Chapter 5: The 1900s

The principal architectural events on Forty-second Street during the spectacularly busy first decade of the new century were the introduction of subway service, the construction of the New York Public Library, and the remodeling of Grand Central Station into the present Grand Central Terminal. Theaters on the street, initiated at the end of the previous century, burst onto Forty-second Street from 1900 onward. All these projects extended into the following decade when the original parts of the buildings or additions to them were opened for use.

In 1900 precisely, however, the street was unattractive, as we see from photographs taken of each east side block between Fifth and Lexington Avenues. Perhaps few people thought that it was worth photographing the blocks farther east. The street itself was often filthy because black and sticky mud sank into streetcar tracks, horse droppings fouled the roadway, and the city had recently ruled that hydrants must not be used to flood the streets. (NYT 12 15 1901, p.5).

Most of the buildings on Forty-second Street were between two and five stories high because premises above that level in walkup buildings were hard to rent. Many of them were monotonous brick or stone-fronted frame structures that could have been individual houses originally but that were turned into small hotels such as the easily forgotten Devonshire at 152-154 East, owned by the Renwick estate, that was modestly remodeled in 1903 by G. M. Allgrove, architect. Another example was 363 West, proposed for alteration in 1900. Shops in this area offered goods ranging from elegant men’s furnishings to cigars, and there were several pharmacies, barber shops, and grocery stores. The long row of houses just west of Fifth Avenue on the north side had two or three of their stories devoted to commerce. They were remodeled with large windows on the lower floors, providing well-lit shops and workrooms. At 7 West, the Drama Bookshop began its long life in 1907. Patrons of the second-floor premises here and elsewhere had to mount steps that jutted into the sidewalk, with iron rails to support the steps and in some cases nothing but thin railings to prevent a sideward fall. Between the steps and the trolley tracks, excavation took place from 1900 to 1904 in relation to subway construction. (https://digitalcollections.nyhistory.org/islandora/object/nyhs%3A81696) West of that were Raines Law hotels for which the bell tolled after 1907, and saloons, as well as Holy Cross church, factories, stables, gasworks, tenements, a few surviving single-family houses, and the small hotels that housed prostitutes. Rumor had it that a Chief of Police frequented Mrs. Mollie Reardon’s “disorderly resort” in the Garrick Hotel. Seven months later, order triumphed, as the place was being transformed into an office building.

(NYT 12 14 1906, p.8, By 7 26 1907, p. 12, architect Charles D. Kohn, had created the new design for Timothy Padell, owner of the adjoining Hermitage Hotel on 7th Avenue.)

Part of the avenue on the east side was blighted by the spur of the Third Avenue El that turned west to Grand Central. It blocked high-class development to the east of Third Avenue. The more impressive buildings were the storage structures, the hospital, the Depot itself, and two pleasant if not actually beautiful two-story “taxpayer” buildings with shops below office premises. These were found east of the corners of Madison and Park Avenues, one of them housing the pharmacy of the chronicler Frederick Schoonmaker. (Chap.2, Fig.4, Chap. 4 fig. 20.) Many of the working-class residents were Irish at both ends of the street, although there were British, German, and a few Jewish names in news reports and property transfer documents; several Jews not from the neighborhood became prominent theatrical entrepreneurs.

In 1900, residents and businesses survived the bankruptcy of the Third Avenue Railroad because its crosstown railway was taken over by the Metropolitan Street Railway Company, (Roger P Roess & Gene Sansone, The Wheels That Drove New York: A History of the New York City Transit System, Heidelberg & New York, Springer 2013, p. 68) which completed electrification of the route in 1901. Ferries met the final stations on each side of the island. The one to Weehawken dated to 1859. Its ferry house of the 1880s, a replacement for one burned in the Civil War draft riots, was replaced with a spacious and well-organized terminal building that opened in 1909 (NYT 5 28 1907 p. 3; 1 29, 1909 p. 4. The Sanborn map of 1911, vol 5 plate 65 gives an explicit plan of the terminal that served ferries to both Weehawken NJ and West New York NJ). A ferry from the east side to Williamsburg, Brooklyn that opened in December 1901 stopped running suddenly in 1908, having operated at a financial loss for several months under judicial order. (NYT 4 9 1908, p. 5; 12 4 1908, p. 18; 12 15 1908, p. 6)

Within a few years, significant changes heralded parts of the street’s present appearance. By 1906-1908, despite the depressed economy of those years, Forty-second Street was acknowledged as the north end of the city’s commercial heart, which by then started at Fourteenth Street. (NYT 1 10 1909, p.AFR 53) Throughout the decade, property values soared near Times Square. By 1909, the entire street was occupied by constructions of some kind, except for one lot at the far west end where construction was anticipated. (http://nyapril1946.blogspot.com/2011/09/paddys-market-and-hells-kitchen.html NYT 12 11 1904, p. SM7) The higher land values did not translate into a street of consistent building of any type or class, because much of the land was still held by old families who seem to have responded to opportunity rather than to ideas of long-term coordinated planning.

A few entrepreneurs saw opportunities for the future, especially Walter J. Salomon who began to buy and lease property just west of Fifth Avenue in 1899. He managed by 1915 to obtain control of 1 to 29 West; the buildings on the northern corners of Sixth Avenue, with 101 West mortgaged from the DePeyster family. He also acquired the former Morton house site across Fifth Avenue, by then called the Seymour Building. The Times noted that those who leased or sold land to him included “many old and aristocratic families” or their estates, including those of Levi Morton, Commodore Elbridge T. Gerry, Russell Sage, and General John Watts de Peyster. The implication was that Mr. Salomon’s family was neither old locally nor aristocratic. With the new century had come new entrepreneurs and new buildings

(NYT 3 3 1905, p. 14; 3 12 1905, p. 19; 7 2 1909, p. 1; 66 John St. Block 995, lot 29; for a diagram of the Fifth-to-Sixth Avenue block with ownership recorded, see NYT 3 12, 1905, p. 19; 10 26 1930, p.RE2. For his acquisition of the Arcade Building at Sixth Avenue, NYT 6 29 1913, p.XX 22).

Among minor but conspicuous changes, the Bristol closed as an apartment hotel in 1902 when the landowner, the Gerry estate, raised the rent. Walter J Salomon then leased and remodeled it for shops and offices and threatened to sue a tenant who placed placards in the shop windows criticizing the incomplete renovations. Later photographs show rooftop advertising signs atop the formerly elegant hotel. The signs were easily visible from a distance because the Public Library just to the south was set back from the street. On December 30, 1904, the Harmonie Club members decamped from West Forty-second to Sixtieth Street just off Fifth Avenue as fashion moved northward. (NYT 12 16 1905, p. 18)

Farther east. the improvements to Grand Central Station designed by Gilbert, Huckel, and chief engineer William Wilgus were insufficient for the long run. A major remodeling of Grand Central came about for several reasons. In late 1901, the rival Pennsylvania Railroad announced a plan for a trans-Hudson tunnel that would enable the company to bring trains directly into Manhattan. The tunnel was built between 1904 and 1908 but opened in 1910. Until the opening, passengers had to complete a journey by ferry, an inconvenience that could be avoided by using the rival New York Central line trains that terminated at Grand Central. But the equal access to Manhattan that the tunnel represented meant dangerous competition if Grand Central itself were not modernized and altered to accommodate more trains. Renderings of the proposed Penn Station showed McKim Mead & White’s design talents as re-creators of the grandeur of ancient Rome, at least in the most widely published parts of the station; indeed, the great hall was modeled on the frigidarium in the Baths of Caracalla. Bradford Lee Gilbert’s cluttered design of the heightened Grand Central Station looked outmoded by comparison despite Samuel Huckel Jr.’s internal improvements,

When the remodeled Grand Central opened in October 1900, the unified waiting room was 200 x 100 feet in size, with a ceiling 50 feet high. Marble and white stucco and a glass roof made it lighter and airier than the gloomy predecessors. Someone decided to name each pillar for cities served by the railroad so as to help travelers to meet friends, and there were good facilities for dining and baggage. Handsome arched portals led to the train shed. But it clearly could not rival visually the arrangements being made by the Pennsylvania Railroad.

(For Grand Central Terminal, see especially. Schlichting, Grand Central Terminal; idem., Grand Central’s Engineer. William J. Wilgus and the Planning of Modern Manhattan, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Univerity Press, 2013; Belle & Leighton, Grand Central, esp. pp. 42-44; Roberts, Grand Central, and countless articles in the New York Times; Deborah Nevins, ed., Grand Central Terminal; Anne Walker and Peter Pennoyer, The Architecture of Warren & Wetmore, New York, Norton, 2006, pp. 78-1101; Robert A.M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin, John Montague Massengale, New York 1900, New York, Rizzoli, 1983, pp 34-40. The New York Times described part of the construction process (with a preliminary rendering of the main concourse) 9 12 1909. p. SM9. For the interior remodeling of 1900, see NYT 10 18 1900, p. 11, and 10 23 1900, p.6 and 1 5 1901, p.7 for comments on its improvement over the earlier Depot. For the government’s role, see Matthew Kennedy, “Reform Politics, Public Pressure, and the Beginnings of New York’s Terminal City” Pratum Romanum:, Richard Krautheimer zum 100 Geburtstage, ed. R. L. Colella, M. J. Gill et al., Wiesbaden, Reicht, 1997, pp. 215-232, and his “Terminal City: Architettura e ferrovia a New York, “Casabella DCXXIV, 1995, pp. 22-33, 67-68. Mr. Kennedy kindly supplied the text of his lecture to the Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in 1998)

More important than aesthetic competition, the rivalry for passengers and freight haulage as well as congested schedules at Grand Central called for remedies. What’s more, the public had by then tired of the corruption represented by the railroad and streetcar owners, and had elected a city administration of reformers, led by Mayor Seth Low.

On January 8, 1902, a week after Mayor Low’s inauguration, two trains collided because of signal problems and steam-obscured vision. The collision caused fifteen fatalities. Public hearings recorded the public’s desire not only for railroad electrification--steamless and far cleaner than a system requiring coal--but also for a restoration of the crosstown streets that the tracks interrupted. In response, the Board of Estimate and Apportionment (then the City’s body for budget, land-use, and contracts) in 1903 demanded an end to steam traction below Ninety-sixth Street by 1908. The Pennsylvania Railroad had to use electric traction through the tunnel anyway, but the City’s demand required Grand Central’s radical change from the existing steam operation. Even more radical was a proposal by William Wilgus, the railroad’s chief engineer since 1899 and a vice-president after 1903, who first developed his ideas in the late 1890s. He and Vanderbilt’s lawyer, Chauncey Depew, the railroad’s vice-president, William Newman, and the Municipal Assembly president, Randolph Guggenheimer, all spoke about the advantages of electrification. (NYT 7 20 1901, p. 1; 8 2 1901, p. 6; 11 20 1901, p. 16; 11 22 1901, p. 1, etc.) But electric traction would cost a vast sum, which the railroad did not want to pay for, so for as long as it could, the railroad suppressed Wilgus’s expensive but rational suggestion for combining depressed tracks and electrification. (Kennedy, opera cit., showed the political aspects of the planning most clearly.)

To enlarge the station’s capacity and to benefit from the required electric traction, Wilgus proposed to create two layers of trains because expanding laterally would have required the railroad to buy land. One layer would be below grade and the other deeper underground. Efficient scheduling could be promoted by separating suburban tracks from long-distance departure tracks---the former below the latter.

(Fig. 1. Grand Central Terminal cutaway of levels. Photo: Author’s collection. Public domain)

There would be loop tracks at each level to enable trains to move between arrival and departure tracks; the upper loop is now gone. A loop had been considered desirable for a long time but now the City obliged by granting sub-surface rights to the New York Central Railroad between Lexington and Madison Avenues, and between Forty-second and Forty-third Streets. (Roberts, Grand Central, p. 80. Maps and plans show a loop to 40th Street, too.). It would be complicated to build the layers so that tracks did not lie directly above each other, but it could be done. The Station building could be demolished and replaced---to rival the Roman grandeur of Penn Station-- because trains using electricity removed the need for ventilation through a glass-and-metal shed.

Wilgus assembled experts in electrical work on railroads, including Frank Sprague who had built improved elevators in the previous decade and who had experience with street railways. If the railroad built its own generating plant, as it did at Forty-ninth Street, it could make small savings in operating costs. These renovations could be financed once steam trains were removed from Fourth, now Park Avenue because Wilgus imagined erecting a revenue-producing office building above the station house. While outside commercial interests were the first to propose buildings along Park Avenue on railroad-controlled land (Kennedy in Casabella, n. 6) the railroad directors eventually adopted that idea to help pay for the other improvements.

By March of 1903, Wilgus had formulated additional elements of his plan. Incoming passengers would be diverted to specific exit areas. There should be a connection to the subway then being constructed for opening in 1904. An elevated roadway should connect lower Park Avenue to the part of the road north of a new terminal building, since Vanderbilt Avenue and Depew Place were too narrow for current and anticipated traffic.

(Fig. 2. Depew Place before Grand Central Terminal was completed. Geroge Hall & Sons photograph, undated. The New York Historical, Hall collection. Public domain.)

The new roadway should rise on broad open arches from about Fortieth Street. Wilgus also proposed dimensions for the main room-- called the concourse-- at the new building, ramps to connect the levels, a park or plaza over the rail yard from Forty-fifth to Forty-eighth Street with a baggage-handling facility in the southern part of that area, a large waiting room, and a new hotel. All these facilities except the park or plaza were built eventually, albeit not to Wilgus’s specific plans. The elevated roadway was finished only in 1922 because its construction had to await completion of the steelwork for the Lexington Avenue subway line. (NYT 1 15 1915, p. 5) Wilgus solved the problem of demolishing and replacing an existing busy railroad terminal by dividing the work into well-timed and well-coordinated north-south strips, disabling only a few tracks at a time.

Financing this project was daunting. An entity called the New York State Terminal Realty Company secured through J.P. Morgan & Co the money for the basic elements of the plan; Morgan was on the railroad’s board. Predictably, construction costs rose beyond the initial projection. Even Wilgus’s first estimate used almost half of the railroad’s revenue for the previous year, and the cost rose ever higher. An early idea to build low buildings along Park Avenue was altered later to provide much taller buildings for increased revenue from proposed commercial office and hotel buildings there. Despite many problems, the railroad’s very wealthy trustees voted to continue work. Until 1907, this was done by the O’Rourke Construction Company and later by teams that the railroad assembled.

Today, when Grand Central Terminal has become a designated historic landmark and a source of aesthetic delight, it is easy to forget that the technical arrangements were always primary. Nevertheless, the new building also had to rival Penn Station in impressiveness, as well as in its function and convenience. It advertised itself as “The First Great Stairless Railway Terminal in History by connecting the levels by ramps.” The cladding material that concealed steel structure had to be durable and dignified---on the exterior, Stony Creek granite from Connecticut for the lower parts up to the balustrade along the roadway, and Indiana limestone above. It had to be handsome, too.

(Fig. 3 below: Left to right: Belmont Hotel, Hotel Manhattan, the low Vanderbilt Avenue Building before its enlargement, tall club and hotel buildings, Grand Central Terminal, the structure surrounding the lower concourse level, part of the loop of tracks that reach to Fortieth Street, and in the foreground, the spur of the Third Avenue El. Photo: The New York Historical. Photo by William Hassler, vs/ 1914. Public domain)

(Deborah Deford, ed., Flesh and Stone: Stony Creek and the Age of Granite, Stony Creek Granite Quarry Workers Celebration, with Leete’s Island Books, 2000; Indiana Limestone: The Aristocrat of Building Materials, 5th ed., vol. l, Nov. 1919, pp. 18-19 captioned photograph https://www.google.com/books/edition/Indiana_Limestone/B23PAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=inauthor:%22Indiana+Limestone+Quarrymen%27s+Association%22&printsec=frontcover accessed 9 27 2020. New York Times special supplement. 2. 2 2019, part 9, p. 5. On p. 4, craftsmen and suppliers who worked on the Terminal took advertisements to proclaim their participation)

While Penn Station had long corridors with steps creating inconvenient separate levels, and separate ticketing rooms and track entrance areas, Grand Central required passengers to cross only the waiting room before arriving at the concourse where ticket booths and long-distance track portals faced each other.

(Fig. 4. Grand Central Terminal upper concourse, interior to the east: Photo: Author, January 2006) Ticket windows at viewer’s right, track entrances lit at viewer’s left.)

(Fig.5. The same, but toward the west. Photo: Author, September 2021)

. Grand Central provided broad ramps as well as stairs and elevators for easy circulation. While Penn Station’s passengers had to descend narrow staircases to the tracks, the long-distance passengers at Grand Central simply walked down sloping ramps to the tracks---or on a red carpet to the Twentieth Century Limited trains, their baggage having been taken care of in the designated facility. Commuters would use ramps, steps, or elevators to the lower level.

The aesthetics were different, too. Penn Station was more literally referential in its main room and external columns, but Grand Central used ancient Rome as inspiration by allowing the usual Roman goal of circulation to a climactic room to take precedence over academic re-creation. The climactic room was spacious and handsome, and contained every essential—ticket windows, an information booth, and entrances to the trains. Magnificent as New York’s own Pennsylvanian frigidarium was, it had a rival in the concourse at Grand Central which was more original and more convenient.

We owe the result to several architects who did not work happily together. A design competition held in 1903 was limited to four firms---McKim Mead & White, D. H. Burnham & Co. of Chicago, Samuel Huckel Jr.’s firm, and Reed and Stem of St. Paul, Minnesota. The Minnesotans had had experience in building stations for the Northern Pacific Railway, but the fact that Mrs. May Reed was Wilgus’ sister was surely significant. To Charles Reed and Allen Stem we owe the idea of the elevated roadway and the convenient ramps inside the Terminal. Family considerations also affected the railroad directors’ decision to add another architectural team, that of Whitney Warren and Charles Wetmore. Warren was a distant cousin of William K. Vanderbilt, the Commodore’s grandson who was on the railroad’s board of directors and who admired the classicizing mode of design taught to Warren at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Vanderbilt expected the very different architects to work together, however reluctantly.

Warren & Wetmore’s participation was made easier by two events. First, in a controversy over blame for a fatal crash of electric trains, Wilgus-- Reed & Stem’s advocate-- was removed from work on Grand Central in July of 1907. Second, when Reed died of a heart attack in 1911, the railroad’s board almost immediately canceled the original contract, as they were entitled to do, and made a new one with Warren and Wetmore. Reed’s estate and Stem then brought a lawsuit that ended in a financial settlement and Warren was removed from membership in the American Institute of Architects. Nevertheless, he continued work at Grand Central until its completion in 1913, canceling---for a time---the elevated roadway, and eliminating the office building over the tracks in favor of a classicizing design. His final design for the terminal building emphasized three broad arches with windows sixty feet high covering several interior levels. The arches are flanked by solid walls rising above a low basement level for shops and entrances. (Figs. 1, 3 above) A broad cornice concludes the composition. On either side of the central window are narrow bays with rectangular windows under smaller oval ones. Above the central window are a clock and statues including Mercury who is over twenty-seven feet high, designed by Jules-Alexis Coutan but executed by William Bradley & Sons in Long Island City. The images of Mercury, Minerva, and Hercules represent commercial leadership, intellectual and moral strength---ideas lost on the general public that admires the figures for their energy and decorative value. On the Vanderbilt Avenue and Depew Place sides are three large windows with stone moldings around them. On Vanderbilt Avenue, a ground-floor carriage entrance permitted convenient access to the interior from private vehicles. In 2021, the developer of One Vanderbilt, a “supertall” office building, blocked the south end of Vanderbilt Avenue to create a small outdoor pedestrian area that gave his company permission to build extra floors.

(For preliminary competition designs and those by Warren & Wetmore, see Nevins, ed., op. cit., pp. 15, 22-29)

While Grand Central’s exterior presents a dignified appearance worthy of the sponsors’ ambitions, the interior is more ingenious. Before large buildings blocked the sun’s rays from the concourse, it was at times flooded with light.

(Fig. 6. Grand Central Terminal upper concourse September, 1959. Photo Angelo Rizzuto, Library of Congress Lot 115144-K no. 151. LC-DIG-ppmsca-70682. View toward the south side with ticket windows and ramp from the waiting room under a clock. In 1959 there were exhibits and advertising installations in the concourse.).

All entrances led to the upper and lower concourses, where there were tickets and trains, the goals of travelers. The vast upper concourse, 174 feet long and 120 feet wide, has at its center a four-sided clock atop an information booth, exactly where they are needed, and the booth continues to the center of the lower floor. The ticket windows and train entrances are also immediately obvious. For anyone oblivious to the large portals that lead to the tracks, ornamental leaves above the doors, the work of Sylvain Salieres, might capture their attention. Postal service portals were opened east of those for travelers, and there were other service portals on both levels. Passengers arriving on long-distance trains were originally directed to a special exit door leading to a broad corridor for easy egress up a ramp to taxis or public vehicles, or straight ahead to the subway.

(Fig. 7. Corridor to subway. Ramp to street level. Photo: Author, August, 2025)

After 1905, they could seek help at a Travelers’ Aid bureau. Passengers who had to wait for trains could relax and dine at the Oyster Bar, both a restaurant and oyster bar on the lower level. Approached either from a ramp in a splendid corridor about ninety feet high

(Fig. 8. Ramp from main level to lower level with Oyster Bar and now, fast food offerings. Photo: Author, 2025)

or from steps down from the main concourse, the restaurant is entirely vaulted with the hollow ceramic tiles that Rafael Guastavino introduced to New York and other cities. Edward Trumbull, later famous for his Chrysler Building lobby murals, executed work in the Oyster Bar, too and in a passageway to Lexington Avenue.

(Fig. 9. Two views of the Grand Central Terminal Oyster bar. Architecture, March 1913, plate XXVII. Public domain.)

At the south side of the lower concourse were ticket windows for suburban trains, and on the east side, a large baggage depository and the Lost-and-Found office. Clear signs and good lighting added to this level’s convenience.

(Fig.10. Grand Central Terminal lower (suburban) concourse. Ticket windows at right, information desk at left in distance. Photo: Detroit Publishing Company ca. 1914, LoC LC-D4-72973 [P&P] Public domain.)

Basement storage areas beneath this level took charge of the deposited items that elevators raised when they were needed; these areas also allowed the tracks to be free of the luggage to be boarded when trains arrived and free of the luggage being removed in time for trains to depart.

It is, then, not just the symmetrical design of the concourse sheathed in artificial Caen stone with real marble trim, the vast Tennessee marble floor and steps, and the zodiac mural designed by Paul Cesar Helleu on the ceiling that give dignified significance to the interior; it is primarily the clarity of planning and the amplitude, indeed the grandeur and the convenience of the architectural forms throughout the public spaces that were outstanding.

At various times in its history, the Terminal has had amenities as well as complicated technical facilities from switches to sewers that have their own histories. The amenities began for the arriving traveler with the service of the “redcaps” porters, but the station had railroad offices, a women’s waiting room with maids in attendance, a marble-clad beauty parlor, a barber shop, a shoe-polishing room, and later, an art gallery, tennis courts, cinema, police station, and emergency hospital, as well as shops selling items for the bored traveler awaiting a train or the expected guest who had forgotten a hostess gift.

Given the number of buildings that had to be removed to enlarge the Terminal, one may wonder where the former occupants went. Homeowners who were rich enough moved north to the newly elite streets near Central Park; less prosperous people rented apartments uptown that had been made accessible by the subway and the Els. Shops relocated near their clientele if they could, and the Hospital for the Relief of the Ruptured and Crippled moved east in 1912 to a six-story building between First and Second Avenues where the Ford Foundation stands now. Cornelius Vanderbilt II was a member of its Board of Managers, and not coincidentally, he had led negotiations for the sale and relocation of the hospital so as to complete the Terminal’s expansion. (NYT 6 5 1909, p.5) Office buildings later rose around the station on the railroad’s property and on private holdings, and many were connected by tunnels to the Terminal. From the late teens, the tunnels made it possible for a suburban business leader to be driven to the station, rush to a train, ascend to his office, descend to lunchtime restaurants or walk through subterranean corridors to hotel restaurants and bars and never emerge outdoors until he reached his home station in the evening.

(Ahrend Associates, Inc. of New York published a map in 1966 of tunnels connecting buildings in the Grand Central, Rockefeller Center, Penn Station, and Columbus Circle, called “A Rainy Day Guide to Midtown Manhattan.”)

The other transportation innovation of the first decade of the new century was the subway, a private enterprise initiated by the City which eventually took it over. The arrangement between the City and the investors provided that after fare receipts had reached a certain sum, the City would own the subways. The plan for the new transportation system was produced by a “public commission, every member of which was also a leader in the New York State Chamber of Commerce.” (Reichl, p. 46; see also Keith D. Revell, Building Gotham, Civic Culture and Public Policy in New York City, 1898-1938, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003, pp.105-114). We can infer that this was not so much a civic project as an investment, which, once sufficiently profitable or else deemed unrewarding, would be unloaded onto the public. And once a transit system that carries millions of passengers each year was in place, it could not be closed down when revenue failed to keep up with the costs, although it did close for several hours each night for disinfection during part of the Covid-19 health pandemic that began in 2020.

The Interborough Rapid Transit system was a private corporation, but a municipal bond guarantee supported the bonds that financed the project. (Reichl p 46). The IRT, as it was universally known, built its first lines between 1900 and 1904, the southern part first. The route went from City Hall to Grand Central, then west to Longacre Square (soon to be renamed Times Square) and then north. It had to cross the northern part of the trapezoidal block where the Pabst Hotel stood before the tracks turned north on Broadway. The Subway Realty company, part of the enterprise, bought the necessary site from a real estate investor, Amos F. Eno, who had small buildings on his property. He granted the City a perpetual underground easement. The subway sponsors also took possession of a cellar in the Pabst Hotel and ran a tunnel through much of the rathskeller and a storage room. Pabst then declared that this work nullified his lease. He had not only lost some underground parts of his hotel, but he had also been forced by publicity--initiated by the owner of the New York Times and his allies--to remove the illegal protruding extension of his second-floor restaurant. The sensible if desperate thing for Pabst to do was to destroy the hotel around Thanksgiving in 1902 and get what he could as compensation. This was the first building to be demolished that had an entire steel skeleton. (NYT 11 23 1902, p.12) At this point, one of optimism in the real estate industry, (NYT 4 6 1902, p. 19) publisher Adolph Ochs entered into a lease for the site, bought the Eno property, and began to build the Times Tower.

Before discussing that tower and other high-rises along the street, we must examine the subway’s route across Forty-second Street, which links the eastern and the western routes of the trains. The system, its history, and its contractors were described clearly in the New York Times for October 28, 1904, starting on page one, recording the opening of the route on the previous day. The plan, a compromise between desirability and construction costs, (Hood, 722 Miles, p. 68) was a backward vertical Z, running north from City Hall to Grand Central, west on Forty-second Street to Longacre-then-Times Square, and after a little jog north through the Pabst’s rathskeller, north along Broadway to 145^th Street. At Grand Central there was to be an express stop but at Longacre Square the plan called for only a local stop since the subway planners did not foresee that the area would shortly become the entertainment heart of the city. By 1900, there were only two theaters close to the planned Forty-second Street station, and the Times Tower was not in anyone’s mind but Ochs’s.

The building of the subway did not go smoothly. A fatal explosion occurred in January 1902 (NYT 1 29 1902, p. 2; 1 30 1902, p. 2; 1 31 1902, p. 2) and others came later, often caused by unsafe handling of dynamite. The Grand Union Hotel suffered damage twice. The tracks turned west at the corner of Lexington Avenue and Forty-second Street, under the spur to Grand Central of the Third Avenue El. This left a problematic vacant lot that was occupied soon afterward by the Belmont Hotel of 1904-06 owned by the financier August Belmont, the chief investor in the subway system.

By 1902, there was discussion of a second line along Broadway that might intersect the original IRT line, but the addition did not materialize for a decade. It meant dealing with the city and acquiring property by purchase or eminent domain. These were potential headaches. The builders had challenges, too. They had to avoid the existing pipes for gas and water and sewers, as well as anything else underground. They had to keep streetcar tracks intact. Sometimes they were surprised by discovering bedrock. The excavation level ranged from six feet at Sixth Avenue to almost forty feet elsewhere. The construction firm of Degnon-McLean employed about 425 men for the work. (NYT 4 5 1901, p.1; 5 19 1901, p. 16). Property owners suffered from noise, dirt, narrower street and sidewalk passages, the difficulty for customers of reaching shops and the consequent business failures, and other problems. (NYT 1 14 1914, p. 9) It was, of course, worth doing although if it had been a well-funded municipal project, it might have been done better, with wider platforms, for instance, or with full tiling on the walls.

The subway system proved to be popular, despite the initial poor ventilation, so that it required extension almost immediately. The IRT platforms were modified in 1910 to accommodate longer trains. On March 10, 1909, the New York Times reported plans to extend the eastern branch of the system from Grand Central northward along Lexington Avenue; later, the western branch was extended southward. This created two north-south lines, but it meant that the Forty-second Street link between them was no longer part of a Z-shaped route; it had become the crossbar of an H, just a link between the two nearly straight routes.

Operated as a shuttle from 1918 onward, the link required passengers to transfer trains. Four tracks connected Grand Central to what was by then Times Square. Two of those tracks were designated for a line of trains to Queens through the Steinway alias Belmont Tunnel that had been initiated in 1892 for trolley cars and finished in 1907; it was converted for trains by 1915. Rudolph Welcker, a Dutch immigrant, was the engineer in charge of design, and later worked on subway construction under Forty-second Street. (NYT 11 9 1935, p. 15) The vicissitudes of the four tracks form a complicated story, but shuttle trains now run on the originally designated tracks 1, 3, and 4, with a walkway to other lines covering track 2.

(For ventilation, NYT 6 30 1906, p 16) For the shuttle, see http://www.columbia.edu/~brennan/abandoned/grandcentral.html by Joseph Brennan, 2002. For a clear explanation of the shuttle track, see William Keith, “F.Y.I.,” NYT 11 5 2017, p. MB5) ,

The other major feat of infrastructure that affected Forty-second Street in this decade was the expanded sourcing of water. The City had not been relying on the Forty-second Street reservoir and its sources for over a decade and had moved water storage to Central Park. The pipes had become inadequate, and there were more useful things to do with the midtown site.

(FIG. 11. Reservoir under demolition, newspaper article Sept.2, 1899, NYPL Public domain)

In 1905, the state legislature authorized the City to create a board of water supply to find a way to increase the supply and to safeguard it. A reliable enlarged water supply with its conduits, safety provisions, and sufficient pressure into buildings had long been needed to supplement the initial Croton system. The development of tall business buildings in midtown, and elevator apartment houses capable of housing an increasing population depended upon additional supplies. The Board designated a drainage area of almost eight hundred square miles, and aqueducts about 160 miles long on largely undeveloped land in the Catskill Mountains. This water system was completed in 1917 under the supervision of engineers John Ripley Freeman, J. Waldo Smith and others. (Revell. Building Gotham, pp. 114-126)

In the center of Forty-Second Street, on increasingly fashionable Fifth Avenue, the reservoir’s demolition made way for the New York Public Library, the product of the joined Astor and Lenox private libraries and the Samuel J. Tilden legacy. A self-respecting city had to have a public library for research as well as pleasure, and not just the handsome neighborhood libraries sponsored by Andrew Carnegie which later became parts of the overall library system. The most important person responsible for coordinating the Tilden endowment with the two private libraries was lawyer John Bigelow, a trustee of the Tilden legacy. A formal agreement to the plan had been signed in 1895.

Planning for the functioning of the library preceded the architectural frame by several years. We owe the brilliant and unprecedented heart of the plan to Dr. John Shaw Billings, a surgeon who had earlier helped to develop the Index Medicus a monthly resource enabling doctors to find medical literature on specific topics. He had also created the Index Catalogue of the Surgeon General’s Office in 1880 and expanded that library exponentially. A polymath who developed punch card systems and is given credit for planning the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, he also inspired Andrew Carnegie to donate funds to build main and branch city libraries in North America and Britain. This remarkable man devised the inner workings of the new library, improving upon precedents.

(Carleton B. Chapman, Order Out of Chaos: John Shaw Billings and America’s Coming of Age, Boston, Boston Medical Library, Canton MA, (Science History Publications), 1994.)

Billings, in consultation with architecture professor William R. Ware, prepared a symmetrical building plan to suggest order; this was an era of both political reform and architectural classicizing reform. (Fielding H. Garrison, John Shaw Billings, A Memoir, New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915, pp. 288 ff., esp. pp 296-300.) The concomitant taste for clarity and symmetry reacted against the corruption and excesses of Tammany Hall and similar secretive political maneuvering, and against the colorful and inventive but eccentric Victorian facades exemplified by those of the first Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled and Dr. Tyng’s church. Besides, a symmetrical building would be easily intelligible to users of the new library.

(Fig. 12. New York Public Library, Carrere & Hastings, ca. 1913. Photo: Library of Congress service-pnp-det-4a24300-4a24388r.jpgPublic domain.)

But Dr. Billings’ plan was essentially functional rather than aesthetic. His proposal with a T-shape in the center, represented by the catalogue room and the reading room perpendicular to it, formed the basis for the actual plan.

(Fig, 13, New York Public Library, Bird’s eye view by Angelo Rizzuto, 1959. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LOT15144-K no.145 hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.70676 LoC Control # 2020636820, Along 42^nd Street at top right, left to right: Bryant Park Building, Stern’s department store, Aeolian Building, ll West 42^nd Street, 500 Fifth Avenue (fragment).

The cross bar of the T, the core of the New York Public Library, is a stack system around an elevator.

(Fig. 14. Stacks around an elevator which is indicated at the top and bottom of this image. From Scientific American May 27, 1911. Public domain.)

Made of cast iron, this exceptionally efficient arrangement supports the main reading room on the building’s top floor, which receives abundant clerestory daylight from windows on two sides. Books could be plucked from the stacks, placed on the elevator, and delivered in less than twenty minutes, often even in ten. The cross section through the system shows the proximity of stacks, elevator, and readers. The French national library had had metal stacks, but not the integrated elevator and delivery system allied with the reading room.

The building surrounding this system is grand and handsome, the largest marble edifice erected in the country until that time, with outer walls five feet thick. It stretches 390 feet along Fifth Avenue and Bryant Park, 270 feet along Forty-second and Fortieth Streets. Critic Herbert Croly, writing under the pseudonym of A.C. David, called it “the most important building erected since the American architectural revival began,” by which he meant the arrival of Beaux-Arts-inspired classicism.

Construction began in mid-November of 1902 and the library opened to the public in late May 1911. The thick marble slabs quarried in Dorset Vermont were laid in alternating dimensions as facing for a brick core that held the floor beams. The lowest walls were stone remnants from the reservoir. Placing the library’s basement more than twenty feet below the base of the reservoir allowed for below-grade levels inside the new building. Digging down to bedrock was not necessary because the building rests on a mix of gravel and hard clay that has the character of concrete. (NYT 11 22 1903, p. 25)

First, of course, the reservoir had to be removed. Draining it was accomplished in 1897 by connecting it to the sewer system, after stopping the incoming flow. In November 1900, a water main ruptured under Forty-second Street and poured millions of gallons back into the reservoir. Once that was drained, the reservoir removal and preparatory work proceeded. A member of a demolition crew, Paul Micci, fell to his death in an uncovered well, a tragedy that illustrated the state of labor relations at the time. When asked if he accepted any responsibility for the accident, the contractor, Eugene Lentilhon, replied, “Of course not. It was just an accident, and nobody to blame. Anyway, it’s the first ‘stiff’ we’ve had on this job.” (NYT 5 2 1900, p. 7; the name was initially given as Lenihan). Aroused by the disparity between management profits and workers’ salaries, and by the workmen’s long hours and poor working conditions, organized labor struck the building industry-- and others— several times during this decade.

(The New York Times had many articles about striking workers; its editorial policy favored management. An article listed wages of nearly everyone in the building trades, e.g. sheet-metal workers and plasterers $4 per day, marble worker and steamfitter helpers $2.50-2.75 per day, bricklayers 60 cents per hour, journeymen stonecutters $4 to $5 per day. NYT 4 8 1903, p.1. A two-month-long strike for higher wages than those began in May 1903; 1 5 1903, p.18. But some construction work was done for the George Fuller construction company, even during the strike, as at the Lyric Theater (NYT 7 5 1903, p. 21). On the condition of water mains: NYT 6 29, 1900, p. 6., and “F.Y. I” NYT 9 15 2013, p. WE2., and C. Gray, “Streetscapes:The Library’s Extremely Useful Predecessor,” NYT 1 23 2011, p. RE6. For the preparations, see also Garrison, John Shaw Billings, chapter 7, esp. pp. 296-303, 308-309.)

Nevertheless, preparatory work proceeded briskly enough for the library trustees to sponsor a design competition, judged in 1897. Ernest Flagg had devised an expansive classicizing proposal for an enhanced Tilden Library in 1892, in consultation with John Bigelow (John Bigelow, “The Tilden Trust Library What Shall It Be?” Scribner’s Magazine, Sept. 12, 1892, pp. 287-300; Bacon, Ernest Flagg, pp. 67-69) but Flagg was not one of the final competitors for the building design. John M. Carrere and Thomas Hastings won the architectural competition and built a mockup of one bay of the exterior on the site in 1902. (Architectural Record. 12, Nov. 1902, pp. 637-640) Their plan encased a T within a rectangle, following Dr. Billings’ lead.

(Fig. 15, New York Public Library, third floor plan. Photo: Library of Congress service-pnp-ppmscap15500-15565r.jpg. Public domain.)

On the third floor, the leg of the T leads through a catalogue and information room to the crossbar of the T, a vast and impressive reading room that rests on the stacks below.

(Fig. 16. Main reading room, looking north. Delivery desk and elevator behind the wooden screen in the center. Photo Library of Congress service pnp-ppmsca 15400-15428r.jpg. Public domain)

The room stretches for 297 feet north and south of the delivery desk at the top of the elevator; the space is 78 feet wide. Specialist reading rooms open at each end. When readers look up, they see at the center of the ceiling a view of the sky by James Wall Finn, completed in 1911, restored in 2016. Seven layers of stacks below it are fitted into the vertical space by having low ceiling heights. Long windows on the west bring daylight to the stacks and as seen from Bryant Park, form vertical stripes below the reading room’s arched windows-- a literal reading of the idea that form follows function.

(Fig. 17. Back of Public Library, seen from Bryant Park c. 1913-20. Photo: Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress LC—DIG-det-24565, LC-D4-73002 [P&P] Public domain.)

The books were catalogued according to the method common to both the Astor and Lenox libraries---in groups such as History, Philosophy, and Literature--and were packed so efficiently that they could be installed immediately in the proper positions at the new building. (NYT 7 21 1907, p. 12; see also Landmarks Preservation Commission Report August 8, 2017, Designation List 497 LP-2592 with historic and current photographs) On the Forty-second Street side, a large glass-roofed room within the north light court served the public as a borrowers’ room, one that became so popular that books had to be stored in nooks and crannies as well as on visible shelves. The Free Circulating Library had a million books on offer when it opened.

(Fig. 18. New York Public Library borrowers’ room, now the Bartos Forum. Photo: Detroit Publishing Company, ca. 1913-20. Library of Congress det,4a24342 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/det.4a24342 LC-DIG-det-4a24342. Public domain.)

A sense of excitement about the Library is given by an illustrated article in the New York Times, in which the headline used the words “grandeur” and “wonderful interior,” about the building yet to be opened (NYT 9 5 1909, p. SM5. For an efficient account of the facilities, see Garrison, John Shaw Billings, pp. 320-324).

Around the T on the third floor and below it, corridors often used for art displays lead north and south to special collections rooms, librarians’ offices, and a trustees’ room. Two large open courts flanking the leg of the T lit additional offices facing the court, although changes have been made to that arrangement.

The façade on Fifth Avenue is set back from the street line, on a podium that removes the building from bustling Fifth Avenue. The portals open to a grand reception hall. The façade is divided into the five sections common in Beaux-Arts designs---a central entrance, long wings, and culminating features under pediments at each end. Windows at the base indicate a lower level of rooms; a subsidiary doorway on the north side gives easy access to the original ground floor lending room, now a lecture and event locale. On Fifth Avenue, windows that light major reading rooms are arched on the entrance level and rectangular above where special collections rooms are found. Each bay is separated by Corinthian half-columns that rise to a substantial cornice; full columns stand beneath the pediments at each end of the composition. The main entrance at the top of the podium’s steps has three grand arches separated by paired columns, with single columns beside the outer doorways. The columns support an entablature interrupted by single and paired figures that draw the eye up to a terminating pediment. Between the figures, inscriptions record the three founding donors. Flanking the entrance, niches with fountains below them contain sculpture by Frederick MacMonnies executed by a prolific artisan, John Donnelly. They represent Truth as an old man, and Beauty as a Bernini-inspired nude woman. Three imposing pedimented doorways have bronze portals. Above them, windows light the grand welcoming hall, from which one easily sees the stairs that lead to the catalogue room and to second and third floor reading rooms. Urns, potentially for plants, stand at either end of the podium. They show various symbolic images carved by John Donnelly to the design of Carrere and Hastings, but the public is most drawn to the Tennessee marble sculptures of lions, created by Edward Clark Potter and executed by the Piccirilli brothers, expert marble carvers.

(Fig. 19, Lion, Edward Clark Potter, designer, Piccirilli brothers, executants. 1911. Photo: Carol Highsmith, Library of Congress https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/highsm.07422 LC-DIG-highsm-07422. Public domain)

Given various names over the years, the lions have been known as Patience and Fortitude since Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia cited these virtues as essential to surviving the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Second World War.

A few days before books were moved into the new building, Thomas Hastings, the architect, mourned the death of his father, a pastor of the same name, who had led the West Presbyterian church across Forty-second Street for eighteen years some decades earlier. It was not the only irony tied to this event: The vestry had just begun discussions about selling the church. While it retained a strong membership, it had lost some of the immensely rich members that it had in the early 1890s because the minister’s sermons increasingly criticized plutocracy.

(See also pp 349-398 in Harry Miller Lydenberg, History of the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation. New York, New York Public Library, 1923 pp. 349-398. For images especially, and preservation reports to ca. 2001: The New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, New York City: The Central Building and Site. Part III Documentation, prepared by Bresnan Architects, PC, ca. 2001. Restoration and conservation reports by Wiss Janney Elstner, Inc.; Scott Sherman, Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library, Brooklyn (NY), Melville House, 2015; Phyllis Dain, The NYPL: A Hist of its Founding and Early Years, 1966, thesis Columbia University. 1966 or in book form with the same title, New York, New York Public Library,1972; A.C. David (Herbert Croly), “The New York Public Library,” Architectural Record 28, Sept. 1910, pp. 144-172, with the quote on p. 144; Hewitt, Lemos, Morrison, Warren, Carrere & Hastings, Architects, vol. 1, pp. 280-323. Laurie Ossman and Heather Ewing, Carrere and Hastings: The Masterworks. New York, Rizzoli, 2011, pp. 108-127, R.A.M. Stern et al., New York 1900, pp. 91-97, longitudinal drawing on p. 96, plan drawing on p. 96; Paul Andrija Ranogajec, Apotheosis of the Public Realm: Civic Classicism in New York City’s Architecture, dissertation. City University of New York, 2014 pp. 265-279 focusing on urbanistic matters. Henry Hope Reed, The New York Public Library, Its Architecture and Decoration, New York, W. W. Norton, 1986; a centenary edition was edited by Francis Morrone. For a north-to-south section through the library, see NYT 5 14 1911, p. SM3. For the church, see NYT 3 13 1911, pp. 3; 4 16;. I.N. Phelps Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909, New York, Robert H. Dodd, 1915, vol. 3 p. 886 and addendum image A pl. 30

The library and the Terminal kept a low profile, but that was not true of several new buildings along Forty-second Street in the first decade of the century and later. The Times tower was the first tall building erected on the street, designed by Cyrus L.W. Eidlitz, partner of engineer Andrew McKenzie; they used the expertise of the George A. Fuller construction company.

(Fig. 20. New York Times Building. Eidlitz & McKenzie, 1903, Photo: by George P. Hall, The New York Historical ORI2q4 b 98 f 68 002-01, Public domain.)

The slender building on its riveted steel frame rose in several stages of uneven height, culminating in a tower that looked too heavy for the building beneath it. The ensemble was conspicuous not for beauty despite the Times’ many articles praising its design and engineering, but for its position at the apex of a triangle formed by Broadway as it intersected with Seventh Avenue, having its base on Forty-second Street. Only a project that wanted to capture attention would have been built on that difficult site, with the subway running between ten and twenty-two feet under it. To assure resistance against wind, the external masonry was two feet thick, and triangular steel plates at the ends of each beam reinforce the juncture of beams and columns on the outer walls. The 358-foot height above the sidewalk made it possible to send searchlights indicating the results of the 1904 elections; the lights were visible north of the Bronx and in New Jersey.

(For the relationship of the subway to the building, see supplement to the NYT 1 1 1905; Randall Gabrielan, Times Square and 42nd Street in Vintage Postcards, New York, Arcadia, 2000; for the building: NYT 8 7 1902. p. 8; 8 8 1902. p. 8; 8. 11 1902, p. 6; 8 13 1902, p. 8); Montgomery Schuyler “The Evolution of a Skyscraper” Architectural Record 14 #5 1903, pp. 329-343 explaining the design process; see also NYT 6 27 1903, p..7; 11 22 1903, p. 25; for searchlights, NYT 11 6 1904, p. 3).

Inside, the publication office was on the ground floor, the presses in a fifty-five-foot-deep basement under the subway, and offices for the Times from the thirteenth floor to the top; floors 1-12 were for rent by other businesses. Those parts of the basement and ground floor not needed for the newspaper’s own purposes were rented to an elaborate barber shop and a drugstore with a large soda fountain which claimed to have dispensed one million glasses of soda water each year (NYT 7 15 1909, p. 2). The north end was advertised for rent in 1906. The Flatiron Building on a comparable site at Twenty-third Street and Broadway had gained publicity for its distinctive shape, and evidently Adolph Ochs imagined similar fame for his own taller headquarters. He said that the newspaper had moved from Park Row because it could not obtain space there for new printing presses; his canny understanding of the future of midtown and its real estate was surely another motive. (NYT 1 1 1905, p. BS31).

But the fame of the Times tower came about for another reason. To replace a show of fireworks on previous New Year’s Eves, on December 31, 1907, the first descending lights at midnight delighted the public, as various forms of light have done since then. The firm of Artkraft Strauss first designed an iron ball five feet in diameter with a hundred small light bulbs on it and then made technical and aesthetic changes over the years. The ball was an obvious improvement over the celebrations of 1905 to 1907 when dynamite bombs were dropped from the tower. (NYT 1 1 2016, p. C26) The dropping ball established an enduring tradition, although within a few years, the Times itself relocated its operations to other buildings nearby and in various years, new owners changed the type of ball.

The Times tower starts the “Great White Way” running north in the bowtie of streets formed by the crossing of Broadway; the name is said to have been given by a newspaper reporter in 1902 named Shep Friedman. (https://www.newspapers.com/article/fort-worth-star-telegram-shep-friedman/55765649/ accessed 12 12 2024)

Other tall buildings--large hotels-- arose in consequence of the subway and the eruption of theaters around Times Square where the entertainment industry quickly recognized the ease by which patrons could be brought to the theaters. There had been a few large hotels on the street ---the Manhattan, the Rossmore, the Knickerbocker, the Grand Union as it added adjacent buildings---but not as large as the new ones of this decade. As the area quickly became a theatrical hub accessible by subway, the crosstown trolley, and elevated lines, hotels with restaurants found it profitable to build nearby.

One consequence of hotel building was that men---and newly, single women traveling alone--who were intent on suicide could disappear into these anonymous rooms to drink carbolic acid, inhale gas from the fixtures, or shoot themselves. In the first three years of the new century, the New York, the Rossmore, Sig Cohen’s, Park View, and Grand Union hotels were among the locations on or just off Forty-second Street where suicides were reported in the Times. If they occurred later in more elegant hotels, the management squelched the reports, if possible. The Park View itself was the victim of crime; it closed in June 1905 when the manager charged the hotel corporation president’s wife with larceny. (NYT 6 4 1905, p. 2)

On the east side, the Hotel Belmont opened in 1906 at 120 Park Avenue where the subway turned west onto Forty-second Street. The site stretched to Forty-first Street along the length of Park Avenue. The former site of a blacksmith’s shop and then of the two-story taxpayer with Frederick Schoonmaker’s pharmacy was torn down in 1902 as investors planned the hotel. As the hotel faced Grand Central Terminal, it was obviously meant as a destination for visitors who used that facility’s trains.

The IRT’s parent company, the Subway Realty Company, had purchased the land for subway building. Since August Belmont Jr. was the chief investor in the subway, the hotel’s name was almost self-evident, although at first it was to be called the Terminus, a name of many French hotels near railway stations. Construction began in 1903. It was complicated to build for several reasons. First, the bedrock had to blasted away to accommodate the subway, and the void thus created also resulted in five basement levels for the hotel. Second, the hotel’s structural steel columns had to be separated from supports for the subway. And since there could be no solid foundation below the hotel, owing to the presence of the trains, the brick-clad steel columns had to be massive enough to hold up three hundred feet of above-ground building that included twenty-three stories and an overhanging cornice. The Architectural Record in 1902 made much of the Belmont’s five underground levels and the refrigeration plant in the cellar, the special furnace for garbage, and dumbwaiter installations. (William Hutchins, “New York Hotels. II. The Modern Hotel,” Architectural Record, 12 Nov. 1902, pp. 624, 626-627) The Belmont--and later, the Knickerbocker Hotel farther west--benefited from locations near a faulty city water main that supplied in the latter case twenty thousand gallons of free water each day. (NYT 4 4 1906, p. 6.)

(Fig. 21. Hotel Belmont. Warren & Wetmore. 1906. Photo: George P. Hall, The New York Historical.. Public domain.)

August Belmont engaged Warren and Wetmore as architects. They could be expected to design a building in harmony with the terminal building, but a hotel is not a terminal or civic monument. It had to make a profit and watch expenses, so most of the Belmont’s twenty-one above-ground stories were covered only in red Harvard brick. The granite basement and limestone two-story base with elaborately pedimented windows and some paler brick set off the main shaft from the base and top floors. Here and there, with no apparent rationale, balconies appeared high up on the exterior wall. There were 750 rooms inside and a roof garden that was invisible from the street behind the projecting cornice. William Hutchins, writing in the Architectural Record in 1902, pointed out that hotels had to be as large as possible in order to turn a profit. (Ibid., p. 621)

Inside, the Forty-second Street lobby had two stories, the upper one a gallery on three sides of the lower floor-- a design that many other hotels also used for at least a generation. The gallery provided a lounge area and gave a spacious aspect to the enclosed center of a high-rise building. Useful rooms opened from the gallery. The rectilinear forms included heavy piers covered in Caen stone decorated with bulky atlantes at balcony level where they were unnecessary either for structural help or decoration. The Park Avenue side, the women’s main entrance, had a grand two-story staircase, electric elevators, and a facing of aggressively veined red marble on the area’s walls, supports, and floor. The elevator is likely to have been a recently invented gearless traction type, introduced by the Otis company in 1903. (https://skyscraper.org/hoh/?skip2=4-05 accessed 3 12 2019)

A frescoed and carpeted restaurant with a gallery at the second level opened from this lobby. Near it was the palm room, recalling the entrance axis arches and columns that Michelangelo used at S. Maria degli Angeli in Rome but with clumsier forms and an oval vault. The attempt at grandeur was surprising, as a palm room was meant for refreshments or newly popular thé-dansants. This one was given informally arranged lightweight tables and chairs provided by the eminent furniture merchants W & J. Sloane.

(Fig. 22. Hotel Belmont, Palm room. Photo Architectural Record, July 1906. Public domain.)

(Hood, 722 Miles, the Building of the Subways, pp. 71-74 for August Belmont. Walker & Pennoyer, Warren & Wetmore, pp. 119-122; Hutchins, op. cit.; H W Frohne, “The Hotel Belmont. Warren & Wetmore, Architects,” Architectural Record 20 #1, July 1906, pp. 63-69; George E. Walsh, “Hotel Belmont without Insurance. An Investment of Eight Million Dollars Considered Safe,” Fireproof Magazine 9 #1, July 1906. http://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-lost-hotel-belmont-120-park-avenue.html accessed 7 19 2019. August Belmont & Co. was the New York agency for the Rothschild financiers. For tunnels built to the hotels and office buildings from the Terminal, see most recently https://untappedcities.com/2021/08/30/secret-tunnels-grand-central-terminal/?displayall=true accessed 8 30 2021. Sarah Bradford Landau and Carl Condit, Rise of the New York Skyscraper, New Haven, Yale U Press, 1996, pp 340-341 and further bibliography, p. 439 note 73)

More enduring is the Knickerbocker Hotel, which replaced the St. Cloud and did away with the shanties just to its south (NYT 4 5 1900, p. 12). The new building was initiated in 1901 by J.E. and A. L. Pennock, developers from Philadelphia, who went bankrupt in 1904 after commissioning Bruce Price and his associates Marvin & Davis to design it in 1902 John Jacob Astor IV, who owned the land, had stipulated that any new hotel on the site would have to cost at least $2 million to assure its distinction. When Astor took over the building, he arranged for the services of an experienced hotel manager, James B. Regan who had initially worked with the Pennocks and then at the Pabst, and gave the interior design to Trowbridge & Livingston, who had worked for him elsewhere; these architects also added a two-story portico to the Forty-second Street side. Their promise was an American hotel for Americans, a Fifth Avenue house at Broadway prices. (NYT 10 21 1906, p. 12; 10 24 1906, p. 9; 9 14 1908, p. 9).

(Fig. 23, Hotel Knickerbocker. Marvin & Davis, with Bruce Price. 1906. Photo: The New York Historical, Hassler Collection. Public domain.)

The hotel proved to be an immediate success, partly due to its convenient location and basement connection to the subway junction, and partly for its exuberance outside and inside. A particularly exuberant feature at the hotel was its enormous grayish-white marble-sheathed rathskeller, accessible directly from the subway; the connecting door, now locked, survives at subway level. On the same lower floor were an enormous barber shop, a shoeshine area, lavatories, kitchens, and storage. Below that were provisions for cooking and ventilating with dynamos and refrigeration and other machinery. There was an immense wine cellar, too, given the emphasis on alcohol at the hotel. Like the Belmont’s, the Knickerbocker’s exterior featured stone and brick, but in a far more elaborate style known then as French Renaissance, but really Beaux-Arts baroque. Twelve floors of windows culminated in copper-clad mansards at the top. Stretching 185.6 feet east from Broadway and 102.6 feet on Broadway, the Knickerbocker dominated an area then filled almost entirely with four- and five-story row houses and tenements with ground floor shops. The Bromley map of 1908 records the Bernard Building at the south corner of Seventh Avenue, and the Walter and Swayne Buildings, the latter perhaps the law offices of Union Army Colonel Wager Swayne, who practiced in New York after 1881, but these structures, among the row houses or lost to history, were not visual competition for the Knickerbocker. Its only rival was the nearby Times Building before the Bush Building was erected in the next decade.

While the hotel’s exterior continues to be an accent along Forty-second Street despite the banal remodeling of the lowest floors, the interior has been entirely altered, first by architect Charles Platt for offices after 1920, and for other purposes as well, including garment showrooms after 1980. The original interiors were far from the pale and purified ones heralded by Mr. Regan. He had given an interview on his return from a trip to Europe, claiming that the hotel would be refreshingly simple inside, with austere white marble floors for an “open feeling” and American-made furniture “of the highest order” rather than the “European junk” found in other hotels. The Architectural Record in 1902, however, promised a ladies’ lounge in the “classic East Indian manner with carvings in Teak wood” and other lavish decorations. The main dining room had beamed Renaissance-style ceilings and rugs, if not carpeting, on the floor, silk on the walls, lacquered decorations, and two marble fountains with bronze putti on top, designed by Frederick MacMonnies. One putto was clearly indebted to its Renaissance prototype by Verrocchio.

(For MacMonnies, see E. Adina Gordon, The Sculpture of Frederick William MacMonnies, A Critical Catalogue, Dissertation, New York University, 1998, pp. 458-461, and illustration of the fountain in Herbert Croly, “The Knickerbocker Hotel: A Novelty in Decoration,” Architectural Record. 21 #1, 1907 pp. 1-17; for additional bibliography, see the Landmarks Preservation Commission designation report #210, LP-1556, Oct 18, 1988)

The Flower Room, an adjacent dining room corresponding to the palm rooms elsewhere, had a relief of the nude Aphrodite by John Flanagan, and a large painting by James Wall Finn that imitated a tapestry featuring maidens, lovers, dignitaries, and dogs in a flower-strewn lawn with building fragments in the distance. (Finn later painted the ceiling mural of clouds in the Public Library’s reading room.) A kind of canopy occupied the middle of this marble and Caen stone room. Maxfield Parrish’s thirty-foot-long mural of Old King Cole and his fiddlers three hung over the principal bar until it was removed in the 1920s to the Racquet and Tennis Club and in 1935 to the St. Regis Hotel, which the Astors also owned. There was heavy wood paneling in the barroom, where thick square pillars and ceiling beams, and sturdy wooden furniture created a pub-like atmosphere, emphasized by a reproduced tavern scene by Frans Hals and a copy of Rembrandt’s merry self-portrait with his wife, Saskia. Under the Elizabethan ceiling in the basement grill room, sporting prints and trophies were joined by Frederick Remington’s painting of charging cavalrymen which later found a home at the University of Texas. The thirty-foot-high ballroom on the second floor, 50 x 105 feet with adjacent banquet and private dining rooms, had to be suitably impressive, not puritanically plain as Mr. Regan had promised. An article in Architectural Record emphasized practicalities such as fire exits and ventilation mechanisms.

Bedrooms varied in decoration from simply furnished ones to imitations of Versailles, all supervised by James Wall Finn. There were 556 rooms and 390 bathrooms. Some rooms could be joined into suites with a single bathroom, since not every traveler at the time demanded private plumbing. Each floor had a pantry served by a dumbwaiter for room service, and an office with clerks to satisfy requests. In 1903, the Otis company had invented gearless traction elevators, using a counterweight to the elevator itself, but the type of elevator used at the Knickerbocker is not certain. The hotel’s six passenger elevators and other mechanical equipment, much of it duplicated, prevented cessation of services during breakdowns. Ventilation, especially of the basement, received necessary attention. The manager did some redecoration in 1908, evicting a cigar store to enlarge the grillroom; the tobacconist moved to the Metropole across the street. (NYT 7 15 1909, p 2. This was done in conjunction with street and sidewalk modifications). Enjoyable as the Knickerbocker’s interiors were in setting people up for varied pleasurable experiences, it is hard now to understand the praise lavished on the ensemble by the Architectural Record, but perhaps that compensated for the magazine’s criticism of comparable excess at the Belmont.

(William Hutchins, as in a note above. Architectural Record 12, Nov. 1902, p. 630-632, rendering on p. 631, gives a complete account of the interiors as of that date. The scheme then envisioned was not entirely realized.)

The Knickerbocker bar was so popular that it earned the nickname of the 42^nd Street Country Club. Like many other hotels and restaurants, it was done in by Prohibition, enacted in 1919. But perhaps Prohibition’s most extraordinary or at least its most extravagant victim was Murray’s Roman Gardens, farther west at 228-234 West Forty-second Street. Why Roman? Because the ancient empire was rich, famous, dynamic, and imperial. After all, the United States had acquired its own empire after the Spanish-American War of 1898 and many Americans liked to think of their country as a late successor to the ancient one. And what about gardens? There weren’t any. Murray’s replaced the Percival bachelor apartments from 1908 until the Roman Gardens’ own demise in 1923 when even its thirty-foot circular revolving dance floor and saucy revues couldn’t save it from the effects of Prohibition.

Murray’s was a ‘lobster palace,’ a place of excess in food, drink, and décor. The other prominent one--less lavish because it would have been hard to be more lavish--was Shanley’s on Broadway near Forty-second, that was bankrupt by the end of 1904. Murray’s was also a bachelor hotel, less respectable than its predecessor, the Percival, seems to have been. Rumors flew about the activities upstairs, the after-dinner destination of young women and their older male escorts. The Tudor-inspired rooms upstairs seem to have preserved the decoration known from the Percival, as did a statue mounted outside of that noble Arthurian knight. The restaurant below was entirely different in appearance and clientele from sober restaurants catering to the social elite, such as Delmonico’s or Louis Sherry’s, both at Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street. By contrast, Murray’s was a place where people went for a merry outing after theater---a musical more likely than a serious drama.

(Fig. 24. Murray’s Roman Gardens, Henry L. Erkins, from Charles Bevington, New York Plaisance, Number One.,1908. Public domain Part of the so-called Cleopatra’s barge may be at the far right edge.)

The extravagant setting was directed by Henry L. Erkins, an architect otherwise little known, who was one of four investors in the venture along with John L. Murray. Money from the American Tobacco Company, owned by James B. Duke among others, backed this venture since the increase in theaters and restaurants brought plenty of smokers to the area. Erkins was apparently inspired by plaster casts of ancient objects and by the novel The Last Days of Pompeii by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. (Elizabeth.Macaulay-Lewis, “Dining Like Nero,” Classical Outlook 93 #1 2018 pp13-20, p. 14) Erkins whitewashed the base of the building and adorned it at the entrance with graceless Ionic pilasters that were meant to evoke the portal of Hôtel de Rohan in Paris. They didn’t, and no one cared. There were accompanying vine festoons in plaster, and plants in pots.

Inside, the foyer had at its center a huge glass globe hanging above a table. The main dining room, an indoor court surrounded by balconies, had a pièce de résistance: an immense barge, supposedly reproducing Cleopatra’s. The room also had a thirty-foot-high marble fountain under a round temple that Stanford White had designed for the Chicago fair of 1893. In much of the interior, there were mirrors to confuse guests about what in the interior was actual. Here and there were fruit swags, lion heads, a frieze with figures and horses faintly evocative of ancient Greek models, a variety of light fixtures from the merely useful to faceted balls in colored glass, caryatids at the balcony level, and, after 1915, the slowly revolving dance floor. The management covered the dining room with a ceiling painted to look like sky, containing tiny lights to represent stars. A simulation of clouds passed over this would-be rival to Nero’s Golden House. Various rooms featured herms and masks and replicas of the barely clothed nymphs that Jean Goujon designed for a Renaissance fountain in Paris. Statues imitated Hellenistic ones known in Roman copies—the Medici Venus, Sleeping Ariadne---that were better known to the general public then than now, but perhaps not to the chorus girls who were treated to dinner. In other rooms, Greek, Egyptian, and—surprisingly-- Libyan antiquity was evoked by decoration and murals. A Gothic room represented the European middle ages. Farther upstairs, one could dine privately in a version of Beijing’s Chinese imperial palace and its gardens. There were also Old Dominion and Rose Rooms. One need hardly say that nudes featured prominently in the imagery almost everywhere, and that Murray’s advertised in publications addressed to men who could afford to dine there.

(https://archive.org/details/newyorkplaisance01unse accessed 1 28 2017 = Charles R. Bevington, New York Plaisance: Number One-MCCCCVII. An Illustrated Series of New York Places of Amusement, New York, H. Erkins, 1908, pp.30 -128; H. Erkins, “Murray’s Roman Gardens,” Architects and Builders Magazine 39 #12 (also old series vol. 39), pp. 574-79; Cindy Lobel, “’Out to Eat’: The Emergence and Evolution of the Restaurant in Nineteenth-Century New York City,” Winterthur Portfolio 44 # 2/3, 2010, pp. 193-220; Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis as above. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York, New York, Monacelli Press, 1978, pp. 101-104. Advertisement in Seventh Regiment Gazette, 32, Oct. 1917-Sept. 1918, 32 #2 p. 122). The statue of Percival lasted at least until 1954 when Angelo Rizzuto photographed it; the image is at the Library of Congress.)

A more genteel atmosphere prevailed farther east, where from 1900 onward a Childs restaurant at 47 East offered normal-sized portions rather than Murray’s huge ones, and later also at 1 East with its kitchen at the back of 3 East. A photograph taken in 1906, thought to be of number 47 East, shows a construction with thin metal columns holding visible ceiling beams, a long wall of arched windows

(Fig. 25. Byron Company, Childs restaurant, 1906. probably 47 East 42^nd Street. Photo: Museum of the City of New York ,93.1.1.10703. Public domain.)

with abundant glass, long wooden tables seating ten, a wooden floor, and bentwood chairs that had no drip-collecting upholstery. The lighting fixtures looked like oversized incandescent bulbs.

This was part of a restaurant chain that flourished in the northeastern United States from 1889 until about 1960; William, one of the Childs brothers, and his nephews later built a restaurant called Old London, decorated in a pseudo-historical style, at 130 West in 1931. At the older buildings, the décor implied cleanliness and purity. After the early version with iron and glass, walls and floors were often made of white tile. Long tables seating ten--not individual ones seating four--had marble tops. The hard surfaces discouraged leisurely dining. Hanging fans circulated the air. The chain employed waitresses, which was unusual at the time, but women could be paid less than men. To emphasize pristine cleanliness, the servers wore starched white uniforms. Apart from the waitresses, the impression given was that of a French café or brasserie, with amenities reduced to a pleasant minimum. Childs’ design was well suited to its goal of feeding business employees, preferably in at least two shifts at lunchtime. A location in a busy neighborhood may not have needed to entice diners by having a cook produce flapjacks in the front window, but this attraction was found in other branches, and perhaps on Forty-second Street at some point.

Restaurants, whether for the elite or for people just rich enough for a merry trip to town, would not have flourished as much as they did in the area had it not been for the theaters. The star of them all, now restored, was the New Amsterdam Theatre at 214 West, It opened on October 26, 1903, near mostly monotonous brick buildings that would soon be replaced by other theaters. One exception to the prevailing monotony was a three-story commercial building on one side with exceptionally large windows on its two upper floors; it housed a dentistry college and the office of an entertainment company. On the theater’s east side, the brick commercial building had stone embellishment at the third level and perhaps originally more below; large iron-framed glass windows appeared by the early 1900s on the lowest two levels, here as on many new and remodeled buildings. It had been built a few feet beyond the legal limit. a matter that its owners, theater proprietors Marc Alonzo Klaw and Abraham Lincoln Erlanger, tried to cover up before the city aldermen acquiesced.

The New Amsterdam’s narrow entrance façade was covered in limestone and terra cotta, with yellow marble columns bearing bronze capitals designed by Enid Yandell. There was much more, including heavy allegorical sculpture atop a large arch, the work of George Grey Barnard. Above that, windows of various sizes lit offices. The top, at 190 feet high, had a crowning metal roof with a central framed panel. But this was only the entrance; most of the building was on the south portion of its lot where land was cheaper.

(Fig. 26. New Amsterdam Theatre entrance. 1903 Photo: George P. Hall & Sons, The New York Historical, Public domain..

The path to the auditorium made the experience of entering the building all the more entertaining. One walked through the access corridor, its walls heavily molded and lit by elaborate ceiling fixtures of no identifiable style but perhaps evoking something Asian. Hinton Perry designed a frieze of scenes from Shakespeare and Wagner for the upper walls, with bouquets in bronze-toned relief below them. Beyond lay New York City’s major experiment in art nouveau. First came the foyer with broad arches containing historical scenes in relief by Perry and a dome with stained glass representing the “Song of the Flowers;” floral motifs, particularly tea roses, pervaded many parts of the theater. A relief by Hugh Tallant represented Progress. Elevators ascended to a roof garden with a theater and to the upstairs offices, but also several staircases had elaborate railings featuring herms, hooded women, and tightly packed plant and vine forms reflecting inspiration from the Arts and Crafts movement. Carvers and ceramicists inserted an occasional monkey and the bearded head of Bacchus. A grand promenade gave access to the orchestra level. Auxiliary spaces featured paintings of ancient drama from Assyria to Rome. Between the men’s and women’s lounges, in the elliptical men’s smoking room, twelve pillars supported entwined moldings below a ceiling showing winged spirits whose poses derived in part from those of Adam at the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo’s early Pietà. One room evoked a baronial hall in England, using darker surfaces, arched walls, and ceiling ribs. Chair backs in various rooms had intersecting lines in the art nouveau taste but the arms and curved legs recalled rococo models; at least one scornful critic accurately connected these styles. It would take much more space to describe the building completely.

(Fig. 27 New Amsterdam Theatre boxes. The New York Historical, Geo. P. Hall & Son photo collection. 15 6093 Service File. PRO24_b_18_f_164_004-01. Public domain.)

There were 1702 seats (or 1537, depending on the source). Orchestra patrons were within ninety feet of the stage, and all views were unobstructed because the two balconies were cantilevered and suspended rather than supported by pillars. The upper one was unusually steep. Steel skeleton construction made some of this possible. Tallant’s knowledge of acoustics provided audible sound everywhere. Filtered fresh air entered through wall ducts and floor grilles. Plaster flower-encrusted boxes stepped up the sides-- in two layers near the stage, with the upper entrances topped by a near riot of flat decorative forms. Each box was named for a flower and had plaster ornament by St. John Issing, modeled by Fritz and Max Newmark. Hardly a surface was bare, the abundance somewhat tempered by the pale color scheme of mother of pearl, violet, and green that critic A. C. David (Herbert Croly) found insufficiently cheerful for a theater. (“The New Theatres of New York,” Architectural Record 15 #3, 1905, pp. 39-54, especially p. 50, illus. on p. 55). The ceiling panels were painted, too. An airy figurative mural by Robert Blum and Albert Beck Wenzel surmounted the proscenium arch, which was 40 feet wide and 36 high, embellished with green peacocks in terra cotta relief. The mural was an even wider 45 x 18 feet making room for allegorical figures of drama including Poetry, Truth, Love, Melancholy, Death, Chivalry, and Romance, with flanking murals of Virtue and Courage. The stage measured 100 x 60 feet and was one hundred feet from floor to the rigging loft. Plateau elevators facilitated rapid scene changes, allowing the stage to sink thirty-three feet and reappear soon afterward with new décor. (For images of the theater as restored, see Chap. 13, Figs. 6 and 7)

Even more fantasies might have been satisfied on the roof. There, a metal-framed theater seated 499 patrons who were more comfortable in summer than they would have been indoors where air cooling had not yet been introduced. A lobby with blue and gold plasterwork decoration, and several lounges preceded the auditorium. Whiplash curves and other art nouveau characteristics abounded. A garden terrace extended from this structure, including plants, trees, and small tables. Irving Berlin’s first musical was staged there. His “Watch Your Step” featured the then-famous dancers Vernon and Irene Castle who made ballroom dancing popular, resulting in Murray’s revolving dance floor and changes to the New Amsterdam’s roof.

Indoor and roof productions had to be given at different times, often to different audiences. The roof could be used for naughtier shows as well as private performances and dinner theater productions. From 1913 to 1927, the theatrical entrepreneur Florenz Ziegfeld masterminded the activities there as he did in the main theater below where, after 1915, he presented his famous “Follies”.

In 1915, Ziegfeld hired designer Joseph Urban to transform the theater into a night club. This had a moveable stage, glass balconies and a runway for chorus girls, colored lighting, and telephones allowing guests to call each other from dining tables. The club’s Midnight Frolic shows became well known. Guest performers included the comedians Fanny Brice and Will Rogers, but Ziegfeld had his own staff including “a brilliant Negro orchestrator named Will Vodery whose scoring reflected the influence of Ravel and Debussy.” (Tom Prideaux, American Heritage Special publication on New York, NY, 1968, n.p.) The space, however, was soon outdone by that of the roof garden of the American theater, by 1909 enlarged by two floors and renamed the American Music Hall at 260 West and Eighth Avenue. Its new garden was built over three separate roofs connected by iron bridges, and featured a woodland made of fireproof cement trees covered with real birch bark. (NYT 7 20 1909, p 7; for theater roof gardens in general, see Stephen Burge Johnson, The Roof Gardens of Broadway Theatres., 1883-1942, Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press, 1985.)

The New Amsterdam’s architects, Herts & Tallant, had both been young students at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the 1890s. At that time, art nouveau was the latest exciting style, countering the classicizing mode favored by the school. In the USA, these architects worked for Bruce Price and for Shepley Rutan and Coolidge but set up a partnership in their early thirties. Herts had a gift for business, Tallant for engineering. Their theater reflects their belief that “new constructural [sic] methods and new practical requirements demand a new outward form.” Moreover, a theater, home of fantasies, could allow an innovative style that an office building or the Harmonie Club might not. But at the New Amsterdam, the linear embellishments of the French art nouveau made concessions to academic American taste, especially in the main theater.

(New Amsterdam Theatre, Charles R Bevington, New York Plaisance: Number One-MCCCCVII. An Illustrated Series of New York Places of Amusement, New York, H Erkins, 1908 pp. 5 -29. Mary C Henderson, The New Amsterdam. The Biography of a Broadway Theatre, New York, Hyperion, 1997. Andrew Craig Morrison, The Theaters of 42nd Street (MS at Avery Library, Columbia University); Harry C Lines, “The New Amsterdam Aerial Gardens,” pp. 27-37 in New Amsterdam Theatre Forty-second Street New York City, Alameda CA, Theatre Historical Society Annual, 1975; King’s Views 1905, opposite the cover page for 1911 edition for the number of seats, and 1908 edition p. 78 for exterior view; NYT 11 1 1903, p. 21 Architecture and Building 48, Sept. 1916, pp. 147-149. Landmarks Preservation Commission, October 23, 1979, Designation List 129 LP-1026 New Amsterdam Theater, with earlier references. The architects’ work at the Harmonie was a comprehensive enlargement; see above, chapter 1 fig. 28)

The New Amsterdam was the most exciting---and the most expensive—of the theaters built on Forty-second Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues during this decade. Theatrical entrepreneurs Klaw & Erlanger, again with architects Herts and Tallant, built the Liberty at 236 West in 1903-04, ten doors away from the New Amsterdam. A thousand people could see one of the light comedies for which it was built, having passed through the façade with its large arched window, paired caryatids, an American eagle, and a carved Liberty Bell. It later acquired an immense sign that concealed the arch and clumsy marquee framed in abstract fasce which disappeared during the Second World War because they evoked symbols of our enemies. (Photo at the Landmarks Preservation Commission) It is not possible to pigeonhole the interior style, an original mixture of small-scale forms that produced a faintly exotic effect.

The Lyric, of 1903 at 213 West, designed by Victor Hugo Koehler for composer Reginald DeKoven, had a projecting porch carrying the marquee in front of a three-story arch beneath a cornice. There was little else because its principal entrance was on Forty-third Street but many theaters, like this one, wanted an address on Forty-second. The interior was soberly neoclassical in detail, if allowances are made for impure stylistic traits. Apart from hosting performers who included Sarah Bernhardt and the Marx Brothers, its claim to early fame was a solid steel proscenium arch, fabricated in Brooklyn, that was so large that all traffic stopped on the Brooklyn Bridge when it was brought to Manhattan. (NYT 3 27 1903, p. 9)

Each theater was designed in a different style on the exterior, but nearly all the interiors other than the distinctive New Amsterdam conveyed a generally similar impression with a broad proscenium embellished by plasterwork, walls with more plaster reliefs, perhaps murals, some gilding, and eclectic details. One theater might have more comfortably spaced seats. Another might have a broader stage. Most of them felt somewhat cramped at the entrances and at the rear aisle of the orchestra, because seats were more profitable than circulation space. The details often became confusing rather than impressive.

Several other theaters were built on this block alone by the end of the next decade: the Eltinge (later the Empire) at 230 West in 1912 designed by Thomas Lamb, the Selwyn at 229 West by George Keister or Arthur Brounet that opened in 1918; the Rialto that replaced the Victoria in 1916. The Rialto of 1916 boasted a design by Lamb with an ‘atmospheric’ interior featuring ceiling lights and faraway décor mixing neoclassical with Moorish forms, smoking rooms for men and ‘retiring rooms’ for women but newly, no stage, as it was a cinema (http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/16666). Its manager was Samuel Rothapfel, later famous in entertainment circles as Roxy Rothafel. Then there was the Candler of 1914 at 226 West designed by Lamb and Brounet for the owner of Coca-Cola as an early cinema. The National--later Lew Fields and then Harris after a purchase in 1911--was another enterprise of Hammerstein’s at 254-258 West, on a site 67 x 98 feet, with plans filed by architect Albert Westover in 1904 for an orchestra, two balconies, and boxes. It seated only nine hundred and was cramped but had an ingenious arrangement of water pipes in case of fire although this did not satisfy the building department. Its inadequate fire exits were altered in 1905.

(NYT 8 17 1905, p. 7. The essential publications for theater history are Mary Henderson, The City and the Theatre; New York, Back Stage Books, 2004; idem with Alexis Greene, The Story of 42nd Street, New York, Back Stage Books, 2008; Nicholas van Hoogstraten, Lost Broadway Theaters, rev ed., Princeton, Princeton Architectural Press, 1997, Stern et al. New York 1900, New York, Rizzoli, 1992; The New York Times and other newspapers reported regularly about newly opened theaters, and several are subjects of designation reports by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission),

When theaters rather than congregants surrounded it, St. Luke’s Lutheran church left 233 West and moved to 308 West Forty-third Street, probably having been paid well for its newly desirable lot on what was considered the ‘lucky’ north side of the street. (nycago.org/Organs/NYC html/StLukeLuth.html, accessed 1 12 2020). Owing to the popularity of the new theaters, frontage on the block had risen in value from $1500-2000 to $6000 per foot by 1909. (NYT 3 14 1909, p. SM7)

The rise of theaters, however fashionable, had no effect on the far west end of the street where coal and gas companies remained, joined by the Glad Tidings Mission at 416 West for longshoremen, “the homeless, hungry, and outcast” and scene painting ateliers in old row houses near Eleventh Avenue. In this decade or perhaps an earlier one, tenements at the southeast corner were converted into an annex of the West Shore Hotel. Trolley car sheds facing the river had been present since 1886 but burned down in March 1906. (NYT 3 6 1906, p. 6)

Private improvement on Forty-second Street was apparently independent of the City’s efforts. Of the latter, the most notable was the re-paving of much of the street, first with Belgian blocks that replaced cobblestones, and then with smoother and quieter asphalt. Broadway was given an asphalt surface between Fourteenth and Forty-second Streets in 1900, and Forty-second received at least a promise of asphalt between Park and Seventh Avenues in 1905. Stones had created noise, and the pavement was often pulled up noisily to fix sewers or steam pipes or gas mains that were still owned by individual companies in 1900. An increase in traffic along Forty-second Street, (NYT 1 10 1900, p. 2) and the occupation of part of the road by the street railway, which had just switched to electric motors, led to some street-widening achieved largely in 1910; this caused minor modifications to many building facades. Residents regularly petitioned the city for help in abating construction noise and removing the piles of Belgian blocks that interrupted vehicles and pedestrians beyond Seventh Avenue at the west and Park Avenue at the east. In the absence of traffic lights, the intersection with Fifth Avenue was jammed with people and vehicles. Policemen’s whistles were the preferred remedy, but hardly sufficient. (NYT 8 1 1906, p. 16) Women’s dresses, still long in this decade, were regularly splashed with mud and other filth, including that produced by horses. Any nostalgia for a past golden age should not include nostalgia for the condition of the street in the early twentieth century. (On trolleys, see NYT 3 31 1900, p. 5)

Nevertheless, since many streets farther south were also congested, noisy, and dirty, businesses did not fear moving uptown to a street with profit potential and with affordable building lots. There had been no important financial institutions near Times Square at the start of the decade (NYT 9 22 1907, p. 12) but the Franklin Savings bank had been dealing in mortgages on the west side for almost twenty years when in 1897 it planned something new and more imposing than its initial one-lot building. The initial building had its short side on Eighth Avenue

.

(Fig. 28. Franklin Savings Bank. 1900. York & Sawyer. Photo: Inland Architect, 1901. Public domain.)

The bank hired York & Sawyer to make the building look solid ---that is, not subject to financial or architectural decay. Accordingly, and in keeping with current Roman-influenced taste and Beaux-Arts training, the architects created a granite-faced building with a rusticated façade and sides supporting arches, three on the long side. People entered through bronze doors under the single façade arch; after 1901, the owners placed a bronze bust of Benjamin Franklin on the facade. Heavy exterior ornament of swags, brackets, and a cornice added visual weight to the building. The architectural descriptions did not mention that the bank had encroached thirty inches onto public space and was made to move back. (Dr. Palmer Cole, NYT 4 12 1903, p. 27)

The interior was a single barrel-vaulted banking room with inset ceiling panels and smoother walls of Caen stone. Veined marble denoted the approach to the door of the counting room where large sums were dealt with. Tellers’ stations lined the sides of the main room, and desks for customers occupied the center. In 1926, the building was enlarged beside the entrance, using the same style and continuing the cornice. A mural by N.C. Wyeth, “The Apotheosis of Franklin,” embellished the interior, but it was later removed to the University of Pennsylvania. The enlarged building yielded to a new Franklin bank across the street in 1974 designed by Poor and Swanke, later demolished to make way for a parking lot.

(Inland Architect and News Record, 1901 photo, American Architect and Building News 7 13 1901; NYT 1 19 1898, p. 10 and 8 5 1974, p. 51, http://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-lost-franklin-savings-bank-42nd-st.html accessed 3 12 2019)

Apart from a new two-story Bryant Park Bank near Sixth Avenue (NYT 9 6 1907, p.6), other banks of this decade on Forty-second Street seem to have been in existing buildings, including the United Consumers’ National Bank near the northeast corner of Broadway, with unusual cooperative ownership on a German model. The bank owners altered the lower two floors of the four-story building, adding a four-columned Ionic porch and enlarging the second-floor windows.

(NYT 9 13 1901, p. 6; 10 1 1901, p. 13, United National Bank appears in a The New York Historical photo https://digitalcollections.nyhistory.org/islandora/object/nyhs%3A81573 Next door was a two-story building at the corner with a large billiard parlor above shops, a drugstore, and a saloon.)

Modest office buildings rose farther west until the next decade. First came the Spalding Building of 1890, at 29-33 West, with large second-floor windows that clashed visually with all the other windows. Another was the earlier Harvard Building at the southwest corner of Sixth Avenue, hardly recognizable as an office building at four stories. It was noteworthy only for the enormous advertising signs on top of it. A tenant who manufactured an apparatus that supposedly relieved catarrh and even incipient tuberculosis benefited from the exposure of his signs to riders on the El. More typical was 363 West, a brick and frame dwelling and shop where alterations were proceeding in January of 1900. (NYT 1 10 1900, p. 12)

Only from mid-1909 was there more site assemblage for office buildings east of Sixth Avenue, perhaps anticipating increased rail service to Grand Central from the suburbs where business owners were increasingly likely to live. Land prices had risen noticeably in midtown during a building surge ending in mid-1905, after which a business downturn lasted from 1905 to 1907. The lots at 47-65 West, at the northeast corner of Sixth Avenue, had been transformed into the Bryant Park Arcade building early in the recession. It opened in 1907 with entrances on the street and on the avenue. It had two rows of shops, one with large plate glass display windows facing the street and another extending from the ground floor arcade, although the latter had no success and were eliminated in favor of larger shops in 1913. Above were six more stories that survive under eight additional floors dating to 1932, but later behind a green glass curtain wall façade of 1984 that was altered in the 2020s. Fleischman’s Baths was a long-time tenant. (See Chap. 4 for the bathing establishment)

The building was a spectacular creation for its day, with a top floor meant to be covered by a glass and metal barrel vault intersected by a transept, conceived for Fleischman’s Baths. It looked as if the Grand Palais in Paris had shrunk to crown an office building, although the idea of the glass vault was gone within a few years, perhaps related to its owner’s bankruptcy proceedings from 1909 to 1913. Large wood and metal signs for the baths survived on what was just a flat roof. Above the shops, the next two floors had large arched windows spanning entire bays. Then came a decorative row of swags and medallions before the top stories that had normal-sized paired windows. (NYT 12 31 1909, p. 1)

(Fig. 29. Bryant Park Building incorprating Fleischman’s Baths, as built 1907. William Naugle, architect. Photo: Roege, 1910, The New York Historical , %3A52443. Public domain.)

Fleischman’s interior was furnished with arches, statues, potted plants, and other objects to suggest comfort and opulence. Images of the interior from about 1912 show cloth-covered beds with pillows, where men in shorts sat or lay as attendants poured soap and water on their heads or measured the guests’ spines and doused their shoulders with essential oils. A doctor was on the staff and the facility offered chiropody and ‘vibration treatments’ along with exercise in a swimming pool where a mechanism kept the water constantly moving. More passive activities such as massages, hairdressing, manicuring, and dining proved to be the most popular pleasures.

(Fig. 30. Fleischman’s Baths advertisement in Theatre Magazine, 1910. Public domain.)

The low-ceilinged principal room was seemingly supported by painted women, half-clothed, attended by small painted children to suggest respectable family life rather than bachelor revels. A drawing of the pool room showed women in white shirts and shorts lounging on couches or on the steps to the swimming pool during ladies’ hours, which were held on weekdays up to 4:30 PM while men were usually at work. Broad arches held on two pairs of columns framed the pool, and under the arches were scenic images. Statues of nude women in coy poses stood near the entrance.

That the facility was directed primarily to men is suggested by the artistic decorations and by the men’s club membership that allowed gentlemen to store daytime clothing while they, in evening garb, attended the theater or opera. There was a restaurant on the premises and other amenities. Although Fleischman went bankrupt, his enterprise survived and he later repaid his creditors in full. The baths moved to the diagonally opposite corner in 1925, occupying less extravagant premises in the Hart Building.

(NYT 9 11 1907, p. 4; 2 2 1908, p. 3; 2 7 1908, p. 4; 11 29 1908, p. 16; 12 1 1908, p. 4; 6 5, 1909, p. 2; 6 29 1913, p. XX22; 12 14 1938, p. 25.)

At a more aristocratic level of society, Mrs. Frederick dePeyster gave one of her final entertainments in early February of 1900 at number 7 East. It was a lunch for the Huguenot Society. She then sold her five-story brownstone. Along with its similar neighbor at number 5, the Sniffen family property, 7 East was sold to intermediaries for Joseph Milbank. He commissioned Charles A. Rich to design a ten-story office and shop building, called the Transit Building, constructed by the recently incorporated Andrew J. Robinson Company. Rich designed it alone, having recently ended his prolific partnership with Hugh Lamb.

(NYT 2 2 1900, p.7; 3 29 1900, p.12; 4 20 1900, p.12; 5 5 1900, p.12; see also http://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-lost-transit-building-5-7-east-42nd.html accessed 3 12 2018. Architectural League Yearbook 24, 1909 p. 27; Aspinwall & Owen are also credited with the design in some of these sources.)

(Fig. 31. Transit Building, 1903 5-7 East 42^nd Street. Charles A. Rich, architect. Photo: Architectural Record, January 1903. Public domain.)

The design included a mixture of classicizing and Renaissance forms including a temple front incongruously placed on the third and fourth floors. It is hard to understand how an architect decided to combine a multitude of unrelated ornaments on the façade but the interior satisfied its tenants, some of whom remained there for decades. (NYT 5 3 1902, p. 5; 11 6 1903, p. 10) Several ornamental forms were simplified or removed later when the building became home to the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, which still occupies the site.

(For the Transit Building, see https://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-lost-transit-building-5-7-east-42nd.html#google_vignette. American Architect and Building News, vol. 73, 8 31 1901,.# 1340)

Two narrow houses on either side were converted for office use. Across the street, at 8 East, Henrietta Schwartz spent a quarter-century career as a money broker and notary and also a vendor of hair restorer and postage stamps. The Lincoln National Bank and Safe Deposit Company at 60 East would not deal with her because of eccentricities that included strolling outdoors with a parrot on her shoulder, but the Corn Exchange Bank--which had recently absorbed the Home Bank--- was more tolerant. (NY 6 23 1903, p. 6; 2 18 1904, p.7) Banks on the street were still almost entirely small branches of downtown headquarters.

There were several minor building transactions at this time. Architects Welch, Smith, and Provost located their offices at ll East (NYT 6 17 1903, p. 14) Doctors Andrew H. and Davison H. Smith patiently assembled 18 to 26 East as well as 310 Madison and three small houses near it, later exchanging this site with the Thompson-Starrett construction company for the Algonquin Hotel site on West 44^th Street. (NYT 12 12 1902, p. 14) It was fortunate that the doctors did so, because the property was not developed until a company known as the Johnson syndicate bought the site in 1912. Canny speculators had bought the small lots that held light and easement rights, without which no new large building could be erected, but the Johnson syndicate was prepared to pay the speculators’ extortionate demands. The syndicate envisioned a twenty-story building there. (NYT 3 31 1912, p. XX1; Activities, Oct. 1925, p. 5) At 51 East, Warren and Wetmore built a six-story office building in 1902, expanded in the 1920s. American Express bought the site of Stearns’ silk factory and four four-story lots from 219 to 223 East, intending to erect a six-story utilitarian building that extended to Forty-third Street. (NYT 6 13 1903, p. 14; 6 18 1903, p. 14) The most significant east side land transfer for the future occurred in 1903 when Edward Cooper, Abram S. Hewitt, and Sarah Hewitt were grantors, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art the grantee, of the land under the eventual Chrysler Building. (66 John St. Block 1297, lots 15-17)

New commercial construction coincided with the deteriorating condition of most residential buildings on Forty-second Street. Els and then the subway gave people more choice of places to live uptown or in the outer boroughs, while the population of poor immigrants increased rapidly. Where one family had lived, there were now at least two, and often many more if a private house had been converted to flats. Several doctors still resided or had offices on Forty-second Street, such as Robert M. Fuller who lived in one of the last “old-fashioned five-story dwellings “at 126 West that was to be remodeled in 1909 for shops and studios. (NYT 2 26 1909, p.12; 3 7 1909, p.12) Some older buildings were named in connection with explosions, suicides, fires, and other calamities; among them were L. J. Osborne at 146 West, Dr. Robinson who treated a sick visitor to the city, W.P. Simpson on the west side, A. A. Moloney at 238 West, and James Franklin Dunseith of 354 West whose patient died while under chloroform (NYT 8 9 1906, p. 14 for Dr Dunseith. It is unclear whether all ‘doctors’ were fully trained graduates of medical schools). Diseases related to crowding and poverty, including tuberculosis, diphtheria, measles, and others for which there were then no remedies made it useful for doctors to practice near hundreds of potential patients. The parishioners of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church supported the six-story clinic beside their settlement house, at 205-217 East where there was a dental-medical-prenatal outpatient facility with one or two overnight beds. (NYT 5 18 1902, p. 7; 5 22 1902, p. 3; 2 21 1902, p .6)

The city’s public-school population was about eighty-five percent foreign-born or first-generation native-born, and many parents were illiterate and poor. Children sometimes stayed home for lack of shoes or overcoats. Many were filthy if the parents were too poor to pay for public baths or too ignorant to do so. It was in part for these reasons that public schools were rebuilt and reconfigured. An even better reason was that many were dark, poorly ventilated, seriously overcrowded given the rapid increase in population, and a menace to public health and safety. Supervision of schools changed to make the City rather than wards responsible for school building.

The person largely responsible for an improvement in schools, some of which provided bathing facilities, was Charles B.J. Snyder, an architect trained by classes at Cooper Union and then by work with a carpenter. Because he was also a volunteer fireman, he had more knowledge of materials and spaces prone to fire than the average architect had, and one result of that work was the use of baked clay in floor construction to retard fire. Another was his use of fireproof light-weight steel skeleton framing that permitted the large windows needed to make reading easier. He advocated good lighting, healthy ventilation, efficient use of space, and areas for physical activity as well as study. Others from the 1890s onward also wrote articles and books about public education and influential people read and acted on their recommendations.

(Endnotes to the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission Designation Report for P.S. 109,written in 2018 by Margaret Herman, provide an excellent bibliography of Snyder’s work, esp. notes 12, 15-41; see http://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/2597.pdf)

Snyder, like most architects of his time, favored designs evoking older eras. And like most people of northwest European descent, he looked to models from that region for cultural expression. English Tudor and Jacobean buildings had large windows to bring light into thick-walled houses in the northern latitudes, as did Dutch buildings at various periods. Those countries also used brick for building, when stone was unavailable or costly. Snyder adapted various modes of northern European historical tradition to the exterior of his buildings. If they gave subtle messages about assimilating to Anglophone culture, some people at the time would have said “So much the better.”

But Snyder’s principal achievement was in planning, and he explained the essentials of his thinking in articles for the American Architect and Building News in January and March 1908. His most recognizable innovation was the H plan, with two wings of classrooms flanking a central link that contained the entrance, offices, perhaps an auditorium at the rear, or other common rooms. This allowed for separating boys from girls, older from younger children, or other planning requirements that a principal might initiate, but just as important, it provided spaces for outdoor recreation flanked by classrooms rather than factory walls or someone’s laundry. Both the stylistic and planning improvements were evident in the replacement in 1908 for school 27 on East Forty-second Street. Maps show that by 1910 the old building had disappeared in favor of an H-plan building.

Figs. 32 and 33. P.S. 27 as rebuilt by C.B.J.Snyder 1908. Top photo, Fig. 28: Board of Education lantern slide boe72012. Lower photo, Fig. 29: NYPL 712790f-a. Public domain)

Photographs of Snyder’s now-demolished school show that it was steel-framed and covered in brick with pale stone trimming in his hybrid Anglo-Dutch historicizing style. In the 19-teens it housed the Evening School of Industrial Arts, to help artisans improve their techniques and designs so as to earn more for their labor, and became Central Commercial High School, educating girls for stenographic and other office work. At a time when most immigrant women did not study beyond eighth grade, it offered economic opportunity to the daughters of the poor. For at least two decades, the address at 214 East, part of the school building, also housed a Continuation School, instructing students who had to work rather than attend customary daytime programs. Public meetings were also held there on some evenings.

Pratt, a private school for secretarial studies, established by Mrs. Alma Pratt and headed by Franklin Pratt, opened at 140 West but moved away sometime after 1909. (NYT 12 25 1933, p. 34) Of far greater significance was the founding of the New York Kindergarten Society to promote early childhood education at a time when New York’s school officials were uninterested in this essential starting point. Private philanthropists led by a bereaved father, oil magnate John Archbold, and organized by a kindergarten promoter, Bessie Locke, sponsored several kindergartens in working-class neighborhoods and placed the organization’s headquarters in Hell’s Kitchen at 522 West. The four-story building contained classrooms, offices, a room where mothers picked up their children, and an auditorium. The architect, Walter Cook of the well-known firm of Babb, Cook, and Willard, provided a sturdy red brick façade approached through a pair of pillars, and embellished by handsome geometric fencing and other ironwork decoration. The originally symmetrical design has rectilinear windows on the ground and two upper floors, and a band of lower arched windows on the second level. White stone bands separate the latter floor from the others, and white stone appears at the rectangular windows’ sills.

(Fig. 34. Wurts Bros. New York Kindergarten Society Building, now police station. Photo: Museum of the City of New York, 2010.7.1.9763 Public domain)

It is unnecessary to characterize the building as representing a specific period style. That is to the credit of its architect who gave his attention to the program and the budget. The overall sobriety of the building was no doubt deemed suitable in a neighborhood of repetitive tenements. Now an auxiliary police station, the building is poorly maintained. It lacks its rooftop pergola and its cornice. Many buildings liable to lawsuits removed their aging cornices to avoid having them fall and kill passers-by after a tragic accident occurred in 1979.

(http://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-1907-new-york-kindergarten-assoc-no.html, accessed 3 12 2018. NYT 7 6 1958, p.S11. For Bessie Locke, see https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.0900443 and for John Archbold, see https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.1000044 accessed 3 12 2018)

In most housing, conditions were not yet as appalling as they were on the older Lower East Side, although the level of malnutrition among poor immigrants was likely the same. Criminals from lower Manhattan, notably the Black Hand extortionists, transferred some of their work to Forty-second Street until the late 19-teens. (NYT 4 2 1908, p.3) Saloons and gambling dens sucked up some of the workers’ wages and were more numerous on Forty-second Street near the rivers. Less enduring was a native of India who called himself King Solomon and claimed Biblical ancestry; he wore a crown and wizard’s cloak while practicing as a clairvoyant at 242 West until the police arrested him for fraud. (NYT 6 27 1909, p.C5) These activities and horse-betting parlors known as poolrooms clustered on the west side, where the gambling dens of George Brotherton seem to have been famous.

Betting parlors were present farther east, too, where James Wakely, another well-known saloon keeper, had horse-betting establishments at 776 Sixth Avenue over his saloon and at the rear of the eastern half of Sherman’s Hotel on the north side of Forty-second Street between Park and Third Avenues. Even firemen and city officials gambled there. (Pamphlet: Some Things Richard Croker Has Said and Done,’ New York City Club, July 1901, pp.21-22. NYT 7 20 1901, p. 1; 6 26 1902, p. 5; 12 14 1905, p.20) Respectable-looking ladies placed bets in the more elegant betting parlors, as poor men did in the dives. The former were seldom raided, and some raids by the Parkhurst Society, otherwise known as the Society for Prevention of Crime, led to no arrests, either because of corruption or because of insufficient evidence. A dramatic raid was staged right beside the Knickerbocker Hotel in February 1907, causing the staff and guests to rush outside to see what the police were doing. In May 1905, Police Commissioner William McAdoo, who was known for newsworthy raids, put about a hundred poolrooms out of business, following a police invasion of a four-story building with a liquor store on the ground floor, a printing establishment on the top floor, and a gambling and horse-betting parlor in between. Some raids could be ended after the Western Union Telegraph Company hindered the betting industry by abolishing its efficient racing news bureau; It had been telegraphing horse-racing information to the poolrooms for two decades. (NYT 5 18 1904, p. 2; 5 19 1904, p. 1; 5 21 1904, p. 1; 2. 23 1907, p. 14)

As a place of masculine amusement, Doyle’s Academy, a billiard parlor at Broadway, seems to have been orderly and legal throughout the decade and the Times regularly reported on its competitions. McGraw’s Academy was another billiard enterprise. Wholesome sports competitions were held at St. Bartholomew’s Settlement House on the east side, next door to its clinic. For earnest young artisans, more serious instruction was available at the training school nearby at 147 East, which the Amalgamated Society of Painters and Decorators ran in order to reach European standards that would secure higher wages for American workers. (NYT 12 9 1900, p. 17)

Improvements to the street overall included the sale in 1909 of the only empty lot between First and Eleventh Avenues, intended for future building. (NYT 9 11 1909, p. 16). The far west end remained industrial, with stables, furniture storage, and the Gambrinus brewery founded in 1883 that enlarged its premises significantly in 1901 on lots between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues; it closed only in 1948, having survived Prohibition by selling T.N.T., a “near beer.”

(http://www.oldbreweries.com/breweries-by-state/new-york/new-york-city-ny-220-breweries/v-loewers-gambrinus-brewery-co-ny-433e/)

More important improvements were the realized plans to widen Forty-second Street, especially between Sixth and Madison Avenues, later followed by similar work on other crosstown blocks. In an attempt to ease traffic congestion and keep pedestrians close to shop fronts, property owners agreed to remove stoops and front yards, thereby widening the roadway from 40 to 68 feet. Fifth Avenue had just been widened in 1908 between Twenty-fifth and Forty-seventh Streets (Ballon et al., Greatest Grid p. 205). Hotel Manhattan, however, did not support stoop removal. It had a portico and café entrance, a barbershop, and other encumbrances illegal even under previous laws. Until later 1907, at least, it let coal delivery wagons park in the daytime, obstructing street traffic. (NYT 9 23 1907, p.6; 8 22 1909, p.12). Although traffic lights did not appear until the 1920s, there were streetlights at night, lit first by gas and then by electricity, illuminating the route to the Great White Way at Times Square.

Pedestrians passed clothing and shoe stores, tobacconists, drugstores, law and medical offices, barbershops, lunchrooms and larger restaurants, a dealer in statuary who went bankrupt, a few small banks, ever fewer remaining brownstone houses, at least two bookstores, a showroom for trucks, a jeweler, a milliner, a photography studio, the McCreery Building (home to dog shows), at least two music schools and two piano salesrooms, a tailor, Shayne’s enlarged fur salon, an optician, a mechanical engineer’s office, a trunk vendor, a hosiery and glove shop, tenements, small hotels, rooming houses, and the shop near Ninth Avenue of John Kurtz, known as the singing shoemaker----a miscellany of mostly small enterprises. Although Walter Salomon thought that Forty-second Street would remain one of small shops and had figured out a way to individualize small shop entrances on small sites, other landowners were evidently anticipating higher land values. (NYT 1 1 1906, p. 5; 1 28 1906, p. BS15) Buildings of three to six stories soon disappeared as their sites rose in tempting value and as business owners understood the advantages of consolidation. (NYT 6 12 1904, p. 13) On the west side, one four-story red brick building of large size was the well-established Vogel Brothers clothing shop at least four by six lots wide at Eighth Avenue. A moderate-sized apartment house, the Dunmore, at 228-232 West, between the Liberty Theater and the Bruce Free Library, was about to be altered by a new owner. (NYT 2 10 1906, p. 16) As for religious buildings in which anything more noteworthy than routine worship occurred in this decade, the Sisters of Charity celebrated their golden jubilee in late November 1908 at the Holy Cross Academy for girls nearby at 343 West.

In the next decade, the opening of the Public Library and Grand Central Terminal, the construction of large office buildings and more theaters established much of the enduring image of Forty-second Street, albeit augmented significantly in the 1920s and intermittently thereafter.