Chapter 8 The 1930s-1940s

In the title song from the musical film, “42^nd Street” of 1933, the thoroughfare is called the place “where the underworld can meet the elite.” That had been true for some time. During the Great Depression followed by years of war, the different classes and activities became even more obvious in many parts of the street but the meetings were less cordial. The condition of the street in the 1930s can be conveniently assessed from the volume on New York City produced by the Federal Writers’ Project in 1939 but there is more to be said.

(Federal Writers’ Project, New York City Guide, New York, Random House, 1939)

The start of the 1930s saw the completion of large buildings—500 Fifth Avenue, McGraw-Hill, Daily News, Tudor City, and the Hotel Dixie. A few smaller ones had been initiated before the stock market crash and were finished, too, but until the end of the recovery from wartime in the late 1940s, there were no new skyscrapers. A good many buildings failed financially and closed. As early as 1930, about two million square feet of office space lay vacant in the area, though not just in Forty-second Street. (NYT 8 15 1930, p. 26). The Times devoted an article in its Sunday magazine to methods of building demolition. Immigrants did most of the work. Austrians built protective bridges akin to scaffolds; Ukrainians and Russians were more numerous than Spanish-born men in tearing down walls. Specialists from northeast Canada cut up steelwork with acetylene torches, and former sailors unafraid of heights earned the best salaries. (NYT 8 11 1935, p. SM7)

Businesses that managed to survive in the shrunken economy rented office space in the new skyscrapers east of Sixth Avenue or sometimes in the McGraw-Hill Building if their trades were connected to publishing, manufacturing or shipping. In general, however, the west side deteriorated, accommodating a mixture of respectable and questionable if not outright criminal enterprises. Legitimate theaters moved northward, leaving behind the risqué burlesques staged by the famous Minsky family and other showmen that aroused the moralizing ire of Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia, his license commissioner, Paul Moss, and the ever-vigilant New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. After 1937, when those shows closed for lack of a license, there were no more stage playhouses on Forty-second Street. Several of them became respectable cinemas, often bought by the Brandt family from the mid-1930s into the 1940s, or had cabaret performances in rooftop premises. The Pix was a new cinema, designed by Ely Jacques Kahn in 1938 and opened in late 1939. Others showed westerns, violent, or salacious films. Some restraint was enforced by the Motion Picture Production Code, alias the Hays Movie Code named for the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. In ever-weakening force between 1934 and 1968, the code restricted images of sex, violence, criticism of religion, and other matters, but not every film was made by the major studios that joined the association. When the Apollo began to show foreign films with translations, that theater became popular with respectable deaf moviegoers who welcomed the captions. (Variety 5 7 1947) The Harris theater, by then a second-run cinema, replaced its limestone façade with a stuccoed windowless wall, installed stadium seating inside, and showed pornographic films. (Henderson, Story of 42nd St. p. 135). The word ‘grindhouse’ came into popular use, indicating a cinema open twenty hours a day with continuous performances, often of double features, specializing at first in action films and sometimes descending to pornographic ones.

(George Chauncey, “The Policed: Gay Men’s Strategies of Everyday Resistance,” Inventing Times Square, ed. William R. Taylor, p. 322)

Not long after the completion of the McGraw-Hill Building in 1931 that gave real estate people hope for the future of the west side, the Hotel Dixie was finished at 351 West.

(Fig. 1. Lumitone Press Photoprint postcard, Dixie (later Carter) Hotel, Emery Roth, 1931 postcard, ca. 1931-40. Museum of the City of New York, X2011.34.3526.)

Most of the hotel replaced tenements on Forty-third Street, but there was a Forty-second Street portion on the site of a former taxpayer. The architect, Emery Roth, a successful Hungarian immigrant, took full advantage of the zoning allowance, raising the central section of the front thirteen brick-faced stories above the limestone ground floor; the side sections were eleven stories high before the setbacks. The monotonous design was enlivened slightly by a more compact grouping of windows in the side sections, and by accents of red and green, the latter apparently from window shades, the former from strips above the windows. At the summit of this man-made mountain, a tripartite smooth-walled structure that concealed mechanical elements and the water tank, sported a bright red sign with the hotel’s name. The lobby design was so bland as to be immediately forgettable. The structural columns were covered in paneling, the diamond-patterned floors were largely covered with rugs, and there was the usual complement of furniture, ash receptacles, and potted plants.

The Uris Brothers, Harold an engineer and Percy a businessman later prominent as builders, opened this hotel at just the wrong moment. By early 1932, they failed to meet payments on their $2.2 million loan from the New York State Title and Mortgage Company. The mortgage firm sold the Dixie in March of that year to Southworth Management Corporation which ran it successfully enough to make the Carter Hotels Corporation interested in buying it in 1942.

Although most of the hotel faced Forty-third Street, the Forty-second Street portion made this building distinctive because on the ground floor, buses could enter a sunken depot that served commuters from New Jersey and other travelers.

(Fig. 2a. Hotel Dixie, postcard ca. 1929, Public domain. Fig. 2b. Plan of the Dixie bus terminal, 1929. From forum.bustalk.info/viewtopic.php? t.2304. Public domain.)

At peak season, three hundred fifty buses came and left each day from both Forty-third and Forty-second Streets, using designated ramps. A turntable thirty-five feet in diameter that could hold ten buses directed buses to the proper exit. Departing passengers had a simple waiting room with a newsstand; parts of its linoleum floor survive. At first called the Central Union Bus Terminal, it was renamed the Short Line Bus Terminal by July 1931. It was profitable despite the presence of another one, called The American Bus Depot, at 244-248 West by June 1937, and others in the adjacent streets. Bus travel had increased dramatically with the opening in that year of the Lincoln Tunnel to Weehawken, New Jersey. (Photos in NYC 1940 Municipal Archives collection; see also https://www.scoutingny.com/the-1930s-bus-station-hidden-in-a-times-square-hotel/ written in 2013, accessed 5 26 2022) The Carter facility closed, however, after the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey opened its competitive terminal at Eighth Avenue and Forty-first Street in 1950.

The Lincoln Tunnel was these decades’ most enduringly successful project affecting West Forty-second Street. Its designer was the Norwegian-born engineer Ole Knutsen Singstad. He used the two-plenum ventilation system that he had invented for the Holland Tunnel and developed prefabricated sections and immersed tubes for the Lincoln. The central tube of 1934-37 was later joined by the northern tube of 1945 and the southern one of 1957. A new street, Dyer Avenue named for George R. Dyer, chairman of the Port Authority of New York, accommodates buses from Thirtieth to Forty-second Streets, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues.

Where might bus passengers stay overnight? At the Dixie/Carter, perhaps. The West Shore Hotel survived at least until 1944, although other parts of this hostelry had been razed in 1935 to build a warehouse for the Frederick Hussey Realty Corporation. (The New York Historical George B. Corso Hotel Collection, s.v. West Shore Hotel, NY Sun 12 14 1934; 3 24 1936; 2 1 1944; clippings lack pages) Worse still was the Forty-second Street Hotel near Eighth Avenue, a house of prostitution frequented by military men, a source of venereal disease. (NYT 3 9 1943, p. 25). On the more fashionable east side, the Commodore Hotel’s owners commissioned Cross & Cross to refurbish ballrooms, guest rooms, elevators, and kitchens in 1937.

Unlike hotel guests, working men lived in a lodging house nearby at 159 East at the rear of the second floor of a tenement where the Rockaway Restaurant’s auxiliary kitchen caused a fire. That was not as bad as the five-story Standard Hotel lodging house’s fire in 1943 at 437-439 West, in a building owned by the Cutting estate and leased to a reputed slumlord named John J. Campbell, Jr. A smoldering cigarette caused the death of nineteen restaurant and night workers who had occupied 3 x 6-foot cubicles separated by plywood in halls that could hold two hundred forty-eight people; the men crawled into bed through a door on a central vertical hinge that folded to permit entry to each cubicle. While governing officials focused on closing burlesque shows, three sessions of the state legislature had neglected to pass a law requiring sprinklers in lodging houses. The existing Multiple Dwelling Law was not retroactive. (NYT 12 25 1943, p. l)

This way of living for single men among the working poor contrasted with the situation at Tudor City, where a resident might enjoy a small-scale golf course on the private parkland, improve his strokes at a golf practice area indoors, or hit ping-pong balls in a room designed for the game. Starting in 1936, the Tudor City management staged an annual flower show, at first focused on tulips and children in Dutch costumes. The borough president promised that the East River Drive, now the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, would have grass plots, trees, and plants on either side, replacing the remaining decrepit buildings between the apartment houses and the river. (NYT 5 13 1936, p, 25). Neither he nor Tudor City’s management had anything to say about a legal and financial judgment against it brought by Claude Marchant, a dancer and teacher with the Katherine Dunham school, who had been excluded from a passenger elevator because he was African-American. (NYT 5 26 1948, p. 23; New York Amsterdam News 5 29 1948; Samuel, p. 92) A long-delayed rebuke to the management came in 1979, when a park below Tudor city was named in honor of Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche.

The FDR Drive opened between Thirty-fourth and Forty-ninth Streets in 1942, later engineered to create a commodious ascent from the roadway to First Avenue and the United Nations campus at Forty-second Street. Decayed industrial and commercial buildings, the trolley tracks, and the row of houses there succumbed after pleas from the United Nations and residents of Tudor City. Promised plantings had to wait.

While Tudor City prospered, banks foreclosed on loans to the Lincoln Building, the Liggett and its neighbor, the Vanderbilt Avenue Building, the Bush Tower and the Holland House, among the formerly promising properties on the east and west sides. Shayne’s much-admired fur salon closed for this reason. (NYT 1 16 1932, p. 31) While businessmen lunched at the Cloud Club in the Chrysler Building; churches and charities dispensed food to the poor. Social disparities had long existed on Forty-second Street and throughout the city but the 1930s and 1940s brought them to the fore.

The Forty-Second Street Property Owners and Merchants Association issued occasional optimistic statements to the press, at least in the early 1930s, but they also provided information for an article headlined “Dearth of Tenants Hits Skyscrapers. Building Managers’ Check-up Reveals Worst Conditions in Midtown and Financial Areas.” (NYT 8 16 1930, p. 26). Optimists at the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank ordered a remodeling of its branch at 5-7 East, the Transit Building; in 1932. Howe & Lescaze were called upon but the work was given to Voorhees, Gmelin and Walker.

(Fig. 3. Irving Underhill, Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank after 1932. Voorhees, Gmelin & Walker. Photo: Museum of the City of New York X2010.29.316)

The new architects simplified the ground floor design, much to the building’s advantage by, among other things, eliminating the baroque twisted columns at the entrance, the asymmetrical shops, and some of the rustication above them. Fluting at the rounded doorway edges suggested tradition, simplified in the current taste to pure geometric forms. So did the pedimented columnar ornamental feature in the center of the third level. The conservative modernity included two lower floors faced in smooth stone, and lettering without serifs. The interior design expressed confidence: Officers had desks in the open, and tellers worked behind low counters, not cages. Reddish-brown wood paneling and terrazzo on the floor gave a warm impression, and bronze fixtures cast then-fashionable indirect light. Amenities included a special reception room for women, and a vault lined with stainless steel and rubber tile paving. (NYT 11. 13 1932, p. RE1 for closeup photo of entrance at https://pastvu.com/p/1260398 accessed 5 29 2022)

Occasional optimism, however, was no cure for the Depression and a lack of tenants. Building owners acknowledged reality, especially after aggressive marketing of space in Rockefeller Center drew tenants to that new project by 1932. In vain did August Heckscher, Fred F. French, Benjamin Winter, and J. Clydesdale Cushman join others in July of 1933, to petition Governor Herbert Lehman to have a special session of the state legislature decree a two-year moratorium on commercial real estate mortgages. Savings banks and others opposed the proposal. (NYT 7 23 1933, p. N1). The Forty-second Street Association’s director kept busy by calling the police to arrest bootblacks, peddlers, and “sandwich men” in the theater district who eked out a living by wearing large advertising signs over their shoulders. Strikes became everyday occurrences, affecting the elevators of Walter Salmon’s office buildings, access to restaurants on the west side, service in hotels large and small, and film projection in movie theaters, among other businesses. Confusion and desperation prompted the opening in 1931 of the Gypsy Tea Kettle, which lasted until the building came down in the early 1980s. One could get fifteen-cent sandwiches and legal-if-free fortune-telling on the second floor of the former Ward-Morton house at the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street.

The Great Depression only exacerbated earlier distinctions between the rich and the poor, but unionized workers were able by then to strike for redress. From June to September 1935, there were simultaneous pickets or strikes at Bickford Cafeteria’s commissary, at the Times Square Theater and the Eltinge Theater, all on one block. Many strikers were arrested. (NYT 6 6 1935, p.44; 6 7 1935, p.13; 6 13, 1935, p.6; 6 14 1935, p.17; 6 20 1935, pp 16, 17; 9 13 1935, p.46) The strikes did not always succeed, and sometimes the businesses hired scabs at Broadway and 42^nd Street --“the country’s greatest recruiting station for strike-breakers,” as witnesses told the Senate Labor and Education Committee in 1936. (NYT 9 24 1936, p. 8) Some businesses simply closed instead of acceding to the demands of their overworked and underpaid staff. One example was the two-story Drake’s Popular Priced Restaurant at 119 West, then thirty-seven years old, operating day and night. (NYT 8 10 1937, p.2; 9 28 1937, p.8)

(Fig. 4. Drake’s Restaurant, Photo: Postcard in Seynour B. Durst Old York Library, Avery Library, Columbia University. Public domain)

The main workers’ organizations themselves--the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations--were sometimes conflicted, sometimes mutually supportive. They suspended strikes during the Second World War but allowed strikes to resume after the war ended in August 1945 whereupon elevator operators and laundry deliverers promptly struck in September and October, affecting restaurants and office buildings.

(https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/this-week-in-history-labor-pledges-no-strikes-during-ww-ii/e posted 12 12 2016, accessed 6 2 2020)

Sometimes there was an enduring and peaceful labor settlement, as when the Hotel Association provided virtually free medical care for over thirty thousand employees; the consultant to the New York Hotel Trades Council AFL was Martin E. Segal, whose success initiated a large North American employee benefits consultancy. (NYT 5 16 1948, p.F1) Almost simultaneously, however, National Airlines faced pickets because the company had refused to re-hire those who had struck. (NYT 5 19 1948, p.18) In 1948, strikes by retail sales staff, service employees, airline personnel including pilots, bus drivers, brewery employees, longshoremen, and bartenders all affected Forty-second Street. The Times reported, however, that loyal employees of the Yardstick Fabric Company at 11West picketed against CIO union picketers there. (NYT 6 14 1947, p.3) Some other picketing was political, not economic; Opponents of “Japanese Imperial Oppression in China” paraded in front of 500 Fifth Avenue in 1935 where the Japanese Consulate had its offices. (NYT 6 21 1935, p.7.)

Less controversial meetings throughout the decades were held to provide kindergartens, especially for the underserved poor on the west side, and to offer relief for those afflicted by poliomyelitis, which reached epidemic proportions in the late 1940s. At that time, the Hospital for the Relief of the Ruptured and Crippled changed its name to the Hospital for Special Surgery and in the 1950s left Forty-second Street to move uptown. (NYT 3 25 1949, p.20)

Unemployed building workers, most of them skilled, were hired under work relief programs to repair New York Public Libraries, including the research building at Forty-second Street. Marble-cutters improved the traction of the slippery marble steps. Peeling ceilings were repaired on the third floor. (NYT 6 30 1935, p.29) A year later, the Works Progress Administration provided skilled roofers who installed sheets of corrosion-resistant monel metal. (NYT 2 18 1936, p.6.) Then from 1938 to 1940, Edward Laning completed WPA-sponsored murals showing “The Story of the Recorded World” in the space leading to the catalogue room. (NYT 4 23 1940, p. 17; 4 28 1940, p. 42). Starting from Moses’ giving the tablets of the Law (with an artistic nod to Peter Paul Rubens’ Scene of Marie de’Medici arriving in France) through other historic episodes, the sequence ends with Otto Mergenthaler, inventor of the linotype, using his machine in the presence of Whitelaw Reid, publisher of the New York Herald-Tribune newspaper.

(Fig. 5. Edward Laming, Moses Gives the Tablets of the Law, New York Public Library, 1938-42. Photo: https://livingnewdeal.org/sites/new-york-public-library-murals-new-york-ny/)

The bad news included reports that every library seat was taken by worried people reading about finance during a bank holiday in 1933. (NYT 3 11 1933, p 6). The Library reduced its opening hours, foreseen in early 1938 and initiated in 1939. (NYT 3 10 1938, p. 23; 5 8 1939, p.16) During the Second World War, the Library closed on Sundays and legal holidays to save fuel. Further assisting the war effort, it became the site of war bond and war stamp drives and provided a book canteen for service personnel in room 112 that enlarged an earlier initiative. Librarians found that women in the military read short stories, scientific volumes about radio engineering, books about war-torn countries, and about correspondents’ experiences; military men, who were under more stress as combatants, preferred The Bedside Esquire and humorous books. (NYT 3 26 1943, p. 17) In October 1948, the Library returned to its former open hours: seven divisions open daily until 10 PM, other divisions with only slightly shorter hours, the main reading room and information desk “as always” open from 9 AM to l0 PM, and on Sundays and holidays from 1 to 6 PM. (By contrast, in January 2023-July 2025, it opened from 10 to 6 on six days and from 1 to 5 on Sundays except in summer.) Readers could receive their books in “eight or nine minutes” thanks to the brilliant stacks-and-elevator system. In 1948, Consolidated Edison installed new wiring and bulbs, replacing flickering old low-wattage bulbs powered by the overburdened dynamos provided in 1909. By then, the Library’s invested endowments produced less income. More people needed library services, but inflation drove up the price of materials and maintenance and reduced the value of the endowment. Most employees were poorly paid. These have been persistent problems. The Library closed a seven-room apartment for the chief engineer and his family, replacing it with a mimeograph room, a smoking room, and the telephone switchboard. But the custom initiated in 1949 of placing Christmas wreaths on the lion statues has endured.

(NYT 7 3 1948, p.19; 10 8 1948, p.23; 11 30 1948, p.26; 12 8 1948, p.35; 12 27 1948, p.23; 12 2 1948, p.19; 2 19 1949, p.14; for the apartment: 6 20 1949, p.21)

The vigilant Forty-second Street Property Owners and Merchants Association, the Broadway Association, the West Side Association of businessmen, and Father Joseph McCaffrey of Holy Cross Church pressed the police and the courts repeatedly to banish outdoor vendors from the street, and monitored the offerings at newsstands, theaters, and taxi-dance halls. Could they close the nudist gymnasium nearby? In March 1934, while burlesque theaters modified their acts hoping in vain to have their licenses renewed in 1937, (NYT 2. 12 1934, p 17; 3 28 1934, p. 26; 7 11 1937, p.1) there was no hope of removing the brothels and pinball parlors; those had greater social consequences. The intended cleanup also made it illegal to sell flowers, an activity with no social consequences except for the vendors, but easier to monitor. In 1932, midtown businessmen tried to rid the area of panhandlers by giving them tickets for meals and lodging at the city’s Emergency Shelter which was then feeding 1500 each day and providing shelter for at least 750. The news report of the merchants’ benevolence failed to say where the other 750 slept or whether the shelter could handle the additional men. (NYT 10 1 1932, p.17)

When arrests of unlicensed vendors occurred, magistrates often let the offenders go because they were earning money for their families or their own survival. Magistrate Jonah J. Goldstein, later a General Sessions judge and Republican candidate for Mayor, made a two-hundred-pound policeman try in vain to perform a dance called the hootchy-kootchy, to prove that it was lewd and that therefore the poorly paid burlesque performers were justifiably arrested. (NYT 12 27 1934, p. 25) The business associations continued their cleanup efforts and even pressed the police to stop owners of telescopes from selling views of the sky from Bryant Park for a nickel or a dime. Tourists and local residents seem to have appreciated the opportunity to see a meteor shower or views of Jupiter; they kept a Latvian-born former sailor, Ed Balod, in business for thirty years, starting in 1925, He could charge more than his rivals did because his twelve-inch lens in a 156-inch case, mounted on a car, gave larger views. Apparently, enforcement of the anti-telescope rule depended upon the precinct captain’s interest in astronomy. (NYT 2 12 1934, p.17; Fr. McCaffrey’s obituary 8 23 1970, p.71; 7 4 1938, p.15; 6 25 1955, p.36; etc.)

Fig. 6. People using a telescope outside Bryant Park, ca. 1930. Photo: The New York Historical %3A (24845.png.)

Poverty was more evident west of Broadway. While there were electrical generators, slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants on the East River, there were more industrial facilities on the west side, including gasworks, garages, a plumbing supplies company, warehouses, and the office of the venerable Loewer’s Gambrinus brewery at 528 West with its office in a tenement there. Once the coal gas plant closed in the 1920s at the far west end, truck and automobile-related uses moved in. The number of building demolitions grew alarmingly in 1931, so the city declined to issue new authorizations for parking lots which were competing with garages and avoiding taxes on the buildings. (NYT 11 29 1931, p.RE2). But underground gas tanks remained at 536, 550, and 605-615 West that caused a fire in 1932 and constituted a threat for the future. Along the riverfront, a combination of sturdy buildings for the ferries and small utility shacks terminated the view beyond the elevated West Side Highway. A white Esso gas station was the brightest feature of the far west side. Next to it stood the West Shore Diner and an outdoor food service counter, but there was a long stretch of empty property to the east of these businesses.

(Fig. 7.West 42nd Street at llth Avenue, June 20, 1937. Photo: Municipal Archives bpm 1130-9)

On the north side, a ten-story office building and its lower neighbor, there in 1931, were razed by 1937 perhaps because tenants had fled from the decaying area. There was comparatively little activity, so no traffic lights were installed at the intersection of the avenues. Instead, flagmen kept order.

Photographs taken around 1940 show only a few building improvements over their original late nineteenth century forms. Most structures were of four stories, existing or converted tenements, some with commercial remodeling of the second floor. Several sold men’s suits for $5 and $10, trousers alone for $1.50. Irving Maidman became owner and manager of a remarkable number of lots in that area. His was the far west side’s parallel to established real-estate firms such as Pease & Elliman, Cushman and Wakefield, William A. White & Sons, and others who were the mainstays of the Forty-second Street Property Owners and Merchants Association. By the 1940s, Maidman faced competition from Webb & Knapp and the Schulte company for desirable properties on the west side--a sign of potential but not of actuality. One of them was the block-through former Park & Tilford warehouse, later called the Lane Bryant building at 529-49 West, which Webb & Knapp bought in June,1947 from the City Bank Farmers’ Trust Company. (NYT 6 4 1947, p.48) with five freight elevators and another for passengers including workers for a lithography company that had rented a floor since 1942. (NYT 2 28 1942, p.26).

The city mandated that all buses from outside the city had to have terminals west of Eighth Avenue. (NYT 7 18 1940, p. 18) Several privately-owned bus depots occupied parts of Forty-second and nearby streets, including the Dixie/Carter, the All American (formerly just American) at 244-248 West and another at 260 West on the site of the defunct American Theater. Most depots closed when the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey opened the south wing of the world’s largest bus terminal in 1950 at Forty-first Street and Eighth Avenue. That ended plans issued in 1947 by Irving Maidman for a garage and bus terminal on the northwest corner of Eighth and Forty-second, where he hoped to clear the site. (Maidman obituary NYT 10 8 1979, p. B13) The west side also had more surviving tenements, some of them brothels, and it had more saloons than the east side had. (On major landlords for the sex industry: NYT 7 10 1977, pp.1, 40.; see also NYT 7 11 1977, pp.1, 26).

When legitimate theaters moved north of Forty-second Street, there was less reason to maintain ladies’ lunch restaurants. Schrafft’s moved to Forty-third Street and yielded the premises at 141 West Forty-second to neighbors of the Adler shop that sold Elevator Shoes for men who wanted to be “taller than she is.” (NYT 4 5 1934, p. 44)

(Fig, 8. Wurts Bros., Adler Shoes at 141 West and its neighbors on either side in 1922. Photo: Museum of the City of New York X2010.7.1.11015 Public domain)

A modest foil to Schrafft’s, welcoming guests with a striped awning and outdoor seating, was Topps Restaurant at 145 West. It advertised the “longest and friendliest bar in Times Square” and the “Sea Food, Steaks and Chops” that usually accompanied the advertisement of a bar, but also “Italian Spaghetti.” (postcard; https://digitalcollections.nyhistory.org/islandora/object/nyhs%3A77111) One could go upstairs in the building to play chess or bridge. The most stylish architectural achievement in the later ‘thirties between Seventh and Eighth Avenues was a three-story billiard parlor and restaurant, designed by Louis Allen Abramson at 210-212 West for the McMillan Realty & Construction Company. It featured glass brick windows separated by vertical stone triplet ribs. The project cost $75,000 which was regarded as a large sum. (NYT 8 15 1936, p. 27)

On the east side, Stouffer’s genteel restaurant chain rented six shops and five levels in the Pershing Square Building to seat over eight hundred people.

(Fig. 9. Byron Company, Pershing Square Building with Stouffer’s restaurant at street level in 1940. Photo:Museum of the City of New York, 93.1.1.16720.)

This registered confidence in the future and in the more privileged part of the street. Dwight James Baum designed it in the conventionally acceptable “modified Georgian Colonial style” favored by prosperous ladies and gentlemen. English or French modes of design were fashionable in an era when immigrants from more distant areas were excluded or limited by quotas in the Immigration Act of 1924, in force until 1965. The areas intended for women had tablecloths, but at lunch time, the male executives who were expected in this area of office buildings ate on bare tables in the Grille Room. The same tables were covered with cloth by the evening, when their wives might be present. Bland murals decorated the London room, with an atmosphere then considered more feminine. The bar was easily accessible, and so were packages of candy at a counter near the restaurant exit. (NYT 8 30 1938, p. 32; there are over two dozen images by Samuel Gottscho, Library of Congress.)

 (Figs 10, 11. Stouffer’s restaurant interior. Photos: Samuel Gottscho, Library of Congress. Fog/ 10 above: Men’s grill set for dinner LC-G612-T-35109. Below, Fig. 11. London Room, with murals, LC-G612-T-34955)

A branch of the Childs chain of restaurants redecorated its building and advertised that its servers could speak all European languages as well as Russian and Turkish. (NYT 3 5 1931, p. 26) The chain opened another restaurant in 1937 at 263 West on the northeast corner of Eighth Avenue, despite the increasingly seedy atmosphere of the block. The glass brick façade could be easily washed, and the decoration suggested that it catered to whatever refined customers were in the area. The interior of “modernistic” design by George E. Sweet, offered air-conditioning and murals by Arthur Crisp depicting the area in the Dutch colonial era and in the eighteenth century. It contrasted strongly with the burlesque show posters across the street. (NYT 12 30, 1936, p. 28; 7 14 1937, p.39) Farther east, William Childs, a relative, planned to open his own thousand-seat Old London restaurant in the Bush Building, remodeled for him by Pruitt & Brown. A former banking counter became a luncheonette service bar. (NYT 3 10 1931, p.49)

At the start of the ‘thirties, the large restaurant in the Heidelberg Building at Times Square was renovated and given the name Subway Central. Architect Simon Zelnik gave the restaurant a stone front with low-arched windows, and Winold Reiss executed murals in the dining room. (NYT 12. 19 1933, p.16). Besides the Schrafft’s in the Chrysler Building and the one at 11 West that moved north in 1941, the chain had another at 13 East where architects Bloch & Hesse provided a new marble façade in 1940. (NYT 10 20 1935, p.N1; 10 22 1937, p.33; 8 11 1940, p. 110) But the financial strains of the Depression combined with the recent increase in midtown office building prompted an increase of low-cost restaurants. Nevertheless, cheap prices were no guarantees of longevity; the Nedick’s orange drink stand at Forty-second and Seventh Avenue was sold on April 10, 1934. (NYT 4 13 1934, p. 16)

A move to inexpensive self-service benefited the owners of cafeterias and automats, several of the latter owned by the famous Horn & Hardart company. One of the chain’s most popular establishments was at 250-252 West, although some people shunned that seedy block. A food-vending-machine company opened the Presto Automatique restaurant at 220 West but was enjoined from using its name because it might confuse customers who wanted to eat at the original Automat. In 1931, the Foltis-Fischer company, owners of cafeterias, commissioned a striking building at 200 East on the southeast corner of Third Avenue. The architect was Hector O. Hamilton, one of three first prize winners of the Palace of the Soviets competition---none of whom finally built the Palace.

(Fig, 12. Foltis-Fischer cafeteria. Hector O. Hamilton, 1931. Photo: Browning. The New York Historical 63974, taken ca. 1932-38.)

The young architect designed a massive three-part, three-story composition, unfortunately remodeled in 1947 by Horn & Hardart. The original design had at the center a large glass wall divided into rectangular panes and enclosed in a smooth limestone frame embellished with the company name in art moderne letters. At the sides were glass shopfronts at ground level and horizontal windows above, separated by heavy limestone bands. A revolving door at the entrance had a protective lid made of three horizontal bands that curved to meet the façade. A sign protruded from the east end, since the west end was partly hidden by the enclosed staircase leading to the Third Avenue El that survived until 1955. The architecture typified the heavier, simplified stylistic trend in the years after 1931. (NYT 4 16 1931, p.51). It was one of the decade’s most characteristic building designs, along with those of the Airlines Terminal and the Rialto cinema.

The east side continued to be the principal location of high-quality men’s haberdashers. Weber & Heilbroner expanded their L-shaped store at the northeast corner of Forty-second and Madison in July of 1941, adding undulating upper walls and fluorescent lighting while subtracting interior columns. (NYT 4 24 1941, p.37; 7 17 1941, p.16) The somewhat less expensive John David clothiers, which had started in the basement of a brownstone west of Sixth Avenue, remained on that block, rented space in a five-story building taken over for a new American Savings Bank branch there by Morris & O’Connor, and in 1945 moved a few doors down into its own new building by Walter Raymond. (NYT 2 17 1937, p.39; 3 27 1941, p.40; 9. 6 1941, p.2; 8 20 1942, p. RE2; 6 261945, p.28; 4 20 1948, p.47).

In an effort to segregate industry at the island’s western margin and create more opportunity for business building, the West Side Association of Commerce studied the use of land in its area. The businessmen knew that the unstable activities there created “cultural unpredictability” (Betsy Blackmar, “Uptown Real Estate and the Invention of Times Square, Inventing Times Square, ed. William Taylor, p.65) which could damage real estate values. After 1936, when the new City Charter provided for a City Planning Commission but before the agency started work in 1938, city officials rezoned Seventh to Tenth Avenues, Fourteenth to Fifty-ninth Streets. This increased the residential zone from 6 to 22.55 percent. The district had a shortage of habitable dwellings because homeowners and investors had feared intrusion by industrial facilities when these blocks were included in an unrestricted zone. The unrestricted---that is, industry-friendly---zone was cut from 66% to 50%. Seventh to Tenth Avenues along Forty-second Street were reserved for retail, focused on men’s haberdashery, shoes, and hats, and for places of masculine entertainment. Men were the main customers of nearby pinball parlors, violent movies and peep shows, burlesques as long as they lasted, brothels, and saloons---those enterprises that caused distress to the merchants’ associations. Shops selling neckties and fedoras were to be encouraged instead.

In this period, Fleischman’s Baths ended its forty-two- year existence. Many shops and restaurants had far shorter lives. Paddy’s Market, the open-air pushcart food market that reached to Forty-second Street along Ninth Avenue, closed in 1938. The timing related to construction of the Lincoln Tunnel, the widening of Ninth Avenue to improve access to the tunnel, and plans for demolishing the El train. The absence of legal standing for the market provided a convenient excuse for shutting a facility that catered to the poor; the city’s new administrative code had omitted mention of open-air markets. (NYT 3 13 1938, p.4)

The middle classes were endangered, too, and the Times gave regular coverage to bankruptcies and to mortgages in difficulty. Rationing, which was essential to the war effort, hurt the income of various businesses after late 1941. Appeals to patriotic cooperation did not result in universal compliance. All this and more augmented the poverty, fires, suicides, robberies, arson, and murders known at other times although the street in general was not a hotbed of violent crime. Prostitution, confidence rackets, crooked card games, and fake ministers who collected money for nonexistent charities were more common, usually around and west of Times Square. (NYT 3 15 1937, p.11 for the ministers) Some conduct that was hardly criminal was performed by “fishers” who spent late nights trying to extract dropped coins from grates along Forty-second Street. (Meyer Berger, ’About New York,” NYT 11 20 1930, p.20)

Despite the widespread poverty, degradation on the west side, and labor disputes, there were brief brighter moments and some significant changes to Forty-second Street. The Hotel Holland was leased in 1936 and refurbished in 1945. The Bartholomew Building had new tenants. (NYT 2 7 1936, p.36; 3 4 1936, p.40.; 8 25 1945, p.21) Architects Wallace K. Harrison and J. André Fouilhoux, who had worked with Raymond Hood at Rockefeller Center, were chosen by the Daily News management to prepare a twenty-four-story extension of the newspaper’s skyscraper by replacing six old buildings. This proposal anticipated changes to the zoning rules, although nothing was built until the later 1950s. (NYT 1 6 1944 p. 32.) Nearby, P. S. 27 became the location of the Central Commercial School where daytime vocational education was offered free to adults. The program included technical arts, citizenship and English classes, and commercial subjects. (NYT 12 11 1932, p.N4) “One of America’s greatest wrestlers,” George Bothner, opened a modernized gymnasium at 250 West, an event attended by two-hundred-fifty people prominent in sports and vaudeville. (NYT 12 19 1935, p.35) Swiss immigrant William Heckler’s fleas performed in their circus until the showman’s death in 1935 and were thereafter directed by the son of its founder until the 1950s. The building was sold when the older “Professor” died. (NYT 2 2 1932, p. 2; 10. 26 1936, p.17) Theaters on Forty-second Street all became cinemas. Hotels in the area were at full capacity for the Labor Day weekend in 1936, the first time that had happened since 1930. (NYT 9 7 1936, p.19)

Tourists and local residents could visit exhibits not only at museums but also at the Grand Central School of Art which occupied four studios above the terminal’s spaces. In 1938, the International Harvester company exhibited in its far west side premises two “jungle yachts” by the industrial designer Count Alexis de Sakhnoffsky. They were to accommodate Attilio Gatti and his wife, Ellen, explorers, authors, and filmmakers, who were going to the Congo to capture animals for zoos and assess opportunities for tourism. Each trailer was twenty-five feet long and air-conditioned. One was the living room-library-bar and small kitchen with a refrigerator; the other had the bath and bedrooms. A tractor was to pull them along. (NYT 4 12 1938, p. 12. http://www.coachbuilt.com/des/d/desakhnoffsky/desakhnoffsky.htm; see also youtube videos.) Visitors could enjoy a model railroad in the basement of the Knickerbocker Hotel-- renamed the Newsweek building for its office spaces’ principal tenant. They could see the city from the Chrysler Building observatory before it closed in 1945, or from the short-lived one at the Chanin Building. The public could learn new things from educational exhibits at the Public Library, although college and high school students had recently been excluded from the reference room, a measure protested by the High School Teachers’ Association. (NYT 2 7 1931, p.19; 2 13 1931, p.36) The Library also cleared “loiterers” from the front steps, restricting political debaters and observers to a small area with few benches. (NYT 4 12 1931, p.XX5) Anyone could visit the Museum of Science and Industry, installed in the Daily News Building for a few years until it moved to Rockefeller Center in 1936. Its most conspicuous display was not in the office building but at Grand Central, where an airplane was lodged in the east gallery. The plane, called the Bremen, was presented by one of the German aviators who had made the first westward flight across the Atlantic in 1928; it eventually went to the Smithsonian Institution. (NYT 3 3 1931, p.1) Most museums at the time were free of charge or had low admission fees.

There were other appealing features of a walk along Forty-second Street in the later 1940s. At the west end, strollers would find the Circle Line boats docked at a pier at Forty-third Street but after 1955, at Forty-second. Investors had formed the company in 1945. Sightseeing tour promoters, however, were not doing as well as they had done earlier, owing to more competition and to tourists’ limited disposable incomes.

Along the way, pedestrians would find that candy shops multiplied at the time, perhaps to ease people’s distress in these years. The shops often belonged to chains that provided predictable delights at tolerable prices. The Barricini, Barton, and Loft chains offered forms of modern architecture in their shops.

(Fig. 13. Wurts Bros., 251-7 West 42^nd Street. Loft Candy Corp. property in the Cane Building. Photo: Oct. 20, 1948. Museum of the City of New York, X2010.7.1.9449.)

Victor Gruen designed several for Barton’s, owned by a fellow Viennese émigré, in cheerful primary colors that popularized Mondrian-inspired modernism. Two of their shops along Forty-second Street, east and west, were designed by Morris Lapidus, later famous for designing extravagant hotels in Miami Beach.

Fig.14 and 15. Barton’s shops by Morris Lapidus, 1949, photos by Samuel Gottscho, Library of Congress. Foh 14 top: 208 West. LC-G613-T-55791, Fig.15, below. location on the east side: LC-G612-T-51811)

Barricini shops had sheets of plate glass, and Loft’s most up-to-date shops after 1945 by industrial designer Charles C. S. Dean, had large square signs and sans-serif lettering.

(“Scheme for a Chain Store,” Interiors Magazine 105 #4 Nov. 1945 pp.76-79; for Gruen, Joseph Malherek, “Victor Gruen’s Retail Therapy,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 61 #1 Nov. 2016, pp. 2019-232)

Loft’s also took the unprecedented step of leasing space for ten years in four IND subway stations, including one on the west side of the mezzanine near the northwest corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-second Street. The Loft’s shop enticed customers with a façade of structural glass and stainless steel, as the Board of Transportation’s first installation of shops in the subway proper rather than in the approaches to it. (NYT 12 16 1948, p.21) The subways had been used only haphazardly for commerce such as shoeshines or newsstands, but fluorescent lighting and air-conditioning made shops there more appealing. The real estate agent and appraiser of the Transit Authority, Ferdinand Roth, recognized this potential in 1948, and soon, Cushman’s Sons bakeries, Nedick’s orange drink café, hosiery shops, and gift shops followed. (NYT 3 4 1956, p R1)

Five additional improvements on Forty-second Street during these two decades proved to be ephemeral, as will soon be explained. They were the Rialto cinema, the Airlines Terminal Building, the city information office, the Chrysler showroom, and the landscaping of Bryant Park. A sixth improvement was the demolition of the Ninth Avenue El in 1940, replaced by the Eighth Avenue line of the IND (Independent) subway system that opened in 1932. The tearing-down did not cause dramatic permanent change on Forty-second Street, as this part of the street was marginal to development, but it allowed air and light to reach buildings along its route. During demolition, the disorderly state of the street led to temporary leases, some of dubious quality. The Merchants and Property Owners Association managed to have the City deny licenses to such applicants as “an amusement centre to include Oriental dancing” at 204 West. The Eighth Avenue line opened with longer cars, frosted lamps to ease reading, fans, and more seating room than had been available on the IRT. (NYT 9 9 1932 p 1; 9 12 1932 p 17)

A moderate rerouting of Twelfth Avenue had little effect on Forty-second Street. At the avenue’s end, there was by 1930 a neat rectangular New York Central freight station, two stories high. A seventh major improvement was the Sixth Avenue subway line, invisible from the street but the reason for demolishing the El there. The new subway lines on Eighth (1932) and Sixth (1940) Avenues were potential financial benefits to building owners and to the shopkeepers along their routes who appreciated the lack of noise, dirt, and darkness. Trolley tracks were to be removed and the streetcars replaced by buses. This implied re-paving, repairs, and scheduling street openings for electric cables, gas and water mains. Work on the Sixth Avenue line was interrupted in 1937 when the head of the Rosoff Construction Company was implicated in the murder of a labor leader, but the line opened in December 1940. (NYT 2 21 1937, p.38; 2 27 1937, p.1) Despite early hopes for rapid construction activity on Sixth Avenue, (NYT 11 22 1931, p.33) it took decades before developers built the kinds of expensive structures on Sixth Avenue that a broad centrally located street implied. In the meantime, demolition of the El enhanced property values in a central commercial part of Forty-second Street.

In 1940, when the City also paid the subway investors for the IRT and BMT lines, there was at last a unified subway transit system. Samuel Untermyer, former special counsel to the Transit Commission, had proposed this measure in 1932, but encountered opposition from commercial interests. (NYT 5 25 1932, p.21) Only in July 1948 was the fare raised from five to ten cents, a delay that had long deprived the City of revenue needed for maintenance and improvement. Meyer Berger explained in one of his “About New York” columns for the New York Times the unseen personnel and related expenses that the nickel fare could not sustain. He mentioned, too, the track walkers, ninety-five percent of them from Naples, Italy, who cleared out cats and dogs that had been run over, removed mentally ill people, put out subway fires often caused by sparks that lit grease, and carried away debris. As trains passed, these fearless men stood in wall cavities and were made visible by carbide lamps. (NYT 2 21 1940, p. 23) Above ground, noisy trolley cars disappeared from Forty-second Street at about the same time that the City bought the subways, which by the end of the 1940s extended for 241 miles. The Second Avenue El was demolished in 1942, after it had brought visitors to the World’s Fair. Some of its materials were recycled for the war effort. (NYT 10 27 1949, p.29; Hood, 722 Miles, esp. p. 181 ff.).

Understanding the appeal of talking pictures, and the price-to-pleasure ratio of cinema versus theater prices, in 1935 a developer remodeled the brick-faced Rialto theater by Thomas Lamb into a movie house at the northwest corner of Forty-second Street and Seventh Avenue. Anthony Campagna, a native of Italy with a law degree, had become a construction executive, often hiring his countryman Rosario Candela to design luxurious apartment houses uptown. Working with Arthur Mayer, the theater’s manager. Candela altered his usually sober and historically informed style to design something that would attract moviegoers.

(Fig, 16, Rialto Theatre, Rosario Candela, 1936 with mural by Alex Katz ,1977 Photo:Chuck DeLaney, publicaartfund.org. Courtesy Alex Katz Studio and copyright 2025 Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA at Artists’ Rights Society(ARS) New York

Economy mixed with exuberance: Candela’s design featured a conspicuously curved corner faced in glass brick. One hardly noticed the ground floor with its narrow shops, or the shopping arcade below street level that led to the subway. But the second level, built for a restaurant, had blue glass striped plaques alternating with white marble and metal strips. Curved fins jutted out above this ornament. At that level, tall windows extended outward and then retreated inward, separated by white glass tiles. The flat lower levels, the curved fins, and the angled windows created an unusual and lively composition. At the top was a parapet meant, it seems, to support huge wraparound advertising signs that produced income. A white glass tower eighty feet high, intended for more advertisements, rose above the roof. At various times, the parapet featured advertising displays but in autumn 1977 the Public Art Commission sponsored a work of art---a mural designed by Alex Katz presenting female heads, each twenty feet high, executed by a professional sign painter.

The Rialto’s main room had 750 seats above a basement theater. Both rooms could be entered directly from the subway. The second story had a restaurant with a circular dance floor, and there were offices above that level. The Brandt family of theater owners bought the building in the ‘thirties, but several later owners bought and sold it before it was demolished, having been deemed unworthy of preservation by two landmark experts. Perhaps they were influenced by Lewis Mumford’s puritanical review of the building in The New Yorker; he called the colors ‘unspeakable’ and considered the overall design a ‘wisecrack,’ although these were hardly explicit criticisms.

(Lewis Mumford, “Sky Line: Concerning Glass Houses” The New Yorker v 12, April l1, 1936 pp. 56-58. Alex Katz website. Municipal Archives photograph. “Streetscapes,”: NYT 7 19 1987, p. R14)

Another conspicuous building was the Airlines Terminal at Park Avenue and Forty-second Street on the former Belmont Hotel site. Indicating the state of other aspects of the building industry when the hotel was demolished, the wreckers spoke of the seriously depressed market for second-hand building materials compared to their price soon after the First World War. Scrap copper brought only half the former price, bronze far less. Scrap steel, worth $3.50 a ton in 1931, had been worth $26 per ton twelve years earlier. (NYT 5 31 1931, p. RE1)

At first, there were no plans for an airline terminal. Instead, in 1931 the site’s owner, William Fiegler, commissioned Bottomley, Wagner & White to design an office building of sixty-six stories, but there was no market for it. Recognizing that, the owners created what was called the longest bar in the world: the Parisian Grill and Garden that opened in September 1933, accommodating eighteen hundred people along the north-south blockfront. That, too, went bankrupt, and the Airlines Terminal replaced it. (NYT 3 8 1935 p.40)

It made sense to locate the Airlines building on the east side because the Queens-Midtown Tunnel was being constructed, reaching Queens from East 34^th Street. Cars and buses would use the tunnel as they headed to La Guardia Airport and later, Idlewild (renamed for John F. Kennedy after his assassination). A ventilation tower for the tunnel at 42^nd Street near the East River opened in 1940 when the tunnel was built.

(Fig. 17 Ventilation tower at East River. Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. 1940. Photo: author, 2023. Fig. 18. Robert Moses playground and ventilation trower, Oct. 22, 1941. RECO125_08_20928.Photo: Municipal Archives, New York City Department of Parks)

The building adjoins a playground named for Robert Moses. Its location marks the west end of the tunnel as it enters Manhattan, before it curves south and west to its terminus. The tower in dark yellow brick is polygonal, with vertical window strips to reduce the apparent bulk of the utilitarian structure.

The Airlines Terminal building occupied 105 feet on Forty-second Street and the entire 200-foot length of the block on Park Avenue. The terminal project required sponsors---five airlines: American, Eastern, Pan American, Transcontinental and Western Air (later Trans-World or TWA), and United. It required an operating company, the Airlines Terminal, Inc., created for this purpose. Then the land was leased to Floyd deL.Brown, the president of the Bethlehem Engineering Company which was to build a five-story limestone-faced steel-framed building to be operated by the new company. The sponsors hired architect John B. Peterkin whose plans called for accommodating five airlines on one floor although he had to modify his initial design to two floors, delaying the building’s opening to January 9, 1941, because air traffic had increased greatly. The final building included Canadian Colonial and American Export Airlines. There had to be exemptions from some zoning provisions, probably those that restricted industrial facilities west of Third Avenue. It was also desirable to have food service on the premises, so appropriately named Michael Drinkhouse opened the Churchill Restaurant on the ground floor corner and basement; he had started his career in hospitality as a messenger at the Belmont. A bookstore was another welcome addition for those who did not want to watch newsreels in the on-site cinema or the foreign films that were introduced when interest in newsreels faded. Doubleday Doran leased space for one of its bookshops in July 1943. By this time, the principle of grouping allied businesses had become commonplace among rental agents and entrepreneurs.

Peterkin designed a five-story building that was as tall as a usual seven-story one. The steel structure was electrically welded rather than riveted as steel buildings had had to be before 1936.

(Fig. 19. Airlines Terminal, John B. Peterkin, 1941. Photo: Manhattan Postcard Publishing Co. Copyright expired)

The symmetrical exterior faced in smooth limestone blocks had the customary classicizing arrangement of a larger, taller central section with a three-story-high portal, and slightly lower wings. The wings had shops at the bottom and offices above, lit by three levels of windows with shield designs in the spandrels between them. Crowning the central section were addorsed stylized eagles carved by the architectural sculptor, René Chambellan, in his usual simplified and chunky forms; since the building’s demolition in 1977, they have been at the Best Products’ former campus in Richmond, Virginia. A pole in the center was originally lit with colored lights that shone and dimmed every ten seconds. The avenue side had shops at the north end, protective walls at the south end, and office windows above, along the entire length of the building. A decorative cornice of simplified plant forms interrupted by the terminal’s name completed the composition. The fifth floor on the sides was set back, and a railing surrounded the rooftop where a rectangular structure enclosed the mechanical installations. Buses entered the building at Forty-first Street where the land sloped downward.

The passenger doorway on Forty-second Street curved inward to entice people to come inside. On its black surface was a map of the world designed by Otto Bach, with the land masses outlined in red. Inside, a long room had ticket offices at the sides.

(Fig., 20, Airlines terminal, interior. Postcard photo: W. Holt 114. Copyright expired.)

The building’s broad curved solid geometric forms were typical of the decade, as was the use of new materials such as golden stainless steel along the walls and sheets of light-transmitting plastic. Chambellan added large reliefs at each end, representing a man and an eagle in flight. The elongated curved blue ceiling incorporating lights was meant to suggest the sky and stars.

(Fig, 21 Airlines Terminal, cutaway. Photo: 6sqft.com the-history-behid-42^nd-streets-glamorous.png. Copyright expired)

The center of the room had a cylindrical information booth, a waiting area and a newsstand farther on, and a circular cavity containing an escalator that brought arriving passengers up from the bus parking areas at the lower level. Departing vehicles were raised on hydraulic elevators from the basement to the principal floor for the convenience of passengers and baggage handlers. There were efficient technological facilities such as pneumatic tubes to send tickets and baggage checks, and conveyor belts for the luggage. Tucked inside the building, the cinema could accommodate over five hundred people. At Grand Central, too, a cinema opened in this decade with 242 seats, showing newsreels, short films, and cartoons.

Efficiency was important throughout the building. Vehicles taking passengers to and from the airports could be loaded and dispatched every eight minutes at peak times. These innovations aroused enthusiastic excitement at the World’s Fair of 1939. Some inventions at the time had more than aesthetic consequences. For instance, an improved, cooler fluorescent bulb allowed workers to occupy up to eighty percent of rentable office space, as compared to sixty-five percent in older buildings with light courts. (https://americanhistory.si.edu/lghting/bios/gi_rt.htm. accessed 1 23 2018)

(An outstanding publication on the Airlines Terminal is “The Airlines Terminal, John B. Peterkin, Architect. Pencil Points, March 1941, pp. 143-162.)

The Airlines Terminal had only a short life as the main facility for airport access because air traffic increased dramatically along with cars and buses on city streets. This caused delays. Some passengers had to use an auxiliary terminal under the viaduct on Park Avenue. When Idlewild was planned for opening in 1948, the City addressed the near impossibility of having one facility serve both airports. In 1946, a new terminal was planned for a site nearer the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, to relieve congestion in midtown. The Forty-second Street building continued its life as a ticket bureau and executive office building for the airlines after the new terminal opened in the summer of 1951. In 1937, the older building was sold to the real estate firm of Webb & Knapp. There had been a proposal in 1940 for a West Side Airlines Terminal serving passengers to Newark, with a streamlined design by Wallace K. Harrison and J. André Fouilhoux, between Eighth and Ninth Avenue, initiated by Harold McGraw of the publishing company there. Nothing came of this idea for another decade, and then only with another developer.

NYT 7 13 1938, p.44; 9 12 1939, p 26; 12 10 1940, p.22; 4 23 1947 p.41; 6 6 1954, p R1; Stern et al., New York 1930 p. 704; http://www.drivingfordeco.com/new-york-city-art-deco-airlines-terminal/ ; https://www.6sqft.com/the-history-behind-42nd-streets-glamorous-airlines-terminal-building/; http://untappedcities.com/2012/06/25/from-forge-to-skyscraper-the-story-of-120-park-avenue. For the design by Harrison & Fouilhoux, see NYT 12 8 1940, p.1. The Ventilation Building for the Tunnel at the East River bank also contains drainage pumps, an innovative standpipe system, and a generator. http://www.mta.info/news/2014/10/27/keeping-things-fresh-queens-midtown-tunnel accessed 7 29 2020

The city information office had an even shorter life, from December 1939 to the summer of 1941, providing help to tourists who came for the World’s Fair. It occupied space 42 feet wide and 195 feet long under the Grand Central Terminal viaduct.

(Figs. 22 and 23: Top: Pershing Square information center and viaduct. 1939. Photo: Artstor. AWSS35953_35953_40067547.jpg. Copyright expired. Bottom: drawing by Eggers & Higgins for the interior, a preliminary design. Photo: Municipal Archives, bpm 1656-1. Public domain.)

On a curved plate glass entrance, in the front window, was a miniature model of the fairgrounds. Eggers & Higgins designed a sleek interior in black and silver tones, with a good deal of glass. The room had a dark, curved information counter with a clock, counters probably meant for writing postcards with the desks separated by partitions for privacy, and exhibits such as one that explained how fingerprints were taken. A popular attraction was a diorama, eighteen by twenty-four feet in size, designed by Henry Dreyfus and Edward H. Burdick who had worked on the Fair. The diorama showed the city from the Battery to 155^th Street, with illuminated Lucite reproductions of thirty outstanding buildings, and small flags to mark leading hotels. The staff answered questions from tourists and local people, but the facility could not be self-supporting as Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia demanded, so he shut it. Eventually, it became a café that exists today under later management. (NYT 12 16 1939, two articles on p.1. See also 12. 21 1940, p.20; 4 2 1941, p.25).

Nearby, the Chrysler showroom was designed by L Andrew Reinhard and Henry Hofmeister, architects who were simultaneously working on Rockefeller Center, executing other people’s ideas there. But they were not without ideas of their own.

Fig. 24. Chrysler automobile showroom, Reinhard & Hofmeister, 1936. Photo: Library of Congress ppmsca 50138 https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.50138 Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-ppmsca-50138 (digital file from original) LC-USZC2-4866 (color film copy slide)

The showroom occupied the southwest corner of the Chrysler Building’s ground floor. Opened in 1936, the showroom replaced a less satisfactory space for the same purpose where flowers had been displayed to distract attention from the inadequacies of William van Alen’s design. After the renovation, passers-by on the street could see inside, where automobiles revolved four times an hour on a platform fifty-one feet in diameter, allowing views of five cars at a time. The view was especially clear because the window glass of a type called “invisible” was curved slightly and recessed in its frames. Filters made the cars seem to be surrounded by soft color, but the cars were also well lit by lights on the floor and circular tubes on the ceiling. The surrounding colors were dark and the surfaces sleek, giving an impression of glamour. An upper floor within the showroom had a movie theater for films about industry, a lounge, and offices, all conveniently reached by escalator.

Bryant Park required attention. Work at the west end for the Sixth Avenue subway went on during the 1930s, but that was not the park’s only problem. It was the resort of homeless, unemployed, and eccentric people as well as working people at lunchtime. The unfortunate denizens of the park often ate their meals at the Automat on Sixth Avenue between Forty-second and Forty-first Streets, or at the nearby Liggett’s drugstore. The park was only minimally tended and the installation in 1932 of a bronze bust of Goethe by Karl Fischer failed to have an elevating effect. (https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/bryant-park/monuments/) The merchants’ associations listened to W. R. Herrick, the parks commissioner in 1931, who said that he would ask for an appropriation for landscape work (NYT 3 6 1931, p.14) but nothing was done then. Instead, the city staged a ceremony in 1932 celebrating the bicentenary of George Washington’s birth and the hundred-forty-third anniversary of his inauguration as President. Architect Kenneth Murchison was selected to impersonate our first president. Washington had stood almost in the same place angrily trying to rally his fleeing men before the British general, Lord Howe, took possession of the city, but a rout was hardly something that people needed to remember. In any event, the park was improved temporarily for the occasion with cedar trees, formal axes to the park entrances, and a flagstaff. At first it was proposed to build a replica of Mount Vernon, but in the end, architect Joseph H. Freedlander created a replica of Federal Hall in New York where Washington had taken the oath of office. (Architectural Record 71 #5, May 1932, p. 296; NYT 3 27 1932, p. N6; 5 18 1932, p.23)

In January 1934, the Times expressed “renewed hope that the four acres of mud and dirt…designated as Bryant Park will soon become a park in reality.” The hope had been raised because Robert Moses had been appointed to the recently created office of City Park Commissioner when all city parks were brought under one agency in 1934. He had nothing to say about Bryant Park in his memoir, Public Works: A Dangerous Trade, published by McGraw-Hill in 1970, perhaps because its new design was better than mud and dirt but not distinguished. The Times and the Forty-second Street Merchants and Property Owners’ Association enthused about a proposal by landscape architect George Hamilton Miller. The newspaper published his design but later in 1934, Lusby Simpson, another professional, outlined the final plan executed by the Parks Department staff. Perhaps economy alone explained the design, with rows of plane trees on all four sides of a central lawn with the east and west ends open at the center for access and egress. A large fountain erected in memory of Josephine Shaw Lowell, an important social worker, was moved to the west end, on a terrace. Some grass and trees fared better than the former dead or dying trees and muddy curved paths, but no one warmly praised the result.

(Fig. 25. Bryant Park, Public Library c. 1934. Photo: Postcard copyright Wm. Frange, copyright expired, NYU Art History department photo collection).

To be sure, as long as there were promised and, after 1936, actual excavations for the Sixth Avenue subway on the park’s west side and even part way through the lawn, it must have been difficult to envision anything but a neat albeit boring final design. Chrysanthemums added in 1945 reappeared annually at least into the 1950s. Enhancing the park work, the Public Library was washed, fulfilling the wishes of citizens who had been writing to the Times lamenting the sooty appearance of the dignified building.

Moses’ idea of parkland as spaces of pure refreshment was shown when he expelled the telescope-renters although nighttime views among light-shielding trees would have been better than those from the sidewalk. The park rehabilitation was also the excuse for the Merchants and Property Owners’ Association to try to remove barkers for sleazy shows, peddlers, pushcarts and their companions from West Forty-second Street. They didn’t leave. Most of them were merely reprimanded. It was neither humane nor economical for the city to jail, house, and feed a large number of harmless people, as few offenders could afford to pay fines for small misdeeds.

There was little that the merchants’ associations could do about sexual activity in the park. As it was elevated above street level, clandestine activity could flourish there. Bryant Park became a meeting place for homosexual men, and for assignations with sailors and other visitors to streets near Times Square. This led to closing the park at night in 1944. The affected people moved to automats, especially the one across Sixth Avenue, and also to Chase’s cafeteria at 201 West, or to a rougher atmosphere at the Marine Bar and Grill in part of 228 West where Murray’s Roman Gardens had been and where the flea circus survived within Hubert’s Museum. At Chase’s, Alfred Kinsey conducted some of his research for Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in 1948.

(Stern et al., New York 1930, passim; G. Chauncey, in Inventing Times Square, p. 323. NYT 1 2 1934, p RE1; 2. 14 1934, p.14; 2 18 1934, p.N1; 6 2 1934, p.29; 5 12 1935, p.N2; 10 20 1945, p.8. For Dr. Kinsey: Bill Morgan, The Beat Generation In New York: A Walking Tour of Jack Kerouac’s City, San Francisco, City Lights Publishing, 1997, p.2. Two of Moses’ favorite colleagues, architect Aymar Embury II and landscape architect Gilmore D. Clarke, were consultants to the park renovation. http://www.nysonglines.com/42st.htm)

There were smaller pockets of nature on Forty-second Street at this period, apart from the tulips and private tree-shaded parks at Tudor City. A man known only as Moish sold flowers in the subway arcade at the Times Square station. His sales method required pinning a corsage onto a woman in hopes, not always successful, that her escort would then pay for it. Moish had taken up this business only because his brother sold flowers in Brooklyn, not for love of either flowers or humanity. (NYT 7 28 1946, p. SM10) Far more thoughtful was Jesse T. Stubbs, owner of a bus parking lot site at 627 West. He created a landscaped garden, 14 x 100 feet in size, on part of the lot where he had been cultivating plants since 1939 when he arrived in New York City. At the end of 1941, he erected a red, white, and blue fence, added stars to it, and attached plaques bearing the names of dead military personnel, including the heroic pilot Captain Colin Kelly, his bombardier from Brooklyn, Meyer Levin, who saved three airmen at the cost of his own life, the five Sullivan brothers who drowned together, and other tragic heroes of the Second World War. Mr. Stubbs placed annotated and printed plaques in his garden and installed atop a flagpole a gold-plated light bulb that shone at night. Despite being in an area full of car fumes and dirt, he grew peonies, azaleas, snowballs and hydrangeas. (NYT 5 29 1945. p 17)

During the war, and even in anticipation of it, Forty-second Street was a center of preparation and activity. There was a general dimming of lights to save fuel and to limit knowledge that offshore submarines could collect about the city. Trial blackouts took place In May and July of 1942. (NYT 11 2 1943, pp.1, 5; 11 27 1942, p.40. Blackout tests NYT 5 1 1942, p.1; 7 7 1942, p.1) A mock air attack was staged nearby to instruct the public, (NYT 1 5 1944, p. 1) and air-raid shelter signs appeared, first at subway stations. (NYT 11 27 1942, p.40) The management of the McGraw-Hill Building, having an exceptional quantity of window glass, guided tenants to the building’s core, where lights could not be seen by enemy pilots. (NYT 12 12 1941, p.30) Grand Central’s windows were covered with black pigment to obscure this potential target. The Red Cross had a war fund office in the Bush Building. (NYT 9 23 1943, p.36) The War Production Board at 122 East and other agencies rented space in the office buildings that had lost business tenants. (NYT 12 4 1942, p.7) Secular and Jewish organizations such as the Joint Distribution Fund and the American Jewish Congress located in office buildings there reported on the dire conditions facing Jews in Nazi-occupied countries, even before news of the concentration and death camps became known. Building owners were encouraged to switch to steam heating in order to save fuel but shortages of heating fuel led to the use of soft coal that created serious pollution throughout the city. The city government established depots that provided coal to new users and those whose suppliers had gone out of business. Shortages of fuel lasted until 1947. (NYT 8 14 1947, p.1) Tenants of Tudor City collected piles of scrap metal, depositing them at the far east end of Forty-second Street out of sight of most apartments, and they collected paper, stockings, rubber, and cooking fat for the war effort, as did other Americans. The patriotic residents of Tudor City also collected reading matter for those in military service, some of whom were temporary neighbors---officers on short-term leases. (Samuel, p. 74. Posters in butcher shops advised customers to save meat fat in cans, which would be used in explosives.) Much scrap metal came from the demolition of the Second Avenue El. (NYT 5 28 1942, p.16) Officials tried to stop the overcharging of servicemen who visited the city. (NYT 6 4 1944, p.34) Buildings were repurposed, as when brick-faced six-story 529-49 West was taken over for the manufacture of electronic equipment for the military and has ever since then been known as the Armory.

(NYT 7 25 1944, p. 28; Municipal Archives 1940s photo file; NYT 3 25 1945, pp.1, 39. For the electronics company, later known as the Federal Signal Corporation, see http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/federal-signal-corp-history/ accessed 3 15 2020. During the war, 529 West specifically became a cafeteria serving 1800 people, probably all in military positions. NYT 11 28 1944, p. 25)

Forty-second Street, particularly at Fifth Avenue and Times Square, provided a setting for patriotic manifestations during and after the war. The Times suspended its New Year’s Eve ball drop in 1942 and 1943, and advertising signs in the area went dark to prevent the general radiance from disclosing the location of our nearby ships to enemy patrols. Holy Cross Church dedicated a Victory Chapel in the basement, and Father --by then Monsignor-- McCaffrey blessed flags dedicated to men in the service. (NYT 4 23 1943, p.19) Grand Central Terminal, a major transportation hub for servicemen, installed a giant photograph a week after the Pearl Harbor bombing.

(Fig. 26. Photographic mural displayed first on Dec. 14, 1941 at Grand Central Terminal. Photo: Arthur Rothstein for the U. S. Treasury Department. Library of Congress LC-USF34- 024495-D [P&P] LOT 263. LC-USF34-024495-D)

Its patriotic images provided by the Farm Security Administration showed viewers “What America Has to Defend and How It Will Defend It.” The photographs rose over the balcony above a servicemen’s lounge which operated between 1942 and 1948. The all-female employees there provided sleeping chairs, blankets and even tags to tell the staff when to wake a sleeper. There were ping pong and billiard tables, free checking, writing equipment, a snack bar, and miniature movie machines. The United Service Organization (USO) operated one just for officers who might be expected to exercise more literary pursuits, as bookshelves were within full view of the entrance.

(Fig. 27.Wurts Bros., United Services Organization lounge at Grand Central for military officers in 1942, decorated by Leonard Mitchell. Photo: Museum of the City of New York X 2010.7.2.18311 Copyright expired,)

The war caused other changes inside the Terminal, such as painting over windows from which light might shine at night, and the closure of the art school on the Terminal’s upper floors, likely for lack of male students who were then in military service.

A rule in force late in wartime had required many restaurants to close at midnight. This presented a hardship for single working men who lived in rooming houses or hotels and who worked late. There arose, predictably, illegal places catering to them. Servicemen were vulnerable to shills who led them to late-night drinking dens with bad alcohol, and others drank heavily just before midnight, leaving them easy prey for thieves and confidence men. Since night clubs for café society did not have to close until later, the military men and war workers on late shifts protested. The City’s response to protests was to work with the Office of Price Administration to penalize offending businesses, sometimes by withholding electricity, gas, coal, and essential materials. (NYT 3 19 1945, p.12; 3 25 1945, pp.1, 39) These caterers were not the only offenders. Several restaurateurs, for instance, were accused of cheating on rationed food supplies, including the Silico Spaghetti Bar at 303 East. (NYT 4 11 1943, pp.1, 42) Other restaurants tried ways, even illegal ones, to get around meatless day mandates. Wartime conditions, deferred maintenance, the absence of building managers and janitors, rationing, and other business conditions threatened property tax receipts, and not just those from restaurants.

A month after victory in Europe in May 1945, four million people assembled in Manhattan to cheer General Dwight Eisenhower. Of course, not all the celebrants were on Forty-second Street, nor was all $52,500 worth of war bonds sold on the street but it was a hub of celebrations. On August 15, 1945, thousands of people among the estimated two million at Times Square spread to Forty-second Street, celebrating the end of the war in Japan.

(“Victory Celebrations,” Life magazine, August 27, 1945, p.21 ff, also Joe McKendry, Times Square: A Century of Change at the Crossroads of the World, Boston, David Godine, 2011 for accounts of other celebrations.)

Soon afterward, in September, a parade of Chinese and Chinese-origin residents of the city placed its reviewing stand in front of the Library and commemorated both the military victory and the fifteenth anniversary of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. The floats related to Chinese history and featured gongs and drums, dancers and acrobats who performed despite the rainy weather. (NYT 6 2 1945, pp.1, 5; 8 14 1945, p.1; 9 19 1945, p.27) And at last, the illuminated ball could drop again from the former Times Tower on New Year’s Eve.

As was the case after the First World War, the building industry did not immediately rebound from wartime conditions. Rationing of various materials continued for several years after 1945. When products weren’t rationed, they were in short supply. This was true, for instance, of pig iron, important for steel production, and there were inadequate supplies of millwork, hardwood flooring, and softwood plywood. Douglas fir and ponderosa pine had already been over-cut and thus were expensive. The idea of value engineering, or value management, was a product of wartime shortages and budgets that required low costs and substitutions. But workers whose wages were restrained in wartime demanded more compensation.

Planning in peacetime after depression and war required fresh thinking. Of course planners and architects had been at least mentally lively during the war (Andrew Shanken, 194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front, Minneapolis, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2009, passim) and the urgency of planning and producing everything from army bases to bombs and medical care promoted innovation after war’s end. Architectural Forum’s volume 82 for January-February 1945 anticipated postwar construction and materials. Architectural Record volume 100 for October 1946 devoted pages to lightweight protection for steel, for air-entraining Portland cement, and for more economical and practical wall materials. Advances in the strength of bricks had already allowed them to become thinner. Advertisements touted innovations in storefront design, loading platforms, arc-welding, and office partitions. Shortages of materials eased gradually, paving the way for the building that increased steadily in the 1950s.

At the end of the 1940s, Grand Central Terminal lost the revenue that came from war-related transportation. Even earlier, it had become grimy. The main concourse ceiling was in such poor physical condition that a simplified copy was placed below it in 1944. To make the public and tourists feel positive about the decaying facility, the management installed a colonial village display in 1948. In the following year, in order to raise money, it displayed over the east side of the main concourse an enormous Kodak photo mural called the Colorama, lit by cold cathode tube backing that made the images, many by photographer Neil Montanus, extra bright.

The newsreel theater from 1937 into the mid-1970s and a mezzanine restaurant were sources of rental income. Sloan & Robertson designed the theater with extra room between the rows of seats so that people could come and go without requiring others to get up to let them pass. A sound program served people with hearing loss, and a clock let viewers check to see when their trains were about to depart. Artist Tony Sarg designed a blue ceiling with stars as well as a women’s lounge. The office and studio spaces upstairs in the Terminal housed broadcasting and television studios for the Columbia Broadcasting System from 1939 to 1964. Decaying physically or not, the building was nevertheless a destination for tourists seeking the site of a weekly radio program called “Grand Central Station” that aired from 1937 to 1953. An announcer introduced each episode as if he were calling out the name of a stop along a route.

(NYT 3 15 1949 p. 48, https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/did-you-know-there-used-to-be-a-movie-theater-in-grand-central-terminal by Jen Carlson, April 22 2015 accessed 7 26 2020; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WQXR-FM for the antenna)

Attempts were made to improve the area nearby, including the remodeling of a two-decades-old cafeteria in the subway arcade of the Chanin Building. It boasted coved cold cathode lighting to give “a night club atmosphere” --a nod to the Chanin company’s theater designs. High above, an FM antenna increased the radio power of WQXR, a classical music radio station, from 1941 to 1965. The Chanin’s theater was converted into premises for a photofinisher by the 1980s.

A sadder fate befell Ely Jacques Kahn’s Pix Theatre, the first purpose-built cinema on Forty-second Street.

(Fig. 28. Pix Theatre, Ely Jacques Kahn, 1939. Photo: William Ward, Pencil Points, March 1941, p. 165)

This elegant creation for the Brandt family opened during Christmas week of 1939. Intended for foreign films, it seated about eight hundred people in a handsome interior stripped of most ornament but delicately adorned with rust-colored stepped side walls enlivened with white theatrical masks, shallow saucer ceiling elements, a large plain disk ceiling light, and fluorescent tubes enlivening the brown and tan entrance area. The foyer had a curvilinear candy counter resting on lively patterned carpet. The theater was comfortably furnished and air-conditioned. An important element was its obedience to a new fire code that specified additional exits to safe outdoor spaces. Despite these virtues and the wholesome intentions of the Brandt family, the building became a showplace for pornography. After a short return to respectability it became the last of the porn houses to be demolished.

(Ely Jacques Kahn Architect, “Three views of the Pix theatre…”; http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/6496 information from Ed Solero on November 29, 2006 at 2:21 pm; “Functionalism expressed through lighting and acoustics,” Interiors 100 #5, Dec. 1940, pp. 24-26; E. J. Kahn, “Theaters and the interior designer,” Interior Design and Decoration 14 #6, June, 1940, pp. 44-45, 64; “Pix Theatre, E. J. Kahn Architect,” Pencil Points 22, March, 1941, pp.163-169. 72 drawings for this are at Avery Library, Columbia University, listed as an Unidentified theater,alterations and additions, published in 1939. Call number NYDA 1978.001.07120-07191)

“Fifty friendly nations met in San Francisco,” according to a song by Irving Caesar, taught to New York City’s schoolchildren in 1946. The assembled delegates planned the United Nations Organization there, but it did not remain on the west coast. Through a gift by John D. Rockefeller Jr. of land that he bought from Webb & Knapp who had difficulty developing it, the international organization was persuaded to locate in Manhattan, having temporarily occupied property at Lake Success on Long Island. The site had its southern border at Forty-second Street and its northern edge at Forty-ninth; most of the planning and the removal of slaughterhouses and meat-packers do not concern us here. A new seven-story concrete air-conditioned office was, however, being built with an underground garage at 405-407 East, intended for a thousand staff members of the New York City Housing Authority. While the UN plans proceeded and all the industrial installations were cleared away, the NYCHA building construction continued according to the contract with the builder. Under the terms of the bonds that financed the building, NYCHA could convey the building to the city for sale to the UN, but no one knew its fair value or whether the UN could meet the price. NYCHA could renew its lease, but the UN did not want the city agency there, and the housing authority could not give, sell, or lease the property under the terms of bonds that financed its construction. Nor could NYCHA waive reimbursement for the building. The UN did occupy it, first as temporary offices for the Secretariat, then as a library in 1948. It was replaced with the library that is there today, named for Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold who died in a mysterious airplane crash. (NYT 12 6 1945, p.35; 4 19 1947, p.3; 1 7 1948, p.6; 6 1 1950, p.29)

The United Nations plans, street-widening, building a vehicular underpass, and related matters concerned sites primarily north of Forty-second Street. A representative from the UN hoped that the area around the complex could become a first-class residential zone, but Tudor City, then planning a new building that would have to be shrunken in size, opposed some aspects of the rezoning. Once an agreement was reached between the City and the UN, the Sameth Extermination Company got rid of rats and prevented rodent survivors from infesting nearby buildings. Wreckers & Excavators, Inc., of Maspeth in Queens received the contract to demolish about fifty buildings on the UN site and along First Avenue (Chap. 7, Figs 26, 27). They started by removing a boarded-up brick tenement at the northeast corner of First Avenue and Forty-second Street. To avoid excessive labor costs, demolition had to be done in four months despite the solidity of packing plants and slaughterhouses. Another element affecting Forty-second Street was the roofing-over of the East River Drive from Forty-second to Forty-eighth Streets, and the construction of an exit from the drive at Forty-second Street to replace old cobblestones there.

(NYT 1 11 1947, p.2; 1 23 1947, p.12; 1 25 1947, pp.1, 5; 3 12 1947, p.14; 3 19 1947, p.12; 3 24 1947, pp. 1, 2; 3 27 1947, pp. 1, 21; 5 19 1947, p. 8; 5 22 1947, p. 19; 7 1 1947, p. 1; 7 9 1947, p 3. For the site and early planning, see Victoria Newhouse, Wallace K Harrison, Architect, New York, Rizzoli, 1989, pp. 104-143, and for Zeckendorf and his involvement, pp. 104-137, also George A. Dudley, A Workshop for Peace: Designing the United Nations Headquarters, New York and Cambridge, MA, Architectural History Foundation/MIT Press, 1994)

The Forty-second Street roadway at its eastern end was affected primarily by the replacement of the lower, narrower trolley tunnel with the present tunnel that accommodates cars, buses and trucks. To achieve this, Robert Moses directed the lowering of the roadway. In 1939, it had been possible for a retired butcher, Ike Kamm, to say that if you turned your back to Tudor City and looked eastward, the area did not look appreciably different from the way it did when he first arrived in 1876. The cobbled street led to the river from First Avenue. The abattoirs already existed. Perhaps one could still hear animal noises in 1939. A large stable with red-painted wooden sides had disappeared. But by 1950, after the wreckers finished their work and the slaughterhouse area was cleared, the differences were dramatic. There was Tudor City. There was Robert Moses, now as the man in charge of planning for the UN, who wanted to lower the east end of Forty-second Street and build a new, wider, reinforced concrete tunnel surmounted as before by Tudor City Place, the street that connected Tudor City’s buildings.

(Fig. 29. Tudor City tunnel. Andrews & Clark et al., 1950. Photo: Author, 2023.)

Moses assembled a team. Consulting engineers Andrews & Clark prepared the plans, with Earle Andrews the engineering designer. Anthony J. Donargo, chief engineer of Manhattan, and his assistant, Pincus Rizack, collaborated, as did James A. Dason, coordinator of construction for the United Nations. Several buildings, including the Church of the Covenant, the Tudor Hotel, and the Hospital had to be reached by new staircases. Architects Adams & Woodbridge created the steps to the church and the podium that encases them. Cars bringing residents to parts of Tudor City would have to deposit passengers on Forty-first or Forty-third Streets. The plan meant lowering the lobby of Tudor City’s Woodstock Tower by an entire floor, reducing some of its interior spaces, and facing the lowered floor with granite in 1952. It meant unnecessarily shrinking Tudor City’s parks in order to widen Tudor City Place merely because Mr. Moses decreed it.

(For Mr. Kamm, NYT 11 23 1939, p. 38. For the other changes, Samuel op. cit., pp 85-89, for Moses’ presentation NYT 12 22 1949, p. 1, for alterations to nearby buildings, see 10 7 1951, pp.1, 59; 3 18 1952, p 4; 3 21 1952, p.25; 4 7 1952, p.19;1 19 1953, pp.1, 3)

As usual, he got what he wanted, and so did the UN. Once the work on the new tunnel ended, the City paved the street under it, the rest of the street having been re-paved after June, 1949. It was high time because part of Forty-second Street had not been re-paved since 1905, and other parts not for twenty or more years. (For paving, NYT 4 6 1949, p.31; 4 7 1949, p 32; 6 2 1949, p.29; 7 20 1949, p.24) The City constructed a tunnel along First Avenue beside the UN, widened both First Avenue and Forty-seventh Street, condemned some properties, and saw the start of a district of consulates, hotels, and cultural institutions. Noisy trolleys had yielded to buses in 1946, and the street had been re-paved as a result, though the work proceeded slowly. All those new facilities replaced the existing tenements and small shops, giving rise to the present appearance of the east end of Forty-second Street.