The 1847 "Margaret Sanger Clinic" House - 17 West 16th Street

The farmland that John Cowman had purchased in 1825 was, by the time his will was executed in 1842, still undeveloped and rural; although Fifth and Sixth Avenues had been newly extended through the area. Cowman’s widowed son-in-law, Edward Sebring Mesier received half of the property.

Mesier, a partner in the firm Mesier & Rich, book publishers and stationery merchants, came from a long line of New York retailers extending back to the 18th Century. Edward Mesier’s inherited land was divided into lots on the north side of West 16th Street – Nos. 1 through 21.

In 1845 Mesier began talks with several prospective property owners and a restrictive agreement was recorded. Accordingly, buildings erected on the lots were to be “at least six feet back from the street” and no “stable, meat shop, slaughter house…or any base commercial establishment” would be permitted. The block was to be one of “first-class” homes.

George S. Fox purchased No. 17 in April of the next year.  The row of Greek Revival residences that included No. 17 were three stories high above a brownstone English basement. Brownstone trims, including the door surround, window sills and lintels, and the broad entrance steps, contrasted handsomely with the red brick. An elegant cast iron balcony hugged the parlor level. The curved bowfront of No. 17, along with those of its neighbors Nos. 21 and 23, was a popular and common architectural touch in cities like Boston, but extremely rare in New York.

The entrance was slightly recessed, with a paneled double-door with sidelights and overlight. Inside, the finest furniture from the workshops of mid-century New York cabinetmakers adorned the parlor, dining room and bedrooms.

In 1876, wealthy merchant William B. Rice and his wife Gertrude Stevens Rice purchased the home. The Rices were active in New York social circles and spent their summers at their Bar Harbor, Maine estate, The Tides. In November of 1888 Mrs. Rice was appointed Commissioner of Common Schools by Mayor Hewitt.

After William Rice died in 1899, Gertrude Rice secluded herself at No. 17 West 16th Street for a year, renting The Tides out to A. Butler Duncan for the summer of 1900. She thereafter devoted herself to charitable works, most specifically the State Charities Aid Association, when not spending her summer months in Maine.

In the meantime, Margaret Higgins Sanger was a nurse in Manhattan’s impoverished Lower East Side. Sanger was horrified by the infant mortality rate she witnessed and in 1912 abandoned her career to advocate for birth control. She wrote and published a series of articles on sexually-transmitted diseases and contraception.

The articles were considered obscene by the United States Government and were, therefore, illegal to mail under the restraints of the Comstock Act. Margaret Sanger fled the country to avoid prosecution in 1914.

The uproar from women’s groups made the Sanger case an embarrassment for the government. All charges were eventually dropped and in 1915 she returned to New York to continue her campaign. In 1923 she opened the first physician-staffed clinic in the country for “the medically supervised study of contraceptive techniques.”

Seven years later the clinic had outgrown its space and Margaret Sanger’s husband, oil industrialist J. Noah H. Slee, purchased the house at 17 West 16th Street for the clinic's use. The Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau moved into the house in 1930, expanding its services. Doctors nationwide came to the clinic to learn the latest contraceptive techniques (few medical colleges taught birth control) and social workers kept in contact with the women who sought assistance.

Margaret Sanger consults in the clinic - photo NYPL Collection

Within a few years the Bureau was serving over 10,000 patients a year, providing contraceptive instruction for couples and married women, and gynecological services.

Margaret Sanger died in 1966, however the Bureau continued to work out of the house until 1973.

Although the National Park Service recommended national landmark designation, the nomination was held up by the first Bush Administration which felt that Sanger’s involvement in birth control would be equated with the abortion movement. The nomination sat, unsigned, on the desk of the Secretary of the Interior for years.

Upon Bill Clinton’s election, Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt signed the forms and in 1993 the Sanger Clinic was designed a National Historic Landmark.

Today No. 17 West 16th Street is privately owned and beautifully restored.

The 1903 Art Nouveau "New Amsterdam" Theatre

In the first days of the 20th Century New York architects were recreating Roman temples, Renaissance palazzos and Romanesque castles. At the same time Paris turned its back on the past and embraced the innovative Art Nouveau style introduced at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Sinuous Metro station entrances and floral apartment buildings and retail stores seemed to sprout from the pavement like vines.


New York architectural critic Charles De Kay described Art Nouveau design as “…the senseless curves which mar a good deal of the work embraced nowadays under that somewhat misleading title. Nine-tenths of the art nouveau we see in Europe emanates from men and women who mistake haphazard fantasticality for imagination. Their products have neither rhyme nor reason, confuse the mind, and add no real beauty to an object, while often they injure its usefulness. Spindling, swirling supports that do not support anything, grotesque decorations that have no meaning where they are applied, architecture treated like a piece of jewelry merely signify the artisan who seizes on a new movement without understanding it and tries to be in the fashion at any cost.”

Architects Henry B. Herts and Hugh Tallant thought differently.

When Abraham Erlanger and Marc Klaw chose 42nd Street for a new theatre in 1902 as the entertainment district moved uptown from 23rd Street, they commissioned Herts and Tallant to design it. What the architects produced was like nothing seen before in the country.



photo NYPL Collection


The deceptively narrow façade disguised the wide auditorium to the rear extending to 41st Street. The front elevation was a Beaux-Arts explosion splashed with Art Nouveau touches. The ornate sculpted arch over the entrance was a matter of legal bickering for months in 1903.  The arch would project four feet over the building line, a violation of code. The mayor chimed in saying “…if we are to have a beautiful city, we have got to allow ornamentation beyond the building line…Now, limit the style of ornamentation, and the extent to which it may project, and, instead of a beautiful city we will have a city as ugly as can be imagined.”

Eventually the mayor and the theatre owners got their way and the installation of the remarkable arch proceeded. Sculptor George Gray Barnard perched a grouping of Drama, Pierrot, Cupid, a Knight and a Lady, surrounded by wreathed flowers, scrolls and garlands. The arch was supported by columns of yellow marble with bronze capitals.

None of the lavish façade ornamentation, however, could prepare the visitor for visual impact of the interior. Designed by Richard Anderson it was the first example of Art Nouveau in the country. A floral motif in “silvery green,” mauve, lilac, pink, red and gold bombarded the theater goer with slinky ornamentation. Charles De Kay, who had held low esteem for Art Nouveau, praised the design. “To enter here is to get a horror of the red plush effects that still linger at the opera and in many a theatre,” he said. “The line of the proscenium arch is accompanied by a chain of conventionalized peacocks modeled in relief by St. John Issing, a decorative motif repeated in the ceiling and elsewhere.”

Herts and Tallant used an innovative cantilever construction that allowed the balconies to hang over the main floor with no visible means of support – giving unobstructed views from all seats in the house.

The pod-like boxes on either side of the stage, also designed by Issing, were each given a separate flower motif such as lily, buttercup, violet, and goldenrod. In the lobby, beneath an art glass dome, was a fireplace of Irish marble and Caen stone, two murals by George Peixotto of “Inspiration” and “Creation,” marble wall fountains with brilliant mosaics, and bronze busts of dramatists.

The men’s lounge, “The Amsterdam Room,” was decorated with a continuous mural by Edward Simmons, George Peixotto and R. W. Finn depicting the history of New York. Masculine oak and leather furniture rested on a terra-cotta tiled floor. The ladies’ lounge was outfitted in satinwood furniture under a ceiling fresco depicting classical figures.

De Kay admitted, “…one cannot refrain from praise to the firm, Messrs Klaw & Erlanger, that sought for our sculptors and painters, our terra cotta workers and carvers, our tapestry makers and embroiderers, mosaicists and modelers, in order to perfect a theatre by the hands of American artists. They have set an example which will be followed. And for having set it so well they deserve the thanks of the community.”

James Traub in his “The Devil’s Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square” said “The sinuous line and stripped-down ornamentation of art nouveau was the very look of modernity for the forward-thinking aesthetes of the early years of the century, and the New Amsterdam was considered a building of the first importance—a building that might well 'mark an epoch in the history of art,' as one penetrating if breathless account put it. This was also, of course, an era of opulence and show, and the New Amsterdam was intended to dazzle even the most blasé theater-goer."

The architects stressed while designing the building that they wanted to elicit the magic quality of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Appropriately, the opening play on October 25, 1902 was, indeed, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

An architecture critic present on opening night called it “the most airy, fairy beautiful thing in the way of a playhouse that the New York public has ever seen.”  On the roof a second, enclosed theatre offered entertainment in the summer months.

The road ahead for the theater would not always be smooth.

A complaint by the Health Board nearly closed the theatre on March 21, 1907, when police stopped ticket sales. Curtains that had been hung over the exit doors as decoration were deemed a fire hazard by the Board. Joseph Brooks, one of the owners, called the action “uncalled for.” “They closed us up tight and turned away hundreds of persons…There’s not the slightest doubt that there’s something back of the whole thing, but I don’t know what it is.” Whatever “it” was, the theatre was back in operation a day later after removing the curtains.

In 1908 The New Amsterdam was enjoying a smash hit with The Merry Widow. To celebrate the 275th performance, the management announced it would give away “Merry Widow hats” as souvenirs to all the women in orchestra and balcony seats during the matinee. Between the second and third acts, however, the women rioted when a rumor broke out that hats were being given away early.


“There was a small stampede,” reported The New York Times, “a mere hint of what was to follow…One woman, jammed tight against the one table that still stood in place, tackled the woman next to her with a vim that would have done credit to the world’s champion female wrestler. Then the battle was on in earnest. The older women did themselves credit. The remarks which some of them exchanged and the ardor with which they threw themselves into the melee made their daughters look like the veriest molly-coddles.”

The skirmish lasted for about thirty minutes. “At 5:30 o’clock,” said The Times, “only the debris and the memory of the struggle remained.”

The worst problem came in 1930 when the play “Vanities” was raided by police and nine of the cast members were arrested for “giving an indecent performance.” The theatre was reopened when the scene that the police censors found objectionable was removed.

photo 3Dmovingpictures.com

Between the hat riot and the police raid, Florenz Ziegfeld moved his famous Follies from the Moulin Rouge. The Follies presented an annual review at The New Amsterdam until 1927 when Ziegfeld opened his own Ziegfeld Theatre. Through the Follies The New Amsterdam hosted stars like Bert Williams, Fanny Brice, Will Rogers, W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor and Marion Davies.

The Great Depression hit the theatre district hard. At the beginning of 1931, Variety reported that 31 theatres had closed. The rooftop theatre became NBC Times Square Studio, a radio studio and feature film studio.

Despite its valiant struggles, the theatre was unable to keep afloat. On May 7, 1936 the Dry Dock Savings Institution foreclosed citing $1.6 million inpaid interest and taxes. Max Cohen purchased The New Amsterdam for $500,000 to convert the theatre to a movie house.  The elaborate Beaux Arts entrance arch was stripped off to accomodate a sleek Art Deco neon sign.  The movie theatre opened in 1937 ironically screening A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The rooftop theatre became the NBC Times Square Television Theatre in 1951; but as 42nd Street degraded, so did the New Amsterdam. In the early 1980s the once-magnificent theatre was boarded shut. Although the Nederlanders bought the building for $5 million in 1982, a string of problems prevented its renovation. The theatre sat abandoned for a decade while its lavish interiors deteriorated.

Finally New York City and State pushed for the resurrection of the 42nd Street Theatre District. The 42nd Street Development Project took over the building in 1992 for $247,000. The architectural firm of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer, known for rejuvenating historic properties, was hired to stabilize the theatre. Water was pumped from the basement, the spread of mold and loss of decorative plasterwork was halted, and the building was ridded of vermin and vagrants.

In 1995 the Walt Disney Company formed the New Amsterdam Development Corporation to renovate the building as a live theatre venue once again, using partial financing from tax incentives offered by the National Park Service. The renovation, lasting a year and a half, cost $36 million.

The New Amsterdam officially reopened as a live theatre on April 2, 1997 with a concert staging of King David, followed later that year by the long-running stage version of The Lion King.

Today the sumptuous façade of The New Amsterdam is gone. However, to enter the theatre is to step back to 1903. The sinuous, entwining designs are fresh and renewed. One of the greatest Art Nouveau interiors in the country -- and a true rarity in New York City -- has been salvaged from nearly inevitable destruction.

The 1905 Tiffany & Co. Building - 401 Fifth Avenue

The Tiffany Building in 1905 -- NYPL Collection

Young Charles Tiffany opened his first tiny store opposite City Hall in 1837, in the middle of America’s first great depression. When he died 65 years later in 1902 leaving an estate of $35 million, his store had become the benchmark of the jewelry business in America and the name Tiffany & Company synonymous with quality.

Tiffany’s store had moved to Union Square in 1870. The new cast iron store was praised by The New York Times as “a Jewel Palace...the largest of its kind in the world. A school of taste...a teacher of art progress."

Charles Tiffany kept a staff of seven whose jobs were simply to keep files on the wealthy socialites across the country. Photographs, newspaper clippings and details of their financial position were kept at hand so that when moneyed patrons entered they were recognized, addressed by name and allowed to take their purchases without paying upfront.  According to Tiffany, “When we give credit to anyone who had supposed himself unknown to us we are sure to retain him forever.”

At the time of this death at 90, Tiffany was planning to move his store once again. Fifth Avenue was the center of wealth in New York and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel between 33rd and 34th Streets was where the well-heeled went to be seen. Diagonally across the street, at 401 Fifth Avenue between 36th and 37th Streets, the new Tiffany store would rise.

Tiffany’s vision moved ahead and the board of directors commissioned McKim, Mead & White to design the new store; a building appropriate to its surroundings. The move in 1905, along with Benjamin Altman’s great white marble emporium next door that would open a year later, would signal the upward encroachment of commerce into the Fifth Avenue stronghold of brownstone mansions and marble chateaux.

What Stanford White produced was, as novelist Henry James called it “a great nobleness of white marble.” Drawing on the Sixteenth Century Venetian Palazzo Grimani, the architect designed one of the most beautiful buildings of his career. The completed structure cost $1 million.

The side entrance -- photo NYPL Collection

According to Francis Morrone and James Iska in their The Architectural Guidebook to New York, “There is a phenomenal lightness to this building that is an almost perfect amalgam of the Beaux-Arts and the Modern; the Tiffany Building is a truly underappreciated work that makes one wonder what White might have produced had he not died so tragically young.”

Indeed, Edmund Vincent Gillon and Henry Hope Reed felt White outdid the original. In their Beaux-Arts Architecture in New York: A Photographic Guide, they said “In some ways, thanks to the proportions given it by White, the Tiffany Building is superior to the model.”

Through its doors came brigades of New York’s and the world’s elite. In the days when society women draped themselves in pearl ropes and weighed themselves down in diamonds, the robin's egg blue Tiffany & Co. box, introduced in 1847, had become a symbol of status.

With the Russian Revolution, which was quickly followed by World War I, times changed in Europe. As royal houses fell the exiled nobles sold off their jewels for desperately-needed cash. Many of these ended up in the vaults of Tiffany & Company. From their white marble palazzo, Tiffany customarily sold $6 million in diamonds each year. There were often over $40 million in jewels in the vault.

The one Tiffany & Company item no one seemed ready to purchase, however, was the Tiffany Diamond; the 128.5-carat gem still sits in the New York store, valued today at $22 million.

In 1940 Tiffany & Co. once again moved, this time uptown to Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. The move signaled a decline in what Morrone and Iska called “…maybe Fifth Avenue’s most beautiful building.”

While much of the upper building remained intact, the street level was brutalized. Pseudo-modern storefronts obliterated the Stanford White facade.  “The beholder is shocked by the vandalism inflicted on the lowest row of columns on the Fifth Avenue front,” lamented Gillon and Reed.

In 2003 an aggressive restoration brought back the three-story Corinthian columns that had been obliterated mid-century. Yet today, where Astors and Vanderbilts once shopped for silver ewers and diamond brooches, tourists in sneakers and shorts inhale Whoppers.  And the building that Gillon and Reed termed “underappreciated” is in fact mostly overlooked and ignored.

The 1891 J. Hampden Robb House - 23 Park Avenue

The J. Hampden Robb House 1891 -- NYPL Collection

By the time James Hampden Robb commissioned Stanford White to design his home at 23 Park Avenue in 1888, he had already been a cotton broker, a New York State Assemblyman and a State Senator.  At the time, he was busy with the functions of Commissioner of the Parks Department.

Park Avenue and the streets leading off it were lined with substantial brownstone homes of about a decade earlier.  White's design for the Robb mansion would be strikingly different.  He created a five-story Renaissance-inspired palazzo of iron spot brick with exuberant terra cotta trim on a high brownstone base.

The pillared entrance portico was mimicked in the stone balcony directly above.  A finely crafted cast iron balcony and two story oriel window on the south side added to the visual appeal.

Robb and his wife, Cornelia Van Rensselaer Thayer Robb, moved into their newly completed home in 1891.  The couple filled their home with rare art and antiques, 16th century Persian rugs, Gobelin tapestries, and paintings by artists like Rubens, Van Dyke and Emmanuel.

While Robb was aggressively involved in the Democratic Party, he invested equal passion into his Parks position.  He steadfastly refused to allow any incursion of commerce onto park property set aside for public recreation.  “Only by eternal vigilance can the parks be maintained and developed as they ought to be, for there is never a time when someone is not trying to ‘work’ something to his own personal advantage and to the detriment of the public," he said.

During his Senate years he had fought for the appropriation to establish the State Reservation of Niagara Falls, speaking fervently of “the preservation of the beauties and the breathing places of the State.”  When he was offered the position of Assistant Secretary of State by President Grover Cleveland, Robb politely declined.

Photo CityRealty.com

Twenty years after its completion, J. Hampton Robb died in the house January 21, 1911.  His daughter, Cornelia, remained in the house for another year, then sold most of the furnishings at a highly publicized auction at the Plaza Hotel in April of 1912.

Among the items sold were a 7-by-12-foot Persian carpet that brought $22,000 (about three quarters of a million in 2010 dollars) and a 16th century terra cotta Madonna and Child purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

By now Park Avenue was changing.  One by one the grand mansions were falling to be replaced by office buildings. Cornelia Robb leased the mansion as a boarding house and moved northward.

Were it not for the Advertising Club of New York, the Robb House, too, would eventually have been demolished.  The organization acquired the house in 1923 as its clubhouse, and architect Fred F. French was hired to renovate it for the club’s purposes.  A local clergyman made a plea to the Club’s membership: “Save as much of White as possible. He had a wonderful sense of proportion. There is something about a house where he had a free hand that gives you a special feeling of comfort. That’s why I say…that I would rather have a Stanford White house than a painting by Rembrandt.”

The Advertising Club 1977, photo Anita Pinas, courtesy Murray Hill Neighborhood Assoc.

Renovations were completed within the year at a cost of $250,000, and the club opened on January 6, 1924.  Heeding the appeal of the minister, French preserved much of White’s interiors.

The clubhouse was enlarged after a fire damaged the structure in 1946.  The abutting house to the rear at 103 East 35th Street was incorporated as an extension of the Robb mansion.  Here, two years later, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt gave an impassioned plea for help for delinquent boys.

The house, considered by many to be one of Stanford White’s finest residential designs, was converted to co-op apartments in 1977.  Although landmark status was not awarded until 1998, the conversion left the exterior untouched, as well as many of the surviving interior details.

Photo Lamb Realty NYC

Author James Trager wrote in his 1990 Park Avenue, Street of Dreams, “Although Park Avenue has little to match the most glorious Fifth Avenue relics (none of them any longer private residents), it once had many splendid private dwellings and still has some quite respectable survivors.  The oldest of the best is 23 Park…This is the only true Stanford White house on Park Avenue and one of the few anywhere.”

The 1890 Grolier Club - 29 East 32nd Street

photo via The Grolier Club

The during last years of the 19th century, gentlemen’s clubs dotted New York.  These comfortable escapes from business (and home) provided gentlemen an outlet in which share common interests such as yachting, tennis and racquets, shared college ties, or collecting.  A very specialized gentlemen's club was the Grolier.

On the cold evening of January 23, 1884, eight gentlemen arrived at 11 East 36th Street, the residence of Robert Hoe.  Hoe owned the world’s largest printing press manufacturing company.  That night the assemblage of highly educated men formed the Grolier Club, named after Jean Grolier de Servieres, a 16th century French book collector.  Each member was a connoisseur of “book arts.”  And each felt that the arts of printing and typography in America were in serious decline.

Although the membership included men from other professions–bankers and lawyers, for instance–most were publishers and printers.  Whitelaw Reid was the editor of the New-York Tribune, William Laffan published The New York Sun, and Theodore De Vinne of De Vinne Press on Lafayette Street was perhaps the foremost printer in the country.  Other members were involved in publishing houses such as Scribner, Harper, and Appleton.

Initially, members met on Thursday nights in rented rooms in the Mott Memorial Hall at 64 Madison Avenue.  Reid’s paper, The New-York Tribune, said, “They talk of books and nothing but books–editions, dates, printers, bookbinders, illustrations, book plates, autographs.”  For outsiders their weekly discussions would have surely induced sound sleep.

Within six years the club had grown and a permanent clubhouse was necessary.  Included in the club’s constitution was the requirement of maintaining “a Club building for the safekeeping of its property, and otherwise suitable for the purposes of the club.”

Charles W. Romeyn received the commission to design a permanent clubhouse.  He designed a Romanesque Revival-style building at 29 East 32nd Street clad in tan Roman brick with contrasting red sandstone.  Romeyn gave the edifice a purposefully domestic look, so that it could slip innocuously into the residential block.  Clad in tan Roman brick with contrasting red sandstone, its bold stone arches defined the first floor ornamented by carved stone with Celtic-type basketweave designs.  The second floor was dominated by a great arched window, mirroring the shape of the arches directly below, while on the third floor, a wide run of four side-by-side windows allowed sunlight to pour in.

It was not an all-male refuge, however.  Women, too, discussed their passion of books. On February 21, 1896, The New York Times reported, “Miss Louise Both-Hendriksen read a paper on ‘Book Plates’ in which she discussed ancient and modern plates, French and English principally, and gave the distinctions in style and the underlying reasons therefore. She also gave the names of the prominent book-plate artists of the present day.”

The same night, Theodore De Vinne criticized modern printing methods.  He complained that, “in his younger days he had been taught that anything that was difficult, eccentric, or striking was fine printing, but that idea has now largely been outgrown.”

Monthly exhibitions were staged at the Club.  On April 16, 1898, The Times reported, “For its April monthly exhibition the Grolier Club…has arranged a display of title pages and frontispieces of books published in the sixteen and seventeenth centuries.  There are 271 numbers in the catalogue, which, as usual, has been compiled with great care.”

Despite its impressive building, encroaching commerce forced the Club to move on.  On December 27, 1914, The New York Times reported, “the Grolier Club is preparing to move to a site which will be less disturbed by the activities of trade than is its home in Thirty-second Street, near Madison Avenue."

The newspaper said that when the clubhouse was built, “Twelve-story business lofts in the choice Murray Hill district or on Fourth or Madison Avenues were not thought of at that time.  Now, however, a twelve-story building on Madison Avenue corner of Thirty-second Street overtops the modest Grolier Club, and just to the east is another huge building of the same size.  The Grolier Club with its bookish atmosphere, looks out of place, and this fact has led the members to vote to sell the house.”

The New York Times went on to describe the library of works on book making, paper, etching, printing, illustrating and binding, “what is said to be the largest and finest collection in the world, outside of the national libraries of France and England.”  The collection at the time numbered about 12,000 volumes.

Although the newspaper predicted that the clubhouse would be razed, it survived.  Converted to office space, it served as the headquarters of women’s garment trade organizations then, in the 1930s became home to the Building Employees Union.

Actor and dancer Gilbert Kiamie purchased the old Grolier Club and used it as a private home in the 1940s, after which it reverted to office space again.

In 1990, the building became “The Grolier,” a members-only supper club, operated by Henri Kessler and Peter Kotite.  The owners spent more than $1 million on interior renovations.  While most of the interior detailing had been stripped away during its use as office space, the Grolier retained its original fireplaces.  The building was landmarked in 1970.

The 1899 Appellate Courthouse - Madison Avenue and 25th Street

On June 28, 1895 when The Sinking Fund Commission met in the Mayor’s office, it was agreed that the new Appellate Court, established a year earlier, would hold session in rented rooms on the third floor of the Constable Building.  At the same time the committee appointed to recommend a site for a new courthouse reported on their surprising choice: the lot at the corner of Madison Avenue and 25th Street, surrounded by posh homes of the city’s gentry.

At $370,000, the site was considered extravagant, especially by Commissioner Finch, and a new committee was formed to discuss the matter.  Despite the cost of the land and protests from wealthy homeowners, the site was approved.  To appease the neighboring mansion owners, the courthouse would be designed to meld into its environment – a low, stately structure intended to impress but not overpower.

The Courthouse in 1899, surrounded by brownstone residences.

A year later designs were approved and on July 1, 1896, The New York Times reported on the newly planned Appellate Courthouse. “On this ground, at an estimated cost of $650,000, will be placed an imposing and ornate structure of pure white marble from designs prepared by James Brown Lord.

from the collection of the New York Public Library

“The courtroom will occupy the main portion of the first floor. It will be a handsome chamber, 46 by 68 feet, with a ceiling 18 feet in height….The second floor will be 14 feet in height and will contain the library, the Judges’ private rooms, toilet rooms, attendants’ rooms, and rooms for stenographers…The third story will contain one Judge’s private room, for which space could not be found on the second story; toilet rooms, a ladies’ toilet room, janitor’s apartments, and storage rooms.  On this floor there will also be a complete men’s outfit for the Judges including a dining room, kitchen, and pantry.

“The details of the interior decorations have not yet been fully worked out, but there will be plenty of marble statues and bas-reliefs from the indications in the drawings.”

Indeed, there would be “plenty of marble statues” inside and out.

The courthouse opened with a private viewing for the press and dignitaries on December 20, 1899.  James Lord and his wife received the guests at the door as though it were their home and personally led the tour.  The combination of architecture, function and art was not lost on The New York Times reporter.  “It therefore emphasizes the growing understanding in this country of the fact that ‘the house’ to be truly ‘beautiful’ requires and demands the co-operation of the allied arts.”

Lord had been given free-reign in choosing the artists and sculptors who decorated the building, which The Times called “one of the most chaste monuments of art in the metropolis.” Sixteen sculptors – sponsored by the National Sculpture Society and among of the most esteemed of the day – worked on the thirty 12-foot marble statues on the facade, the most ever to work on a single building in the United States. Inside, ten renowned artists created murals for the courtroom and main hall.  Herter Brothers made the custom furniture.

Fully one-third of the $700,000 cost of the building was spent on statues, murals and other decorative features.

Lord’s finished courthouse is a Roman temple splashed with Beaux-Arts ornamentation.  Six two-story marble Corinthian pillars support a classical pediment encasing an elaborate sculptural grouping, “Triumph of Law” by Charles H. Neuhaus.  A similar portico supporting a flat cornice faces the Madison Avenue façade. Above it all stand statues of lawgivers – Confucius, Moses, Justinian, and Alfred the Great, for example – by artists like Karl Bitter, Daniel Chester French, Phillip Martini and William Cooper. Allegories of Wisdom and Force flank the broad entrance staircase.

When James Lord died in 1902, his obituary noted that “The building is said to be the first ever constructed in America in which the architect had the entire control of the sculpture and mural decorations, as well as the construction of the building.”

In 1953 a $1.2 million restoration of the facade was undertaken by the Department of Public Works during which the huge marble statues were removed and cleaned.  It was at this time that the general public first realized one of the lawgivers was Mohammed.  Representatives from Pakistan, Egypt and Indonesia petitioned the State Department to destroy the statue rather than restore it, citing Islamic canon that forbids the depiction of human beings in painting or sculpture.

When the statues were replaced in 1955, each was moved over one spot to fill in the void where Mohammed had stood. Today one empty pedestal remains.

above photographs by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council

At the same time a five-story addition was erected behind the courthouse, carefully avoiding any disturbance to the original building.  On the addition, a Holocaust Memorial was included; a marble plaque of Auschwitz as seen from above in a World War II reconnaissance photograph. Inscribed in the stone is “Indifference to Injustice is the Gate to Hell.”

An overhead view of Auschwitz concentration camp is emblazoned on the memorial.

The exterior of the Appellate Court was designated a landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1966, the interiors were given landmark designation in 1981, and the building was included on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

from the collection of the New York Public Library

Today the interiors are nearly untouched, other than the addition of 21st century technical updating. The vast stained glass dome over the courtroom, the gilded coffered ceilings and the Sienna marble walls look as they did when James Lord led the press through in 1899. Outside air pollution is eroding the irreplaceable rooftop statues, but over all the Appellate Court remains an architectural and artistic treasure.

The Appellate Courthouse is not open to the public.

McGurk's Suicide Hall -- 295 Bowery

In the last half of the 19th Century the Bowery was the center of nightlife for the mostly German population of the Lower East Side.  Beer gardens and music halls lined the street and songs celebrated the carefree atmosphere.  Everything on the Bowery, however, was not innocent.

Just after the Civil War, a hotel was erected at 295 Bowery for returning soldiers.  The red brick, neo-Grec-style structure was trimmed with limestone.  At each floor, the windows were connected by stone bands at the sills and stone lentils.  An ambitious cast metal cornice crowned the design.  By 1880 it was Steuben Hall, the headquarters of the political group, the German Republic Central Committee. The respectable atmosphere of the hotel, however, would be short-lived.

Prostitution and gambling were migrating from the Water Street area to the Bowery by the 1890s.  In the balconies of many of the Bowery theatres, which catered to a lower class audience than those in the 23rd Street theatre district, prostitutes openly plied their trade.  Sailors searched the seedy saloons for the women who haunted them.  It was the sort of environment that attracted John McGurk.

McGurk had previously owned three saloons, each one closed down by the police.  In 1893, at 295 Bowery, he opened another.  McGurk’s Saloon earned a reputation as the most degraded spot on the Bowery.  The bartenders were thugs and thieves and the prostitutes who ended up at here had fallen as low as they could go.

A decade earlier, in his 1882 New York by Gaslight, James D. McCabe, Jr. described these women:

You would find her in the terrible dens, sailors’ dance houses, and living hells of some kindred locality.  She is a mass of disease, utterly vile and repulsive, steadily dying from her bodily ailments, and the effects of rum and gin.  She has reached the bottom of the ladder, and can go no lower.  She knows it, and in a sort of dumbly desperate way is glad it is so.  Life is such a daily torture to her, hope has so entirely left her, that death only offers her relief.

So it was with the girls at McGurk’s.  One by one they committed suicide in the saloon or in the hotel above it–reportedly six deaths and seven failed attempts in 1899 alone.   A few threw themselves from the top floor windows, others drank carbolic acid.  Two, Blonde Madge Davenport and Big Mame, made a pact to end their suffering.  They purchased carbolic acid at a nearby pharmacy, then returned to 295 Bowery.  Davenport swallowed her dose, ending her life in writhing agony.  Big Mame, however, in trying to gulp the acid splashed most of it on her face.  Disfigured and unable to work, she was banned from McGurk’s thereafter.

In response to the notorious deaths, John McGurk renamed his saloon “Suicide Hall”--a callous, tongue-in-cheek marketing scheme.  He defended himself as an innocent by-stander.  “Most of the women who come to my place have been on the downgrade too long to think of reforming,” he said.  “I just want to say that I never pushed a girl downhill any more than I ever refused a helping hand to one who wanted to climb.”

His head bartender, "Short-Change Charley" Steele, who was once arrested for murder, kept a supply of chloral hydrate ready to drug unsuspecting patrons.  To make the liquor go farther it was diluted with water, then camphor was added to strengthen the taste.  McGurk’s was the first establishment to have an armed “bouncer.”  He was "Eat-‘em Up" Jack McManus.  McManus was repeatedly arrested for assault, however since his victims were always stricken with memory loss when it was time to identify him, he was never held.

McGurk’s, from the beginning, was the target of police raids.  In 1893, The New York Times reported,

They charge McGurk with admitting minors to a concert saloon where intoxicating liquors are sold.  When they visited the place the agents found it overrun with men and women of the lowest type.  Everything was carried on openly and in a disgusting manner.  The agents found Mary Ormsby, fifteen years old, of 249 Spring Street, in the place, and they at once arrested McGurk.  The girl was taken to the rooms of the Gerry Society.

A year later McGurk was held by Justice Hogan for running a disorderly house–or brothel–but was released because due to the transient nature of his “hotel” guests “naught would have come of the raid.”

By 1899, with Theodore Roosevelt serving as police commissioner, the pressure on McGurk intensified.  That January, before young George Eberhardt set off to identify Charley Steele who was being held on murder charges, he was shot dead.  Two months later, on March 8, McGurk’s brother, Patrick, was arrested “in the resort at 295 Bowery” for running an establishment “for disorderly persons.”

On April 2 of that same year, The New York Times reported that McGurk’s liquor license was to be revoked.  “We are not conducting a disorderly house,” protested the manager.  The article said, “John McGurk has been ill at his house for several weeks, and last evening said he had sold out the place and has nothing more to do with it.”

In actuality, McGurk had not sold the place and in 1900 Suicide Hall was named by John McCullagh, State Superintendent of Elections, as a place of “colonizing”–a practice whereby transients were housed in McGurk’s “hotel” in order to tip the district election results.  By keeping "friends" in office, McGurk had been able to evade the law.

The overt illegal activities of McGurk and his crew eventually became too much to ignore.  Bartender William Strauss and McGurk’s nephew, Philip McKenzie, noticed an intoxicated patron, Samuel Cohen, stumble out of the bar on March 11, 1900.  The New York Times reported, “as he left the two men followed him up the Bowery and attacked and robbed him at the corner of Bleecker Street.”  Judge Newburger had had enough of Suicide Hall.

Strauss was given a sentence of ten years and three months in Sing Sing Prison and McKenzie, a minor, was sent to the Elmira Reformatory.  “If I can do it I’ll make the Bowery as safe at night as it is in the daytime,” the judge said.

On March 23, 1901, the police raided Suicide Hall again.  “McGurk’s was in full blast,” reported The New York Times.  “The place was crowded.  Men and women were drinking and smoking.  Sailors and all kinds of people were there and dancing was going on with the rest of the amusements when the police startled everybody by rushing in…Then Col. Monroe indicated the men he had warrants for, and they were placed under arrest and taken to the station house by some of the policemen.”

The article continued, “The men and women in McGurk’s were excited and shouted that they wanted to get out, while the crowd outside yelled back.  When the three prisoners were taken out the crowd jeered them.”

With the pressure on, McGurk installed a new sign outside on which McGurk’s name did not appear.  The New York Times said, however, that it, "had its usual crowd of sailors and their companions, with a ‘barker’ at the door who assured all comers that ‘the old place is still McGurk’s and it hasn’t moved away.’”

By April 1902, with a new police captain, James Churchill, at the Fifth Street Police Station, the end was near for McGurk’s.  Churchill was doggedly closing down disorderly houses and sending their proprietors to prison.

“When I first took command, I told John McGurk, who was the proprietor of several dives in the district, that he would have to close them. McGurk laughed at me,” said Churchill.  “McGurk soon found that I would not stand for any funny business and asked me to give him a month to dispose of his lease to some financial advantage.  I granted him this time but told him not to violate the law in the meantime.  McGurk is now a nervous invalid at his home, 209 East Eighteenth Street.”

McGurk was in truth using the "nervous invalid" ploy to flee.  He skipped out on $1,000 bail and took his wife, Louisa, and his daughter Martina, to California with approximately half a million dollars in cash.  He died in 1913 at the age of 59.  “His last heartbreak came when his daughter Martina was denied admission to a convent school after those in charge discovered her father’s identity,” according to Luc Sante, author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York.

Following McGurk, 295 Bowery changed little.  For approximately 40 years it was known as The Liberty Hotel, a cheap flophouse for Bowery men down on their luck.  A sign inside reminded them, “When did you write to mother?”

The reputation as McGurk's stuck and when Mae West wrote her 1932 novel Diamond Lil, she included a chapter “Suicide Hall.”

In the 1960s, female artists took over the hotel, converting it into an artist co-op where writer and sculptor Kate Millet worked and where photographer and custom furniture maker Sophie Keir had a space.  The co-op lasted four decades until the Cooper Square Urban Renewal Plan targeted the building in 1999.

Despite the unexceptional architecture and the questionable, if colorful, historical significance of the building, a group protested against its demolition, pressing the Landmarks Preservation Commission to designate it a landmark. The Commission declined, citing insufficient historical, cultural or architectural merit.

image via cityrealty.com

No. 295 Bowery was razed in 2005.  In its place is a glass and steel apartment building, Avalon Bowery Place; a symbol of the changing atmosphere of The Bowery which has effectively erased a vibrant and infamous chapter in New York City history.