Chapter 10 The 1960s

The 1960s saw the usual water main breaks, robberies, blood donation drives, fires, and occasional murders along Forty-second Street and the continued degradation of the blocks between Sixth and Eighth Avenues, especially west of Seventh. Less usual was the fact that in this decade, the city’s entire economy began to sink. It gradually became visible in the building industry after the postwar boom. (NYT 2 11 l965, p.5) At the same time, New York City required more revenue to support new needs including more vigorous policing of certain areas, including West Forty-second Street. An entire squad of plainclothes policemen was replaced, having failed to enforce laws prohibiting prostitution and gambling there. Transferring them was easier than investigating possible bribery of the men in blue. (NYT 10 22 1961, p. 77)

At least for a while, though, the decade saw further construction of glass-faced high-rise office buildings in the midtown district. Then there was Lincoln Center and its urban renewal project, which benefited primarily people rich enough to go there or to build or live in apartment houses nearby. The same classes hailed the opening of several architecturally distinctive terminals at John F. Kennedy Airport that could be modified to accommodate jet planes. Less visibly at first, artists moved into empty manufacturing lofts in SoHo, while new Federally subsidized low-income housing projects arose to generally diminishing standards before President Richard Nixon ended the entire program early in the following decade.

A new geologic map was scheduled for delivery in 1961, recording a previously unknown underground stream at Forty-second Street near Third Avenue which required some building plan alterations. The map prevented surprises that affected the value of sites and their construction costs. Builders were required to do test bores every 2500 square feet on a building site and file an affidavit with the Buildings Department to make sure that the structure’s foundations were safe, so an accurate map was essential for this purpose. (NYT 7 6 1961, pp. 1,6) Improved technology provided concrete pumps that replaced chutes and hoppers. Booms on the pumps could reach greater heights using cranes and could pour concrete into specific locations. A new Danish construction crane with a long-projecting rotating arm simplified building demolition and was used to destroy the Manhattan Hotel in 1962 (NYT 3 28 1962, p. 223). A revised building code prepared in 1965 was envisioned as cutting costs (NYT 3 15 1964, p. VIII1; 7 19 1964, pp.VIIl4; 7 9 1965, pp. 1, 12; 7 28 1972, p. R10), and enhancing fire safety, the last major revision having been done in 1937. Among the newer procedures would be folded plate and shell spans, cable-supported structures, and prestressed concrete (NYT 8 9 1964, p. VIII l; 7 14 1964, pp. VIII1,4) although bricklayers lamented the inroads of other building materials (NYT 4 5 1964, p. 61). Concrete gradually became confirmed as the preferred material for apartment houses, steel for office buildings. Factors of cost, the number of columns and spacing between them, the weight of floors and the ease of opening cavities within them, the timing of preparatory work, and other factors including extra height needed for floors made of steel helped to determine the materials for any building.

(Leah Ray. "Shanghai Tower Construction Update." Gensler On Cities. July 2010. https://www.gensleron.com/cities/2010/7/15/shanghai-tower-construction-update.html accessed 3 25 2019; https://skyscraper.org/hoh/?skip2=7-09; “Office Buildings,” Architectural Record 141 #7, June 1967, pp. 171-186. Construction costs rose in general, which Brian Bowen attributed to salary demands by unionized workers; lecture, Skyscraper Museum, Nov. 23, 2021. Mark McCain, “Commercial Property: The Variables That Dictate the Kind of Construction,” NYT 12 18 1988, p. X9).

Most important for the city’s future, a greatly amended Zoning Resolution was approved in 1961. It affected few buildings immediately but altered office building design especially after it came into full force in 1965. Before that, a rush of construction was due to entrepreneurs who found the old rules more generous and who filed plans before the new rules came into effect.

(NYT 4 21 1961, p. R1; there was a three-year grace period included, See also evaluation by Ada Louise Huxtable, and “Building Code Highlights,” NYT 7 9 1965, p. 12; 7 18 1965, p. VIII1. The code has been repeatedly amended.)

The new provisions eliminated the setbacks mandated in 1916, replacing them with Floor Area Ratios, called FAR, which related the maximum allowable floor space to a multiple of the lot size. In the most desirable business zones, a building could rise fifteen stories over its entire lot, but more artistic and practical designs would result from adding height in exchange for ground-level open space. In theory, a new structure could rise to twice fifteen stories if half the site were left open. Variations in design and extra height might be gained by providing amenities such as new subway entrances or plazas, although some of the latter were north-facing and left bare if the builders were simply greedy. Later, amended rules gave space bonuses if the plazas contained trees, seats, water features, food service or other public benefits and even free toilets if the plazas were inside a lobby and kept open until l AM. In 1967, in an attempt to save theater buildings, the city designated a zone for theaters from Sixth to Eighth Avenues. Unused air rights could be transferred to adjacent sites, increasing the potential size of an office building or hotel in the zone. The rule had little immediate effect but proved useful later when the area was redeveloped.

Following the unpopular but economically understandable demolition of the Beaux-Arts Pennsylvania Railroad Station in 1963, the City responded to public outcries by establishing the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1965. Its powers included the ability to delay demolition of designated buildings pending investigation of the owner’s economic and other reasons for proposing a building’s destruction. The Commission could also prevent changes to the designated portions---usually the exteriors---if it considered the alterations incompatible with the original design. At the end of the decade, the City Planning Commission let owners of landmarks transfer unused development rights along a chain of properties under the same ownership, and allowed owners to sell portions of the development rights to various buyers. It also ended a 30 percent limit to floor space that a receiving lot could add upon obtaining transferred development rights in specific high-density districts. (Reichl, Reconstructing Times Square, p. 30.) This had later consequences for Forty-second Street because developers after 2000 could build and plan gigantic buildings flanking Grand Central, using the Terminal’s air rights.

Traffic conditions either improved or did not become worse during the years between 1962 and 1968, thanks to the work of Henry Barnes, traffic commissioner. Before his sudden death from a heart attack, he had municipal parking garages built, and ordered parking meters installed. His achievements included four-way pedestrian crossings known as the Barnes Dance, dedicated bus lanes, coordinated traffic lights, completion of plans for one-way avenues, and the painting of traffic signals in brighter, more visible colors. The test of the pedestrian crossing system was conducted at Vanderbilt Avenue and Forty-second Street for a week in January 1962 and proposed for the Fifth and Madison Avenue intersections in March. Forty-second Street would probably have been even more choked with traffic had it not been for his work.

(NYT 9 17 1968, p.1 ff.; 1 2, 1962, pp. 1, 16; 1 27 1962, p. 23; 3 26 1962, p. 33).

In 1966, the city entertained hopes for the mayoral administration of John V. Lindsay who took over the office from Robert A. Wagner. The new mayor engaged energetic architects to work in an urban design group on new visions for the city. Better architecture and a catalogue of the city’s infrastructure were on its agenda. The mayor created a Special Theater District, in which builders could build twenty percent more than normally allowable for tall buildings if they included theaters, but few were built. (Reichl, op.cit., p. 58; NYT 6 4 1967, p. VIII14; 10 11 1968, p. 50). He even installed some bicycle lanes. These efforts led to publications more than to specific permanent improvements on Forty-second Street, but until the city experienced a calamitous fiscal crisis in the following decade, the architectural and planning professions were invigorated. Improvement paled, however, in comparison to the effects of a twelve-day transit strike at the start of Lindsay’s mayoralty, followed later with strikes by teachers and sanitation workers. They damaged the city budget, public morale, and Lindsay’s standing.

The entire subway system was under-funded because of political resistance to raising the fare to cover rising costs. The original nickel fare had endured until mid-1948 and had not risen since then enough to provide proper maintenance, amenity, salaries, or adequate new equipment. The one positive result of the transit strike was a temporary drop in crime when malefactors might not want to wait long for trains that might hinder their own quick escapes. Subway patronage was reduced as many middle-class taxpayers continued to move to suburbs. Corporations moved, too, to expand or to avoid urban taxes and social problems. Rumor had it that some companies moved out of town to avoid hiring city-dwelling staff who were increasingly other than White or, after 1965, were immigrants from places previously seldom represented in the city.

Suburbanization made room in the city’s decaying apartment stock for southern Black migrants and emigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America. The Immigration Act of 1965 opened the country to—among others-- Russian Jews fleeing discrimination, and to Asians who had earlier been nearly excluded from the United States. These demographic changes, however, coincided with the reduction of factory employment, especially in the garment trades, so that earlier means of economic advancement for poorly-educated immigrants were now closed. Other industries also saw a decline, because much shipping and longshore work moved to deep-water berths in New Jersey when containerization became the norm after 1965. The United States Navy decommissioned the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1966. Abandonment of the west side docks affected Forty-second Street, leaving empty sites there and on nearby streets where earlier businesses had catered to the needs of the shipping industry and its workers. A municipal plan of 1962 to replace dock-related buildings with a convention center that reached Forty-second Street was revised so that the present Jacob K. Javits Center occupied only the Thirty-fourth to Thirty-eighth Street riverfront.

Forty-second Street retained its position as a locus for public actions. In 1960, for instance, civil rights advocates, collaborating with the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union picketed Woolworth’s at 33 West, among other locations, to protest the chain’s segregated lunch counters in the south. (NYT 3 24 1960, p. 8) Merchants banded together to hire guards to patrol arcades in private buildings that led to the subway stations. Legal authorities raided the offices of companies that distributed lewd magazines, although that cleanup was only temporary. At least briefly, there were increased summonses for littering and overstuffed trash bins, and in 1961 there was even a brief campaign of mass ticketing for jaywalking. (NYT 6 8 1961, p 23; 6 13 1961, p. 26)

Against this background, an examination of Forty-second Street from west to east during the turbulent 1960s provides a panorama, or perhaps a kaleidoscope, of developments.

On the far west side, civic leaders started to refer to the area of Forty-second Street west of Eighth Avenue as Clinton instead of the more familiar Hell’s Kitchen, in order to raise its reputation and safeguard what was left of real estate value there. (NYT 11 15 2020, p.RE11) In December 1965, the Circle Line, with the help of the City, completed a two-story concrete and glass building containing offices, loading berths, and parking spaces at Pier 83

(Fig. 1. Circle Line Building. Miles A. Gordon, architect, 1966. Edward J. Smith, engineer. Photo: author 2023)

Above a rectilinear ground floor, a circular crown with the company’s name and an image of the Statue of Liberty make the building’s purpose obvious to anyone approaching it. A central corridor leads to ticket windows and the water. The new building revealed the success of the excursion enterprise by replacing a smaller building with a boat-shaped upper story resting on a small partly curved two-story base made of steel and glass. The architect for the new building was a municipal employee, Miles A. Gordon, working with Edward J. Smith, engineer, and George E. Minton, director of planning, among others. Mayor. Lindsay attended the opening ceremony in 1966.

Not far away, in 1962, six coal gas tanks were buried at a gas station on the northwest corner of Eleventh Avenue and Forty-second Street. Six more were buried at another gas station on the north side of the street at Twelfth Avenue, with eight more buried on the south side of the street. This improvement made it possible for developers to imagine buildings that would have appealing views, although the principal new tenant on the westernmost block was the Mack International Motor Truck Corporation at 625 West, which rented space in 1969.

In May 1960 came an announcement about the redevelopment of one parking lot, a site bought for a million dollars from North River Properties. A hotel and garage would be built at Twelfth Avenue and Forty-second Street to the design of Morris Lapidus, Kornbluth, Harle & Liebman.

(Fig. 2. Former Sheraton Motor Inn, Morris Lapidus, 1962, now Consulate General of China, with One River Place and Silver Towers at right, other recent rentals and condominiums behind the Consulate Building. View to the east from 12th Ave. Photo: Author, 2023)

There had been little hotel building anywhere in Manhattan since the Waldorf-Astoria rose in 1931, and only one other, on West Fifty-second Street, was then in the works. Louis J. Glickman, a prominent real estate investor who also owned the Commodore Hotel at the time, headed the investment on the Forty-second Street site. He became his own contractor for a reinforced concrete hotel, using his firm’s construction division. Reinforced concrete construction expanded in this decade, as did—to quote the Skyscraper Museum’s exhibition information in 2025---“improvement in concrete mixes, efficient building techniques…flat plate construction, tube structures, and composite concrete-and-steel design.”

Gliickman expected to attract a middle-class clientele of tourists, salesmen, and convention-goers who would find the location easily accessible by car from the Lincoln Tunnel. Guests would be able to drive into a four-story-and-basement limestone-clad garage holding three hundred automobiles, and place their luggage on an escalator that led to elevators to the rooms. Families would be glad to have clothes washers and dryers on each floor. Many guests would appreciate the ice cube machines, an amenity not yet seen everywhere. Everyone would use the free television, radio, and coffee maker in their rooms.

Lapidus designed pillars supporting an L-shaped tower on two sides of the garage roof, an arrangement perhaps inspired by the terrace used for recreation at Lever House. This design freed the garage roof for a glass-walled and domed pavilion containing a revolving cocktail lounge and a “gourmet” restaurant. In the tower, a sawtooth room configuration at 45-degree angles gave each of the 450 guest rooms a view of the Hudson River and the New Jersey Palisades. A list in the lobby of incoming ships helped guests to identify famous vessels as they arrived and departed. Lapidus had already used a similar room configuration for his popular beachfront hotels in Miami Beach where views were important for attracting business. Louis Glickman opined that air-conditioning had made windows less important for ventilation than as features of a design.

Guests reached the garage-top swimming pool in elevators adorned with nautical designs. The café had revolving benches that let everyone enjoy river views. For guests with traditional tastes, there was the Crown Restaurant with statues and columns evoking something vaguely Elizabethan, and harpists providing soft music. The Sheraton hotel corporation operated the hotel after it opened in 1962, but it closed in the next decade, perhaps a victim of competition. It stood empty for two years but then, much remodeled and enclosed for security, it became the Chinese Consulate.

(“Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, July 21, 1962, pp. 18-19; NYT 2 4 1962, p. 217; 7 15 1962, p. 239; https://www.nysun accessed 1/10/2021. Alice T. Friedman, American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2019. Progressive Architecture 43, Sept. 1962, p.68. Architectural Record 13 Oct 1962, p 13. Architectural Forum 112, June 1960, p 11. For other motor hotels, see “West Side Gets Motor Hotels as First Manhattan Landfall,” NYT 8 7 1960, pp. R1, R 6)

A Greek diner, still there at 647 West, occupies a four- story stuccoed building erected as part of a vanished late nineteenth century row near the far west end of the street. The later owner, Louis Gritsipis, achieved some celebrity for being the tenacious Little Guy holdout against an apartment developer who found the four-story tenement building visually detrimental to an adjacent luxurious high-rise.

(Fig. 3a. Louis Gritsipis’ restaurant and building, dwarfed by the former Sheraton Motor Inn (left) and the Sky apartments (right). A fragment of Silver Towers is at right. Photo: Author 2023. Fig. 3b. Closeup of the restaurant’s façade, painted white and blue for the colors of the Greek flag. Photo: Author, 2025.)

(www.nytimes.com/.../american-dreamer-on-42nd-street-who-fled-from-a-deal.html ; copied with minor variations in The Greek USA Reporter by Ioanna Zikakou 11 27 2013; http://usa.greekreporter.com/2013/11/27/a-greek-american-who-said-no-to-10-million-dollars/ both accessed 2 11 2017)

Smaller transactions occurred near Eleventh Avenue where the Railway Express Company and transportation firms held property. FedEx still occupies a corner site, 560 West, with a parking lot for its trucks to the east of the building. Their buildings were simply utilitarian. Among the neighbors were several more tourist hotels. Motel City, probably

(Fig. 4. FedEx building at 560 West, 1940; seen toward the east from 11th Avenue. Trees grow in its truck parking lot farther east. Photo: Author, 2023.)

intended for guests less affluent than those at the Sheraton, was being planned on two sites on Forty-second Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, and the River View motor hotel was supposed to rise on Tenth Avenue on the north side of Forty-second Street with five floors of parking under 450 rooms and an outdoor rooftop pool. (NYT 10 30 1960, p. X 23) In 1963, the five-story Travel Inn, around 1970 called TravelLodge, was completed at 515 West in anticipation of tourists coming to the 1964 World’s Fair. The neighborhood’s other features were primarily parking lots and decaying industrial buildings, so convenience rather than a beautiful view was likely to attract visitors. The TravelLodge survived into the 2020s, offering 160 rooms (although postcards of it listed more), air-conditioning, a swimming pool, and much later, a family-friendly microwave in each room.

(NYT 11 17 1963, pp. R1, R14; other motor hotels were located near the West end of 11th, and a small one stood between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. https://ny.curbed.com/maps/hells-kitchen-manhattan-new-york-development, updated Oct. 10, 2018, but copyright 2025 by Vox Media, accessed 7 21 2025.)

The Armory remained the home of quartermaster and military transportation companies, a combat unit, and other units that supported troops by providing supplies, creating smoke screens, and operating oil trucks. Reservists were demobilized there in the summer of 1962 when their services in the Berlin airlift crisis were no longer needed; by then, the building had been renamed the Staff Sergeant Vincent Q. Kelly Reserve Center. (NYT 8 2 1962, p. 2) At Ninth Avenue, a building housing an Automat and the United Auto Workers’ Pension Fund was sold to an investor. (NYT 4 4 1960, p. 49)

Across the street, Irving Maidman won praise from civic officials and amenity groups for opening the 199-seat Maidman Playhouse at 416-418 West in 1960, as noted in chapter 9. He remodeled a former bank and apartment building of 1930 into the theater accompanied by a cocktail lounge and a restaurant. The location later housed Playwright’s Horizon. Officials of the West Side Association of Commerce spoke of other improvements in the area, such as the third tube of the Lincoln Tunnel, a heliport at Thirtieth Street, the West Side Airlines Terminal, and farther north, the Coliseum exhibition and convention center, and developments at the Lincoln Center site. The Pix Theatre, formerly a foreign film and revival cinema, then a pornography house, reopened with serious films such as “Rocco and His Brothers,” and advertised its presence with a new marquee and interior furnishings (NYT 6 17 1961, p. 13.) but it ended its days decades later with salacious films again.

Maidman offered theater patrons free parking at the West Side Airlines Terminal’s garage, which was one of his other enterprises, and in 1961 announced two more theaters on the south side of Forty-second Street. (NYT 11 21 1961, p. 46) Again, he collaborated with the versatile cartoon and magazine artist Russell Patterson. The Mermaid would occupy the site of 420 West, with the Midway next door at 422 West. The buildings provided storage space for sets and props, rehearsal rooms, and other auxiliary necessities. By early February of 1960, Maidman had also bought for cash a five-story shop and apartment building at 412 West, intending to create more small theaters with 149 seats each by displacing two stores and sixteen apartments. The anticipated works by Eugene O’Neill and Slawomir Mrozek were of a higher class than those of decaying theaters farther east. In the next month, the same investor displaced a former Woolworth’s variety store from a corner at 588-590 Ninth Avenue abutting a parcel he had bought at 365 West. He intended the site for art films, especially foreign ones, although nothing came of that plan. (NYT 9 3 1961, p. X7). In November, news articles referred to another theater adjacent to the Maidman, to seat only one hundred. Diagonally across the street would be two more, situated on his corner lot. These were not makeshift conversions; the theaters had lobbies, rehearsal rooms, and storage areas for sets and props, just with a smaller capacity than the Broadway theaters that had to pay union wages. Their names all began with M—Mermaid, Midway, Masque and Mainline, the last in an existing four-story building at 442 West that opened in 1963. (NYT 11 21 1961, p. 46) Russell Patterson designed them with bright colors. Maidman apparently anticipated a small theatrical empire near his Airlines Terminal and near the Riviera Congress Motor Inn that he was building nearby at 550 Tenth Avenue between Fortieth and Forty-first Streets. (NYT 11. 27 1960, p. X1) He also announced an apartment house at 361-363 West that remained a proposal. (NYT 5 31 1961, p. 49). In 1962, he bought three lots on Ninth Avenue, expanding his Forty-second Street holdings to eighty-nine feet, with more on Forty-third Street and on the avenue. (NYT 5 11 1962, p. 48)

Maidman’s little empire of live theater split apart soon after its establishment when in 1965 he converted the Playhouse to a cinema. Then from 1968 to 1972 or later it showed adult films. So did the Masque, at 440 West. Nevertheless, the investor had several other properties on the street, including 303 West, part of an L-shaped plot on the northwest corner of Eighth Avenue that had a twelve-story building containing a branch of Chemical Bank, and a parking lot next door. (NYT 4 8 1961, p. 31) He also hoped to build a bank on the southwest corner of Ninth Avenue. (NYT 11 17 1963, pp. R1 R14)

This decade saw the property activity of the more durably successful Durst family of real estate entrepreneurs on the west side, far from their skyscrapers on the east side. During the early 1960s, they obtained a site on the north side of Forty-second Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues.

Some of the properties used as tenements and parking lots had been in the possession of the same families since the 1850s and 1880s. A firm called Speed Park, Inc. with A&P groceries heir Huntington Hartford as president, proposed an eight-story garage for 315 West. It would require only one attendant to watch the elevating mechanism that deposited cars in available space, although it is unclear now that this marvel was ever built. (NYT 10 3 1960, p. 51)

It was the most accessible part of Forty-second Street east and west of the Times tower that languished or decayed—the blocks served by subways between Sixth and Eighth Avenues. From teenagers to retired workers, those searching for entertainment of all kinds or just cheap food could afford the fare to get to this area. In 1962, the stage of the Times Square Theatre became a haberdashery, and the rest of the building was turned into a cinema that showed cowboy movies. (http://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-1920-apollo-and-times-square.html accessed Oct 15, 2021). Volk’s German restaurant closed as patrons lost enthusiasm for its blighted locaation on Eighth Avenue and its later locatiom on Third.

Fig., 5, Volk’s Hotel and Restaurant, Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street. Photo: Roege, The New York Historical. Public domain.)

. The New Amsterdam Theatre planned to have its roof renewed. The building had been used most recently for rehearsals, and was profitable as a cinema, but renovation did little to improve the 200 West block. (NYT 2 4 1960, p. 34; 11 29 1964, p. 65) Switchblades and gravity knives had been banned legally, but a doctor’s letter to the Times asked how the city could enforce the laws against switchblades if they were for sale in several shops on Forty-second Street near Broadway. Public telephones were regularly vandalized. Respectable merchants in the subway arcades, having been injured by the presence of ‘loiterers,’ would not serve unescorted women who were assumed to be prostitutes. Tricksters and vendors regularly fleeced military men on leave. Hubert’s Flea Circus closed at 228-232 West. It had moved earlier to the basement in order to rent space above it to a peep show and the floors upstairs to a male brothel called the Barracks. Diane Arbus mourned the closing with a photographic campaign and wrote a “rapturous obituary” for Hubert’s enterprise. It didn’t help the city’s condition that in 1968, there was a Broadway theater strike for three days, a sanitation strike for nine, and a blizzard in the following winter.

(Gregory Gibson, Hubert’s Freaks, NY, Harcourt, 2009; see also www.jazzageclub.com/venues/the-magnificent-murrays-roman-gardens/ accessed 9 3 2018 and http://observer.com/2010/05/the-disappeared-building/ accessed 9 3 2018 https://books.google.com/books?id=xqbQAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA503&lpg=PA503&dq=%22We+had+our+awe+and+our+shame%22+Diane+Arbus&source=bl&ots=3b8dsninx_&sig=ACfU3U2GcYINP_Mlq6cmrNu0BDQTd84lFg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj1i73Jk43sAhWCl3IEHXHRD5sQ6AEwEHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22We%20had%20our%20awe%20and%20our%20shame%22%20Diane%20Arbus&f=false . Lisette Model also photographed at Hubert’s, see, inter alia, http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/58753/lisette-model-hubert's-freak-museum-and-flea-circus-forty-second-street-new-york-american-about-1945/ http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/58752/lisette-model-percy-pape-living-skeleton-hubert's-freak-museum-and-flea-circus-new-york-american-1945/ NYT 5 1 1960, pp. SM59, 62)

The low-life activity survived new anti-obscenity laws. It survived a proposed clean-up in 1961 (NYT 12 6 1960, pp. 1, 34; 3 23 1961 p. 27) and another in early 1966 because owners were reluctant to sell buildings that earned exceptionally high rents and that demanded little maintenance. A couple named Max and Anne Cohen held mortgages and leases on a number of them; these investors did business under various names starting with An. Irving Maidman was quoted as saying that this was “probably the highest rent area in New York for stores of this [small] size,” because at the time, the yearly rent per shopfront foot was as high as $2000. Owners of theaters showing obscene films could pay up to $32,000 in annual rent and still make a profit. Later in 1966, despite hopes for improvement, the twenty-five-cent peep show was introduced, heralding adult films and erotic merchandise. Movie-goers across the country and indeed, the world, could imagine the Times Square area as home to male prostitution from the Academy-Award winning film, “Midnight Cowboy,” released in 1969.

(NYT 3 26 1966, p. 2; Michael McMenamin “From Dazzling to Dirty and Back Again: A Brief History of Times Square, The Museum of the City of New York” accessed Oct 15, 2017).

Selling rooftop space for advertising signs was also profitable. That is why Maidman and Douglas Leigh, king of illuminated advertisements, obtained the site of the Heidelberg-then-Crossroads Building on the site between Broadway and Seventh Avenue: The lower part was to become an automobile showroom with six glass-fronted floors displaying cars that would be visible from street level. William S. Schary designed it in 1964. The façade would be coordinated by a long metallic oval binding the floors together. A projecting cornice was to be illuminated with short slit lights. It was never built, however. Instead, the owners covered the lower floors with marble to match that of the re-surfaced Times tower.

(http://www.facebook.com/httoups/148115058541857; see also C. Gray, “Streetscapes,” NYT 4 26 1998, p. RE7)

The decay within the bowtie of the ‘square’ intimidated virtuous observers who looked askance at the nearby single-room-occupancy hotels, houses of prostitution, shops selling sexually-oriented merchandise, and increasingly lewd film presentations. The distributors of pornography had offices in several business buildings on the street, which were only occasionally raided by the police. That presumably respectable landlords rented space to these tenants had to do with the high vacancy rate in buildings in the Times Square area, estimated at thirty percent. (NYT 12 6 1960, p. 1). Landlords with empty premises chose not to be choosy.

Parts of the area’s more enjoyable spectacle shut down: They were Douglas Leigh’s most popular creations: the Bond’s Clothing waterfall sign flanked by two figures, the Camel cigarette sign from which puffs of smoke emerged. A large hotel, the Astor, was demolished. Nothing appealing replaced them. Formerly fashionable supper clubs in the area closed—the Copacabana, the Stork Club, the Astor Roof. Even the original Lindy’s delicatessen closed, saddening cheesecake lovers but improving their cholesterol counts. Renewal of individual sites did nothing to halt the downward slide. At the same time that his church was being redecorated, Monsignor McCaffrey of Holy Cross church recalled wholesome musicals and comedians of the past, and lamented the area’s current offerings of only “crime, sex, and horror pictures.” (NYT 8 16 1960, p.60).

While the Port Authority bus terminal became an essential facility for thousands who commuted to work in Manhattan from across the Hudson River, it also became a destination for people who had been freed from the wretched mental hospitals of the era but who had nowhere else to live. People joined them if they had been displaced by gradual gentrification from the west side’s single-room-occupancy hotels. Both groups increased in number as time passed and as new offices and apartment houses gradually replaced the ‘SROs’. Snack bars provided food, passers-by provided some money, and some of the homeless could sleep in the cinemas that showed films of comedy, violence, adventure, and pornography.

No matter who slept there, the terminal had to be enlarged to serve travelers and commuters. The first plans were formed in 1965 for an extension to Forty-second Street on one of Maidman’s sites, with the goal of enlarging the facility by sixty percent. The actual construction awaited completion in the 1980s, so Maidman’s own West Side Airlines Terminal survived during the enlargement’s construction phase. His improved building introduced the first internationally used computerized reservations using the Sabre System, finalized in 1960. but his terminal gradually lost customers to limousine and other services that were more convenient to the homes of people who could afford them. The West Side terminal closed in August 1972 although it was repurposed and survived until it was replaced by the MiMA mixed-use building.

(Emily Carroll, comment 9 7 2019 to https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2014/05/31/the-jet-age-airlines-terminal-on-42nd-street/ for the computer system; NYT 8 11 1972. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/West_Side_Airlines_Terminal

In the late 1970s, as work proceeded on the Port Authority’s building, the Trailways bus system complained to the Interstate Commerce Commission about overcharging by the Port Authority. The system’s officials objected---as passengers did--to poor lighting, inadequate seats for waiting passengers, lack of protection from wandering people, and other matters.

(NYT 3 2 1966, p. 26. The site dimensions included 200 feet on Forty-second Street, lots of almost that length on Eighth Avenue, and lots of about half that length at the west running north-south; 66 John St. ad loc.)

Not everything was miserable. The McGraw-Hill Building housed the one remaining large company on the west side. On a smaller scale, the American Metal Market Company, publisher of a metals industry trade journal, leased a six-story building at 525 West in 1962, in order to move uptown from lower Manhattan. (NYT 11 25 1961, p. 36) Several respectable bookshops flourished in part because of the novelty of high-quality paperbacks, and there was even a large Bookmasters shop in the Times Square area. Benign activities such as the Chess and Checker Club at 210 West, and the Hartnett Music School, and Hector’s Cafeteria in the same building persisted, as did shops that sold men’s hats, shoes, and suits. (NYT 2 16 1960, p. 39). Pizza and hero sandwich shops served people on the go, while corporate cafeterias in new office buildings provided on-site convenience for staff and, for employers, an incentive for employees to return to work immediately after lunch. Arthur Maisel, however, maintained one of his delicatessen restaurants at 140 West catering to what The New Yorker magazine called “the Broadway type” able to afford a one-pound prime steak dinner for $3.50. The type was clearly not one with which the writer identified. (The New Yorker 12 27 1952, p. 14)

Low prices and a wide choice of food had not prevented the rapid decline in the number of public cafeterias in the city--from an estimated five hundred in the 1950s to fewer than one hundred by 1969. (NYT 8 18 1969, pp. 37, 47) The Times’ feature writer, Murray Schumach, identified subtle changes in the economy when he observed that cafeterias had been closing. More affluent customers were no longer as willing to carry their own trays, so that Hector’s and other cafeterias nearby had seen business declining. Those that survived amid the movie theaters and bookshops of West Forty-second Street catered to various types of customers. The theatrical personalities Moss Hart, Cary Grant, and Dore Schary frequented the Forty-second Street Cafeteria between Broadway and Sixth Avenue before it closed in this decade. Writers and artists of the Beat Generation frequented Bickford’s as did prostitutes and miscellaneous ‘characters’ on whom Jack Kerouac lavished his energetic prose. Other cafeterias attracted the permanently down-and-out, and addicts. “Midnight Cowboy” about rootless men and their experiences around Times Square had given the area a national reputation for a lifestyle presumably unfamiliar to Midwestern towns presumably full of churchgoers.

(“New York Scenes,” from Lonesome Traveler, 1960 cited by Kenneth T. Jackson and David S. Dunbar, eds. Empire City: New York through the Centuries, New York, Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 752)

In 1961, designer Douglas Leigh bought the Times building but sold it to the Allied Chemical Corporation after a subterranean fire in late 1961 caused three deaths. The City then proposed new fire-prevention programs for premises below street level. In 1963, the new owners commissioned architects Smith, Smith, Haines Lundberg and Waehler to strip the building to its steel frame and cover it with marble-faced concrete panels. Inside, an exhibition hall for new products remained empty for some time, but exterior signs brought in revenue. The news zipper that the Times had installed was removed between 1961 and 1965, and again in 1977 to 1986, but it was then restored.

(http://www.nyc-architecture.com/MID/MID104.htm accessed 2 12 17; NYT 12 11 1961, p. 23)

Greater respectability started at Sixth Avenue. When the Wurlitzer company at 120 West announced the invention of a compact piano only fifty inches long, two feet deep, and not quite a yard high, it assured potential customers that it had the same tonal quality as its larger models. The change in size was wise because postwar apartments usually had less floor space than prewar ones of the same class. Across the street, John S. Schulte sold the northwest corner of Sixth Avenue to investors who proposed to raze the two five-story shop-and-office buildings there and replace them with a single twelve-story office building. The new owners had already lined up a bank as the ground floor tenant and a textile company in the offices above. The site was not immediately developed, but remained a prime location. Other old buildings had survived under long leases, such as a one-story building at 135-139 West that housed a popular sporting goods shop. (NYT 6 24 1960, p 42) To the east, Stern’s department store continued to entice customers by offering attractions ranging from Ukrainian Easter egg decoration lessons to cost-free space on the sixth floor for special events sponsored by civic and non-profit groups. Nevertheless, its urban customer base was not robust enough for it to survive---true of several other department stores in these years---and it closed in 1969, thereafter opening branches in suburban New Jersey. (NYT 4 8 1960, p. 35; 4 10 1961, p. 34; 4 8 1962, pp. R1, R10; 7 27 2002, p. B1.)

In 1960, philanthropist Mary Lasker donated sixteen London plane trees to the street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue. The hard winter of 1960-61 caused the trees to shed leaves as early as late June of 1961 but while at first there seemed to be no cause for alarm, the trees had to be replaced with ginkgos which usually manage to survive. A considerable part of the south side of the street between Seventh and Sixth Avenues was owned or leased to the Hart family, which had owned sites there since the nineteenth century. In 1969, the One Hundred Hart Corporation, and the Horn and Hardart Corporation--the owners of an Automat on Sixth Avenue---gave up their leases in the fall of 1969, and by 1972, construction started on a forty-story skyscraper for the New York Telephone Company on the southwest corner of Sixth Avenue at number 1095. (66 John Street ad loc.)

Early in the decade, automobile interests again proposed a garage to be excavated under Bryant Park, and Mayor Robert Wagner supported the idea. San Francisco had successfully installed a parking garage under Union Square, and planners were proposing one for Boston Common. But New York’s City Planning Commission dismissed the proposal.

The park area’s new mercury vapor lights provided twice the light of the glass-enclosed incandescent bulbs that they replaced, and exposed illicit activities that drew public attention. To make protracted sitting uncomfortable for people considered to be ‘derelicts,’ the park authorities removed the backs of benches. A group of private citizens proposed a cafeteria-restaurant on a terrace just west of the library, ostensibly to aid park workers who had to gather wine bottles discarded there but also to prevent the bottles from accumulating in the first place. This might also be a prime location for a restaurant, facing the trees of the park.

The sponsor of the new lighting, the Bryant Park Committee, was part of the Avenue of the Americas Association of business interests, headed by building owner Walter Salmon whose skyscrapers faced the park. The organization had done nothing to clean the statues or to provide more attractive planting, so the absence of people who had some choice of places to go was hardly surprising. While the police often shooed shoe-shiners from the adjacent sidewalk, the New York Times wrote sympathetically about two Dutch students who were working at that job to pay their way home. At the time, and for too long thereafter, no one seemed embarrassed to be hounding poorer homeless people and informal workers of color. (NYT 5 25 1965, p. 36; 6 17 1964, p. 24; 9 1, 1964, p. 2; 9 15 1964, p. 39)

Across the street, Aeolian Hall was converted in 1966 to the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, an institution established in 1961. Dr. Mina Rees, then in charge of the graduate program, chose the site because it was located accessibly from the university’s colleges in the five boroughs of the city, and because it was opposite the Public Library; being new, the program had no comprehensive library of its own. The graduate program quickly became popular, so that more space was needed for instruction and offices. Dr. Rees arranged to buy the entire building from the Woolworth variety store chain which had a retail outlet on the ground floor. The Woolworth interests were glad to sell the building, even at a discount, because its revenue from upstairs offices was meager, owing to rent controls. A sale was arranged, with the New York State Dormitory Authority making the purchase and allowing funds for renovation. The renewed building opened in 1970 to the design of architects Carl J. Petrilli, design principal Samuel DeSanto, and a contractor, John Gallin who had made the earlier renovations on the initially-rented floors. Associate Dean J. Marilyn Mikulsky was praised widely for her role in directing the remodeling. When the work was finished, the university had an auditorium well suited to concert performances and convertible to a lecture hall, computer facilities, a theater, laboratories for the social sciences, food service, lounges, and a three-story library. The remodeling earned praise from professional magazines, too. The Times’ influential architecture critic, Ada Louise Huxtable, reported with enthusiasm about the ground floor space, and praised the Graduate Center for making photography exhibitions, films, seminars, and walking tours available. (NYT 8 9 1970, p. 80; 11 6 1977, p. D31)

(Fig. 6a. Entrance to City University ground floor passageway and exhibition area. Fig. 6b Inside the passageway. Carl J. Petrilli, 1971. Photo: Courtesy Mina Rees Library, CUNY Graduate Center Archives and Special Collections, The City University of New York, Building Design & Exhibitions-Barry Disman records GSUC_42ndSt_005ma and 0017ma respectively.)

The mid-block passageway came about in 1971 soon after the essential indoor work was almost completed. The ground floor Woolworth’s store was evicted and the university secured the money for remodeling before the city’s fiscal calamity occurred at mid-decade. The goal was to offer the city an immediately accessible outpost of art-- seventy-five feet of it, open without charge from 8 AM to 7 PM. There were concerts, gatherings, and exhibitions in the passageway. Artists installing their work could be approached by the public, which also had the chance to see professional installation specialists working on new displays. The building remained home to the Graduate Center until it moved its enlarged activities to the former B. Altman department store at Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue in 1999.

(https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate Center/PDF/President/50TH_ANNIVERSARY_BOOK.pdf?ext=.pdf The title is Fifty Years at the Center: The Graduate Center. City University of New York, from 1961 to 2011 by Michael Anderson, New York, CUNY Graduate Center, 2011 accessed 6 27 2021, pp. 60-63; Huxtable: NYT 8 9 1970, p. 80 also naming the architects and contractor.)

For those who knew about it, there was an appealing low-cost cafeteria on the eighteenth floor until it became too popular and had to be restricted to those affiliated with the university. At street level, the Chock Full o’ Nuts lunchroom in mid-block served ever more of its coffee and its cheap cream-cheese sandwiches on date-nut bread to hungry library patrons. The ingenious restaurant design accommodated many customers at a time by tightly-packing U-shaped eating counters throughout the long, narrow premises. Uncomfortable high stools discouraged diners from lingering; at mid-day, there was always someone waiting for a seat. When the restaurant company was later sold to the Riese Brothers corporation that by then also owned the Childs restaurants chain, it joined the corporation’s graveyard with the four surviving Longchamps restaurants that filed for bankruptcy in 1967. (NYT 6 3 1967, p. 35; 9 29 1971, p.45)

The Public Library faced increasing shortfalls in its research collection budget. From 1952 until the later 1960s, the mounting deficit was eliminated by the dangerous diminution of the endowment. Meanwhile, the City proposed cuts to the branch libraries, which are the City’s responsibility; eleven were slated for elimination. For the foundation-supported research collections, the Public Library authorized the installation of sprinklers in the stacks and cellar; the system required an eight-inch supply main in the cellar to connect the water to all parts of the building. In this decade, too, the Library considered ways to digitize its eight million index cards. Perhaps hoping to avoid paying rent for a newspaper and miscellaneous collections annex on West Forty-third Street, the Library authorized test drilling in Bryant Park to investigate the possibility of expanding underground but deferred that construction to a later date. (NYT 5 26 1960, p.35) Parallel to the Library’s façade, along Fifth Avenue, new gold-painted metal trash boxes on poles replaced swing-top cans that had been expensive to maintain, but the installation of golden rubbish bins was unseemly when the Library faced ever-higher deficits. They were apparently gone by the time that the editorial page of the New York Times virtually screamed in protest in 1969 against the closing of branches and the limited hours proposed, using the headline “Bookburning by Any Name.” The newspaper could not, however, remedy the deficit.

(NYT 10 10 1960, p. 63; illus. 10 11 1960, p.47; 4 17 1966, p. 116; 1 21 1967, p. 20; 4 25 1969, p. 46)

While the west side displayed a mixture of decay and development, the east side maintained its prosperity until the end of the decade. Seymour B. Durst, a partner in his family’s real estate organization, attributed much of the street’s commercial success to the removal of the El. He pointed out that three blocks in the area of Sixth Avenue had the offices of more large companies, especially industrial ones, than all of Fifth or Madison Avenues or Broadway, holding third place behind Park and Third Avenues. (NYT 1 24 1965, pp. R1, R8) His own company had built 200 East in 1958-59 at the southeast corner of Third Avenue. The Dursts had also recently bought property on the west side for future construction---100,000 square feet in block 1052, on the north side between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, and the former site of White’s seafood restaurant between Sixth Avenue and Broadway. (NYT 5 1 1962, p. 75; 11 17 1963, pp. E1, R14; 1 24 1965, pp. R1, R8)

Apart from 200 East, by the end of the decade the east side boasted new buildings at the northwest corner of Madison Avenue, 300 East, 800 Second Avenue, the Daily News annex at the southwest corner of Second Avenue, a new library for the United Nations, the rehabilitated Union Carbide building, the partly renovated Bartholomew Building, and the Railway (later American) Express building at 219 East where a new owner, Sylvan Lawrence, was installing central air-conditioning, lighting, ceilings, floors, and a new lobby by Raymond & Rado as well as a new aluminum and glass façade. (The architect was Ladislas Rado; his partner, Antonin Raymond, had returned to his usual workplace, Japan. The building was later taken over by Pfizer). Tudor City made improvements primarily to the interiors, and in 1965 sold the Tudor Hotel to a group of investors. The Chrysler East and Socony-Mobil buildings were still new; the latter dropped the Socony part of its name in 1966. Best of all, the Ford Foundation Building rose on the site of the defunct Grand Central Hospital, adding its indoor garden to the pleasures of the street. Only Grand Central Terminal and the adjacent Commodore Hotel showed evident signs of financial trouble in this decade.

In 1964, an Automat moved out of the basement of 501 Fifth Avenue, having occupied that location since 1917. The building owners, by then the Franchard Corporation, rehabilitated the entrance at 2 East and leased the space to personnel agencies. These businesses were glad to have applicants free of elevators where staff might discuss job openings that were considered proprietary secrets. (NYT 2 10 1966, p. 62) Also in mid-decade, the new owners of 501 Fifth Avenue replaced the original limestone cover of its lower floors with green-black granite cladding, an addition fortunately removed starting in 2013. Arched windows were restored as well, while the marble lobby was under revision in order to emphasize the original cast bronze doors there.

(NYT 3 31 1960, p. 54; 20http://nyrej.com/abramson-brothers-inc-begins-restoration-of-501-fifth-avenue-hires-architectural-firm-bohlin-cywinski-jackson-for-renovation 5 13 2013, accessed 7 19 2019.)

The same businessmen bought the Heckscher Building and did some sensitive renovation, removing a dropped ceiling in the lobby and, using what was left of the original coffered ceiling to make molds, restored the entire composition. (C. Gray “Streetscapes” NYT 1 20 2002 II, p.RE9)

On the north side of the Fifth-to-Madison block, Emery Roth & Sons designed the new 360-foot-tall building for which the Emigrant Savings Bank became the prime tenant when the building opened in 1969. It replaced the Transit Building at 5-7 and a six-story building at 9 East. Fisher Brothers construction company built it. Emigrant’s initial main office downtown at 51 Chambers Street was to be demolished in connection with a remodeling of the civic center area. Appearing to be a three-dimensional diagram of maximum zoning permissions, it was covered in brown metal-framed glass panes in a repetitive pattern. An amply-glazed entrance level greets customers at street level but those window frames do not match those of the office windows above them.

(Fig.7. Emigrant Savings Banks building. Emery Roth & Sons. 1969. Photo: Author, 2025.See also: “Office to be built for Emigrant Bank,” preliminary pale-colored image printed in the NYT 4 30 1967, p. 155 made for Fisher Brothers, developers.

The south side of the block had more active commerce, revealed in photographs and associated information at the Municipal Archives. At number 24 East, for instance, on a site owned since 1937 by the New York Historical Society, a 78-foot-high fireproof building erected in 1915 had a Zum Zum lunch counter, with a Womrath’s bookstore on one side and John Ward Shoes shop on the other. The various tenants changed, so that Zum Zum, Sheffield Farms Milk Bar, and Howard Johnson’s restaurant all dispensed food at various times from the same place. Flagg Brother men’s shoe store replaced Alex Taylor’s sporting goods shop. The individual shops were not large, so that there was liveliness along the street, as well as a mix of shops to satisfy many needs, rather than the lunch vendors who have predominated since the internet encouraged merchandise shopping by computer.

At Madison Avenue, the twenty-three-story building occupied by the Carbide and Carbon Building, became open to redevelopment when the corporation, renamed Union Carbide, announced an impending move to a new office building on Park Avenue. Koeppel & Koeppel, a real estate firm, bought the L-shaped parcel that extended to Forty-first Street. The new owners renovated parts of the interior, including the lobby, installed high-speed elevators, and air-conditioning, altered the offices to some extent, and modified the building entrance. The result lasted until 2001.

Across the street, a new office building rose on the Manhattan Hotel site at 11-17 East, now known as 330 Madison Avenue. Plans were evidently initiated in 1959, because the investors announced the project in mid-March of 1960, filing the plans officially in November of that year. The old building came down in 1961. John J. Reynolds, Sr. had bought the site for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. at 11-17 East; he was head of a prominent real estate brokerage with ties to the father of President John F. Kennedy. The participation of the George A. Fuller company, construction contractors and investors in real estate, was already assured. Reynolds had had his offices on Park Avenue close to those of the First National City Bank which proposed to open a branch in the new 330 Madison building and rent 35,000 square feet of space for its various needs. Reynolds planned to move in as well. The bank was not the tenant for which the building was named, however; instead, it was Sperry & Hutchinson, distributors of green stamps then given by retailers and redeemable for merchandise.,

.

(Fig. 8. 330 Madison Avenue, Kahn & Jacobs, 1961. Photo: https://www. 42floors.com)

Ely Jacques Kahn and Robert Allan Jacobs, who had recently done the working drawings for the Seagram Building, designed the new building. Kahn had decades-long experience in designing visually distinctive art deco office buildings and apartment houses in New York City and was prominent in architectural and design circles. By this stage of his career, he had abandoned the ornament that figured prominently in his designs of the inter-war years, perhaps to satisfy parsimonious clients or because he or a colleague had adopted the most mundane and low-cost results of the zoning regulations.

The thirty-nine-story building had two setbacks under a rectilinear flat-topped tower. Dark brick strips protruding from the surface covered the interior structural columns. Between them were four windows separated by less salient thin strips above continuous pale spandrels. Some changes were made to the lobby in 1979 by Weisberg Castro Associates. When the architectural partnership headed by Leon Moed and Raul de Armas (now MdeAS) was hired by a later owner to renovate it in 2009-2012 with a green glass surface, few if any urbanists lamented the loss of the old building.

(NYT 3 17 1960, p. 56A;7 7 1960, p. 51; 11 23 1960, p. 48; Carter B Horsley, “Tower at 330 Madison Is Sold,” 9 9 1979, p. R7; http://www.skyscrapercenter.com/building/330-madison-avenue/2808, https://www.thecityreview.com/madison.html; http://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-lost-hotel-manhatltan-madison-ave.html both accessed 3 29 2020).

50 East was to be the new home of John Muhlhan’s business of selling hay and straw in carload lots to racetracks and horse trainers. To be sure, the products were not dispensed from either his former office in the Grand Central Terminal Office Building, where he had been since 1915, or from his new office. The five hundred tons of hay that he sold each week were delivered from farms directly to his customers. (NYT 4 17 1960, p. R1, R2; 5 l 1960, p. 123). At 80 East, Horn & Hardart, sensing the diminishing appeal of their Automats in a decade of increasing prosperity, planned a cocktail lounge, oyster bar, and waitress service. At least one other of its branches had already introduced these changes. (NYT 5 20 1961, p. 26; there was also another Automat in the east side Airlines Terminal building)

The Park Avenue Viaduct had its expansion joints repaired, along with its lighting, wiring, and railings, and aluminum mesh was installed to protect pedestrians from roosting pigeons. Within Grand Central, a gourmet food shop opened, adding to the toy trains and hats for sale in other shops, and the building contained such services as clothes-mending and portrait-making in pastels. (NYT 5 3 1960, p. 12) Inevitably, some beloved shops closed, including Cushman’s bakery, designed by Raymond Loewy. A short-lived bookshop called the Open Book occupied a site on the lower level and provided a note tree where people could attach messages for their friends. (NYT 8 25 1962, p. 11) Even before the Landmarks resolution was approved, civic groups prevented a drastic remodeling of the waiting room meant to allow installation of bowling alleys above it. The bowling facility would have provided a tenant for space recently vacated by CBS-TV, an art school, and the thirty-six-year-old Grand Central Art Galleries, but it would have meant lowering the waiting room ceiling, leaving only fifteen feet of space above its floor. (NYT 4 9 1960, p. 46; 8 4 1960, p. 27; 8 24 1960, p. 28; 1 5 1961, p. 21; 2 12 1961, pp. R1, R5;3 22 1962, p.37).

A new threat appeared in 1967 when the Penn Central Railroad Group, which owned the Terminal, joined developer Morris Saady and asked Marcel Breuer and his colleague Herbert Beckhard to design a fifty-five-story skyscraper over the entire building. Breuer, originally acclaimed for furniture designs, had become an international architectural eminence. He designed the UNESCO headquarters in Paris and an innovative Catholic church, St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, among his domestic, university, industrial, institutional, and educational works. An initial proposal showed a prismatic tower to be cantilevered over the Terminal and supported on sloping pilotis, It would have destroyed much of the main concourse. In 1968, a year after its presentation, the new Landmarks Preservation Commission denied it a Certificate of Acceptability, as the Terminal building was an official landmark. For the Penn Central, newly organized from the remnants of the Pennsylvania and New York Central railroad systems, Breuer & Associates tried again in 1969, with a design that would have preserved the concourse but required demolition of one side of the Terminal. The Landmarks Preservation Commission rejected the preposterous assertion that the skyscraper would have no exterior effect on the landmark. No revisions fared any better in the later 1960s. The Terminal’s designation as an official New York City landmark in 1967 reduced only some threats to the building.

(Emery Roth project: Architectural Forum Feb.,1955 and anti-appeal published in November 1955. NYT 2. 8 1955, p. 20. Fellheimer & Wagner were working for developer Erwin Wolfson on an alternative project; see above, Chap. 9, Fig. 5)

Inside, though, the main concourse was still defaced by the gigantic Kodak photograph, by a stockbroker’s kiosk, and other intrusions. Some revenue in a hidden area came from Geza Gazdag, an athlete and former Olympic coach in his native Hungary. He installed two tennis courts in the former CBS premises, as well as a sixty-foot indoor ski slope. He gave lessons to novices, coached experienced players, and remained there until he was outbid for his lease by Donald Trump in the 1980s.

(https://untappedcities.com/2017/02/09/a-look-at-the-hidden-tennis-courts-of-grand-central-terminal-once-leased-by-trump/ accessed 9 11 2020, by John Del Signore, 3 19 2009, accessed 9 27 2020, https://gothamist.com/news/grand-central-tennis-courts-once-secret-soon-to-be-history 3 19 2020, accessed 9 27 2020. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/vanderbilt-tennis-club, accessed 9 11 2020)

Beside the Terminal, the Commodore Hotel was slowly decaying, having been opened in 1919. In November of 1960, the Glickman realty company bought the leasehold from Evelyn Lubin, likely the proxy for her husband, Joseph Lubin, a prominent accountant who owned stock in the Glickman Corporation. The New York Central Railroad, however, continued to own the building and the land, while the Zeckendorf Corporation operated the hotel and continued to manage it under a sublease that expired along with the leasehold at the end of December, 1967. The Lubin interests had created a new ballroom and made other changes that saw the hotel’s operation through the lease period but the hotel had a short life thereafter. (NYT 11 24 1960, p. 56).

Pyramid, a men’s clothing chain, leased a four-story building that had survived at 153 East, and had it remodeled by architect Harry Silverman. Above the ground floor shop, the premises were being fitted for leasing as offices. (NYT 7 27 1961, p. 43)

Workers cleaned the Chrysler building, which Wellington Associates, Inc., had bought from William Zeckendorf in 1960. Wellington was one of the names under which Sol Goldman and Alex DiLorenzo Jr. engaged in the real estate business. The partners were accused of hiring people to harass tenants, and of suppressing a building employees’ strike with the help of “labor consultants” S.G.S. Associates who had members in the Mafia, although Mr. DiLorenzo said that he had quickly fired the firm. Tax evasion and building code violations were among the misdeeds of which the partners were accused. But they did refresh the Chrysler lobby and the building exterior—the parts that potential renters and the public would see. The cleaning staff used machines up to the thirtieth floor. Above that level, the necessary generator machines could not fit the available space, so the work proceeded by hand-guided brushes and acidic cleaning fluid. (NYT 9 22 1961, p. 14) The street-level automobile displays had yielded to other attractions by March 1962, when over two hundred news photographs of events in 1961 were displayed in the showroom space.

(NYT 3 25 1962 p. 144 https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2016/06/29/billionaire-goldman-family-richest-in-real-estate/?sh=b2f92409e14f Obituary for Alex DiLorenzo, NYT 9 6, 1975, p.22; he died in his office in the Chrysler Building).

The Durst interests, builders and owners, finished leasing their building at 200 East. (NYT 2 6 1960, p. 30) The small Haloid Company rented space there, soon achieving spectacular success under its new name, Xerox. This was not the only business machine company to relocate to midtown; others made sure to display their products in street-level showrooms, and some companies even hired demonstrators, especially at lunch hour, to show how to use them. (NYT 12 27 1960, p. 40)

Central Commercial High School had long been outdated, and was overcrowded by the 1960s, serving 2600 students, eighty-two percent of whom were of African and Puerto Rican descent. The all-too-obvious inadequacy of the building, one that even lacked a lunchroom, required a remedy: relocation to Thirty-fourth Street and Park Avenue. The school yielded its site to commerce itself in the form of a hotel, opened in 1981 to a design by the Emery Roth firm, that is now part of the Westin chain (Chap. 11, Fig. 15.).

Close by, the Fred F. French company sold the Tudor Hotel in 1963. The French company sold the rest of Tudor City to the Rabinowitz Corporation which sold it to the Helmsley Corporation in the next decade. (Samuel, Tudor City, pp. 106-107) The new Tudor City management initiated an eighteen-story office building at 300 East on the southeast corner of Second Avenue, abutting the Hotel Tudor. Its appearance had nothing in common with the Tudor City apartment houses; it was meant to look and be contemporary for office use.

That the large, new, monotonous building covered in dark glass has eighteen stories like the building across the street indicates that zoning limits affected the design as did cost-benefit considerations about building extra height. 300 East looks like a building of the later 1950s, but it opened in 1964. The developers intended 300 East to be an apartment house, but they realized that as the area was being filled with office buildings, a residential building would be anomalous and thus potentially less profitable in that location. William Lescaze, who had worked a generation earlier on the innovative PSFS Building in Philadelphia, disappointed his admirers with this building, perhaps owing to constraints by the client. (NYT 10 27 1955, p. 56; 12 27 1955, p. 46; 10 21 1956, p. 297; 3 29 1959, p. R4.)

(Fig.9. 300 East, William Lescaze. 1964. Photo: Author, 2025)

The Diesel Construction Company built it. The façade is a block long on the avenue and 80 feet long on Forty-second, 81 on Forty-first Street—a large container with many windows in repetitive rows. Tenants secured by the Helmsley-Spear company occupied an air-conditioned box, partly on pilotis, with setbacks on the upper floors. The good news for tenants was that they had the option of opening windows---something not granted in all air-conditioned buildings. 300 East was not successful from a financial viewpoint and went to a foreclosure auction in 1996, when a German non-profit called ULM Holding bought it. Although renovated in 2008-09, 300 East was not much more attractive as a result. No wonder that in 2019, Brookfield Properties funded new owners; Somerset Partners and Meadow Partners, with Hill Property Partners, who planned to have Spector Group architects remodel the entrance and lobby, the mechanical installations and the five passenger elevator cabs, and to brighten the building’s appearance with light glass and new shiny mullions. Plans of late 2024 by new owners, David Werner and CDC real estate investors, proposed to convert part of the building to residential use, given the post-Covid downturn in office renting for other than prime buildings.

(https://www.metro-manhattan.com/buildings/300-east-42nd-street/ https://www.loopnet.com/Listing/300-E-42nd-St-New-York-NY/17576870/ http://www.somersetpartnersllc.com/investments/office-properties/300-east-42nd-street/ NYT 4 7 1963, pp. R1, R11 said Salvatore G Schimenti and Howard Barnaby, construction contractors, were finishing 300 East at that date. https://nypost.com/2019/09/03/second-ave-building-near-grand-central-terminal-set-for-makeover/ accessed 12 12 2023; https://www.optimalspaces.com/new-york/10017/rent-office-300-east-42nd-street/accessed 12 24 2024. https://nypost.com/2025/04/27/business/east-42nd-street-office-building-to-be-converted-to-apartments/ accessed 4 27 2025)

Despite the Daily News Building’s ninety percent occupancy, (NYT 8 18 1960, p. 44) in 1967 the Daily News company stopped updating the map in the lobby of its building, a harbinger of neglect although the potential decay was not yet obvious. It was clear, however, that newspapers in general were in trouble. They were struck for 114 days in 1962-1963, leading to the closing in 1966 of the Herald-Tribune, Journal-American, and World-Telegram and Sun; the tabloid Daily Mirror held out until 1972.

The News building’s near neighbors saw changes after 1960. By then, across the street, the Railway (later American) Express building at 219 East and the Bartholomew building at 205 East had been remodeled, the former becoming part of the Pfizer headquarters immediately to the east. On the next block, although the Grand Central Hospital was about to move uptown, patients were admitted as late as October 1962. The hospital’s trustees sold the site at 309-325 East for $3.2 million to the Ford Foundation which initiated design work in 1963, started construction in 1964, and completed its building in 1967.

(NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission designation report, LPC Designation List 285, LP-1969 Ford Foundation Building, 321 East 42nd Street and 320 East 43rd Street, aka 309-325 East 42nd Street and 306-326 East 43rd Street, Borough of Manhattan. Built 1963-67; architects Eero Saarinen Associates (later, Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates). Landmark Site: Borough of Manhattan Tax Map Block 1335, Lot 5. http://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/1969.pdf accessed 8 6 2021. 10 31 1962, p. 16. Wikipedia, s.v. Ford Foundation Building accessed 12 12 2024; NYT 9 29 1964, p. 45; Among the articles not cited in those sources, see: Foundation, New York,” Architecture d'aujourd'hui 39, Feb., 1968, pp. 106-109.; “Crusader’s Castle,” Contract Interiors 127 #8, March 1968, pp. 95-109; “Oase in Manhattan,” Deutsche Bauzeitung 102, June 1968, pp. 418-423; “Fords feines Foyer,” Baumeister 65, 1968, pp. 514-522. Kenneth Frampton, “A House of Ivy League Values,’ Architectural Design, 38, July 1968, pp. 304-307; Architecture and Urbanism, special issue, 1987. Walter McQuade, “Structure and Design. The Ford Foundation’s Mid-Manhattan Greenhouse,” Fortune, Oct. 1964. Ludwig Glaeser, “Greenhouse Architecture: Notes on a genesis of form for Roche & Dinkeloo’s recent works,” Architectural Forum, March 1974; for a schematic section looking north showing the environmental systems for the offices and garden, see Arthur Drexler, Transformations in Modern Architecture, New York, MoMA, 1979, p. 151. Suzanne Stephens, “Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice,” Architectural Record 207 #2, Feb. 2019, pp. 64-69 and interview with Raymond Jungles on p. 24; Aleksandr Bierig: “Modernity and the Monument,” Architectural Record 204 #2, Feb. 2016, pp. 48-51. “Walking the Talk: The Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice Updates its Home,” Oculus 80 #4, Jan. 2019, pp. 40-43 et al.)

The Foundation or its president, Henry T. Heald, determined that it would be the sole occupant, so--as with Lever House a decade earlier--it needed a building only for its own staff. This meant that it could be designed without money-making extra office floors, and could be distinctive in appearance. If this restraint advertised anything, it was the Foundation’s wealth but implicitly, its charitable use of that wealth.

A benevolent organization ought to look dignified and be a congenial neighbor. The architects were well chosen to provide just that. They were Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo, and Joseph N. Lacy. They had established a partnership after the early death of their previous employer, Eero Saarinen, who contributed early ideas to the project. Until the younger men set up shop under their own names, they were known as Eero Saarinen Associates. Collaborators included the Turner Construction Company, and the engineering firms of Severud Associates and Cosentini Associates.

(Left: Fig. 10. Ford Foundation Building from the east. Roche & Dinkeloo, 1967. Right: Fig. 11. Ford Foundation Building from the west. Photos: Author, August 2025.)

Among their neighborly gestures were the choice of warm brown granite cladding to harmonize with the brick buildings of Tudor City around and opposite it, and the maintenance of the first setback line of building to the west. Dan Kiley, who designed the garden inside, said that he imagined it as an extension of Tudor City’s park spaces adjacent and across the street, but probably few other people make that connection to the elevated parks. That the building was not a glass box with a small plaza in front like many office towers of the time was part of its self-expression: a place for giving money away rather than making it. It expressed, too, Kevin Roche’s idea of a communal, comparatively egalitarian workplace, although no architect could have enforced his moral preferences without the client’s assent.

The Ford Foundation occupies a nearly square site that rises from Forty-second to Forty-third Streets. On Forty-second Street, the granite-clad monumental concrete piers form the corners of the building, while windows framed in controlled-rusting (Cor-Ten) steel stretch between them. The frames harmonize with the color of the granite. The top two floors project over the ten lower ones to terminate the composition with a form of cornice. On Forty-third Street are more granite-clad piers. The overall impression on Forty-second Street is one of monumentality, given by the piers. But when approaching the building on that street, one sees that between the piers and behind the glass, a large and abundantly planted garden steps upward toward the north side lobby.

(Fig. 12. Ford Foundation interior in September 2016. Photo: Author.)

The airy garden container, the building’s central atrium, rises the full height of the building to a zig-zag glass and steel skylit roof that provides sunlight for the plants although artificial lighting was also needed. Staff offices enclose the garden on three sides, with the uppermost projecting floors containing additional offices that face outward. Offices on the west side have windows facing an alley.

The principal entrance is on Forty-third Street, a more discreet location and one with many fewer competing vehicles. The Foundation needed an entrance for limousines and cars for the important people who visited. The recessed ground floor there allows room for closing umbrellas and navigating wheel chairs. Above, the scale of clearly marked individual floors suits the character of Forty-third Street with its apartment houses; it is different in public character from the Forty-second Street’s glass wall flanked by sturdy supports. The Forty-second Street’s present doorway is tucked under one side of the south wall so that one’s impression is that of an uninterrupted view into the garden. The building itself emphasizes glass on three sides; the fourth side, at the west, has less glass, and is only a few feet across the alley from its neighbor, 800 Second Avenue. The bold contrast between the glass and the massive piers forms a major part of the building’s effect.

Inside, most of the staff members could see each other through the glass that fronts the garden-facing offices--except some in the executive suite on the top floor or those at the west exterior side. The executive suite, dining and conference rooms were nine of the building’s six-foot modules in size, while all the lesser premises were six modules in size. Conference rooms and a comfortable auditorium with plenty of leg room and ash trays in the chair arms filled underground spaces. The office floors’ design emphasizing visibility had the potential to create a sense of community and of a common mission to improve aspects of the world---the purpose of the Foundation. If anyone objected to a lack of privacy, there were shades on the glass walls, but after a few days, most people kept them up, perhaps because of unspoken social pressure. The writer William Zinsser observed that with the glass wall, there was no place “for a boss to make more than a verbal move toward his secretary” or to take a nap. Not much other flexibility was permissible in the offices, which Warren Platner designed to be uniform, having been given some coaching from the architects. Additional furniture was designed by Charles and Ray Eames who had been part of the Saarinen artistic circle. Lights were centrally controlled. Desks for people other than secretaries had no drawers and every electric typewriter rested on the same thin brass stand. Everyone’s carpet was the same pale golden tone. For relief from this uniform equality, one could look toward the central garden.

The garden was the feature of the building that most obviously commanded attention. Paths through the garden accommodated the able-bodied, who could leave by walking up steps to the lobby and doors on Forty-third Street. Dan Kiley, who had collaborated earlier with the Saarinen firm, acknowledged that he did not know which plants would flourish for a long time in this unfamiliar environment, so he experimented with them--not always successfully. There were gestures to environmental thinking such as the collecting of rainwater and allowing natural light to replace some electric illumination. From the start, the garden under the care of Everett Conklin was a much-admired surprising element in a handsome building that enhanced its neighborhood. It was not a substitute park, because it had no seats to prevent loitering or lunching. But it was a welcome surprise to newcomers, an island of serenity at a time of social unrest and of the seemingly interminable and pointless war in Vietnam. It was a source of interest and visual relief to the office staff, and a display of the Foundation’s interest in the arts and nature.

The building had its critics, including the influential architectural historian, Vincent Scully, who thought of the building’s scale as ‘military,’ a term chosen carefully to suggest a connection to the unpopular war. Herbert Muschamp, architecture critic for the New York Times in the 1990s, wrote one of his most thoughtful essays in 1995 when the building received the twenty-five-year award from the American Institute of Architects. He assessed the building from various viewpoints. Should one celebrate this as a work of art that had embraced the techniques and forms dear to the reformist, socially-enlightened aspects of modern architecture? Or was this a corporate takeover of modernism that had begun in left-of-center socialist-influenced circles? The critic noted the “difficulty (or futility) of expressing progressive ideas within the visual language of [architecture], a traditionally conservative art form.” But were the ideas progressive, and if so, in what sense? Some would say that including nature, carefully chosen materials, and creating at least a visual sense of community were forward-looking. Others might criticize the potential for supervisory vision as being anything but progressive. Only a building that everyone considered important would have elicited as much discussion.

(Herbert Muschamp, “A Declaration of the ‘60s, Before the Doubts,” NYT 4 16 1995, p.I31)

At the far east end of the street, the United Nations Library in the former city office building had a window broken in February, 1960 by a hammer-wielding Polish refugee, a recent arrival in the city. His well-dressed appearance evidently fooled the guards into letting him approach the building that was in any case slated for demolition in the following month. Then in April, sections of two walls under demolition collapsed, leaving debris on the East Side Highway, known now as the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. After that, without further incident, the library project was finished in 1963 to the design of Harrison & Abramovitz. It was named for Dag Hammarskjold, the Swedish Secretary General of the United Nations who died in an airplane crash in 1961 en route to negotiate a cease-fire in the Congo.

(Fig. 13. Dag Hammarskjold Library, in front of the United Nations Secretariat, and across Forty-second Street from the tunnel ventilation building and Robert Moses Playground. Harrison & Abramovitz, 1963. Photo: Author, 2023.)

The rectangular library has glass façades to the north and south and solid stone over reinforced concrete on the other sides-- a wise design, considering the noise of traffic on the drive and its exit, and along First Avenue. In its far more modest way, it also conforms to the design of the rectilinear Secretariat nearby. On the roof is a small glass-enclosed pavilion topped with a gently curved roof, an echo of ideas by Le Corbusier for government buildings in Chandigarh, India. The library building marks the south end of the United Nations complex.

Across the avenue, the blocks were given rounded corners, largely for aesthetic reasons to frame the design of the international headquarters. The police pledged to remove a storage area full of barricades from the corner facing the library, and the city fathers eventually expelled a frankfurter stand from its customary location one block south. (NYT 4 5 1962, p. 35) The bare Robert Moses Playground still occupies a site near the East River’s edge across the street from the library.

The improvements made to individual buildings could not disguise the problems that beset midtown at the time. The unsuccessful merger of the Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads resulted in poor upkeep, leaking roofs, trash on the tracks, and the occupation of tunnels by homeless people. (Schlichting, Grand Central Terminal pp. 200-201) Most significant was the city’s perilous fiscal condition, which limited policing, sanitation, street paving, and measures against corruption and vice. Despite the exceptional achievements at the far east end, this street and others began to show evidence of decay, seen in deferred maintenance, the persistence of pornographic activity, the increased sale of illegal drugs, and the absence of the dynamism that had created the skyscrapers of the first third of the century. Probably most New Yorkers were unaware of---or perhaps preferred not to acknowledge----the city’s perilous financial condition that was responsible for deferred maintenance of municipal infrastructure, but in the next decade, it became impossible for the city’s government, its business leaders, and its design professionals to ignore an impending fiscal crisis and its potential impact on the city’s built environment. A street at the heart of the city’s commercial interests could not be immune to the city’s difficulties.