110 Years ago today the Manhattan Bridge opened to traffic. The bridge was the last of the East River bridges to be constructed, following the Brooklyn Bridge (1883) Williamsburg Bridge (1903) Queensboro Bridge (1909). Utilizing a weight-saving Warren Truss, the bridge was the first modern steel suspension bridge and paved the way for future record-breaking bridges. The grand Beaux-Arts arch and collonade entry on the Manhattan side of the bridge was designed by Carrere & Hastings and opened in 1915. On the Brooklyn side, two female figures representing Brooklyn and Manhattan designed by Daniel Chester French flanked the entrance to the bridge. The statues were later moved to the Brooklyn Museum.
Today the bridge carries over 450,000 commuters daily; 85,000 vehicles; 950 subway trains carrying 340,900 riders across four subway lines; and 4,000 bicyclists on a protected bike path. Over three-quarters of all bridge crossings are public transit!
Upper View of Brooklyn Tower from Main Cables 1996
Manhattan Bridge
View from Brooklyn Tower Balcony 1997
PHOTO OF THE DAY
Our campaign continues to have this food truck garage cleaned up or closed by the Sanitation Dept. Last summer it was reported and still no permanent improvements. East from a food truck…NO WAY!!
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UNTAPPED NEW YORK NATIONAL POSTAL MUSEUM/ SMITHSONIAN MUSEUM
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
Once Ubiquitous in Skyscrapers, Rochester’s Mail Chute Building Languishes
March 1, 2026
Western New Yorkers can always count on finding a little piece of home in the lobbies of historic buildings across the country and the world, including the Empire State Building, the Savoy Hotel in London, and the Bacardi Building in Havana.
It’s likely that the mail chute, which quickly conveyed letters from the highest stories of ever-growing towers to their lobbies for pick-up, is emblazoned with the eagle insignia and name of the Cutler Mail Chute Company of Rochester, New York.
The first mail chute was installed in the Elwood Building in Rochester in 1884. The experiment was successful and chutes were installed in two New York City office buildings. The first mail chutes were limited to railroad stations and public buildings.
By 1905, the US Postal Service allowed mail chutes to be placed in hotels taller than five stories and in apartment houses with more than 50 residential apartments.
Holding the patents of James Goold Cutler, a Rochester architect and mayor, the Cutler company exercised a virtual monopoly on mail chute production in the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries, the boom years of high-rise construction.
A 1920 headline labeled the Cutler mail chute an “essential part of every skyscraper equipment,” with the subsequent article noting the company “has the only factory in the world devoted to the production of mail chutes.”
That factory is the humble 1908 structure at 76-94 Anderson Avenue in Rochester’s Neighborhood of the Arts (NOTA), but passersby who look carefully will see the Cutler eagle rendered in terracotta gazing down from its parapet.
With its history producing a singular product found in buildings across the world until its closure in 1971, as well as its well-preserved early twentieth century industrial architectural features including its intact sawtooth roof, the Cutler Mail Chute Company building uniquely testifies to the city’s and the nation’s industrial history and graces a neighborhood transformed by a focus on arts and culture.
However, recent redevelopment plans appeared online that were unsympathetic to the history embodied by the site and indicated demolition as a possibility, prompting concerned neighbors to enlist the help of The Landmark Society of Western New York.
Led by the NOTA Neighborhood Association and guided by preservation architect and researcher Christopher Brandt, former Landmark Architectural Research Coordinator, Cynthia Howk, and The Landmark Society, advocates quickly took action to pursue City Landmark designation — an important tool that would require the City’s Preservation Board to review and approve future changes to the structure’s character-defining exterior.
While the Preservation Board recommended designation, the Planning Commission denied the application, citing concerns that designation would hamper development efforts.
Yet adaptive reuse has proven to be a catalyst for redevelopment by retaining the character and history that make a place distinctive and community-supported. This has been the story of many of Rochester’s historically significant buildings.
With no further local recourse available, The Landmark Society has filed a lawsuit challenging the Planning Commission’s decision. The case is awaiting a ruling, but the vision remains the same: that one of Rochester’s foremost connections to our nation’s architectural heritage can be retained and repurposed for new use, rather than lost to demolition or incompatible alterations.
The Landmark Society of Western New York has included the Cutler Mail Chute Company Building in its 2026 Five to Revive — a list that identifies opportunities for targeted strategic revitalization. The list calls attention to sites across Western New York in need of rehabilitation.
Through this list, the organization hopes to facilitate investment and protect the area’s architectural heritage, by working with owners, developers, investors, and other partners to create connections and reactivate buildings in their communities.
Cutler Mail Box and Chute Natioan Postal Museum
As urban business centers flourished in the 19th century and buildings grew vertically, rather than horizontally in response to growing urban land values, the Post Office Department sought an easier way for occupants to mail their letters. It was more convenient to collect the mail inside the office buildings instead of forcing tenants to deposit their mail in boxes on the street or post offices. The answer was the creation of mail chutes that would extend from the top floor to a receiving box located at ground level.
The first mail chute was installed in the Elwood Building in Rochester, New York in 1884. The experiment was successful and chutes were installed in two New York City office buildings. The first mail chutes were limited to railroad stations and public buildings. By 1905, the postal service allowed mail chutes to be placed in hotels taller than five stories and in apartment houses with more than 50 residential apartments.
This receiving box, which was located at the bottom of the mail chute, was manufactured by James G. Cutler, who received patent #284,951 for his design. which stated that the box must “be of metal, distinctly marked ‘U.S. Letter Box,'” and that the “door must open on hinges on one side, with the bottom of the door not less than 2’6″ above the floor.” If a receiving box was to be placed in a building that was more than two stories high, the bottom of the box was required to be outfitted with an elastic cushion to “prevent injury to the mail.”
Mail chutes had to be accessible along their entire length and at least three-fourths glass fronted so that postal workers could easily locate and remove any lodged mail. Congress placed all chutes and subsequent mail matter under the exclusive custody of the Post Office Department in 1893 and made all chute construction work subject to postal regulations. Cutler’s company was the sole manufacturer of mail chutes and receiving boxes until 1904. During those 20 years, the company produced more than 1600 receiving boxes, and continued to produce them for several more years. This receiving box was constructed in 1920.
The wonderful mail box in Grand Central Terminal
PHOTO OF THE DAY
THE WONDERFUL ENTRANCE TO 575 LEXINGTON AVENUE, THE FORMER GENERAL ELECTRIC BUILDING
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All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
On 57 Great Jones Street in Greenwich Village sits the studio of Jean-Michel Basquiat, an artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent best known for his graffiti art. As part of the graffiti duo SAMO, Basquiat created works like the Irony of Negro Policemen series, and he would often use a crown above his signature. A number of Basquiat’s artworks are still found throughout Lower Manhattan, some of which are protected by preservation societies.
Behind the unassuming exterior of 1467 Bedford Avenue in Crown Heights, Brooklyn is a flourishing event space with myriad historical connections to New York City’s political scene. The former campaign headquarters of Congresswoman and Brooklyn icon Shirley Chisholm, and later the community venue Alpha Space, the building that was built in 1906 has become the new home of Unbossed Media LLC, an initiative working to provide the resources for local artists who haven’t yet had them to get their projects off the ground. Chisholm was the first African American woman to serve in Congress, both the first woman and African American to run for the Oval Office, and the second woman and first African American woman to serve on the House Rules Committee. Chisholm was elected to Congress in 1968 and ran for the presidency four years after. A plaque for Chisholm, created by Alpha Space, was once hanging on the side of the building, but had fallen off due to the wind.
Nearby, the Shirley Chisholm Circle in Brooklyn’s Brower Park is a circular terrace named for her. Chisholm was born in Bedford-Stuyvesant and went on to earn a Master’s Degree in Elementary Education, often teaching her classes outside in Brower Park. As a champion of equal rights, Chisholm would introduce Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge (SEEK), a program designed to help disadvantaged students enter college. For her work in Congress, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama.
Today, a plaque in Brower Park includes her quote “When I die, I want to be remembered as a woman who lived in the 20th century and who dared to be a catalyst of change.” Chisholm is also honored by the newly-created Shirley Chisholm State Park in Spring Creek, Brooklyn, the largest state park in New York City.
Hunts Point Slave Burial Ground (1909)
Joseph Rodman Drake Park
In Joseph Rodman Drake Park in Bronx’s Hunts Point neighborhood is an enclosed cemetery and recently discovered slave burial ground. When Drake Park was originally created in 1909, an 18th-century cemetery of wealthy slave-owning families like the Hunts and Leggets were preserved. Yet in 2013, students at Public School 48 analyzed census data and maps to identify a potential spot where the remains of 156 Black and Indian slaves in Hunts Point, per the 1790 Census, ended up.
The students and their teacher Justin Czarka found a black-and-white photograph from 1910 showing several markers resembling headstones, labeled on the back, “Slave burying ground, Hunts Point Road.” The US Department of Agriculture sent scientists to perform soil tests using radar in the cemetery in the summer of 2013, and several areas of the park were determined to have “anthropogenic features” as “likely potential burial sites.” A plaque honoring the burial ground was put up in 2014.
Louis Armstrong House Museum (1910)
The Louis Armstrong House in Corona, Queens, was where jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong lived with his wife Lucille Wilson from 1943 until his death in 1971. The brick house was designed by architect Robert W. Johnson in 1910, and it now serves as a museum with archives from Armstrong’s writings and concerts. Many gifts that Armstrong received while on tour internationally are also displayed inside the museum, such as ornate paintings.
Originally from New Orleans, Armstrong is perhaps best known for singing “What A Wonderful World” with his characteristic gravelly voice. He pioneered scat singing with songs like “Heebie Jeebies,” and he also famously covered “West End Blues” and “When the Saints Go Marching In.” He led the “Hot Five” and “Hot Seven” ensembles in the 1920s, and he would also appear in films like Hello, Dolly! and High Society.
Addisleigh Park Historic District (1910s)
Addisleigh Park is a historic district in the St. Albans neighborhood of Queens that served as the home of many prominent African-American figures and today is an African American and Jamaican enclave. More than 400 houses were built in the area initially as a segregated area for white people, yet in the 1930s, this policy was reversed and many African-American families began to move into the area.
With easy access to Manhattan, the epicenter of the Swing Era, many African-American jazz musicians moved to the suburban haven of Addisleigh Park. Fats Waller, Count Basie, and Ella Fitzgerald each had homes in the area, as well as Jackie Robinson and W.E.B. DuBois. Many of the original homes have been preserved, and the area was declared a historic district in 2011 by the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission.
St. Philip’s Episcopal Church (1911)
St. Philip’s Episcopal Church on West 134th Street is the oldest black Episcopal parish in New York City, founded in 1809 by free African Americans. The church was originally named the Free African Church of St. Philip and was first located in the Five Points neighborhood, before moving north to Harlem. The church’s first rector was Rev. Peter Williams, Jr., an abolitionist who also supported free black emigration to Haiti and served on the executive committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society.
Many of the church’s members were pioneers in their fields, including many teachers, doctors, restauranteurs, and marine traders. The church would suffer damage in the mid-1800s due to vandalism by whites and by the NYPD during the 1863 Draft Riots. The church moved to Harlem in the early 1900s and was designed by Tandy & Foster, prominent African-American architects, in the Neo-Gothic style. The church included among its parishioners Dr. James McCune Smith, the first African American to hold a medical degree. Among its members were W.E.B. DuBois, Thurgood Marshall, and Langston Hughes.
Audubon Ballroom (1912)
The infamous Audubon Ballroom at 166th Street is where Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965 while giving a speech. The building was originally built as the William Fox Aubudon Theater in 1912, designed by Thomas Lamb. Shabazz died either en route to or at the Harlem Hospital, across the street.
Today it is owned by Columbia University, which provides space for the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Education Center. Columbia University also preserved the facade of the theater.
Hotel Theresa (1913)
The Hotel Theresa in Harlem
The Hotel Theresa on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard is an iconic 13-story building in Harlem that served as a center for African-American life in the mid-1900s. Now an office building known as Theresa Towers, the hotel was considered the “Waldorf of Harlem” and was designed by German stockbroker Gustavus Sidenberg in 1913. As a symbol of Black culture in Harlem, the hotel actually only accepted white guests until 1940, when African-American businessman Love B. Woods bought the hotel and ended its policy of racial segregation.
The hotel served as the location of organizations like the Organization of Afro-American Unity, founded by Malcolm X, and the March on Washington Movement, organized by activist A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. Politicians like Roy Brown, Secretary of Commerce under Bill Clinton, and Charles Rangel, member of the House of Representatives, worked in the hotel. Fidel Castro and his associates famously stayed at the hotel in 1960 for the opening session of the United Nations, renting out 80 rooms. Castro was visited at the hotel by figures like Nikita Khrushchev, Langston Hughes, and Gamal Abdel Nasser. However, the hotel closed in 1967 as the hotel suffered from business due to Harlem’s deterioration, and the building was renovated into office spaces in 1970.
Duke Ellington House (1915)
At 935 St. Nicholas Avenue in Washington Heights is the Duke Ellington House, a National Historic Landmark named for the noted African-American composer and jazz pianist who frequently played at the still-active Cotton Club in West Harlem. The Late Gothic Revival style apartment, specifically Apartment 4A, was where Ellington lived from 1939 to 1961, during which time he published the extended jazz work Black, Brown, and Beige.
Ellington was famous for performing Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the ‘A’ Train,” describing a route to Sugar Hill. Other of his noteworthy compositions include “Mood Indigo,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” and “In a Sentimental Mood.” His band included musical talents like saxophonist Johnny Hodges and trombonist Juan Tizol, and his album Such Sweet Thunder was actually based on the works of William Shakespeare.
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PHOTO OF THE DAY
A NEW WAY TO FIND 900 MAIN STREET Many Coler residents and visitors have been misdirected by APPs that lead them to the back of Coler instead of the Main Entrance at 900 Main Street.. While the APPs are being modified, new clear signage is being posted at the north end. THANKS TO COLER ADMINSTATION AND NYC H+H FOR HELPING SOLVE THIS. Pictured are Jovemay Santos, Christina Delfico and Verna Fitzpatrick.
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
For the last few hundred years, New York City has been one of the country’s epicenters of African-American and Black culture, from early free Black settlements in the 1820s to musical icons in the 1930s to modern-day Black activists. All throughout the city there are historic sites where influential Black figures lived and practiced their craft, from the Lewis Latimer House in Flushing to the Claude McKay Residence in Harlem. According to writer Laura Itzkowitz (an Untapped New York contributor and former managing editor) in her article for Architectural Digest “When Architecture and Racial Justice Intersect,” only 2% of the nearly 95,000 entries on the National Register of Historic Places focus on the experience of Black Americans, but you don’t have to search hard to find an abundance of sites connected to Black history around New York.
New York City is fortunate enough to have many relics of African-American struggles and victories preserved as landmarks. Yet there are many others, especially in the Bronx, that are forgotten or at best, commemorated only by a plaque. Here is our guide to Black historic sites in New York City across the five boroughs, including both landmarked and un-landmarked sites. Some have historic plaques, others do not.
We have organized the locations by date first built, but in some cases the connection to Black history may have occurred later than when the building was originally built, started in an earlier building that has been demolished, or have been connected to the site since the very beginning. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but we attempted to highlight here sites that should be known to the public as well as those that have slipped under the radar.
The African Burial Ground National Monument is found in the Civic Center area of Lower Manhattan that contains the remains of more than 419 Africans from the 17th and 18th centuries. It is estimated that there were as many of 10,000 to 20,000 burials in the 1700s, and it is considered New York’s oldest African-American cemetery.
In the 1600s, the Dutch West India Company brought over slaves from Angola, Congo, and Guinea, and by the mid-17th century, a village called the Land of the Blacks saw 30 African-owned farms in modern-day Washington Square Park. It was estimated that 42% of households in New York had slaves, which eventually totaled about 2,500 by 1740. Slavery was ultimately abolished on July 4, 1827, yet only one-third of the city’s blacks were free in 1790. The site was initially labeled on old maps as “Negro Burying Ground,” and the first recorded burials for people of African descent occurred in 1712, but it is speculated that the burial ground was in use two decades earlier.
Some of the bodies of the deceased were illegally dug up for dissection, which sparked the 1788 Doctors’ Riot. The city shut down the cemetery in 1794, and urban development began taking place over the burial ground. The land remained largely forgotten until bones were discovered in 1991 during an archaeological survey by the General Services Administration. Protests occurred just a year later after it was discovered that the GSA had damaged some of the burials and took little care in excavation efforts. George H.W. Bush signed a law to redesign the area and to install a $3 million memorial, which was dedicated in 2007 to commemorate the role of Africans and African Americans throughout New York City’s history. In 1993 the African Burial Ground was designated a New York City Landmark and a National Historic Landmark. It is also a National Historic Monument.
Dyckman Farmhouse
The Dyckman Farmhouse is Manhattan’s oldest remaining farmhouse, built around 1785 in the Dutch Colonial style. The home is situated in a small park in Inwood on the corner of Broadway and 204th Street, and today it serves as a New York City Landmark and a National Historic Landmark. William Dyckman, who constructed the home, died just three years after constructing the farmhouse, yet his son Jacobus would later inherit the house along with his wife Hannah, his eleven children, and a number of slaves and free blacks. Today, Inwood is home to a forgotten slave cemetery believed to have the remains of a number of the Dyckman family’s slaves.
As part of the DyckmanDISCOVERED initiative, the museum has investigated the stories of those enslaved by the Dyckman family. In 1820, a free black woman, a free black boy, and an enslaved man inhabited the home, and it is estimated that seven or eight slaves lived in the house when it opened. It was believed that freed blacks and enslaved workers would have used the house’s Summer Kitchen, a small one-and-a-half-story building adjacent to the farmhouse. A free black woman named Hannah worked as a cook for the Dyckmans and was born between 1784 and 1794. Although it was believed that the home housed a number of enslaved workers, the only one fully identified was Francis Cudjoe, who was set free in 1809. An official document stated:
“Recorded for and at the request of Francis Cudjoe this 11th day of January 1809. Know all men by these present that I Jacobus Dyckman of the City of New York on consideration of motive of humanity and sum of one dollar to me in hand paid Do hereby manumit and set free a Black man named Francis Cudjoe aged about Forty years. In witness whereof I have hereunto subscribed had my name and affixed my seal this eleventh day of January Anno Dominis one thousand eight hundred and nine. Jacobus Dyckman, Witness Peter.”
Seneca Village in present-day Central Park
Seneca Village was a settlement in the 19th-century in present-day Central Park, founded in 1825 by free blacks. With a population of around 250 residents at its peak, the village featured three churches, a school, and two cemeteries. Bounded by 82nd and 89th Streets, Seneca Village would exist for over three decades before villagers were ordered to leave due to the construction of Central Park.
A white farmer named John Whitehead bought the land in 1824 and sold three lots of it to an African American man named Andrew Williams and twelve lots to the AME Zion Church. After the outlawing of slavery, many African Americans began to move into the village from downtown. A number of Irish immigrants fleeing the Potato Famine also settled in the village. Most of the homes were well-constructed, two-story buildings, the Central Park Conservancy tells us, rather than shanties which were in the minority of the buildings. Workers typically were employed in construction and food service, with many women working as domestic servants. The African Union Church in Seneca Village was one of the city’s first black schools, named Colored School 3.
The Seneca Village Project, founded in 1998, was created to raise awareness of the settlement’s history as a middle-class, free black community. Today, a plaque commemorates the site where Seneca Village once stood. There have also been recent archaeological excavations to uncover traces of Seneca Village, and in 2011, researchers discovered foundation walls of the home of William Godfrey Wilson, who was a sexton for All Angels’ Church in the village. 250 bags were filled with artifacts during the digs, including the leather sole of a child’s shoe. Central Park recently celebrated the history of Seneca Village through new historic signage as well as free tours during Black History Month, of which Untapped New York partnered with the Conservancy to offer a special tour to our Insiders members.
Blazing Star Cemetery is in Rossville, Staten Island nearby the Sandy Ground community
Sandy Ground was a community in Rossville, Staten Island, that was founded by free African Americans around the year 1828. Only a few months after slavery was abolished in New York City, an African American man named Captain John Jackson purchased land in the area, and the area quickly became a center of oyster trade. Many settlers would harvest and sell oysters at the nearby Prince’s Bay.
Sandy Ground was also an important stop on the Underground Railroad, and the settlement is currently considered one of the oldest continuously settled free black communities in the U.S. A church, a cemetery, and three homes from the settlement are today designated as New York City landmarks, yet most of the original houses were destroyed in a 1963 fire. Today, the Sandy Ground Historical Museum is home to the largest collection of documents detailing Staten Island’s African-American culture, history, and freedom.
Historic Weeksville in Brooklyn
Like Seneca Village, Weeksville was a neighborhood that was founded by free African Americans, situated in modern-day Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Weeksville was founded in 1838 by James Weeks, an African-American longshoreman who bought land from Henry C. Thompson, a free African American land investor. The land was previously owned by an heir of John Lefferts, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
By the 1850s, Weeksville’s population had surpassed that of Seneca Village, with upwards of 500 residents from across the East Coast, with over a third of residents born in the south. Weeksville was home to two churches, a school (Colored School No. 2), and a cemetery, as well as the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum. Weeksville also had one of the first African-American newspapers called the Freedman’s Torchlight and served as headquarters of the African Civilization Society. Additionally, the area was a refuge for many African Americans who left Manhattan during the 1863 Draft Riots. Four historic houses dating back to the time of the village collectively make up the Hunterfly Road Houses, listed on the NRHP in 1972. The discovery of these houses led to the creation of the Weeksville Heritage Centerdedicated to the preservation of Weeksville.
A memorial in The Olde Towne of Flushing Burial Ground honoring the dead who are buried there.
The Olde Towne of Flushing Burial Ground is a small burial ground alternatively known as the “Colored Cemetery of Flushing.” A large circular monument notes the burial of 500 to 1,000 people, primarily African Americans, Native Americans, and victims of four major epidemics of cholera and smallpox in the mid-1800s. Acquired by the town of Flushing in 1840 from the Bowne family, the burial ground contains the bodies of slaves and servants of the Flushing elite, as well as members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Death certificates issued in the 1880s confirm that more than half of the buried were children under the age of five. About 62 percent of the buried were African American or Native American.
In 1936, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses decided to build a modern playground on the site of the burial ground. Local activist Mandingo Tshaka halted plans of renovating the cemetery to preserve its history. The Queens Department of Parks commissioned a $50,000 archaeological study in 1996 of the burial ground. In 2004, $2.67 million was allocated to this site, leading to the creation of a historic wall engraved with the names from the only four headstones remaining in 1919.
The Charlie Parker Residence at 151 Avenue B is a Gothic Revival-style rowhouse that served as the home of the legendary saxophonist from 1950 to 1954. Built in 1849, the rowhouse stands four stories tall and faces Tompkins Square Park. Parker lived on the ground floor with his wife Chan Richardson and their three children. By the time he moved, Parker had achieved great fame for helping to develop bebop with Dizzy Gillespie and for releasing standards such as “Ornithology” and “Yardbird Suite.”
He continued performing with jazz groups large and small while living at the home, releasing the album Bird and Diz in 1952. He notably performed at Massey Hall in Toronto in 1953 with jazz greats including Charles Mingus and Max Roach, resulting in the album Jazz at Massey Hall. Though, not all was smooth sailing at the rowhouse; he continued using heroin, and his health started to deteriorate. He spent time in a mental hospital after the death of his daughter in 1954 from cystic fibrosis and pneumonia. Parker died in 1954. In 1992, Avenue B between 7th and 10th Streets was renamed Charlie Parker Place. The Charlie Parker Jazz Festival is held annually at Tompkins Square Park.
St. George’s Episcopal Church, a National Historic Landmark, is located in Stuyvesant Square and is designed in the Early Romanesque Revival style. The original church was located near Trinity Church from 1752, and this new church was constructed from 1846-1856 by Charles Otto Blesch and Leopold Eidlitz, the latter of whom worked on the New York State Capitol Building.
Although not a predominantly African-American church, St. George’s is perhaps best known for having among its congregants Harry Thacker Burleigh, a Black composer and baritone. He was one of the first African-American composers to incorporate spirituals into much of his music. He was accepted to the National Conservatory of Music in New York and was known for his compositions like his versions of the spiritual “Deep River” and songs like “Little Mother of Mine.” Burleigh was hired as a soloist at St. George’s, at the time an all-white church, and the deciding vote in this decision was made by J.P. Morgan. Burleigh would go on to teach composer Antonín Dvořák “Negro melodies” and Native American music, which Dvořák would later incorporate into his famous Symphony From the New World and his American String Quartet.
Langston Hughes House
The Langston Hughes House on East 127th Street in Harlem was the home of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes where he wrote works like “Montage of a Dream Deferred” and “I Wonder as I Wander.” Built in the Italianate style in 1869, the house is a three-story building added to the NRHP in 1982.
Hughes used the top floor as his workroom for the last 20 years of his life. In 2019, the home received a National Trust for Historic Preservation grant, and today this home is the base of the I, Too, Arts Collective nonprofit, which preserves Hughes’s legacy and supports emerging underrepresented artists.
Lewis Latimer House
The Lewis Latimer House in Flushing, a red and white Victorian home, honors Lewis Howard Latimer, an African-American inventor and humanist born to fugitive slaves who lived in the home from 1903 until his death in 1928. Latimer was one of the founders of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Queens, and he was known for his work with figures like Hiram S. Maxim, Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. The red and white house, which dates back to around 1889, contains a museum dedicated to Latimer’s work and the achievements of other black scientists.
George Latimer, his father, escaped from Virginia to Boston before his subsequent capture and imprisonment. Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass strove to grant George freedom through a publication called “The Latimer Journal, and the North Star.” Growing up in the Antebellum period, Lewis Latimer joined the Union Navy in 1864 and later became an expert draftsman while working at a patent law office. After learning about physics and engineering, Latimer would work with Edison, under whom he invented and patented the carbon filament, which improved the production of the incandescent lightbulb. He also authored “Incandescent Lighting,” the foundation for modern electrical engineering theory. He would also go on to draft drawings for Bell’s invention of the telephone.
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UNTAPPED NEW YORK
PHOTO OF THE DAY
A NEW WAY TO FIND 900 MAIN STREET Many Coler residents and visitors have been misdirected by APPsthat lead them to the back of Coler instead of the Main Entrance at 900 Main Street.. While the APPs are being modified, new clear signage is being posted at the north end. THANKS TO COLER ADMINSTATION AND NYC H+H FOR HELPING SOLVE THIS.
All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated THIS PUBLICATION FUNDED BY DISCRETIONARY FUNDS FROM CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JULIE MENIN & ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE FUNDS.
The story of Harlem’s Last remaining Wood Clapboard House, Built at the Dawn of the Gilded Age
EPHEMERAL NEW YORK
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2026
ISSUE #1635
Can you stand another story of a storybook–like wood clapboard holdout? I hope so, because this 3 and a half-floor charmer, at 17 East 128th Street, has a backstory that dovetails with the urbanization of all of Manhattan.
Built toward the end of the Civil War and at the start of the Gilded Age, it’s a totem of Harlem’s transition from isolated farmland to a vital part of Manhattan’s cityscape. It managed to survive more than 160 years more or less intact because in all that time, it’s only had a handful of owners.
Let’s go back to mid-19th century Harlem. Mostly rural with well-spaced estate homes, farmhouses, and shantytowns, the area was cut off from the main city thanks to unreliable roads, plus spotty train and streetcar service.
Harlem’s population at that time numbered just 1,500, according to the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) report on 17 East 128th Street. By contrast, Manhattan as a whole had more than half a million residents.
But 200 years of farming hurt the quality of the soil, and during the 1860s, the city’s population swelled. Developers began eyeing Harlem for its potential as a fine new residential area, especially with the impending arrival of elevated trains, which could whisk residents downtown and back.
Enter a real-estate investor named Abraham Overhiser. Owner of the lot at 17 East 128th Street, he sold it to another investor for $2,200, and in turn in 1864 that investor sold it to a James Beach for $5,900—which gives you an idea of how hot land in Harlem was toward the end of the Civil War.
The house probably went up in 1864 or 1865. The exact builder isn’t known, but “the design of the structure, its detailing, and the type of building materials used in its construction indicate that the house at 17 East 128th Street had to have been built at roughly this time,” states the LPC report.
The architectural design was the fanciful French Second Empire with Italianate touches, both popular residential styles at the time. As for the choice of wood, it had not yet been banned in Harlem as a building material in Manhattan (due to its penchant to go up in flames). That wouldn’t happen until 1882.
James Beach stayed in the house until 1874, watching before his eyes the transformation of this part of Harlem into an enclave of fine brownstones, row houses, and churches. That year, he sold it to a Hannah Van Reed for $11,000. Van Reed and her husband shared the house for 12 years.
(Below, similar houses with front porches on East 128th Street between Park and Madison Avenues, 1932
In 1886, Viola H. Banning purchased the house, now surrounded by lovely residential blocks and just three streets away from the shopping, theaters, and services on bustling 125th Street. Banning lived in the house with her lawyer husband, Hubert A. Banning, who worked on Nassau Street downtown.
Sadly, Viola lost her husband on an elevated train platform in 1916. The Sun ran a small new item on June 5 of that year stating that a man’s body was found on the northbound platform at 66th Street. “Banning was on his way home when he dropped dead,” a reporter tersely wrote, misidentifying him as Herbert, not Hubert.
Viola continued to live in the house, passing it on to her son and daughter-in-law, who put it in a trust. After Viola’s death in the late 1920s, a trustee named Palmer Brooks sold the house for $12,000 to Margaret Lane, who seven years later sold the house for $1 to Louis and May Seeley. (Third image: the house in 1932)
The $1 sale “suggests some arrangement between Lane and the Seeleys,” states the LPC report. “Indeed, when Seeley, at the age of 90, sold the property in 1979, he told the buyer that he had inherited the property from his nanny. Evidently Margaret Lane was his nanny.”
At the time the LPC report was completed in 1982, it notes the current resident of the house as Carolyn Adams. Raised in Harlem, Adams joined the Paul Taylor Dance Company as a dancer and is described as being involved in numerous performance, preservation, and community events in the neighborhood.
A new owner appears to have purchased the house in 2015, completely updating the interior while maintaining its Second Empire and Italianate details. That includes the slate mansard roof, wood clapboard facade, and “gingerbread pendants” over the porch, which is in its original place—as are all the windows and the main entrance, notes the LPC report.
The details about the renovation in 2015 come from a sales listing, which seems to be active. The link to the listing includes dozens of gorgeous exterior and inside photos of this Civil War–era survivor, including the curvy banister and small backyard.
The listing price for 17 East 128th Street, still a one-family residence, isn’t so bad at $2.95 million. But it’s quite a lot higher than the $2,200 it went for in a very different version of Harlem in 1864.
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Edward Livingston Trudeau was born in 1848 in New York City to a family of physicians. During his late teens, his elder brother James contracted tuberculosis (TB) and Edward nursed him until his death three months later. At twenty, he enrolled in the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia College (now Columbia University), completing his medical training in 1871. Two years later, he was diagnosed with TB too.
Following current climate-therapeutic theories that promoted the relocation of patients to regions with atmospheric conditions favorable to recuperation, he moved to the Adirondack Mountains. Seeking as much open air as he possible could, almost continuously living outside, he subsequently regained his health. In 1876 he settled in Saranac Lake and established a small medical practice. It was the beginning of a remarkable career and a new chapter in American medical history.
Industrialisation & Disease
The Industrial Revolution marked a turning point in our relationship with the environment. New production systems delivered more goods for consumption, but in the process natural resources were exploited, poisonous fumes emitted, water and soil polluted. Burning coal produced an “ink-sea of vapor, black, thick, and multifarious as Spartan broth” (Thomas Carlyle).
City streets were covered with grease, the sky smeared with soot. Factory chimneys blocked out natural light. A dramatic rise in population exacerbated the effects of contamination. Urban life became unbearable. For most city dwellers physical nature was mere memory. Slag-heaps were a more ‘normal’ landscape than shrubs and bushes. Those who could carry the cost of escape fled to the suburbs.
Disease accounted for many deaths in industrial cities. The poor lived in cramped homes and worked in dirty factories. Children developed rickets and bone deformities. With a chronic lack of hygiene or sanitary care, no clean water, and no knowledge as to what caused diseases, epidemics such as cholera, typhoid, and typhus could be devastating.
Known as phthisis and consumption from Hippocrates through to the nineteenth century, the term tuberculosis was introduced in 1834 by the German physician Johann Lukas Schönlein. For considerable time, the widely accepted miasma theory had suggested that epidemics were caused by noxious “bad air” emanating from rotting organic matter. Eventually, medical science realized that invisible micro-organisms were the source of contagion by which germs could jump from person to person in crowded cities.
The epidemic wasting disease of TB became associated with the process industrialization which had forced a poorly nourished working class to live in drafty and damp dwellings. Between 1810 and 1815, the disease accounted for more than twenty-five percent of deaths in New York City. In 1900, it was still the country’s most common killer. Fear of the “graveyard cough” is reflected in such names as “white death” or “great white plague” (white referring to the anemic paleness of those affected).
From the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century specialist sanatoria were designed to isolate and protect well-heeled patients. Physicians advocated the jour médical, a regime of treatment that required a lengthy residence at a clinic. During the 1860s the twin villages of Davos Dorf and Davos Platz became a destination for European patients as the valley’s micro-climate was recommended for lung sufferers.
Pure Air & Heliotherapy
In 1863, German physician Hermann Brehmer founded his Heilanstalt für Lungenkranke in Göbersdorf, a “healing” village in Silesia’s Sudeten Mountains. Patients suffering from TB were promised a recuperation course with the aid of alpine air, nutritious food, crisp walks, and icy waterfall showers (Walddusche).
Brehmer’s encouragement of heliotherapy was a medical reversal. In the millennia preceding the industrial revolution, pallor was popular within the ruling classes, hinting at a noble life of leisure spent indoors. Whiteners to create a pale skin were widely used. Dark skin was associated with servitude and suggested toiling on the land. Industrialism halted the bourgeois preference for paleness. Physicians insisted that exposure to the sun would cure vitamin-deficiency diseases and enhance public well-being. Sunlight was thought to destroy the tubercle bacilli.
In 1882, Trudeau took notice of Hermann Brehmer’s ground-breaking methods in treating TB. Following the German example he founded the Adirondack Cottage Sanatorium in February 1885. The first patients were two sisters who had been factory workers in New York City. They were treated in a one-room cottage named “Little Red.”
In February 1897 Trudeau published an essay on “Sanitaria for the Treatment of Incipient Tuberculosis” in the New York Medical Journal in which he stressed the invigorating influence of a life spent out of doors. Being exposed to the severity of atmospheric conditions in the Adirondacks proved to be the best stimulant to the patient’s assimilative powers. The combination of pure air, hygiene, unspoiled nature, nutritious food, moderate physical exercise, and a routine of complete rest equaled health and well-being.
Trudeau insisted that a sanatorium should consist of a set of pavilions connected by galleries and constructed in a manner that each ward could be kept dust free. Ventilation and an abundance of sunlight were vital. In order to achieve this, he developed a cottage plan. The Adirondack Sanatorium cottages were one-story buildings with a capacity for four or five. Each patient had his/her own room which opened into a central sitting area with a veranda (the ubiquitous Saranac Lake “cure porch”) on which outdoor treatment was carried out. The library, recreation pavilion, chapel, and infirmary were all separate buildings.
If, Trudeau insisted, the same principle could be applied to the tenement house residents of New York, it would be a practical step in the direction of curtailing the ravages of TB. The medical world challenged architects to play their part in battling disease.
Treatment & Architecture
Modernism introduced an acute social awareness in architecture and design. Health and hygiene became principle criteria. The emphasis on improved social housing coincided with the exploration of new building materials and technologies. Le Corbusier expounded his radical ideas on building and planning in Urbanisme (1924). In Germany, experimental houses were built for the influential “Weissenhof Seidlung” exhibition in Stuttgart (curated by Mies van der Rohe). With an emphasis on air, light and hygiene, architects re-defined their ideas about urban housing. Flat roofs, balconies, and terraces became fundamental parts of design. The color of modernism was white.
The search for treatment of TB influenced the development of architectural thinking. In the 1930s new sanatoria were being constructed throughout Europe. They were designed with the dictum Licht und Luft (light and air) in mind. Between 1932 and 1940, high in the Alps of Northern Italy, the biggest sanatorium in Europe (Eugenio Morelli Hospital) was built in Sondalo. Known as “Sanatorium City,” it contained 3,500 beds, a post office, shops, and a cinema. The hospital was immortalized in Vittorio De Sica’s film Una breve vacanza.
Away from Alpine areas, sanatoria were located in wooded environments. In 1931 Dutch architect Jan Duiker built the Zonnestraal (sunbeam) sanatorium at Hilversum. A classic example of heliotherapeutic architecture, the building was designed in an airy manner using transparent materials. Open and glazed interior spaces were painted in pale blue and cream to exclude gloomy northern lights. Its flat roofs, terraces, verandas, and covered corridors, the sanatorium expressed both modernism’s ideal of rational functionality and adhered to the demands of medical treatment.
TB also inspired new furniture. Reclining “cure chairs” were part of a sanatorium’s outfit. The original design came from Peter Dettweiler who was a patient of Hermann Brehmer. In the early twentieth century, chaises-lounges in wood or chrome were designed by architects such as Alvar Aalto, Marcel Breuer, and Le Corbusier. Modernism promoted a therapeutic lifestyle in pursuit of health and hygiene. Dettweiler’s chair was taken as a model for the Adirondack Recliner, produced by George Starks at the Adirondack Hardware building at 28 Broadway in downtown Saranac Lake.
TB & Creativity
Over history, some diseases have been regarded as a badge of genius. In the eighteenth century gout had “patrician” pretensions. Voltaire, Smollett, Cowper, Fielding, and Joseph Banks were victims. These men represented Europe’s spiritual aristocracy.
TB was the Romantic’s illness. Sufferers of consumption took on the appearance of a pale and melancholic spirit. The disease was “celebrated” in the poetry of John Keats (who died of TB in 1821), Shelley and Byron. Chopin’s death from TB cemented its reputation as an affliction of artists. As consumptives wasted away physically, they gained spiritual resources. In the mythology of the disease, TB was an ailment of passion and “inward burning.”
The later nineteenth century was obsessed with medicine, both literally and metaphorically. Émile Zola defined his task as a novelist in surgical terms, using his pen as scalpel. At the age of twelve, William Ernest Henley was diagnosed with TB of the bone, which led to the amputation of his left leg below the knee. In 1873, his other leg was affected, but thanks to a new antiseptic surgical method, it was saved. Henley stayed almost two years in hospital. A collection of twenty-eight ‘In Hospital’ poems was included in his debut Book of Verses (1888).
An early biographer of Robert Louis Stevenson argued that TB had enhanced the author’s talent. A sculptural relief by Dublin-born Augustus Saint-Gaudens (Irish mother; French father), depicts the novelist during a stay in New York City in 1887/8. The writer is portrayed with long hair, cigarette in hand, looking sharp and alert, despite being propped up by a stack of pillows in bed. Stephenson spent time in Davos as a patient. Illness enforced his creative presence.
End of an Era
After its founder’s death in 1915, the name Adirondack Cottage Sanatorium was changed to Trudeau Sanatorium. The institution also developed a school for nursing, and later the Trudeau School of Tuberculosis offering instruction courses in the latest treatment methods for the disease.
The first sanatoria were opened to paying patients. Trudeau’s institution also charged them, but at least made an attempt to treat poorer inmates at less than cost by active fund-raising. Many physicians and nurses served without pay. In Boston in 1889, the American Society of Climatology recognized the sanatorium as the best method of cure for TB, particularly for working-class patients. Sanatoria however remained a health haven for those who could afford the phenomenal cost of treatment (patients were held for long periods – from a minimum of six months to seven years or longer).
Before the First World War, the fight against TB was largely carried out by voluntary societies and spontaneous associations. The war brought new epidemics of the disease, forcing a more structured intervention. At last, the state became involved in organizing and planning healthcare and social solutions to the problems connected with the disease. In the end, science would supply the answers. After the discovery of streptomycin and the development of effective antibiotic drugs, the era of sanatoria came to an end. The Trudeau Sanatorium closed in 1954. It ruptured the close association between treatment, recuperation, and architectural design.
CREDITS
NEW YORK ALMANACK JAAP HARSKAMP
PHOTO OF THE DAY
READY FOR SUMMER?
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As New York City faces the first blizzard warning issued in nearly a decade, we’re reminded that even as March approaches, we can’t get too excited about spring being just around the corner. From March 11 to March 14, 1888, one of the most intense blizzards in American history buried New York City under mounds of snow and brought the city to a standstill.
When the head of the national Weather Bureau, Elias Dunn, closed up shop at his office on 120 Broadway on Saturday, March 10, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. At the time, the Weather Bureau kept in touch with the Coast Guard through telegraph and carrier pigeons(!), and Sunday’s forecast called for light rain. No one manned the Weather Bureau on Sundays, but following torrential downpours, Dunn decided to check anyway. There were no updates because, it turned out, telegraph lines had frozen up and down the Atlantic Coast.
Walt Whitman had just published his new poem, The First Dandelion, about the coming of spring. It ran in the New York Herald the day of the blizzard. Doesn’t Walt Whitman look exactly like Gandalf the Grey? Here’s the poem:
Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s close emerging, As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics, had ever been, Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d grass— innocent, golden, calm as the dawn, The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful face
Julian Ralph’s Monday morning account of the blizzard morning is mesmerizing.
The wind howled, whistled, banged, roared and moaned as it rushed along. It fell upon the house sides in fearful gusts, it strained great plate glass windows, rocked the frame houses, pressed against the doors so it was almost too dangerous to open them. It was a visible, substantial wind, so freighted was it with snow. It came in whirls, it descended in layers, it shot along in great blocks, it rose and fell and corkscrewed and zigzagged and played merry havoc with everything it could swing or batter or bang or carry away.At half past ten o’clock, not a dozen stores on Fulton Street had opened for business. Men were making wild efforts to clean the walks, only to see each shoveful of snow blown back upon them and piled against the doors again.
Starting at midnight on March 12, it snowed continuously in New York City for about 36 hours, piling up 20-40 inches of snow. Fierce winds created massive snowdrifts, with some accounts claiming drifts as high as 50 feet, and plenty of photographic evidence showing 15-20 foot drifts that barricaded people inside their homes.
Elevated trains were stranded up and down the tracks. Some passengers escaped to the street via ladders set up by the fire department or enterprising individuals on the ground. One train, stranded above a bar, was successfully able to hoist up buckets of beer to pass the time in revelry. This fiasco gave a major push to underground subway advocates, and work on the subway system commenced a few years later. Much was made of Andrew Cuomo’s decision to shut down the subways during last month’s so-so snowstorm. The entire system had never been shut down before because of snow, and was indeed designed to withstand that exact act of nature.
New York City was overwhelmed by fire and flooding. During and immediately after the blizzard, fire trucks were unable to move, and unchecked fires destroyed buildings all over the city. As the snow started to melt, another set of buildings was irrevocably damaged by flooding. Two hundred New Yorkers died during the blizzard, one of the largest losses of life from any event in city history, and the financial costs were catastrophic.
Among the dead was legendary political power broker Roscoe Conkling. Conkling was a U.S. Senator, wealthy Wall Street lawyer, the political benefactor of President Chester Arthur and facilitator of Gilded Age money and Republican politics. Outraged at price gouging by the cab he hailed in the middle of the snowstorm, he defiantly walked home. Or rather, he tried to, collapsing in the snow and dying two weeks later.
NYC’s pre-blizzard wiring system. Photo from Wikimedia Commons. Photo by Richard Arthur Norton/Public Domain.
One of the biggest hazards in the aftermath of the blizzard was navigating the telegraph and electric wires. The blizzard had brought not only snow, but devastating winds of up to 84 mph, knocking over poles.
In a blistering series of articles recounting the danger and damage afterwards, the New York Times demanded, “that all the electric wires – telegraph, telephone, fire alarms, and illuminating – must be put underground without any delay.” The city took steps to do this, at least in most of Manhattan, and that’s why downtown doesn’t look like the photo on the left.
Even though most of the city was shut down, the nightlife hummed along. Because conditions got too crazy to leave bars by nightfall, a number of them threw wild, all-night parties. P.T. Barnum, proprietor of Madison Square Garden, insisted the show must go on, and handed out champagne to his spare crowd, who eventually got drunk and danced in the circus infield while clowns cheered them on.
Our city infrastructure and ability to detect weather patterns are both vastly improved since 1888, but I wonder if the people are as hardy. Let’s hope blizzard season is over, and that those first dandelions will get to blooming soon.
CREDITS
UNTAPPED NEW YORK JANOS MARTON
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Streetscapes: Socony-Mobil Building; A Building of Steel On East 42d Street
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY
THE before-and-after drama of a building being cleaned always provides an interesting sidewalk spectacle. So do go and inspect the dramatic work on the waffled metal finish of the 1956 Socony-Mobil Building at 150 East 42d Street.
Except for cheap tin structures and copper buildings such as pier sheds, builders generally avoided metal-faced buildings until just after World War II. In 1946 Alcoa proposed an aluminum-faced office tower at 58th Street and Park Avenue. Although it was never built, the company did put up a similar office tower in Pittsburgh in 1953.
During the same period, the Goelet family, a major real estate owner, finally completed the assemblage of the entire block from Lexington to Third Avenues, between 41st and 42d Streets, parts of which it had owned for over a century. Two developers, John Galbreath and Peter Ruffin, persuaded the Goelets to accept their proposal for a first-class office building.
While accepting the basic form set out by the Goelets’ architect, John B. Peterkin, the developers brought in Wallace Harrison and Max Abramovitz, who were the McKim, Mead & White of postwar New York — polished, educated and well-connected.
Apparently because Galbreath and Ruffin had close connections to the United States Steel Corporation, an original design of brick over a granite base developed into one for stainless steel panels above a lower portion of glass. Steel priced out at one and a half times the cost of brick, but United States Steel, nervous about the inroads aluminum was making in the building-metals industry, offered to make up the difference.
The architects wanted the 0.037-inch-thick panels stamped with a raised pattern, both for architectural effect and for greater strength, and worked out different modular designs: picture frames, fields of teardrops, a clapboard-like design, bicycle chains and others.
(Published accounts reported that the builders were concerned that flat panels might create bright reflections that would annoy neighboring office tenants.)
They finally settled on one of irregular pyramids arranged in rectangles and rosettes; the final effect is delicate, almost floral.
By using steel panels on the 1.6 million-square-foot building the team gained several inches of floor space on the inside wall, greatly reduced labor costs on the skin, and saved weight — the panels weighed 2 pounds per square foot as opposed to 48 pounds per square foot for brick.
Opened in 1956, the Socony-Mobil Building sheltered an office population of 8,000 and was the largest metal-clad office building in the world. There had been aluminum-skin buildings in New York before, but stainless steel was, and remains, unique on such a large scale.
The only critical discussion of the building was by Lewis Mumford, writing in 1956 in his column “The Skyline” in The New Yorker. He thought the skin was “a disaster,” making the building look “as if it were coming down with measles.” Mumford particularly objected to the fussy quality of the panel design, and much preferred the stark geometry of the diamond-shape pressing of the aluminum panels of the new building at 666 Fifth Avenue.
THE Goelet estate still owns the land, but Mobil left the building in 1987 and sold it to the Hiro Real Estate Company for $240 million. Mobil’s departure, and a general downturn in office rentals, brought the occupancy of the building dangerously low, only 15 percent in 1991 according to a report at the time published in Crains New York Business.
According to Frank Ward, chief operating officer of Hiro, the occupancy rate is now up to 28 percent, and his company has just put in a new chiller for air-conditioning service. Crews of workers are also cleaning the stainless steel skin — the metal is dull and brownish, like something lost in the bottom of a dishwasher for a year or two.
The cleaned stainless steel makes a brilliant and startling contrast: when older masonry buildings are cleaned, there is a dissonance between the freshly scrubbed surface and the natural age of the brick or stone. But this is a building that really does look like new.
There is, however, something even more striking about the building. In the current fashion, even the owners of the best postwar buildings — like the Corning Glass building at 56th and Fifth and the Look Building at 488 Madison Avenue — have succumbed to the temptation of new lobbies and entrances or even whole facades.
But Hiro has decided that the original architects must have had a reason for what they were doing. Except for a pair of video terminals, the soft, swooping marble lobby remains intact, and Hiro has resisted the temptation to do anything more than polish it, inside or outside. It is an approach as unusual as a stainless steel skin.
Photos: The Socony-Mobil Building, above left, in 1956, the year it opened. (Ezra Stoller $; Esto); Building, above right, glows anew after a recent scrubbing.; Entry, right, to marble lobby, which remains intact. (Photographs by Jack Manning for The New York Times)
CREDITS
Christopher Gray New York Times
*Gray passed away a few years ago, but his wonderful
essays live on and are a wonderful memory of a
unique architectural essayist
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from the collection of the New York Public Library
As the 1920s roared on in New York City, Irving Chanin was busy building. The developer was responsible for several Garment Center buildings, as well as the famous Roxy Theatre, the Majestic Apartments and the Century Apartments on Central Park West, and the Royale and Majestic Theatres.
His signature building would rise at 122 E. 42nd Street at Lexington Avenue, The Chanin Building. Chanin commissioned architects Sloan & Robertson to design his 56-story tower. It would be the first major Art Deco office building in the city and, according to The City Review, “the finest expression of Art Deco in the city.”
Mayor James Walker was on hand for the dedication of the building in January 1929. It heralded the beginning of an age of iconic Art Deco buildings in Manhattan: Rockefeller Center, the Chrysler Building, and the Empire State Building would all rise in a matter of years.
Although the bulk of the structure, complying with the city’s demand for set-backs, has been declared somewhat unexciting; the crown of the building with its buttresses and piers has been called the finest in the city. What no one complains of, however, is the exuberant Art Deco decoration.
In their New York 1930, Architecture And Urbanism Between the Two World Wars, Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins write:
Above shop fronts sheathed in bronze and black Belgian marble, a bronze frieze narrated the story of evolution, beginning with the lower marine forms and then bursting forth with fish and birds. This formed a plinth for a two-story colonnade of massive Norman piers whose squashed cushion capitals were carved with writhing sea monsters. The fourth story was sheathed in terra-cotta panels rendered with a bold overall pattern of abstract floral patterns.
The frieze depicting evolution stopped at geese; the designers no doubt feeling that including man in the process, only four years after the Scopes Trial, might be too controversial.
Chanin used his own architectural department head, Jacques I. Delamarre and Rene Chambellan, an architectural sculptor, to decorate the interiors. Fantastic Art Deco grills, elevator doors, mailboxes and sculptures greeted the visitor. Two bronze-painted plaster reliefs by Chambellan represent Achievement and Success. The means by which to gain these are represented in six matching reliefs: three are physical, Effort, Activity and Endurance; and three are mental, Enlightenment, Vision, and Courage.
On the 54th floor was an roof top observatory and on the 50th and 51st floor a 200-seat theater decorated in silver and black for the tenants’ sole use. Later the space was converted to offices.
Chanin installed his own offices on the 52nd floor, lavishing it with Art Deco ornamentation, including bronze gates. Below ground, the Baltimore Ohio Railroad Company leased space for ticket offices, waiting rooms and a bus terminal–complete with an immense turntable to turn the busses around.
The Chanin Building was perhaps solely responsible for making 42nd Street the premier commercial address of the time. The imposing structure became the subject of one of Hugh Ferriss’s architectural paintings. Throughout the 20th century to the present it remains a striking presence in midtown–an Art Deco masterpiece.
CREDITS
Daytonian in Manhattan
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Under marquee and above 1260 Avenue of the Americas entrance
These six playful plaques under the marquee on the granite wall are both architectural decorations and introductions to the stage events ahead. Each one represents a different scene typical of international ethnic performances of the early twentieth century. Characteristic accessories and carefully depicted native costume make each easily recognizable, from five American dancers (the Rockettes) precision-kicking to a French cellist and German accordianist. Chambellan was also commissioned to model nearly all the architectural details, including grilles, handrails and moldings, in the Center.
Carving
Aspects of Mankind
Gaston Lachaise
American, born France. 1882 – 1935
1250 Avenue of the Americas
These four allegorical stone carvings express ideal aspects of the development of modern civilization: Genius Seizing the Light of the Sun (the development of electricity and communications), The Conquest of Space and Gifts of Earth to Mankind (an acknowledgement of spirituality), and The Spirit of Progress (a reference to the bond between capitalism and the unions during the building of the Center). Although Lachaise wasn’t popular with art critics at the time, he was championed by Nelson and Abby Rockefeller, who were supporters of avant-garde artists and collectors of his work.
Carving
Cornucopia of Plenty
Lee Lawrie with colorist Leon V. Solon
American, born Germany. 1877 – 1963
10 West 51st Street
This polychrome-painted stone carving depicts a messenger soaring from the clouds, emptying an overflowing horn onto the earth. Lee Lawrie wrote that it symbolizes “the plentitude that would result from well-organized international trade”, a theme compatible to the activities of the building. The figure’s downward angle, her flowing golden hair and the dramatic spilling of contents from her cornucopia all skillfully convey a feeling of motion and energy.
Sculpture
Industries of the British Empire
Carl Paul Jennewein
American, born Germany. 1890 – 1978
Above 620 Fifth Avenue entrance
The nine gilded allegorical figures on this large bronze panel represent industries that were once considered major sources of income for the British. Depicted as beautiful, unemotional and idealized, they include Coal, Fish, Salt, Tobacco and Sugar. Australia is symbolized by Wool, Canada by Wheat and Africa by Cotton. A stylized sculpted sun is symbolic of the saying, “The sun never sets on the British Empire.” In New York City, Jennewein’s works can also be found at the Brooklyn Central Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Mosaic
Intelligence Awakening Mankind
Barry Faulkner
American. 1881 – 1966
1250 Avenue of the Americas
This mosaic of small glass tiles (tesserae) is composed of over one million glass tiles in two hundred and fifty colors, each hand-cut and hand-set. The work is a narrative concerning the triumph of knowledge over the evil of ignorance. The central figure of thought (intelligence) stands above the world, controlling the action in the mosaic; the two other powerful figures in this piece are spoken words and written words. Other figures symbolize creativity, ideas and intellectual efforts. The mosaic’s message is that thought will propagate new knowledge and advance civilization.
News
Isamu Noguchi
American. 1904 – 1988
Above 50 W 50th Street entrance of 30 Rockefeller Plaza
Soaring above the entrance to 50 Rockefeller Plaza, this dynamic plaque symbolizes the business of the building’s former tenant, the Associated Press. One of the major Art Deco works in the Center, it depicts five journalists focused on getting a scoop. AP’s worldwide network is symbolized by diagonal radiating lines extending across the plaque. Intense angles and smooth planes create the fast-paced rhythm and energy of a newsroom. News is the first heroic-sized sculpture ever cast in stainless steel and the only time Noguchi employed stainless steel as an artistic medium.
CREDITS
Rockefeller Center
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