The 1904 Facelift of No. 36 West 34th Street

"Alterations" to two back-to-back brownstone mansions resulting in a single Beaux Arts commercial building.

Although West 34^th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues was still fashionable in 1885—after all the brownstone mansions of the Astors still anchored the Fifth Avenue end of the block—No. 36 was no longer a private dwelling.  On May 9 of that year the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity was incorporated and established its clubhouse in the lower levels of the house.  The articles of incorporation declared the objects of the club to be “To promote social intercourse among the members thereof, and to provide for them a pleasant place of convenient resort for their entertainment and improvement.”

The new club of 250 members threw what the New-York Tribune called a “memorable house-warming.”  After “two years of prosperous life in that house,” the club outgrew the space.  By May 1, 1887 the membership numbered 360 and the space was no longer adequate.  Now called by the newspaper “The largest and one of the most successful Greek letter clubs in the city,” it moved to a larger residence at No. 435 Fifth Avenue.

Shortly after the fraternity moved out, the mansion was the scene of the funeral of Henry Milford Smith, proprietor of the nearby Grand Hotel, located at Broadway and 31^st Street.  In 1884 “New York’s Great Industries” had called Smith “as widely known as he is warmly respected throughout all sections of the United States, and one who has manifested superior qualifications for the keeping of a first-class hotel.”

Smith’s respected status among his peers was evident on the afternoon of August 23.  In reporting on the funeral The New York Times said “There were a large number of hotel men present, including Hiram Hitchcock, of the Fifth-Avenue; A. L. Ashman, of the Sinclair; H. H. Brockway, of the Ashland; Mr. Hoyt, of the Victoria; Mr. Rogers, of the Coleman, and George T. Putney, of the Rossmore Hotel.”

Within a few years the house would be leased to the Fox family.  While the family lived upstairs, the parlor floor housed the high-end shop of dressmakers Miss Fox and Miss Boland.  The New York Times counted them on April 30, 1891 among “some of the most fashionable” dressmakers.  Both women were no doubt embarrassed when they were separately named in newspapers during a Customs scandal that year.

The big dry goods houses were puzzled when private high-end dressmakers were offering the latest in Parisian fashions at lower prices than they could offer.  Customs officials began an investigation.  Undercover agents found that Charles H. Lauer, who had offices in Paris, London and New York, was skirting the payment of duty on “silks, worsteds, woolens, crepes, etc., and made up in the highest style of Parisian art.”  The goods were then passed on to high-end dressmakers at the reduced cost.

Sorting out which dressmakers knew about the scam and which were innocent dupes was difficult.  But in the meantime The Evening World reported on April 30, 1891 “If you have ordered a gown from Paris through your dressmaker prepare for trouble in getting it.”

The Fox family received more favorable press when Theresa Fox was married to John J. Derry on July 9, 1894.  The wedding took place in the Church of the Paulist Fathers on Columbus Avenue and 59^th Street.  “The bride wore a traveling costume, and was attended by her sister Miss Amelia Fox,” reported The Times.  Following the ceremony, a breakfast was served in the house on 34^th Street.

Later that year, in October, The New York Times reported on the sale of the residence.  “The four-story brownstone dwelling 36 West Thirty-fourth Street has been sold by Mrs. Herzog at a little over $100,000.”  The sale price would translate to about $2 million today.

The staggering price reflected the exclusive district.  Although William Astor had demolished his house and erected the Waldorf Hotel, completed a year earlier; the exclusive hotel drew upscale visitors to the neighborhood.  It also drew commerce, and within the next few years the old brownstone residences of 34^th Street would be razed or unrecognizably altered for business purposes.

On September 19, 1902 the real estate community pondered George C. Boldt’s intentions on the block.  When Thomas H. Barber sold the two four-story houses at Nos. 32 and 34, The New York Times noted “George C. Boldt is the owner of 36 West Thirty-fourth Street, together with an abutting lot at 41 West Thirty-third Street—a circumstance which caused him to be mentioned as the probable buyer of the Barber parcels.”

If developers thought that Boldt was acquiring adjoining parcels of land to erect a large structure, they were wrong.  For a few years he simply rented out spaces in the back-to-back structures to a variety of tenants.  In 1903 artist Walter H. Robertson had his studio here.  He was scammed out of a $10 gold piece that year when two “well-dressed strangers” told him they would place his $10 horse race bet on “a sure thing.”

The Times reported that the scam artists pretended, at first, to be art patrons.  “In order to cultivate Robertson’s good-will they had pretended to select some handsome pictures, which they asked him to set aside for them in a corner of his studio.”  Having convinced him to place a bet with them, they “vanished with the coin,” explained the newspaper.  Robertson, seemingly, had more talent than common sense.

Earlier that year mining engineer John Armistead of Denver, Colorado was renting a room here while on business in New York.  In June he discovered that New York City policemen were unrelentingly determined.  When bicycle Policeman Greenison noticed the engineer “driving a 20-horsepower machine at a lively pace along the east drive” in Central Park, he took chase.  The New-York Tribune reported that “after a chase of sixteen city blocks through Central Park [the policeman] succeeded in overtaking Armistead.”

The westerner was impressed with the bicycle cop’s tenacity and riding skill.  “Allow me to congratulate you on your ability to ride.  I always like to see a man who does his work well.  I was making very good speed, and you overtook me handily.  I congratulate you,” he said.

Armistead spent the night in jail and was held on $200 bail for trial for speeding.  Nevertheless, the newspaper said that he “did not seem to mind his predicament at all, and, besides making friends with the officer who arrested him, had a merry word for most of the other officers and court clerks.”

A year later Boldt executed what the Department of Buildings termed “altering” the abutting properties.  The completed conversion was significant in the very least.  Matching Beaux Arts facades of limestone and cast iron on 34^th and 33^rd Streets adorned what was now a single structure.  The top floor of the five-story structure was the focal point—behind an iron-railed balcony two prim copper-clad dormers supported decorative urns.

The 33rd Street side retains the decorative railing above the copper cornice.  The twin facades were originally virtually identical.

The upper floors were intended for small professional offices like that of the architectural firm Westervelt & Austin, of which John Corley Westervelt was a member.  Westervelt would be the architect of the Childs Restaurant chain for more than three decades by the time of his death in 1934, with his office was still in the building.

From the beginning the ground floor was home to a Childs Restaurant with entrances on both streets.  In 1908 the eatery fell victim to “Hunchie” Williams, a gang leader of “expert safe blowers and counterfeiters,” according to The New York Times.  Williams’ gang robbed Childs of $8,000 in what Inspector McCafferty called a “clean-cut job.”

The restaurant would get a boost when the soaring Art Deco Empire State Building replaced the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1931.  The skyscraper housed a workforce the size of a small town; yet it offered little in the way of eating for the workers.  There was a tearoom on the 86^th Floor, which cost a dollar admission; the Empire State Club, open only to members; or the Empire State Pharmacy’s lunch counter which offered only stools at a counter.  Six months after the Empire State Building opened the Childs Restaurant Company was calling its branch at No. 36 West 34^th Street the “Empire State Childs.”  Workers filled the tables here where lunch could be purchased for as little at 50 cents and dinner for 60 cents.

On February 23, 1932 two men finished their meals and walked up to the cashier, Joseph Ommer, presenting their checks.  Ommer took the bills and waited for the men’s payment. Instead, one of the men produced a revolver and demanded “Where’s our change?”

With a gun pointed at his chest, Ommer produced the men’s “change”--$140 in cash, the contents of both cash drawers.  The Times reported that “The men then hurried to the street and escaped.”

Among the tenants upstairs in 1935 was C. R. Acfield, Inc.  The firm received a complaint from the Federal Trade Commission on December 11 that year on charges of “unfair practice.”  The company sold the “Perfection Toe Splint” for bunions and the “Bentoe Splint” for hammer-toe.  “The complaint charges that the disputed medicines would not cure either ailment,” reported The New York Times on December 12.

On February 6, 1942 fire broke out in the basement of the restaurant around 6:48 in the morning.  The stubborn blaze disrupted traffic on 34^th Street for six hours as fire equipment blocked the street.  Fire Chief John J. McCarthy noticed that the tile flooring of the restaurant was sagging and ordered his men out of the building.  Five minutes later a 12-foot section collapsed into the cellar.  One fireman was slightly hurt and a dozen others were affected by smoke inhalation.   Despite the significant damage, the restaurant recovered.

Sadly abused, the building still shows evidence of its once-proud design.

When the building was sold for around half a million dollars in 1953, the Childs Restaurant was still going strong after nearly half a century.  Later that same year, the restaurant introduced a ground-breaking idea—take-out food.  On December 10 The New York Times reported that “A wide assortment of familiar food specialties of Childs restaurants are available in the recently opened Take-Home Food Department at the Childs restaurant at 36 West Thirty-fourth Street.

“Among the foods offered in the new department are several types of salad, beef pie, baked beans, chicken pot pie, beef stew, lamb stew, pastry, rolls, muffins, other baked goods and Savarin ice cream.”

The concept of take-home dining perhaps reflected the changing and increasing role of women in the workplace. 

Today both of the matching facades of the building are careworn.  The ground floor space where decades of Empire State Building workers grabbed lunch has been divided into separate stores with entrances on 33^rd and 34^th Street.  The street levels have been obliterated, covered over with modern store fronts.  The restrained and handsome upper floors are still intact, however, including those wonderful urns perched on the dormers.

The copper urns, like Aladdin's lamps, survive on both facades.

 photographs taken by the author

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The 1907 Ditson Building -- Nos. 8 to 12 East 34th Street

By 1905 the neighborhood of 34^th Street and Fifth Avenue had drastically changed from a generation earlier.  Where the brownstone mansions of the Astors had stood on Fifth Avenue between 33rd and 34^th Streets the massive Waldorf-Astoria Hotel loomed over new commercial buildings and the residences that still clung on.

Commerce had not engulfed the entire region, however, and that year Charles H. Ditson filed plans for his new mansion at No. 19 East 37^th Street to be designed by C. P. H. Gilbert.  Ditson’s residence would be next to the imposing French chateau of Joseph De Lamar under construction, also designed by Gilbert.

The mansion was not the only new construction Ditson had in mind at the time.

Ditson’s fortune began generations earlier when in 1826 Oliver Ditson, a clerk in a Boston bookstore, began learning the printing trade.  Also a church organist, he combined his interests in printing and music into his own business in 1835 as a music-seller and publisher.

By the end of the Civil War the firm had branch offices in Cincinnati, Philadelphia and New York.   Son Charles took over the New York concern, named Chas. H. Ditson & Co. and built an impressive building on Fifth Avenue; later expanding to a new building at 867 Broadway. 

By the time Charles was planning his new mansion, the firm was nationally-recognized as a leader in music publications; printing Dwight’s Journal of Music, The Monthly Musical Record and The Musician.  An 80-volume series entitled “The Musicians’ Library” had been published along with numerous instruction books.  Musical instruments had now been added to the sheet music and books being sold.

In 1906 Ditson’s The Musician announced intentions for a “New Ten-story Ditson Building.”  Three brownstone houses at Nos. 8, 10 and 12 leased from William Waldorf Astor were already in the process of demolition for “the skyscraper.” 

It would be a building “of pleasing design,” promised the article.  Designed by Townsend, Steinle & Haskell, it was faced in Indiana limestone.  The Beaux Arts structure featured expansive showroom windows at the first and second floors.   Centered in the cornice above the second floor would be an intricately-carved leafy cartouche in the form of a lyre—symbolic of the musical roots of the firm.

A lyre and crossed horns set the musical theme.

Between the third and fourth stories, a carved balcony was ornamented with four exuberant copper lamps and the proud announcement DITSON BUILDING spelled in bold copper lettering.  An overhanging cornice would be decorated with classical antefixae.

The four large lamps along the balcony have lost their properly-proportioned milk glass globes.

Completed in April 1907, less than six months after construction began, Ditson’s new building cost around $230,000 and prompted a real estate headline in The Sun to call it “A Feat in Rapid Construction.”

The Musician published a sketch of the new building in 1907 -- copyright expired

The company took the lower four floors and the basement.   The upper six floors were intended for rental income.  The first floor was devoted primarily to sheet music and books, the second to “small goods,” and the third floor sold “talking machines,” or phonographs.  Pianos were displayed on the fourth floor, while the musical book section took up the basement area.

The Musician, in a marketing effort to lure customers and tenants, pointed out the advantages of the new site.  “This is only a few doors from Fifth Avenue, and is in the heart of the fashionable new shopping district.  The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel is a few feet away, as are two of the largest dry goods stores in the city, Aeolian Hall, and other structures visited each day by hundreds of persons.”

Among the early tenants was the John & James Dobson company, dealers in carpets.  The American Carpet and Upholstery Journal noted the company’s lease of the entire sixth floor in December 1909 saying it “marks another step in the general movement of carpet firms into the uptown district of New York.”

Like The Musician, the Journal remarked on the location saying it “will be conveniently near to the new Pennsylvania Railroad Station—a fact which visiting buyers coming to the New York market will appreciate.”

By the time of this 1909 advertisement, Ditson was producing its own mandolins. (copyright expired)

When Ditson moved into the new building it sold only Briggs and Poole pianos, somewhat apologetically noting “Other lines will probably be taken on.”   In 1910 it scored a coup by becoming the sole representatives for Baldwin pianos.

Chas. H. Ditson & Co. published an advertisement in the Boston Symphony Orchestra season program that year extolling the virtues of the Baldwin instrument.  “Here—at one’s ten fingers—is all the piano has known, all the masters have dreamed.  Instead of the plaintive ‘bebung’ (the melancholy vibration of the ‘plucked’ claviers, loved of old composers) the modern Baldwin reveals an emotional content of unimagined beauty.”

As war-weary soldiers returned from World War I, a plan was publicized by Everybody’s Magazine.  The publication asked readers to donate used musical instruments for returning servicemen.  The response was overwhelming and van loads of instruments arrived in New York.  Chas. H. Ditson & Co. received those instruments needing repair and restored them free of charge.  The magazine called it “an enormous contribution.”

A pile of donated instruments awaits repair in the Ditson Building in 1919.  Music Trades magazine said "Like the boys who used them, they have all seen service."  copyright expired.

The same year booksellers  Scott, Foresman and Company was in the building.  Ironically, with the war against Germany just ended, the company advertised Chester Nathan Gould’s “Handy German Grammar” for 50 cents.

Ditson added to its piano offerings in 1922 by introducing the player piano.  The sensation was worth devoting an entire street-level showroom to the amazing instrument.   The Music Trades magazine reported that the window display drew large crowds.

The Palestrina player piano drew crowds to the showroom window above in 1922 -- Music Trades Magazine (copyright expired)

The article said that the Janssen Palestrina player “occupied the center of attraction in the window and no other merchandise, with the exception pf a few rolls, was exhibited with the instrument, so that attention could be concentrated on the one big feature of the display.”   The piano’s mechanism was exposed and a large chart pointed out the features of the self-playing apparatus.

After doing business in New York City for 62 years, Charles Healy Ditson died in his house on East 37^th Street in May, 1929.  Within a year John Jacob Astor’s daughter, Princess Serge Obolensky (formerly Alice Muriel Astor) purchased the Ditson Building.  Chas. H. Ditson & Co. leased back its retail space from the princess.

Three years later, on June 7, 1932, Ditson’s vice president and publishing manager William Arms Fisher addressed the annual meeting of the Music Publisher’s Association in the Hotel Roosevelt.  The members were panicked with the marked decline in classical and high-class music sales, and the nearly equal increase in Tin Pan Alley sheet music.  The deduction was that American taste had eroded.

Fisher argued against the knee-jerk assumption saying “it no more indicated an incipient musical degeneracy than does the similar drop in the sale of art books, paintings, etc., indicate an alarming loss in our nation of the sense of beauty and growing atrophy of taste.”

Instead, he said, the drop in music sales could be blamed on the Depression and that new household appliance—the radio.

Things change and by November 10, 1946 the Chas. H. Ditson company was no more and the Princess Obolensky was now Mrs. Alice Astor Bouverie.  Mrs. Bouverie sold the Ditson Building on that day to a merchandising group as the 34^th Street neighborhood changed to one of garment companies and other small businesses.

Four giant, snarling lions' heads look down from below the exuberant cornice.

Today the building is essentially unchanged, albeit covered in grime and with ill-fitting milk glass globes on the marvelous third floor balcony lamps.  As was the case in 1907, a variety of tenants  including publishing, garment, cosmetic and technology firms still occupy full floors.  And as was also the case in 1907, a real estate agent boasted in 2011 that the building is “within walking distance to Penn Station.”

non-credited photographs taken by the author

The Little Building Under the Big Bag at Macy's

photo by Mike Strand

The dry goods store established by Rowland Hussey Macy in 1858 at 14th Street and Sixth Avenue was in the hub of the shopping district.  But by the 1880s large, impressive emporiums were establishing themselves further up Sixth Avenue along what would be called The Ladies Mile. 

Roland Macy had died in 1877 and in 1896 brothers Isidor and Nathan Straus acquired the business.  Realizing that the continued northward movement would leave his store behind and as the century wound down, they schemed to jump ahead of the pack, secretly buying up the properties along Broadway from 34th to 35th Streets.  A handshake with Alfred Duane Pell cemented a $250,000 agreement for the 34th Street corner property.

Henry Siegel, part owner of a major competitive dry goods concern, Siegel-Cooper, got wind of the plan.  Through an agent he outbid Macy's for the corner lot by $125,000 and understandably Pell accepted--the difference was a substantial $3.8 million by today's standards.  Although Siegel's intentions cannot be completely certain, it appears he wanted Macy's 14th Street property.  He held the 34th Street corner hostage; the ransom being the 14th Street property.

The Strauses called Siegel's bluff.  In July of 1901 it was announced that that Macy's would built a gigantic new store with over 1.5 million square feet, nine stories high, a commercial phenomenon.   The structure would be built around the obstinate corner; a notable example of a real estate holdout.

Horse-drawn carriages and one motorcar line the curb in front of the new department store.  Siegel's replacement building, still vacant, sits on the corner.  photo from the collection of the New-York Historical Society

Defeated, Siegel razed his little corner building and erected a five-story commercial structure.  When R. H.  Macy & Co. moved into its new building in 1903, Siegel took over the 14th Street property.  Four years later he sold his interest in the 34th Street building to Robert Smith who resold it in 1911 for $1 million--more than 27 times that much today.

In the 1940s Macy's began using the little building as an easel for its advertising, in what must have been an "if you can't beat it, use it" philosophy.  As the decades progressed, less and less of the little building, designed by William H. Hume, was visible.

Advertising had begun covering the little corner building by the 1940s -- from the collection of the New York Public Library

Today just two floors of the Hume building can be seen under the huge red Macy's shopping bag that has become so familiar to New Yorkers.  The David and the Goliath of the 34th Street corner have made peace, it would seem, after a century of irritating co-existence.