A History of New York in 27 Buildings Read online

  For Michael and William

  I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline … The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? … Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window—no, I don’t feel how small I am—but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.

  —Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Only in New York: An Exploration of the World’s Most Fascinating, Frustrating, and Irrepressible City

  Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America

  A History of New York in 101 Objects

  America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York (editor)

  A Kind of Genius: Herb Sturz and Society’s Toughest Problems

  The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Atom Spy Case

  Who We Are Now: The Changing Face of America in the 21st Century

  Who We Are: A Portrait of America

  “I Never Wanted to Be Vice President of Anything!”: An Investigative Biography of Nelson Rockefeller

  CONTENTS

  Timeline

  Introduction

  1. The Bowne House

  2. St. Paul’s Chapel

  3. Federal Hall

  4. City Hall

  5. Domino Sugar Refinery

  6. Tweed Courthouse

  7. The Marble Palace

  8. 21 Stuyvesant Street

  9. The High Bridge

  10. 123 Lexington Avenue

  11. Pier A

  12. The IRT Powerhouse

  13. The Bossert Hotel

  14. The Asch Building

  15. The Flatiron Building

  16. The Lyceum Theater

  17. Sixty-Ninth Regiment Armory

  18. The American Bank Note Plant

  19. Grand Central Terminal

  20. The Apollo

  21. The Coney Island Boardwalk

  22. Bank of United States

  23. The Empire State Building

  24. The Hunter College Gymnasium

  25. First Houses

  26. 134 East Sixtieth Street

  27. 60 Hudson Street

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  A Note on the Author

  How much more epic are the lives of buildings.

  —Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City

  TIMELINE

  1661

  The Bowne House: Construction probably began this year, because in 1662 the Quaker meeting held there resulted in the arrest of its owner, John Bowne.

  1766

  St. Paul’s Chapel: It opened as an outreach chapel of Trinity Church and survived the Great Fire of 1776 and the collapse of the World Trade Center.

  1804

  21 Stuyvesant Street: Known as the Stuyvesant Fish House, it was built by the grandson of Peter Stuyvesant as a wedding present for his daughter and son-in-law.

  1811

  City Hall: Far uptown at the time, it replaced the century-old seat of municipal government, which had been converted into Federal Hall and razed in 1812.

  1842

  Federal Hall: Constructed on the site of the nation’s original Capitol, where Washington was inaugurated, it served as the U.S. Customs House and Subtreasury Building.

  1845

  The Marble Palace: Built for the self-made retailer A. T. Stewart, this architectural gem grew into what was arguably America’s first department store.

  1848

  The High Bridge: Originally called the Aqueduct Bridge, it is the city’s oldest. Built to transport water from the Croton River, it was opened to pedestrians in 1864.

  1855

  123 Lexington Avenue: Once one of nine identical brownstones, it is the only existing building in New York City where a U.S. president was sworn in.

  1865

  134 East Sixtieth Street: Typical of thousands of nineteenth-century brownstones, it survives because of a woman who became a shaker, but refused to be a mover.

  1881

  Tweed Courthouse: Justice was blind when the vastly overbudget Italianate landmark became a monument to the corruption of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall.

  1882

  Domino Sugar Refinery: The original complex dated from 1856, the current one from a generation later. Once the world’s largest sugar refinery, it dominated the waterfront.

  1884

  Pier A: The last surviving historic pier in Manhattan, it was the headquarters of the dock commissioners. Its clock has been described as the first World War I memorial.

  1901

  The Asch Building: Prophetically named, the fireproof ten-story stack of lofts was in a district crowded with garment manufacturers. It is now part of New York University’s campus.

  1902

  The Flatiron Building: Who knew? The name of one of the favorite subjects for artists and photographers in the former Theater District actually preceded its construction.

  1903

  The Lyceum Theater: Commissioned by David Frohman, who, with his brothers, dominated show business, it is the oldest continually operating legitimate theater in New York.

  1904

  The IRT Powerhouse: Stanford White’s industrial colossus generated electricity to drive the subway system for a half century while paying homage to the City Beautiful.

  1906

  Sixty-Ninth Regiment Armory: Home to the “Fighting Irish,” as they were nicknamed during World War I, the Beaux-Arts drill hall broke ground architecturally and for the art inside.

  1909

  The Bossert Hotel: Called “the Waldorf-Astoria of Brooklyn,” it was built by the lumber baron who supplied the timber for Ebbets Field and became a Dodgers hangout.

  1909

  The American Bank Note Plant: This impregnable complex in what became a notorious South Bronx ghetto was, to the cognoscenti, a veritable moneymaking machine.

  1913

  Grand Central Terminal: The construction of the city’s greatest public space ushered in a glamorous era of rail travel and the elegance of Park Avenue. It also kept the Vanderbilts out of jail.

  1914

  The Apollo: “I May Be Wrong (But I Think You’re Wonderful)” became the theme song of this originally whites-only, fifteen-hundred-plus-seat showcase built for burlesque.

  1921

  Bank of United States: No plaque or tablet marks this site in the Bronx, another transformative setting that survives, but whose rich history has been all but forgotten.

  1923

  The Coney Island Boardwalk: Not to be outdone by Atlantic City, Brooklyn coupled the subway with a communal promenade to democratize a former playground for the wealthy.

  1930

  60 Hudson Street: Here’s where the metaphysical internet converges into a tangible mass of lasers, cables, tubes, generators, and servers. You can almost hear the building hum.

  1931

  The Empire State Building: New York developers played “Race to the Roof” in a contest for the world’s tallest building. This one kept the title for decades and remains the most iconic.

  1935

  First Houses: The name wasn’t original, but the concept was. It became one model for solving an ongoing challenge: how to define, create, and replicate affordable housing.

  1936

  The Hunter College Gymnasium: An earlier effort to achieve what finally happened here in 1946 proved to be an exercise in futility. And
what happened here was brief. But it produced a global legacy that endures today.

  INTRODUCTION

  In my earlier books, I’ve tried to tell the story of New York through its people (Only in New York), through its surviving artifacts (A History of New York in 101 Objects), and through a single edifice (Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America). In this latest five-borough odyssey, I’ve raised the stakes: Can collective conglomerations of bricks, glass, wood, steel, and mortar reveal the soul of a city? Forged from natural resources and assembled by human ingenuity, can they help illustrate why and how New York, poised to celebrate its four hundredth anniversary, evolved from a struggling Dutch company town into a world capital?

  “A bicycle shed is a building,” the art historian Nikolaus Pevsner wrote. “Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture.” I’ve stretched the definition of both words in the interests of making our perspective on the cityscape more democratic. Just how many buildings are there in New York City? While the exact number changes from day to day, the best estimate is well over seven hundred thousand. In my list of twenty-seven, while I’ve included a few other structures that were also built but aren’t strictly buildings, most of the other criteria for including them were more exacting: They had to still exist. For the most part, you wouldn’t find them referred to in typical tourist guidebooks or even historical reference manuals. You’d be hard-pressed to find most of them displayed on picture postcards. They had to have been transcendent in some way or emblematic of a transformational economic, social, political, or cultural event or era. I arbitrarily chose twenty-seven, but only as a starting point. My goal is to get you thinking about your surroundings, about things we see every day but take for granted, and about history—not by rote but in ways that resonate in issues that we still grapple with today. You can email your own nominations, with explanation, to [email protected].

  This is not an architecture book, although design also says a lot about time and place. While Louis Sullivan postulated that “form follows function,” his fellow architect Philip Johnson argued instead that “architecture is the art of how to waste space.” Who society embraces as its celebrities of the moment—in any field—can always be revealing, particularly in architecture, where, as Witold Rybczynski has written, the critics marshal partisan opinions, the practitioners aim to persuade rather than to explain, and the public is blinkered by jargon about bousillage, crenellation, muntins, and quoins. “Of course, all professions have their technical terminology,” Rybczynski writes, “but while television and movies have made the languages of law and medicine familiar, the infrequent appearance of architects on the big screen is rarely enlightening, whether it’s the fictional Howard Roark in The Fountainhead or the real Stanford White in The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing.”

  Ultimately, of course, buildings are built by people and reflect their needs and aspirations. “A building has integrity just like a man,” Ayn Rand said. “And just as seldom.” We customarily attribute inanimate qualities to people: they might be solid as a rock, wooden, earthy, stone-drunk, steely-eyed, iron-willed, glass-jawed, or gravel-voiced. They may be endowed with edifice complexes. We also humanize insensate objects, infuse them with an organic core that pulsates beyond the physical space defined by foundations or property lines or by height or bulk. We speak of smart buildings, sick buildings, green buildings. “Really tall buildings,” Edward Glaeser, the Harvard economics professor, wrote, “provide something of an index of irrational exuberance.”

  Some designs are dictated by constraints imposed in response to that very exuberance (it’s estimated that for one reason or another, about two of every five buildings in Manhattan today exceed the height, bulk, or density limits in effect under current zoning laws), others solely by utilitarian, economic, or technological impediments. Manhattan has no gated communities, per se, but its many apartment houses have doormen instead (some do have courtyard entrance gates, though most were probably rendered inoperable decades ago by rust). Still others, defying Louis Sullivan, seek to distinguish themselves by sacrificing function to form, by following Goethe’s metaphor that architecture is “frozen music.” And sometimes, architects, perhaps bullied by their patrons, driven by philistine agendas, or victims of their own poor taste, produce an eyesore of a building that was not unbecoming by design, recalling Frank Lloyd Wright’s dry observation: “A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.”

  This book doesn’t feature the city’s oldest building. Nor could it keep pace with the newest. “Landmark” is loosely defined. It includes some structures that the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission hasn’t officially designated. Only a few of the selections are familiar architectural icons, like the Empire State Building, but even in that case I’ve tried to go beyond its familiar 102 stories to offer insights into the personalities, rivalries, and exploits behind that unparalleled skyscraper’s construction. Even if you think you know New York, many buildings in the book may surprise you: the Bronx gymnasium where the United Nations General Assembly first met; the nation’s first department store; the only surviving site in the city where a president of the United States was inaugurated; a hidden hub of global internet traffic; a homeless shelter that pioneered modern art; a nondescript factory that produced billions of dollars of currency in the poorest neighborhood in the country; the oldest city hall in the United States; and the buildings that helped trigger the Depression and launch the New Deal.

  Material culture is about more than inanimate objects. Buildings and their components are, for the most part, made by people who decide they need or want them, design them, construct them, live or work or play in them, and, more often than not, are torn down to create another structure that someone else believes will be better. Behind every building is a story, particularly in a society consumed by planned obsolescence. This city never seems to sit still long enough for a complete portrait, but reclaiming and reprocessing property is not unique to New York. Since the twelfth century, wholesale urban renewal was a periodic Chinese tradition, as each incoming dynasty routinely demolished the palaces and emblematic buildings of its predecessor regimes. In New York, what the economist Tyler Cowen called “creative destruction” may have been more piecemeal, but each new developer, too, has always subjugated a misty nostalgia for a utopian past to the commercial imperatives of recycling real estate for a propitious future. What did the building replace? What need was it intended to fulfill? Why was it placed there and erected then? How was it judged by contemporaries and with benefit of hindsight? Why did it survive, what was its enduring impact on the city and its people, and how did the consequences of its construction reverberate around the world?

  The architect Robert A. M. Stern once said, “People want to look at buildings and make connections.” Explore more closely some landmarks in this book that you may think are familiar and a few other structures that you may have overlooked. Here’s hoping it will give you an eyes-wide-open connection to the present through the past.

  1

  THE BOWNE HOUSE

  The Bowne House as it looked in Flushing, Queens, in the early twentieth century. (New York Times, 1907)

  Mention the Flushing Remonstrance and most people will think it’s a homeowner’s complaint to a plumber. Guess again. Instead, it codifies the courage of English settlers who rallied to the defense of their Quaker neighbors in what would become Queens. When these freedom writers were rebuffed, they produced a foundational document of American democracy—more than a century before Congress approved the Bill of Rights in New York.

  A petition signed in 1657 by thirty otherwise unremarkable citizens of Flushing—none of them Quakers themselves—to Peter Stuyvesant, the director-general of New Amsterdam, triggered recriminations and a subsequent backlash that would transform a man named John Bowne from an obscure English immigrant in his mid-thirties into a consequential American historical figure. As a result, Bowne’s wood-frame
saltbox, built circa 1661 and home to nine generations of the family, was preserved. Today, it is the oldest house in Queens.

  New Amsterdam was unique among the American colonies. The settlers lured by the Dutch West India Company didn’t come to proselytize. They weren’t escaping religious persecution. Nor were they seeking get-rich-quick gold rushes or shortcuts to China and India. Their single-minded goal was to regularly make money, and pretty much anyone who helped, or even managed not to hamper, that endeavor was more or less welcomed, or at least countenanced.

  By the twentieth century, utopians would extol the attitude of the Dutch as tolerance. Doubters described it as indifference. Whatever the motivation and the many exceptions, that forbearance toward ethnic, racial, and religious diversity defined the city that would become New York to the rest of the nation as the population spread westward. It would characterize what became the United States to the rest of the world. While the Puritans were expelling the religious-freedom-advocating minister Roger Williams and his followers from Massachusetts, the Spanish were hanging Lutherans in Florida, and just about everybody else everywhere was persecuting Catholics, by the 1640s more than a dozen languages were being spoken in New Amsterdam, and within a decade Jews were settling there amicably, too.

  The freedom of conscience that prevailed, or was supposed to, had been enshrined in 1579 in a treaty signed in the Netherlands called the Union of Utrecht. It guaranteed that “each person shall remain free in his religion and that no one shall be investigated or persecuted because of his religion.” Practically speaking, that meant that while the Dutch Reformed Church was the established religion of the Netherlands, other religions were generally indulged if they remained unobtrusive and were worshipped privately. In New Amsterdam, the doctrine largely survived the arrival in 1647 of the new director-general, Peter Stuyvesant, who brought order and prosperity to the colony, at the price of indulging his prejudices and alienating his constituents.