Chapter 2 The 1870s
During the 1870s, the area’s character began to change from being sparsely populated to more urban. New areas had to be developed--to Forty-second Street and beyond--to house immigrants and workers as new industries developed. Broadway above Thirty-fourth Street was “but little improved…though it [was] believed the next few years” would see important changes. (James McCabe, Lights and Shadows of New York Life, Philadelphia, National Publishing Company, 1872, p.128). Rich people left crowded downtown and even midtown for the upper reaches of the central avenues, far from the existing factories and docks at the city’s edges. To reach these newly occupied areas, wealthier New Yorkers who sought relief from the crowding in Lower Manhattan and even from row-house developments in pleasant Murray Hill used private transportation if they could afford it since walking to work in distant downtown was no longer feasible. Gradually, conveyances extended their operation. In July 1870, horse cars began service to Seventy-third Street, running through the Murray Hill Tunnel along Fourth Avenue to Forty-second Street, turning west and then northward on Madison Avenue. James McCabe, who wrote popular encyclopedic works about the state of Manhattan, asserted in Lights and Shadows that the streetcars were too few and therefore too crowded. He found them threatening to public health and staffed by over-worked and under-paid personnel whose sullen behavior was understandable if not forgivable. (ibid., p.212) But while the beginning of the decade saw slightly expanded horse-car transportation, and while the end saw a horse-drawn railway from the Weehawken Ferry to First Avenue with an extension south to Thirty-fourth Street, the more significant changes of the 1870s were improvements in mechanized transportation.
(For the horse railway: NYT 12. 20 1879, p. 3; 6 5, 1880, p. 7; 1 3 1884, p. 5; 2 21 1884, p. 8; 9 9 1884, p. 8; the work was protracted: 5 16 1900, p. 14.)
Most important were the opening of the Grand Central Depot in 1871 and the construction later of elevated railway lines. The first “El,” the New York Elevated Railway, crossed Forty-second Street in mid-decade. It was situated on Ninth Avenue in order to protect more fashionable streets from the noise and dirt of construction and of the coal-burning steam operation. Other investors using the name Metropolitan Elevated Railway Company also received permission in 1875 to initiate construction of a similar line on Third Avenue between South Ferry and Forty-second Street, with a spur to the Grand Central Depot.
(Fig. 1, 42nd Street with El spur from Third Avenue to the Grand Central Depot. Visible right to left are the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled (corner only), Warren’s Wallpaper Factory, the Depot, Holy Trinity’s spire. Image NYPL image 01531https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-cd3f-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99. Public domain)
When the Third Avenue line opened on August 26,1878, it already had a rival New York Elevated line on Sixth Avenue. The Metropolitan company also built the Second Avenue “El.”
(Burrows & Wallace, Gotham, pp. 1053-6; the two companies amalgamated in 1879: Hood, 722 Miles, p 51; financier Jay Gould merged the lines in 1881: Hood, p.60; see also NYT 9 8 1875, p. 8))
The two most attractive aspects of the Els were the speed at which they moved when everything went well—sometimes it didn’t-- and the Victorian-country-cottage-style stations on the Sixth Avenue line designed by the painter Jasper Francis Cropsey.
(Fig. 2. J. F. Cropsey, Sixth Avenue/42nd Street “El” station. Wood engraving. Courtesy NYU. Public domain)
Under broad iron roofs, separate waiting rooms for men and women preserved social proprieties. Simpler rooms sheltered passengers on the Third Avenue line. There was general rejoicing about the Els, despite the noise and the oil and cinders that they dropped, because they were quick, did not foul the streets as horses did, and shifted retail business to their pathways. Horse car owners hoped to win lawsuits for damaging their business but gave up. (e.g. NYT 6 8 1878. p. 8)
Important developments in steam power were not confined to vehicles. In building, chain-ladder elevators used for hoisting reduced labor and its costs, and powered elevators and derricks. (A History of Real Estate Building, Architecture in NYC 1868-1893 NY Real Estate Record & Builders Guide, 1894)
Along with the improvements in transportation came shops and services gradually increasing in number, as well as row houses and tenements for residents who were either adventurous enough to move uptown or desperate for somewhere to live. Mechanical transportation at unprecedented speed encouraged people of modest means to rent apartments in new locations, as work downtown would be reachable in minutes.
A map of the former Norton estate, dated November 1872, compared with the Bromley-Parsons fire insurance map of 1879 shows the buildup of West Forty-second Street in this decade. The landowners had divided almost all of it into lots for narrow houses, evidently intended for working-class tenants. Where earlier, the west side streams had impeded some construction, the later map shows house construction above most of the waterways. Apart from a few interruptions, the blocks on the north and south sides of Forty-second Street were filled by 1879 with nearly identical narrow multiple dwellings all the way east to Seventh Avenue. The well-to-do clung to the center of Manhattan Island, but even for them, row houses prevailed over individual mansions on this street.
(Map of the Hermitage Farm and the Norton Estate, Compiled by John Bute Holmes, C.E. and the City Surveyor, November 1872, NYC Department of Records & Information Services, mfm03. (Municipal Archives) Online images are privately owned. Several Bromley maps are digitized at the New York Public Library.)
James McCabe characterized the edges of the city as the resorts of the poor, where streets might be dirty, unlike those of the richer areas. It was considered remarkable that an all-iron bathtub with claw feet was installed in a tenement near Ninth Avenue; it had to be hoisted up outside the building and inserted through a window, which added to its singularity. (NYT 8 4 1935, p. E10) Names of murderers, robbers, and harmless celebrants recorded in the New York Times show that many of the poor were of Irish origin, living mainly west of Eighth Avenue and east of Lexington, and that more prosperous residents were of English origin, living near the center.
The city’s eleven miles of piers did nothing to enhance the social scene at the island’s edges, because the shores were primarily the haunts of sailors, prostitutes and poor working people. The atmosphere of the areas near the rivers required the introduction of a bill in the state Assembly to prohibit “throwing of offal or dead animals in the North and East Rivers” where slaughterhouses clustered for that very purpose. (NYT 3 26 1871, p. 1) The 400 West block was repeatedly the scene of drunken attacks, assaults, and robberies. In contrast, 129 West was the location of Mrs. Frost’s Young Ladies’ School in 1872, an indication of the social scene on the central blocks.
By that time, much of the city was being paved. Wood and Belgian blocks replaced cobblestones but not until the early 1900s was asphalt laid on Forty-second Street between Fourth and Seventh Avenues. (NYT 6 20 1905, p. 6) Cobblestones were considered obsolete even if some were still used near the east and west ends and along the far eastern avenues. (NYT 9 2 1874 p. 2). Lexington Avenue north of Thirty-fifth Street was paved with wood in September 1874, when the cobblestones on First and Second Avenues were in nearly useless condition. (NYT 9 2 1874 p. 2.) Many sidewalks, and probably those on newly opened streets such as Forty-second, were made of large flagstones and the streets were lit at night by gas lamps supplied by the city or private owners.
Development, then, was neither uniform nor immediate, and the results were often noxious. An amendment to a statute about cattle-driving allowed herds arriving above Thirty-ninth Street to be driven across the entire length of Forty-second Street if there was one herdsman per twenty animals. (NYT 7 11 1870 p. 8). A six-story factory owned by James H. Ingersoll, a corrupt man in the Tammany Hall circle, was proposed in 1870 for Lexington Avenue at Forty-second Street (NYT 3 26 1870, p. 6). A few city blocks had yet to be regularized, including one site about 74 feet west of Third Avenue which was a right-angled triangle formed by the early post road that had crossed the block; it accounts for the later Chrysler Building’s irregular plan. (NYT 7 12, 1870, p. 6) The horses of the Forty-second and Grand Street Ferry Railroad Company were housed in a filthy and inadequately staffed three-story brick building at the far west end of the street, finally opened to inspection by an official of the Board of Health. Hosing down the areas around stables further damaged street paving. Nearby, the Ferry company building on the north side of Forty-second near the Hudson River was considered unsafe. The company itself was unusual as it ran only one boat, irregularly. A committee of the state legislature investigated it after unexplained delay but the outcome of the inquiry is now unclear.
(For the horses: NYT 7 7 1871, p.6;7 8 1871, p.5; 6 8 1871, p.8, 21; 7 18 1871, p. 6; 7 22 1871, p. l; 8 3 1871, p. 3) https://www.archpaper.com/2021/12/here-are-the-controversies-that-drew-ire-in-2021/?trk_msg=ADFLQTMOLLJKVBGRFVDEQK0DP8&trk_contact=TEPFHR44CIVCNPL8VQT1VM1DKS&trk_sid=E0EEFFNO3OUAV1ANDLPFKKGQB4&trk_link=A8UCNPFJ66KK70JF4BV6MV1H2G&utm_source=listrak&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Here+are+the+controversies+that+drew+ire+in+2021&utm_campaign=Late+Edition+East%3a+The+controversies+that+drew+ire+in+2021+and+more; NYT 3 13 1870, p. 5)
An explosion caused by a careless employee damaged the gas works near the Hudson riverfront in 1871. No lives were lost but people were injured and windows nearby were blown out. (NYT 12 25 1871, p. 2) Foul gases from this facility and from slaughterhouses along the west side needed remedies and since the Department of Docks was unable to remove accumulated filth, the city’s Sanitary Committee proposed to use the material to fill the river front and open Twelfth Avenue (NYT 6 21 1873, p.2) The Central Market at Broadway produced refuse that was not always cleared away (NYT 1 21 1874, p. 8).
It wasn’t just industry or commerce that caused problems; the street-cleaning bureau found repeatedly that the occupants of tenements west of Eighth Avenue threw their “ashes and garbage into the street.” (NYT 6 21 1873, p. 2; for the Bureau’s report: NYT 1 21 1874, p. 8.). Economic stringency left one long-lasting souvenir, however, because Forty-second Street was the north end of Paddy’s Market. This outdoor market under the westernmost El lines operated on Saturdays—payday when there was a six-day work week. Originally operated by Irish vendors who catered to the largely Irish local population by selling food and merchandise at low prices, the market stall owners eventually came to include South Slavs, Jews, Italians, and Greeks. In 1938, the market was evicted from that location--after a lawsuit--when the street was widened to facilitate passage to the Lincoln Tunnel. Some food businesses survive on Ninth Avenue today, located on the ground floor of tenements rather than outdoors.
(https://www.annexmarkets.com/blog-feed/2016/4/1/hells-kitchen-flea-market-history http://nyapril1946.blogspot.com/2011/09/paddys-market-and-hells-kitchen.html)
In tenements on the east side, where some children were starving, merciful pharmacists and Dr. H. J. Parramore, as well as visitors from the New York Times tried to save children from death owing to malnutrition. A local pharmacist, John J. Rambo, agreed to provide helpful foods and medicines at a “reasonable” price. Parents petitioned medical authorities to provide a bath house so that they could keep their children clean; many were living in cold-water flats or without reliable plumbing. In other parts of the street, the Methodist-Episcopal Ladies’ Union Aid, the YMCA, the New York Times, the St. Vincent de Paul Society, additional churches, and the Colored Mission offered help to the poor. (NYT 4 21 1874 pp. 1,3) By this time, a Board of Health, established in 1866, tried to regulate matters related to sanitation, and had succeeded in confining cholera primarily to lower Manhattan and to the area around Ninety-third Street in that year. (https://virtualny.ashp.cuny.edu/cholera/1866/cholera_1866_3new.html) Near the Depot, street-railroad horses were stabled outdoors, creating sites of stench and filth (NYT 9 8 1874, p. 8). To add to the sanitary and social problems, there was plenty of fraud connected with contracts for paving, street-widening, and permit-granting, some of it related to the County Auditor himself (NYT 2 12 1871, p. 8; 2 13 1871, p.2; see also 4 9 1875, p. 5; 4 12 1875, p. 10).
Not everything on Forty-second Street was depressing, however. On January 8, 1922, the New York Times published a drawing from Valentine’s Manual of Old New York showing part of East Forty-second Street in 1872 to present the changes wrought since then.
.
(Fig. 3. East 42nd Street, From Valentine’s Manual, 1922, public domain)
The image showed the north side of the street between just east of Fifth and Lexington Avenues. From Fifth to Madison Avenues, there were mostly undistinguished five-story buildings, typical also of the west side where the buildings were in some cases lower and narrower. At Madison Avenue stood the Wellington Hotel that resembled a large Victorian house. Holy Trinity, the railway Depot across the street, and a hospital stood out among the lower buildings. This eastern part of the street retained a similar appearance until the early twentieth century; the image is not entirely accurate. West of Fifth Avenue, as a forecast of things to come on the west side, theatrical agents who rented offices in the commercial buildings were noticeable after about 1870 although theaters themselves remained farther south. (Barr, Building the Skyline, p. 260)
A pharmacist, F. W. Schoonmaker, recalled in a memoir called Yesterday and Today on Forty-second Street that in 1874 “Forty-second Street was so far uptown that by the means of the Third Avenue Streetcar and later on [the] Fourth Avenue streetcar [before the east side Els], a good half-day was taken up in the journey downtown and back, besides that the larger drug houses only sent an agent to our part of the city once a week.” (New York, Chauncey Holt Co., 1922, p. 11.) Mr. Schoonmaker’s friend Charles Elliot Warren, born in 1864 and later a banker, contributed to the memoir. He recalled the street in his youth as “a dreary waste of rocks, a place of pigeons, goats, and shanties;” the last of which served meals to hackney drivers, freight handlers, and other working people. He claimed that nesting pigeons could weigh down the hands of the new railroad depot’s clocks. He spoke of goats grazing and sleeping at the side of the Livonia Bank and the sale of goat’s milk as an early industry on the street. He quoted the old woman who lived on a rocky outcropping at Forty-third Street, who declared that goats were the only possible crop to be gained from the soil of the area. Warren also mentioned that Maud S, a famous racehorse, grazed in a field opposite the Depot. He did observe that there were some other businesses there, such as Charlie’s grocery store at Second Avenue (later the more elegantly named Charles & Co., and eventually the Gristede chain of supermarkets). Another was a saloon called John Galway’s to which commuters resorted when they missed their trains. (Activities Oct. 1925, p.2). Mr. Schoonmaker’s pharmacy at the southwest corner of Park Avenue burned down in the late 1890s.
(Fig. 4. F.W. Schoonmaker’s Pharmacy, Photo c. 1895. Museum of the City of New York X2010.11.2738 See also 96.116.29. Public domain)
There was also the Reunion, renamed the Westchester Hotel at the southeast corner of Forty-second and Fourth Avenue, a canny investment by Samuel P. Shaw and Simeon Ford that later, much enlarged, served travelers arriving at Grand Central as the Grand Union Hotel. Mr. Warren recalled the barns of a horsecar line on the south side of the street, not an amenity that most hotel patrons would have wanted as a neighbor. Walter C. Reed, who added to Mr. Schoonmaker’s memories, wrote about shacks opposite the depot (Schoonmaker, p. 44); a later comment in the New York Times referred to saloons there every twelve feet. (NYT 11 8 1887 p.2). Reed remembered a grocery and a candy store on the north side at what is now Vanderbilt Avenue, but he could recall no other shops--mostly just houses--until Sixth Avenue.
The roiling mix of filth, poverty, wealth, charity, criminality, and sometimes improvement that characterizes many urban streets was evident to Mr. Schoonmaker. He emphasized the good parts. People who worked in the area sometimes strolled eastward uphill to Prospect Place to watch boats plying the East River. “Forty-second Street, as I look back, was a beautiful street shaded from Madison Avenue west by fine trees, and on the east of my [business] location from Lexington Avenue almost to Third Avenue.” (Schoonmaker, p.12) Evidently, most of the shanty-dwellers were gone by the time that Mr. Schoonmaker wrote his affectionate memoir.
The market for new building in the 1870s can be seen even in the least desirable parts of the street. Entrepreneurs built row houses between First and Second Avenues even though the East River was home to industry. The builders evidently sold the houses before the buyers realized the effects of the noxious industries at the river end of the street. The industrial premises included Watrous & Willson’s lumber yard between Fortieth and Forty-first Streets, the four-story brick Eberhard Faber pencil factory until its destruction by a spontaneous fire in 1872, and a slaughterhouse running north from Forty-third Street where there were also chemical works. While the industries were concentrated primarily along the river, in part on recently filled land, the houses above the bluff there provided at least minimal distance from stench and noise. There was enough gentility and canny naming so that the residential area became known as Prospect Hill. Old photographs and maps show some of the houses between First and Second Avenues as uniformly wide, with stone fronts, tall windows, and ornament only at the cornice.
(Fig. 5. Wurts Bros., Houses at 332-336 East 42nd Street. Stone fronted. Photo April 8, 1946, Museum of the City of New York, 2010.7.1.9006. Public domain.)
Architects Hubert & Pirsson designed the houses to the west of these with three stories and a basement, stoops with metal handrails, stone fronts, and neo-Renaissance architectural details such as triangular pediments over the doors, lintels diminishing in salience as the stories rose, and smaller windows on the upper floors. Each house had a rear garden covering on average about forty percent of the lot. The five lots closest to First Avenue on the south block seem to have remained in the family of the owner of a surviving older house that faced true north-south, probably a relic of the Winthrop family. It was gone by 1879, though the family still held the emptied lots, according to a perspective map of New York City published then by Galt and Hoy; the house still appears on the Bromley-Parsons map of that year. (https:/ /www.loc.gov/resource/g3804n.pm005990/?r=0.675,0.841,0.062,0.049,0)
In order to allow people to reach all the houses on the hill, an upper-level sidewalk extended for a block on both sides of the street. A later reminiscence by George W. Sweeney, a real estate executive, included the memory of a street with four sidewalks. (NYT 1 4 1931 RE p. 15; his name is sometimes spelled Sweeny)
(Fig. 6. East 42nd Street looking west from near First Avenue, c. 1925. Courtesy Konrad Wos. Public domain)
On the north block, Prospect Place—a short street cut into the bluff to create additional building lots-- had narrow houses lining each side, and slightly wider lots facing First Avenue. These lots were not of uniform width. Mortgages were issued starting in 1873 for eleven lots on the east side of the street, extending at least to 1889 but it evidently took some time for the houses to be built, as the Bromley map of 1879 does not show buildings on the site. The owner who planned the houses on the east side, if not both, was S. Stevens, with the Cutting family involved to some degree until the latter date. The Cuttings continued to be landowners on Forty-second Street at least into the late 1950s although Mrs. Gertrude Cutting’s property between Thirty-ninth and Forty-fourth Streets, between Second Avenue and the river was presented in 1867 as a guide for those who might buy it.
(Fig. 7. G.W.Bromley, Map of the City of New York, Manhattan Island, 1891. Prospect Place, block 1335, at First Avenue toward the river)
(Map of real estate in the city of New York, belonging to the estate of Mrs. Gertrude Cutting, deceased, to be sold by E. H. Ludlow & Co. located between 39th and 44th Streets and between Second Avenue and the East River, New York, E. H. Ludlow & Co., 1867 at New York Historical. NYT 7 7 1871, p.6 notice of proposed new buildings by S[alman and Susan] Stevens, to be twelve first-class dwellings on the east side of Prospect Place, 16.8 x 40 feet each. Mortgages were issued three years later: 66 John Street, block 1335, lots 22 ff.); NYT 7 7 1871, p. 6 notice of proposed new bldgs. S Stevens owner. 16.8 x 40 ft; 12 1st class dwellings on E side of Prospect Place)
The E. Robinson map of 1885 shows the buildings and their dimensions, ranging from nineteen to thirty-one feet in width.
(Fig. 8. Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library. "Plate 16: Bounded by W. 52nd Street, E. 52nd Street, (East River) First Avenue, E. 40th Street, and Sixth Avenue" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1885. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/2cc268a0-c5fa-012f-238e-58d385a7bc34 Public domain.)
Earlier in the decade, a small mission church had been organized by young members of the recently built Church of the Covenant on Park Avenue at Thirty-fifth Street, designed by James Renwick Jr. and soon to be merged with Brick Church near it. One of the mission’s members was Josiah Cleaveland Cady (1837-1919). then a young architect, who later designed the first Metropolitan Opera House and the original wings of the American Museum of Natural History. Appropriately, the fervent young man received the design commission for the chapel that the mission group proposed for the distressed population east of Second Avenue. The chapel--later recognized as a church--seems to have been built between the spring of 1871 and the end of the year (Plans were filed by March 30, 1871. NYT 4 3 1871, p. 2). Its outline is marked on the Bromley map of 1891, figure 7 above, on Block 1334. The auditorium wing survives.
(Fig, 9. Chapel, later Church of the Covenant, 1871, Josiah C. Cady, photo nyc.ago. Public domain.)(Fig. 10. View east from Second Avenue, with chapel at right, and the chapel at the right, above the four levels of roadway. Photo: NYPL Percy Loomis Sperr/ Brown Brothers, 1925, NYPL711773F https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47dd-0470-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99. Public domain)
(Fig. 11. Church of the Covenant. Interior. Photo from nycago,org internet site. Public domain.)
Under a steeply pitched slate roof are two rose-windowed dormers placed above sections of brick wall rather than the long round-arched windows of the auditorium. Remodeled in 1927, the church and its adjacent parish house are now reached by a staircase introduced when the street level was lowered and the two levels of sidewalk were removed. It still recalls a country chapel-- low-rise, gabled, and made of warm brick with pale Ohio stone trim. An arched welcoming door at the center opened under a low tower with a polygonal spire. The broad interior retains its thin cast iron columns that support a raised decorative screen suggesting Gothic gallery openings, although there is no gallery. Decorative ironwork separates the upper parts of the aisles. The altar and pulpit stand against a flat wall with a broad round arch inscribed with Gothic lettering; the space available did not permit the building of a projecting apse. Dark wood frames square fields of the ceiling. The impression projected by the interior is unassuming but comfortable, with pleasing artistic touches in the Gothic revival mode.
{LPC Tudor City Historic District designation report, Landmarks Preservation Commission (hereafter LPC) May 17, 1988, Designation List 203, P-1579. Rev. Dr. Geo Sidney Webster, Forty Years of Covenant Mercies: A Description of Historic Memorials in the Church of the Covenant. New York, Privately Printed, 1906, pp. 14-15, with interior photographed in 1888 between those pages.)
Presbyterians who planned to buy a church on West Forty-eighth Street held services in the Harvard Rooms, apparently a meeting place for rent, at Sixth Avenue. Another large meeting room called the Standard Hall accommodated a thousand audience members when Prof. Felix Adler lectured to the Society of Ethical Culture in 1877; this building was located at the corner of Broadway, fronting on that street but with almost 88 feet on Forty-second. Not long afterward, the owner, Josiah Jex, sold it at auction to a Mr. Potter. (NYT 11 5 1877, p. 8; 3 29 1879, p. 8)
To the west, building was denser on the north side of Second to Third Avenues, and halfway across the following block. As of 1879, an inverted L-shaped lot stood empty at Lexington Avenue, perhaps because it experienced noise from trains that turned at that intersection; the northeast corner, too, stood empty. Modest row houses lined the western half of the north block toward Madison Avenue.
At Lexington Avenue stood the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled, alias Hospital for the Relief of Ruptured and Crippled Children, where doctors may have used Mr. Schoonmaker’s pharmaceutical services a block away at Park Avenue. That the area around Lexington Avenue was still considered salubrious enough for a hospital around 1870, despite the soot-spouting trains and the use of polluting coal fires for heating, speaks to both the general lack of major development in the area and to a certain lack of foresight, since the hospital was completed just as the new depot was being built. Probably the sufficiently large site was both available for sale and cheap because householders who had more choice would not want to live near sources of soot. A hospital could be mechanically ventilated.
This rehabilitative institution, founded formally in 1863, occupied the intersection’s northwest corner. The successor hospital’s history records that “a group of prominent New Yorkers led by John C. Green, a successful China trader, set about raising more than $200,000 for a new facility…[that] flourished under Dr. [James] Knight’s leadership. His attitude toward care emphasized sunshine and fresh air, along with diet, exercise, electrical stimulation, and gentle rehabilitation.” Given the frequency and severity of surgical infection at the time, Dr. Knight disdained surgical treatment but Dr. Virgil P. Gibney, his successor, promoted the use of plaster casts, traction, and surgery. The plans for the hospital were devised in 1867 and construction ended in 1870. The railroad and elevated trains surely made the fresh air requirement an example of wishful thinking.
(Fig. 12. Hospital for the Reuptured and Crippled, 1870. Edward Tuckerman Potter. The image also shows the supports for the spur of the Third Avenue El. Photo: King’s Handbook. Public domain.)
Dr. Knight required the building interior to serve two hundred patients. He used the services of the well-connected architect Edward Tuckerman Potter who designed the colorful façade and the interior layout. The structure was a parallelogram with round turrets at three corners and an extension on its west side toward the north. The turret windows were intended to add light to the interiors from several angles. There were three approximately equally high stories above a windowed basement, but each level had different striped and arched designs made of freestone and brownstone courses above and around the windows. The rectangular areas held two hundred patients. Children occupied the upper two floors, spending time indoors in large well-ventilated rooms with large windows, while the first floor was given over to outpatient adults, the resident doctor’s apartment, and furnished accommodation for twenty private paying patients. The turrets held nurses’ rooms, toilets, and bathrooms; the basement accommodated reception areas and the kitchen, laundry, a steam engine for an elevator, and other functional elements. Above the principal cornice rose a rooftop winter garden under a shaded hood that could open in warm weather. The effect of the exterior was that of a highly decorated medieval castle in the fashion of the time but perhaps frightening to sick children as they approached it.
The building was not without problems, however. Internal fireplaces, four on each in-patient floor, always presented a hazard although they caused no accidental fires. The elevator in one of the towers was initially lined with brick as a fireproofing measure but Dr. Knight thought wood more handsome and vitiated the safety of the shaft. Wood was used on the winter garden, too. The architect and doctor did provide iron fire doors, and interior courtyards open to the street, but some doctors must have been relieved when the institution moved in 1912 to 321 East Forty-second Street. In the meantime, in 1898 the winter garden had been removed to make way for two extra stories. Although certificates issued to physicians show a building with a smooth, pale surface, and a commemorative tinted print shows the surface as white interrupted by small arched windows, the exterior seems always to have retained its colorful façade, to judge from photographs. It would have challenged the designer of a medical certificate to present the intricate patterns that Potter conceived.
(https://www.hss.edu/history,asp 7 15 2017. David B Levine, Anatomy of a Hospital, New York, published by the hospital, 2013 with a misleading drawing; American Architecture and Building News 5 29 1880, p 237; Sarah Bradford Landau, Edward T. and William A. Potter: American Victorian Architects, New York, Garland Press, 1979, pp 245-48, 42nd Street Property Owners and Merchants’ Association, Activities, New York, the Association, 1936 p. 24 Fenwick Beekman, Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled: A Historical Sketch Written on the Occasion of the Seventy-fifth Anniversary of the Hospital. New York: Statistical Press, 1939).
By 1879, one could pass the large building that manufactured wallpaper, owned by J. S. Warren & Co., just west of the hospital. (Fig. 1 above) The wallpaper company flourished in the age of the Aesthetic Movement, and produced handsome products, some of them embellished with metallic surfaces. To the east, between Second and Third Avenues, stood John N. Stearns and Company’s silk factory, facing grammar School 27 on the south block. The industrial installations occupied dignified buildings and manufactured elegant products. Another important business was James Murtaugh’s dumbwaiter and elevator factory at 147 East, specializing in the former type of apparatus and producing eighty-five thousand of them. The firm had been established in 1855 and quickly gained prominence in the field, eventually extending its business to England and Italy. Stables on the south block represented a convenience to horse-owners but a detriment to elegant development until row houses replaced them during the following decades. Several large sites near Third Avenue remained empty for a few years on both sides of the street, awaiting hotel or commercial construction.
The Valentine’s Manual drawing published in the Times of January 8, 1922 (Fig. 3 above) showed the more developed north side of the street between Fifth and Lexington Avenues fifty years earlier. An oyster stand at Fourth Avenue became established before new buildings replaced the old (Schoonmaker p. 47) although it cannot have lasted long when more permanent commercial premises rose nearby. Land had been cleared opposite the Depot for new building, so hotels were obvious potential occupants.
By the end of the decade, Samuel P. Shaw and Simeon Ford had opened the brick-faced Italianate Westchester Hotel on the southeast corner of Fourth (later Park) Avenue that figured in pharmacist Schoonmaker’s memories. After absorbing its first neighbor, the hotel was heightened to six stories in one part, five on the other, and was given mansard roofs. By adding another hotel adjacent on two sides, the Westchester expanded an additional 25 x 50 feet from its original 40 x 50 feet. (NYT 9 l 1871, p. 6; https://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-lost-grand-union-hotel-park-ave-and.html#google_vignette). The combined buildings’ owners eventually expanded to the whole block as the Grand Union Hotel, with Edward Schott as architect. (Stern et al., New York 1880, note 126 to p. 528)
(Fig. 13 Grand Union Hotel, with the El spur visible behind it, the Grand Central Depot Annex behind that, and part of the Depot at the left. Photo: Valentine’s Manual. Public domain.)
Guests facing the depot and Fourth Avenues would have heard the noise of vehicles running on tracks from the south and east, either terminating at Fourth Avenue or continuing along the street, turning north on Madison.
Something of the social mores of the time can be discerned from answers given to reporters who inquired whether Jews and people of African descent would be accommodated in the city’s hotels. Most said yes, but the Albemarle and St. James said no, and the Buckingham dodged the question. Many people of African ancestry were servants, who could stay at the Grand Central, the Sturtevant, the St. Nicholas and the St. Denis. (NYT 6 20 1877, p. 2)
Car barns survived into the new century between the hotel and the Manhattan Storage building. Noise from the vehicles probably disturbed Sunday services at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church immediately west of the Depot.
After 1873, Holy Trinity replaced its predecessor building by Jacob Wrey Mould, using the same site. The new church occupied its own short block between Madison Avenue at the west and, on the east, Vanderbilt Avenue--a new street introduced on the west side of the Depot. The new church building owed its appearance to Leopold Eidlitz who had designed Temple Emanu-El nearby on Fifth Avenue in 1868. More important, he had rebuilt St. George’s Episcopal Church on Stuyvesant Square after a fire in 1865. Despite his connections, Eidlitz had to enter into competition in 1869 for the new church, although it is hardly surprising that he won. The rector at fashionable St. George’s was the Rev. Dr. Stephen Higginson Tyng whose son of the same name founded Holy Trinity for working people
(Fig. 14. Holy Trinity church, 1873 ff., Leopold Eidlitz, photo Robert Bracklow, The NewYork Historical , Public domain.)
The church’s dimensions were 154 x 94 feet. The colorful façade was not on Forty-second Street but followed tradition in being at the west, thus along Madison Avenue. A tower rose at one side, creating an asymmetrical design common in medieval and Victorian parish churches. Blue and yellow bricks contrasted with the more usual red ones laid in black mortar; the expanded color palette and the diaper patterns and quatrefoils adorning the exterior called both favorable and critical attention to the building. Perhaps the younger Rev. Tyng thought that a lively exterior would appeal to the many members of the working class who worked nearby. Besides, colorful facades were in current fashion, as the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled shows. The church’s interior with High Victorian patterning in several colors--yellow, brown, red, and blue—the exterior, and three colors of sandstone led to its nickname, the Church of the Holy (or Homely) Oilcloth. Mr. Schoonmaker said that the name came from the slate roof with colored diamond shapes, but the entire building was patterned. It seems to have been locally well known also for its belfry full of pigeons sustained by grain from the feedbags of horses that led cars to their terminus at the railroad’s building.
The church façade was designed with three stories beneath a pointed gable that included a rose window. These levels corresponded to those on the flank along Forty-second Street where one might guess correctly that the interior contained a ground floor, galleries, and a clerestory. The liturgically correct orientation meant limiting the extension of the choir and apse because Vanderbilt Avenue newly existed at the east, but this was not a problem for Low Church adherents who focused on preaching rather than on ritual. The polygonal apse was especially colorfully embellished, but it was partly obscured from the street by a two-story billiard parlor that perhaps attracted more neighborhood men than sermons did.
The church interior, though lofty and Gothic in inspiration, reflected the preference of both generations of Tyngs for Low Church practices that focused on the officiant and sermons. Eidlitz created an interior for 1900 worshippers embraced by an ellipse of columns. This plan was well suited to the acoustics of preaching. One of Eidlitz’s biographers, Kathryn Holliday, pointed to galleried oval precedents in Vienna with which the Prague-born, Viennese-educated Eidlitz would have been familiar—the Karlskirche and the synagogue in Seitenstettengasse. The ceiling followed the angle of the roof, with polished beams and arches. but the roof itself was supported by two longitudinal trusses, more familiar in bridge design than in churches; they rested on substantial granite piers. The clerestory windows, inserted into the lower part of the ceiling, appeared as dormer windows outside. The organ was a youthful work by Hilborne L. Roosevelt, cousin to Theodore and Franklin, who declined to enter politics as he was more interested in sound machines, especially those operated by electricity and telephone technology.
Did the eager young minister succeed in a mission to save the souls of the working and middle classes in the area? Some local people at least visited the church’s dispensary originally located on Forty-third Street or attended Saturday sewing classes or Sunday school. Were they inspired to attend services, when most Episcopalians were members of the upper classes? Perhaps, because while pews were sold, seating was free to everyone at Sunday evening services. In 1881, before the value of this spiritual gift to the area could be confirmed, Reverend Tyng resigned in 1881 and went to work in the insurance business. The congregation relocated in 1895, moving uptown to join another parish, and the building was demolished in 1911 during the construction of the present Grand Central Terminal.
(NYT 10 28 1872, p. 2, 4 18 1874, p. 4 ; 4 28 1874, p. 5; Kenneth Franklin Jacobs, Leopold Eidlitz: Becoming an American Architect, diss. University of Pennsylvania, 2005, pp. 273-284 citing earlier writers; Kathryn E. Holliday, Leopold Eidlitz: Architecture and Idealism in the Gilded Age, New York, W. W. Norton, 2008, pp. 109-114;New York Sketchbook of Architecture, vol. 3 # 12, December,1876, pl. 45. NYT 4 8 1874, p. 4; http://www.nycago.org/Organs/NYC/html/HolyTrinityEpisUES.html; Year Book of the Church of the Holy Trinity, New York Historical library F 128 BX5980.N5 C486 1888 f.; Schoonmaker, p. 33)
The substantial residence at the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue was bought in 1871 from Susan and Montagnie Ward, by banker Levi P. Morton, later elected governor of New York State, Representative in Congress, and Vice-President from 1889 to 1893. Morton owned it until the late 1880s. Architect J.E. Terhune extended the building eastward to the end of the lot, added corner quoins, and installed two more stories that replaced the earlier mansard roof, thereby creating adequate space for what later became the Hamilton Hotel after 1881. The hotel occupied the upper floors, with a carriage-maker’s showroom at street level. (Chap.1 Fig. 24) The building was later altered at least externally with art nouveau flourishes in lettering identifying it as the Hotel Meurice.
(Fig. 15. Ward-Morton house as offices and Hotel Meurice in 1893. Photo; The New York Historical, H.N. Tiemann & Son. Public domain)
Still later, it became offices and, on the second floor, home to the long-lived Gypsy Tea Room and its fortune teller. (Arthur Bartlett Maurice, Fifth Avenue, New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1918; p. 268; C. Gray, “Streetscapes ,” NYT 2 21 1988, p. R13), After the Mortons moved uptown, as other wealthy people did by then, their oldest daughter retained the property until at least 1962, and the building generated rental income until it was sold in 1980 to a real estate company. (66 John Street, Block 1277, lot 1; NYT 2 21 1988, p. R13). Close by, the family of Amos Cotting occupied large rooms in a “handsome house” at 13 East. (NYT 12 30 1880, p. 5). Even the wealthy did not normally have houses wider than 25 feet, because upper floors were supported by wooden joists; longer ones needed intermediate supports that would interrupt interior spaces.
Across Fifth Avenue on its northwest corner, the Bristol Hotel received approval from King’s Handbook in 1893 as “aristocratic and elegant.” The owner, W. H. Webb, who acted as his own architect, had replaced a tavern at the highest point of the street on a site 75 by 125 feet. The new building was an apartment hotel that opened in September 1876, welcoming families in suites of three to six rooms. Seven stories high over a raised basement, it was faced with yellow Dorchester sandstone from Nova Scotia. It advertised interior fittings such as brick-walled staircases in the event of fire, hoses on each floor, warm air heating in hallways and radiators in the apartments, separate elevators for guests and for service personnel, bathrooms for each suite and extra ones, too.
.
(Fig. 16. Hotel Bristol, W.H. Webb, 1876 illustration by Louis Oram for hotel postcard. 1891. NYPL image 805243 https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-d3e5-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99, Public domain.)
Wide staircases at the entrances on the street and avenue, a large frescoed and mirrored public dining room with adjacent private dining rooms, parlors, reception rooms, a billiard room, a barber’s room, and a separate dining room for children and their nurses made clear the Bristol’s elegance at a time when apartment living was not yet standard for the wealthier classes. Many windows, separate gas meters in each suite, and other amenities were meant to attract tenants of the appropriate social strata. That there was no liquor bar confirmed the respectable family-centered nature of the hotel. (Arthur Bartlett Maurice, Fifth Avenue, New York, Dodd, Mead & Co. 1918, p.268; NYT 8 19 1877, p. 12)
Row houses filled the block until the Gesellschaft Harmonie clubhouse interrupted their course near the west end. At Sixth Avenue, Walter C. Reid recalled a saloon and a shoe store, but no more shops until Broadway. (Schoonmaker, p.44). By 1878, however, one corner of the intersection held the Royal Hotel. The site of the Crystal Palace saw improvement in 1870-71 when the city designated it as a park after a new City Charter had organized the Parks Department. When James McCabe prepared his description of the city in 1872, he wrote of then-recent changes that made the open space “very pretty…much frequented by the nurses and children of the adjacent neighborhoods.” (p. 203) The plan provided curving paths and clusters of trees in the Romantic mode of garden design. The layout was significantly altered only in 1934.
(Fig. 17. Proposed plan of improvements at Reservoir Park, 1871, NYPL image 800710, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-0f34-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99)
(Fig. 18. Bryant Park, air view 1931. NYPL Percy Loomis Sperr. NYPL image 717910F https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47dd-2c85-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99. Public domain.)
By 1877, the Department of Public Works had shown that the reservoir was no longer necessary, and debates about the inadequacy of the reservoir persisted, although it was drained only in 1897 and destroyed in 1899-1901. (NYT 5 11 1877, p. 8;5 27 1877, p. 7;3 6 1880, p. 5)
Some building was luxurious, including an infamous building on the west side owned by the corrupt politician, William “Boss” Tweed. It was described as showing “regal magnificence…with walnut trimmings and splendidly furnished…elegant rooms” where the host offered drinks “mixed in a wonderful and costly silver punch-bowl, while many a plan was perfected there to plunder the city.” (NYT 4 12 1875, p.10)
Increasing train service brought more people to the city, and new hotels appeared, usually small ones; the recent large St. Cloud had been an exception at the time. (Chap. 1 Fig. 31)
The south corner of Seventh hosted the Avenue House hotel opposite Briggs’ Livery Stables known as the New-York Tattersalls-- a substantial building on the north corner that burned in 1879. Overin’s Stables occupied a two-story building that rounded the corner of Forty-second Street at 600-610 Seventh Avenue, apparently a replacement for Briggs’.
(Fig. 19. Overin’s Stables at 7th Avenue. Photo: Robert Bracklow, The New York Historical . Public Domain)
There was also Louis Douglas’ riding academy which he closed in 1879 after his son was killed while riding in Central Park (NYT 6 2 1885, p. 8). The present Times Square was home in the nineteenth century to horse-related industries such as the outfitting of animals and of carriages that gave the nickname Longacre Square to the area, echoing Long Acre, a street in London where similar businesses flourished. None of this sounds elegant, but the stables industry was respected as essential. The word Longacre remained in citizens’ minds as a telephone exchange until the later twentieth century when numbers replaced exchange names in the city’s telephone books. The buildings nearby included lodging houses, boarding houses, small hotels, low-rise commercial buildings with apartments above shops, and light industry.
The former Forty-second Street Presbyterian church at 233 West was converted by 1879 into St. Luke’s Lutheran Church, a congregation independent of synodic affiliation, that occupied the site until 1922. The Lutherans hoped to minister to the increasing German population in the area near the docks and they redecorated the building to suit their taste.
(Fig. 20. Forty-second Street Presbyterian Church, date uncertain. Photo from online nycago. Public domain.)
The congregation numbered a thousand, but the average attendance on Sundays was two thousand (NYT 8. 30 1875, p. 4). The congregation then built a new church nearby. After a few row houses, one could find the Methodist-Episcopal Home for the aged, separated by three more row houses from Eighth Avenue.
In addition to the Central Baptist church, the south block had stone-fronted houses and the St. Louis College on three lots collectively called 230 West. (Chap. 1, fig. 28) This was a school for Roman Catholic boys “of refined families.” It moved there in 1873 to a building costing $100,000. (The Catholic Church in the United States of America, Catholic Editing Co., 1913 p 380; King’s Handbook 1893; C. Gray, “Streetscapes, 230 West 42d Street” NYT 6 16 1996, p. RCW7.) The brick school, adorned with white stone trim, was seven stories high including the basement. It housed “ample and well-ventilated classrooms”, a chemistry laboratory, dormitories, parlors and a chapel on the ground floor, a gymnasium on the top floor, and six bath rooms, among other features. As in a monastery, the dining hall was called a refectory. (NYT 4 20 1873, p. 12). Beside it at first was the small municipal Primary School #72, with a bank on its other side. The College did not last long in that location. It moved uptown, and sold the Forty-second Street building in 1882 to Percival Wood Clement, later a governor of Vermont, his home state
At Eighth Avenue the Franklin Savings Bank occupied a small building from which the bankers issued mortgages and other services to the householders of the neighborhood, It grew substantially later, dealing with local mortgages, well into the following century. The bank stood opposite a drugstore, and on the west corner, Vogel & Sons clothing shop faced a branch of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, known into the mid-twentieth century as the A & P grocery supermarkets. This was one of about seventy of the company’s shops by the late 1870s. The area was still largely residential, and the homeowners seem to have been people of British and German origin, largely Christian to judge from their surnames listed in the city’s property transfer records at 66 John Street: Dunseith, Schreyer, Schulz, Elsbach, although one or two German Jewish families acquired property on the street in the 1870s. James and Annie Cummings granted a mortgage to Salvatore Caro in 1876 for lots 7 and 8 on block 1071; his seems to be the first Italian name in the extant records. A tenement at 319 West built in 1875 survives as Kaufman’s Army-Navy Store along with a few of its neighbors that house small restaurants and shops. The organ factory, existing in 1879, survived near the corner of Ninth Avenue until at least 1897, according to fire insurance maps of that year
(Fig. 21. The 300 block West, north side of 42nd Street. Kaufman’s painted red, white, and blue is at the right end, formerly beside a parking lot now filled by the Ellery apartment house. Holy Cross is at the left end of the tenement row. The Ivy apartment house is at the far left.. Photo: author, 2025.)
On Tenth Avenue, the Forty-second Street Manhattanville and St. Nicholas Railway was chartered in 1878. It opened in 1884 but was sold twelve years later to the Third Avenue railway company which thereby acquired a lucrative crosstown line.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Avenue_Railway#Forty-second_Street.2C_Manhattanvile_.26_St._Nicholas_Railway accessed 10 8 2017).
West of Tenth Avenue, development was reduced, as the gas works and other industrial facilities near the Hudson River made the area less desirable for housing. The Higgins & Co. carpet factory between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, and Jones & Co.’s wallpaper factory one block east did not enhance the neighborhood’s residential charm. A perspective view in the bird’s eye view of 1879 known as the Galt & Hoy (or Taylor) plan shows the entire western neighborhood dotted with industrial chimneys and increasingly large buildings used for various unappealing purposes such as the slaughter of pigs. While animal butchering was not done on Forty-second Street itself, slaughter was legal on Forty-first, and between Forty-second and Forty-third Streets.
(New York City Department of Health, 505 Pearl Street, Sections of Sanitary Code and Regulations Governing the Slaughtering of Cattle, Sheep, Swine, Pigs, and Calves. Section 326. Document 25-2359-25D. Sanitary code of the Board of Health of the Health Department of the City of New York, October, 1870, New York NY. Department of Health, pp 1-2.)
The Dripps Plan of New York city in 1868 and Galt and Hoy’s image show tracks for vehicles, including a horse-drawn streetcar serving a ferry that carried commuters from Weehawken, New Jersey. Ferry service originated in 1859 with a company that went out of business in 1872, after having experienced arson at its building during the Civil War draft riots. Other operators soon took over, including the West Shore and New York Central Railroad; service ended in 1959 but was later resurrected. A barn for the vehicle company’s horses occupied the westernmost lots of the north block, surely an inducement for homeowners to move away if they had the means to do so. The ferry building was in operation by 1879, thanks to the new owners, and although it does not appear on the Bromley-Parsons map published in that year, the Galt and Hoy perspective map shows the ferry building clearly. Passengers embarked through a broad, gabled structure that extended into the water and was therefore easily approachable by vessels under sail or steam.
The Bromley-Parsons map of 1879 showed Forty-second street almost completely lined with buildings, and there was considerable construction farther north, primarily on the east side between Fifth and Third Avenues thanks to the horsecar line on Madison. Population growth aside, one reason for the rapid increase of building on Forty-second Street was commercial response to the new railroad depot built on Forty-second Street on the west side of Park Avenue-- not yet blocking the roadway as Grand Central Terminal has done since the early twentieth century.
Until Cornelius Vanderbilt gained control over three separate railroad lines, there had been no substantial building on Forty-second Street to serve train passengers. At that location after 1858, trains transferred from steam to horse power in order to continue toward the southern part of Manhattan. Some maintenance and storage facilities existed there as well, and a small Harlem Railroad depot (Belle and Leighton, Grand Central, p. 34). In 1869, Vanderbilt persuaded the state legislature to let him purchase land between Forty-second and Forty-seventh Streets, Madison to Fourth Avenues at fair market prices, through the process of eminent domain. Of course, there were objections from those who were evicted but the legislators sided with Vanderbilt, perhaps to promote coordinated travel to and from the city--- or perhaps to line their own pockets.
From 1869 to 1871, the three railroad companies now under one ownership built separate terminals under one roof. The building was so large and seen so necessary by the City that the state legislature—corrupt or not--- allowed it to block Fourth Avenue from Forty-second to Forty-fifth Streets, as its successor building still does. Vanderbilt and his staff had no intention of paying for streets and blocks worth $370,000 as buildings sites. Instead, they obtained a bill for the nominal sum of $25,000 which they paid in haste to the City Chamberlain and then claimed that it was the final payment. As late as September 1884 when the railroad planned a 90-foot eastward extension, the matter of the land’s true value had not been established by the Court of Appeals (NYT 9 14 1884, p.14). The plans of 1869-71 rerouted traffic onto a new road west of the Depot, an avenue named for Vanderbilt himself. Originally, the Depot building occupied only what became its western portion and Vanderbilt Avenue was two blocks longer at the north end and one at the south end than it is now, but the northernmost portions yielded to later commercial skyscrapers and the south end is now planted to allow extra height for the adjacent skyscraper under generous provisions to encourage new building..
The new depot was almost 250 feet wide on Forty-second Street, and nearly 700 feet long from south to north.
(Fig.22. Grand Central Depot in 1872. John B. Snook, architect. NYPL image 908358 https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-27ba-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99. Public domain.)
When it opened, there were one hundred sixty-four trains daily. An increase in passenger traffic, the need to coordinate the three lines, and the absence of enough tracks for them required a joint building, although it was poorly planned. Internally, it caused confusion and inconvenience because there was no common room where passengers could transfer from one train line to another. There was no joint waiting room, and a stone platform in front of the baggage room was the only provision for passengers’ seating. There was no notice of arrival times or late departures. Nor was the building beautiful although it was imposing in a low-rise area that was still largely empty.
Architect John B Snook employed the Second Empire style that referred to neo-Baroque buildings in Paris during the rule of Napoleon III. Snook worked with the engineers Isaac V. Buckhout and Robert G. Hatfield, and builders P.T. O’Brien and J. Andrews. The buildings in this style emphasized symmetry, a sense of grandeur given by boldly exaggerated Renaissance-era doorways and windows, curved mansard roofs, and often, as at the Depot, turrets or towers at the corners. The three-story exterior was sheathed in red brick. It had a central tower 120 feet high and lower terminating ones, all accented by window and door frames of granite and iron painted to look like marble; the color contrast, common at the time, can still be seen on the Knickerbocker Hotel farther west at Broadway and was a feature of the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled and the St. Cloud Hotel. The Depot’s windows had assorted pediments and decorations to avoid monotony but at the cost of harmony. At the center, a large pedimented but empty niche rising on the upper levels of the central tower identified the New York and Harlem Railroad’s section, while its sister railroad lines occupied the left and right ends. Changes in window designs above twin arched doors and identifying lettering marked the separate companies. Clocks below the mansard roofs told the time to passengers and the public
The impressive part of the building was the iron and glass train shed over the dozen tracks, from which steam and smoke could be vented.
(Fig.23. Grand Central Depot, train shed. 1872 Image artist Stanley Fox, photographer George Rockwood. NYPL Image 809357 https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-27bb-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99 Public domain)
The headhouse---ticket halls, waiting rooms paired on Vanderbilt and facing Forty-second Street, offices, and other spaces---lined the exterior on the south and west, while the train shed filled the rest. Offices above baggage-handling areas, and the perch of the depot master were situated at the north end of the shed, where the facade design in metal differed from that of the southern and western elevations.
(Fig. 24. Grand Central Depot north end of train shed. Photo: Wikipedia. Public domain.)
Here there was a frank acknowledgment of the thinness of metal, conceived in symmetrical arched and trabeated levels of metalwork and abundant glass to bring light to offices and to the brick-walled train shed itself. The design may have been based loosely on north Italian Renaissance facades with layers of arched and rectangular panels, such as that of the Certosa di Pavia, or even the recently enhanced French Romanesque cathedral of Le Puy-en-Velay with its arched portals. Both buildings were celebrated in nineteenth century architectural instruction. The train shed was evidently inspired by the grand iron and glass sheds over London’s stations, particularly those of Paddington, of almost identical length, and of the slightly wider St. Pancras with its broad single arch finished in 1868. Above the tracks stretched corrugated iron trusses, each four feet wide and one foot thick, weighing forty tons, painted in light colors and partly gilded. Their wall-to-wall span was just over 245 feet. After sunset, electrified reflectors lit the shed. Architectural Iron Works executed the demanding job; by then, this important construction firm had completed other multi-story commissions in Manhattan and elsewhere. A prescient proposal for depressing the tracks to the north, and building profitable structures along them, offered in 1872 by engineer Alfred W. Craven, was not taken up until the start of the next century.
(A.W. Craven, “The Grand Central Depot: Architecture of the New Building,” The Evening Post, 3 23 1872, p.1, a proposal unearthed by Matthew Kennedy. On Vanderbilt’s strategies in 1870 for getting his way, see NYT in 1870: 6 8, p 5; 6 10 p. 9; 1 11 1923, p. 1. On further construction: 11 7 1871, p. 8. On problems and sinking of the tracks: 12 5, 1871 p. 5; 12 20 1871, p. 2; 1 13 1872, p. 8; on the depot’s inadequacies 10 20 1873, p. 8.)
No one seems to have mourned the headhouse design when it was later modified, but the real problem with the Depot was the separation of the three train lines’ ticketing offices and their waiting rooms. Perhaps entrenched personalities insisted on preserving each line’s identity. Passengers on one line intending to transfer to another had to leave the station, re-enter, and then buy new tickets. James McCabe, however, praised the furnishing of the individual waiting rooms with hardwood paneling and handsome frescoes. Starting in 1875, the railroad branch of the YMCA had a lounge for reading and card games, a kitchen for snacks, and a bathroom with a tub. (NYT 11. 20 1950, .p 13)
The railroad perceived the need for some design changes, especially those concerning the inadequacies of the mere four tracks that entered the terminal from the north. In 1871-73, it planned the Fourth Avenue Improvement and created it during the next two years. This resulted in at last depressing the tracks and bridging them to preserve crosstown movement. The plan created an open cut between the retaining walls from Forty-ninth to Fifty-sixth Streets, followed by a tunnel to Ninety-sixth Street and other improvements north of that. The city agreed to defray half the expense. Smoke, gas, and cinders still fouled the neighborhood, however.
(W.J. Wilgus “The Grand Central Terminal in Perspective,” Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers 106 (1941) pp, 992-1024 esp. 996 ff.)
If passengers continued from the headhouse into the city, four-wheeled one-horse vehicles holding four passengers carried them on the Third and Sixth Avenue lines before the Els were finished. Visitors and local residents might, however, occasionally encounter cattle and sheep being driven to slaughterhouses on the East River. (Schoonmaker, p. 45). After 1878, by which time cattle-driving had abated, they could also use the Els.
If they chose to stay near the depot, they could dine at an adjoining restaurant owned by the Austrian-born Friedrich Brandeis [or Brandies or Brandess], who was also Mr. Schoonmaker’s landlord. A wine and spirits merchant by that name had premises adjacent to the Depot later, visible in an old image of the opening of the spur from the Third Avenue El to Grand Central. If they felt ill, travelers could obtain relief at the Schoonmaker pharmacy. A few hotels had already appeared, as we have seen. The area had begun to look busier, more urban than village. And once there was a large railroad hub, more construction would follow.