The 1923 Public National Bank Bldg - 106 Avenue C

 

photograph by Beyond My Ken

At the turn of the last century, a branch of the Anguilar Free Public Library sat on the northeast corner of Avenue C and East 7th street.  On July 9, 1902, the New-York Tribune explained that the Anguilar Free Library Society's facilities, "are mostly situated in poor and densely populated sections of the city."

Five years after that article, the Public Bank was organized as a state bank, and in 1917 "it took out a charter as a national bank," according to the New-York Tribune, becoming the Public National Bank.  The institution's growth was prodigious.  In 1922 it had $78 million in deposits and seven branches in Manhattan.  And there was about to be one more.  In September that year, The New York Times reported that the bank had purchased the "three-story business building at the northeast corner of Avenue C and Seventh Street."  The article said it would "be altered early next Spring and used by the bank as a branch office."

The trustees quickly changed their minds, however.  Instead, the bank demolished the old building and hired Eugene Schoen to design a replacement structure on the site.  His plans, filed in May 1923, projected the construction cost at $50,000--just under $920,000 in 2025 terms.  Ground was broken in June and construction completed in December.

The multi-talented Eugene Schoen was well-respected as a furniture designer, interior decorator and architect at the time.  Born of Hungarian Jewish immigrants in 1880, his father was Rabbi Jacob Schoen.  He studied architecture at Columbia University before working in the office of McKim, Mead & White.  In 1913, Schoen spent five months in Europe, where he met artist Alphons Mucha, renowned for his Art Nouveau designs, and architect Josef Hoffman, a founder of the Viennese Succession movement.  Schoen's exposure to their ground-breaking designs would be reflected in his own work back in New York City, including the Public National Bank building.

Sitting upon a granite water table, the two-story structure was clad in granitex, a material similar to cast concrete, and trimmed in terra cotta.  Schoen chamfered the corner where he placed the projecting, rounded entrance.  It was flanked by engaged, fluted granite columns that upheld a symphony of colorful terra cotta (executed by the New York Architectural Terra Cotta Co.) that terminated in a wreath of fruits and leaves that surrounded a clock.  

photograph by Anthony Bellov

Decorative rondels sat between the bases of full-height, fluted pilasters.  Like the entrance columns, they had no capitals.  They upheld a two-layered parapet above a band of decorative bosses.

Inside, the cavernous banking room rose to the equivalent of two stories.  The bank's offices occupied the second floor.

The clock and ground floor rondels can be seen in this 1941 photograph.  The bank's name is emblazoned on the parapet.  image via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services.

In 1952, the Public National Bank & Trust Co. opened a new branch at Broadway and East 3rd Street.  Two years later, the bank sold 106 Avenue C to Stuymet Realty Corp., headed by Grand Rabbi Isak Leifer.  The purchasers hired architect Henry G. Harris to convert the bank building to a nursing home.  The double-height banking room was divided into two floors and an additional entrance was cut on the East 7th Street side.  The ground floor rondels were removed and first floor windows were filled in with glass block.

Called the Stuyvesant Nursing Home, it was acquired by Dr. Bernard Bergman, who would eventually own as many as 70 other similar facilities.  In the early 1970s, prompted by complaints of "no heat, vermin infestations, neglect, filth and odors, and physical abuse" at the Towers Nursing Home on the Upper West Side, state and federal authorities launched an investigation into Bergman's nursing homes.  The Stuyvesant Nursing Home was shut down in 1972.  Bergman was indicted in 1975 and subsequently convicted of Medicare fraud.

The property passed hands twice before being foreclosed by the City in 1977 for non-payment of taxes.  On July 13 that year, the city was plunged into blackness after lightning struck a Con Edison electrical substation at 8:34 p.m.  Almost unbelievably, a second lightning strike hit two transmission lines, followed by a third strike to the Sprain Brook substation in Yonkers.  By 9:37 p.m. the city was in total darkness.  

The building was sorely neglected in the early 1980s.  photograph by Albert J. Winn from the collection of the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

The blackout lasted until the following day.  Thousands of looters ran rampant throughout the city.  Hundreds of stores were broken into (including a Bronx car dealership that lost 50 new automobiles) and damage was considerable.  Mayor Abe Beame called it, "a night of terror," adding, "The costs when finally tallied will be enormous."

On July 25, 1977, The New York Times reported that the New York City Office of Economic Development was setting up "neighborhood business assistance teams" to "facilitate the reopening of businesses damaged during the blackout."  One of those new offices was located in the former Public National Bank building.

Artist and furniture designer Richard Artschwater and his wife, Catherina A. Kord, purchased the building in 1980.  They converted it into two residences--a duplex on the first and second floors, and one apartment on the third.

The former Public National Bank building was designated an individual New York City landmark in September 2008.  Jay Shockley described it in the LPC's designation report as, "a highly unusual American structure displaying the direct influence of the early-twentieth-century modernism of eminent Viennese architect/designer Josef Hoffman."

many thanks to historian Anthony Bellov for suggesting this post