her lease had to be co-signed by a man at Time, Inc. because a woman alone was not allowed to rent an apartment. John Vassos, an industrial designer, created a stylish interior with built-in furniture. Stairs led to a terrace that her lease did not allow her to use. The observation deck on the 71^st floor had a narrow exterior walkway that may not have been open to the public; inside, one had to look through triangular windows---less convenient than the open views at the Empire State and RCA Buildings finished not long after this one. Interior angled walls painted with arrowlike forms rising from an irregular dado made the space look like an expressionist film set. Models of the planets hung from a ceiling painted with imaginative celestial objects.

(Fig, 46, Chrysler Building observatory. Photo: https://hiddenarchitecture.net/chrysler-building-lobby-and-observatory/. Public domain., Note: this site has rare additional images of the observatory.)

Just below, floors 69 and 70 had an apartment for Walter Chrysler with a gym, private office, and a dining room with a figurative mural in black silhouettes. Despite the availability of mechanical heating, he wanted a fireplace because rich men like Campbell and Chrysler expected fireplaces.

Floors 66 through 68 were devoted to the Cloud Club for businessmen, particularly those who worked for companies that rented space in the building. On floor 66, the decor was Tudor and Jacobean, seen in many male-centered interiors as at the Bush Tower or the Campbell Apartment at Grand Central or the Uptown Club on the Lincoln Building’s twenty-seventh floor or the apartment there of Michael J. Paterno whose tastes were more continental. Chrysler’s designer was Charles R. Hester, experienced in creating traditional interiors for restaurants and bars. (NYT 1 3 1935, p. N9) Amenities at the club included lockers for storing alcohol during Prohibition and a bar that somehow could hide the liquids that it dispensed.

(Fig, 47, Dining room in the Cloud Club, Photo: P & A Studios, NYPL ps_art_036 Public domain)

Members approached the main dining room on the floor above by a Renaissance style staircase but were probably shocked at first because the room owed much to German expressionism, known from movie sets or van Alen’s own travels and reading. While all the motifs—window framing, mirrors, polished granite columns, originally-styled capitals----were symmetrical, they were unconventional. The capitals, which were also angular light fixtures, seemed almost to weigh down the angled columns. The ceiling plaster oozed down to the upper half of the wall as if it were a cloud, above a painted sky. One end of the room was framed as if it were a portal to the cloud-covered space. At the large real window, a curtain motif hung above plaster formed to suggest fabric ripped back to expose the sky. Only the tame conventional armchairs looked familiar. It was not quite the Lunchroom of Dr. Caligari but it was unexpected, and memorable even in later years when new curtains and chairs failed to attract members. The premises gradually emptied in the 1970s.

(Landmarks Preservation Commission July 28, 1981, Designation List 145, LP 1049, Stern et al., New York 1930, pp 603-610, both with extensive references, also Wikipedia with a responsible bibliography to 2021, accessed 10 1 2021 https://untappedcities.com/2015/02/19/top-10-secrets-of-the-chrysler-building-in-nyc/10/ ; https://therealdeal.com/2020/03/24/retail-tenants-disappearing-from-chrysler- building/?utm_source=internal&utm_medium=after_article&utm_campaign=related_article ; https://mrbellersneighborhood.com/2002/03/inside-the-needle-the-chrysler-building-gets-lit Progressive Architecture l #10, July-Dec. 1929, p. 525 for design stages; NYT 10 19 1930, p. 157 and “How Engineers Crowned the World’s Tallest Building,” Popular Science Magazine, 117 #2, Aug.1930, p. 52 with explanatory drawing of the spire mechanism by G. Seielstad ; David Stravitz, The Chrysler Building. Creating a NewYork Icon. Day by Day, NY, Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.; “Chrysler. 405 Lexington Avenue at 42nd Street, William van Alen,” A+U Architecture and Urbanism, Dec.,1994, pp.134-143. https://untappedcities.com/2021/06/23/secrets-grand-central-terminal/?displayall=true accessed 6 23 21. Building ownership has changed several times but Cooper Union retains the land. L. T. M. Ralston, “The Engineer’s Problems in Tall Buildings,” Architectural Forum 52, June 1930, pp. 909-920.; Ralston, a mechanical engineer, assisted especially with the high-speed elevators. Kenneth Murchison, “Chrysler Building, As I See It,” The American Architect 138 #2587, Sept. 1930, pp. 24-33, 78 and see p. 34 with photographs not usually reproduced. For earlier designs and later matters, see Cervin Robinson & Rosemarie Haag Bletter, Skyscraper Style, pp. 21-22 and C. H. Krinsky, “The Chrysler Preserved,” Art in America 67 #4, July-Aug 1979, pp 81-86. See also D. Michaelis, “77 Stories,” Manhattan Inc 3, # 6, June 1986, pp, 105-135; Eric P. Nash, Manhattan Skyscrapers, pp. 60-63. For van Alen: Francis S. Swales, “Draftsmanship and Architecture,” Pencil Points 1 #10, Aug. 1929, pp. 515-526.)

The Chrysler and other buildings near it benefited from their proximity to Grand Central; Salmon’s buildings benefited from the air and light opposite the low Public Library and from a memorable address: 500 Fifth Avenue. While occupants of the higher floors of Salmon’s buildings could enjoy views of Bryant Park, during the first half of the decade the views were not beautiful. Only one elm survived from a former group of six, and only one old poplar; newly planted elms were still young. The wartime Eagle Hut for military people was finally taken away in 1920, replaced by fresh grass sod, but wartime cold frames continued for a while containing lettuce, cabbage, and cauliflower. News-and-soda stands at the park entrances or just inside them distressed the Forty-second Street Property Owners and Merchants Association. So did the presence of homeless men including unemployed war veterans who were rounded up in 1921 for sleeping in a public park.

These matters were less enduring than construction work initiated in 1922 for a new two-track subway tunnel running diagonally across the park from Forty-first Street, extending the Queensboro (now #7) line from Grand Central to Eighth Avenue. That was at least concealed by a fence and would be completed in four years by the Powers-Kennedy Contracting company. A more alarming but abandoned idea was that of building a bus terminal underneath it. An even more implausible idea was that the park could become a landing field for the small airplanes of that time. Ornamental plans were put forward by architects Thomas Hastings and John M. Hatton, and the Fifth Avenue Association prepared its own plan, working with the Committee of the Forty-second Street Property Owners’ and Merchants’ Association. Meanwhile businessmen objected to an activist, Urbain Ledoux, alias Mr. Zero who distributed food in the park to hungry people in June of 1931 and who proposed to “auction” for employers some willing unemployed men and women, as in a slave market. They would work in the Midwestern wheat belt in exchange for grain which Mr. Zero would bake into bread for the city’s poor. Local businessmen held meetings only to oppose the auctions and bread-baking, offering no remedies themselves for the unemployment problem.

(NYT 3 23 1920, p 8; 5 30 1920, p.E1; 10 18 1921, p.3; 2 19 1922. p.125; 7 30 1922, p. 97; 1 1 1927, p.1; 2 27 1927, p.SM 14; 4 17 1928, p.RE51; 6 17 1931, p.22; 9 4 1931, p.4)

Farther east, the lure of proximity to Grand Central and new buildings there as well as to the Tudor City area attracted investor syndicate Rheinstein-Schulte to available land near the northeast corner of Third Avenue, at 205-217 East. The site had become available when St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church closed its clinic and moved its parish house and chapel to Madison Avenue and Forty-fourth Street, closer to its new church on Park Avenue and Fifty-first Street. By this time, it could realize a good price for the land because anything near Grand Central was seen as desirable, and the noisy spur to Grand Central of the Third Avenue El was gone as of late December 1923, ending its blight of East Forty-second Street. After the spur came down, the syndicate of investors was reassured by the presence of Tudor City, the Covenant church and parish house, and plans for the Daily News Building which would replace a silk factory.

The new twenty-one-story office building would be known as the Bartholomew, where money rather than mercy became primary. Starrett and van Vleck architects, finished it in 1929. It contained 350,000 square feet, just over half as many as the contemporary Chanin Building has. (NYT 5 10 1931, p. RE1) The ground floor exterior features a long russet marble lintel and there are original interior fittings of the entrance hall. Above the entrance outside is a floor with alternating light and dark voussoirs on an arcade of round arches.

(Fig. 48. Wurts Bros., Bartholomew Building (in 1957). 1929, Starrett & Van Vleck. Photo: Museum, of the City of New York X2010.7.1.13631 The corner taxpayer was replaced in 1966 by 675 3^rd Avenue.)

The rest displays a broad stretch of rectangular windows in a red-orange brick façade with slightly salient verticals. Only one major setback was required because the site is large, stretching to Forty-third Street where there are other setbacks. It seems to have had little trouble filling its offices. One tenant om 1929 was Remington- Rand, which had just moved its offices out of the west side Remington Building. (Wikimapia s.v. Bartholomew Building adds useful details.)

Sixty East, renamed in 2009 as One Grand Central Place, is still widely known as the Lincoln Building, named for the preceding buildings on the site. A replacement was announced in June of 1928 for the existing Lincoln National Bank, the Lincoln Storage Warehouse, and the Athens (formerly Devonshire) Hotel opposite Grand Central. The demolition contractor paid the building owners $8 per ton of structural steel and worked for nothing, because he knew that if his workers demolished it carefully, he could later sell the thousand tons of long-length steel for between $40 and $60 per ton. (NYT 8 11 1935, p.SM15; article starts on SM7).

The new building’s architect was J. E. Carpenter, associated with E. J. Willingdale, Kenneth R. Norton whom some credit with the design, and William Harmon Beers. Supervising architects Warren & Wetmore also participated, probably required as part of the Grand Central zone planning. The syndicate that financed the building had as its head John H. Carpenter, perhaps a of the architect. Dwight P. Robinson & Co finished construction in 1930.

(Fig. 49. Lincoln Building. J.E.R. Carpenter, with Willingdale, Norton, and Beers; Warren & Wetmore. 1930. Photo: Wurts Bros. NYPL ID1558487.)

Fifty-four stories high, it was planned to contain 922,000 square feet of rentable space, with floor heights of twelve feet, served by thirty elevators. The base is a three-story anchor for protruding and stepped wings on the east and west. The large building recedes in heavy steps at the ends of the Forty-second Street facade. Three setbacks provide visual support for a broad tower as wide as the site. The elevation emphasizes vertical ascent with the structural columns marked by strong brick-faced verticals containing pairs of windows, alternating with continuous vertical shafts framing recessed windows with more glass. The verticals are interrupted near the top first by brackets above the larger windows and then by brackets at the top of the four main verticals. They give a strong sense of geometry rather than the northern Gothic references of the Bush and Wurlitzer towers, and they downplay the Renaissance forms of the more recent tall buildings beside and opposite it. The brackets and tan color evoked medieval Tuscany among those with imagination. The elevation terminates in large Gothic arches with intersecting tracery under voussoirs of two colors. A low attic and a thin, barely projecting cornice complete the composition. On the east, the final tower is bare above the former Belmont Hotel’s roofline until another decorative arch, like the three on the Forty-second Street and west sides, suddenly terminates the blank wall. The developers’ initial publicity specified that shops would face Forty-second and Forty-first Streets and Madison Avenue on which there was building frontage and would also be present in the interior arcades at ground and subway levels. (NYT 6 3 1928, p.RE1; 8 5 1928, p.137; 2 3 1929, p.161). The lobby had veined marble walls under an elaborate High Renaissance coffered barrel vault in a taste that was as conservative by that time as the use of Gothic elements was, and incongruous with the Trecento references on the outside.

(“Lincoln Building, New York, American Architect 134 # 2549, 1 20 1928, p. 16; “The Lincoln Building, New York,” Through the Ages 8 Jan.,1931, pp.30-35; “Manhattan’s Building Peak Shifts to Forty-second Street. Five Buildings Cost over $61,000,000. A Pioneer Movement. Renting from the Plans.” NYT 2 3 1929, p.161 referring to Lincoln, News, Chrysler, Chanin and Tudor City’s Woodstock tower. Stern et al, New York 1930, p.548-549. For the Crown and needle construction: NYT 10 19 1930, p.157; and Ragojoyac, CUNY dissertation. Grand Central Terminal as of 1930 had passageway connections from the IRT to the Terminal and to ten buildings and the Queens station connection in 42nd St near 3rd Avenue, NYT 8 26 1930, p.17)

While the Lincoln Building maintained the aspect of the early 1920s and the Chrysler and Chanin sought to modernize by means of distinctive ornament in the art deco mode, the Daily News and McGraw-Hill Buildings, both designed by Raymond Hood, moved American skyscrapers closer to the European avant-garde, usually summarized as International Style modernism. This was defined as a manner of design that favored geometric shapes and smooth surfaces often projecting an aspect of industrial efficiency, the absence of applied ornament beyond that of an interesting entrance and lobby, flat roofs, ribbon windows, and an aspect of thrust or dynamism. In the hands of Raymond Hood, the style was more than just the straight lines and flat surfaces that saved money for stingy developers and eventually gave the style a bad name. From the start, his were distinctive buildings in modes that still seem younger than their ninety-plus years.

The Daily News Building at 330 East, was built in 1929-30 for Joseph Medill Patterson, heir to the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, and the Washington Times-Herald. He chose Hood to design the building in New York because Hood had designed the Tribune building in Chicago.to wide acclaim. The Daily News building was located where it was because zoning rules prohibited industrial facilities on the east side west of Third, and the News had a printing plant as part of its building. A suitable site was available on what was by then a prestigious thoroughfare. The printing was done in a nine-story wing on Forty-first Street.

(Fig. 50. Daily News Building, Raymond Hood of Hood & Fouilhoux, 1930. . Photo: Angelo Rizzuto, 1954, LOC LC-DIG-ppmsca-69881, LOT15144, no.55. Bowery annex in right foreground next to Hotel Belmont when it was an office building. Tudor City is in the distance. The Third Avenue El is visible.)

Hood persuaded the publisher to erect a thirty-six- story office building that provided extra office space for rent. Hood, like van Alen, understood that his clients wanted their buildings to look distinctive, not part of the herd of elephantine tan and brown brick buildings around Grand Central. Brown buildings surrounded the News’ site, too. but they were small except for those in Tudor City; the Bartholomew was not designed before the News was planned. Newspaper and insurance companies had for some time sought distinctive buildings because their products were fundamentally the same but in direct competition. The Daily News was, to be sure, already noteworthy because it was a tabloid with short, snappy texts and plenty of pictures. News readers might welcome something colorful and energetic if they ever saw the building; everyone who did see it would know that there was something distinctive about the product that gave the building its name.

The street front entrance alone would have made that clear; it is a composition by René Chambellan cut into a flat polished granite block almost five bays wide and bordered by vertical lights. At first, Hood wanted the façade to be just three stories high, as it would be hidden by the Third Avenue El. A low entrance might have emphasized the height of the tower, but Patterson wisely demanded a higher façade that was more prominent, and even more so once the Els came down. It also offered more space for sculpture. (Information from Walter H. Kilham.Jr., c. 1971) The entrance bears the newspaper’s name on top and the inscription “He made so many of them” accompanying a mass of people. The inscription ends a saying, variously attributed, that starts with “God must have loved the poor” or “God must have loved the common people.” Either text identified many of the tabloid’s readers.

(Fig. 51. Daily News Building entrance. Rene Chambellan, 1930. Photo: Author, 2023)

The façade with its simplified realistic figures is anomalous in the overall design which is geometric, emphatically vertical, and faced with the bricks that the client wanted because stone was costly. Tall thin white bricks cover the steel columns and project in front of the spandrels to emphasize the slab’s height. Intermediate verticals of equal thickness frame the windows, adding to the soaring impression while conforming to the governing nine-foot module. The contrast of white verticals and rusty tan-and-black brick spandrels enlivens the exterior, as does the Chinese-inspired ornamental frieze, designed by one of Hood’s staff, perhaps Carl Landefeld, above parts of the ground floor. (Information from Walter H. Kilham, Jr. c. 1971) The original red window shades made the overall impression cheerful and lively, something that could not be said for the Pershing Square, Lincoln, or Heckscher Buildings. The setbacks satisfied the zoning requirements but were not designed for that reason alone; their specific design responded to artistic considerations. The setbacks are more obvious on the south and east sides but subtler on the north-facing façade where aesthetic rather than legal modifications were most important for the public image. Some ink has been spilled over the conceptual purity of the top of the façade: although it shields the mechanical installations. it looks much like the rest of the elevation. The notion of honest expression of the interior garnered more interest in past decades than it does today. Nor do we worry much about whether or not this exemplifies the International Style as defined by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in a book that accompanied the seminal exhibition in 1932 of new architecture---the International Style--- at the infant Museum of Modern Art. Inclusion there of the Daily News building aroused debate at the time.

The lobby was one of the most remarkable elements of the News building. In an area free of columns, the lobby displayed a rotating globe in a sunken illuminated basin, under a black glass hemisphere that perhaps alluded to the universe. In the basin, inscriptions conveyed information about the place of Earth in the solar system Along a curved marble-clad wall beyond it were meteorological indicators of relative humidity, wind velocity, and other facts along with charts and illustrations. Bronze lines in the terrazzo floor showed how far other cities were from New York.

(Fig. 52. Lumitone postcard, Daily News lobby, c. 1930-40. Photo: Museum of the City of New York, X2011.34.3468-40)

The originator of the ideas may have been Hood; it may have been Patterson, but they agreed about it and Patterson invested $150,000 to create “a satisfying effect”—that of commending the building to the public as more than just another office building. The newspaper itself provided information in an accessible and lively way, and so did the architectural design and lobby displays. The lobby, which offered other visual attractions such as relief panels by the eminent glass designer, Frederick Carder, became a tourist attraction and a subject of postcard messages.

(Raymond Hood, in Architectural Forum 53, Nov., 1930 pp. 531-532; Walter H. Kilham, Jr., Raymond Hood, Architect, New York, Architectural Book Publishing Company, 1973, esp. pp. 27-28/ (This author worked for Hood and took notes about the architect during his employment; I interviewed him several times in the 1970s) NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission July 28, 1981, Designation List 145, LP1049 with further bibliography, especially Bletter & Robinson, Douglas Haskell, and William H. Jordy; Stern et al., New York 1930, pp. 577-579; for context: Aurora Wallace, Media Capital: Architecture and Communications In New York City, Urbana/Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 2012

Hood’s other major work on Forty-second Street was the McGraw-Hill Building at 330 West.

Fig. 53. Samuel Gottscho, McGraw-Hill Building, Hood & Fouilhoux, 1931. Photo: Museum of the City of New York, 88.1.1.1943, view from Corn Exchange Bank).

It is still commonly known by that name, although the publishing company moved its offices to the extension of Rockefeller Center half a century ago. The company’s name appears in handmade white terra cotta blocks against a blue-green background at the top of the building. It was restored in 2019 and in 2021, neighbors and preservationists persuaded the Landmarks Preservation Commission to deny permission for new owners to remove the name. This was the last noticeable building erected on Forty-second Street before construction halted almost everywhere in midtown except at Rockefeller Center during the Depression and wartime years.

Like the Daily News building, this one had a printing plant and was therefore forced to occupy a site outside the high-class commercial zoning area between Third and Eighth Avenues. Building something new had become urgent for the publishing company, which specialized in technical books, journals, catalogues, and directories. James H. McGraw and John A. Hill had bought many smaller companies, including one that manufactured paper, but their premises were dispersed. There had been makeshift and unsatisfactory alterations to the old headquarters building. A large new building would solve the problem of fragmented branches. McGraw, the surviving partner, entered into a lease with the 342 West 42^nd Street Corporation to occupy much of the striking green building at 330 West. That corporation had as its president a former vice-president at McGraw-Hill, so the owner and tenant were hardly separate.

As the company had had previous quarters on the west side, the area was familiar. The site was cheaper than any in the elite zone. Tenements with small commercial premises at street level could be bought and demolished. Immigrants and African-Americans who lived on the Forty-first Street side of the eventual building could be displaced without arousing public outcry. But the publishers did not do the displacing; John A. Larkin did. Larkin was an architect and real estate developer who had assembled the large mid-block site on which he hoped to build an office building one hundred ten stories high. He and his brother Edward even filed plans for it in 1926 but could not complete the project. In the spring of 1930, they exchanged this site for that of the then-existing McGraw-Hill head office and disappeared from Forty-second Street. (NYT 5 30 1930, p. 37)

McGraw hired Raymond Hood and his architectural partner, J. André Fouilhoux to design the new building, probably because a company headquarters in a derelict part of the street needed good publicity. Hood was known for his varied and innovative designs that always garnered attention but when he discussed his buildings, he emphasized practical matters rather than beauty or theory. Clients evidently expected him to provide noticeable buildings that would be talked about but that would also be both economical and profitable.

Hood provided large flexible loft spaces for offices or any other future purpose. The building benefited from a change in the zoning rules for buildings on West Forty-second Street, related to setbacks that increased rentable floor space---probably an effort to stimulate more development there. (Clary, Mid-Manhattan, p. 215) The printing processes and the flexible office space were encased in superimposed boxes, in which the somewhat taller factory-like spaces below controlled the design of the whole by suggesting that horizontal lines would predominate even above the industrial levels. The printing presses had to be on the lowest floors where extra-heavy construction could help to anchor the building. Other considerations related to the weight of paper and machinery affected floors through the eighth, which had especially thick floors and high ceilings. The bindery was on the fifth floor, the press room on the sixth, and the composing room above that. The first of three setbacks had offices for rent by others; the setback there was one bay deep, while those at the top of the tower are shorter and narrower, forming a conclusion to the design.

The interior columns are reflected on the exterior by broad dark green terminations to sets of four windows that have slightly thicker dark green mullions between the central windows. The dominant horizontals are clad in blue-green terra cotta tiles, an unusual surface material; Hood described them as becoming lighter in color as the building rose higher, as if blending into the sky. Fading brick colors had just been used by Harvey Wiley Corbett uptown at the Master Apartments, opened in 1929; Hood and Corbett were by 1930 collaborators on the design of Rockefeller Center. Originally, apple green glass frames varied the blue-green, and had as a complementary color a vermilion band above them. Vermilion accents also appeared on piers, the penthouse, and the signs as well as at the front door. The sign bearing the McGraw-Hill name rests on the entire length of the final setback. Open horizontal beams at its ends suggest the kind of dynamism made popular at the time by posters of streamlined train engines thrusting forward, or the lines of force shown in drawings and cartoons.

Offices above the tenth floor were meant for editorial and clerical work of the parent company and for outside renters. The planning reflected principles of scientific management, still much discussed at the time, based on the ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. They were used in this building to smooth the processes of editing, printing, binding, packing, and shipping. The authors of New York 1930 called it “a decorated factory” rather than an adherent of a specific style, although Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson included it in their exhibition of the “International Style.” (Stern et al., New York 1930, p.579) Over the years, critics have written about whether a tall building should emphasize verticality or whether the building reflected honestly the individual floors with several different functions. There is certainly a central vertical –a spine of twin windows that rises from just above the base to the sign atop the roof, but the prevailing impression is that of superimposed horizontal layers.

Debate about the building’s artistic position has been lively over the years but it resists simple classification as international modern, art deco, art moderne, or anything else. It is a futile exercise to shoehorn every building into a stylistic box. The horizontal lines, flat surfaces, and long bands of windows are related to International Modernism. Colorful decoration enlivened many buildings of International Modernist design as well as those at the 1925 decorative and industrial arts exposition in Paris. Color appeared in the terminal sign---green, orange stripe, white letters with thick and thin elements---and around the entrance door.

(Fig. 54 Samuel H.Gottscho, McGraw-Hill Building entrance door. Photo:1931, Museum of the City of New York, 88.1.1.1927)

There, the resemblance to streamlined locomotives is apparent in the heavy rounded and colorful framing; at the time, a McGraw-Hill publication referred to the doorway as “lacquered like the body of a motor car.” Blue-green baked enamel and orange stripes against a black background guided visitors inside the lobby and appeared in the elevator cabs. Nothing like this had been seen earlier nor would it be seen again. In fact, later owners had designers Valerian Rybar and Jean-Francois Daigre cover some of the metal panels in the lobby, redesign the ceiling, and install cylindrical light fixtures. An even later owner, Deco Tower Associates, removed those additions and other details in the winter of 2020-2021 and placed them in storage, making way for a new design by Moed deArmas & Shannon (now MdeAS), but parts of the original cladding were uncovered later in 2021

(Landmarks Preservation Commission September 11,1979, Designation List 127, LP-1050; Anthony Robins, author of this and of the Daily News building designation wrote excellent essays about these buildings, with further references. See also Stern, et al., New York 1930 p 57, Kilham, Raymond Hood, pp. 71 ff.; J. F. Gill, “But the Sign of Which Times?” NYT 2 28 2021, p. MB RE11. https://www.archpaper.com/2021/03/the-demolit,ion-of-the-lobby-at-manhattans-mcgraw-hill-building-is-nearly-complete/ 3 11 2021, accessed 3 12 2021; Architectural Record 69, April 1931, pp. 307-308; “Mc Graw-Hill Building, 330 West 42nd Street, Raymond Hood, Godley & Fouilhoux, 1931,” A + U Architecture and Urbanism, Dec.,1994, pp. 162-167. Communications from Theodore Grunewald, September 2021 ff. for recent developments)

Skyscrapers might obscure some sunshine from the street but they could not obscure certain truths about the problems facing Forty-second Street in the 1930s. Live theater was in trouble, facing competition from films. Stage performances would now have to be more than ordinary to attract theatergoers and many were ordinary, losing money for their investors and shutting the theaters. Investors were increasingly wary after the Stock Market crashed and the Depression began. That meant shutting nearby restaurants, too, as the Depression wore on. Building owners were unable to earn money from their profitable roof gardens because Prohibition had steered some of their patrons to speakeasies and private parties. That also meant the end of the Pleasant Hour Tavern between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, where the proprietor, Thomas Kerrigan, played the pipes and invited other musicians to perform. (The Companion to Irish Traditional Music, New York, NYU Press, 1999 See author Fintan Valelly, p. 399 s.v. Touhey, Patsy) No one could easily stop the immoral behavior on various parts of the street--behavior that scared away higher-class investors and upper-income patrons of hotels, restaurants, theaters, and new office buildings. All this threatened the prosperity that had made Forty-second Street attractive during the 1920s. Once the McGraw-Hill Building was finished, so was most large-scale building on West Forty-second Street for the next five decades.

(Stern & Catalano Raymond Hood, pp. 12-13; Landmarks Commission Designation List 127 LP-1050, Sept. 11, 1979/; Walter H. Kilham Jr., Raymond Hood, op. cit.)

Observers worried about the congested condition of Forty-second street whenever a new building was finished, probably fearing that even more crowding would come. The Great Depression took care of that worry for a while but did little to diminish the congestion at Grand Central. The trains had carried about 16.1 million passengers per year in 1903, about 32.3 million in 1919 and almost 44 million in 1927. (NYT 2 17 1929, p.170) The long-distance train system thrived through the Depression, as air travel was still uncommon and limited. The crowded subways and Els carried passengers to work each day if there was work to be had. But the optimism and prosperity of the 1920s yielded in the next decade to both economic and personal depression.