The Art Deco 'Fur Land' Building - 155-163 West 29th Street

Close inspection of the long, low building reveals stylish Art Deco elements obscured by the grime and circus-like awnings.

By 1929, the West 29th Street neighborhood between Sixth and Seventh Avenues had been part of Manhattan's Fur District for years.   That year Fur Land Company, Inc. laid plans for its headquarters and wholesale store, at 155-163 West 29th Street.  But the Stock Market Crash on October 29 that year may have significantly scaled back those plans.
 
The firm commissioned the firm of Sugarman & Berger to design the structure.  Plans were filed on April 22, 1930 with the cost projected at $150,000, slightly over $2 million today.   Completed in March the following year, it was just three stories tall--standing in stark contrast to the soaring loft structures that had already risen along the block.

The architects sheathed the structure in white terra cotta tiles.  The offset entrance to the upper floors, wedged between storefronts, sat within an Aztec-inspired, stair-stepped frame that smacked of grander examples found in buildings like the Chrysler Building.  A bandcourse of crisp zig-zags against rolling waves formed the base of the two-story grouped openings.  Here tiles gave the impression of fluting to the pilasters, which were capped by Art Deco capitals.  The pressed metal spandrels were surprisingly spartan.  A row of decorative tiles suggested a cornice.

The Fur Land Company leased a portion of the new building to A. Hollander & Sons, a "dyeing and fur dressing establishment."   The firm had been founded in 1889 by Austrian-born brothers Joseph and Adolph Hollander as Hollander Brothers.  A. Hollander & Son became the world's largest fur dressers and dyers listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

According to family member Jane Hollander decades later in a letter to The New York Times, "the Hollanders specialized in making cheap furs look expensive, especially mink-dyed muskrat."  The company's fur cleaning process, involving sawdust and other agents, became a household word in the 1940s, "Hollanderizing."

Furs offered by department stores nationwide were marketed as Hollander-dyed.  The Pittsburgh Press, August 15, 1935

Not long after A. Hollander & Sons moved in, the firm suffered the loss of founder Adolph.  He died on September 29, 1932 at the age of 80.  His brother stayed on for another five years before retiring.  The company was still operating in the West 29th Street building in 1940 when he died while wintering in St. Petersburg, Florida with his wife.

The Depression dealt a severe blow to dealers in luxury goods, like furs.  Although it remained in the building, in 1934 the Fur Land Company leased it for "a discounted rent" of $24,000 a year, for ten years.  The ploy did not work and the building was lost in foreclosure.  Nevertheless, Fur Land forged ahead and on August 14, 1947 bought the building back from the City of New York.

The recovered economy following the end of World War II breathed new life into the fur industry.  The Fur Land Building continue to house furriers like Loran Furs, Inc., here by 1946, and National Coney Fur Institute.  But it was not the rebounded economy that could be credited for the unusual profits of Loran Furs.  Instead it was the fact that its partners, Nicholas Proscia and Max Davis, did not pay for many of the expensive goods they sold.

It all came to an end on January 25, 1950 when the FBI announced it had arrested them, along with American Express driver Thomas A. Carr.  The Bureau said the men were the "nucleus" of a "ring that over the last four years allegedly had stolen furs valued at $1,000,000."

Carr had been with American Express since 1917.  His route was within the Fur District and for years he manipulated shipping tickets and diverted shipments to Loran Furs, Inc.  American Express then paid out claims to the rightful customers or their insurance companies; but when that amount topped $1 million (more than ten times that much today), the firm brought in the FBI.

A six-month investigation pointed to Carr and he was put under surveillance.  After he delivered two marked cartons to Loran Furs, he was taken into custody outside.  Agents arrested Davis and Proscia in their offices.

The consumer's renewed ability to purchase furs resulted in high-end lifestyles for the furriers' executives.  Such was the case with Jack Poser, account representative for National Coney Fur.   He and his family live in the fashionable Eldorado Apartments at 300 Central Park West.  

In 1954 Poser, his wife, Margaret, and their 21-year old daughter, Elizabeth, sailed to England.  The family boarded the Queen Elizabeth in Southampton on Wednesday, July 28 to return home.  The steamship stopped briefly in Cherbourg to board more passengers, then steamed on, bound for New York.  About nine hours after leaving port Margaret could not be found.

The ship's crew made what the Cunard Steamship Company said was a "fruitless search of the ship."  The Queen Elizabeth circled the area for about and hour and a half, and radioed other ships to be on the lookout for the woman.  On August 2 the ocean liner docked in New York.  Jack Poser and his daughter left the pier without Margaret.

Sugarman & Berger's entrance smacked of those found in grand Art Deco structures like the Chrysler Building

There was at least one tenant in the building at the time who was not involved in the furrier business.  In April 1952 Lester Leber left the Grey Advertising Agency to form his own agency under his own name with offices at 155-163 West 29th Street.

The Fur District remained in the neighborhood through the last decades of the 20th century.  Fur wholesaler Harry Bakel was still here in the late 1960s.

Today there is little or no trace of the furrier trade on the 29th Street block.  Garish shops vie for attention at street level, the Fur Land Building being no exception.  Sugarman & Berger's streamlined storefronts are long gone, replaced with metal roll-down gates surmounted by a carnival of vinyl awnings.  But the wonder Art Deco entrance survives essentially intact along with the upper floors.

photographs by the author

The Lost 1910 Pennsylvania Station

image from the Pennsylvania State Archives.

For their design of the newest Pennsylvania Station, McKim, Mead and White turned to Imperial Rome for inspiration.  The result, completed in 1910, was the most dramatic and impressive train station in the country.

ArchitectureWeek.com W.W. Norton

Costing $112 million to erect, the immense structure ran the length of two city blocks along Seventh Avenue.  Eighty-four giant pink granite columns supported entablatures, creating porticoes.  Two grand carriage entrances mimicked the Brandenburg Gate.  Carved granite eagles, each weighing 5,700 pounds, perched above the entrances.  Covering over seven acres, the building was, as historian Jill Jonnes called it, a “great Doric temple to transportation.”

One of the two Brandenburg Gate-Inspired Carriage Entrances  from the collection of the New York Public Library

The interior, however, was the show-stopper.

In its 1939 New York City Guide written for the Works Progress Administration, Random House described the progression of spaces. 

The interior is a sequence of tremendous spaces.  From a long, barrel-vaulted arcade, lined with shops, a marble stairway and escalators lead to the floor of the main hall.  In this vast Hall, which is a copy of the Tepidarium of a Roman bath, are ticket booths and the information desk.  Six murals by Jules Guerin depict scenes of the area served by the Pennsylvania Railroad.  Along the west side are twin waiting rooms.  Beyond them a great glass-roofed concourse gives access to the track platforms.

The main hall was inspired by the Baths of Caracalla, but on a larger, grander scale.  The vast space was approximately equal to the nave of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.  It was the largest interior space in the city, rising 15 stories upward.  The concourse–a soaring conservatory of iron arches supporting a glass ceiling–was breathtaking.  Writer Thomas Wolfe, overcome by its immensity, said that Penn Station was large enough to "hold the sound of time."

from the collection of the New York Public Library

Over 2000 railroad employees worked within the station and tens of thousands of passengers passed through it daily.   The station yard, part of which was below the concourse, covered 350,000-square-feet requiring 650 steel foundation columns to support the floor.

Author Richard Guy Wilson, in his 1983 McKim, Mead & White Architects, said it “was one of McKim's most monumental and moving designs, a giant of a building that still retained a human scale.  In catching or meeting a train at Pennsylvania Station one became part of a pageant—actions and movements gained significance while processing through such grand spaces."

By the 1950s train travel was severely on the decline.  The automobile and airplane took over as the preferred means of travel and the Pennsylvania Railroad felt the financial pinch. The cost of maintaining the colossal structure forced the railroad to attempt to divest itself from operating costs.  Plans were announced to join forces with Madison Square Garden in 1961.  The deal would provide the railroad with a new, air-conditioned station and a one-quarter stake in the new Madison Square Garden Complex.

Initially, nearly no one truly thought the monumental station would be demolished.

As plans progress, however, New York and the country in general broke into two factions: those who felt that the razing of the old station and replacement with a new facility was progressive, and those who rallied against the loss of an architectural and historical treasure.  There was no landmark preservation commission nor legal means by which the destruction could be stopped, however.

On August 2, 1962, over 100 protesters wearing black armbands of mourning, almost all of them architects, picketed in front of Pennsylvania Station with placards with slogans like ''Shame,'' and ''Don't Amputate--Renovate.''

Irving Felt, president of Madison Square Garden, saw the preservationists as a nuisance.  As the picketers marched he derided, “Fifty years from now, when it’s time for [the new Madison Square Garden] to be torn down, there will be a new group of architects who will protest.”  (As it turned out, within 50 years architects and laymen alike repudiated the architecture of the new building.)

But despite cries from the press, politicians, and architects, the largest, grandest train station in America was pulled down.  Irving Felt offered no regrets. "It was not, architecturally, a monument," he said.

The world at large disagreed.

In its editorial “Farewell to Penn Station” on October 30, 1963 The New York Times wrote,

Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance.  Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves.  Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean.  We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture.  And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.

The American Institute of Architects lamented, “New York seems bent on tearing down its finest buildings…No opinion based on the artistic worth of a building is worth two straws when huge sums and huge enterprises are at stake.”

And architectural critic Louise Huxtable chided, “We are an impoverished society.  It is a poor society indeed that can’t pay for these amenities; that has no money for anything except expressways to rush people out of our dull and deteriorating cities.”

Adding insult to injury, in place of the pink granite temple, New York received an eyesore.  Costing $116 million, the new Madison Square Garden complex was, from the day it was dedicated, considered unattractive at best.  Carl Condit called it a “prime candidate for the most poverty-stricken architecture in New York—indeed, it is questionable whether the structures and enclosures can be regarded as architecture at all.”

If anything positive was born from the destruction of Pennsylvania Station, it was the outrage felt throughout the city and the country.  Within two years the Landmarks Preservation Commission was created and Penn Station was a rallying cry for preservationists nationwide.

The immense granite eagles survive, scattered around the city and in New Jersey.  A few other architectural remnants were salvaged by art museums.  But, otherwise, one of New York City’s monumental treasures is lost forever.