Chapter 3 The 1880s
The 1880s on Forty-second Street were marked not by a large number of extraordinary new buildings such as reservoirs or gigantic depots but by steady development, by changes in building uses, and by a considerable number of technical improvements that altered construction practices there and elsewhere. Electric power was first used commercially in this decade, and while it took time to be adopted universally, it eventually led to the famous displays at Times Square. The decade saw the first electrical generating plant, Edison’s, and then the alternating current projects of Charles P. Steinmetz which could provide distant sites with power, given some means of generating it. By 1886, William Stanley built a plant for this purpose, and later, Nikolai Tesla modified the system. Steam pipes for heating laid in 1882 eventually reached 105 miles in length and served two thousand buildings. Electric streetcars made their debut by the end of the decade. Improvements made to steam engines, and the elevated railroad, or “El”, on Second Avenue introduced a compressed air motor instead of a gas-powered filth-spouting engine that generated flying cinders. The telephone was gradually improved starting in 1877 although service went to only about three thousand subscribers; telephone numbers were introduced in 1880, and by 1881, there was long-distance service. Telephone poles rose on the north side of Forty-second Street before 1886 when they were relocated to the park side; the park itself had been renamed for poet William Cullen Bryant in 1884. The price of gas began a long decline, promoting its use for cooking, among other things. Western Union expanded, extending its pneumatic tubes to enable people to send messages quickly to Forty-second Street and many other locations in the world. (NYT 3 15 1883, p.8)
Street paving was a matter of necessity and occasionally of controversy because property owners resented the assessments for regulating, paving, and grading. Granite blocks, also known as Belgian blocks or setts, covered many more streets. Set perpendicular to the direction of vehicles, the blocks had to be roughened to let horses easily keep their footing. The result, noisy but necessary, was an improvement over dirt roads or cobblestones that allowed rain and snow to make the roads irregular and treacherous. The earliest Belgian blocks, introduced in the 1870s, were larger and less regular than other surviving standardized blocks that are between four and five inches wide, sized to suit horseshoes. The earlier blocks sometimes became misaligned. When worn down to a smooth surface, they were slippery when wet. But for about a decade, Belgian blocks were ubiquitous, and some survive, although not on Forty-second Street. Forty-second Street was paved in this decade in connection with the two-track street railway that was later electrified and finished in 1901. The horsecar-then-electric railway was itself a matter of dispute between business interests and householders near Fifth Avenue who feared noise and disturbance. Building the horse-car rail route had also raised the prices of real estate along its route between ten and twenty per cent and did so again when its electrification neared completion in 1901.
(NYT 9 10 1884, p. 8; https://untappedcities.com/2017/09/01/10-fun-facts-about-nyc-belgian-block-not-cobblestone-streets/6/ accessed 3 13 2020) The Metropolitan Railway Company consolidated ownership of the Els and the Metropolitan Crosstown Railway between late 1893 and the spring of 1900. https://metro.fandom.com/wiki/Metropolitan_Street_Railway/Railroad_(New_York_City)
In 1880, the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company began to produce the product for which it is named. While plate glass did not immediately affect building design on Forty-second Street or anywhere else, it was responsible for the gradual adoption of large shop windows usually framed in iron. The building code as amended in 1882 forbade wood-framed buildings below 155th Street, and allowed metal-skeleton framing, as long as the metal was thick enough to withstand fire for a specified time. This framing increased interior space by eliminating the thick masonry walls previously required for support and safety. Revolving doors, invented in 1888, facilitated entry to tall buildings because air flowing through a building’s vertical shafts had earlier created a vacuum that made it hard to open doors.
While old families continued to hold on to some property, other lots were sold, including those conveyed to the railroad by the Ogdens and Goelets, among others. The records of property transfers housed now at 66 John Street show an increase in the number of owners with German surnames, mostly Christian but a few Jewish. Mortgages were often granted to people of similar origin, but tenants, unlike the owners, often had Irish and Scottish as well as German surnames. That a free library offering books in both English and German opened during this decade suggests a significant part of the ethnic mix in midtown Manhattan’s foreign-born population.
There were some African-Americans in the area, too. An article of 1890 in the Library Journal refers to “a little colored boy” who came regularly to the local library to find books bound in red, a request that librarians accommodated with evident pleasure. (I owe this reference to Robert Sink.) The George Bruce Library, designed by G. E. Harney and paid for by the philanthropist Catherine Wolfe Bruce, had opened at 226 West early in 1888.
(Fig. 1. New York Free Circulating Library. George B. Bruce branch. 1888 Photo: Wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Free_Circulating_Library#/media/FileNYFCL_George_Bruce_ranch.jpg. Public domain). Part of the St Louis Academy, later the Percival residence is at right (see below)
(NYT 1 27 1889, p.9; Harry Miller Lydenberg, “History of the New York Public Library,” Bulletin of the NYPL 21, April 1917, pp. 222-223) It contained seven thousand volumes, some surely bound in red, including nearly two thousand “well-selected” books in German. The building, about twenty-five feet wide, had a rusticated stone ground floor with a broad arch, and two stories above with large windows in the brick upper wall. George Bruce is now honored by having his name on a later library in west Harlem, as the library of 1888 was sold in 1913.
Philanthropic efforts to relocate and employ Russian Jewish immigrants were carried on by the Young Men’s Hebrew Association at 110 West. Generous people of all religions held meetings, including at locations on Forty-second Street, in support of Jews subjected to pogroms in Russia after 1881. (NYT 9 9 1881, p.8; 1 31 1882, p. 8). Members of the YMHA tried to relocate and employ refugees who managed to get to the United States. When not doing good works, the Y’s members, almost a thousand strong, appreciated the organization’s library, gymnasium, bowling alley, and an employment service. (NYT 5 15 1882, p. 8)
To give additional views of life along Forty-second Street in the 1880s, it may be useful to record information offered in short social notes or crime reports in the New York Times during the decade. They confirm the impression that one might have from the buildings alone. Industry was still focused at the edges, west of Eighth Avenue and east of Lexington, although the occasional church or hospital might interrupt a line of factories and their workers’ tenements or row houses. Businesses catering to prosperous residents nearby filled the center of the island but some of the tenants were later exposed as bigamists or swindlers. At the fashionable center of the street near Fifth Avenue lived a merchant at 139 West, the manager of an opera company at 120 West, a couple at 112 West who sent over five hundred invitations to a golden wedding anniversary celebration, a dentist at Sixth Avenue with another at Madison, and a gentleman who received contributions for the American School of Classical Studies at Athens at 7 East. The decade saw the arrival of the Duane S Everson College School for Boys; it had an auditorium at Sixth Avenue where people connected to this and other private schools assembled for meetings. (NYT 3 9 1895, p. 8). The Psi Upsilon Club had its own meeting rooms at 33 West (NYT 11 30 1889 p 3). One might find the occasional doctor or merchant living farther west, probably in an inherited house, as well as people connected to the theatrical industries that were then moving northward. Mr. and Mrs. Henry E Abbey ---he was a theater manager--- at 212 West gave a children’s party at the new year in 1888, with guests including young Lionel and “Jack” Barrymore. Farther east, opposite the reservoir, the Architectural League rented the second floor of 47 West (NYT 5 7 1889, p .8). A boarding house, which at the time could be a respectable residence for single people, welcomed tenants at 61 West. An occupant of 113 West published a Christian Science magazine, and a couple at 12 West published another one until the wife and her lover left suddenly for Australia.
The residents who did not depart in haste surely welcomed Christopher Columbus Shayne’s fur salon that opened in October 1889 at 124 West in a five-story brick building. (NYT 10 23 89 p8).
(Fig. 2. 42nd Street Sixth Avenue looking toward Fifth. Shayne’s building is the pale one on the left side. Photo: The New York Historical, Subway Collection, 81194. Public domain.)
This was the largest fur shop in the city at the time, and Mr. Shayne was so successful that the building was enlarged in the next decade. For fabric garments, Vogel Brothers had opened in 1857. On the corner of Eighth Avenue, the clothier occupied a four-story red brick building, expanded in this decade to five floors including manufacturing areas and an annex. Its retail overcoat department was considered innovative, and the shoe department boasted “large Turkish sofas, rich carpets” and incandescent lights. (NYT 9 19 1887, p. 8) It, too, grew larger in the 1890s. On another corner at that intersection stood John Wieland’s drugstore. (NYT 9 26 1889, p.4)
For those, mostly men, who could get away from tenement rooms, there were saloons at---among other locations--- 436 West, 417 West, and at the Eighth Avenue corner, as well as a gambling room at 210 West. Evidently, commerce west of Seventh Avenue was still a mixture of middle-class shops and of places for lower-class activity and for poorer residents. An unregistered doctor at 303 West provided unspecified medical services, perhaps illegal ones. A group of robbers known as the Starlight Gang gathered in this area (NYT 3 24 86 p. 8). 559 West was a five-story tenement with four families on each floor above a grocery and a liquor store. Four-year-old Minnie Eichorn fell from a window at 455 West, dying immediately and joining a remarkable number of people recorded in the Times as having fallen from windows, especially on the far west side where alcoholism or desperate poverty may have led to events more intentional than accidental.
The street west of Ninth Avenue continued to be largely industrial, including the gas works which in 1885 took over the entire southwest block and owned part of the north block near Tenth Avenue. The treasurer of the New-York Ontario and Western Railroad filed plans for a ferry house at the foot of Forty-second Street at the Hudson River end. By the fall of the following year, it had been built along with ferry slips. (NYT 3 15 1883, p.8; 11 27 1884, p. 2) A ferry line’s brick-built car stables caught fire in 1886 and burned to the ground after standing for twenty-two years. Although rescuers saved 565 horses and most of the cars and harnesses, the fire destroyed tenements and a carpet factory. (NYT 6 13 1886, p.1) The car facility was quickly rebuilt but succumbed to another fire in 1906 (NYT 3 6 1906, p. 6). At some point lost to history, the West Shore Hotel opened at the far west end of the street, eventually combining a lower older building with an adjacent tenement.
(Fig. 3. West Shore Hotel, dates unknown, but in buildings perhaps from the 1880s. Postcard pre-1929. Public domain.)
J. H. and C. S. Odell’s long- enduring organ factory stood at 407-409 West, and nearby were the premises of Charles Horn, a silk merchant, as well as one small hotel. Closer to the gas works were a sawmill, a flour and grain company, a wallpaper manufacturer, homes of working-class people, saloons, and small shops. Police Justice Henry Murray was co-owner of a coke dealership at 503 West that removed coke and provided carting for the Municipal Gas Company (NYT 11 29 1883, p. 8). Some wooden buildings survived, and several structures had back houses behind them, indicators of poverty among the residents.
Forty-second Street had several piano factories and dealerships-- Hunter’s at 333-335 West that suffered a serious fire in April of 1885, and one between Ninth and Tenth Avenues on the south block. Later came Hallett & Davis’ in a marble-fronted building of 1913 designed by Harry L. Walker that survives at 18 East just off Fifth Avenue, and the Schiller showroom and offices at 130 West. Joseph Kunze tuned, polished, and repaired pianos at 7 West. The treatment of the skilled workforce in this industry is suggested by a protest meeting held in Heiter’s Hall in East Forty-second Street in 1889. The owners of the Steinway and Hardman piano factories wanted their men to parade at the centennial of the Constitution, while paying for their own regalia and losing a day’s wages. The superintendent at Hardman’s was known for replacing union workers with non-union men. (NYT 4 22 1889, p. 5).
Holy Cross was remodeled internally. Builders extended the curved sanctuary by twenty-five feet, to make room for rearranging the interior, installing an organ and nine German-designed stained-glass memorial windows-- either new ones or the earlier German ones by the Mayer firm. Embellishments included encaustic tile pavement and four large clerestory windows. Existing paintings of the Crucifixion and of St. Helena’s Vision of the True Cross were reinstalled, along with three white Vermont marble altars and a seventy-five light brass fixture. Archbishop Michael A. Corrigan led a joyous re-consecration on March 21, 1886. (NYT 12 27 1885, p. 4; 3 22 1886, p. 8) The Lutherans and Baptists remained nearby.
Fig. 4. Holy Cross, interior after 1886. Lawrence O’Connor architect of the enlarged sanctuary. Photo: author, 8 3 2025
Only one bank was enterprising enough to locate a new branch on the west side at that time, although the Franklin Savings Bank already had a small branch there. The Home Bank opened in 1883 at the corner of Eighth Avenue and prospered. It then erected its own structure at 303 West in 1887-88. Thom & Wilson architects designed a one-story building with two stories at the rear of the lot. The granite façade, of no coherent style, had three vertical sections. The center section featured a projecting porch with an arched entrance under a cornice and pediment, rusticated supports, Ionic capitals, a grottesche ornament of Renaissance inspiration, and a decorative window in the mansard roof. Other details were enumerated in the contemporary press, none of them regarded with approval
(Fig. 5. Home Bank. 303 West 42nd Street, now demolished. Wurts Bros. 1927 Museum of the City of New York,X2010.7.2.15338 Public domain)
Aesthetics apart, observers opined that having a bank on Forty-second Street itself rather than on an avenue marked a step up for the neighborhood. The bank was sufficiently attractive commercially to be taken over in 1900 by the Corn Exchange Bank and was demolished only in 1927.
(“The Lost 1888 Home Bank—no. 303 W.42nd Street” ttp://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/search?q=home+bank)
When Percival Wood Clement leased the site of the St. Louis Academy in 1882, including 228 to 232 West beside the Bruce Library, he could be confident that McKim Mead & White would rebuild it to provide the elegant bachelor apartments that his desired clientele wanted. Mr. Clement had recently sold a marble business in his home state and diversified his business interests. He renamed the building for himself as The Percival, evoking the legendary Arthurian knight who would have been a model tenant. The architects were familiar with this building type, having completed the Benedick apartments on Washington Square in 1879. The bachelor part of the description had to do with the absence of kitchens; breakfast could be brought to the tenants’ rooms via the separate servants’ staircase. The occupant had only to use a speaking tube or electric bell to the Superintendent’s office in order to summon the meal. The tenants on the five upper floors enjoyed large parlors lit by two windows each, small bedrooms, some of which had only light from the parlors, and in most cases, private bathtubs and toilets in bathrooms ventilated by shafts to the roof. The units--bed-and-sitting-rooms with private bathrooms--were ventilated by light shafts if they did not face the street or the rear of the lot.
(Fig. 6. The Percival’s residential floors 2, 3, and 4 from the New York Daily Graphic, Jan. 15, 1883. Public domain) For a partial view of the façade, see above Fig. l.)
Steam heat and open fireplaces in many of the units provided comfort in cold weather. The management designated attic storage spaces for trunks, coal, or other heavy objects that could be raised by an elevator; by this time the hydraulic elevator had stimulated the construction of buildings more than five stories high. A more spacious elevator served the tenants if they disdained exercise on the stairs. The brick exterior had stone trimming around and between the monotonous windows except on the second floor where the owner lived; those windows had stone quoins, and above the paneled entrance door, a distinctive triple window fit into a carved frame. One can imagine Mr. Clement enjoying brandy and a cigar in his own stylish quarters below those that he offered for rent. The tenants might meet him now and then in the garden at the rear of the 75 x 65-foot site.
(“A Model Apartment House,” New York Daily Graphic Jan 15 1883; https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/16/realestate/streetscapes-230-west-42d-street-school-residences-flea-circus-brothel.html’ ; https://digitalcollections.nyhistory.org/islandora/object/nyhs%3A10318. C. Gray, “Streetscapes,” as in5chapter 2 concerning this building as the St. Louis Academy)
Stables remained for a while as part of nearby Longacre Square, which was never literally square. By 1885, only two wooden buildings survived between Eighth and Seventh Avenues. At the corner of Broadway, a brick building housed Acker Merrall & Condit, wine merchants still in business but now located uptown. On another corner at that intersection, the St. Cloud Hotel occupied just over a hundred feet on one side. A large hotel in this location was then about equidistant from the railroad Depot and theaters that then were farther south. (Chap. 1, Fig.29)
Close by, on Broadway just south of Forty-second Street stood the 250-room Rossmore Hotel, built in 1876 by an entrepreneur named Ross to the design of John B. Snook. It had five primarily bedroom floors and three more floors with suites and public rooms. Shops occupied the street level along with facilities catering to men: a barber shop, billiard room, bar, a men’s parlor. All guests enjoyed having elevators and steam radiators, bath rooms and water closets attached to most sleeping rooms, and ventilation from windows on the street or on courtyards. Many furnishings came from the well-known emporium of A. T. Stewart.
(Fig, 7, Rossmore Hotel, 1876, with adjacent building later incorporated into the Metropole Hotel, 1871, from Frank Leslie’s Magazine Feb. 26, 1876, NYPL image 805272 https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-d421-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99. Public domain.)
But it did not prosper long; it was bought, renamed the Metropole, extended by the purchase of a small adjacent hotel at the corner, and refurnished in 1889 “from cellar to garret.” It may have been then that all the rooms were equipped with running water, the first hotel in the city with this amenity. The New York Times enthused about the light and airy dining room with entrances on both Broadway and Seventh Avenue, with bright murals and cut-glass chandeliers. It had tablecloths and Thonet-style bentwood chairs. Patrons hung their coats on pegs along the wooden dado of the wall. A basement rathskeller ‘s decorations presented Bavarian clichés but without carved wood chairs or cuckoo clocks. After1903, under new management, the hotel appealed to a far lower class of patrons and finally closed in 1910. (NYT 4 28 1889, p. 2.)
(Fig. 8. Byron Company, Hotel Metropole Men’s bar, café and restaurant. 1915. Museum of the City of New York 93.1.1.2246 Public domain.(Fig, 9 below: Byron Company, café interior. 1915, Museum of the City of New York 903.1.1.2248. Public domain)
(Fig. 10. Byron Company, Hotel Metropole, entrance to Rathskeller. 1915. Photo: Museum of the City of New York, 93.1.1.17212. Public domain.)
In the late 1870s, but more noticeably in 1880 and later, the fate of the reservoir was subject to vigorous debate. Various factions within the Democratic party proposed to retain it, while others wanted to drain it and use the site for the regimental armory that was eventually built at 643 Park Avenue. Others preferred to have a park on the site, something that would surely raise the value of nearby houses. Disputes arose, too, about a horse-car railway across the entire street, something that had been proposed, tentatively approved, and then forbidden before 1884. As there were no traffic lights at the time, some citizens proposed a bridge at Fifth Avenue to relieve traffic congestion at the intersection but influential property owners of lots near Fifth Avenue objected to the idea. Traffic would have bypassed some shops, and if traffic lights were installed, the bridge would be unnecessary. Streets were widened in places, sidewalks paved and enlarged and shrunken, usually with these actions disputed if higher property taxes were in store or if stoops had to be sacrificed.
On the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue, the home furnishings company of Pottier and Stymus opened in 1884 an elegant showroom on the former site of the Rutgers Female College which sold its land to Auguste Pottier in May of 1883. The showroom’s brownstone façade, described as “beautiful and chaste,” enhanced what was by then an “aristocratic locality” on the blocks closest to Fifth Avenue on both sides. The showroom faced the Avenue; the side entrance was on Forty-second Street. The displays included furniture and fabrics, some of them arranged as period rooms containing tapestries, embossed wallpapers, objects of onyx, ivory, and ebony, and bedsteads that cost thousands of dollars. Some of the wallpaper might have been made by Warren, Lange & Co. farther east on Forty-second Street; its products were considered rivals to imported ones, as it employed Louis Comfort Tiffany and Lockwood DeForest among other designers (NYT 8 28 1887 p. 5) Pottier & Stymus’ main salesroom with its fireplace was said to create the “appearance of a grand chamber in a foreign palace,” thanks to its lofty ceiling, tapestries, and the combined oak staircase and elevator–evidently an unusual arrangement. The Times’ enthusiastic writer felt it necessary to distinguish American wealth as private and democratic from the concentration of wealth at a court or in the hands of a “greedy oligarchy or despotism.” (NYT 1 26 1884, p.5). The showrooms were elegant enough to be used at times for charity benefits and social occasions. Some furniture production was also done on the site. (For the firm., see https://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-lost-pottier-stymus-bldg-375-377.html)
These were not the only luxurious objects displayed at this intersection. Some were carriages made by J. B. Brewster & Co. starting in 1882. (http://www.coachbuilt.com/bui/b/brewster/brewster.htm accessed 12 12 2021) Nevertheless, the anonymous author of “Trade on Fifth-Avenue: The Waning Glory of an Aristocratic Thoroughfare” voiced contempt for the commercial buildings taking over from handsome private mansions, unaware that commerce would confirm the avenue’s prestige albeit of a socially different type. (NYT 3 9 1883, p. 8; 4 1 1883, p. 14)
The Levi Morton house at the northeast corner, officially 503 Fifth Avenue, altered as a hotel after 1881, was first called the Hamilton and then the Meurice. The latter’s sign above the brokerage office used the then-fashionable art nouveau lettering seen in Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters to suggest the Meurice Hotel’s presumably Gallic charm. A photograph taken in about 1895 after further renovation shows a five-story building over a windowed basement, with an entrance stoop for the hotel and office premises for Seymour Real Estate Brokers on much of the ground floor, featuring incongruously large windows of the kind that plate glass and iron frames had made possible. Over decades, the building underwent repeated enlargement and redecoration and at times was festooned with plaques identifying businesses, or with large advertising signs.
(Fig, 11. Levi Morton house, ca. 1900. Photo: The New York Historical, Baltes Billboard photo collection. Public domain. As in Chapter 2 above.)
(Edward B Watson and Edmund Vincent Gillon, New York Then & Now. 83 Manhattan Sites Photographed in the Past and in the Present, New York, Courier Corp, 1976, p.60.)
Midtown banks of larger size became new phenomena during the 1880s, often locating on Forty-second Street, but only the small Franklin and Home banks served the west side. East of Fifth Avenue, supplementing the enduring Emigrant Industrial Savings repository, the Irving National Bank came first, in 1882. Within two years, it was joined by the Lincoln with its safe deposit vault opposite the Grand Central Depot, and by the Columbia, part of the American Safe Deposit company at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. The American’s site on the southwest corner was modest in size—twenty-three feet wide and one hundred feet long with an alley subject to use by others; McKim Mead & White, the architects, (NYT 1 13 84 p. 5) divided the long side vertically and horizontally. Over a low ground floor and arch-windowed first floor, both of rusticated stone, rose five smooth-faced office floors with terra-cotta-bordered windows grouped in threes. At the top, under a projecting bracketed cornice, loggias like those of Florentine Renaissance palazzi embellished the top floor of two projecting elements.
(Mariana van Rensselaer, Accents as Well as Broad Effects , ed. David Gebhard, Berkeley etc , University of California Press, 1996, p. 174; NYT 1 5 1884, p.8;11 18 1887, p. 8; www.daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com’2014/03/the-lost-1888-home-bank-no-303=w=42nd-.html accessed 10 15 2017 )
The words “safe deposit” held special meaning at this time. There had been a devastating fire in October of 1881 in Morrell’s Storage Warehouse ten blocks to the south, a favored repository for household goods of many rich families that sent possessions away for storage during long absences or seasonal changes. People blamed the Goelet family for having built a storage facility that was not fireproof, but one architectural journal pointed out that customers had agreed to rent space in it before it was even finished. Blame might properly be laid at the legislature which had never regulated the building type, and even at the people who carelessly “stored goods in a building of which they knew nothing about the construction.” (Architecture and Building: A Journal of Investment and Construction, 7 #4 July 23 1887, p. 26.) The Morrell family promptly joined other investors to build a fireproof replacement on Forty-second Street called the Manhattan Storage and Warehouse Company, recorded at 374-390 Lexington Avenue. It rose on land formerly the property of the Buchanan and Turnbull families as well as the Iselin estate. The list of investors included eminent names such as the these and members of the Cutting, Jesup, and Stokes families as well as others who needed safe storage.
(Fig. 12. Manhattan Storage Warehouse. 1882. James E. Ware. Image from warehouse stock certificate, courtesy Mark Tomasko.)
The new seven-story-and-basement facility occupied the south side corner of Forty-second Street; its dimensions were 197 feet east-west and 125 north-south. A driveway on Forty-first for deliveries and a courtyard in the building’s center with platforms for cross-building access showed thoughtful planning by James E. Ware. He built the storehouse with external walls five feet thick. They were made of red brick and iron and had concrete floors. Water and drainage pipes were visible in the court. Each floor had ten fireproof partitions that divided the premises into fireproof lofts, each one reachable from the court by an elevator on one of four sides--an elevator able to carry a loaded van up to any floor. Ware, who was as much a builder as a formal architect, described the architectural style as “Italian, free from decoration except in the outlines,” with windows reduced to the minimum needed for ventilation. (NYT 4 24 1882, p. 2; Block 1296 lots 11-13) The result resembled a fortress with broad, largely blank walls articulated by turrets, but a specific stylistic source does not spring to mind, nor does it matter. The fortress allusion sufficed.
This formidable structure was not the only fireproof storage facility built soon after the fire. Its rival was the Lincoln Bank and Safe Deposit Company which opened in 1883 opposite Grand Central Depot.
(Fig. 13. Irving Underhill, Lincoln Bank and Safe Storage Company, John B. Snook,1883. Photo: ca.1910, (labeled Lincoln Safe Deposit Company). Museum of the City of New York, X2010.28.112 Public domain)
The company had been organized in 1881 occupying modest premises on the upper floor of a two-story building at Forty-second and Vanderbilt that it had to share with the West Shore Railroad Company, but it had the only safe deposit vault north of Twenty-third Street at the time (Schoonmaker, p 43). The sponsors assembled a lot from holdings of the George Hecker family, the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, and from the former King’s Stables which had been intersected by the then-vanished Lowe’s Lane, a path that survived until 1848 from the years before the 1811 gridding of Manhattan. The investors, including Vanderbilt family members, asked John B. Snook to design the 116-foot-tall building and George Louden to construct it. The building committee included the Commodore himself, the mayor, businessmen and a medical doctor.
The new structure rested on bedrock which required blasting to form a three-level basement. The building held bank offices, two shops, and safe deposit vaults at grade level. Twenty-three storage rooms on each upper level, averaged thirteen by twenty feet within fireproof brick walls and iron doors. The floors were made of asphalt over brick arches. Masonry covers protected the steel beams and iron columns. Insulation was assured by plaster block sheet cork encased in cement and a recent invention: mineral wool. The necessary lifting devices included a dumbwaiter to carry stocks and bonds to and from the basement vaults. Aesthetics were not primary; safety was, but the brick exterior had Belleville stone trim, wooden shutters on open shafts, and iron sashes. No exterior windows opened above the main floor. Not suggesting a strong fortress this time, the storage building suggested a Renaissance banker’s secure palazzo, albeit with large blank areas devoid of windows.
Inside, a trustees’ room and the ladies’ reception room were separated by glass and wire. Ladies had their own entrance and a coupon room nearby. The domed men’s coupon room at the rear of the was forty-two feet long. To assure that even these rooms would be fireproof, the walls were left without plaster, the floors were tiled, and only furnishings such as desks and chairs were made of wood.
(The Warehousing Industry: pp. 1061 and 1062 in House of representatives, 58th Congress, 2nd Session, doc. No 15, part 4. NYT 12 13 1881, p 8. US Dept of Commerce and Labor. Bureau of Statistics, no 4. Series 1903-1904 Monthly Summary of Commerce and Finance of the United States, October 1903)
By 1916, the company had expanded to additional floors, storing “the finest grades of household goods” and works of art while adding transfers of household goods, freight, merchandise, and motor services. Evidently, wealthy customers reasoned that savings on fire insurance helped to pay for storage. The amenities increased over time, particularly with the advent of cold storage for furs and fabrics.
(House of Representatives; also Distribution and Warehouse Directory, New York Transfer & Storage Publishing Corp., n.p., 1916, p. 127; For even greater effects of cold storage, see Michael Osman, Modernism’s Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2019, chapter 2)
It had become clear that the Depot, opposite the storage building, was inadequate for the greatly increased demand for rail transportation. It had only fifteen tracks to handle both long-distance and commuter traffic. The railroad directors therefore acquired land toward the east. The purchase displaced a good many business owners and tenants who deeply resented the courts’ interpretation of permits that enabled the railroad to do pretty much as it wanted. The railroad had not yet paid the City what various honest judges said that it was owed. (NYT 9 14 1884, p. 14). It had a well-lit train shed but left everyone in the dark about payment for the new terrain and the buildings formerly on it
Near the Irving and Lincoln banks, the Vanderbilt family added tracks and a joint concourse to the Depot at the east. Forty-second Street beside and east of the Depot was disorderly during construction. People resented the high-handed power of Vanderbilt and his clever lawyers, when occupants were displaced from their property (NYT 9 14 1884, p. 14). Unsurprisingly, no remedies were offered.
Thanks to the Commodore’s lawyers including Chauncey Depew, Vanderbilt’s own obstinacy, and perhaps to some undisclosed political contributions, in May of 1884, the State Assembly had passed a bill authorizing the expansion. (NYT 5 4 1884, p. 5). The railroad interests filed plans with the Bureau of Buildings in November of that year. The eastward expansion shrank Fourth Avenue to the gratefully-named Depew Place. The annex, which added 76,000 square feet to its original 166,000, provided seven more tracks and five platforms even with the train car floors, as at the original building.
(Fig. 14, Left to right: part of the Depot, a bridge to the Annex, the steep roofs of the annex, the end of the El spur, the Grand Union Hotel. Photo NYPL Image5187548 https://qa-digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/cba593a0-0915-0132-22eb-58d385a7bbd0. Public domain.)
Above the new tracks rose a corrugated iron roof with a skylight thirty feet wide running from front to rear. Iron columns on the west side and brick ones on the east side supported it. A lobby of 27 x 86 feet, and a 35 x 55-foot waiting room for those greeting arriving passengers completed the list of fundamental elements of the annex. The whole structure was 695 feet long from north to south, and 110 feet wide on Forty-second Street. Among its other features was a YMCA in the basement, perhaps relocated from its earlier position. (NYT 5 17 1885, p.5) Like the original Depot, the annex was faced primarily with brick, and it also had steep roofs., although the annex was two stories high only for forty feet on Forty-second Street. (NYT 11 19 1884, p. 8). The New York Times, which had published scathing editorials about the Commodore and his business practices, did not waste much newsprint on the annex.
The owners introduced some efficient measures. They decreed that the original building would be used for departures only, and that passengers would arrive at the annex. Between the annex and the original building, two tracks accommodated freight cars. Porters transferred baggage through a tunnel connecting both buildings. Those measures simplified circulation, as did wide doors and passageways for people. Carriages and mail or baggage wagons could line up on Depew Place and under a projecting canopy on Forty-second street. The new building was integrated with the adjacent El station, which gained circulation space. (The Buffalo Express, Aug. 24 1885. p.2) The ensemble opened by September when the roof and asphalt platforms were not yet finished. (NYT 9 1 1885, p. 8)
Some of this technology created a vivid contrast to the goats that still grazed and slept on the side of the Lincoln bank (Charles Warren; Activities, 1935, p. 2). There was also a saloon. As of 1883, Mrs. White still owned her farmhouse on the northeast corner of Lexington Avenue and Forty-second Street, with squatters’ shacks and more goat pasture adjacent to it—land on which the Chrysler Building rose decades later. The east side therefore mixed the elegant and industrious and the hospitable with some surviving poor and rural features. The Times published the following assessment of the station’s vicinity, which the writer saw as “greatly improved by the demolition of the wooden shanties, with a drinking saloon to every twelve feet on the south side of Forty-second street, and their supersedure by elegant stores; but the neighborhood could still stand considerable additional reform, especially at night when thieves prowl and human wrecks perambulate.” (NYT 11 8 1887, p. 2) Mr. Schoonmaker’s pharmacy, benefiting from increased activity nearby, had been relocated to the ground floor of a two-story building at the southwest corner of Fourth (by then Park) Avenue and Forty-second Street; (Chap 2 fig. 4). he later moved to the ground floor of the Belmont Hotel. His neighbors at various times included Herman Abraham’s cigar store, Purcell’s restaurant, and a trunk and leather store near Adams Express. Small factories found that a location near the Depot could save shipping costs. The Real Estate Owners’ and Builders’ Association had its headquarters after 1888 at the southwest corner of Park and Forty-second Street, close to the Depot. (NYT 3 8 1888, p.5)
The railroad’s effects could be seen in the proliferation of large and small hotels, some of them adjacent to the noisy elevated trains but at least convenient to public transportation. The most conspicuous hostelry was the Grand Union, enlarged from its original form as the Westchester. (Chap. 2, Fig. 13) It steadily increased in size by buying the adjacent buildings and stables and the Riggs Hotel, bridging the discrepancies in floor heights when the buildings were combined. The architectural designs were far from harmonious, and there was a multitude of stairs and room sizes, but the location opposite the depot kept customers coming. Some permanent residents lived there as well. The exteriors were of brick, festooned with fire escapes. Two mansarded turrets were added probably to distract attention from the varied facades and to suggest that the interior was fashionably up to date. In summer, when large awnings projected from the building, it was harder to discern the inconsistencies in the architecture. An old photograph of the writing room, which seems to have contained mailboxes for the long-term residents, had a tin ceiling and tiled floors, and clumsy furnishings in wood, implying functional adequacy but not elegance. The hotel survived under the original management until 1914 when it was demolished in connection with subway construction and soon afterward replaced by the Pershing Square Building.
Beyond the Depot, the east side retained the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled, the Church of the Covenant, and the factories that produced expensive home furnishings and silk fabrics. One factory belonged to Pottier and Stymus, at Lexington Avenue and Forty-first to Forty-second Streets on land owned by the Goelet family. Its building burned in 1888, taking with it parts of the elevated railway, smaller industrial and commercial buildings, and the Vanderbilt Hotel’s Forty-second street side Among the other devastated businesses and owners in the building and nearby were a preeminent cigar factory, two cabinetmakers, a decorator, a photographer, a manufacturer of folding chairs, and a firm of marble cutters and polishers. (3 2 1888, p.1; 5 24 1884, p. 8)
Pottier & Stymus’ factory was rebuilt to a design by Joseph M. Dunn, in a tripartite arrangement characteristic of late nineteenth century business buildings with three bays on the entrance side. Above the ground floor with arches topped by a cornice, the next three levels were grouped together between brick-clad supporting columns. The top floor under a prominent cornice had uniform smaller windows.
(Fig. 15. Pottier, Stymus & Co. factory, ca. 1889. Joseph M. Dunn. King’s Views, 1893, p. 861. Public domain.)
At another corner of Lexington Avenue, the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled also experienced a serious fire in 1888 that took the life of a cook. Children were kept overnight in the homes of local residents at 120 and 139 East, on Lexington Avenue, and in the Vanderbilt Hotel while the firemen extinguished the flames within an hour. Several patients had been heroic; ten-year-old Max Schwartz, despite losing his hip brace, used his arms and teeth to bring a bedridden boy to safety, and Alice Ramsay, a teenager with one arm, used the limb to rescue several children by carrying them across the street. After several smaller subsequent fires there, investigators realized that a much-loved adolescent patient had set them, as she had undiagnosed mental as well as evident physical illness. The building fabric seems not to have been altered permanently. (NYT 1 30 1888, p. 1)
Modest improvements farther east were connected to the row houses on the eastern block that replaced the former shanties, and to Prospect Place at the east end of the bluff overlooking the river. One wooden building survived, tenanted by immigrant shop owners; it later became a beer saloon. A Chinese laundry operated at 164 East, a robber lived at 207 East, and a vandal who rolled a stone onto the street railroad tracks lived at 241 East. The office of the Paper Hangers’ Union of America at 223 East helped to direct a strike against wall-coverings companies such as Warner, Fuller & Lange of 129 East and the George W Allen Company of 500 West, which had proposed to reduce wages (NYT 3 29 1885, p. 8). 216 West was the site of another wallpaper factory and a coal dealership. A hall on the east side sheltered the journeymen piano-makers who had protested their employers’ demand that they parade and pay for their regalia while losing a day’s wages (4 22 1889, p.5; as noted above).
While most tenants everywhere were respectable, the easternmost blocks of Forty-second Street gradually declined socially and became one locus of prostitution and petty crime. St. Bartholomew’s Mission opened at 158 East in February of 1889 to rescue “poor slaves of drink” who might have fallen into criminal ways to support their addiction. A few years earlier, contributors opened a lodging house for women who were called “temporarily homeless” at 207 East. It charged twenty cents per night for a single bed and hoped to promote self-sufficiency in a year. It also provided a “restaurant” which today would be called a soup kitchen (NYT 3 24 1883, p.8). A clinic of complementary design adjoined the parish house at the east. The pair of buildings provided more services in larger surroundings. Other beneficial activity was directed from the office of the Eighth District Charity organization at 214 East, where a robbery occurred in early November of 1884. (NYT 11 14 1884, p..3)
Industry near the riverfront by then included the Equitable Gas Works where an engineer died in an explosion in 1887; the company was ordered to abate noxious odors from the works within a week (NYT 8 4 1888 p.3) but there was no report about compliance with the order; Consolidated Gas, at the Hudson River end of the street, had ignored a similar order a few years earlier. (NYT 12 3 1884, p. 5; 1 29 1885, p.3). Small wonder that the neighborhood failed to attract prosperous residents.
Newspaper reports are unclear as to whether Colored School #80 at 41st Street on the west side was to be abolished and schools integrated, following a new law mandating integration of the two surviving schools for African-American children. The school Superintendent’s positive assessment of Grammar School 27 near Second Avenue conflicted with that of “Prof. Charles L. Reason, a colored gentleman of considerable education,” and principal of school 80, who called 27 “old and not fit for a school. He attempted to prevent the transfer of his smaller student body there.” A court ruled that the Board of Education could transfer the students and that the Board wanted school 80 “for a larger number of white pupils.” (NYT 9 10 1884, p. 8; 9 28 1884, p.3) Newspaper reports did not mention the race of students at 27 in 1888 when it was scheduled to be given new wings to accommodate three hundred additional children. (NYT 7 8 1888, p. 6; the Board of Education approved $16,000 in 1886 to buy a site at 204 East NYT 7 15 1886, p.8; it was enlarged and given two light courts; see Bromley map 1897) It had already been expanded to cover almost all of three lots, to judge from a fire-insurance map of 1883. A report of appalling conditions in various public schools noted a lack of daylight, poor ventilation with sewer odors penetrating into the classrooms, vile toilets in odoriferous basements, fire exit stairs made of wood, and unfinished repairs. These conditions persisted well into the 1890s but perhaps not at P.S. 27. It was replaced in 1907-1908 at 210-214 East by Superintendent C.B.J. Snyder. He is lauded today for his historicizing designs featuring well-ventilated and well-lit H-plans that also allowed for recreational courtyards, but he was justifiably criticized in 1895 when his annual report failed to record the still disgusting state of some schools under his control.
(NYT 1 4 1995, p. 9; see also 2 20 1996, p.7; on delayed construction see 11 22 1996, p. 15; P.S. 27 was at 210 and the Continuation School Board of Education photo dated 1908; School at 214 East: 5 22 1931, p..22, also p. 19, but the Continuation School moved uptown by January 1932)
By the late 1880s, the east side experienced a quick rise in brick tenements above shops, replacing a situation of more abject “social disorder,” poor sanitation, “political corruption, an excess of saloons, and dilapidation.” (NYT 5 7 1888, p. 8) A 40 x 200-foot tunnel at the river end was part of the improvement, joining the two sides of Prospect Place that were separated by a drop of fifty feet from each side to ground level.
(Fig, 16 top: Tunnel at Prospect Place, toward the east, 1925.Municipal Archives bpm (Borough President of Manhattan) 1940 archive. Public domain. Fig.17, bottom Tunnel toward the west. Photo: Brown Bros 19270b5dfcd8229a4ab045b8eed92bd978e6. Public domain) The upper roadway flanked by tenements and utilitarian buildings is evident above the tunnel. Buildings below were demolished ca. 1950 as part of improvement related to the United Nations’ presence.)
The tunnel had cost the lives of men on two occasions when the improperly built tunnel collapsed because someone had not applied the proper cement between the bricks when the project was completed by 1880. An inquiry in 1887 cleared at least one construction firm of responsibility for the deaths (NYT 1 19 1887, p.8). Scissors-shaped flights of stairs led from street level to a walkway that carried Prospect Place across the bridge. The height of the arch let horsecar and mechanized streetcar and bus traffic flow through this new tunnel, but the span created traffic congestion later when automobiles jammed the area in attempts to reach or leave a highway later built along the riverfront. The original tunnel was replaced by the present broader one between 1950 and 1952 in connection with the building of the United Nations complex. (tudorcityconfidential.com/2016/11/ the-tunnel.html accessed 3 12 2019; with illustrations)
The 1890s were no less busy along Forty-second Street.