The 1909 Fourth Avenue Building - 381 Park Avenue So.

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In 1909, architect Charles A. Valentine filed plans for a 16-story "brick and stone office building" at the southeast corner of Fourth Avenue and 27th Street.  Construction would cost developer A. Filmore Hyde $700,000, just under $25 million in 2026 terms.  Named the Fourth Avenue Building, its Renaissance Revival design included a three-story rusticated limestone base.  The 10-story midsection was faced in beige brick, its grouped openings stacked within full-height metal frames that included cartouche-decorated spandrels.

The reserved ornamentation of the lower levels was merely an aperitif for the three-story top level.  Paired arches separated by engaged columns were embraced within elaborate pointed arches, possibly inspired by Milan's Ca Granda.  The spandrels were embellished with frothy shields.

The Architectural Record, December 1910 (copyright expired)

The Fourth Avenue Building filled with a diverse tenant list.  Among them was the New York office of the State Labor Department.  Its meeting rooms were normally the scenes of labor disputes and strike negotiations, but in June 1911, its staff was distracted with a much different issue.  

George E. Dayton had worked as a financial clerk "for many years," according to The New York Times.  "He was so methodical in his habits that his fellow-clerks said they could regulate their watches by him."  On Friday, June 2, Dayton, who was a widower, left for his "Summer camp" in New London, Connecticut.  He was scheduled to return on June 7, but did not, and, in fact, was never heard of again. 

The New York Department of Labor would remain for years, dealing with issues like the 1912 laundrymen strike, and holding public hearings on fire-prevention construction methods the same year.

Another initial tenant was the substantial contracting firm Caldwell-Wingate Company.  It not only erected structures, but demolished them.  In November 1912, for instance, it received the contract for demolishing the four buildings at 107-113 East 23rd Street; and on July 14, 1924, the New York Evening Post reported that it had received the $4,174,800 contract to erect the Brooklyn Municipal Building.

Coldwell-Wingate Company was headed by Roy Wilson Wingate.  He suffered a public scandal in December 1921 when George J. Ainslee sued him for $50,000 for having "won his wife's affections by taking her on automobile trips, to dances and other entertainments."  The Ainslees divorced and whether Wingate (who was married with two children) continued the affair is unclear.

What is clear is that three years later, on March 20, 1924, Roy W. Wingate and his wife hosted a dinner and bridge party.  The guests left at around 10:00.  Mrs. Wingate went to bed, but woke shortly afterward "in pain," according to The New York Times.  She "saw her husband standing by her with a revolver in his hand."  After shooting his wife, Wingate walked around the bed, got under the bedclothes, and shot himself through the heart.

The Wingates' 14-year-old daughter, Janet, rushed to the bedroom.  Her mother said, "Your father shot me and then shot himself.  Get a doctor, get Dr. Brown quickly."  While his wife' life was saved at a hospital, Wingate had died instantly.  In reporting on the tragedy, The New York Times remarked, "The firm has just about completed the new building of Saks & Co. in Fifth Avenue."

In the meantime, perhaps the first publishing firm to occupy offices in the Fourth Avenue Building was The Crowell Publishing Company.  It published popular periodicals like Farm & Fireside, Woman's Home Companion, The American Magazine, and Colliers, the National Weekly.

George Buckley was president of Crowell Publishing Company.  On May 21, 1918, a telegram from the War Department informed him that his brother, Joseph H. Buckley, had been wounded in France.  A few weeks later, Buckley received a surprising letter from his brother dated two days after that telegram.  Joseph Buckley had enclosed in the letter "a piece of the shrapnel" that was removed from his wounds, reported The New York Times on June 9.

Thomas Nelson & Sons occupied space by 1915.  It published the American Standard Bible and Nelson's Perpetual Loose-Leaf Encyclopaedia, which enabled subscribers to insert and remove new or outdated information.  Founded in Edinburgh, Scotland, the firm was headed by the founder's son, William Thomson, who took over in 1904.  Born in 1862, he started working in the company when he was 14 and came to the United States in 1893.

Sophie Kerr symbolized the modern, self-sufficient career woman of the early 20th century.  The unmarried young woman was an editor of the Woman's Home Companion.  She scoffed at debutantes whose entire focus was preparing to be the wife of an affluent man, telling Marguerite Mooers Marshall of The Evening World in March 1917, "No girl in America is so rich that she can afford not to know how to earn."

In 1919 the National Juvenile Motion Picture League established its headquarters here.  Its president, Adele F. Woodward explained its purpose on May 25, saying "it expresses the idea in the efforts of many people who are opposed to official censorship of motion pictures, yet believe that the moral and artistic influence of many films is bad."  To that end, the league published The Bulletin that reviewed motion pictures.  The standards were, apparently high.  On May 25, 1919, The New York Times reported that between January 1 and May 20 that year, it "reviewed about 400 feature pictures and comedies, of which about 70 had been approved."  (By the following year, the organization's name was changed to The National Motion Picture League.)

In October 1921, the Industrial Bank of New York leased the ground floor, and Princeton Silk Mills took space on an upper floor.

Additional publishing firms moved into the building.  In the 1920s, it was home to the International Publishers, the Macaulay Company, Engineering Magazine Company, and Experimental Publications.  The latter published Radio News, which it boasted in 1929 had a "circulation larger than that of any other radio publication."

International Publishers had a decidedly socialist bent.  On September 15, 1925, The New York Times reported that it had released Leon Trotsky's Whither England? that day.  In it Trotsky predicted:

The inevitable hour will strike for American capital also: the American oil and steel magnates, trust and export leaders, the multimillionaires of New York, Chicago and San Francisco are performing--thought unconsciously--their predestined revolutionary function.  And the American proletariat will ultimately discharge theirs.

Two years later, on October 5, 1927, The Daily Worker reported that International Publishers, "cooperating with the Lenin Institute in Moscow," was publishing "the complete and definitive edition of Lenin's speeches and writings."  And three months later, in January 1928, the firm published Scott Nearing's Whither China?.  Nearing was a leading intellectual within the Socialist Party of America.

A much less controversial publishing firm, which moved into the building in June 1929, was Popular Science Publishing Company, publishers of Popular Science Magazine.  It signed a lease "for a long term of years" for the seventh floor, reported The New York Times.

The early 1930s saw new tenants, including The Modern Institute, which offered slimming techniques by mail order; the Boys Clubs of America headquarters; and the offices of the Social Register Association, which annually published the directory of America's socially elite.

The Modern Institute's advertisements, like this one from 1932, guaranteed results in the privacy of one's home.

Having the New York State Department of Labor within the building might have been convenient for the Macaulay Company in 1934.  On September 19, The Daily Worker reported that a breach of contract "caused the calling yesterday of the second strike in three months, by the Office Workers Union.  During the first strike, in May, 18 picketers were arrested, including several respected authors.

Now, the union charged that Macaulay Company had fired three workers "without consulting the shop committee."  The dispute triggered a strike of the employees of eight other publishing houses.  Strikers lined the sidewalks outside the Fourth Avenue Building while Lee S. Furman, president of the firm, called them "malcontents" and "agitators."

Other politically-motivated tenants moved into the building in the 1930s, including the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy and the offices of the American Peace Mobilization. 

A seemingly non-political tenant was the G. S. Blakeslee Company, distributors of dishwashing machines.  One employee, however, did have a political agenda.  On January 15, 1940, The New York Times reported on the FBI's indictments against 18 co-conspirators who were intent to overthrow the Government of the United States.  Among them was 32-year-old Blakeslee employee Macklin Boettger.  He and the other members of the Christian Front were or had been members of various branches of the American military and had stolen weapons from National Guard armories.

Increasingly, organizations established their headquarters in 381 Fourth Avenue.  On February 2, 1940, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited the offices of the National Youth Administration here.  The group placed "orphaned boys and girls in employment," explained The New York Times.  Mrs. Roosevelt commended the work and suggested it could be extended throughout the country, but cautioned, "against the possibility of the plan's falling into the hands of unscrupulous people who might use it to get cheap labor and to exploit youth."

On September 22, 1942, following the United States entry into World War II, West Coast shipbuilder Henry J. Kaiser opened a "recruiting office" here.  The New York Times said he intended "to recruit 20,000 shipyard workers for his plants."  By 4:00 the first day, 1,600 had applied.  The plan was successful.  Two weeks later, the newspaper reported that another "trainload of workers" was heading for the Kaiser shipbuilding yard in Portland, Oregon.

The U.S. Government followed suit and installed an Army recruiting office here.  A journalist who stopped by on April 26, 1942, counted "more than 400 men in line."

At midcentury, the International Publishers (which would remain into the 1970s) and its Socialist ideology drew the attention of Congress.  On June 20, 1951, at the height of Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communism campaign, Russian-born Alexander Leo Trachtenberg, the head of the firm, was indicted on conspiracy charges.

Alexander Leo Trachtenberg, The New York Times, June 21, 1951

Trachtenberg went on trial on January 7, 1953.  His attorney called him the victim of "a frame-up and a fraud."  The publisher was convicted under the Smith Act (known today as the Alien Registration Act) but his conviction was overturned when a government witness recanted his testimony.

Still occupying space in the 1960s were the Boys Clubs of America and the Social Register.  A new tenant by 1963 was the New York Board of Regents.

In 1959, Fourth Avenue was renamed Park Avenue South.  Atco Properties and Management acquired 631 Park Avenue South in 1974.  The firm's senior vice president, Peter L. DiCapua, later explained that the property was its first "adaptive re-use of middle-aged buildings."  He told Richard D. Lyons of The New York Times in December 1989, "We put in a lot of dollars and re-created the original design, such as restoring the main lobby to its original form, while upgrading the mechanical systems."

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Among Atco's initial tenants was Public Affairs Pamphlets, which published brochures like "Help for Your Troubled Child," "Helping Children Face Crisis," and "Your Child's Emotional Health" in 1977.  It was joined in the building with Inform, a non-profit environmental group that published reported issues about chemical hazard pollution, sustainable transportation such such.  As early as 2009, the National Center for Learning Disabilities operated from the building.

many thanks to reader Peter Alsen for prompting this post