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gone
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demolished or
destroyed New York
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By 1963 the conservation movement was gaining momentum. It seemed
urgent to make some sort of plea for architectural preservation in New
York City. It had been announced that Pennsylvania Station would be
razed, a final solution appeared likely for the 39th Street
Metropolitan Opera, and the commercial buildings of Worth Street were
being pounded into landfill for a parking lot. I suggested that the
collective picture of some vanished first-rate architecture would make
a sobering reminder of how much finer a city New York could have been
with its all-time best buildings still intact. When the exhibit opened
in January 1964, it was still a work in progress. If architecture is
somewhat the art of beautiful buildings but fundamentally the art of
human use (as I believe), then conservation of good use is a matter of
concern for everyone, and conservation is not `obstructionists' but
wise.
Most perpetrators of destruction, after all, are unknowing or simply
ignorant. I would personally nominate only three unworthies to remember
with disdain: A. J. Greenough, the President of the Pennsylvania
Railroad Company in the early 1960s, who wantonly engineering the
destruction of Penn
Station to improve his company's balance
sheet; Anthony Bliss, the President of the Metropolitan Opera Company
in the late 1960s, who helped finance the company's move to Lincoln
Center with a contract that ensured smithereens for the old building;
and Robert Moses, Commissioner Plenipotentiary and Rubblemaker General,
for his recurrent terminations of any place he autonomously decided
upon."
Some less generous observers might be tempted to cite quite a few more
"Unworthies" among developers and might also add some who are "civic
activists" who blocked some good projects.
Of course the city had early losses, such as the Broadway Tabernacle at
340 to 344 Broadway, which was erected in 1836 and would become the
city's main meeting hall until it was demolished in 1857, and Niblo's
Garden at Broadway and Prince Street that was built in 1827 and served
as the city's first major exhibition hall, and the German Winter Garden
at 45 Bowery that was built in 1855 with one of the earliest
cast-iron-rib domes.
Then there was the first Madison Square Garden designed by Stanford
White of McKim,
Mead and White. The spectacular building, which occupied
the block bounded by Madison and Fourth Avenues and 26th and 27th
Streets, formerly had been occupied by the Great Roman Hippodrome, a
performing arena adapted from railroad sheds which P. T. Barnum leased
from Commodore Vanderbilt. Subsequently, Barnum's Hippodrome became
Gilmore's Gardens and eventually Madison Square Garden when William H.
Vanderbilt repossessed the site in 1879. The National Horse Show
Association bought the property in 1883 with the aid of J. P. Morgan
and planned an elegant new home for it's annual horse show. White's
design won an architectural competition for the site and called for a
theater, a restaurant, a concert hall, a roof garden and a tower that
would be the second highest structure in the city as well as arcades.
Constructed of "yellow brick and Pompeiian white terra cotta, with an
interior painted pink with cream-colored iron arched trusses," it
opened in 1890 but succumbed to foreclosure in 1925 by the New York
Life Insurance Company, which erected a skyscraper with a gilded top
designed by Cass Gilbert.
Interior of Tammany Hall
Then there were small gems like the New York Tammany Society was
founded in 1789 "growing out of the earlier Sons of Liberty" and was
named after Tamanend, Indian chief of the Delawares." "The Society had
four Wigwams in its history. Its famous second home was on Park Row and
Frankfort Street, which was taken over by The Sun when Tammany moved to
a new building in 1868. This one went up on the north side of 14th
Street, between Third Avenue and Irving Place, next to the original
Academy of Music. Tony Pastor's Theater, a small variety house, operated
within Tammany Hall from about 1877. A color lithograph of the main
hall shows an `Interior View of Tammany Hall Decorated for the National
Convention, July 4th 1888.' This splendid room was demolished, along
with the rest of the block, to make way for Consolidated Edison's
office building. A new Tammany Hall was built on 17th Street and Fourth
Avenue in 1929, but it is now a trade union hall."
Restaurants usually occupy rented quarters, but some were not such as
the great Dining Room at the demolished Penn
Station, the Claremont Inn
that stood on Riverside Drive just north of Grant's Tomb until it
burned in 1951, and the ninth Delmonico's, which was designed by James
Brown Lord and stood on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 44th
Street from 1897 to 1923, around the corner from Canfield's Gambling
House at 5 East 44th Street whose site would be redeveloped for an
office building in the 1920s.
Park Avenue Hotel on 33rd Street was demolished in 1927
In the 1870's, John Kellum designed the cast-iron façade of the Park
Avenue Hotel on 33rd Street originally as a home for working women
established by A. T. Stewart, the merchant. It opened in 1878 but "it
became a luxury hotel when strict house rules made the first scheme a
failure," adding that it was demolished in 1927.
Many hotel buildings have been lost such as the Astor House on Broadway
between Vesey and Barclay that was designed by Isaiah Rogers and opened
in 1836 and was demolished in 1913, the Fifth Avenue Hotel on 23rd to
24th Streets that was designed by William Washburn and had the first
hotel elevator and opened in 1858 and was demolished in 1908. "There
are those who believe that the finest of all New York hotels was the
Ritz-Carlton, designed by Warren & Wetmore, architects of the new Grand
Central Terminal. The Ritz-Carlton, on Madison Avenue and 46th Street,
reached its fashionable heyday at about the time of the First World
War. Its ballrooms and lobbies, and some say its service and general
ambiance, where between than those furnished later elsewhere at the
Ritz Tower. The Ritz-Carlton, shown below, was razed in 1951 to provide
a site for an office building.
The Ritz Carlton Hotel on Madison Avenue and 46th Street was razed in
1951
One of the city's, and the nation's, most egregious architectural
plagues has been the demolition of movie palaces and theatrical houses.
Examples include the
4,000-seat Academy of Music on East 14th Street and the Grand Opera
House on 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue, and the Loew's 72nd Street
theater, designed by Thomas Strand, architect, and John Eberson,
decorator, among others.
Of all the institutions associated with civic advance,
theaters have probably been the most highly esteemed. From the
mid-18th Century, when theaters were instruments for the advancement of
society and fashion, to the mid-20th Century, when they are supposed to
be vessels of culture, new theaters have been credited as being the
fairest architectural examples of the splendor and spirit of the
community. Even privately-owned theaters, operated for profit, have
been hailed as municipal improvements when built, when in fact as has
frequently occurred in New York they may have supplanted better
buildings. Change has often been more characteristic than improvement,
though fire was frequently to blame. The rapid rate of new theater
building in New York has far outstripped advancements in theater
technology. It would seem that new theaters, like a woman's annual
spring fashions, are primarily meant to support ideas of freshness,
reaffirmation and vitality. This being so, it is no wonder that the old
gowns are pushed to the back of the closet.
A few wholly modern New York theaters have already vanished. The
Center Theater in Rockefeller Center, built as recently as 1932 by the
architects, Reinhard & Hofmeister, Corbett, Harrison & MacMurray, and
Hood & Fouilhoux, had an auditorium quite as good if somewhat less
stunning than their nearby Radio City Music Hall. And some of the
interior design, such as Edward Steichen's photo mural in the Men's
Smoking Room, far surpassed any of the callow artwork which survives at
Rockefeller Center."
The City Hall Post
Office building in City Hall Park was demolished in 1939.
Tower at left background is the Singer
Building, once the world's
largest, which was also demolished. The Woolworth Building in the
center still stands.
Not forgetting the reservoir at Fifth Avenue
and 42nd Street, a site now occupied by the New York Public Library,
and prints of the Castle Garden civic hall that now is the Castle
Clinton National Monument in Battery Park, the Fifth Avenue campus of
Columbia University, and the City Hall Post
Office building designed by A. B.
Mullet in 1875 and demolished in 1939 at the foot of City Hall Park
across from the Woolworth Building, and numerous Fifth Avenue mansions
as well as row houses including the Rhinelander Gardens at 110-124 West
11th Street designed in 1854 by James Renwick and demolished in the
1950s for a public school, and apartment houses such as the Navarro
Flats on Central Park South at Seventh Avenue designed by Hubert,
Pirsson & Co., in 1882 and the Knickerbocker designed by Ernest Flagg
at Fifth Avenue and 28th Street.
The New
York Herald Building anchored the top of Herald Square just to
the west of the Sixth Avenue "Elevated" line.
Among commercial buildings that have been lost are the Singer
Building at
149 Broadway, designed as the world's tallest building in 1908 by
Ernest
Flagg and demolished in 1966, Cotton Exchange, designed by
George B. Post and completed in 1885 at William and Beaver Streets,
which Mr. Silver likened to the chateau at Chambord, and the Western
Union Building of 1875, also designed by Post, at Broadway and Dey
Street, and the German Savings Bank on the southeast corner of 14th
Street and Fourth Avenue designed by Henry
Fernbach in 1872, the A. T.
Stewart Store on Broadway between 9th and 10th Streets that was
designed in 1859 by John W. Kellum and destroyed by fire in 1956, and
McKim,
Mead and White's Venetian-style New
York Herald Building, shown
above, at Broadway and 35th Street of 1893.
The Normandie toppled at Pier 88
There were also some special New York City disasters, such as parades and the 1942 fire that toppled the Normandie at its Pier 88 berth, documented in a fine aerial
photograph, shown above, and lost nightclubs such as Billy Rose's
Diamond Horseshoe, the Latin Quarter, the International Casino and the
Central Park Casino as well as El Morocco, the Stork Club, the
Copacabana and Studio 54 and the jazz clubs of 52nd Street between
Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
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New York Times
April 3, 2005
Goodbye to All That
By JOHN FREEMAN GILL
Ending a 71-year run, the Helen Hayes Theater was razed in 1982.
Slide
Show: Manhattan's Lost Treasures
At the end of this month, the Plaza Hotel will close its fabled doors so
that its new owner, Elad Properties, can begin the process of converting
the bulk of its rooms into condominiums and renting out new stores.
Although much of the plan remains hazy, the prospect of a construction
crew stomping through the Plaza's ornate entrance has provoked a cascade
of personal, sepia-tinted recollections among anxious New Yorkers. As with
most treasured places, it is not just the architecture and décor that
people so prize, but the memories that were born there.
The new plans for the Plaza have awakened recollections of the fate of the
old Pennsylvania Station, the 1910 McKim, Mead & White masterpiece,
the razing of which in 1963 ultimately led to the creation of the city's
Landmarks Preservation Commission.
In the 40 years since its founding, the commission has designated 1,119
individual landmarks and 83 historic districts, protecting about 23,000
fine buildings that would otherwise have been vulnerable to demolition.
Among them is the Plaza Hotel itself, whose exterior, but not interior,
was given landmark protection in 1969.
But in a city all but synonymous with change and growth, there will always
be, rightly or wrongly, some loss of cherished buildings. In some cases,
these structures possess the ability to transport us to a different,
earlier incarnation of New York and, inevitably, a different version of
ourselves.
Here are a baker's dozen of such places - all in Manhattan, which has
suffered the greatest loss of architectural treasures - that are forever
etched in the city's collective memory. All have disappeared since the
demise of Penn Station, and most were subjects of controversy at the time
of their destruction. They are just a sample of what has vanished.
Taken together, these lost buildings and rooms form a kind of ghost city,
an island of memory that hovers above the real, evolving Manhattan. It is
a shadow New York that once was and might have continued to be, had the
economic and political forces that shape the city been different. It is
also the only New York that is a perfect New York, for as Marcel Proust
wrote in "Remembrance of Things Past," "the true paradises
are the paradises we have lost."
BROKAW MANSIONS
79th Street and Fifth Avenue
1890-1965, 1905-1965, 1911-1965
Built by a clothier named Isaac Vail Brokaw, this cluster of mansions
provided a grand architectural anchor for the important corner across from
the Central Park Transverse. Unabashedly extravagant, the parent castle
was modeled in part on a Loire Valley chateau, while the adjacent building
to the north, one of a matching pair constructed by Brokaw for two sons,
was flamboyantly Gothic. The mansion to the east was more restrained and
classical.
The lamentations over the razing of the mansions strengthened the growing
preservation movement that the loss of Pennsylvania Station had catalyzed.
“The outcry was undoubtedly what at last induced the mayor to sign the
law giving the Landmarks Commission legal powers,” the architect Nathan
Silver wrote in “Lost New York,” his compendium of vanished city
structures.
OLD METROPOLITAN OPERA HOUSE
Broadway and 40th Street
1883-1967
In “The Age of Innocence,” a novel of New York society set in the
1870’s, Edith Wharton wrote that “there was already talk of the
erection, in remote metropolitan distances ‘above the Forties,’ of a
new Opera House which should compete in costliness and splendor with those
of the great European capitals.”
Indeed, when the blocklong Italian Renaissancestyle Metropolitan Opera
House was opened in 1883, The New York Times fretted that the auditorium
was “on a scale of possibly too great magnitude” and that its lavish
interior would “dazzle the eyes.” That interior, which was
subsequently redesigned by Carrère and Hastings, architects of the New
York Public Library, featured an elite set of boxes in an area known as
the Diamond Horseshoe, which was occupied by Astors, Vanderbilts and other
millionaire patrons.
Anticipating its move to the planned Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan
Opera gave its last performance at the Old Met in 1966.
THE SINGER BUILDING
Broadway and Liberty Street
1908-1967
When the gracious, 41-story Singer Building pierced the sky above Lower
Broadway with its Beaux-Arts, lantern-topped tower in 1908, it was the
world’s tallest building — until it was eclipsed by the Metropolitan
Life Tower just 18 months later. The Singer’s tower occupied only a
quarter of its lot, elegantly expressing the belief of its architect,
Ernest Flagg, that skyscrapers should be set back, so that “we should
soon have a city of towers instead of a city of dismal ravines.”
Demolition of the building began in 1967 to make way for One Liberty
Plaza. At the time, it was the tallest building ever demolished.
ASTOR HOTEL
Broadway and 44th Street
1904-1968
For sheer, unflinching grandeur, it was hard to top the Renaissance-style
Astor Hotel in Times Square. The lobby had a 21-foot-high colonnade of
marble and gold, while at its rear, encircled by an ornate gallery, stood
the “orangerie,” a reproduction of an Italian tropical garden.
As the Great White Way flourished, the Astor became the strip’s most
popular meeting place, its famous circular bar always populated with
actors trading gossip. Cole Porter gave the locale a knowing wink with his
lyrics “Have you heard that Mimsie Starr. . . just got pinched in the
Astor bar?”
LEWISOHN STADIUM
136th Street and Convent Avenue
1915-1973
From 1918 to 1966, thousands of New Yorkers poured into this colonnaded
Greco-Roman amphitheater for summer open-air concerts — classical, jazz
and more — that cost as little as 25 cents.
One person who remembers those events is Claudette Law, from the Pelham
Parkway area in the Bronx. In the 1950’s, she used to take the subway
with her small son each Independence Day to watch Louis Armstrong play at
the stadium, a performance that was always followed by fireworks. “I
remember Louis coming out,” said Ms. Law, 72, “and his wife got up
once and told us his birthday was really on the first ‘but we always
celebrate it on the Fourth’ and he was always here to celebrate it.”
She added: “He was quite picturesque himself. He had his white
handkerchief, and he’d just be waving it around.”
But she is unsentimental about the loss of the stadium. “I was born in
Harlem Hospital, and the building I was born in and every building I lived
in before this one is gone,” Ms. Law said.
“You can’t go around missing things,” she added, laughing.
“Otherwise, you’ll be still sitting here, missing.”
ALL ANGELS’ CHURCH
West End Avenue at 81st Street
1890 -1979
The neo-Gothic exterior of All Angels’ Episcopal Church was well
regarded, but its interior was spectacular. Among its treasures was a two-anda-
half-story Tiffany window and a pulpit ringed with limestone angels that
wrapped around the banister and paraded toward the top. There, a carved
wooden angel leaned out and blew his trumpet into the center of the
sanctuary.
“What I would do in midweek would be to get the drums out and play them
in the sanctuary,” said Paul Johnson, who was a member of the church’s
music group in the 1970’s.
“No one else was using the sanctuary at the time and so my practicing
didn’t bother anyone,’’ he added. “There was a wonderful effect in
the afternoon, when the setting sun, the afternoon sun, would hit the
Tiffany window, which was on the northwest corner, and so it bathed the
whole back end of the church in this very golden light, because there’s
a lot of gold and gray-blue in that window. Of course you had oak pews,
and you had the red carpeting, so all of that was made more golden out of
the light.
“That’s one of my very special memories; that’s just me being alone
in the sanctuary.”
BILTMORE HOTEL
43rd Street and Madison Avenue
1913-1981
Constructed by New York Central Railroad as an accessory to Grand Central
Terminal across the street, the Biltmore appealed to lovers for decades.
Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald honeymooned there so boisterously that they
were asked to leave, and the Biltmore’s solid bronze clock was a popular
meeting place for amorous couples.
When Holden Caulfield showed up in the lobby for a date in J.D.
Salinger’s 1951 novel, “The Catcher in the Rye,” he was struck by
the crowd of young women. “I was way early when I got there,” he
recounted, “so I just sat down on one of those leather couches right
near the clock in the lobby and watched the girls. A lot of schools were
home for vacation already, and there were about a million girls sitting
and standing around waiting for their dates to show up. Girls with their
legs crossed, girls with their legs not crossed, girls with terrific legs,
girls with lousy legs, girls that looked like swell girls.”
HELEN HAYES THEATER
46th Street near Broadway
1911-1982
When the theater opened, under the name Folies- Bergère, its vibrant
terra cotta facade of gold, turquoise and old ivory instantly made it
“the brightest, most eye-catching theater along the Rialto,” Nicholas
van Hoogstraten wrote in his 1991 book, “Lost Broadway Theaters.”
For seven decades, generations of theatergoers strode under its marquee to
see luminaries like Bela Lugosi in “Dracula” and Audrey Hepburn in “Gigi.”
But in 1982, the Helen Hayes — it had been renamed in 1955 to honor the
doyenne of the American stage — it was razed along with two other
vintage Broadway theaters, the Morosco and the Bijou, both from 1917, to
make way for the Marriott Marquis Hotel.
The Helen Hayes and the Morosco conveyed a sense of occasion that avid
theatergoers find lacking in newer auditoriums. “Theater architecture
generally was designed so that the show would begin before the curtain
went up,” said Joseph Rosenberg, who conducts theater-oriented tours in
the city. “It’s like walking into a church. You walk into a church,
and you get certain feelings and certain warmth and certain expectations
of what’s going to follow.”
The Little Theater, on 44th Street, was renamed the Helen Hayes Theater in
1983, a year after the original was razed.
LÜCHOW’S
14th Street and Irving Place
1882-1982
For 100 years, the German baroque interior of Lüchow’s was as stuffed
as a sausage casing with oompah music, gemütlichkeit and the smell of
sauerbraten. The distinguished but eclectic clientele included Diamond Jim
Brady, H.L. Mencken and Enrico Caruso. Ascap, the American Society of
Composers, Authors and Publishers, was formed in the restaurant in 1914,
and Gus Kahn is said to have composed the lyrics to “Yes, Sir, That’s
My Baby” on a Lüchow’s tablecloth.
“A fragrance, delicate, but not weak, and slightly male, rides the
air,” is how the artist Ludwig Bemelmans described the atmosphere in his
introduction to “Lüchow’s German Cookbook” in 1952. “It composes
itself of the aromas of solid cooking, of roast geese and ducks... Through
it is wafted the bouquet of good wines, and above this hangs the blue
cloud of the smoke of rare cigars. This obscures the stag and moose heads
that are part of the décor, along with samples of the ironmonger’s
art.”
After the restaurant vacated the building in 1982 for a short-lived stint
near Times Square, preservationists fought to save the structure, but it
was razed in 1995 after a fire.
MOUNT NEBOH SYNAGOGUE
79th Street near Columbus Avenue
1928-1984
The synagogue was an imposing six-story structure with Byzantine
influences, but for those who loved the place, the attachment was more
personal and cultural than architectural. “Mount Neboh is not the Taj
Mahal, and nobody says it is,” Alan Towers, a neighborhood resident,
told The Westsider, a local newspaper, in 1981. “I think it’s
unorthodox, it’s odd, but so is the whole Upper West Side. In the East
60’s, they would think it’s an eyesore. We think it’s the crown
jewel of the street.” In the mid-80’s, the building was razed and
replaced with an apartment house.
SMALLS’ PARADISE
Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and 135th Street
1925-1986
Smalls’, a rollicking 1,500-seat Jazz Age nightclub, was famous for
elaborate floor shows, stride piano and performances by the likes of Fats
Waller and Willie (The Lion) Smith. While some notable Harlem Renaissance
nightspots, like the Cotton Club, admitted only white patrons, Smalls’
welcomed both blacks and whites, who were served by singing waiters on
roller skates serving Chinese food.
Vacant from 1986, Smalls’ three-story building was topped with three new
stories and reopened last year as a public school, which shares the
structure with an International House of Pancakes.
“What’s been lost,” said Michael Henry Adams, a Harlem architectural
historian, “is the actual physical space where the Suzy Q dance was
created in the 1940’s, the actual physical space where waiters delivered
trays of drinks while dancing the Charleston or on roller skates, and the
actual floor that they did it on.”
MARINE GRILL
34th Street at Herald Square
1912-1990
Tucked into the basement of the McAlpin Hotel, the grill was a vast,
kaleidoscopically ornamented terra cotta grotto. Multicolor ceramic
embellishments flowed up the thick columns and across the vaults of its
ceiling, and maritime murals lined the room.
“Even the radiator grills were punctuated with beautiful ornament of
ceramic,” recalled Susan Tunick, president of the Friends of Terra
Cotta, and the murals, she added, were “absolutely thrilling.”
“You could see Wall Street; you could see early schooners,” she said.
“It went all the way up to the phenomenal steam liners, the big ocean
voyage cruise ships.”
While leading a walking tour in 1990, Ms. Tunick stumbled across evidence
that the Marine Grill was being demolished. “There was a huge Dumpster
outside the back of the McAlpin, filled with the room,” she recalled.
“It was really horrible.”
After its demolition, the once splendid grotto became a storage room for
the Gap. Ms. Tunick and others managed to salvage a few of the maritime
murals, six of which are on display in the Fulton Street Broadway- Nassau
subway station.
DVORAK HOUSE
17th Street near Second Avenue
1852-1991
Antonin Dvorak, the Czechoslovak composer, lived with his family in this
nondescript brick row house from 1892 to 1895, during which time he
composed “From the New World,” his most famous symphony. “We live
four minutes from my school in a very pleasant house,” Dvorak wrote to a
friend in Prague shortly after moving to New York. “Mr. Steinway sent me
a piano, free, so we have one good piece of furniture in the parlor. The
rent is $80 a month, a lot for us, but a normal price here.”
In 1991 the Dvorak house was designated a city landmark on historical and
cultural grounds, but the designation was overturned by the City Council,
and the house’s owner, Beth Israel Medical Center, demolished it to make
way for an AIDS hospice.
Copyright
2005 The New York
Times Company
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GRAND CENTRAL STATION
The original Victorian station by I. C. Buckhout opened in 1871 and has a large train shed behind it. The station was demolished in 1901 for the present Beaux-Arts Building.
GRAND OPERA HOUSE
This theater first opened in 1868 as Pike's Opera House, but was bought and renamed in 1869 by Jay Gould. Once showing opera, vaudeville, and later motion pictures, it burned down in 1960.
HOTEL NEW NETHERLAND
Designed by William Hume and completed in 1893, this neo-Romanesque reached seventeed stories and 234 feet and was claimed the "tallest hotel structure in the world." It was replaced in 1927 by the Sherry Netherland Hotel tower.
HOTEL SAVOY
This twelve story hotel was built in 1892 by Ralph S. Townsend and was distinguished by its vertical rows of bay windows. The hotel was eventually demolished.
 
NEW YORK TIMES BUILDING
This focal point of Times Square was finished by Eidlitz & McKenzie for the New York Times in 1905. With a flagpole top at 476 feet, this tower was proclaimed the "City's Tallest Structure from Base to Top." It was remodelled in 1961 to look more "modern".
PABST HOTEL
Built in 1898 for the Pabst Beer Co. of Milwaukee, it sat at the head of Times Square. The lower two floors and arcade were occupied by Pabst's Bar and Restaurant. The hotel was torn down in 1903 to make way for the Times Building.
ST. REGIS HOTEL
This fine hotel was constructed by Trowbridge & Livingston in 1904 for John Jacob Astor. This eighteen story, lavishly Beaux-Arts styled hotel was cited as "offensive" in the 1913 report of the city's Heights of Building Commission because of its Fifth Avenue location.
Manhattan Life
Building
64-70 Broadway 106m high
1893-1930
Architects: Kimball & Thompson
WASHINGTON LIFE BUILDING
This insurance headquarters was completed in 1898 by C. L. W. Eidlitz with German Renaissance dormers on its gleaming bronze tiled roof. Its base was faced with pink granite and its shaft clad with smooth limestone. Though considered one of the most positively attractive and popular downtown skyscrapers, it was eventually demolished.
WASHINGTON BUILDING
Sometimes called the Field Office, this 258 foot building overlooking the Battery was finished in 1885 by Edward H. Kendall. Decorated in the Queen Anne style, it was orignally covered in heavy dark red masonry, but was remodelled in 1921 with classical Roman-white limestone and mosaic details to be more fashionably Beaux-Arts looking.
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WESTERN UNION BUILDING
Grown rich by the massive growth of the telegraph industry, Western Union had G. B. Post build them a new headquarters in 1875. It rose 230 feet to become in its day one of the tallest structures in the city. The iron time ball on its flagstaff would be the precursor to today's lighted New Year's globe in Times Square. The granite clad building style is called Neo-Grec. Designed to be fireproof, it burned down in 1890 in the world's first large fire to occur in tall buildings.
WORLD BUILDING
Also called the Pulitzer Building, this striking building was completed in 1890 by G. B. Post for Joseph Pulitzer's World newspaper. Its Renaissance styling had red sandstone walls up to the fourth story, buff-colored brick and darker buff terra-cotta above, base columns in red granite, base spandrel panels in gray granite, bronze statues, and a gilded copper dome. Critics called it a hideous monstrosity, and it was demolished in 1955 to make way for the widening the
Brooklyn Bridge approach.
Gone
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