Bryant Park Place

This post also appears on the Bryant Park blog.

A few months ago the Landmarks Preservation Commission added the Engineers' Club building, now known as co-op residence Bryant Park Place, at 32 West 40th Street, to their list of New York City landmarks. In very good company, this Beaux-Arts clubhouse is flanked on either side by the Radiator Building, built in 1924, and the Scientific American Building, completed in 1925.
 

West 40th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 1935

The Engineers' Club was formed in 1888 to unify a profession growing in significance and numbers throughout the city. By the early 1900s, the club outgrew it's former location at Fifth Avenue and 35th Street, and club member Andrew Carnegie made an initial donation of $1 million to erect a new building.

Engineers' Club on West 35th Street and Fifth Avenue, 1897

Shortly after, he raised the amount to $1.5 million, to facilitate the construction of the Engineering Societies' Building, one block over on West 39th Street. The two buildings would connect on the ground floor, and have entrances on both 39th and 40th Streets.

Six well-known architects were invited to submit plans, and were each paid $1,000 for their submissions, whether they won or not. The small firm Whitfield & King beat out a few much larger firms, among them Carrère & Hastings, and won the contest to design and build the Engineers' Clubhouse on 40th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Another firm, Hale & Rogers, was chosen to design and build the Engineers' Societies Building on 39th Street. (Incidentally, Cargenie's wife, Louise Whitfield Carnegie was the sister of winning architect.) The firm also built the Carnegie building in Troy, NY.

The Engineers' Club, now, Bryant Park Place, at 32 West 40th Street, 1905

This 12-story Renaissance Revival clubhouse was completed in 1907, and was thought to be one of the most luxurious buildings of it's kind. Notable club members included Nikola Tesla (In 1917, a dinner was held in the adjoining building at 33 West 39th Street, in his honor after receiving the Edison Medal), Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, and H.H. Westinghouse. The building featured public and social spaces, as well as 66 sleeping rooms. Tesla was very fond of pigeons, and often fed them in adjacent Bryant Park on a favorite bench near the corner of Sixth Avenue and 40th Street.

Dining room at the Engineers' Club, 1910

The Engineers' Club sold the building to developer David Eshagin in 1979, and it was converted into a co-op in 1983. Both buildings were added to the National Registrar of Historic Places on August 30, 2007.

** All photos are from the MCNY digital collection.

Primary sources cited:
Landmark's Preservation Commission document, March 22, 2011
Landmark's Preservation Commission press release. March 22, 2011
NYT Streetscapes column, 1995

New York Public Library Turns 100!

This post also appears on the Bryant ark blog.

To commemorate the 100th birthday of the New York Public Library, and its central branch, the Stephen A. Schwarzman building, lets take a look back at the library through the years.

Before the Beaux-Arts building designed by architecture firm Carrère and Hastings was built, the two-block section of Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets was home to the Croton Reservoir. The reservoir was torn down in 1899 to make way for the library. To read more about the demolition of the reservoir, and subsequent building of the library, click here.

Construction began in 1902, and was no small feat. When completed, the library was the largest marble structure in the country up to that time. This photo, from the NYPL's digital photo collection on the central building, shows exterior marble underway in 1905.

Photo: NYPL digital collection

The library opened to the public on May 23, 1911 with an elaborate ceremony presided over by 27th President of the United States William Howard Taft. Those flags are massive.

Photo: LOC digital collection

In 1919 the building served as a backdrop for a WWI victory parade along Fifth Avenue. Every stationary part of the building and street appears covered in shields, spears, and eagles. Shields and crossed spears often signify the defense of freedom, and eagles have long been associated with power and the U.S. I'm guessing that's their significance as decorations. If anyone knows otherwise, please email me.

Postcard:Pisark's cards

In the mid-1930s the NYPL established an outdoor reading room and called it the Bryant Park Library at Central Building. Much like our current reading room, patrons could enjoy books, magazines and newspapers outside in the park. The 1930s reading room was located on the Upper Terrace, just behind the main library building, and staff librarians were on hand to assist patrons.

Photo: BP photo collection

The library gets a scrub in 1945, seen here from 42nd Street looking east toward 40th Street. The World's Tower building on 40th Street looks huge in comparison to surrounding structures; the Empire State building is off to the right, just behind the Engineer's Club building (recently designated a landmark by the Landmarks Preservation Commission).

Photo: MCNY digital collection

Librarians and archivists: making research easier for 100 years and counting.

Photo: NYPL digital collection

The Bryant Park lawn (no chairs!) and rear facade of the library, May 1984.

Photo: BP photo collection

In 1988 the NYPL put two floors of additional library stacks beneath Bryant Park's lawn, seen here in a rendering by Hanna Olin, the design firm responsible for BP's redesign.

Photo: BP photo collection

Around this time last year, Improv Everywhere paid a visit to the the reading room, and re-enacted (sort of) the opening scene from Ghostbusters.

The NYPL has been hosting a number of events in celebration of the centennial, most over this past weekend. The library also has a special exhibit called "Celebrating 100 Years" on view until December 31, 2011. Here's a NY Times review.

The Farley Post Office Building

The Farley General Post Office Building is located on the "superblock" between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, and 31st and 33rd Streets, within the 34th Street district in Manhattan.

It's massive, old, and almost looks out of place among the surrounding office buildings. A relic from a different time, its closest neighbor is Madison Square Garden. The Farley building was conceived and constructed to replace the 1878 General Post Office, located downtown on Park Row and Broadway.

Construction of the Pennsylvania Terminal Building, as it was called then, came on the heels of the completion of McKim, Mead & White's monumental Pennsylvania Station. In the photo below, taken in 1913, Penn Station sits in the foreground, with the Penn Terminal building just behind it, to the west, and, for a good measure of bizarre, a lone guy on the roof of the building in the lower right corner. He was probably counting Penn Terminal's colonnade of 20 Corinthian columns, designed to complement the facade of Penn Station. Both buildings were designed and built by McKim, Mead &White, Beaux-Arts kings in the early 1900s.

Photo: MCNY

Penn Station was completed in 1910, and that same year, ground was broken for the Penn Terminal building. Penn Terminal was finished in 1913, and opened for business in September, 1914. In this postcard, most likely issued shortly after the new post office opened, it's rendered quite majestically. The artist took some liberties with the gold-embellished columns, but it really was (and is) an impressive building.

Image: Pisark's Cards

In 1914, Ira Schnapp, who at the time was designing stamps for the Postal Department, was hired as a stone carver by the US Post Office Department to design, and hand-carve the famous quote on the building's front facade:

NEITHER SNOW NOR RAIN NOR HEAT NOR GLOOM OF NIGHT STAYS THESE COURIERS FROM THEIR APPOINTED ROUNDS

The quote comes from Herodotus' Histories 8.98, and refers to Angarum, the royal riding post in the Persian Empire. Schnapp had previous experience carving, having completed the front facade of the New York Public Library in 1911 when he was just 19 years old.

Around 1918, Penn Terminal was renamed General Post Office Building, and here it is in 1920.

Photo: NYPL Digital

In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed James A. Farley as the 53rd Postmaster General. Under Farley's leadership, a western annex was added onto the existing building in 1934, and The General Post Office building was extended all the way to Ninth Avenue, giving it superblock status. Farley served until 1940, successfully managing the postal service during the Great Depression, and greatly improving trans-continental mailing services.The next two photos are from the Smithsonian's flikr page, which is definitely worth a visit.

In this photo, taken on June 15, 1936, postmen exit the building to deliver the first round of  WWI "bonus army" checks. In 1932, WWI veterans demonstrated in Washington DC, demanding faster payment for their Service Certificate Payment. Click through the photo for more information.

Below, postmen storm the Eighth Avenue steps to deliver holiday packages in 1952, fourteen years before the building was designated a New York City landmark in 1966, and ten years before demolition began on its neighbor Penn Station in 1962 to make way for Madison Square Garden.

Smithsonian flikr

You can still see a good bit of Farley history in the Farley Museum, located in the north pavilion, as well as the building itself. I was fortunate enough to get a brief work-related tour of part of the building. Here are a few photos.

Detailed ceilings in the front foyer

Postal delivery bike on display

Carrier pigeon service, and pigeon capsules(!) in the museum 

  Filigree staircase

 Steel girders in the loading dock (probably original)

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To read a more in-depth post about the history of the building, check out   Daytonian in Manhattan, and for a more thorough look at the inside of the building as it is now, before it turns into the new Moynihan Station,  check out  Scouting NY.

World's Tower Building: A 40th Street Gothic High-Rise in the Middle of Midtown Art Deco-land

A version of this post also appears on the Bryant Park blog.

Recently, there was shift of offices here at work. I went from sitting in an open area, sort of a combo - cubicle/bullpen setting, to a room with four walls, a door, and two windows that actually open (rare for a midtown office building).  Being able to somewhat control light and temperature levels and tell when it's dark outside is very nice. Like many working archivists, most of my former jobs took place in dreary basement-level rooms with poor air circulation (great when you are sorting through 30 year-old Thermofaxes layered in dust, or rotting photographs reeking of developing fixer solution) and no natural light. Now, I look out the window and see this building.

Photo: A. Kumer

Photo: A. Kumer

The World's Tower, at 110 West 40th Street, between Sixth Avenue and Broadway, has 30 above-ground levels, and a glazed terra cotta facade. When this Neo-Gothic building was completed in 1913, it was the tallest of its kind, on an extremely narrow, 50 foot-wide footprint, and made a striking impression in mid-town Manhattan.


Photo: MCNY

The architecture firm, Buchman & Fox, was commissioned by budding real estate magnate Edward W. Browning. According to New York Times Streetscapes columnist Christopher Gray, Browning was eccentric, throughout his life, steadily acquiring adoptive daughters (and marrying one), as well as skinny mid-block high-rises. You can also see part of the Empire (Eltinge) theater in the bottom right, with Billie Burke (later to play Glinda the Good Witch of the North in The Wizard of Oz) on the marquee.


Photo: BPC Collection

Behold, midtown, more or less as we know it now. The above photograph, taken in 1935, and looking south-west from above and across Bryant Park, shows numerous high-rise buildings surrounding the Tower. The Union Dime Savings Bank building is in the lower right of the above photograph, and Bryant Park is just west, outside the bottom frame of the photograph.

**Note: The eccentric Browning link may not work w/o a NYT login. It's worth it though, so maybe get one and read the article anyway. Sorry!

Union Dime: Saved Dimes Turn into Prime Real Estate

In 1859, a group of thirty four business men founded and chartered a mutual savings bank. They named it Union Dime Savings Institute to show solidarity with the Federal Union as well as remind people that “dimes saved increased to dollars.”  They were also the first banking institution to use the word "Dime" in its title, though others soon followed. The bank first opened a modest office at Canal and Varick Streets. In 1867, they moved their headquarters to Canal and Laight Streets, and in 1876, to 32nd and Broadway:



photo: NYPL Digital Collection



This six-story white marble building was built in 1874, and in October of that year, Union Dime Savings Institute bought the title of the property from Rudolph A. Witthaus, for $275,000, nearly $70 per square foot. This was considered a fair amount of money for a neighborhood that hadn't quite achieved its desirable reputation.

Greeley Square, c. 1908, with the elevated 6th Avenue train station on the right.

The front façade faced Greeley Square and 32nd Street, and the building housed the Union Dime offices as well as apartments on its upper floors.  The bank remained there for the next 34 years before moving uptown eight blocks to the corner of 40^th Street and 6^th Avenue. The old building at 32^nd sold for a record high price of $1,000,000, or, about $250 a square foot. Aside from making news for its price tag, the deal aroused interest because the purchasers, City Investing Company, didn’t own any adjacent property, or have any plans for the space or building, suggesting to many, an intention to flip the property for a higher price.  

At around the turn of the century, the 34^th Street district was going through a massive transition. Improvements in mass transit led to the arrival of retail giants Macy’s, whose flagship store was built in 1901-1902, and Gimbels (1910).  The 6^th Avenue elevated train had been operating since 1878, but the early 1900s also saw the addition of the “Hudson Tubes” (New Jersey PATH train), and the completion of Pennsylvania Station in 1910. Additionally, the Hotel Martinique on 32^nd Street and Broadway finished its third phase of completion in 1910-1911, rounding out the district as a new hub for retail, transportation, and hospitality.

Regardless of the rise of the 34th Street district, in 1908, Union Dime purchased the corner lot on 40^th Street and 6^th Avenue, across from Bryant Park, for $1,000,000. (Many also know the block between 5th and 6th Aves on 40th Street as the longtime home of the Tesla Society, named after the inventor of wireless communication and alternating current electricity, Nikola Tesla.) Five row houses were demolished to make room for what The Independent referred to as “one of the most imposing banking edifices in the city” (vol. 68, p. 664). The Italian Renaissance building was designed by architect Alfred Taylor, and featured a 96 x 85 foot main banking room with 48 ft. tall ceilings.

View from Bryant Park (known then as Reservoir Square) looking towards 6th Ave. 40th Street is along the left. Photo, NYPL



View of the South side of the Union Dime building on 40th Street, looking east toward the park and the NYPL building. Photo, NYPL



I'm not sure when this building was torn down, but it was still there in the 1930s (upper left, just behind the 6th Avenue elevated train line):

And, in the 1950s, when this subway map was published and distributed by Union Dime:

It was probably torn down sometime in the mid-1950s, to make way for a 34-story office building designed by Kahn and Jacobs, and Sydney Goldstone. The building was completed in 1957, and is still there, looking much the same as it did in 1959, when a photo of it was published on the cover of Union Dime's 100th Anniversary booklet.

**Special thanks to Mr. Boyd Lewis at Union Dime, Inc. for his insight and interest, and a copy of the Union Dime 1959 yearbook.