Category Archives: New York

New York City

640 Broadway

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640 Broadway, designed by DeLemos & Cordes and completed in 1897, is the original Empire State Building – named for the bank that was housed on the ground floor.

DeLemos & Cordes would go on to design much grander buildings – notably the Keuffel & Esser Company Building, Siegel, Cooper & Co. Department Store, and the R.H. Macy & Co. Department Store at Herald Square.

The building’s original commercial tenants – including the Empire State Bank – have long since departed; a Swatch store now occupies the ground floor; upper floors have been converted to loft apartments.

640 Broadway Vital Statistics
  • Location: 640 Broadway at Bleecker Street
  • Year completed: 1897
  • Architect: DeLemos & Cordes
  • Floors: 9
  • Style: Classical Revival
  • New York City Landmark: 1999
640 Broadway Recommended Reading

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Bleecker Tower

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Bleecker Tower, originally the Manhattan Savings Institution, is a distinctive red sandstone and brick structure. Its chamfered corner and Romanesque arches are on a massive scale – appropriate for the bank that it was. (Lofts filled the upper stories.)

After mergers with two other banks, Manhattan Savings Institution became Manhattan Savings Bank – and closed the branch at 644 Broadway in the early 1940s. “MSI” remains embossed on the building’s copper pediment.

In the 1970s the owners converted the building to residential lofts; in the 1980s the building was converted again, to luxury loft apartments. In 2000 the owners embarked on a major facade restoration.

Bleecker Tower is in good company: Landmarked Empire State Bank Building is across the street; landmark Bayard-Condict Building is next door.

Bleecker Tower Vital Statistics
  • Location: 644 Broadway at Bleecker Street
  • Year completed: 1891
  • Architect: Stephen Decatur Hatch
  • Floors: 8
  • Style: Romanesque Revival / Queen Anne
  • New York City Landmark: 1999
Bleecker Tower Recommended Reading

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Bayard-Condict Building

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Bayard-Condict Building is New York’s only sample of the Chicago School architecture of Louis H. Sullivan. The 12-story steel-framed, terra-cotta-clad office building was considered a skyscraper when it was completed in 1899. It still glows a warm white at the T intersection of Bleecker and Crosby Streets, thanks to painstaking restoration in 1996.

The six-year, $800,000 project repaired almost 1300 terra cotta tiles; only 30 had to be replaced. In addition, restoration architects Wank Adams Slaving Associates located one of the elaborate original store front column capitals that had been ripped out during an early renovation – and made copies to restore the ground floor to its original design.

Louis Sullivan’s architectural innovation was to abandon the custom of designing and ornamenting buildings in the styles of the past – Beaux Arts, Classical Revival, Romanesque, etc. Instead, he created forms that accentuated a building’s height and structure – thin steel beams instead of massive masonry columns. Decoration, too, was modernized and Americanized.

(It should be noted that the six angels crowning the Bayard-Condict Building were not Sullivan’s idea. They were ordered by Silas Alden Condict.)

The building’s financial form was not as well designed as its facade. New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission notes that though the structure’s original name was to be Bayard Building, none of the prominent Bayard family was financially involved. The point became moot when construction delays resulted in a recall of the mortgage: New owners Emmeline and Silas Condict changed the name to Condict Building. A scant five months after the tower’s completion, the Condicts sold it to Charles T. Wills, the builder – who revived the Bayard name.

Bayard-Condict Building Vital Statistics
  • Location: 65 Bleecker Street at Crosby Street
  • Year completed: 1899
  • Architect: Louis H. Sullivan and Lyndon P. Smith
  • Floors: 12
  • Style: Chicago School
  • New York City Landmark: 1975
  • National Register of Historic Places: 1976
Bayard-Condict Building Recommended Reading

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Engine Company 33

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Engine Company 33 firehouse embodies New York fire department architecture: big, bold, and colorful – like the men who live, work and sometimes die there.

The house dominates Great Jones Street on the block between Lafayette Street and The Bowery. Its monumental limestone Beaux Arts arch, scooped out of the four-story red brick facade like a band shell, recalls the top of New York’s demolished Singer Building. That tower, also designed by Ernest Flagg, was the world’s tallest building when completed in 1909 – 11 years after this firehouse.

The firehouse, now shared by Ladder Company 9, was among the first designed by Flagg. Until 1895, Napoleon Le Brun (and sons) had been the NYFD chief architect; the firm designed 40 firehouses in 16 years.

Tragically, this house lost 10 of its 14 firefighters on September 11, 2001. (The NY Times article was incorrect on this point.)

Engine Company 33 Vital Statistics
  • Location: 42 Great Jones Street between Lafayette Street and the Bowery
  • Year completed: 1898
  • Architect: Ernest Flagg, W. B. Chambers
  • Floors: 4
  • Style: Beaux Arts
  • New York City Landmark: 1968
  • National Register of Historic Places: 1972
Engine Company 33 Recommended Reading

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700 Broadway

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700 Broadway seems to have an ongoing identity crisis. Originally the Schermerhorn Building*, it was designed by George B. Post as a store. A decade later the Romanesque Revival structure was converted to showrooms, offices, storage and workshops. Then it became lofts. The building was vacant and abandoned for most of the 1980s, until the National Audubon Society took it over as their national headquarters in 1989. Lincoln Property Company bought the building in 2006, but sold it in 2008 to the law firm Weitz & Luxenberg.

The building became “green” as the Audubon House: A two-year restoration project triple-insulated the structure’s walls and roof, rebuilt interior spaces to make better use of natural lighting, and installed high-efficiency lighting and heating/cooling systems, among other improvements.

When Weitz & Luxenberg took over, the firm discovered that routine facade maintenance was anything but routine: Years of subway vibrations and freeze/thaw cycles had created severe structural damage – major cracks had developed and parts of the walls were leaning out over the street. Another two-year restoration project ensued, rebuilding and repairing the walls, cornice, and terra cotta ornamentation.

Architect George B. Post also designed the landmark New York Stock Exchange and Brooklyn Historical Society.

* Not to be confused with the Schermerhorn Building just two blocks away at 380 Lafayette Street.

700 Broadway Vital Statistics
  • Location: 700 Broadway at E 4th Street
  • Year completed: 1891
  • Architect: George B. Post
  • Floors: 8
  • Style: Romanesque Revival
  • New York City Landmark: 1999
700 Broadway Recommended Reading

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Ardsley

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The Ardsley is one of a handful of Art Deco apartment buildings on Central Park West – and considered by some to be Emery Roth’s finest Art Deco building, even surpassing his Eldorado, one block south. It’s a sharp departure from the styles Roth used in his other famous Central Park West apartment towers: Alden, Beresford, and San Remo.

The Ardsley Vital Statistics
  • Location: 320 Central Park West at W 92nd Street
  • Year completed: 1931
  • Architect: Emery Roth
  • Floors: 22
  • Style: Art Deco
  • New York City Landmark: 1990
The Ardsley Recommended Reading

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El Dorado

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El Dorado (aka The Eldorado*) is among New York’s most fabled apartment buildings – for its celebrity residents as much as for its stunning twin-tower Art Deco architecture.

Despite (or because of?) the building’s impressive design, El Dorado (The Golden One) got off to a rocky start – foreclosure following the stock market crash. Though the apartments were luxe enough to include maid’s quarters, the building was economy-minded enough to use cast stone instead of the real thing in the three-story base. And original notations of gold leaf for the towers’ pinnacles were never executed.

After reorganization, the building successfully attracted luxury-minded tenants; in 1982 El Dorado turned co-op. Unlike other pricey New York cooperatives, El Dorado welcomes celebrities. Famous tenants and former tenants include (in no particular order) Bruce Willis, Tuesday Weld, Barney’s founder Barney Pressman, Faye Dunaway, Garrison Keillor, Michael J. Fox, U2’s Moby, Sinclair Lewis, Marilyn Monroe, Groucho Marx, and Alec Baldwin.

One celebrity the apartments could have done without was the resident of apartment 9B – you can read the gruesome details in The New York Times and New York Daily News stories!

*El Dorado is Spanish for “The Golden One,” so THE El Dorado is redundant; the official name is Americanized as The Eldorado – but the canopy on Central Park West has it El Dorado. The name is inherited from an earlier (1902) eight-story luxury apartment house on the same site, El Dorado.

El Dorado Vital Statistics
  • Location: 300 Central Park West at 90th to 91st Streets
  • Year completed: 1931
  • Architect: Emery Roth with Margon & Holder
  • Floors: 28
  • Style: Art Deco
  • New York City Landmark: 1990
  • National Register of Historic Places: 1982
El Dorado Recommended Reading

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336 Central Park West

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336 Central Park West is a modest Art Deco apartment building that you might pass without thought – unless you looked up. The undulating, gently flared cornices on the building and its tower enclosures are embossed in an Egyptian reed pattern that is both simple and stunning.

You might also notice the thoughtful polychrome brickwork, with its projecting piers and segmented spandrels, which emphasize the building’s height.

Alas, over the years the cooperative has spoiled the design and created a stew of replacement windows – casements, double-hung, sliders in a variety of single and multi-pane configurations. Through-wall air conditioning vents are also done in different styles. Even the ground floor doors are mismatched.

336 Central Park West Vital Statistics
  • Location: 336 Central Park West at W 94th Street
  • Year completed: 1930
  • Architect: Schwartz & Gross
  • Floors: 16
  • Style: Art Deco
  • New York City Landmark: 1990
336 Central Park West Recommended Reading

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Memorial Sloan-Kettering Mortimer B. Zuckerman Research Center

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Memorial Sloan-Kettering Mortimer B. Zuckerman Research Center is a major expansion of previous lab facilities. The distinctive red-sliced slab tower accommodates a neighboring church, which provided the needed land and air rights.

The red terra cotta wall slices through the slab tower, separating laboratories in the western section from supporting offices in the eastern section. Each major facade has its own passive sun shade solution. Fritted glass panels shade the labs; aluminum-pipe louvers shade the offices.

The project had to be completed without disturbing ongoing research at the existing laboratories.

The base of the tower includes a rectory for St. Catherine of Siena Church.

See the architect’s project portfolio and design narrative for a detailed analysis.

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Mortimer B. Zuckerman Research Center Vital Statistics
  • Location: 415 E 68th Street between York and First Avenues (block-through to 410 E 69th Street)
  • Year completed: 2006
  • Architect: Skidmore Owings & Merrill
  • Floors: 23
  • Style: Postmodern
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Mortimer B. Zuckerman Research Center Recommended Reading

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Master Apartments

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Master Apartments is the tallest building on Riverside Drive, and reputedly the first building in New York City to have corner windows. But the most interesting side of this Art Deco architecture is that it was built as a personal museum for a prolific Russian artist and philosopher, one Nicholas Roerich. The name “Riverside Museum” still rises above the Riverside Drive entrance.

As reported in The New York Times, Roerich set up a school – Master Institute of United Arts – at a mansion owned by a wealthy follower, Louis Horch. The mansion also housed the Nicholas Roerich Museum – displaying the artist’s prolific output.

In 1928-29 Horch replaced the mansion with this 27-story tower. The first three floors contained museum, theaters, libraries and more devoted to Roerich; the rest of the building was apartments. Following the stock market crash, Horch was in and out of control; Roerich’s popularity waned and in 1938 the museum became simply the “Riverside Museum.”

The building became a cooperative in 1988 – and became a NYC Landmark the following year. The museum moved to a brownstone on W 107th Street.

Master Apartments Vital Statistics
  • Location: 310 Riverside Drive at W 103rd Street
  • Year completed: 1929
  • Architect: Harvey Wiley Corbett
  • Floors: 27
  • Style: Art Deco
  • New York City Landmark: 1989
Master Apartments Recommended Reading

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