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The New York Herald building at West 35th Street where Broadway meets Sixth Avenue, was
a two-story building designed by Stanford White of architecture firm McKim,
Mead & White. White was commissioned to build it for friend James Gordon Bennett Jr.
to house the new Herald offices when
the paper moved uptown from Park Row in 1894. The story of the Herald and its founders are here, here, and here.
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| Photo: MCNY |
The Herald had offices in this building until Bennett Jr.’s death in 1918. Soon
after, Frank Munsey bought the paper and merged it with the New York Sun to create the Herald-Sun. The new combo-paper’s
offices were moved to West 42nd Street.
The north half of the building was
demolished in 1921, leaving only the southern part, statues intact on the building’s façade.
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| Photo: MCNY |
Eventually, in 1930, a new, 24-story office building was designed and built by the architecture firm Clinton & Russell where the northern half used to be. The firm was founded in 1894, the same year the Herald building was completed (weird coincidence!).
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| Photo: Berenice Abbott via the NYPL and MCNY |
In the 1930s the Sixth Avenue Group
(a business improvement group of sorts) sponsored a contest to re-design and “beautify” the area following construction
of a new underground subway line and station, and the razing of the Sixth
Avenue elevated line. The low rise portion of the Herald building was completed
in 1940. I’m pretty sure that "completed" meant that the building was stripped of its Stanford White-designed façade work
and given the 1940s-1950s simple (sterile) treatment. The front windows are much larger in the new building, and the ground floor looks lower, but I think the building's original bones are still there. That same year,
the James Gordon Bennett memorial was installed in Herald Square in the form of
a 40 ft. tall monument, unveiled during a dedication ceremony on November 19,
1940.
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| Postcard: Pisark's |
Herald Square and the surrounding
area went into a decline in the 1970s and 1980s, but were brought back to life
with a late 1990s renovation by the 34th Street Partnership.The building is still there, and the first two floors are currently home to a massive Duane Reade.Time marches on.
Additional Sources:
Kruger, Richard. The Paper: The Life and Death of the New
York Herald Tribune
“Sixth Ave. Group to Beautify
Parks,” NYT, March 24, 1939
“Frank A. Munsey Buys the Herald
and the Telegram,” NYT, January 15, 1920
