80q. 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, and August 8, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



569-575 Broadway (Thomas Stent, 1882) is currently Prada's New York flagship. Can't say much about the interior of the store because...well, can't take any pictures of it as it's private property. OK, OK, I haven't even been inside. I'm a guy! Oops, wait, it's got menswear, too. Yeah, I've been lazy.

Prior to that, it was the Guggenheim's SoHo branch. Originally envisioned as extra offices and storage, it became a full-fledged exhibition space that both served as the anchor for a downtown "Museum Mile", and an opening volley of the feverish expansion plans the Guggenheim tried to realize throughout the nineties and early aughties. I have fond memories of the SoHo branch, particularly the John Cage Rolywholyover: A Circus show staged only two years after he died. In it, artwork by and about Cage, his compatriots, and from city museums were displayed in four rooms according to chance operations in a kind of well-curated anarchy; some of them would hung and rehung at odd places on the museum walls, leaving many a hole from the vacated nails. I thought it was so neat.



I took my friend Colin Meeder there when I wanted to show him New York City in general and SoHo in particular. (He was impressed.) I am almost embarrassed to say that now. Did I become too hip for SoHo or did SoHo become too unhip for me? I don't know. The loss of the artworld, even in the canon-ready form that the Guggenheim offered, meant the area became less fun to me--that I know. In my mind the show was the last broadcast from SoHo's artside carnivalesque (even if it was a traveling exhibition): soon after, I stopped thinking of the neighborhood as something other than a shopping epicenter. Of SoHo's museums on Broadway, the Guggenheim SoHo died in 2001, the New Museum shuffled off to the Bowery, the Museum of African Art is moving uptown, and the Alternative Museum is now online-only.



And way way way before all that, the building was one of the homes of the pioneering men's clothier Rogers, Peet & Co. 14to42.net (who I really must put on my links list) lists the company's innovation: "they attached tags to garments giving fabric composition, they marked garments with price tags (the established practice was to haggle), they offered customers their money back if not satisfied, and they used illustrations of specific merchandise in their advertising."

The building itself is charmingly brawny. Although its partly-swizzly columns on the ground floor and its cornice are iron, I think it might've been designed to stand out amongst the neighborhood's cast-irons, of which I bet fickle New York was tiring in the 1880s: ivory paint replaced by furious red brick; instead of the dazzling repetition of forms, the Broadway side gives every story gets a markedly different treatment.

80p. 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, and August 8, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



Which twin has the Toni?

As you can see from the photo, two buildings. The one on the right, 103-105 Greene Street, was designed by our old friend, Henry Fernbach, back in 1879. It's a lived a life of silk goods and shirtwaists, then bohemian rediscovery, fabulous restaurant, expensive apartments, nice stores. The usual, thanks. Its mirror image, 101 Greene Street, was built at exactly the same time and lived an identical SoHo life.

...until it burned down in January 1957. A one-story garage took its place, or was fashioned from its remnants; the 1973 Landmarks Preservation Commission report on SoHo stated that "Although filed as an 'alteration' the changes were so extensive that they practically constitute a new building."

I know, I know. You're looking at that picture above and thinking Waaaait a minute. A garage. I should be seeing a garage here, and yet I am not seeing one--I see two buildings, conjoined twins, identical in every respect including, presumably, age. But no. Thanks to an ambitious collaboration between developer Goldman Properties, architect Joseph Pell Lombardi, and cast-metal specialists Historical Arts & Casting, Inc., the old 101 Greene Street was resurrected in its entirety, façade and all--indeed, the first new cast-iron façade built in SoHo in over a hundred years--using 103-105 as a model.

To take a building of no great reputation and bring it back to a state of wholeness it hadn't known in fifty years: what a wonderfully needless thing to do. Whether they're in a historically-sensitive building or no, people are still gonna buy the lofts, because lofts are big and spacious and sexy; save for a tiny coterie of the architecturally-aware, people'll pass 101 by and think--if they think about it all--that it was always like that. So I think 101 was done the way it was done out of a love of SoHo, corny as that sounds. From what I can tell, the whole thing was the brainchild of Goldman Properties; if you go to their website, wait about ten seconds, and turn up the volume on your computer, Tony Goldman himself will tell you how much he loves historic preservation in goofy dazzled prideful tones, sounding not unlike Jean Shepherd in A Christmas Story. Mr. Goldman, I salute you. One hates to give it up for a developer--distrust is always the safer position--but there we are.

80o. 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, and August 8, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



A wall of cast-iron--with a curve.

Some of my guidebooks mention that the Gunther Building (Griffith Thomas, 1872) was built for William H. Gunther of C.G. Gunther's Sons, perhaps the pre-eminent furrier of New York City in the 19th century. What they don't mention is its connection to a mayor of New York City. Charles Godfrey Gunther was the oldest of C.G. Gunther's sons and part of the family business (which occupied 502-504 Broadway for a time). A Copperhead elected at the tail-end of a Civil War he opposed, he--rather ironically--foiled a Confederate plot to burn the city down, and, less than a year later, stood by as Abraham Lincoln lay in state at City Hall after his assassination. This posthumous bio says he "attended strictly to his private business" after his 1864-1865 term, which says to me it's possible he was still part of C.G. Gunther's Sons when the Broome Street location was completed in 1872.



Other than the way it dominates the streetscape, the most striking thing about the building is that one of its bays--windows included--curves to meet the corner of Broome and Greene Streets. The second-story bay is capped with a pediment telling future generations, even those with no clue to its significance, that this is the "GUNTHER BUILDING," damnit. Apparently there were once life-sized statues on the pedestals at the sides.



The Gunther Building's partner-in-crime next door, 477-479 Broome Street (Elisha Shiffen, 1873), was yet another home to SoHo silks. But at time, the Cheney Brothers were the Magilla Gorilla of all American silk operations, with The New York Times describing their Connecticut factories as the places where "American dress silks were first manufactured in any large quantity"; Moses King's 1892 Handbook describes the company as "outranking all others in America."

After the Industrial Revolution completely streamlined silk production, demand for the material sunk thanks to competition from synthetic materials like nylon. The Cheney Brothers lingered around and shriveled until they were purchased by the J.P. Stevens company in 1955--the same company behind the story of Norma Rae.

If you were wondering--and I'm sure you were--Dick Cheney is at best only distantly related to the Cheney Brothers. As far as I can tell, anyway.

80n. 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, and August 8, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



Last entry I was mourning how the SoHo of my researches was shaping up to be a landscape of almost-nameless hat factories and silk stores, but I spoke a little too soon. 47-49 Mercer Street (Joseph M. Dunn, 1873)was owned by Alexander Roux, a cabinet-maker maybe only known to American antiquarians, but still, what a relief to encounter somebody who's left traces beyond mangled scans on Google Books.

Roux's work is at the Met, the Brooklyn Museum, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, and on eBay for prices that are more than I make in a year. And they are rather incredible. I know nothing about antiques and have never really had much desire to reverse the situation, but...I respect these pieces. Well-trained hands and sharp tools made some pieces of wood sing with a human voice. The care could break your heart. The slopes of lines, rococo crannies. Tiny inlays. The grain of wood followed. Techniques learned in guilds and passed down from generation to generation. They don't make 'em like this anymore. Well, I'm sure somebody does, somewhere. But it's rare. No demand for it. Roux had the demand, he had the workers (120 by the 1850s) and the techniques (steam-powered saws!) to produce $250-$500K of furniture a year (about $5 to $11 million today). That's an enterprise roughly comparable to one of your 21st-century suburban kitchen cabinet barns. Today, when Americans want to buy furniture with this level of craftsmanship, they just buy antiques. And most don't. (My apartment is entirely furnished with about a thousand bucks of IKEA--they make furniture for people who don't want to care about furniture.)

This furniture made me curious why this cast-iron, as lovely as it is, wasn't built to suggest their level of detail: they could've maybe indulged in a Gothic fantasy like 448 Broome or something as obsessively ornate as the Haughwout. Costs, I guess. Fashion and fitting in are other possible reasons. Maybe Roux was already looking ahead to his next address and being mindful of resale value. (I'm sorry I keep peppering the blog with so many questions I can't answer.) The LPC report says this was a store--as was nearby 53 Mercer, also factory space--but it's not clear what kind of status it had compared to Roux's other locations. Most are gone, except for 827-829 Broadway, one of the finest cast-irons outside SoHo, smothered in butterscotch.

80m. 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, and August 8, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



The King of Greene Street. At five stories high and ten bays wide, it's an imposition: only a few buildings on the street take up so much room. But as with The Queen of Greene Street, its two middle bays project onto the sidewalk just a little bit, making it look somewhat "evolved" next to the buildings on the street that keep their façades flush with each other, like the three-dimensional sphere compared to the Flatlander square.

Unlike most of the landmarks we've visited so far, I can actually show what the building looks like on the inside thanks to racked.com's pictures of 72's interior. They show quite a lot of empty space barely interrupted by a line of spindly things in the middle, probably made of cast iron like the façade. Iron wasn't merely good for pretty Grecian and Italianate exterior effects but got some use as a structural material as well, at least until the far stronger cast steel became a mass-produceable commodity. As The New York Times noted:

"More than this, cast-iron was strong: its tall, thin columns could support large, open interior spaces with high ceilings and big windows--just what department-store owners wanted for their showrooms during the age of the gas light."

As racked.com's photos show, it's still good for showrooms, even in the age of electric light. (Parties, too.)



In spite of 72-76's grandeur, I can't tell if the stores of its early years were especially ritzy. I've found a furrier and a wholesale silks outfit. The upper floors appear to have been devoted to the storage and/or manufacture of things like caps and wigs. Which is numbingly predictable, actually. During our little SoHo jaunt, I've been laboriously going through mentions of each address in Google Books and The New York Times archives, seeing if there is some fresh insight, some hidden irony about these buildings that I can share with you, gentle reader. Mostly what I've discovered are names after names of apparel companies that bequeathed no obvious progeny to history: they started up, labored on for a while, then went out of business, often when the owner died or faced bankruptcy during one of the 19th century's many economic busts. SoHo is so dense with these little businesses sometimes seems as if the linchpin to New York's Gilded-Age economy was women's apparel.

Also utterly forgotten: Isaac F. Duckworth, the architect of both the King and Queen. The 1973 LPC Landmark Designation Report for SoHo flat-out says he "was a New York City architect about whom little is known"; there are only two contemporary mentions in The New York Times, and both involve legal action between he and a John Roach. The nature of these suits are not detailed, but if this is the same John Roach as the New York shipbuilder, it might've been about both men's construction material of choice: iron.

80l. 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, and August 8, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



It is affectionately known by those in the know as The Queen of Greene Street. Forget my photograph, capturing No. 28-30 Greene (Isaac F. Duckworth, 1873) towards the end of a well-deserved renovation. Instead, take a look at the cover of Margot Gayle's 1974 survey Cast-Iron Architecture in New York; see how its stern windows stare down the reader with royal hauteur, see how they're framed by a tiled mansard roof the way a ruff frames an Elizabethan head.

A former warehouse, but like the Fleming Smith, like 176-170 John Street, like many buildings in SoHo, a warehouse that got above its raisin', a building much too elegant to simply hold stuff. But what it held in its day, though, was possibly appropriate anyway: silks and ribbon and lace, fancy frills.

80k. 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, and August 8, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



From left to right: 65, 67, 69-71, 73, 75, 77, 79 and 81 Greene Street. Save for two, all the buildings were designed by one man, Henry Fernbach. He is the best-represented architect in the SoHo historic district, with thirty-four buildings to his name, twenty-five of them on Greene Street alone, in fact. Many are defined by rows of simple Tuscan columns, often supporting some seriously chunky arches whose name (if they even have one) escapes me.

Possessing both consistency and prodigiousness leaves an architect open to charges of hackery, and requesting a building that blends in rather than stands out leaves a client open to charges of immature taste. ("I want the same thing as that, only different. A little bit different.") On the other hand, the relative homogeneousness of Greene Street (as well as the rest of SoHo) might've been something collectively sought by architects and clients alike. How else to explain the spectacle of 65 and 67 Greene Street, the grey building on the left which is actually two separate buildings built by two separate architects (J.B. Snook and Fernbach respectively) for two separate owners, yet joined by a common façade? The result may have looked good. Even today, even after so much has come and gone in the neighborhood, even with the disfiguring fire escapes and new interlopers in former parking lots, when certain blocks are given a wide-angle view--say, looking down a street from somewhere in its middle--the brain and eye delights in blurring out all the nominal differences between buildings and connecting what they have in common until what it sees are faint and broken lines all merging towards a point on the horizon. But architectural homogeneity also had a more practical value, too, I'm guessing. It likely underscored the buildings that didn't fit in, which in the 1870s would've been the vice-breeding remnants of the neighborhood's residential and entertainment life--the very thing the industrialists and retailers moving into the area would want to isolate and destroy, physically and psychologically.



Fernbach is primarily remembered for his work on Central Synagogue, which is something else altogether from his stern neo-Grecs--it's...a polychrome celebration. He is sometimes cited as New York City's first Jewish architect of consequence, or even the first Jewish person to practice architecture in the country, though his sometime collaborator Leopold Eidlitz has been called similar. That this bellwether of cultural acceptance comes after nearly two hundred years of a Jewish presence in the city genuinely shocks me--though that's probably because I'm shamefully ignorant of Jewish history. Give me time.

80j. 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, and August 8, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



Vaux, Withers & Co. did this one in 1872. Calvert Vaux you might already know, (if not: he was half of the team behind Central Park), Frederick Clarke Withers you probably don't. Together they were instrumental in popularizing Gothic architecture in the non-native soil of America. One of the more obscure works of the firm (perhaps the most famous is the Jefferson Market Library), 448 Broome is an attempt at adapting the churchy style to the mass-produced aesthetic of cast-iron on store...and it doesn't really click: the broad windows don't give the ornamentation enough room to breathe, I think. To be fair, it's hard to see this building for what it is, or was. Fire escapes now cover three of its four bays on four of its five floors, and even worse, its cornice--looking very much like Withers' altar and reredos for Trinity Church--was removed at some indeterminate point, possibly because it wasn't stable, possibly because it was old-fashioned. Sadly, what's left is easy to ignore. (The poor thing.) The most distinctive thing about it is the woolly vegetation growing from the fifth floor.

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.