80i. SoHo Historic District

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



Some very brief words about cast iron. The subject is so rich I have been stupidly avoiding it for fear of getting lost in its nooks and crannies and missing self-imposed blogging deadlines. Well, enough of that.

For millennia, architecture was defined by timber, stone, and earth; today, what dominates the world's cities is glass and steel. Metal had been used for roofs, for decorative elements, for structural reinforcement since the Romans, but it is only until the Industrial Revolution that the techniques required to produce metal alloys suitable for architectural construction in large quantities are discovered. One of them is cast iron. Cast iron is a high-carbon iron alloy that, when liquified, can be...cast--that is, poured into molds. The alloy was used in bridges and domes and mills. Eventually the Americans James Bogardus (whose work we've discussed before, briefly) and Daniel Badger would develop a brilliant method of manufacturing many individual cast-iron parts (such as columns) that could be bolted together to create a building façade.



This use of cast iron was an extraordinary conceptual leap for architecture. Even though a building with an iron façade such as 427-429 Broadway (Thomas Jackson, 1871) apes styles hundreds of years old--Joseph Pell Lombardi Architects says it's "Venetian Renaissance style with French Renaissance detailing"--they are deployed in a thoroughly modern way. Much like building with Lego bricks, creating a façade from multiples of a finite number of standardized pieces encourages an economy of form in architecture, and repetition on a scale rarely seen in Renaissance architecture. As Philip Johnson, in his forward to Margot Gayle's book on Bogardus, wrote:

As an influence on my own design work Bogardus looms larger, let us say, even than Louis Sullivan. Even Richardson, a greater architect, was not such a direct ancestor of mine as James Bogardus. It is, fortunately, easy to say why. With his cast-iron facades, he acquainted Americans with modular rhythm, which is the basis of modern design. Imagine Mies without a module. Imagine Le Corbusier wihout the basic freedom of evenly spaced windows.

More about cast-irons in subsequent posts. (Phew, this one got in right under the wire.) But what of 427-429? The Joseph Pell Lombardi website calls it both "The A. J. Ditenhoffer Building" and "The A. J. Dittenhoffer Building"; the LPC designation report favors the latter spelling. And both are probably wrong. The building's namesake is almost certainly A. J. Dittenhoefer (note the "oe."). He was one of New York's hardcore Republicans, having been involved in the campaigns to elect
Lincoln. He was a judge, and later, more famously, something of a Gilded Age celebrity lawyer, successfully defending Enrico Caruso charges of sexual molestation, and The Metropolitan Opera Company against Cosima Wagner and Siegfried Wagner, who sought to prevent all staged performances of Richard Wagner's Parsifal outside of Bayreuth. And that's really all that I can say about the building--what Dittenhoefer was doing with a cast-iron as lovely as this, sadly, I don't know.