57. New York County Lawyers Association Building

Location: 14 Vesey Street
Built: 1929-1930
Architect: Cass Gilbert
National Register Number: 82001201
Listed: October 29, 1982
Visited: March 27, 2008



Cass Gilbert's finest buildings in Manhattan--the US Customhouse, the West Street Building, and the Woolworth--give the eye so much to feed on that the flatness of this neo-Georgian is a disappointment. Even the AIA Guide to New York City is unusually mean, calling it "the wimp of the neighborhood" and a product of Gilbert's "late, fainthearted years." Not a bad little building, but there might be more to it if it was faced with brick instead of limestone, as most Georgian buildings in America were back in the day. It looks as if its interior references Georgian architecture--and the founding-father democratic ideals associated with it--much more profoundly, with a second-floor auditorium modeled after Independence Hall. But it's off-limits to me, as I'm not a lawyer.

56. Corbin Building

Location: 11 John Street/192 Broadway
Built: 1888-1889
Architect: Francis H. Kimball
National Register Number: 05001287
Listed: December 18, 2003
Visited: February 15 and 19, 2008



I like it now that this blog project forced me to think about it some, but I am reasonably certain that I didn't pay one second of attention to the Corbin Building when I worked downtown. I noticed its next-door neighborhood, 194-196 Broadway: it was a TGIFriday's, and it was sky-blue. By contrast, the Corbin was taller, but it was camouflaged by insensitive storefronts and decades of pollution that turned its brick a brackish brown. Black and white photography disguises the decay, and makes its dourness seem intentional--today it looks like a rugged parade of arches in a handsome funk.



The Corbin stands alone now, as its neighbors were demolished by the Metropolitan Transit Authority to make way for the Fulton Street Transit Center. The Center's a definite Good Thing, as it'll link up a dozen subway lines currently connected via a maze of grimy pathways--but the original plan didn't include the Corbin. After some tussling, preservationists were able to win a promise from the MTA that they wouldn't knock it down; in fact, the MTA would incorporate the Corbin into the Center, with the building providing a grand entrance from John Street. Great idea, but the renderings of the design left a lot to be desired. On one side, you've got a egg-shaped "oculus" rising from a gleaming box that dominates almost an entire city block--and uncomfortably squeezed over to the side, you have this thin, dark slab of a building (20 by 161 feet and eight stories!) of a different age, aesthetic, size, color, and scale. You couldn't even call the two structures "contrasting" or "in juxtaposition," rather than completely indifferent towards one another.

Since the economy is melting like a snowman in a global warming world, the Center has been scaled back to the point where there'll likely be no above-ground structure at all. I cannot find anything on the web about what the Corbin's fate is now--most of the updates about the Center seem to blindly re-hash of old news about the building. It'd be sad to have this lonely old slab come all this way into the 21st Century only to be denied modern-day love!

55. Park Row Building

A.K.A.: Ivins Syndicate Building; The Syndicate Building; 15 Park Row at City Hall Park
Location: 15 Park Row
Built: 1899
Architect: R.H. Henderson
National Register Number: 05001287
Listed: November 16, 2005
Visited: March 2, 2008
Additional Documentation: 15 Park Row at City Hall Park website; Tom Fletcher's NYC Architecture webpage; Christopher Grey's NYT article



It was the tallest, once. Tallest in the world, from 1899 to 1908.

Today, it doesn't even have the honor of being tall. In New York City alone, there are 367 buildings that are bigger. Nor does it have much aesthetic virtue to compensate. The Woolworth, the Chrysler, and the Empire State buildings were all world-champeens in their hey-days, but remain beloved because they are beautiful. The Park Row Building is not beautiful. Not ugly, but not beautiful.

It has a perfectly adequate Beaux-Arts façade, if a little dull. Tall buildings from the Potter Building to the Empire State Building the World Trade Center used long upwards lines on the building surface to emphasize verticality. The Park Row Building uses a lot of horizontal lines in its rustication, ornamental balconies and ledges, while many of the vertical lines on the buildings are interrupted, as if neutralize the offense of its height. The one way it unapologetically expresses verticality is in its profile. There's no steppy setbacks or ziggy-zagginess, which is what architects added to later high-rises to allow air and light to the street; no, it goes straight up, ZWOOP! and stays up until the roof, where there are two domes to give it a little bit of distinction. Without the domes, it'd look like a box--but only if you were looking at it from City Hall Park or the little islands of land near where Broadway and Park Row meet; that is, from north and west sides. Walk around and you'll see it's not quite that simple.




The Ann Street side shows the building has a interior courtyard with a series of braces to stabilize the building's two parts. Walk a little further down...




...and there's another thin strip of building reaching out to provide an entrance to Ann Street, and another courtyard. And another part of the building open to another street, this time Theatre Alley. But unlike the Park Row and Ann Street faces, the Theatre Alley side doesn't even bother giving it much of a look--no rustication, no balconies, just columns of windows. Several of the building's sides don't even have that, just thirty bleak stories of brick wall almost completely uninterrupted by window.

The building perimeter is thus shaped like an eccentric W (there's a floor plan on Tom Fletcher's site). There were rational reasons for this: for one, the building stands on what were originally seven different plots of land; the courtyards are added to allow light to penetrate the building interior as much as possible (remember, this was built in 1899, when electric light was still fairly novel). Further, I'm guessing those walls of brick might've left blank intentionally in anticipation of other tall buildings being built on neighboring sites.

Technological innovation of many sorts, along with the public's fear of a future city populated by volume-filling monsters, would lead future high-rises to be constructed a little more thoughtfully, but it's the Park Row Building's awkwardness that makes me like it so much: it's skyscraper form in its gawky pre-adolescent phase; it's fascinatingly unique because future New York City architects were sensible enough not to repeat its flaws.



Another reason the building is so interesting to me is that out of all the landmarks I've covered or will cover, it's the one I know most intimately. The block on Park Row, between Beekman and Ann Streets, are dominated by J&R, one of New York City's retail colossi. Only a block away from the World Trade Center, J&R was always a good way to spend a lunch hour. Mainly I'd go and get CDs from their music store a few blocks down, but the Park Row Building location had the computers and software. I spent quite a few longueurs spent debating whether I should buy a certain piece of graphics or websmithing software (all outdated crap now) that, if applied with confidence and patience, would enhance my creativity. Or a game that would end up wasting it.

It was on just such a trip that I first paid attention to the Park Row Building. I had been going to J&R for years already without any inkling of its history or its claim to fame, but one day I looked up and saw the braces. It didn't occur to me they might have structural value; I wondered if they were bridges. It took a while to realize they weren't. Even with their purpose unclear, I thought they were a fine thing to have, a little something for the people in the upper stories to contemplate. Other features fell into focus. There was the light falling on the expanses of brick, the shadows in the courtyard. The green domes, squat like knobs. Windows. Before they left my sight, I toyed with the irrational feeling that, somehow, this building magically appeared only a week or so ago. Or maybe I was on the wrong block. After all, if such a grand (not beautiful--grand) building was really there all this time, surely I would've noticed it.

54e. Fulton-Nassau Historic District

Location: Roughly bounded by Broadway, Park Row, and Nassau, Dutch, William, Ann, Spruce, and Liberty Streets
Built: Multiple dates, mainly around 1860-1930
Architect: Multiple
National Register Number: 05000988
Listed: September 7, 2005
Visited: December 1, 2007; January 6, February 28, and March 2, 2008



The Bennett Building
(Arthur D. Gilman, 1872-73; additions, James M. Farnsworth, 1890-92)

We'll discuss cast-iron architecture at length once we snake our way up Manhattan a bit more, but for now it should suffice to say that, yes, it's a cast-iron building; that is, the faces of the building were made of an iron alloy heated until molten, poured into molds shaped into arches and cornices, and cooled.

Originally the Bennett was a six-story building done in the Second Empire style, complete with mansard roof. By the early 1890s, with the Bennett needing upgrades to its mechanical systems, and the Potter and the New York Times buildings only just erected down the street, a new owner decided to modernize the building by tearing off the roof (sucka) and adding several floors that closely replicated the ones below. It pushed the building away from the familiars of Second Empire architecture into...something else. Something machine-like, an example of repetition barely relieved by variation--a look conceptually appropriate for a structure partly the fruit of mass production; something so richly attired it seems as if the windows on the top floors are occluded by all the pilasters and arches. As a statement, it feels a bit extreme, and thrillingly so.

Back when I worked at the World Trade Center, strolling through the nabe on my lunch hour (and resigning myself to Teriyaki Boy), the Bennett was the most obvious indication that the neighborhood had any kind of history beyond the fly-by-night discount stores of dubious provenance. But it looked like shit, in poor condition, painted in smarmy Victorian pastels. Today, it's in an neutral cream that lets the texture of the building speak for itself: light casts deep shadows into its crevasses, while highlights glisten in the sun.

54d. Fulton-Nassau Historic District

Location: Roughly bounded by Broadway, Park Row, and Nassau, Dutch, William, Ann, Spruce, and Liberty Streets
Built: Multiple dates, mainly around 1860-1930
Architect: Multiple
National Register Number: 05000988
Listed: September 7, 2005
Visited: December 1, 2007; January 6, February 28, and March 2, 2008



Temple Court
(Silliman & Farnsworth, 1890-1892/Benjamin Silliman, Jr. 1889-1890)

A serious proto-skyscraper, a deep berry-red to the Potter Building's firey near-orange, severe and square to its neighbors' terra-cotta cliffscape, and capped with pyramidal towers that--appropriately enough--look like steeples, giving the building something of an ecclesiastical flavor. It also has a nine-story atrium, and the daylight's even visible from the front doors on Beekman. It's been subject to a condo conversion seemingly forever.

"It was on this site," Moses King tells us, "in a theatre built in 1751, that Hamlet was first produced in America." Before Newspaper Row, the area was the center of New York's theater life, a past with even fewer physical traces. Theatre Alley is one exception, and Kevin Walsh can tell you about it more comprehensively than I can.



Morse Building
(Silliman & Farnsworth, 1880)

Ten years before Temple Court, another brick skyscraper by the same architects, mostly notable for its rainbow arcs of red and black piano keyboards over the windows. It loses some of its impact thanks to some weird brick replacements--the new ones seem awfully pink. Perhaps in anticipation of future skyscraper development, it has one side of sheer nothing save for a collection of windows that's ever-so-slightly eclectic in position and shape. For a long while, this blank side overlooked a parking lot, but if certain parties can get their act together, there'll be a huge-ass Gehry skyscraper to steal everyone's daylight before long.

54c. Fulton-Nassau Historic District

Location: Roughly bounded by Broadway, Park Row, and Nassau, Dutch, William, Ann, Spruce, and Liberty Streets
Built: Multiple dates, mainly around 1860-1930
Architect: Multiple
National Register Number: 05000988
Listed: September 7, 2005
Visited: December 1, 2007; January 6, February 28, and March 2, 2008



That's Ben Franklin, newspaper dude, wondering what the hell happened to Newspaper Row. (FWIW, the main building behind him is the American Tract Society Building; the New York Times Building is the one peeking in the corner.)

According to Mitchell Stephens, New York City once had twenty dailies. Twenty, a number that just shames our post-literate age. Stephens doesn't pinpoint the year when this peak occurred, so his figure may cover newspapers in all five boroughs, or just New York City as it was prior to incorporation, Brooklyn-, Queens-, and Staten Island-free. Whenever it was, it was likely during the very late 19th and very early 20th centuries, back when most of the city's dailies, along with countless weeklies and monthlies, were located in Newspaper Row, a kind of media analog to the Insurance and Financial Districts. New York Then and Now says it was defined by "a three-block area on the east side of adjoining Park Row from Beekman Street to the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, giving it the name Newspaper Row," but based on the exhaustive account Moses King gives in his 1892 Handbook of New York City of most of the important papers of his day, it could be said to have stretched even further down to the Mail and Express and Evening Post Buildings on corner of Broadway and Fulton, and up to the Staats-Zeitung Building on Tryon Row.



The New York Times Building (George B. Post, 1888-1889; expansion by Robert Maynicke, 1903-1905) was in the middle of it all, historically, physically, psychically. This wasn't the first NYT office: the first one was on 113 Nassau Street; the second on the corner of Nassau and Beekman; the third, a five-story building at the corner of Park and Spruce. The fourth is the one in the above photos, and is actually also the third, sorta. When the need arose for new offices--the paper needed more space, but also wanted to teach those bastards at the 260-foot-tall Tribune building (Richard Morris Hunt, 1875) a hurtin' lesson--they got 'em in a not-obvious way. As the NYT, 110 years later, explained, "[t]o allow the presses to remain in place, the new building was constructed around the core of the old building, which was demolished in phases as its replacement was rising." This may have made some smidge of financial sense, since (I guess) the printing presses couldn't stop or be moved, but it also sounds like an awfully expensive folly. And it was, exacerbating financial problems caused by reduced readership. A couple of years later, it was purchased by Adolph S. Ochs.



And then it moved again. When the Times announced its plans in 1904, the Hartford Courant remarked that "there is no doubt that the start made by these two enterprising newspapers will lead to so many other similar moves that Newspaper Row will before long be a name and no longer a fact," and the Brooklyn Times encouraged "everybody [to] move up town and leave lower Manhattan for Brooklyn Bridge approaches" so that "the great problem of transportation facilities will be solved." What they were saying without actually saying was that a whole buncha buildings would be demolished and oh goody goody for that. It took a while, but depressingly, this is exactly what happened. Those twenty dailies thinned to eight by 1940--with similar carnage effected all over the country--partly because the likes of Frank A. Munsey merged many of them into oblivion, and partly because radio (and later, television) rendered newspapers BOR-ING. (In response, newspapers tried to differentiate themselves from other media with a brief vogue for "quality" and "responsibility" that was kind of nice while it lasted.) The above-mentioned Tryon Row doesn't exist anymore, demolished along with the Staats-Zeitung to make way in 1909 for the Municipal Building and its environs. (It should be mentioned that the New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung was a daily that at one point had the third-largest readership in the city; today it exists, albeit phantasmically, on the web. A couple of World Wars can do that to a German-language paper.) In 1955, the New York World Building--once the tallest building in New York City--and the Tribune were demolished to make way for unromantic Brooklyn Bridge on-ramps, forever emasculating the physical context in which the likes of Thomas Nast and Horace Greeley, William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer did their culture-creating business.

(By the way, the Times' very first offices were demolished surprisingly recently, only last summer, in fact. Sucks to be an old building sometimes.)

54b. Fulton-Nassau Historic District

Location: Roughly bounded by Broadway, Park Row, and Nassau, Dutch, William, Ann, Spruce, and Liberty Streets
Built: Multiple dates, mainly around 1860-1930
Architect: Multiple
National Register Number: 05000988
Listed: September 7, 2005
Visited: December 1, 2007; January 6, February 28, and March 2, 2008



Man builds building. Building is destroyed; people die. People accuse man of criminal negligence. They say he could've done more. Man then vows to build the biggest, strongest, safest building the world has ever seen. A cliché, or a Jungian archetype of real estate development?

Orlando B. Potter was a politician, a property man, a six-million-dollar-man at his death (meaning he'd be worth $140,000,000 today). The New York World Building (not the later 1890 one), at five stories, a relatively tall building for its day, was his baby. In late January 1882, some tenants, including Alfred Ely Beach (the Scientific American editor and inventor of the proto-subway Beach Pneumatic Transit system) complained to Potter of burning-wood smells and unnaturally hot walls, but Potter refused to contact the fire department. A fire gutted the place soon after, one of the worst New York fires of the time. At least six died, included two who jumped to escape flames.



Only a few weeks later, Potter proposed a new structure for the site. The result is known as, aptly enough, the Potter Building (N.G. Starkweather, 1883-86)--or, for the people who can remember what came before, the New Potter Building. At eleven stories, it pushed the limits of what could be done with the new-fangled iron construction then sweeping the architectural world, and made extensive use of terra-cotta, both as fireproofing and decoration. The exterior is so overloaded with brown terra-cotta ornamentation complementing the vivid, orange-red brick that it reads more like a curiously symmetrical rock cliff than anything belonging a building. It possesses so much ornamentation, in fact, that out of all the people who have ever laid eyes on the building, maybe only a vanishingly small minority have noticed what's on the capital of the huge column on the corner of Beekman and Park Row. The person who wrote the NYCLPC designation report for the Potter even mistakenly refers to it as an eagle. It's not: it's actually a Phoenix rising from the flames.

54a. Fulton-Nassau Historic District

Location: Roughly bounded by Broadway, Park Row, and Nassau, Dutch, William, Ann, Spruce, and Liberty Streets
Built: Multiple dates, mainly around 1860-1930
Architect: Multiple
National Register Number: 05000988
Listed: September 7, 2005
Visited: December 1, 2007; January 6, February 28, and March 2, 2008



Seems more like a bunch of historic districts spatchcocked together by happenstance than one coherent cocatenation of buildings united by a sensibility. Not a complaint, mind! Just an observation. The first microdistrict surrounds Broadway and Maiden Lane: mainly 1890s-1920s unsetbacked skyscrapers composing the kind of "canyon" cityscape downtown was so famous for.



Crowding around the corner of Beekman and Nassau, there's a passel of buildings from about the late 1870s to the late 1890s, most connected with the long-vanished newspaper row and irresistibly ornate.



Between these two poles, centered on Nassau Street and radiating outwards, dark corridors of smaller commercial buildings.



If anything unites these buildings, it's the shitty storefronts, remarkable for their complete lack of sympathy for what they've been glued to. To my mind, 144 Fulton Street is almost legendary in its affronts to taste. The building must date from the late 1900s, and was once the site of Miller's Restaurant, where men in suits dined on Danish cuisine. At some point after the sixties, maybe much later, it changed hands and received the bitch-slap of a façade renovation you see above. A rhombus window, a red triangle awning, a silvery grid: actually, it's a playful composition of geometric elements that'd be almost um admirable...for a unisex hair salon. In Massapequa. In 1984. That is, if the windows allowed any natural light. And the A/C units didn't look like an awkward afterthought of an architect possessed by an idea the muddy details of which he didn't care too much about. AND the design wasn't also completely compromised by the retention of Flemish Renaissance cornice and lamps. (Which are--don't get me wrong--wonderful details, but if you're gonna do MTV modernism, why keep 'em? Or hell, why do MTV modernism at all when South Street Seaport--only a half-mile away, on the same street no less--demonstrates something of the virtue of keeping old buildings kinda old-looking?) AND AND AND everything was ruined further by what look like new green awnings that harmonize with nothing, to say nothing of the way-dated COPIERS - FACSIMILE - TYPEWRITER lettering up on top. The overall effect is so shitty, so ill-conceived, so misbegotten that I have to take a stand against my own tastes and call the whole damned completely beguiling (and since it's on such small scale, harmless, something you can't say about any of Trump's gilded turds). I think I'm in love with it. It's got the kind of sordid retro-futurism kids in Williamsburg having been straining themselves for a decade to achieve. Long may it sore the eyes of passersby.

(I'll get to some of the district's more conventionally beautiful buildings in subsequent posts, I promise.)