The Manheimer Building - No. 369 7th Avenue

On Thursday, November 7, 1918 the “4-story substantially constructed brick loft building with store” at No. 369 Seventh Avenue was sold at auction.  The owner had made certain that the advertisement clarified this was a “voluntary sale,” and not a foreclosure action.  It also made note of the desirable commercial location “opposite Pennsylvania Station.”

The purchaser was 39-year old Joseph Manheimer, head of Manheimer Bros., Inc.  Like his father, Manheimer was a real estate operator and agent.   The “substantially constructed” building prompted its new owner to do renovations rather than to demolish and rebuild.  On July 25, 1919 architect John H. Knubel filed plans for “new stairs, partitions, roof, windows, plumbing, front and lower beams.”  The renovations would cost Manheimer $10,000—about $137,000 in 2016 terms.

Knubel gave the old building an up-to-date Arts and Crafts façade of yellow brick trimmed in terra cotta.  The broad openings at each floor were influenced by the Chicago School.  Above the top story Joseph Manheimer branded the building with his name in terra cotta tiles.  It was flanked by two slightly-projecting terra cotta shields and topped by a peaked parapet.

The alterations were completed by mid-September 1919 when the store and basement were leased.  Manheimer moved his own offices into the building as well.  The immediate neighborhood had comprised the fur district for several years and so the renovated building was a wise choice for furriers Meiselman & Peto.  They remained here until their bankruptcy in August 1921.

As the fur and apparel district moved north of 34^th Street, No. 369 filled with a variety of tenants.  In 1945 it was home to M. Hollander’s podiatrist office.  Because Hollander did not use the title of doctor, his “foot correction appliances” might be viewed with some suspicion.  Nevertheless, he boasted 30 years of “successful experience” and his advertisement in Billboard magazine on February 10, 1945 tempted “Visit my office and let me show you by scientific application of appliances I can eliminate your foot trouble.”

photo courtesy of Terry Lavin

A hold-out from the apparel trade at the time was A. & F. Embroidery, which remained a tenant until at least 1947.  Joseph Manheimer kept his personal office here (Manheimer Bros. had moved its headquarters next door at No. 365 in 1933, a property Joseph purchased in 1924) until his death at the age of 71 when his widow took title to the building.  

After mid-century the camera district was centered within the Penn Station neighborhood.  Spiratone had its retail store in the building by 1957.  In 1964 it offered a specialized fixed-lens camera which could take photographs through a microscope. 

Mrs. Manheimer died on December 23, 1983 at the age of 89.  The Manheimer properties at No. 369 and Nos. 365-367 were purchased later by Nan Su Kim.

In March 2011 the properties were sold in a joint sale by real estate agent Hook Hee Nam for $6.5 million.  He happily accepted a down payment of $1.66 million from the buyer, Jae Kun Jeung.

The problem was that Nan Su Kim was unaware that his buildings were being sold. 

Hook Hee Nam handed over paperwork with Mr. Kim’s signature—except Nam had signed them himself.  He was arrested and “arraigned on charges of first-degree grand larceny, among other things, in connection with the fraud,” according to the Queens District Attorney’s Office.

Although the shop front has been brutalized with a tawdry tourist gift shop, and window air conditioners poke through the upper story windows; John H. Knubel’s striking Arts and Crafts building survives as a delightful surprise on this frenzied section of Seventh Avenue.

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.