Chapter 4 The 1890s

The often- depressed economy of both the city and the nation during the 1890s brought about private misery, bankruptcies, joblessness, and loss of dwellings, but the public face of Forty-second Street was robust, at least in part. Theaters began to appear there in this decade, as the garment manufacturing district expanded into the surroundings of older theaters that were farther south. (Taylor, ed., Inventing Times Square, pp. 40-41) Prostitution, too, became noticeable on the street in that decade, and while socially conscious individuals knew that it could be a sign of desperation rather than depravity, less sensitive souls simply associated prostitution with theater districts.

While the 1890s saw runs on banks, loss of deposits, labor strife, problems of financing everything from railroads to wheat, and other frightening events, there were enough companies and individuals who could support new hotels, theaters, and suburbs or resort towns reachable by train or steamship. By this time, real estate brokers facilitated development; they had begun work in the area of Forty-second Street in 1859 but only in limited ways.

(A History of Real Estate, Building, and Architecture in New York City During the Last Quarter of a Century, New York, Real Estate Record & Guide, 1898, pp. 195 re: Charles H Easton, and 201 re: John Kavanaugh)

This decade also saw the rise of general contracting companies such as that of George A. Fuller, who undertook to execute and supervise all aspects of building, apart from the design. These firms’ centralized supervision and coordination made skyscraper and other large building construction more efficient and professional. Construction might even be started before the aesthetic design was confirmed, thereby saving time and money for the entrepreneur. Rapid new development in the city also promoted specialization in the building trades, such as bricklaying, gas fitting, roofing, plumbing, and even professional interior decoration. (A History of Real Estate, Building, and Architecture in New York City During the Last Quarter of a Century, New York, Real Estate Record & Guide, 1898, p. 114)

Tenants of many row houses were no longer single families but multiple ones in what had been private homes. As old families moved away, no people of the same class were willing to buy their houses for fear that neighbors would turn them to “unworthy purposes.” (NYT 3 7 1909, p.12) Boarding houses multiplied, and other private houses became dressmakers’ workshops or other commercial premises such as a Conservatory of Music just west of Fifth Avenue. This may have been a pretentious name for Miss Lizzie W. Hollister’s piano lessons at 7 West; her business card is at the Museum of the City of New York. The result of commercial activity was a reduced presence of the wealthier classes but greater bustle on the street. There were now more customers nearby for small businesses. The general scale of buildings around l900 is apparent from this view of what later became the site of the Chrysler Building.

(Fig. 1. Lexington Avenue and 42^nd Street in 1902. Photo: Museum of the City of New York 2010.11.2342 Public domain.)

Street-widening at various times had been a factor in removing stoops from private houses and initiating their conversion into rooming houses with shops below the bedrooms. In 1888, 559 West had sixteen families on four floors above a grocery and liquor store and the formerly more elegant Clinton Apartments at 253 West listed more than two dozen families a decade later. (Henderson Story of 42nd Street, p. 18). Unless the houses became noticeably overcrowded, or the race or religion of the tenants changed quickly, few members of the prosperous classes noticed poor people’s need for decent dwellings. By 1897, some tenements west of Broadway were described as grim although the south side of Broadway to Eighth Avenue still housed respectable businesses, a laundry, an auction house below an early office for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, a decorating practice, marble and slate works in an old building at 218 that was for sale, the Central Baptist church, the George Bruce free Library, Shayne’s Furs, the Murray Hill Baths, and the Percival residence. (https://digitalcollections.nyhistory.org/islandora/object/nyhs%3A10318 ;Times Square: A Century of Change http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4649 3 14 2004 ) A small chapel fifty feet wide, called Zion in 1897 but apparently renamed Wilson, appeared on the Bromley map of 1897 at 418 West; its minister in 1900 was appropriately named Martin Luther. It seems to have had a short life there.

Economic woes and unprecedented immigration, as well as Jacob Riis’ influential How the Other Half Lives published in 1890, sensitized at least some people to the matter of housing the poor. One of several groups interested in improving living conditions for the working classes was the New York Fireproof Tenement Association. It commissioned the socially-minded architect Ernest Flagg to design eleven fire-resistant apartment houses for 470 families on twenty lots. The Fireproof Furniture & Construction Company completed them in 1899.

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(Fig. 2. Tenements built for the New York Fireproof Tenement Association, Forty-second Street and Tenth Avenue, Ernest Flagg, 1899. Photo: H W Desmond,”The Works of Ernest Flagg,” Architectural Record XI, 3, April 1902. p 39. Public domain)

(Fig. 3. Flagg’s houses in 2023. Photo: author)

The framing was made of steel and concrete, not wood; New York City had allowed steel skeleton construction and curtain walls since 1892. Steel framing went along with the increased rationalization and standardization in manufacturing, and it allowed building skins to be light in weight and thin, potentially reducing costs. It also provided more spacious interiors--a consideration on a constricted site and a consideration for the large families common at the time. Concrete, particularly the more recent innovation of reinforced concrete, became essential to apartment house design and to the construction of the subway.

Flagg had already worked with the City and Suburban Homes Company on West Sixty-eighth and Sixty-ninth Streets and long retained an interest in housing matters, which in his planning would not necessarily require the subsidies to which opponents objected. He had written an article in 1894 for Scribner’s Magazine about tenements with light courts rather than the dumbbell forms common on single lots---that is, two apartments at the front of a building, two at the rear, separated by a corridor and a small light court. Flagg understood the amenities and economies of using more than one building lot at a time. He explained later that the added cost of fireproofing the entire building, not just the stairways (as in the dumbbell buildings) was compensated for by thinner and thus less costly walls and partitions that would provide larger interior spaces. Developers, he said, would see decreased depreciation and would save on insurance fees. A model shows his buildings as square, around courtyards. There would be no dark rooms or halls, no rooms on small light shafts as in the contemporary dumbbell tenements, no narrow entrances or steep stairs. Five out of seven windows would look out on the street, two on the central courtyard. Each family would have its own water closet, a great innovation for the poor, and many would have private rooms for baths. Firewalls would prevent the spread of fire from one unit to another, an improvement over the situation in dumbbells.

Flagg’s buildings were originally at 500-512 west Forty-second Street and 505-515 West Forty-first, along with 567-569 Tenth Avenue. They survive only in part on Forty-second Street, as warm tan brick buildings that are almost unnoticed amid the present high-rises of glass and steel. Their white limestone entrances have unadorned Renaissance-inspired frames. The windows, grouped by twos and ones, indicate the size of the apartments and give a punctuated rhythm. Stone lintels above the sash windows and bands of reticent ornament at the top provide the spare embellishment. Shops line the ground floors, providing income to subsidize the apartments, which are 100 by 100 feet in size. There was potential, largely unrealized, for more buildings like this because they claimed a financial return of six percent, but few other model tenements were built at about this time. After a generation passed, all but four of Flagg’s buildings were torn down in 1935.

(https://www.fireengineering.com/1900/03/24/279070/fireproof-tenement-houses/ accessed 3 31 2020); NYT 1 30 1910 p. S11 “Model Fireproof Tenement” ; C. Gray,” Streetscapes,” NYT 6 21 1992, p. X7; https://-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/1692A.pdf NYC LPC designation report for the City and Suburban Homes Company, First Avenue Estate, pp. 2-6. E. Flagg, in Charities and Commons 13, 10. 6 1906; Mardges Bacon, Ernest Flagg. Beaux-Arts Architect and Urban Reformer, New York, Architectural History Foundation/Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1986 pp. 234-236, 251-252. Anon., “Failure and Efficiency in Fireproof Construction,” Architectural Record 7, 1897 pp. 393-398r; “Charities and Commons” 10 6 1906; George B Ford, “The Housing Problem—I,” The Brickbuilder l8, 1909, p. 28. http:// www.nysonglines.com/42st.htm accessed 1 21 2019. For the fate of the houses after the Flagg family sold them ca. 1980, see https://www.clintonhousing.org/what-we-do/building-profile.php?id=54.

The split between less visible poverty and highly visible prosperity became evident on Forty-second Street during this decade. Prosperity between Third and Eighth Avenues continued the trend of the previous decade. Several factors made this more obvious than it had been earlier: By 1890, nearly all the lots on the street were covered by buildings. Forty-second Street was no longer remote, as it could be reached quickly by the El trains or by electrified streetcars that made their tentative appearance toward the century’s end. Ten years earlier, there had been more empty lots, as well as more row houses than four-story tenements with shops at ground level----a building type that was common to many parts of the city by the start of the decade and that can still be seen near the east and west ends of the street. In contrast to the tenements and over-occupied row houses, tall buildings began to rise, especially between Grand Central Depot and Eighth Avenue. They were not yet slender skyscrapers, but some were either taller or much broader than earlier buildings had been. The Depot itself was enlarged dramatically, and hotels expanded nearby as visitors for pleasure or business increased.

Long-established families continued to hold on to their properties, anticipating a steady rise in the value of the land despite temporary financial setbacks or decay here and there. Some benefited also from short-term investment. Property transfer records list Franklin H. Delano’s executors on the 300 block West, the Goelets who had lots on several blocks, members of the Cutting family between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, the Voorhis family who held properties from First Avenue to the East River, and the Milbanks. Descendants of James Renwick transferred rights to property between Park and Lexington Avenues in 1898. Of course, people with newer wealth also accumulated considerable property, such as Benjamin Hart who had come to the city from Canada at mid-century, or Cornelius and Grace Vanderbilt. There were still plenty of Irish mortgagors or mortgagees and a considerable number of Germans, probably including the owners of Everard’s Brewery at 367 West who located there in 1893.

In the following two decades, however, more people began to favor land speculation over property development (Sagalyn, Times Square Roulette, esp. p 60). Joseph Milbank led the way in 1896 when he bought the site of Holy Trinity Church and in 1898 built a two-story “taxpayer” building there, waiting until 1916 to lease the site when its value had risen five times. He commissioned a commercial building in 1896 at 39-45 East alias 321-327 Madison Avenue that was built in 1898-99. Shortly afterward, he demolished the Sniffen and dePeyster houses at 5 and 7 East to make way for the Transit Building just after 1900. which was noticeably taller than buildings near it but not more beautiful. (See Chap. 5 below)

(NYT 5 5 1900, p. 12; Architectural League Yearbook v. 24 1909 p. 27. Holy Trinity had been remodeled in 1893 to make it “more Gothic”, at a loss to its “character and meaning,” according to A History of Real Estate, 1868-1893, 1893 p. 78. For the taxpayer building, see fig. 20 below.).

The Vanderbilts bridged the classes by becoming grantors of seven lots to officials of fashionable St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church. This was not pure altruism. The family may have had a serious interest in religion but it also had the expansion of Grand Central in mind, and the Episcopal Church had property interests there. The lots were on the north side of Forty-second Street between Third and Second Avenues. The church used two lots for a parish house, as shown on the Bromley map of 1897. Two years later, as shown on the Sanborn-Perris map of 1899, the building had been enlarged to cover numbers 205 to 213 and had become a Mission, the religious equivalent of a settlement house. The neighborhood was still full of people with financial. medical, and perhaps also spiritual needs. The mission building contained medical facilities, the relocated soup kitchen, and educational and recreational facilities. When they needed physical food, those who sponsored the buildings might have gone after 1891 to the first large store in the future chain owned by Charles and Diedrich Gristede.

(For the shop: NYT 4 1 1950, p. 10. It opened in 1891 at Second Avenue and was gaslit. Charles Bruning later bought the store. NYT 10 16 1968, pp. 59, 64.)

The needy might have visited the St. Bartholomew Mission which, after 1891, relocated to its new parish house at 205-209 East. The building had a Richardsonian composition of lower arches supporting taller ones, topped by a floor with quadruple rectilinear openings that concluded the design below a projecting cornice. The lower part was faced in polished stone, with buff brick facing above. An additional floor was built in 1897. A clinic of complementary design adjoined the parish house at the east. The pair of buildings provided more services in larger surroundings. There was a larger restaurant and spaces for assemblies, recreation, and instruction in useful and marketable vocational skills. The architects were Renwick, Aspinwall & Renwick, the firm established by James Renwick who had done distinguished work for the denomination earlier in the century.

Fig.4. St. Bartholomew’s Parish House (left) and Clinic (right), 1891, 1897. Renwick, Aspinwall & Renwick. Photo: https://www.nycago.org/Organs/NYC/html/StBartholomewEpisParishHouse.html Public domain).

Those who were still well-to-do found much to enjoy on Forty-second Street in the 1890s. If they wanted fur coats or wraps, they could visit Christopher Columbus Shayne’s fifty-foot-wide emporium. Its second retail shop moved into 124 West and the wholesale division moved to 126 West in the fall of 1893, just when others were experiencing the pains of the economic downturn. (Chap. 3 Fig. 2). Among those who could afford furs, Mr. Shayne had a reputation for honesty and a wide selection that he displayed in a 40 x 50-foot skylit and windowed amphitheater. There, customers could examine the offerings in natural light. If they had particular requests, employees on the upper floors could turn pelts into the required products.

(Wikipedia s.v. Shayne’s Emporium. 4 floors, 50 ft x 100. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shayne%27s_Emporium accessed 1 28 2020; See also NYT 10 3 1893, p. 5. “Shaynes’ Palatial Emporium” and obituary ibid., 2 23 1906, p. 9)

Adults with more mundane needs continued to satisfy them at the corner of Eighth Avenue where the Vogel brothers altered their clothing and haberdashery shop in 1899. At that time, the owners enlarged the men’s department, added one for women, and welcomed customers in an enhanced entrance beside broad iron-framed shop windows of the type that had become common by then. (Clothiers & Haberdashers Weekly 14 #11, 8 25 1899, p. 11)

Newcomers and frequent visitors had a much-expanded choice of hotels as well as shops along the street. Fireproofing was a new means of attracting customers, and the St. Cloud at Sixth Avenue and Broadway publicized this improvement. (Chap. 1, Fig. 31) The hotel’s popularity required an addition in 1894 with supper rooms and private dining rooms; other new income came from shops that could be entered directly from the street. The Rossmore--the Metropole as of 1889--occupied much of the wedge-shaped block formed by Broadway and Seventh Avenue, adding larger ground floor iron-framed windows in a wing with a rathskeller and a men’s bar and café. (Chap. 3, figs. 7-10). Later, along with the Garrick and smaller hotels nearby, the Metropole also housed prostitutes who had arrived with the theaters. The Grand Union near the railroad terminal was more respectable and expanded gradually. Mr. Schoonmaker (p.30) thought that the hotel was at its best in this decade. “On summer evenings they used to set chairs out on the sidewalk, and I have counted nearly a hundred at a time. About once a week, a couple” of African-American musicians would come around, one whistling as if he were a flute, the other playing a guitar. The musicians received silver coins for their talent.

But the star hotel in the 1890s was the Manhattan, built to a design of 1893 by Henry Janeway Hardenberg.

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(Fig. 5. Hotel Manhattan. Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, 1893 ff. From: A History of Real Estate, Building, and Architecture in New York City…1898, Public domain.)

Occupying 120 feet on both Madison Avenue and Forty-second Street, on the northwest corner, it replaced the much smaller brick and stone Hotel Wellington that had a bar and café in the raised basement.

(Fig. 6. Hotel Wellington, From: Valentine’s Manual, courtesy Mark Tomasko. Public domain.)

The Manhattan also replaced several tenements with basements and four upper floors. The hotel was the venture of a member of Congress, James J. Belden, and his associates. It was as convenient to the Depot as the Grand Union was, but far more glamorous. When it opened in 1896 after seventeen months of construction interrupted by strikes, the steel-framed building protected by fireproofing materials claimed to be the tallest hotel in the world and probably was.

(Marc Eidlitz was the architect, according to King’s Views 1903 p. 70, p. 15; Real Estate Record & Builders’ Guide 6 25 1898 p. 111; Eidlitz’s firm later became Vermilya-Brown)

Resting on bedrock twenty-five feet below street level, it rose fourteen stories above the sidewalk to the limit of the Sprague Electric Elevators, innovative mechanisms that had just been sold in 1895 to the Otis company.

(For Frank J Sprague, see William Middleton III, Frank Julian Sprague: Electrical Inventor and Engineer, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2009; Brian Roberts, Frank J Sprague and the Electric Elevator http://www.hevac-heritage.org/built_environment/pioneers_revisited/surnames_m-w/sprague.pdf accessed 3 29 2020; for Middleton’s role at Grand Central, ibid., pp. 147 ff) . For showing that the depth to bedrock had little influence on the location of skyscrapers; see Jason Barr, Troy Tassier, Rossen Trandafilov, “Depth to Bedrock and the Formation of the Manhattan Skyline, 1890-1915,” Journal of Economic History 71 #34, Dec. 2011, pp. 1060-1077).

The granite and limestone exterior was noteworthy, with its culminating dormers and sloping roof, its mass broken here and there by small balconies. The ground floor had a protruding Ionic porch of granite and lightly rusticated masonry. The second- floor design was more elaborate with bands of masonry and round windows for public rooms at that level. The remaining windows were simple rectangles with sills and framing panels, and some windows had triangular pediments.

(Fig. 7, Hotel Manhattan. Photo: Library of Congress. Detroit Publishing Co., Public domain.)

The interior was the real attraction. The porch on Forty-second Street led to the lobby, a Grand Hall and a rotunda. Guests were surrounded by pale marble-clad walls adorned with Tiffany favrile glass mosaic. They walked on a white-and-colored-marble floor partly covered by oriental rugs. Six large columns of false marble sustained the thick-rimmed coffers of the ceiling, but about a third of the ceiling consisted of a Tiffany glass skylight. In 1896, Charles Yardley Turner won a competition to embellish the rotunda with a three-part mural six feet high and sixty feet long, called “The Triumph of Manhattan.” Its subjects included Native Americans, colonists from Europe, and historical figures from the early years of the republic paying homage to “Empress Manhattan” and her attendants.

(Fig. 8. Tyson & Brother, Hotel Manhattan, Rotunda. Photo, Museum of the City of New York, ca.1920. X2011.34.340. Public domain.)

A culminating image showed the Brooklyn Bridge. Turner’s work so satisfied the management that it engaged him again in 1898 to paint another mural for the lobby, this one of Greek divinities, and then in 1900-01 to paint the four seasons and “The Days” in other rooms. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Yardley_Turner accessed 3 29 2020) Frederic Crowninshield, Kenyon Cox, and Charles M. Shean executed other paintings in the restaurants and bar. The ground floor, lavish as it was, seemed less impressive than the main dining room. From the latter’s mezzanine gallery on two sides, an orchestra delighted the guests and allowed some visitors to marvel at the three-to four-hundred diners below. Those enjoying dinner could look out the windows on the other two sides. The walls had wooden wainscoting accented with pilasters and an American Gobelin Company tapestry frieze above the wood. Hovering above, the oak paneled ceiling included gilded relief.

Ladies could enter the hotel by their own entrance on Madison Avenue, which was lined in maple with gold enrichments and many mirrors. They had their own parlor with decoration considered dainty and thus suited to the presumably weaker sex. Providing copious spaces for women was unusual at the time, for women had not often traveled alone in earlier decades. The ladies even had their own dining room of almost two thousand square feet, lit by six chandeliers. Men had a billiard room, and a bar and café in the basement. Hotel guests could enjoy coffee in the mezzanine above the ladies’ parlor. There was a reading and writing room, and a second dining room off the foyer for residents and those temporary guests who wanted privacy; the dining room itself was identified as Adam style, with silk-covered walls and mahogany woodwork adorned with brass. Paintings in the second dining room showed landscapes and women’s heads, executed by J. Wells Champneys. Herbert Denman painted shepherdesses and court beauties presenting the arts and music in a music room that opened from the foyer. Indoors and out there was elaborate metalwork for fences, an outdoor canopy, lamps, and grilles, some of them to Hardenbergh’s designs. Their production was entrusted to the Archer & Pancoast Company, a firm in lower Manhattan that produced lighting and other fixtures for elite individuals and institutions throughout the United States. Residents used the American Plan, which meant three meals a day included in their rent, while others chose the European Plan with no meals, encouraging a proliferation of restaurants nearby

The public rooms were only some of the appealing features. Every bedroom and bathroom had a window--apparently something to advertise at the time--whether on the street front or on one of two inner courtyards, and each had its own thermostat. Every floor had local telephone contact and a service room where attendants brushed and pressed clothes. And each room had a teleseme set, a device recently introduced in Paris’ Elysée Palace Hotel that allowed occupants to order services of many kinds without having to speak to a person. The system of electrodes and numbered compartments could lead to mistakes that cost time, labor, and the patience of disappointed visitors, but when it worked properly, guests could request all kinds of things by moving a pointer on the device and pressing a button.

Far below in the building, the sub-basement contained boilers, a laundry with purified and filtered water, exhaust and supply fans, Westinghouse dynamos, and an ice-making plant. Above that were a bar and café, intended for men. As we have seen in other hotels, it was common at the time to place men’s haunts below ground as if they were rathskellers in Germany: places for the people in charge. Even underground, art appeared; Frederic Crowninshield supplied a landscape frieze in the café, and in the bar, called the Dutch Bar, a Netherlandish landscape by Charles M. Shean showed the windmills and dikes that constituted much of what schoolchildren were taught about that country. Wine vaults and the well-ventilated kitchen were at this level, too.

The hotel boasted something exceptionally appealing---the opportunity to survey the city and even the Palisades of New Jersey from an extraordinary height. The Manhattan attracted elite visitors, including Presidents McKinley and Taft, as well as the Transportation Club that took over the thirteenth floor. Other guests, in April 1899, were Samuel LoneBear, Joe BlackFox, and Philip StandingSoldier. They were Lakota performers in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, men known to later generations from photographs by Gertrude Kasebier. Although at least one of the men spoke several languages and all were well-traveled, they were described condescendingly as remarkable for knowing how to use forks. The objects that they brought, apparently as gifts, were called trinkets but their headdresses, beaded jackets, and armlets were considered beautiful. Other hotels at the time boasted of having famous visitors, too, but few were as up-to-date in their amenities.

(H.J. Hardenbergh, Marc Eidlitz & Son, American Bank Notes Company, Hotel Manhattan: Madison Avenue, Forty-second and Forty-third Streets, New York,” U.S.A.”the triumph of Manhattan,” n.p.., no publisher, 1913.)

One new hotel had a choice location on 68 x 35 feet at Broadway and Seventh Avenue. At this conspicuous but narrow site, the brewer J. G. F. Pabst commissioned a hotel from architect Henry F. Kilburn as part of the company’s strategy of building hotels, restaurants, and resorts where only its beer would be served.

(Fig. 9. Byron Company, Pabst Hotel, Henry F. Kilburn, 1899. Photo: Museum of the City of New York, 93.1.1.6427. ca. 1900, Public domain.)

The company’s brewery occupied the west end of Forty-ninth Street, close enough for frequent deliveries to the new hotel. The firm of Andrew J. Robinson, who worked elsewhere on Forty-second Street, was the main contractor; he completed his work in 1899. (NYH Corso Hotel Collection; New York Tribune 11 12 1899, p. 10. Unpaginated clippings: New York Tribune 11 19 1899; 11 19 1901; 4 22 1902; NYT C. Gray,” Streetscapes,” 12 1 1996, p. R5). The building was framed in steel protected from corrosion and faced with rusticated limestone. (NYT 11 23 1902, p.12). The stone’s pale color and the building’s height contrasted with the dark row houses to the west.

The Pabst was by no means the equal of the Hotel Manhattan, but it was a pleasant establishment, with nine stories and an attic above a basement with the usual men’s rathskeller—to be expected from a German-born brewer. The owner added a restaurant for both men and women. Each of the seven upper floors had five bedrooms meant only for male guests because a sign painted on the exterior referred to a “Bachelor Hotel,” intended for residents as well as transients. One part of the dining room had colored glass decoration on its skylights, and armchairs with art nouveau curves, while a simpler part, brighter with straight and curved windows, had straight-backed chairs. There was a lounge, designed to domestic scale, The conservatory on the second floor was the cause of a crusade by the New York Times. Designed by Otto Strack, it had been added illegally in 1900, projecting from the second-floor restaurant and resting on a portico. About a year later, the owners removed it. The relentless articles inveighing against this commonplace violation of law may well have had an ulterior motive if the newspaper owner already coveted the site for the New York Times Building which soon replaced the Pabst Hotel. After construction for the subway line eliminated the basement beer hall, the lease was sold in 1902 to Adolph Ochs, who had bought the New York Times in 1896.

The Pabst building’s steel framing was still unusual enough to warrant comment, but it was not the only innovative technology introduced in this decade. The important introduction of large water tanks on top of buildings was a new and enduring feature of large buildings. In addition, steam heat was installed in much of lower Manhattan, gas pipes and tracks for the impending subway were buried to improve safety, electric streetcars were introduced, pneumatic tubes sent mail to post offices, and pneumatic caissons helped to create building foundations. Perhaps most obvious to most people were the street lights, important for public safety and convenience, as well as metropolitan beauty. (Harry Granick Underneath New York, New York, Fordham University Press, 1991, p. 96) All this contrasted with the wooden shacks that had stood on Forty-second Street twenty years earlier. (NYT 3 7 1909, p. 12)

A new type of hotel appeared in 1896, called a Raines Law hotel. It followed state legislation that curbed prostitution in brothels or rooming houses but simply transferred it somewhere else. The law was initially intended to reduce at least the public consumption of alcohol. Hotels could serve liquor on Sundays if it was imbibed with food, and it could also be made available in hotel bedrooms where there were no passers-by to observe drunken behavior. Owners of saloons understood that providing the legal minimum of ten rooms upstairs could be profitable for both occupants and themselves. It took less than a decade for counter-legislation to eliminate what had become houses of prostitution that might serve mere sandwiches at the bar. Officials could also invoke a law of 1891 that required hotels over thirty-five feet in height to have fireproof walls three inches thick, rooms of thirty square feet or more, and doors that opened into hallways. Most Raines Law hotels could not provide all of these since they were usually converted from tenements in which rooms might lead into other rooms rather than a hallway. (Timothy Gilfoyle, “Policing of Sexuality,” Inventing Times Square p. 307, and note 36, p. 311)

For a different level of pleasure and comfort, Fleischman’s Baths opened in 1893 at 47 West, lasting there until 1925 by being incorporated into the Bryant Park Arcade building erected in 1906 at 47-65 West. (For the latter, see Chap. 5) The owner, Julius Fleischman, a former florist, presented his facility as being “known all over the world as the most palatial and perfect exposition of the Fine Art of Bathing,” It is true that the famous Gellert Baths in Budapest had not yet been built, but the Friedrichsbad in Baden-Baden had opened sixteen years earlier, and the grand rooms at Aix-les-Bains preceded Fleischman’s by a decade. Nevertheless, there was no serious competitor on Forty-second Street.

(Fig. 10. Fleischman’s Baths on upper floors of the Bryant Park Arcade at the northeast corner of Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue. Photo: The New York Historical. Roege photo, 1910. Public domain.)

The Murray Hill Baths at 113 West were far smaller, not more than fifty feet wide and lasted a shorter time. A sign outside the five-story building advertised both Russian and Turkish baths; a business card added Roman baths and there was a plunge pool, presumably international. A drawing of the interior shows men clad only in towels, which implies that they swam in the nude. Of course, they dressed for meals and in the lounges. The building itself was the width of two row houses but decorated with columns at the door, a cornice, diamond-shaped window panes, and inscriptions to suggest a level of grandeur.

(Figs. 11 and 12 .Murray Hill Baths, interior of pool room and entry ticket. Courtesy Allyson McDavid. Public domain.)

(Real Estate Record and Guide Dec.30, 1890, and June 11, 1892; see also https://daytonianinmanhattan.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-lost-murray-hill-baths-113-west.html)

Across the street from Fleischmann’s, Bryant Park was by then the location of some mature trees and grassy lawns. Sculpture of recent luminaries was introduced in 1894. One work was a bust of Washington Irving, the other a statue by Ferdinand von Miller Jr. of Dr. James Marion Sims, a pioneering gynecologist and inventor of surgical instruments. The Sims statue, of bronze on a granite base, is now uptown in Central Park, reviled by those who know that he performed tests on enslaved Black women who were not given anesthesia. Before this history became widely known, visitors to the parks could take inspiration from the worthy lives of those commemorated by statues.

(L. L Wall, “The Medical Ethics of Dr J. Marion Sims: a fresh look at the historical record, Journal of Medical Ethics, vol. 32 #6, June, 2006 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2563360/ accessed 5 28 2020. )

As for more enduring intellectual pleasures, in 1893, a plan was initiated to provide a free library and reading room on the site of the reservoir. Samuel J. Tilden, former Governor of New York State and disputed presidential winner in the election of 1876, left $2,400,000 upon his death in 1886 for a free library and reading room. At the time, there were two substantial private libraries with some access for the public, one founded by John Jacob Astor and a more restricted one by James Lenox, a bibliophile devoted to manuscripts, giants of British literature, and American materials. When the Lenox collection experienced financial difficulty by the 1890s, John Bigelow, a statesman and friend of Tilden’s, helped to arrange a merger of the three entities in 1895. Realization of the New York Public Library had to wait sixteen years, but a first step was taken toward the goal when the reservoir was drained in 1897 and demolished starting in 1899; some of its foundations survive as part of the library’s basement.

The trustees held a competition for the design, a practice widespread at the time. To the surprise of some older practitioners, the winners in 1897 were John Merven Carrere and Thomas Hastings, by then in their late thirties. Graduates of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, they had worked for McKim Mead & White before forming their own firm, continuing to use comparable French-inspired classicizing plans and forms. In 1899, work began on the library.

(Lemos, Morrison et al., Carrere & Hastings, 2006; David Soll, Empire of Water: An Environmental History of the New York City Water Supply, Ithaca, Cornell U. Press, 2013, pp. 31-34)

Smaller gestures toward education were made in this decade. Holy Cross Church opened a boys’ school next door in 1891. In 1895, when several public schools were found to be unsafe, the city’s budget allocated money for new ones. Summer vacation schools for poor children, open three hours a day, attracted voluntary financing.

It might be said of theatrical productions that they, too, were educational, since plays by Shakespeare were performed frequently. But most plays were far from literary, being designed for light-hearted entertainment. Theaters and night life had been inching up toward Forty-second Street for a few years, and the New American Theatre reached Forty-second Street in 1893in 1893, although with only its secondary entrance corridor there.

(Fig. 13. American Theatre, 1893, Lesser entrance on Forty-second Street. Charles Coolidge Haight, architect. Photo: cinematreasures.org theaters 3386 photo 155669)

The façade rose well above nearby four-story tenements. Its features were Italian--arches on the ground floor, a tall third floor with triangular pediments over the windows, groups of low arches below the cornice--but without coherence. The same could be said of the more lavish façade on Eighth Avenue. Inside, the theater offered one of the largest seating capacities in the city, with nineteen hundred seats and standing room for two hundred. While the interior was described as minimally decorated, and had views obstructed by six columns that supported each balcony, it lasted until 1932. The Times applauded it as a “theatre fit for the noblest plays and the best audiences.” (NYT 5 23 1893, p.4.) Patrons probably appreciated the first theater elevators to bring them to seats above the orchestra. The entrepreneur was Elliott F. Zborowski, the theatrical manager T. Henry French, and the architect was Charles Coolidge Haight, more prominent as a designer of educational institutions. An open-air rooftop theater accommodated summer performances, as many theaters did before air-cooling and air-conditioning were introduced. A garden provided soothing greenery there.

(Fig. 14.. Byron Company, American Theatre roof garden in 1898. Photo: Museum of the City of New York, 93.1.1.10848)

William Morris converted the building to vaudeville presentation in 1908. Felix Isman, a real estate and theatrical entrepreneur, leased it and made some improvements. Morris hired Thomas W. Lamb, one of the geniuses of ‘atmospheric’ theaters, to remodel the rooftop theater into an indoor auditorium for another 1400 patrons. Lamb did there what he was famous for doing elsewhere---providing stars on the ceiling, changes of light, and forests on the side walls that seemed to envelop the patrons. When Morris’s presentations failed commercially, Marcus Loew bought the theater and put his name on it, converting both theaters to vaudeville, stage reviews, and then motion pictures. This proved sufficiently profitable until the onset of the Depression in 1929, after which the American briefly presented burlesque shows. It was demolished three years later, after a fire damaged much of it in 1930.

On the east side, between Lexington and Third Avenues, Robert and Ogden Goelet leased their new Murray Hill Theatre for twenty years, starting in 1896. A four-story building faced in pale brick, it boasted of its many exits and fireproof construction until city officials closed it in 1905 as presenting a fire hazard; it seems to have been open again in 1909. From a white and gold lobby entered under arches, patrons moved to a white and gold auditorium with a stage sixty-five feet wide and forty deep. A feature of the theater was a special room for storing women’s hats during performances, to avoid having them obstruct views of the stage. The acoustics were judged excellent but the opening night opera about the Mexican War had a librettist whose “poverty of …language” was evident despite the ability of composer Oscar Weil to rival Mascagni and Massenet. The tenor’s incompetent acting didn’t help, either, but the performances were scheduled only for one week. (NYT 10 8 1896, p. 11; 10 20 1896, p. 5; 4 4 1905, p. 1; 12 19 1909, p. 4. See also 7 5 1903, p. 21) The theater was sold to the Loew’s chain in 1924, Adjacent to the theater, at 130 East, the small but respectable Penn Hotel of three stories faced in brick catered to traveling salesmen, with a restaurant and a bar that closed on Sundays and after 1 AM. (NYT 1 30 1901, p. 2)

The catalyst for building more theaters on Forty-second Street itself was Oscar Hammerstein’s theater on land still owned by the Livingston family, old New Yorkers who had retained their property interests. The site was at the corner of Seventh Avenue, where stables had been. Hammerstein’s had several names over the years including the Victoria and the Belasco, the latter renamed after Hammerstein sold it to theatrical entrepreneur David Belasco. Constructed in 1898, it opened in the following year to the design of John B. McElfatrick who was expected to fill the entire 100 x 131-foot lot with a small auditorium, a large promenade, a tier of boxes and a balcony. (NYT 9 18 1898, p.7) Hammerstein had built another theater, the Olympia, two blocks north, but because it failed commercially, his budget for the new building was constrained. He leased the land from the stable’s existing leaseholder and used the stable’s wood and brick in the theater’s construction.

(Fig.15. Byron Company.Hammerstein’s Victoria Theatre, Museum of the City of NewYork, 93.1.1.20361, Public domain)

(Fig. 16. Hammerstein’s Victoria Theatre. Lobby. Photo: Library of Congress: LC-YSZ62-116143. Public domain)

(Fig. 17. Hammerstein’s Victoria Theatre. Auditorium. Photo Library of Congress. LC-USZ62-100605 Public domain)

Later writers scorned the second-hand carpets and auditorium chairs taken from the Olympia and noted that the backstage was really the former stable’s hay loft, but the New York Times praised the “attractive…rich and tasteful” decoration, and the handsome velvet upholstery in the boxes as well as the broad, deep stage which could easily be seen from all seats. The predominant color in the furnishing and decoration was red. (NYT 3 3 1899, p. 6).

John McElfatrick need not have spent much time on the exterior design, and photographs show that he didn’t. The reason was simple: fire escapes, and signs advertising the attractions covered much of the exterior. The brick building, apparently plastered, had rows of windows at each floor, brick dentil decoration near the top, and the uppermost floor with additional windows probably to light offices. A protuberance on the roof would have aroused curiosity, satisfied by a visit there via elevator. Hammerstein had it laid out like a promenade on three levels, adorned with plants and two thousand electric lights---a number that in those days earned attention. A theater-in-the round was built there, too. Among the afternoon attractions in the smaller stage was a flea circus, not the last one to be displayed on West Forty-second Street. The roof garden’s most unusual feature, however, was an area called the Dutch farm, with appropriate animals, the obligatory windmill, and a milkmaid who, it was reported, lived in the tiny rooftop farmhouse. (http://hatchingcatnyc.com/2014/05/23/the-dutch-farm-at-hammersteins/)

(Fig. 18. Byron Company, Hammerstein’s Victoria Theatre roof garden “Paradise” Dutch Farm, Photo ca.1901: Museum of the City of New York. 92.1.1.10860 Public domain)

In 1902, architect W. E. Mowbray prepared plans for fireproofing the roof garden theater by re-erecting the structure in steel, providing brick arches, and cement to cover the roof.

Next door, architects Bigelow, Wallace, and Cotton altered the Republic Theater of 1899 designed originally by Albert E. Westover from whom Hammerstein bought it. (NYT 4 4 1902, p. 9; 4 6 1902, p. 19) This was a more modest but visually more orderly building with a broad façade articulated below by a central staircase and at the top by a row of arches separated by pilasters below a cornice. More arches concealed the roof, which had its own garden attached to Hammerstein’s. Inside, patrons reached 964 seats om the orchestra and the only balcony through a cramped entrance and lobby. A forty-foot- wide proscenium twenty-five feet high, and a stage thirty feet deep were more impressive. Wide chairs and good acoustics compensated somewhat for the initially poor ventilation. Much of the façade, some of its muscular gilded putti, and a lyre from the original décor survive in what is now called the New Victory Theatre. (NYT 9 28 1900. p. 5; see Chap.13 s.v. New Victory Theatre) In 1902, this theater, too, was taken over and partly remodeled by David Belasco. Then, in 1911, its fortunes diminishing, the theater switched presentations from plays to burlesque, but even that type of entertainment was slowly losing popularity.

Within a few years of 1900, theaters proliferated along West Forty-second Street, along with new houses of prostitution. Sex was no doubt also traded on the east side, as customers arrived at Grand Central, away from the eyes of their usual associates at home. The Committee of Fifteen, organized in 1900 to eliminate various types of sinful behavior, found 132 addresses sheltering this activity, including more than five dozen row houses---not all on Forty-second Street but at least close by, and particularly evident on the south side of the street between Sixth and Ninth Avenues.

(“The Social Evil in Tenement Houses.” Report to the state governor; NYT 3 25 1901, p. 12. Gilfoyle, “Policing of Sexuality,” Inventing Times Square, p. 300 for a map of the houses of ill fame.)

After 1898, railroad passengers found the east side with its Depot markedly changed and in important ways improved, initially by local architect Bradford Lee Gilbert.

(Fig. 19. First Grand Central Depot, exterior in 1896 with annex, and spur of the El. A corner of the Grand Union hotel is at far right. Temporary restaurant and carriage parking were south of the depot, before a hotel was built there. Author’s collection.)

(Fig. 20. Grand Central Depot as remodeled by Bradford Lee Gilbert, 1900 ff. Photo: Library of Congress from Detroit Publiching Company. Public domain. Note the two-stosry ‘taxpayers’ to the west.)

He remodeled the head house by removing the cupolas and mansards, adding three floors of offices for the increased staff, and changing the exterior appearance to a set of superimposed floors, some of them separated by horizontal moldings. Gilbert covered all but the lowest floors with Portland cement stucco and some artificial stone. Turrets marked the corners, and pediments at the center of the west and south facades relieved the monotonous design. Cast iron eagles were among the few exterior embellishments.

The iron train shed was an impressive 112 feet high, equipped with gates, cuspidors, and guards.

(Fig. 21. Train shed interior. Photo: New York Public Library. Public domain.)

The exterior of the north end of the shed was a composition evoking north Italian Renaissance buildings that had multiple arches and curved pediments.

(Fig. 22. North side, exterior of Grand Central Depot train shed. Photo: Wikipedia. Public domain.)

In 1900, architect Samuel Huckel Jr. altered the interior. He eliminated the former inconvenient replication of ticket booths and waiting rooms by creating a unified waiting room with a unified ticket-sales area. People began to call it Grand Central Station.

The railroads provided armchairs and rocking chairs and fireplaces and writing desks for full-fare passengers, Newcomers to the United States and poor Americans about to relocate using ‘emigrant’ fares had to wait for their trains in the basement. (C. Gray: “Streetscapes: Grand Central Terminal,” NYT 6 21 1998, p. RE5). In other ways, too, richer passengers were well treated according to the class consciousness of the era. Already in 1895, white men had begun work as greeters and assistants to travelers, especially to single women who, it was evidently assumed, would need help upon arriving in the big city. By 1903, African-American men were hired for this work, but soon became porters rather than greeters.

(Eric K Washington, Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal, New York, Norton/ Liveright, 2019, Introduction, p. 2; Belle & Leighton, Grand Central, pp. 41-45 Schlichting, Grand Central Terminal, 2001, pp. 51-53; LPC Designation List 137, LP-1099, Sept. 23, 1980 Grand Central Terminal as interior landmark)

It might be thought that the remodeled building would suffice for another twenty years, but it had too few tracks for the vastly increased train service. The train yard at the north end was unsightly and required bridges over the tracks though not enough were built to serve pedestrians or vehicles adequately, and the tunnel along part of the steam train route became clouded and smoky at times. By the end of the century, one of the railroad’s engineers, William J. Wilgus, was considering electrification of the railroad as the solution to at least some of these problems. It was he who conceived the extensive and permanent improvements that came about in the next decade.