85. Stephen Van Rensselaer House

Location: 149 Mulberry Street (originally 153 Mulberry Street)
Built: 1816
Architect: Unknown
National Register Number: 83001751
Listed: June 16, 1983
Visited: October 12, 2008



Before it was a cheapjack clothier for touristic delectation--and, let's face it, probably also some immigrant's entrée into The Good Life--149 Mulberry Street was a Little Italy restaurant, Paolucci's. And some time before it was a restaurant, it was home to the Italian Free Library and Reading Room, serving the local community with what one account says was 3,000 books in Italian and 32 Italian daily papers from various parts of Italy. (Lord, what happened to the contents of this library?)

None of this is why 149 Mulberry was landmarked, though--neither the 1969 landmark designation report from the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission or the 1983 National Register of Historic Places nomination form say anything about Little Italy. Newer ones are somewhat more ecumenical, but many of these earlier reports are remarkably unconcerned about matters beyond a somewhat narrow architectural aesthetic (the NYC LPC reports from the '60s use words like "quaint" and "charming" a lot) and the Great Men of New York history.

It was landmarked because, well, it was (and is) a surviving wooden-frame Federal Style rowhouse, for one--as you'd imagine, not many survive because of the whole fire thing--and because it was one of the homes of Stephen Van Rensselaer III. He was...well, Fortune called him the 10th richest American of all time. Like many of the ultrarich New Yorkers of his day, he could trace his family back to the some of the earliest Dutch settlements in the New World--and like those families, too, he left his name on our landscape, specifically in the name of the engineering university he helped found.

84. Puck Building

Location: 295-309 Lafayette Street
Built: 1885-1886; 1892-1893 and 1899 (additions and subtractions); 1983-1984 (restoration)
Architects: Albert Wagner and Herman Wagner
National Register Number: 83001740
Listed: July 21, 1983
Visited: October 12, 2008
Additional Information: New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission Designation Report



That's the Shakespearean Puck right up there, leaning on a pen and carrying a mirror, presumably reflecting the poor slobs down below.

This building was the home of the snark, not once but twice. First time was with the building's namesake, a satirical magazine that excoriated all manner of political and social figures of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era with nasty fantastic grotesquerie. A lot of the subjects dealt with are mostly urr and umm to me (for now), so while it's very interesting to note that Puck's cartoons may have swung Presidential elections, what this prisoner of the 21st century gets is all the identity politics stuff: they were pro-Semitic (yay, even if premised on stereotype), anti-Catholic (argh; this must've been real lulzy to the folks across the street), and anti-racist if not above portraying Frederick Douglass as an ape (guh)--as well as the Irish (OMFG).



A hundred years later, Spy Magazine took up residence here. You know it, or remember it--a comic scorner of all things celebrity. I used to read copies of it in the basement of Woodward Hall my freshman year at St. John's when I wasn't reading some incomprehensible translation from the Greek: it kinda thrilled me because I could get a moontan from its reflected New York sophistication and it kinda disturbed me because it gave me nothing to hold on to other than that, couldn't tell what it stood for, couldn't learn anything from it other than things not worth learning about, couldn't make sense of its stance. And it wasn't very nice, and I always fancied myself from kidhood on as awfully nice. So even as all the biggie magazines out there started to mimic its layouts, its Boschian density of factlets, it was something of a relief not to have to take Spy seriously any more when it started sucking a few years into its existence. And now that I know that VFer and truffled-mac-and-cheese-slinger Graydon Carter was partly behind it, I'm sorta sorry I gave the magazine even the slightest mental encouragement.

(If you're a follower of Gawker like I am, you might be amused to know the Puck is owned by the Kushners.)



The Puck was originally a little smaller--the taller back half of the building was added a few years after it was initially completed in 1886. But it was also a little wider. This is what the corner of Mulberry and Houston looks like today:



And this is how it looked in 1892, according to King's Handbook of New York City:



That's right: two bays' worth of building were sliced off the Puck like it was a block of Cracker Barrel Extra Sharp. You see, when the city decided to open up a three-block cul-de-sac--called Lafayette Place--that ran from Astor Place to Great Jones Street, and connect it to several other existing streets, the route of the new north-south thoroughfare went right through the Puck and several of its neighbors. While the latter were all destroyed, the Puck merely underwent major surgery in 1899, in the end gaining an entirely new Western face to meet Lafayette Street.



That's why the building has two Puck statues: the one on Mulberry and Houston stands over what used to be the original main entry, which was later replaced by a grander entrance with multi-story columns and a brownstone capital on which another Puck stands.

83. Old St. Patrick's Cathedral Complex

A.K.A.: Old St. Patrick's Cathedral; Old St. Patrick's Convent and Girl's School; St. Michael's Chapel
Location: 260-264 Mulberry Street (cathedral); 32 Prince Street (convent); 266 Mulberry Street (chapel)
Built: 1809-1815, restored 1868 (cathedral); 1826 (convent); 1858-1859 (chapel)
Architects: Joseph F. Mangin (cathedral); unknown (convent); James Renwick Jr. and William Rodrigue (chapel)
National Register Number: 77000964
Listed: August 29, 1977
Visited: October 12 and 21, 2008



The oldest city churches are surrounded by an iron gate, if anything at all. Old St. Patrick's--the St. Patrick's before what's now the St. Patrick's was completed in 1879--is surrounded by a wall.

I find it easy to imagine a New York with horses instead of cars, or candles and gas and not electric light. If you're attentive, the physical evidence of that former life is everywhere, in things like big SoHo windows or skinny streets, the horseplop stink of Central Park South in the summer. A New York with an underdog Catholic minority is a much bigger conceptual leap because--wall excepted--evidence of such things has largely disappeared, and its counter-evidence so imposing. Speaking as a Catholic (born as such, barely raised as such, lived my adult not immune to the religion's power but never fully embracing it either--did I mention I'm gay?) we are, well, everywhere. But it was not always thus.



In spite of brief moments of religious toleration in its colonial days, Roman Catholicism was suppressed in New York following England's Protestant Glorious Revolution. So effective was the clampdown, once source I've found states there were only 100 Catholics after the Revolutionary War, this in a city of 33,000. A new era of governmental tolerance, epitomized by the Bill of Rights, and immigration, primarily from Ireland, changed the equation to the point where New York could sustain a diocese of its own in 1808. Construction on St. Patrick's began a year later, in what was then the hinterlands of Mulberry Street, which was so isolated that a fox was caught in the churchyard five years after it was completed.

Immigrants kept coming and coming and coming to New York City (even before Ireland's Great Famine), and Nativist hostility towards what was seen as the great squirmy masses and their lockstep religion sometimes flamed up into violence. As early as 1806, St. Peter's Church (the St. Peter's before what's now St. Peter's) was attacked by a mob on Christmas Eve; the later St. Mary's Church was burned down to the ground in 1831; and St. Patrick's itself was "menaced" by a mob in 1835.



Which brings us back to the wall. On the official website for Old St. Patrick's, a picture of the wall has a caption implying the wall was erected by the diocese's fourth bishop, The Most Rev. John J. Hughes. Hughes was a power behind the establishment of churches and schools to serve the growing population of Catholics. The thing, though, that makes him beguiling to me is his toughness in a tough time. In the face of rioting that had destroyed Catholic churches and killed people in Philadelphia, he told New York's Nativist mayor-elect John Harper that "if a single Catholic church is burned in New York, the city will become a second Moscow." (He was referencing this.) Don't take this wrong--I say this out of a kind of discomfort and a kind of awe, but not impeity--but it's a wonder he could walk when he had cojones the size of church bells. He signed his letters with a dagger-like cross: he was known as "Dagger John," a name right out of Low Life or Gangs of New York.

When Old St. Patrick's finally burned down in 1866, the cause was one of those absolutely quotidian city accidents--flying embers from a Broadway fire--not an angry mob. The church we see today was built from the walls left standing, the eccentricity of its original Gothic style (which predated the craze for it by about two decades) toned down a bit.



As for the neighborhood's Irish, they were replaced by the Italians (hi there), who much later got systematically bodysnatched by hipsters. Mulberry Street, just south of Old St. Patrick's: all flimsy boutiques.

82. Fourteenth Ward Industrial School

A.K.A.: Astor Memorial School; Mott Street Industrial School
Location: 256-258 Mott Street, between East Houston and Prince Streets
Built: 1888-89; restored 2004
Architects: Vaux & Radford
National Register Number: 83001724
Listed: January 27, 1983
Visited: October 12, 2008



A is for Astor--John Jacob Astor III, who paid for the building and the property it stood on to honor his late wife. The school was one of many built for the Children's Aid Society, a charitable organization founded in 1853; this location served a local Italian-American community whose last vestiges in Nolita up and died decades ago. The National Register of Historic Places nomination form says the Children's Aid Society was founded to benefit the lives of the city's homeless children "through the establishment of lodging houses, reading rooms, and industrial schools." In a bit of what is perhaps a misplaced focus, the form gives somewhat more detail about the building's architectural rather than civic virtues, Queen Anne style this and stepped gable that. In her book Alone in the World: Orphans and Orphanages, Catherine Reef is a bit blunter with the details as to what exactly TCAS did. For example: "The volunteer teachers were mainly were mainly well-to-do women who paid particular attention to the girls, hoping to prevent them from becoming prostitutes." Oh. Another fact: between 1854 and 1929, TCAS shipped over 100,000 indigent children from New York City to the Midwest where they'd find new families, something like indentured servitude, or a little of both. My god.

TCAS is still around. New Yorkers of a certain age (and economic strata, I suppose) best know it as the source of an insistent television jingle that goes "I'm really glad they made/The Children's Aid/Society." No YouTube evidence of it exists, it seems; you'll have to take my word for it.

81. E.V. Haughwout Building

Location: 488-492 Broadway, on the northeast corner of Broadway and Broome Street
Built: 1856-1857; restored 1995
Architects: John P. Gaynor; Daniel D. Badger (iron components); Joseph Pell Lombardi (restoration)
National Register Number: 73001218
Listed: August 28, 1973
Visited: June 21 and 24, and August 5, 2008

"If any building in New York deserves to be preserved in aspic, the Haughwout Building is it. With its skeleton of cast iron and its Otis elevator, this building is the best example of skyscrapers' roots." John Tauranac, The Empire State Building

Until the late 18th century, most buildings had their walls carry the weight of everything above them: such walls are called load-bearing walls. These walls, when made of brick, stone, or wood, will allow you to build only so high. For example, the north end of Chicago's Monadnack Building is one of the tallest brick load-bearing wall structures ever, but in order to carry the weight of all sixteen stories, the walls at the bottom floor are six feet wide. Theoretically the building could go even higher, but that'd mean the walls would need to be even thicker--and the thicker the walls get, the less space people have to occupy. New options arose with the mass production of metal alloys such as cast-iron and steel. A building could be construction from a frame of steel carries the weight of the exterior walls and everything else, and thank to steel's strength and lightness compared to other materials, these frames can be built very tall, allowing buildings to scale skyscraper heights.



The Haughwout uses metal as a structural element, and in that, it does prefigure the skyscraper. It also has a cast-iron façade whose repetition of prefabricated elements also serves as a prophecy of modern architecture, too. (I say more about this idea here.) But it doesn't actually have a "skeleton of cast iron," per se: its beams are timber and its north and east sides (the ones you can't see from the street) are good old-fashioned load-bearing masonry walls.

But yes, it had an elevator--the world's first passenger elevator. And I don't think I need to explain the importance of elevators to high-rises beyond pointing out that without an elevator, a great height is not something people are gonna want to scale on an everyday basis. This was the work of Elisha Graves Otis: while lifting devices were known at least since Archimedes, his wrinkle was a mechanism that would lock what was being lifted in place should its hoisting rope break, thus making vertical transportation reasonably safe for human use. It was steam-powered, did not have a fully-enclosed cab, and took a minute to go five stories; primitive, and not even that safe-sounding, but the company Otis founded would later be responsible for the elevators in such landmarks of New York height as the Flatiron, the Singer, the Woolworth, the Chrysler, the Empire State, and the World Trade Center. Today Otis Elevator is the biggest elevator company in the world.



It was built for the E.V. Haughwout & Co., a dry-goods purveyor of some repute. As Haughwout & Dailey, they supplied the Pierce White House with china; later Mary Todd Lincoln paid a visit to purchase a new set. Like the near-contemporary buildings for fellow retailers Cary, Howard & Sanger and Arnold, Constable & Company, and A.T. Stewart, the Haughwout was designed to overwhelm both the consumer and the passerby with bounty, inside and out. (It occurs to me that perhaps these stores aimed for an experience akin to the busyness of New York in microcosm.) Even twelve years after it opened, The New York Times could still describe the store as "colossal" in a A guide to Christmas shopping that also exhaustively enumerates the wares for sale:

"Besides their immense stock of crockery, glassware, chandeliers, gas fixtures, &c., of every descriptions, the HAUGHWOUTS have their store literally crammed from top to bottom with holiday goods. Bronzes of all varieties and patterns, statues, statuettes, Parian marbles, the Rogers groups, jardinieres, vases, artificial flowers and bouquets, bonbonnieres, jewelry, perfumery and handkerchief boxes, nicknacks of every description, in bronze and glass, and suited to the most moderate as well as the most expensive tastes..." The New York Times December 18, 1869

This, mind you, was only three floors (the top two were dedicated to decoration and manufacture) on a 6,000 square feet lot. Small as it was by our standards, an 1859 lithograph shows that in a city still dominated by small and sober Greek Revival buildings, it must've been received like a iron angel floated down from a cloud. Modeled after Biblioteca Sansoviniana in Venice, the façade's basic element is a window framed by an arch on top of two fluted Corinthian colonnettes, then framed again by two full columns of similar design. This gets repeated nearly a hundred times on the Haughwout's south and west faces, letting the wide and high windows shoot light through the interior. The result is the building seems both "richly sculpted," as Christopher Gray calls it, and as porous as a sponge.



Subject for further research: based on Google Books and the New York Times archive, it seems to me the Haughwout languished in a kind of fully-public obscurity once cast-iron façades went out of style, going about largely unremarked by the architectural intelligentsia for close to maybe half a century or longer, and had to wait quite a bit after the skyscraper retroactively rewrote much of architectural history in its image until it was recognized as an omen of things to come and re-recognized as beautiful. Even after that happened, even after it had been landmarked by the city and appeared on the National Register, it still took a while before it got properly restored--photos taken as part of the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1967 and 1970 make it look as if the windows above the first floor hadn't been washed for decades. Finally, in 1995, it got repainted--a cream instead of the black it had for a while--and had missing details replaced.

Only thirteen years later, it looks like it could use another coat of paint, with rust streaks running down here and there. No wonder cast-iron façades in New York City seem to have been designed with less and less detail as the 19th century progressed, evolving from the richly textured Cary and 75 Murray Street buildings to blunter, sparer neo-Grecs: after a while people musta realized that more detail meant more to paint and more to clean.

80. 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; August 8 and 31, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



To recap:

80a. 390 West Broadway
80b. 107 Spring Street and 105 Mercer Street
80c. 327, 325, 323, and 321 Canal Street
80d. 139 Greene Street and 143 Spring Street
80e. 307-311 Canal Street (a.k.a. The Arnold, Constable Building)
80f. 502-504 Broadway (a.k.a. Bloomingdale's SoHo.)
80g. 443-445 Broadway and 18 Mercer Street
80h. 383-385 and 391-393 West Broadway
80i. 427-429 Broadway (a.k.a. The A. J. Dittenhoefer Building)
80j. 448 Broome Street
80k. 65, 67, 69-71, 73, 75, 77, 79 and 81 Greene Street
80l. 28-30 Greene Street (a.k.a. The Queen of Greene Street)
80m. 72-76 Greene Street (a.k.a. The King of Greene Street)
80n. 47-49 Mercer Street
80o. 477-479 Broome Street and 469-475 Broome Street (a.k.a. The Gunther Building)
80p. 103-105 and 101 Greene Street
80q. 569-575 Broadway
80r. 109-111 Prince Street
80s. 549-555 Broadway (a.k.a. The Rouss Building)
80t. 112-114 Prince Street
80u. 484-490 Broome Street
80v. 443-449 Broome Street
80w. 561-563 Broadway (a.k.a. The Little Singer Building)
80x. 103-107 Prince Street (a.k.a. The SoHo Apple Store)
80y. 599-601 Broadway (and Forrest Myers' The Wall)
80z. 40 Mercer Street

Back down to Nolita, Little Italy, Chinatown and the Civic Center. But first: the E.V. Haughwout Building.

80z. 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; August 8 and 31, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



In 1800, the area in Manhattan later known as SoHo was largely farmland, with some development around Canal and Broadway. In 1850, it was largely middle-class residential. In 1900--by my untrustworthy estimate--85-90% of SoHo's buildings that survive today were standing. Nearly every trace of its residential life had been replaced with ornate buildings dedicated to industry and retail.

By 1950, the prime retail was long gone, having moved, like just about everything else in New York City, further and further uptown, to bigger and bigger spaces: up Broadway to 14th Street, then Ladies' Mile, then the mammoth emporiums of Macy's and Bloomingdale's and Lord & Taylor. Industry was still there but making a long, slow fade, away from the obsolete buildings of SoHo. Upscale women's apparel, once its bedrock, was being made in the Garment District, leaving the neighborhood for the less respectable kinds, like underwear. Industry in general was moving away from the city, with the highways and airports built after the war making it economically practical to place factories outside the heart of the city, to the suburbs and beyond. Outside the city you could build big to produce big; as Charles R. Simpson put it in his book SoHo: The Artist in the City:

"The most competitive plants were very large, one-story buildings which could incorporate the new continuous material flow-systems. Mechanization, the key to the competitive advantage, had raised the average floor area per employee from 1,140 square feet in 1922 to 4,550 square feet in 1945."

A quick skim through the city government's map portal shows just how inadequate SoHo was to contemporary industry: the lot size of its buildings range from 502-504 Broadway's 16,670 square feet to 112-114 Prince Street's paltry 3,000; the old rowhouses from the early 19th century run even smaller. Simpson again:

"While suburban plants were accommodating block-long, continuous-bake ovens and huge rotary presses, firms in the South Houston District were finding that even forklift trucks were too large for use in thirty-foot wide structures and eight-by-eight foot elevators."

Artists took them over these old buildings, starting around the late 50s. And from then on ours is a familiar story of official arrogance and civic revolt, invisibility and edginess and unhipness. There are times when it seems like every person on every blog with a tenuous connection to New York knows about how Quango Moloch Robert Moses wished to piledrive an expressway thru Broome Street, destroying this and this and this and this and OMG this. And how Jane Jacobs helped bring the man down, fucking up one public hearing on the plan by destroying the stenotype machine recording the event, saying "There's no tape, so there's been no meeting." Or how all those artists sought changes in the zoning laws to make their illegal residences legit in the eyes of the law. And how the galleries and the restaurants and the museums and the luxury shops and the developers and the chains and the cupcake stores all followed. The script is so central to mythology of New York City urbanism that I feel no great urge to explain in any great detail how we got from this point to now; instead, I want to wave off versions of it as cliché. There are those who look at something like Jean Nouvel's blue-baby 40 Mercer Street building (pictured above), with its units priced at $6.9 and $8.2 million, as a sign that SoHo's lost its "edge" (which seems to have something to do with picturesque squalor, or the poor regarded as mere objects of aesthetic contemplation). Instead, I'd point out that the neighborhood has come full-circle of a sort: once residential, now residential again; once retail mecca, now retail mecca again. Not that this is an entirely satisfying run of events--no room for the middle class, the poor, art--but if anything's being betrayed, it's not the neighborhood's essence, if there ever was such a thing.

80y. 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; August 8 and 31, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



The photo above should actually be rotated clockwise ninety degrees, but I prefer it this way: instead of hoist beams (an echo of New York's early industrial life?), these metal projections look like alien sentries facing the dawn. They form part of Forrest Myers' 1973 sculpture The Wall, the perfect introduction to SoHo, should you be entering it from the North on Broadway. It says to the world in secret handshake language:

THE SOHO CHAMBER OF COMMERCE WELCOMES YOU
HOME OF WEIRD ARTSY SHIT SINCE THE '50S
KIWANIS/AMERICAN LEGION/KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS

The artwork consists of 42 aluminum beams affixed to 42 steel braces on the north side of 599-601 Broadway (J. Odell Whitenach, 1917). The braces support the building as its neighbors aren't there anymore, demolished during the construction of an IND subway line during the 1930s. As Christopher Gray notes, right from the beginnning the walls left bare after the mass demolition were put to use as highly lucrative spots for advertising, a public role they still fulfill to this day. Beginning in 1997, the owners of 599-601 Broadway made overtures to remove the sculpture, in large part because they wanted to pimp out the wall for what was estimated to be $600,000 worth of annual ad revenue. The sculpture was dismantled and put into storage, the typical maelstrom of legal battles ensued, blah blah blah, it was all very protracted and knotty. And finally, in 2007, a deal was reached which allowed The Wall to be restored, albeit with smaller ads towards the bottom. From I've seen, they're considerably more subtle than the glib gaping Calvin Klein and DKNY eye-darts I'm used to round these parts: back in June, when I took most of the photography for this blog's SoHo entries, there were all-yellow mini-billboards announcing the new IKEA Brooklyn, proving an excellent color complement to The Wall's blues and teals: say what you will about IKEA (I like them!), the ad agency responsible actually put a little thought into making the ads respectful of their context.



Unless you're a rock critic friend of mine--or, well, gay like me--I suspect you don't care much about disco. But I do, I care very deeply about it: it's been inexhaustible inspiration on every front. So I cannot fail to mention that in December 1974, not long after The Wall was installed, the second floor of 599-601 Broadway became home to The Flamingo, a disco with an ultra-restrictive entrance policy: to be a club member, you'd have to pay $600 bucks a year (something like $2,000+ today!) and get the recommendation of three other members. The building's other side, 172 Mercer Street, hosted the even-more-illustrious The Gallery, where Nicky Siano, Larry Levan, and Frankie Knuckles ruled the roost from 1974 to 1977: can't even begin to tell you here why they matter, it’s like trying to tell a stranger ’bout rock and roll.