How do you “read” a blockfront like a palimpsest? In language, syntax refers to how word order gives rise to meaning. Similarly, New York has its own “streetwall syntax;” here, patterns and distributions of buildings tell a story about the city’s growth and development.
There are a few ways of thinking about buildings that can reveal different truths about the cityscape: architectural style and technology, and use/purpose. Each is a heuristic thread of information that separately and together say different things about the history of the built environment.
Styles inform buildings and neighborhoods
As discussed in previous posts, architectural styles, while historically rich and interesting, are unreliable for making sense of a greater history for the simple fact that architectural anachronisms exist in the streetscape. As well, it was far easier to predict that a developer would have built a bigger building on a site, than the style they might have dressed it in.
That said, the blockfront is the city’s wallpaper, and the street wall can seem to hold the energy of the city. As a cultural parallel, trends in clothing were another way we outwardly dressed and expressed ourselves. Evolving fashion styles and trends in architecture can be aligned; hoop skirts go with Italianate brownstones and cast-iron storefronts, while the flapper dress goes with Art Deco, and the pill-box hat goes with the Modern. The difference is fashion goes in the closet, storage unit, or museum, while a Manhattan block can be like a confused cocktail party with dress codes spanning centuries. Of course, the office tower is the white collar version of work.
Technologies inform business districts
Patterns across Manhattan’s packed built environment are most clearly evident from the 30,000 foot view by building size as the city moved uptown. And just as the cornice heights of the city slope up between City Hall and Central Park, in the microcosm, one can often accurately predict the age order buildings on a block by ordering them smallest to tallest.
The three neighboring buildings on Broadway in NoHo (above) were built about 20-30 years apart and reflect the uptown sequence of business districts in brick (the South Street Seaport), cast iron (SoHo), and steel frame loft buildings (Madison Square). No trend in architecture is clearer than the advancing heights of business districts as the city moved uptown.
Like styles, however, technologies are limited in drawing meaning and sense from the palimpsest.
It’s true that brick and brownstone buildings were often homes, cast-iron buildings were often retail stores, and steel frame buildings were often factoroes. These permutations are well represented in history where generations of New Yorkers lived uptown in brownstone homes and shopped downtown in cast-iron stores, and steel frame loft buildings were almost invariably for manufacturing or wholesale.
But brownstone was used in commercial buildings and churches before the façade material swept the housing market.
And cast iron was used for commercial loft buildings in SoHo and Tribeca more than anywhere else; and the Bennett Building is a cast iron office building.
As for steel frame buildings, Lord & Taylor’s Fifth Avenue and 19th Street location in the early 1900s occupied the building type most often associated with manufacturing and industry (below). Its generous ceiling heights distinguish it from the manufacturing loft buildings further down the Avenue. Note the mansard roof of Arnold Constable & Co. extending from Broadway, and the transformations of the brownstone homes.
Building technologies inform the location of business districts on Manhattan island, the third wave of built environment and redevelopment.
(a former section about retail, wholesale and manufacturing in New York City building will appear correctly in a future post)
But when it comes to the “city” that moved uptown, the purpose of a building is the main arbiter of sense and meaning.
The fate of buildings and neighborhoods through time, and how their original use changed like different hermit crabs changing shells, are additional chapters to an already inordinately rich and complex story.
Use informs the city that moved uptown
While the different combinations of buildings tell the story of a neighborhood, it’s the different combinations of buildings across a dozen different Manhattan neighborhoods that tell the story of the whole city.
The post City Hall: Epicenter, described how the Lower East Side, Financial District and Tribeca developed as tenements, finance-related buildings, and warehouses. Those neighborhoods are relatively easy to decode and decipher; it makes it even easier that they all share a history of just three earlier types of homes: Georgian, Federal, and Greek Revival.
Between City Hall and Central Park, however, the built environment was more complex and class-based. Rather than two, three layers a more attenuated history, with faster moving parts, moved through.
The city’s palimpsest stretches as a column between City Hall and Central Park, as an armature up Broadway and Fifth Avenue, and generally between 3rd and 8th Avenues. Across geography and the grid went a city of architecture for shops, theaters, clubs, museums, hotels, and apartment buildings, to the exclusion of others like tenements, warehouses, factories, and power plants.
From the 30,000 foot level, the precise location of a home, store, hotel, office or factory building, whether on the same block or around the corner, is not as important as the class-based compositions frozen in a miles-long gestalt across a dozen neighborhoods, apparently incompatible modes of life passing over, and absorbing one another.
Below are three “sample” blocks, ascending from downtown to uptown in SoHo, Madison Square, and Times Square, about a mile or so apart. In each block can be seen the developmental algorithm: live, play and work, through ever-larger capacities of residential, cultural, and commercial business buildings.
1. SoHo (Broadway, west side between Prince and Houston)
The following series of images show the evolution of the west side of Broadway between Prince and Houston Streets, where Broadway levels out after climbing up from Canal. We’ll start on the block above, where St. Thomas Episcopal Church once stood at the crest of the hill, where the Cable Building stands today on the northwest corner of Broadway and Houston Street.
The image below is from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper of John Jacob Astor’s funeral in 1848 and the activity around the passing of one of the city’s most formidable developers. The block had some of the city’s finest, stone-fronted Greek Revival homes of the 1830s. Astor’s was furthest to the right in the image. The pinnacled tower of St. Thomas is visible through the tree!
Astor’s neighbor at 589 Broadway was the residence of Judah Hammond (1832), the shaded facade in the image. The building continues in the streetwall today…
The four buildings to the right (uptown side) of the Hammond house were fashionable retail stores from 1859, ’60, ’66, and ’67. The steel frame loft building on the opposite side, though, is from 1897, and housed high end garment trade manufacturers and wholesalers at a time when Broadway functioned like one big convention center for the garment trade.
While Astor’s children moved further away to Colonnade Row (now Astor Place), Astor’s decision to move to the top of the hill becomes clear from Houston Street where he and his neighbors could see across the city from their porches. Broadway slopes down to Canal Street and in the distance, the Woolworth Building marks where the Astor’s moved from in the early 1830s.
From the sacred to the profane through a progression of ever-larger buildings: residential, commercial culture, commercial business.
2. Madison Square (23rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, both sides)
The south side of 23rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues reveal the neighborhood’s early upper class residential history in building heights and widths, along with the fenestration and brownstone facades of some of them. Edith Wharton’s family home has the trees on top.
The next images show the evolution of the block.
1868 was a significant year in the city’s move uptown. That year, Arnold Constable & Co., an upper class shop, the Booth Theater, and the Grand Hotel opened along the radial roads of Broadway and 23rd Street about equidistant from the Fifth Avenue Hotel (1859) in the heart of Madison Square.
The Booth Theater was part of the block we’re following below.
The Booth Theater opened on the southeast corner of Sixth and 23rd Street in 1869. This view, from the other end of the block, was before the elevated train of 1879. The residential history is still clearly visible in the rest of the block, including a church.
Stern Brothers’ (1878) re-worked the block with a cast-iron palace, and expanded over time, and is today Home Depot. The Booth theater and the elevated train are seen at the end of the block in the still largely residential neighborhood.
The Flatiron Building (1902) stands in Madison Square in the image above; Stern Brothers has expanded, and the church site has been fully redeveloped as fashionable clothing stores. The corner of the Booth Theater (converted to retail after the Depression of 1873) is visible, as is some of the earlier residential history in the facades of the upper floors of some of the re-worked homes.
On the opposite side of the street, a sign for the Eden Musee (1883) is visible mid-way down the block. The rest of the images show the transformation of the Schermerhorn mansion (1856, Lineau) as the neighbor of the wax museum.
The Schermerhorns were related to the Astors, who lived around the corner, up Fifth Avenue. The building remained a family residence until the early 1900s, after which it was developed as a fine commercial loft building.
Many Manhattan blocks contain a triplet of buildings in the order of: residential, commercial culture, commercial business.
Finally, this is quick look at a postcard of 42nd Street in Times Square.
3. Midtown (42nd Street and Broadway, from southeast corner)
The smaller buildings with three windows across, if not single family homes, likely functioned as residential in some capacity when first erected around the mid-19th century. The Knickerbocker Hotel (1904) is visible to right, and the Bush Tower (1918), a showroom and buyers club brainchild of a pier operator, stands tallest as the main feature of the image.
From the Sacred to the Profane in ever larger buildings
It was an uptown flow of construction on three fronts in occupational descent from the sacred to the profane. Profane as in secular and mundane; building occupancy and redevelopment went from home to hotel to office, from church to theater to factory. Fine restaurants became less fine (Delmonicos became St. Martin’s Cafe); theaters changed programs for more popular fare; hotels catered to more a professional, rather than a leisure class, as the city moved uptown.
Sometimes the process cycled through the same building; a private home of 20 years might become a retail shop, like a tailor or florist, and 25 years later a wholesaler might be operating within the walls of an old home. More often than not though, newer, larger buildings replaced smaller ones in grand, often flamboyant styles for evermore mundane purposes.
An occupational descent progressed from the sacred to profane in ever larger buildings through the center of Manhattan.
Select bibliography
Burrows, Edwin G. & Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, Oxford University Press, 1999.
Henderson, Mary, The City & the Theratre, James T. white, 1973.
Lockwood, Charles, Manhattan Moves Uptown, Houghton Mifflin, 1976.
Stern, Mellins, and Fishman, New York 1880: Architecture and Urbanism in the Gilded Age, Montacelli Press, 1999.
Stern, Gilmartin, Mellins, New York 1930: Architecture and Urbanisn between the World Wars, Rozzoli, 1987.
White, Norval, New York: A Physical History, Athenuem, 1987.
Internet Resources
Daytonian in Manhattan, Tom Miller
The New York Historical (formerly The New York Historical Society)