87. Former Police Headquarters Building

Location: 240 Centre Street
Built: 1905-1909
Architect: Hoppin & Koen
National Register Number: 80002690
Listed: March 23, 1980
Visited: October 12, 2008



I got exhausted from this building. So much to take in, so much take pictures of.

It's suspiciously luxe, no? I wonder if the example of Washington, DC has primed us to expect government buildings to be massive bulks expressed in the terms of Greek austerity or a merely functional modernism. Detail is uncivic, a waste of the people's money, and in this building's case, perhaps wasted on the criminal element being hustled through its doors. At the time, though, such Beaux-Arts splendor was justified--or rationalized--by its salutary effect on all spectators; Francis Hoppin, one of the architects, was quoted by The New York Times as saying "...we want to impress both officer and prisoner...with the majesty of the law..." This is of a piece with the premises of the City Beautiful movement that ran contemporary with the building. Its idea was that beautiful cityscapes would inspire a populace--especially immigrant populations, like those surrounding the police headquarters--to transcend their abjection; it was a kind of kindred spirit to the premises of the "broken windows" theory of policing that's been popular in the last couple decades, as both stress people are more likely to be civic-minded when surrounded by evidence, however symbolic and however quotidian, that their surroundings matter.



It replaced a tiny Italianate building at 300 Mulberry Street, built in 1862 when Manhattan alone was home to about 800,000. Demographics alone can explain the HQ's obsolescence circa 1900, as by then Manhattan was a million stronger and the New York City Police Department was building precinct houses about the same size. 240 Centre Street itself, with its gymnasium for "fat policemen" and open-air playground for "poor little waifs and foundlings" (the NYT's words, so not kidding) was superseded in 1973 by the utterly charmless One Police Plaza--a building that, unlike this post's subject, will probably never receive a residential conversion.

86. Odd Fellows Hall

Location: 165-171 Grand Street
Built: 1847-1848; 1881-1882 (roof addition)
Architect: Trench & Snook; John Buckingham (roof addition)
National Register Number: 83001737
Listed: September 22, 1983
Visited: October 12, 2008



So I was writing this on Tuesday when suddenly the cool guy became President and I got a mite distracted. Anyway!

Fraternal orders are a living dead detail of American society, as much of the social-services work that was their original rationale for existence now done by the government and insurance companies, and with the whole idea of socialization with the like-minded towards lofty goals undermined by the collective realization that people are actually rather horrible and why on earth would you want to fraternize with them when there's the TV? (College fraternities and sororities are an exception to this decline, of course: drinking and sexing beats TV. For now.)

The Independent Order of Odd Fellows once had had about 100 lodges in the city. They're still around, to be sure, but I'm not entirely sure there's even one NYC lodge around now. Their purpose was "[t]o visit the sick, relieve the distressed, to bury the dead and educate the orphan...". This hall for the Odd Fellows was ostensibly constructed to do just that, with libraries, classrooms and lecture halls serving (I have to assume) the crush of city immigrants surrounding it. It also had rooms lavishly dressed up in eclectic styles, probably not for all those poor orphans but eh who knows?

Originally it had a dome, removed when the building was sold and two floors were added. They're a different style, Queen Anne mansard over Italianate brownstone; they're like a fetching Sunday hat.

OK, I'm still distracted.

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.