Chapter 9 The 1950s

The United Nations headquarters had a catalytic effect on the east side, especially along First Avenue, but also along the east end of Forty-second Street. Before the United Nations moved in. In the mid-1950s, many plots sold for only a third of the $180 a square foot they could command afterward in the blocks from Third Avenue to the East River. (NYT 11 4 1957, p. RE17, p. 303) Businessmen had been aware of the potential for development even before the UN decided to move to Manhattan. Joseph Durst, patriarch of the Durst real estate firm, had already bought the Bartholomew Building in 1944 after the Second Avenue El was taken down in 1942, and in the 1950s, acquired sites on Third Avenue which were ripe for development after the El there was demolished at Forty-second Street in February 1956. In 1955, Tudor City redesigned two parks and built a new tower named 2 Tudor City Place where tennis courts had been. The Church of the Covenant then saw itself as the Church of the United Nations, since it had first ministered to the Scots-Irish, then Germans, Czechs, and Italians before Tudor City “swept the church out of the slums into the white-collar class.” (NYT 12 17 1950, p. 36) The Daily News had proposed an addition at the southwest corner of Second Avenue as early as 1944 and built it from 1957 to 1960. By that time, Max Abramovitz had replaced J. Andre Fouilhoux, who died in 1945, as Harrison’s partner. Developers eyed the remains of the Manhattan Hotel at Madison Avenue and Forty-second Street, although it was not demolished until 1961.

On the west side, Irving Maidman continued to acquire and lease sites in many streets, including several sites on Forty-second. He had faith in the future development of that area, popularly known as Hell’s Kitchen, although he occasionally invested in property east of Eighth Avenue. Members of his family also invested in Forty-second Street properties. Among their holdings in the 1950s were the Candler Building and the adjacent Harris theater, the Remington Building at 113 West which a nephew renamed for himself, the twelve-story National Hotel occupying the corner site at 592 Seventh Avenue, 220 West where a pornographic bookshop was raided in 1956 (NYT 1 7 1956, p. 19) 305-325 West, 300-310 West, a former Woolworth’s store site at 365 West, 416-422 and 448 West where Irving added small theaters, and southwest corner sites on Eighth and Tenth Avenues, along with buildings close to Forty-second Street but not on it.

(NYT 5 18 1944, p. 31; 1 9 1946, p. 3; 5 6 1946, p. 44; 2 24 1947, p. 31; 2 27 1947, p. 23; 9 15 1947, p. R1; 10 1 1947, Business p.50;7 6 1948, p.38; 9 21 1949, p. 54; 5 19 1958, p. 37; 5 24 1958, p.34 all for Forty-second Street alone; he had other investments in the area. See also 66 John St Block 1013 lot 46, 228-232 West)

His rival was the firm of Webb & Knapp with William Zeckendorf in charge after 1949. It had gained special notice as the original investors in the UN site, and while it had longer-lasting and generally more profitable investments on the east side, including the Chrysler block and the Airlines Terminal at Park Avenue, it was alert to opportunities on the west side.

(For proposed alterations to the Airlines Terminal lobby by I. M. Pei, then the Webb & Knapp house architect, see NYT 11 2 1951, p. 27. For executed alterations including the largest of all Automats, designed by Ralph C. Bencker, see NYT 6 6 1954, pp. R1, R12 and 8 25 1952, p. 29. For the west side: NYT 6 16 1949, p. 52; 8 19 1949, p. 30.)

The Schulte company, long known as United Cigar, had also been active in acquiring sites on the street for the many tobacco shops and Whelan Drugstores that it owned.

(NYT 8 14 1942, p. 29; 1 20 1944, p. 29; 5 6 1945, p. 43; 3 9 1948, p. 39 inter alia)

These investors were not alone in noticing the potential for redeveloping old tenements and low-rise office buildings in midtown. Replacing the Chanin, French, Salmon, and Mandel firms of the pre-war period were the Uris Brothers, the Tishman family, Erwin Wolfson, Lawrence A Wien, Harry Helmsley, and the Durst family. Some of the long-time landowners were gradually selling their properties rather than leasing them, and newcomers obtained them from the Cutting, McKinley, and Holzderber families, among others. Even the Astors sold the land under the Knickerbocker (then called the Newsweek Building) in this decade.

(For the Knickerbocker sale: NYT 10 2 1956, p. 55; 6 22 1957, p. 26. The trustees may have thought that the land would decline in value, as low-class activities increased west of Broadway, or else there were new financial benefits from selling, not leasing.)

The impetus to improve the west side came from urban renewal plans including those for the Coliseum exhibition hall and convention center at Columbus Circle, and the Lincoln Center cultural project, both underway in the 1950s. The new Port Authority Bus Terminal on Eighth Avenue at Forty-first Street formed the southern border of the potentially profitable area. Hotels to serve convention guests and music lovers, and new office buildings with space for growing businesses should have been logical followers of these new commercial and cultural facilities, but the bus terminal quickly became home to people at the margins of society. Some had been residents of single-room-occupancy hotels on the west side, but those buildings gradually yielded to more profitable developments although less often before the mid-1960s than afterward.

Forty-second Street proved to be too far from the urban renewal sites to be affected by their changed character. Changes occurred on Forty-second, but for other reasons, including a postwar demand for modern buildings in midtown, proximity to Grand Central, the presence of major subway interchange stations, and the altered neighborhood character on the far east side caused by the United Nations’ presence, and demolition planned or actual of elevated railway lines. The Third Avenue El, the last to come down, was closed in 1955.

The decade began with only modest development, in part owing to shortages of materials and manpower that had endured since the end of the Second World War. The Korean War exacerbated the problems. But defense production meant paperwork and personnel that had to be accommodated, so vacant buildings filled quickly. Although a temporary building freeze had been put into place in January 1951, some entrepreneurs had materials at hand or had entered into contracts before the freeze. (NYT 2 11 1951, p. 191; editorial 2 23 1951, p. 26)

Landlords demanded high rents during a time of shortage, citing increased costs for materials and labor. Rents in buildings of distinguished design averaged $38 per square foot in 1957, and $30 per square foot in speculative buildings. (NYT 12 1 1957, pp.RE1, 5) During the course of the 1950s, to forestall a new Great Depression, lenders required a list of prospective tenants and wrote leases often for twenty-one years with clauses allowing for increased rent if property taxes and operation costs rose above certain limits. Mortgages were written for thirty years. (NYT 4 13 1958 p. R1) Companies were increasingly building their own skyscrapers, often with space to rent to others; the Seagram Building, Socony-Mobil, and the Daily News Annex are examples.

During the Korean War, air raid wardens trained at Central Commercial High School, formerly P.S. 27, and the government appealed for help from firewatchers, auxiliary police, and anyone experienced in rescue work. (The school was scheduled for demolition in 1959. NYT 3 21 1957, pp. 1, 24; 5 14 1956, p. 26.) Blood donation sites and tests for automobile safety were available at various locations along Forty-second Street-- the tests perhaps to insure that men drafted to drive vehicles and in need of eyeglasses would get them. (NYT 2 13 1951, p. 33; 2 15 1951, p. 31 2 22 1951, p. 25, with comparable events in March. See also 6 16 1953, p. 29.) Officials in Manhattan planned air raid shelters in case of an atomic bomb attack by the Soviet Union which had tested its first example in 1949. Basements at Grand Central Terminal and the Chrysler Building were among the sites designated for this purpose. (NYT 1 1 1951, p. 6; 2 2 1951, p. 23; 8 18 1952, p. 19; 9 20 1953, p.1; 9 29 1953, p. 25; 10 l 1953, p.1; 6 15 1954, p .1) Talk about building bomb shelters in subway stations ended in doubt about funding and about their efficacy (NYT 12 29 1950, p. 1; 1 8 1951, p. 1) but just in case, the New York Public Library’s basement stocked food for ten days. A shortage of coal led to the provision of emergency heating supplies and to brownouts in Times Square, where the marquees for “South Pacific” normally used about five thousand watts and where the Times tower’s news zipper had been using sixteen thousand twenty-watt bulbs. (NYT 2 18 1950, p. 2; 2 20 1950, p. 1) The tower itself had been modified in 1951 when a ten-foot-high sign with eight-foot-high letters replaced a cracked terra cotta rampart. (NYT 2 9 1952, p. 25.) Air raid drills simulated the consequences of a nuclear attack in 1952 to 1954 and lasted as late as 1957. Following the test of a new Russian bomb in 1955, a nationwide civil defense test emptied the streets and people took cover, filling Grand Central Terminal and Stern’s department store, among other locations. (NYT 7 13 1957, p. 3) Perhaps to allay fears of Russian dominance, a Redstone rocket was displayed in the Terminal’s main concourse. (https://untappedcities.com/2021/04/06/rocket-park-remnant-nyc-worlds-fair/) Polio, still a scourge, added to widespread fears. The March of Dimes charity converted an iron lung into a receptacle for money to treat victims of the disease and displayed this curiosity in the Airlines Terminal at Park Avenue.

Shortages were factors in spurring fresh thinking. Builder Samuel C. Florman noted that a fellow builder had told owners of a planned fifteen-story structure that instead of waiting for steel, he could construct it in reinforced concrete, saving time and money. Every third day--after the concrete dried--would see another floor go up. This was noteworthy at the time. (Samuel C. Florman, Good Guys, Wise Guys, and Putting Things Up. A Life in Construction, NY St Martin’s Press, 2012 pp 56-57) Steel framing allowed for wider spaces between columns, so it was preferred for offices to allow for remodeling or special configurations, while concrete was well suited to residential building, but other considerations sometimes superseded. Florman also described changes in developers’ business models: as costs rose for land and borrowing, developers found that waiting for completed plans and specifications could cost more than potential savings from competitive bidding. The solution was either to form one’s own construction organization or hire a contractor as a construction manager, working with banks that wanted guarantees against rising costs.

In the process of construction there was an increased use of pre-stressed concrete, which significantly reduced the amount of high tensile steel required for a building made of reinforced concrete. Any way to reduce the use of steel was welcome because steel production lagged behind demand and strikes hampered production and therefore construction. A type of stainless steel that required only half the amount of nickel formerly thought necessary was put into production, and while only 62,800 tons of stainless steel of any composition had been produced in 1934, 1,210,500 tons of it were made by 1956. (NYT 12 21 1957, p. 34) Aluminum had already been used for doors, window frames, and other purposes. The demand for air-conditioned offices became overwhelming during the decade, requiring changes in manufacturing for building. For instance, there was an increased demand for high-velocity ducts containing coils for warming and cooling.

In 1951, the City’s building code permitted welding, which increased material efficiency and created connections that were less rigid than earlier ones. High-strength bolting replaced riveting, allowing faster construction that used less material and less labor. (https://skyscraper.org/hoh/?skip2=6-07). Composite steel decks, stronger than previous construction frameworks for concrete, were introduced to support concrete floors as they dried. (https://skyscraper.org/hoh/?skip2=6-06) Samuel Florman noted that in the 1950s, drywall began to replace plaster, and other people in the building trades discussed new products such as machine-made terra cotta, caulking compounds and sealants for curtain wall panels, fire-retardant paint developed by the Glidden Company, and a non-skid surface developed for military use by the Miracle Adhesives company that had become available to civilians by 1954. (NYT 6 29 1954, p. 23)

After the Korean war ended in July 1953, civilian steel production increased, so more steel became available for private building construction. There was pent-up demand, particularly in midtown, to which major businesses were moving more often than to downtown. Older office buildings, less flexible internally and with aging plumbing and old elevators, were ready for replacement. The demand for space led investors to consider sites that they had ignored earlier, and to fit new construction with the latest novelties such as individual office thermostats. The chief new amenities were air-conditioning and cool fluorescent lighting within flexible interiors in which offices could be easily reconfigured.

(On the boom in building after the Korean War: NYT 8 23 1954, p.19l; 6 27 1955, p 23; 7 1 1955, p. 23). Interior designers became interested in acoustic control and soundproofing. Electronic elevators, almost universal in new office buildings by the end of the decade, saved the expense of paying operators. Tape recordings told passengers how to operate the cars, called out floor numbers and named the types of merchandise on each level of department stores. Some elevator systems could even be programmed to bypass floors when the cabs were full or direct the cabs to the lobby when demand was low.

At the end of the decade, the New York Times reported that twenty-one office buildings in Manhattan that had been erected in 1959 were renting well. Some were full and others were occupied by owners. Twenty-two more were in the planning stage with expected completion in 1961. This addressed several years of high demand and active construction. (e.g. NYT 1 5 1958, p. R1; 6 1 1958, p. R1) The new buildings, on and off Forty-second Street, were covered with glass, precast concrete, limestone, glazed brick, bronze, stainless steel, porcelain enamel, and copper, but less often with traditional bricks. (NYT 10 12 1958, p. R1)

In order to provide more sites for new office buildings that were almost guaranteed to have tenants, businessmen’s associations such as the Broadway Association or the Forty-second Street Merchants and Property Owners Association (renamed the Forty-second Street Mid-Manhattan Association in 1951) proposed again that the city rezone part of West Forty-second Street from Eighth to Tenth Avenues to permit high-rise office buildings in an area earlier designated for industrial and then for retail use. Office buildings brought more income to investors than factories, warehouses, or breweries did, and they also increased tax revenue. The City was therefore willing to comply, leaving Tenth Avenue to the Hudson docks as the industrial zone. In 1958, banks, improvement associations, and city planners hoped to rezone residential block fronts for commercial use from Forty-second to Fifty-eighth Streets from Eighth to Tenth Avenues. (NYT 2 23 1958, pp. R1, R2)

At the Hudson shoreline, the Circle Line of sightseeing boats relocated in 1955 from its former berth at Battery Park to Pier 83 just north of Forty-second Street. Passengers could remain oblivious to the corruption at the other docks memorialized in the film, “On the Waterfront” of 1954. An excursion boat of the Sutton Line that went to Bear Mountain also picked up passengers at Forty-second Street. In 1957, maritime interests called for Pier 82 to be built at Forty-second with municipal funds, the pier to be self-sustaining and revenue-producing, as it is. (NYT 5 2, 1950, p. 21; 9 6 1957, pp.1, 40) In 1962, the Circle Line bought the Hudson River Day Line which had been using the pier at West Forty-first Street. The Weehawken Ferry, however, ended its service from Forty-second Street in March 1959, amid protests from commuters. The New York Central Railroad offered to continue ferry service for $1 if commuters could pay the operating costs. As that was not an arrangement with a long life expectancy, the proposal had no life at all. (NYT 6 17 1958, p. 60; 9 9 1958, p. 37; 3 7 1959, p. 24; 3 27 1959, p. 10)

The presence of the popular sightseeing boats may have been one reason why a company called North River Properties bought from the Fifth Avenue Coach lines the blockfront of Twelfth Avenue between Forty-second and Forty-third Streets, with 154 feet on Forty-second Street and 121 feet on Forty-third. Although the investors did not specify a date for construction, they let it be known that they planned a motor hotel. There would be two hundred rooms above a three-hundred-car garage. (NYT 6 24 1959, p. 49) Morris Lapidus became the architect of the building that was finished in the following decade. At the east end of the block, the Clasic Diner opened in 1954 on part of a former brewery site at Eleventh Avenue.

(In 1959, the grantee on this site was Socony-Mobil Oil Co. Inc, and grantor was Breanross Realty Corp; their relationship to the diner is unclear. 66 John St. Block 1090 lot 29)

Apart from Holland House, the residences on the street’s far west side were tenements, most of them well over a half-century old. By the 1950s, the population had become increasingly poor and often of Puerto Rican origin rather than poor and usually of Irish origin. When carbon monoxide from a defective chimney flue felled nine tenants at 557 West in October 1959, the event was reported as the first since the previous summer, but that short gap in time suggests that this was a common threat from old coal furnace flues that had not been cleaned. (NYT 10 16 1959, p. 23.)

At 529-549 West, the large site of 27,000 square feet, the national government installed an armory during the Korean War. This was converted from its use in wartime when after 1944 it housed a Western Electric Company military factory that made electronic equipment. It was well suited to an industrial purpose because it had an off-street loading platform, a large cafeteria, five freight elevators and a passenger elevator. (NYT 2 2 1950, p .195) Western Electric left in 1947 when Webb & Knapp bought the building and then sold it to the Department of the Army, which trained reservists there. The name Armory endures although in 1977, the building was converted into apartments. (NYT 9 13 1987, p.VIII9; see Chap. 6, Fig. 5)

Across the street, Webb & Knapp bought 522-526 West in 1951, a four-story school and office building that had housed the New York Kindergarten Association since 1905. (Chap. 5, Fig. 34) For about a year, it served the New York Hotel Trades Council as the headquarters for ten unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor and for their insurance fund, but the unions moved out by the start of 1954; by then, the premises had been owned by H.T.C. Realty for about eighteen months. Then the New York Port Society bought the building and set up a religious and social service center and interdenominational church for seamen, close to the transatlantic liners on the west side piers. The kindergarten association’s auditorium became a chapel, and the Port Society was pleased to have more spacious counseling and recreation rooms than those in their previous quarters in the Chelsea neighborhood. This venerable institution, founded in 1818, provided social and educational activities for sailors, operated a mail delivery system, checked luggage, and offered counseling. After the sinking of the Italian Line’s Andrea Doria in July of 1956, the four ministers and six laymen in charge quickly provided sleeping accommodation for 175 seamen who reached New York. (NYT 7 6 1958, p. S11; 7 27 1956, p. 8)

Between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, men who were down-and-out could expect a compassionate welcome at the McAuley-Cremorne Mission at 434 West, a charitable institution that tried to rehabilitate men addicted to alcohol or drugs.

(Fig. 1. McAuley Cremorne Mission, 434 West. Photo: https://www-bygonely.com.)

Even when it did not succeed in that effort, it gave the men food, clothing, and in urgent situations, somewhere to sleep. Addictive substances became increasing menaces in the 1950s but it was not until the early 1960s that “dope fiends” and an increase in related crime became noticeable to the middle classes on the midtown business blocks.

The west side did see some changes, but no glamorous skyscrapers. A proposal for a bus terminal at Eighth Avenue and Forty-second Street, with bus service to Newark Airport had been made in December 1940 by Harold McGraw of the McGraw-Hill publishing firm. He proposed to have it finished by late 1941, and the Times published a streamlined design by Harrison & Fouilhoux, but it led to no result. Obstacles included the reluctance of major bus lines to use a unified terminal, and a controversial legal decision. (NYT 12. 8 1940, pp. 1, 65; 2 20 1941, pp. 1, 14). The war put a stop to any more planning. Irving Maidman had more success in 1955. By this time, every city official knew that the terminal on Park Avenue was congested owing to the rapid increase of air travel, and that coaches had to deal with intense midtown traffic as they departed for airports in Queens. They also had to contend with buses of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad that took passengers from the Chanin Building to the ferry at Twelfth Avenue that served the B&O Railroad’s tracks in New Jersey. A replacement for the Park Avenue facility, again with a parking garage, was planned near the Queens Midtown Tunnel for Queens-bound passengers, (NYT 8 14 1950, p. 1) but passengers heading for Newark Airport had to go west from Park Avenue through even more traffic to reach the tunnel to New Jersey. For them, a terminal near the Lincoln Tunnel would make sense.

Having bought a suitable site at Tenth Avenue in 1952 from the Cutting estate, and more land in 1954 after the City approved the project in 1953, Maidman and his business partner, architect and builder Floyd DeL. Brown who had built the east side terminal, announced plans for a West Side Airlines terminal that they would rent to six major carriers that had been tenants of the Park Avenue facility. In a four-story building of about 50,000 square feet, the lower two stories contained ticket offices, a passenger concourse, a bar, restaurant and oyster bar, an information booth, a newsstand, and restrooms. The upper two floors provided 22,500 square feet of office space. Unlike the handsome terminal at Park Avenue, the west side facility was utilitarian in a simplified International Modern mode, a rectangular prism with smooth pale gray brick walls, long ribbon windows on Forty-second Street, shorter ones on Tenth Avenue where the taxi dropoff was located, and no decoration there. Brown’s own Bethlehem Engineering Corporation, which had worked on the Park Avenue building, provided both architectural and engineering services for the west side terminal. Although the exterior was uninteresting and the interior unremarkable, the latter was spacious and was given pleasant tones of pale yellow, blue, and green over a pale gray terrazzo floor.

Incoming buses arrived on Forty-first Street directly from the Lincoln Tunnel via the recently inserted Dyer Avenue that facilitated access to and from the tunnel. Outgoing buses had to cross only one city street on the way to the tunnel and the airport. Passengers arriving in their own cars could park them in a garage under the building and leave the garage through a passageway at one side that led to Forty-second Street. Passengers who needed to rent cars could do so from Avis on the building’s Forty-second Street side, and tourists could book sightseeing tours next door to the Avis office.

(NYT 8 13 1953, p. 27; 8 14 1950, p.1; 8 20 1953, p. 29; 9 18 1953, p. 25; 9 11 1955, p. X23 with photographs. Structural plans were made by Elpel Engineering Corp., electrical plans by Frederick Latzer, and mechanical and air-conditioning plans by P. R. Moses & Associates, engineers. Milton Nelson Weir, a financier, was known as a developer of the West Side Airlines Terminal. Obituary in NYT 10 24 1981, p. 15. For a more extensive account, see Wikipedia, ad loc. accessed 12 12 2024)

After the terminal facility closed in August 1972, the building housed the Avis car-rental agency and a restaurant that was being converted into a delicatessen (NYT 8 28 1972, p. 33), among other tenants. By the 1980s, it became the National Video Center Recording Studios and the Spanish Television Network headquarters.

The garage under the airlines terminal was just one of many vehicle storage buildings that began to appear in the area. The Dixie Hotel, for instance, applied for permission to build a garage for 239 cars and a parking lot for thirteen more on a north side site between Eighth and Ninth Avenues in which both Maidman and Columbia University held an interest.

(The Dixie may have used its own bus terminal site for this purpose, as the airlines terminal had closed in early July of 1957. NYT 5 1 1958, p. 33, 66 John St. Block 1033, lots 19-28)

Parking provisions brought profit from sites that awaited development. One of them faced the northern end of Dyer Avenue at Forty-second Street and by 1957, it reached from 425 to 435 West. The land under 427-431 had been part of the Thomas J. Farrell estate, which sold an eight or nine-story garage and adjoining lofts at 433-435 West to investors Larry Jossin and Irving Rathaus, joint owners of the Lincoln Operating Company. Rathaus already owned an eight-story garage and office building at 429 West. (66 John St. block 1052, lots 17-19, 1950, NYT 1. 13 1950, p 39). They planned to raze the lofts and alter the garage into a transient parking garage and service station capable of accommodating four hundred fifty cars. Architect James E. Casale prepared the plans for it but his plans were probably not executed. After changes of ownership during the decade, by 1957 the site with 150 feet of frontage on Forty-second Street held a nine-story garage, a parking lot of 50 x 100 feet, and a five-story tenement. The lessee, a subsidiary of Meyers Brothers Parking System, was guaranteed a renewal of the twenty-one-year lease if it built an additional four-story parking garage there. (NYT 7 7 1951, p. 13; 11 21 1952, p. 43; 9 6 1957, p. 42) Maidman, too, proposed to build a garage at the southwest corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-second Street, and published a hazy rendering of the site where the north wing of the Port Authority Bus Terminal opened in 1981. It became a parking lot, prompting Holy Cross’ pastor, Msgr. McCaffrey, to comment wryly at the parish’s centenary celebration that his church should be called the Shrine of the Parking Lots. (NYT 4 6 1959, p. 54)

The monsignor was aware that few people were eager to be pioneers of building investment on the decaying west side. Only five months after the centenary celebration, he inveighed against the “gang menace” in the area and about lenient courts that let youths return to the streets with arms and gasoline bombs. (NYT 10 13 1959, p. 41). Any earlier hopes for improvement must have been dashed by the fate of the neighboring Hotel Holland. (Chap.7 Fig. 35) A syndicate headed by Martin Fleischman and Abe Sonnenschein bought it from the Samuel Lebis interests and planned to modernize the façade and the lobby. The building, with four hundred rooms on twenty-one stories also contained the Midtown Health Cub with a gymnasium, swimming pool, and solarium. Had ambitious plans for the west side been realized, the apartments would have been sought after, but instead, various investors took short-term options on the property into the 1960s when the area began an even worse decline. (NYT 4 8 1956, p. R1)

Hopes for an improved neighborhood could have been strengthened by the persistence of the Holy Cross Academy next door to the church. Parts of the interior were remodeled in 1958 to turn a study hall into an auditorium, and there were improvements to the gymnasium and the laboratories. (NYT 5 4 1958, p. 125) There was also Irving Maidman’s investment in a new theater named for himself at 416-418 West in the former premises of the Bank of the United States. It opened in February 1960. Russell Patterson, a producer-director and scenery and costume designer, made design suggestions that were incorporated in the final form by Ferdinand Klebold. Early plans for a grand theater with 292 seats and an opening presentation about artist-illustrators had to change when seating was reduced to 199 to permit lower wage scales from the unions involved. The building’s second floor was intended as headquarters for a non-profit organization called the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Theatre Arts, with its official address at 418 West where it had its own small theater. (NYT 7 18 1959, p. 11; 11 24 1959, p. 45; 1 4 1960 p. 38; 12 10 1961, p. R1) Both foreign films and off-Broadway theatre had become popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

There were occasional bright moments even earlier on the west side. There was, for instance, a new post office immediately west of the McGraw-Hill Building at number 340.

Fig. 2. United States Post Office. 1952, Louis B. Mertz. Photo: Author, 2023. The McGraw-Hill Building is at the left.)

Webb & Knapp was instrumental in the sale of the site. Louis B. Mertz, the firm’s supervisor of construction, directed the erection of the facility, on which the government took a long lease. On a through-the-block site, a four-story building with a full basement provided shipping and loading areas below those for stamp purchases, registry, money order and postal savings at street level. The basement lobby received parcel post and bulk mail. There was off-street parking for fourteen trucks. The architecture is utilitarian—four floors, each four bays wide, faced in smooth tan brick. A few stone accents mark the tops of the ground floor openings and the base and sides of the windows. The present entrance that includes a ramp for universal access replaces what is likely to have been steps originally. When the building opened, even unremarkable as it was visually, Lutheran, Roman Catholic, and Jewish clergy attended the ceremonies as did secular dignitaries, William Zeckendorf, and two members of the McGraw family. (NYT 10 4 1950, p. 63; 2 9 1951, p. 46; 9 l 1951, p.13; 2 17 1952, p. 69; 2 20 1951, p. 29)

Close to the post office, the Franklin bank at the corner of Eighth Avenue decorated its building with nautical pennants and flags, displayed scale models of ships, and added other ornaments to honor the maiden voyage of the new ocean liner, the United States. A year later, the bank was decorated as a circus during the renovation of the plaster ceiling, when rosettes were replaced by vents for air-conditioning. The plasterers, carpenters, and painters were referred to as men on a flying trapeze---an allusion to a popular song. Cardboard circus animals, balloons, clowns, and an image of Tarzan were meant to take depositors’ minds off the renovation work. (NYT 6 28 1952, p. 33; 4 3 1953, p. 25). Across the street, the Corn Exchange Bank bought the corner lots at 305-307 West and 669 Eighth Avenue from Maidman who promptly leased them back; the purpose was to enlarge the banking quarters on the avenue side.

Other benign aspects of the neighborhood included Greene’s Lighting Fixtures which had a long life at 422 West. So did the theater lobby poster frame-maker, Arthur Rosenfeld, who spent forty years at this specialty before the opening of Dyer Avenue eradicated his building at 442 West (NYT 4 29 1953, p. 35) and Kaufman’s Army & Navy surplus store, opened in 1940 at its present address, 319 West, offering a treasure-hunter’s miscellany. (Chap.2, Fig. 22) To attract attention after 1950, it displayed a cannon from the Spanish American war era on its sidewalk. A professor’s widow fed nine cats each day in the basement of the little red brick Tivoli Hotel at the southwest corner of Eighth Avenue. Fortunately, the Tivoli had not burned down during a basement fire in 1951. She brought water to her favorites from the barber shop across the street. That there were many more cats nearby implied, however, that they were sustained by eating rats in local buildings.

(Meyer Berger, “About New York,” NYT 11 19 1954, p. 25. The Tivoli building also held the Times Theatre and several shops. 5 2 1951, p. 64)

Property values rose except between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. In that stretch of the street, theaters, cafeterias, small clothing and sporting goods shops coexisted with ground floor auction rooms that sold inferior goods, and were adjacent to bars, freak shows, shooting and skee-ball parlors, peep shows, bookstores that sold violent and pornographic publications, and brothels catering to all genders in the tenements above the retail premises. The Broadway Association and other merchants’ groups persuaded the City to alter the zoning rules in 1954 to ban certain offensive businesses from Sixth to Eighth Avenues such as open-door penny arcades and the auction houses, but that restriction just provided more space for indoor bookshops. (Environmental Impact Statement p. 2-24; NYT 1 15 1954, p.1, etc.) Existing businesses could not be dislodged or have their leases terminated. Besides, many of them paid more to landlords than any other business would have done in that location. The block between Seventh and Eighth Avenues remained a problem for the city until the later twentieth century, and a barrier to upscale development.

The situation can be illustrated by various examples. When Irving Maidman tried to develop a large site at 305-325 West, a block away, one that he had assembled over a ten-year period, he had no success, so he sold the land in smaller parcels that could not support an office tower. Some older theaters needed major repairs and fire prevention measures, which were not all done quickly, and several of them specialized in violent and erotic movies. There were more bars, cheap eateries, and amusement arcades than there were elsewhere on Forty-second Street.

The Automat provided desperate people with tomato soup created with free catsup and hot water. Although the company raised the price of a cup of coffee to ten cents in 1950, as did the Chock Full o’Nuts sandwich chain, the Automat accommodated so many different types of often low-income patrons that the Schrafft’s and Stouffer’s patrons kept their distance. (NYT 5 20 1961, p. 26) That later literary luminaries such as Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg hung out in the cafeterias of Forty-second Street and Times Square in the 1940s and early ‘50s did nothing to stop the genteel public’s perception of disorder.

Volume XIV-XIVa of Nathan Nirenstein’s Real Estate Atlas recorded the businesses along Forty-second Street from Grand Central to Eighth Avenue in the early 1950s.

(Fig. 3. Businesses, 7^th to 8^th Avenues from 205 to 264 West. Nathan Nirenstein, Nirenstein National Realty Map Company, c. 1957, Courtesy Mark Tomasko.)

Old buildings survived, containing the increased number of small shops between Sixth and Eighth Avenues. Contrary to what some people think they remember, the businesses were not all offensive, nor did all the theaters show pornographic films. In 1950, the Rialto theater closed its restaurant and turned the upper floor into broadcasting and television studios; a long-lived interview show led by Joe Franklin was based there. In 1955, the Brandt chain bought the building and showed films on the lower levels—respectable ones until the market for less respectable ones increased. (NYT 2 28 1954, p. X5;10 16 1955, p.1) In 1953, the New Amsterdam was fitted with a Cinerama screen, although that entailed removal of the boxes. The Bryant showed specialized and foreign films, while the Laffmovie showed funny shorts and humorous feature films. Between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, almost every building housed multiple businesses including Loft’s candies, Childs Restaurant, and Adam Hats. There was a six-story building at 244 West called the Searing building for its main tenant, T. Victor Searing, a realty investor. But owing to the low forms of entertainment and cheap eateries that were also there, and to the long leases that were profitable to the landowners, the demand for office space was far stronger east of Sixth Avenue. It is true that some offices in the eastern blocks were turned into illegal betting parlors, and true, too, that crimes occurred now and then, but these blocks continued to have more tall buildings, more honestly employed office workers and executives, more pleasant restaurants, and more attractive and larger shops.

Forty-second Street’s principal outdoor space, Bryant Park—notably east of Sixth Avenue-- had been the scene of preparedness drills during the Korean War, when at a signal, people rushed into nearby buildings. When the war ended, the park attracted audiences to concerts of recorded classical music, including concerts for children who at that time were introduced to classical music in the public schools. At least once there was a live operatic performance-- by Lawrence Tibbett in June of 1956. Chrysanthemums blooming in the autumn became a tradition for a while. Members of the Bryant Park Committee of the Avenue of the Americas Association provided new mercury vapor lights on shiny aluminum poles all around the park to give six times the earlier amount of light. No one acted on proposals in 1958 for parking under the greensward. This was fortunate, because a garage would have prevented the later building of climate-controlled book storage stacks there. Even more books would have joined millions of others now in remote storage in New Jersey-- no longer accessible in ten minutes. The park received a gift in 1954—a bronze statue of José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, father of Brazilian independence and the “Benjamin Franklin of Brazil.” Eminent guests attended the unveiling of the statue, which was over eight feet high and set on a pedestal, originally in a different spot from its present location along Sixth Avenue. This was one of several statues placed in the park after this one, all celebrating distinguished figures of Latin American history. The rationale for locating those statues in this park was the renaming of Sixth Avenue as the Avenue of the Americas in 1945, although few New Yorkers use the long name. (NYT 4 23 1955, p. 22)

But the improved park did not prove to be a catalyst for property development even on wide Sixth Avenue, and even after the El came down. Seymour Durst explained that when the El was demolished, land prices rose so high that owners could only make sufficient profits by leasing premises to bars and luncheonettes, which paid high rates. The landlords had written long leases just to keep tenants on formerly blighted land, as on Forty-second Street, and that hindered other types of development. Durst contrasted the situation with that of Third Avenue where the El came down later but where over three million square feet of new floor space had gone up in the 1950s. Property owners there had refused to renew burdensome leases and had assembled large plots suited to new office construction, banks, and higher-class shops. (NYT 1 11 1959, p R1) Proximity to the United Nations, Grand Central Terminal, and other new buildings encouraged construction on the east side, to the detriment of the west side. The shops east of Sixth Avenue were considerably different from those west of Seventh Avenue. East of Fifth Avenue in particular there were clothing shops for middle-class office workers and a Fanny Farmer confectionery—to name some of the busiest. There were no amusement arcades.

On the north side of Forty-second Street, opposite Bryant Park, Stern’s Department store proposed some cosmetic changes in 1954 and 1958 after it was sold to Allied Stores Corporation in 1951 (NYT 11 2 1950, p. R1; 4 3 1951, p. 37; 12 23 1954, p. 27;12 4 1958, p. 61; 12 6 1958, p. 22; 4 24 1959, p. 20) At the time, several department stores had art galleries, and Stern’s exhibited Walt Disney’s animation techniques with screens and sound projections in February, 1959. (NYT 1 27 1959, p. 27) Individual shops changed hands on that block, but no major construction was done. Barricini’s confectionery opened in two shop units in the Bryant Park Building, by then owned by Walter Salmon. Simon B. Zelnik was the architect who made remodeling plans. {NYT 5 18 1950, p. 60). The low-priced cream-cheese-and-nuts sandwiches served at Chock Full O’ Nuts’serpentine counters at 140-151 West, across Forty-second Street from the Public Library, sustained many graduate students, and fed anyone in search of a quick meal. (NYT 12 14 1959, p. 54). Additional cheap sustenance was available at the many Nedick’s orange drink and frankfurter outlets at busy corners. But culinary experimentation was increasing in this decade, and the Woolworth’s no-longer just Five-and-Ten-Cent store at 33 West began to stock bottled herbs, foie gras, Indian chutneys, preserved kumquats, and other items usually offered only in specialty shops. (NYT 11 17 1959, p. 38).

At the east side of the park, the New York Public Library continued to provide education and pleasure, despite increasing costs. After its marble exterior was cleaned, it was hosed down on Sunday mornings. In this decade, the Library installed automatic elevators, replacing its human-operated ones, just as office buildings were doing. (NYT 1 24 1971, p. D22) After 1951, however, the Library had to take funds from its endowment, and appealed for public contributions During one fund drive, the library displayed a model of the reservoir that had occupied its site. Demand for seats at times when college papers were due was so strong that readers were limited in the number of books they could order, and waiting times increased from the usual ten to twenty minutes. The library was open nearly every day for long hours, including evenings and Sundays, when working people could use its resources.

In the Library’s lobby, architect Edgar I. Williams designed a new bursar’s office to be fitted under arches. He used gypsum blocks plastered and painted to coordinate with the adjacent marble. He also improved the ground floor circulating library room reached from the Forty-second Street entrance, later called the Bartos Forum. The changes included new metal stacks, new desks and catalogue cases, linoleum tile flooring, and the display of all the circulating books, some of which had been kept one level below and invisible to browsers. Other interior changes had to do with re-wiring in 1954 for fluorescent lighting that would save thousands of dollars each year, and a new marble floor in the main lobby. In those days, the Library was embarrassed by the fact that because pages had to find books by flashlight, readers might not get their books for forty minutes--a common waiting time today. The public was shocked by the theft of the Christmas wreath from one of the lions in 1953 but was surely delighted by the exterior fountains, restored in July 1957 after being shut during a water shortage.

(NYT 10 22 1950, p. 45; 8 15 1951, p. 25; 11 14 1951, p. 33; 12 18 1953, p. 30; 1 9 1954, p. 12; 2 11 1954, p. 31; 8 9 1954, p. 19; 7 15 1957, p. 2)

While Patrolman Henry Koch regulated traffic for many years at the Fifth Avenue corner until he retired in 1957, less visible activity took place indoors. At 501 Fifth Avenue, the Glickman Corporation renamed the building for itself and converted the tall second story into three floors of office space. Along with some changes to the façade and lobby, the owner gained about 6700 additional square feet of rental space thanks to Michael Saphier Associates, interior designers. Interior space planning and the professionalization of interior design became well established during this decade, exemplified also by Leonard-Colangelo and the firm called Design for Business, and, on other streets, the work of Donald Deskey, Walter Dorwin Teague, and Raymond Loewy. (For Design for Business, see NYT 9 13 1959, p. F3 and other articles about Maurice Mogulescu, its president; for Teague: 10 17 1959, p. 16) The specialists developed portable partitions, advised about the location of electrical outlets for the electric typewriters and large computers that were being developed, advised about flooring materials that could dull sound or be easily cleaned, and recommended coordinated efficient furniture. All this had the potential for saving square footage at a time of rising rents. (NYT 7 6 1958, pp. R1, E2). One of the few remaining individual parcels, at 22 East, was sold in 1955 by Beatrice B. Berle whose family had owned the building since 1879; a law firm was to be one of the tenants. (NYT 3 1 1955, p. 49; 12 14 1955, p. 68)

The Carbide and Carbon building at 30 East had earlier been sold to an investing syndicate headed by lawyers Herbert Tenzer and Louis Greenblatt, who then sold it to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and leased it back. The chemical company decided to keep its head offices in the city when many other corporations were leaving for suburbs. The company had on its Forty-second Street rooftop an outdoor laboratory where the Electro Metallurgical Company developed more durable and cheaper steel. (NYT 8 23 1953, p. R1; 2 2 1959, p. 51. Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. sold the building in 1959 to the Tishman interests).

The National City Bank, which since the 1920s had a branch on Forty-second Street on the west side of Madison Avenue, gradually bought the parcels that made 316-330 Madison, 11-17 East Forty-second and 18-22 East Forty-third Streets into one lot. Part of the site had been occupied since the 1890s by the Hotel Manhattan (Chap. 4, Figs. 7, 9), which the bank had turned into offices in the early 1920s. (New York Sun-Herald 7 23 1920, clipping in The New York Historical Corso Collection) Negotiations began in 1959 and the Bank sold its site to John J. Reynolds, the real estate investor who had first proposed a Chrysler skyscraper. Reynolds was then a partner for a new project with the George A. Fuller Company, investors and construction contractors. The block-long site had 143-foot frontage on Forty-second Street. The investors planned a thirty-seven-story skyscraper there for occupation in 1963, to be built by the Fuller company from plans by Kahn & Jacobs.

(NYT 3 17 1960, p 56. The hotel was still standing in June 1961 when a suicide was foiled 6 2 1961, p. 1. It was demolished with the help of a new 100 ft rotating projection arm which simplified the demolition 1 28 1962, p. 2. Ely Jacques Kahn and Robert Allan Jacobs’ partnership was in effect 1949-69)

Across the street, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company sold the Heckscher Building to Louis Schleifer, a real estate operator especially active in this decade who then resold it to Frankel & Silke, investors. (NYT 10 3 1955, p. 42)

Grand Central Terminal, along with Times Square, remained a busy transportation center, but rail travel declined as automobile ownership increased along with suburban development. To counter the decline in revenue, the terminal’s directors considered but did not build several projects over the low-rise terminal where building rights existed but had not been used. The most dramatic was I. M. Pei ‘s proposal of 1956 for a 102-story hyperboloid skyscraper. At the time, Pei was associated with developer William Zeckendorf of the Webb & Knapp firm.

(Fig. 4. I. M. Pei, Hyperboloid skyscraper, unbuilt. 1956. Photo: NYU slide collection.)

The 108-story building was to have an exoskeleton of elongated diamond-shaped metal webs to support open floors inside. The exoskeleton transferred the vertical forces to footings at the base of the building. Large open interiors that could be custom-divided were then in demand. The tower’s hourglass shape was meant to reduce wind forces and to save structural steel. Open floors at the summit and base were intended to withstand forces of nuclear bombs. In 1954, the New Haven Railroad proposed a cheaper, shorter, and far less innovative skyscraper, an H-shaped box of fifty stories rising above lower boxes. It was designed by Fellheimer & Wagner, successors to Reed & Stem.

(Fig. 5. Fellheimer & Wagner, proposal for Grand Central Terminal. Photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Grand_Central_Terminal#/media/File:Grand_Central_replacement_(Fellheimer_1954).jpg)

It would have allowed Park Avenue to go straight north, thereby eliminating the present concourse. Lower, broader buildings from Forty-second to Forty-fifth Street would have as a central climax an H-shaped building athwart Park Avenue with a south-facing rectangular wing of intermediate height. The Emery Roth firm published a proposal in Architectural Forum in February 1955 that saved the concourse and pushed a high-rise north of it, hinting at the later Pan Am Building on which the Roth firm collaborated. All this fruitless activity stimulated over two hundred architects to petition the railroad to save the concourse in any new plan.

(NYT 9 8 1954, pp. 1, 38; 9 26 1954, p. 55; 2 8 1955, p. 20; https://impeifoundation.org/works/hyperboloid/ accessed 2 10 2023; “Grand Central’s Outdoor Room,” Architectural Forum 102 #2 Feb.1955, p.116 for Richard Roth’s design; Stern et al, New York 1960 pp. 359, 1139-40, 1334 notes 368-369 with extensive references for the architectural projects. Pei’s project appears in a video: “Reproduction of I..M. Pei’s Hyperboloid,” accessed via YouTube 8 4 2021; http://modernmag.com/strange-and-amusing-plans/ by Sam Lubell; Architectural Record 101, November 1954, pp.134-139)

The Terminal’s interior continued the Kodak Colorama display of enormous photographs because the company was willing to pay a satisfactory sum to advertise its film and camera products. Surely some people used the company’s film to photograph the Redstone missile that was installed in the main concourse in 1957-- propaganda to counter the prestige of the Soviet Union’s space program. That year ended the twenty-nine-year tradition of having organ concerts in the building, presented by organist Mary Lee Read. The Newsreel theater initiated in 1937 survived into the 1960s but television news supplanted it. (NYT 1 5 1950, p. X5.) Carey’s popular barbershop closed. Another long-time tenant, Thompson’s Cafeteria, moved out, correctly realizing that dining habits were changing; it wanted to open restaurants serving motels and shopping centers that had ample parking spaces. (NYT 3 13 1958, p. 19).

A shop for Kitty Kelly Shoes inside the Terminal was both ingenious and, for a while, successful. Architect José A. Fernandez, then Vice-President of the Architectural League of New York, suspended the steel-framed, glass-walled shop from ceiling beams beside the ramp descending at the corner of Vanderbilt Avenue. Supporting the shop from below would have required sinking steel beams through layers of the Terminal. The specific location had resulted in vibrations to the glass caused by vehicles on the automobile ramp around Grand Central, but steel runners hanging from the beam stabilized the panes. For the interior of the shop, Fernandez engaged Bogdan Grom, a recent immigrant born in Trieste, to design three abstract screens. (The New Yorker, “Talk of the Town,” Oct. 17, 1959, pp. 33-34) The shop itself is among the many lost objects of visual art on Forty-second Street, but it is commemorated by older New Yorkers who refer to the ramp as the Kitty Kelly ramp even now. (Chap.5, Fig. 7)

Ingenious designs notwithstanding, suburbanization and car ownership contributed to the financial problems of the railroad. While suburban commuters continued to use trains, there was competition from buses and private vehicles, reducing revenue. The offices above and adjacent to the concourse continued in use, the highest floors for art studios and a gallery, then a credit clearing house, and by the 1930s, CBS broadcasting which was developing television; it stayed there until 1964. The network had moved to the Terminal because an experimental transmitter was located atop the Chrysler Building on the next block. One of the broadcaster’s finest moments came in the early 1950s when news host Edward R. Murrow chastised the demagogic Senator Joseph McCarthy from studio 41 on the top floor. In 1958, the first major videotape facility for that two-year-old technology occupied a former rehearsal room there. Almost every space on the upper floors of the Terminal has undergone changes in form and in use over the decades. (https://www.provideocoalition.com/cbs-and-new-yorks-grand-central-terminal/ with further links and references; accessed 3 12 2018)

Next door, the Commodore changed internally and was modified outside at the corner of Lexington Avenue. There had been no new major hotels built in Manhattan since the pre-war period, so existing ones did what they could to attract patrons who expected postwar comfort. The Commodore brought its total of air-conditioned rooms to 800, but that left 1050 more without this increasingly demanded amenity. It added 700 television sets, when that form of entertainment was becoming commonplace in visitors’ homes. The management repainted 600 rooms, refurbished 300, and modernized 400 bathrooms. (NYT 7 8 1956, p. 86) Passers-by would not have known about the interior rearrangements, but they would have noticed that the inexpensive Nedick’s, the chain’s hundredth store, had been replaced by a new pharmacy with a horseshoe-shaped lunch counter and soda fountain. The new Commodore Pharmacy had an entrance under a curved corner and an exterior of blue-gray granite and stainless steel, designed by Horace Ginsbern & Associates. The doorway stood at an angle to the corner, so that the hotel’s corner column, with squares for cladding, stood free in front of the door and the flanking plate glass display windows. In case anyone missed this striking design, neon lights called attention to it. (NYT 3 13 1955, p. R1)

The principal addition to East Forty-second Street during the 1950s was the Socony-Mobil Building, on the south side at 150 East.

(Fig.6. Wurts Bros., Socony-Mobil Building nearing completion, 1956. Harrison & Abramovitz, Photo: Museum of the City of New York, X2010.7.1.15870.)

It occupies the one block that had not yet been redeveloped, owned by the Goelet estate. These venerable investors enlarged their holdings in the area after the Second Avenue El came down in 1942; they awaited the demolition of the El on Third Avenue in February 1956. That avenue was then re-paved and made ready for burgeoning development. (NYT 1 13 1956, p. 25.) At one corner of 42^nd Street and Third Avenue was Volk’s restaurant, famous for bear steak, venison, and beer.

The block’s improvement had initially been delayed by the presence of the Third Avenue El’s spur, dismantled only in late 1923 (Chap. 7, Fig. 18), then by the Depression and war, and perhaps by prudent calculations on the part of the Goelet family and its advisers, including architect John B. Peterkin. The block housed small hotels such as the Penn at the corner, and the Pershing Square at 152-154 East. In between were taxpayers, a parking lot at one corner, and modest old buildings, some built in the 1850s. The most memorable ones were the Pottier & Stymus furniture company of the late 1880s (Chap. 3, Fig. 15) and two small theaters, one of which was Loew’s. In 1953, investors John W. Galbreath and Associates, particularly this firm’s Chief Executive Officer, Peter B. Ruffin, acquired a long lease and redeveloped the south block with the new huge office building for Socony-Mobil, although it took until 1956 to complete it. Nothing as large as this had been erected since 1939 when the original parts of Rockefeller Center were finished. (For a lease to the Pershing Hotel of 1934 see NYT 9 11 1934, p. 39).

The prime tenant was the Socony-Vacuum Company, which moved north from 26 Broadway, home of Standard Oil with which Socony was affiliated. (Soco in the name had to do with Standard Oil Company, in this case in New York.) Galbreath and Ruffin understood the importance to mortgage financing of having secure leases to established tenants, although contemporary builders such as the Uris Brothers, the Tishman Realty and Construction Company, Sam Minskoff & Sons, and Erwin S. Wolfson were willing to take greater risks. (NYT 10 2 1960, p. R1) The building was one of twenty-seven up-to-date offices erected in midtown in 1957-1960 compared to only twelve downtown. (NYT 1 5 1958, p. R1) The demand for office space in midtown’s recent buildings was so strong that Peter B. Ruffin was able to rent all the office space himself, thereby saving two million dollars in brokers’ fees.

A rendering published in July of 1953 (NYT 7 23 1953, pp. 1, 19) showed an early design by John Peterkin who had been working with Galbreath and the Goelets for a decade. By then, Peterkin was associated with Harrison & Abramovitz, designers in a more fashionable mode, that of the International Modern Movement evident in their work at the United Nations. Peterkin’s own first design showed a brick-faced building as enormous as the present one but with some differences. The present sweeping ‘eyebrow’ entrance had not yet been suggested by Wallace Harrison---who said that he had little else to do with the building – and the massing differed from the final version. In Peterkin’s design, the setbacks were to be landscaped like some of the roofs at Rockefeller Center, where Harrison had worked for over twenty years, and at least one setback in the final building did have planting. Another setback would have had a glass-walled pavilion.

By the following year, revisions were underway, and the building was renamed Socony-Mobil. Peterkin’s firm produced thousands of blueprints, but Harrison & Abramovitz provided the final design of the building. Important collaborators with the architects were Turner Construction Company, which relocated its offices to the building, and Edwards & Hiorth, structural engineers. The skyscraper has an embossed stainless-steel façade covering an H-shaped plan created by thirteen-story projections before the rest of the building rises to its forty-five-story height that includes three mechanical floors. Like other tall buildings of the time, it had a broad base and a thick tower, resulting from negotiation between the zoning regulations requiring setbacks and the desire of companies to have large and uniform floorplates once air-conditioning and fluorescent lights made bulky buildings possible.

(For the ability of air-conditioning and cool lights to overcome the former need for desks to be less than thirty feet from a window, see Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, 2nd rev ed., Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984, chapters 10 and 11)

The steel-covered floors surmount a four-story base with shops. Above them is a surface largely of dark blue glass that surrounds office windows, the curved entrance arch, and a rectangular entrance to the subway that maintained a pre-existing amenity.

(Fig 7a. Socony-Mobil Building view from east Photo: Author, Sept. 2025. Fig. 7b., lower floors. Photo: Author, August 2025.)

The impetus for using metal came perhaps from the architects; they had designed the Alcoa building in Pittsburgh with the company’s own aluminum for the exterior. It is also possible that the investors wanted to hire architects who had experience with metal facades, as Peterkin had not. The Galbreath Company had connections to U.S. Steel which wanted to advertise its 20-gauge type 302 steel and was willing to absorb the cost difference between steel and the cheaper aluminum. Metal facades, being thin and lighter in weight than brick, increased usable interior space. If designed with suitable projections, the metal panels could be stiffened to prevent bending and could also be washed clean by wind and rain; the first exterior cleaning occurred only in 1995. The patterns stamped on the panels also break up sunlight so that it doesn’t beam by reflection into nearby buildings. It was eventually discovered that the steel surface cracked, but repairs have been made.

The lobby typified Harrison’s taste of the 1950s for geometric forms, smooth book-matched marble walls, open spaces, and sparse furniture with lighting integrated with the ceiling here and upstairs. The offices upstairs were outfitted with clean-lined metal furniture in the pale colors preferred at the time, and with dropped ceilings that had integrated lighting fixtures. The Carrier Corporation designed a climate system that eliminated the need for radiators, controlling individual offices by thermostats that were becoming expected features of new office buildings. At street level (higher on Forty-second than on Third Avenue) was a spacious lobby with a stainless-steel ceiling held on rectangular marble-clad columns, and thirty-two electronic elevators that were becoming expected in new office towers.

When it was finished, the building had the world’s largest air-conditioned interior, but the single-pane windows could pivot open, and during storms could withstand heavy wind gusts. There was an enormous space on the second floor, as well as locations for dining. Executives lunched at the Pinnacle Club on a high floor, and there were dining facilities as well as kitchens in some offices. In these years, other prestigious recent office towers had lunch clubs: Pan Am, RCA, Chrysler, Time & Life. Lower-paid employees could eat in a vast cafeteria operated by the Brass Rail restaurant chain. Its seven thousand square feet accommodated 3500 people in three shifts between ll:30 AM and 2 PM. The concourse level also had a lounge of four thousand square feet; this and the cafeteria were designed by J. Gordon Carr. Well below that, the sub-basement had twenty thousand square feet of storage space Although the building had a mixed critical reception upon its opening, and can hardly be called graceful, it had needed facilities. It is a stabilizing element on Forty-second Street, and is unusual, though not unique, for its facing in steel, with some structural blue glass at the base.

(Landmarks Preservation Commission, February 25, 2003, Designation list 341 LP-2117 which consistently misspells the name of Max Abramovitz. NYT 7 23 1953, pp.1, 19; 1 16 1955, p. R5; John A. Bradley, “Stainless Panels Reflect Progress,” 5 8 1955, pp. R1, R5; 5 20 1956, pp. R1, R12; 8 19 1956, pp. 272, 273. 275 including construction photographs, 276-278 on electrical installations, and on tenants; 10 4 1956, p. 52; 11 2 1958, p. R8; 3 2 2003, XI, p. 1; 5 26, 2005, p. F3; Architectural Forum 103 #11, Nov. 1956, p. 157; Newhouse, Wallace K. Harrison, pp. 150-151; For Ruffin, The New Yorker, May 19, 1956 p. 23 ff. See also http://in-arch.net/NYC/nyc3.html; Lewis Mumford, “The Sky Line,” The New Yorker, Feb. 4, 1956, p. 82 ff.; C. Gray, “Streetscapes: Socony-Mobil Building,” NYT 10 8 1995, p. R7)

The promise of further improvement following the demolition of the Third Avenue El led Walter P. Chrysler to buy a large lot at the east end of the block between Lexington and Third and commission a thirty-two-story office building there. Perhaps impressed by the successful design by Reinhard & Hofmeister for the automobile showroom, he hired these architects and their new partner, long-time associate John A. Walquist, to design what became known as the Chrysler Building East and later as the Kent Building. Guy B. Panero was the consulting engineer, Edwards & Hiorth the structural engineers, and Turner Construction Company the general contractor.

(Fig. 8. Wurts Bros., Chrysler Building and Chrysler Building East (later Kent Building and Calyon Building). Reinhard, Hofmeister & Walquist, 1952. Commodore Hotel at far left. Photo: Museum of the City of New York, 20107.1.10005, dated Oct. 21, 1954.)

Chrysler East had little in common with its namesake other than a pale surface of the same bricks, and adherence to zoning rules. While the original building was a showpiece with embellishments, the follower looked simply like the zoning-ruled space container that it was. Between the dark granite base with ground floor shops and the summit with its mechanical floors marked by vertical strips was a monotonous design of white brick and identical windows, relieved only by the occasional mandated setback. An underground corridor connected the building to the earlier skyscraper, barely justifying the connection that its name implied. It is easy to think that Chrysler wanted to spend as little as possible on the new building, expecting that a new building associated with the earlier one would draw tenants. A more charitable view proposes that he did not want his new building to compete visually with the older one.

(NYT 11 16 1949, p. 52; 11 24, 1949, p. 59; 6 20, 1950, pp. 42, 188; 9 2 1951, p. 125 https://wikimapia.org/2412286/Chrysler-East accessed 4 1 2024)

In October 1953, William Zeckendorf consolidated his holdings on the block by buying both the Chrysler Building and the Chrysler Building East, having bought all the stock of the Walter P. Chrysler Building Corporation. He added air-conditioning to make the older building competitive with newer ones. The architectural work was done by Rene Brugnoni and Rudolf C.P. Boehler, assisted by W. R. Cosentini & Associates, consulting engineers, and the general contractor, Turner Construction Company. (NYT 5 25 1953, p. 1; 6 27 1954, p. R1) The next spring brought news that Webb & Knapp, Zeckendorf’s firm, working with an associate, had bought 153 and 155-157 East from long-time family owners. This gave the investors control of the block between Lexington and Third Avenues. (NYT 3 10 1955, p. 47) In the following year, newly installed “invisible” windows in the Chrysler showroom experienced cracks that no one could explain but repairs were made, and the room remained an attraction. (Meyer Berger, “About New York,” NYT 1 23 1956, p. 19). In 1957, Zeckendorf sold the Chrysler buildings to the Prentice Development Corporation, investors. By 1960, the building was in the hands of the Goldman and DiLorenzo firm, which continued Zeckendorf’s indifference to maintenance of anything but the façade and lobby--- the part that the public sees

(NYT 7 26, 1957, p. l; 12 31 1957, p. 36. These investors had bought the Lincoln Building, see 3 14 1954, p. R1, which was given additional floors by the division of a high mezzanine on the fifty-third floor; Wechsler & Schimenti were the architects. There was a Chrysler service center at 570 West in 1958: NYT 2 8 1958, p. 2. For a mostly accurate history of the Chrysler Building and its postwar history, see David Michaelis, “77 Stories: The Secret Life of a Skyscraper,” Manhattan, Inc. vol.3 #6, June 1986, pp. 105-132.)

One of the popular businesses housed nearby at 147 East was the Commodore Music Shop, specialists in jazz records. (NYT 10 31 1958, p 31)

Joseph Durst, who had bought the Bartholomew at 205 East in 1944, bought the lot at 200 East, across Third Avenue from the Socony-Mobil Building. That his sites had been home to a house painter and a waiter in the late nineteenth century was hard to discern by the 1950s. (NYT 5 29 1891, p. 8) In 1958, Durst erected a twenty-nine-story office building at 200 East, completed in 1959 and known for a long time as the Lorillard Building from its prime tenant, a tobacco company.

(Fig. 9. 200 East, known as the Lorillard Building. Emery Roth & Sons. 1958. Photo: Office for Metropolitan History, courtesy Christopher Gray.)

Emery Roth & Sons provided the design---a massive building of 250,000 square feet, with setbacks and a tower, apparently designed to extract the maximum square footage allowed under the zoning regulations. Wreckers were to start demolishing the existing old buildings but announced a delay until after New Year’s Eve for the sake of the Fitzsimmons and the Central bars there.

The entire visible surface was covered by white-framed squares of alternating medium and dark blue glass, except for the shops at street level and the top of the tower that contained mechanical floors. The glass curtain wall was innovative for East Forty-second Street. The Diesel Construction Company announced that it would fasten the steel frame with a noiseless bolting system instead of using riveting; newly developed hand-held pneumatic nail and rivet drivers were noisy on other sites. The building might have been larger except that a luncheonette owner in a five-story building next door refused to sell his long lease to the Dursts. (NYT 8 21 1950, p. 2; 8 3 1956, p. 27; 12 17 1956, p. 54; 8 3 1958, pp. R1, R6.) The old building with its arched windows and fire escape is still there, but its cornice is missing because the city required safety precautions after a falling cornice uptown killed Grace Gold, a Barnard College student in 1979. (NYT5 17 1979, p. B3)

The building code allowed glass and metal curtain walls only on street fronts. Exterior walls facing the lot line-- thus potentially adjacent to other buildings-- had to be of masonry that resisted fire for two hours. Aware that the rear of his building would rise above the neighboring one, Durst commissioned Morris Rosen & Sons, masonry contractors, to create a refined dark blue glazed brick for the east wall. As a new building convenient to Grand Central, the subway, and buses, the Lorillard drew tenants quickly. Several consulates rented space there, as it was also close to the United Nations headquarters; among them were those of Finland, Colombia, and Luxemburg. Of greater interest to the public was the presence until 1991 of a large Automat, the last example built in Manhattan, and a replacement for the smaller one that had ruined the Foltis-Fischer design on part of the site.

(Fig. 10. Horn & Hardart Automat on the Foltis-Fisher cafeteria site. Architect and date uncertain. Photo: The New York Historical, Grumbie Collecton.)

Another attraction was the mural in the Lorillard building’s lobby, by H. Jack Schainen and Alfred Stern. A twenty-seven-foot-long abstract view said to be of the city skyline, called “Noon City,” was distinctive in being made of sand-- secured to the wall, of course.

(NYT 8 1 1958, p. RI with photograph; excellent photograph in color at https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=AwriiEiA8_FnURQSvz0PxQt.;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3BpdnM-?p=H.+Jack+Schainen+artist+%22Noon+City%22&type=fc_A06017E0460_s58_g_e_d_n1000_c999&param1=7&param2=eJwtjstugzAURH%2FFy0Qy5hrbgOMdoXxA1VWv7oISl1g8xUNU%2FfqKKprNSHNGOm14oKP3UgIYpSVyGtGRBADkdE7IqUFH1lrkFGZ0lGkhIRfaCpMjp9ZP6GhfkdNeo6Nh%2Bg19X8dGALscYXxMx8rGjUkQ4NgRxlQ79pPqK6vnufeH%2F%2BrCFhuVCZWyS%2Ffchp6zPnSetb7ppitrnss0%2BFgqI%2BAMW%2Bvvegmvy2m1hpfpvvrlv1tp7takEBVllkRSvlVRUeY6KlRm9D2rKqXKk29OOIFERzKJZP4h7Q2SGyihdfr5B%2FoqUak%3D&hsimp=yhs-4004_19&hspart=fc&ei=UTF-8&fr=yhs-fc-4004_19#id=11&iurl=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.licdn.com%2Fdms%2Fimage%2FC5622AQEXPRydfkT-ug%2Ffeedshareshrink_800%2F0%2F1628792104292%3Fe%3D2147483647%26v%3Dbeta%26t%3DR9BjoQs3KQorrXv3kVDK8WlPIuPXX8e382u2wv548tg&action=click).

A ten-foot-high abstract sculpture in welded bronze called “Windward” by German immigrant Jan Peter Stern was executed in 1961 for placement outside the building, and a metal fountain called “High Noon” inside the door completed the art program. The building itself represented the Durst family as one that could combine an efficient building with civic embellishment.

Office tenants were attracted to the building by a load capacity on the first twelve floors that would carry the heavy computers of the era. The electrical wiring system had an energy-delivering capacity five times that of a pre-war building. Air-conditioning and heat control was sophisticated enough to differentiate between the needs of lower floors that needed warmth and sunny upper floors that might need cooling.

The Durst interests bought the corner site on the north block opposite the Lorillard building but kept a taxpayer there until the mid-1960s in order to preserve light for the windows of the Bartholomew, which they had bought in 1944 and modernized with air-conditioning. The taxpayer’s address is 201 East Forty-second Street and 675 Third Avenue. Its roof held the Bartholomew’s central air-conditioning unit that had formerly been on the older building’s roof where valuable penthouse office space replaced it. (NYT 6 7 1959, pp. R1, R10). But after the zoning rules changed in 1961, Emery Roth & Sons designed a thirty-two-story tower on the taxpayer site, 201 East, again sheathed in glass but slightly less monotonous in design because salient verticals provide enough relief to suggest stability and--compared to the façade of the Lorillard Building-- potential monumentality. The problem of light for the Bartholomew was solved by a small plaza that allows for two windows on the west side of the earlier building, and by a light court between the two buildings.

(Fig. 11. 201 East 42^nd Street, illustration by Rowe Langston c. 1964. Durst Archives, Columbia University www2.archivists.org/groups/business-archives-section/repository-spotlight-the-durst-organization-archives retrieved 7 21 2025 Open access. Fig. 12 201 East 42^nd Street as built. Emery Roth & Sons. 1962 Photo: Author, August 2025)

The plaza and the low five-story elevation on Third Avenue made it possible under the zoning rules to erect a then-fashionable rectangular slab tower for the rest of the building. The protruding verticals and the brown color suggest that the Roth firm was inspired by the Seagram Building’s design, albeit with duller results. The projection on Third Avenue came about either because of specific site restrictions or, less likely, as an echo of the low additions to the rear of the Seagram Building. (NYT 6 7 1959, pp. R1, R10)

Joel Schenker, also busy as a theatrical producer, (NYT 10 21 1956, p. 297) was the builder of 235 East, employing Pomerance & Breines at first and then replacing them with Emery Roth & Sons.

(Fig. 13. 235 East 42^nd Street, Pfizer headquarters, 1961 including 219 East adjacent at the west side. Emery Roth & Sons. Photo: Author, August 2025)

The new building, extending 224 feet on Forty-second Street and 100 on Second Avenue, replaced four commercial buildings and an apartment house. Factories, a drainage company, and some buildings that had apartments above shops had occupied the site in previous decades. Early in the planning-- when the architects presented a different exterior design from the one executed-- the investor secured the Pfizer pharmaceutical company as the lead tenant. The thirty-two-story building became known as Pfizer’s world headquarters when it opened in 1961. By that time, ownership had passed to Harry B. Helmsley, who a decade afterward also bought Tudor City. The adjacent building to the west, American Express at 219 East, was later added to the Pfizer holdings and re-clad when the pharmaceutical company grew larger and probably then gave up space it had rented in the News building and elsewhere in the neighborhood. (NYT 5 19 2004, p. C9.)

A tall tower culminates the setback Pfizer Building of 1960-61 It is framed in metal with glass to keep the weather out. Before moving into this building, Pfizer had been occupying several floors across the street at 800 Second Avenue, having learned there what its employees needed. It used the consultation services of Leonard-Colangelo and Peters for the interior arrangement of its new premises. Diesel Construction Company was the building contractor. (NYT 10 12 1956, p. 49 with early rendering; 3 3 1959, p. 55; 6 5 1959, p. 41), Before the onset of the pandemic that began in late 2019 -- mitigated by its own vaccine-- Pfizer negotiated a sale to investors, finally to David Werner and Metro Loft Management. Preliminary renderings of its replacement were published in 2018, but new drawings led to plans for condominium residences in 2024, after Pfizer relocated to Hudson Yards in 2023. (https://www.cityrealty.com/nyc/market-insight/features/future-nyc/first-rendering accessed 3 6 22.) Late in its occupancy of the Forty-second Street premises, Pfizer displayed posters about health in the lobby although earlier, the company had commissioned works of art there. Irregular forms in stained glass and mosaic, related to the cancers and HIV infections treated by the company’s drugs, were designed for this location by Brian Clarke in 1995; these and other works on the exterior commissioned in 2000 were dismantled in 2019 ahead of Pfizer’s move west. One work survived when Pfizer conducted a last-minute rescue: an aluminum mosaic mural by Greek-born artist Nikos Bel-Jon with images of historic figures who had improved medical knowledge.

(https://www.brianclarke.co.uk/work/works/item/284/5. Accessed 3 6 2022. Hixon Design Consultants remodeled the lobby to accommodate the works of art. For the building: NYT 6 5 1959, p. 41; NYT 4 7 1963, pp. R1, R 11)

A block east, at the northeast corner and adjacent to the hospital, tenements at 784 to 804 Second Avenue yielded their place to a pale gray brick-faced building known as 800 Second Avenue.

(Fig.14. 800 Second Avenue, Pomerance and Breines, 1957. Photo: Author 2023. 300 East is at the right of the image.)

In 1953, Urban Housing Associates used an intermediary lawyer to buy the buildings from the Hospital for Special Surgery which had sold its own building to Beth David Hospital—later called Grand Central Hospital. (For the hospital in the 1950s, see NYT 1 10 1953, p. 27; 11 11 1957, p.48; 7 4 1959, p. 8. The investors, joined as the Second Forty-second Street Corporation, had a leasehold from Seaver Realty Company.). All three principals of the investment company were lawyers: Tenzer & Greenblatt and Joel W. Schenker, who invested in several buildings. The demolished tenements had ground floor commercial tenants including a tavern, a dress shop, a watchmaker’s workrooms, a stationery store and a print shop. They indicate the small scale of the existing neighborhood.

800 Second Avenue, with eighteen stories, is nearly two hundred feet high, with three required setbacks arranged symmetrically on each street front. The building is hardly noticeable, except for the fact that although designed in the mid-1950s and opened in 1957, its gray brick surface did not follow the new fashion of cladding the steel structure with glass or metal—perhaps because it was initially meant for apartments. Architectural partners Ralph Pomerance and Simon Breines proposed at first to have 200-foot-long ribbon windows but later reduced those dimensions to more economical lengths.

The Daily News finally built an extension, extending toward Second Avenue, having initiated the idea a decade earlier. Modest five-story buildings had occupied at least part of the site until a parking lot replaced them. (NYT 1 11 1950, p .48; 5 4 1957, p. 33) Wallace K Harrison’s firm was the logical one to engage for the project. Harrison had been associated at Rockefeller Center with Raymond Hood, the original building’s designer, and had been a partner of J. André Fouilhoux, Hood’s surviving partner, when they proposed an addition to the News building in the 1940s. Harrison’s later partnership with Max Abramovitz designed the new project, initiated in 1957 by the president and publisher of the paper, Francis Marion Flynn.

(Fig.15. Daily News annex in foreground, 1957-60. Harrison & Abramovitz. Photo: Municipal Archives, Office of the Mayor (Robert F. Wagner). 1961.RECOO17_04_005_0260-29)

Turner Construction Company erected a treatment, largely Abramovitz’s, that respected the vertical emphasis of the original building, and echoed its colorful brick spandrels, but the result, while complementary, is of its own generation. The bays have thinner proportions, as do the columns which have a more rapid rhythm, and the windows are wider, so that even with respect paid to the earlier design, the later one represents the aesthetic of smaller-scale elements and thin verticality that can be discerned on the contemporary fat setback buildings nearby that are clad in thin glass and steel.

The architects altered the lobby, integrating formerly separate spaces used for the rotunda, two stores, and new space on the addition’s ground floor. They removed a curved wall, scientific showcases, and grilles to provide a broad and connected entrance area. They installed new terrazzo floors where the originals had not reached or were damaged, added acoustical tile ceilings, modified the elevator lobby, added structural glass steps under the globe, and replaced most of the original scientific displays with new ones. J. Henry Weber was in charge of the meteorological changes in 1960; and Franklyn Hansen and Robert Grigg of the Hammond map company, working with Richard Edes Harrison, a consultant cartographer, modified elements on the globe and floor in 1967. (Landmarks Preservation Commission report March 10, 1998, Designation List 290 LP 1982, pp. 6-9 by Anthony Robins. Newhouse op. cit., p 321) Many former visitors regretted the changes that diminished the scientific content.

The News buildings stood at one end of a row of fifty-one London plane trees planted between Second Avenue and Times Square in memory of Seymour Berkson, publisher of the Journal-American newspaper. They are now gone, like the publication itself.

(NYT 12 15 1959, p. 41. The Journal-American ended production in 1966.)

Beyond the alterations made to Tudor City, there were cosmetic improvements to the east end of the street and the East River Drive. They included new paving, uniform bright mercury-vapor lights, and a safety barrier installed in 1950-1951. A new ramp connected the Drive to First Avenue at the United Nations site. (NYT 6 13 1950, p. 18; 9 18 1951, p. 25) The City built the uninviting bare playground in 1952 between Tudor City and the river and named it for Robert Moses. (Chap. 8. Fig. 18) The United Nations Secretary General, Trygve Lie, finished fitting up 405 East for conferences, committee rooms, council chambers, a press room, and a library. He also strongly requested that natural gas be used in the nearby generating plant for Consolidated Edison from which filthy coal-fired effluent was injuring the workers and hindering construction for the organization. (NYT 6 25 1950 p. 12; 8 5 1950, p. 17; 8 8 1950, p. 22; 2 15 1952, p. 24).

Transportation officials concerned themselves with public safety, particularly for pedestrians. New Walk/Don’t Walk signals were intended to reduce ubiquitous jaywalking; (NYT 1 5 1959, p. 31; 6 6 1959, p. 29; 6 16 1959, p. 28; 12 4 1959, p. 33; 12. 14 1959, p. 54) Traffic and transportation problems received a multitude of solutions, many of them small and temporary. At the Times Square station, where congestion caused problems for those who wanted to change train lines or reach the shuttle, a loudspeaker announced the track from which the next shuttle would leave, but this proved unnecessary. (NYT 1 25 1950, pp. 1, 18) Two years later, inspectors found that one reason for the jam-packed shuttles was that operators were skipping between twelve and fifteen runs per day, especially at rush hour. (NYT 10 28 1953, p. 1)

In June 1953, the New York City Transit Authority was created and took charge of both subway trains and buses; the Authority was absorbed into the Metropolitan Transit Authority that was created in 1967. Transit officials exposed ten thousand square feet of track bed in the passageway from the shuttle to the Lexington Avenue line that had been the subway link from the west side in the original plan. The purpose was to provide space for shops that would pay rent to the Rapid Transit fund. The first to open was Barton’s Bonbonniere, part of a chain of confectioneries.

A new lower-level platform for travelers from Queens opened in summer, 1952, fifteen feet below the existing main platform level. This had existed in rough form but was now improved and put into service to serve rush-hour patrons and to smooth the way for those who changed from one line to another. (NYT 8 23 1952, p. 15) Some of the commuters might have bought their reading matter from Hotaling’s long-lived international newspaper store at the north end of the Times Building.

Riders welcomed the proposal by the Board of Transportation’s engineers to add a sloping tunnel 160 feet long for escalators from the Queens line. Given the extraordinarily narrow passageway for it, the problem was to remove the bedrock there without disturbing the Chanin Building, a subway line, and two pedestrian ramps that all lay within ten feet of the proposed tunnel walls. Spencer White & Prentis, contractors, working under Daniel Barrows, project manager, achieved this feat. When skeptics thought that blasting work and then fitting the escalator tunnel between existing structures would be impossible, Barrows countered with the justified boast that he had thrown a bridge over a river in Normandy during the Second World War. The project was finished in 1954, when shiny blue stainless-steel escalators, lit by fluorescent light, began to operate. (NYT 8 14 1950, p. 22; 2 15 1953, p. 23 for diagram; 8 10 1954, p. 41)

Officials tried instituting traffic lanes in 1956 to guide passengers across the east-west mezzanine to the shuttle and to the subway platforms. There were specific up and down staircases at the time, and a Directomat machine on the mezzanine that played Bach’s “Sleepers, Awake” while people received paper messages with directions to their destinations. When a vending machine at a Thirty-fourth Street station obscured the plaque to the memory of Colonel John R. Slattery, deputy chief engineer for the Board of Transportation from 1925 to 1932, it was moved to the mezzanine at Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue.

(NYT 6 5 1956, p. 37; 7 5 1956, p. 27. Older readers may remember the wicker subway seats, still used in 1950. For the Slattery plaque: 9 14 1950, p. 93)

In the same year, the Transportation Authority proposed to build a lower-level reserve train platform at Grand Central similar to one that had been built at the Eighth Avenue line’s Forty-second Street station, so that additional trains could be deployed at rush hours. (NYT 1 18 1954, p. 1) The west side station also became the model for adding new shops to subway stations. It welcomed an air-conditioned ice cream and cake shop in 1950--the year when new cars and clickless turnstiles were installed--- and later, an amusement site with a juke box that played classical music, operatic arias, and jazz by Count Basie. Adjacent attractions included a mechanical bear and a pinball machine. Other shops were to have pastel colors, some chromium details and fluorescent lighting. This was part of a takeover by the ANC Corporation of subway-level shops that were formerly operated by the Interborough News Corporation. (NYT 4 3 1950, p. 22; 5 11 1950, p. 52; 7 15 1954, p. 26)

Architectural projects on Forty-second Street abated gradually during the 1960s and well into the 1970s, as building activity moved to less expensive and underdeveloped sites along the avenues where Els had run, Building did continue but the heyday of large-scale development on the east side was over, as there were few sites left on which to build anew. Nevertheless, there were two catalysts for change in the 1960s: a comprehensive zoning revision and the creation of the Landmarks Preservation Commission.