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.

St. Vincent de Paul - 123 West 23rd Street

A period of noticeable intolerance against Catholics after the French Revolution encouraged some French Catholics to immigrate to America, many settling in New York where French-speaking enclaves had already taken root.  French culture had, by now, become fashionable in the United States; Dolley Madison closely following the French styles and wearing, almost exclusively, Parisian gowns.

There were, however, no Catholic churches in New York that offered masses in French.  French Catholics, unable to understand the English sermons, began simply staying away. Alarmed at the news, the Archbishop of Nancy traveled to New York in the 1830's and from the pulpit of St. Peters Church on Barclay Street preached a sermon in French.  The purpose was clear: the French Catholics of New York must establish their own parish.

The French immigrants listened. They established the parish of St. Vincent de Paul in 1841, erecting their first structure on Canal Street.  In the years immediately preceding the Civil War, the parish had grown and a new church was planned uptown.

The congregation purchased land on 23rd Street between 6th and 7th Avenues and commissioned the architect Henry Engelbert to design the new structure.  Engelbert would go on to design other notable churches, as well as head the renovation of the burned St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mott Street.  For St. Vincent de Paul he produced a classically-inspired temple.  

A wide flight of stairs led to the entrance.  Above the pediment was an immense statue of St. Vincent de Paul.  photo from the collection of the New York Public Library 

Completed in 1857, the interior featured inlaid marbles, mosaics, massive fluted Corinthian columns and brilliant frescoes.

photograph by Michael Henry Adams

The pastor of St. Vincent de Paul, Annet Lafont of the Fathers of Mercy, was not content with merely providing a venue for his French-speaking congregation. In the New York of the 1850's, Blacks endured a “truly pitiable condition.”  In the words of the Fathers of Mercy, the Blacks “could hold no real estate, were permitted in no public vehicle or place of amusement, and when traveling, they had to use a special car which was little better than those for cattle.”

Father Lafont therefore opened the Catholic school to Black children, stressing that “They must receive the same moral and mental training as the white children.”  When some of the white families threatened to move their children to other schools, the Father instructed the Black children himself in his home.  Hearing of this, Haitian immigrant Pierre Toussaint, who would later be nominated for sainthood, helped fund Lafont’s endeavor. It would be another 70 years before another school for black children would be opened in the United States.

In the latter part of the 19th century the neighborhood around the church the 19th century became the city's entertainment district.  Next door was Koster & Bial's Music Hall, on the opposite side of 23rd Street was Booth's Theatre, and down the block was the Grand Opera House, to name a few.  St. Vincent de Paul seemed, perhaps, out of place in its neighborhood of nighttime recreation.

Because of Lafont's advanced social ideas, St. Vincent de Paul was the first Catholic church to invite both Black and white worshipers to partake in communion together.  His foundation of racial and social tolerance never faltered. Decades later when New York took in Jewish refugee children from France at the end of World War II, the church offered comfort to them.

In 1939 the congregation chose to restyle the 23rd Street façade.  Architect Anthony H. Depace stripped away the Engelbert facade, replacing it with a restrained Roman-inspired frontage.  Four fluted Corinthian pilasters support a heavy, classic pediment. The New York State Historic Preservation Office has called Depace’s renovation “an outstanding intact example of the Neoclassical style specifically inspired by Roman architecture.”

Photograph catholicmanhattan.blogspot.com

The French-language masses continued throughout the 20th century, attracting Haitian immigrants fleeing the regime of Jean-Claude Duvalier, as well as Canadian, Belgian, Swiss and French-speaking Africans.

It was here, in December 1961 that Edith Piaf married her final husband, Theophanis Lamboukas. Marlene Dietrich was her maid of honor.

Despite its history-making social and religious innovations and its architectural interest, St. Vincent de Paul has never been designated a landmark.  In 2013 the New York Archdiocese closed the parish, shuttering its historic structure.  Sadly, the terrorist bombing on the block in September 2016 blew out the rose window and damaged the two arched stained glass windows on the front facade.  

photo by Mike Peel

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.

The 1897 Congregation Shearith Israel Synagogue - Central Park West

photograph Gryffindor

In 1654, with both the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions raging in Europe, a group of 23 Spanish and Portuguese Jews fled to America by way of Brazil, establishing themselves in lower Manhattan.  For nearly a century they worshipped in rented spaces until, in 1730, they converted an obsolete gristmill into a synagogue, creating the first American synagogue. 

As the congregation grew and the city expanded northward, so did Congregation Shearith Israel, moving three times to new houses of worship.  By the mid-1890s, the congregation had grown large and wealthy.  The members selected a site at the corner of Central Park West and 70th Street for their next shul--a developing neighborhood filling with impressive homes.  Congregation Shearith Israel purchased five lots for $140,000.

 

P. L. Sperr photographed the building on March 4, 1929 from the collection of the New York Public Library

Architects Arnold W. Brunner and Thomas Tryon were hired to design the new synagogue.  Although fashion in Jewish religious architecture had tended to reflect Near Eastern styles–with onion domes and Moorish arches, for instance–the architects took a different approach.

Archeological excavations in Israel near the Sea of Galilee at the time had uncovered classical ruins of a Greco-Roman period synagogue.  The discovery sparked interest in Jewish history predating the Moorish period.  Arnold Brunner referred to the concept as the “sanction of antiquity.”

The architects produced a dramatic Roman temple, completed in 1897, with four gigantic Corinthian columns supporting a cornice and ambitious pediment.  A grand flight of stone steps leads to the entrance.  Its new synagogue told the community that Congregation Shearith Israel had come a long way since 1654.

photo by Wurts Bros. from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York

Tiffany Studios produced the soaring stained glass windows, and the interior walls were clad in various types of marble.  Two millstones from the colonial period gristmill synagogue on Mill Street were installed at the entrance and the reader’s desk from that same synagogue was brought in.

photos via shearithisrael.org

One room, called The Small Synagogue, is furnished in the Georgian style, including some of the furniture original the 1730 Mill Street building.

Over a century after the building's completion, Congregation Shearith Israel continues its venerable history in New York within its monumental classical synagogue.