Little Histories Add to Big Picture South of Union Square
In 2018, Village Preservation launched its campaign to designate South of Union Square a historic district, and protect an architecturally rich neighborhood alive with New York and national history that was (and remains) endangered by ongoing development plans. The area roughly between Third and Fifth Avenues from 9th to 14th Streets played a key role in the rise of New York City during the 19th and 20th centuries as a center of political, industrial, social, and artistic movements, yet such legacies remain in jeopardy without the protections afforded by historic district status.
On September 24, 2019, we added to our initial preservation proposal and sent to the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission an extensively researched 25-page document featuring 10 more sites that highlight the need for a South of Union Square Historic District. Here are just a few stylistically and culturally interesting examples.
28 East 14th Street, the Joseph J. Little Building
The distinguished cast-iron-fronted facade of 28 East 14th Street (between Fifth Avenue and University Place) was built in 1881 by Joseph J. Little, a congressman, president of the New York City Board of Education, and real estate speculator. The building’s architect was William Wheeler Smith, who had recently made his mark on the then–quite fashionable boulevard with the cast-iron building still standing at 40-42 West 14th Street a few blocks away. Smith, who was known for applying the latest technologies in his buildings, used cast iron on this narrow facade, maximizing the width of the single bay windows in the polygonal bays at the second, third, and fourth floors.
Those north-facing windows, bringing ample light to the floors within, attracted artists and manufacturers to the building shortly after its completion. One creator who lived and worked here from 1886 to 1889 was William Michael Harnett, best known for his photo-realistic still-lifes. His works include The Faithful Colt (1890), Job Lot, Cheap (1878), The Old Violin (1886), and his most famous, After the Hunt (1885). Manufacturers for the piano industry that was centered around 14th Street at the time also made a home here, including an early tenant on the ground floor, the store of prominent piano dealer Jeremiah M. Pelton.
In the 1920s, 28 East 14th Street became headquarters for the burgeoning Communist Party and home for its New York Workers School. The Revolutionary Workers League, a radical left group formed by Hugo Oehler and active in the United States from about 1935 until 1947, was also located here in 1936.
72 Fifth Avenue, Appleton & Co. Headquarters
Another standout architecturally and historically is 72 Fifth Avenue (on the corner of West 13th Street), an example of the Romanesque Revival style that still retains almost all the detail of its exterior facade including at the ground floor, a rarity for a structure of its age in this area. Designed by Cleverdon & Putzel, the building mixes rough and smooth, simple and ornate, uniform and free-form, from the pink granite columns along the storefront on the avenue to its wide Romanesque arched windows spanning the sixth floor and the finely ornamented capitals supporting a classical cornice up above.
No. 72 was built in 1893 as a headquarters and store for Appleton & Company, book publishers since 1825, at a time when the entire South of Union Square neighborhood was becoming a key center for that industry. One of the leading and fastest growing publishers in the country, Appleton distinguished itself with its roster of prestigious writers and works, including Edith Wharton, Henry James, Charles Darwin, and William Cullen Bryant. The company published the first U.S. edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as well as The Red Badge of Courage, which made Stephen Crane (who lived nearby just south of Washington Square) a household name.
In 1902, Appleton moved out of 72 Fifth Avenue; 13 years later, it became headquarters for Philip Morris, which would eventually become the largest tobacco seller in the United States. Publishing returned here in 1946 when the building was bought by educational publisher Ginn & Co., and three decades later it housed both Longman, Inc. and Penguin Books. In 1979 publisher Hamilton Fish moved The Nation, the oldest continuously published weekly in the country (founded in 1865), to the building. The choice of this site was unsurprising given the area’s history as a center of both publishing and left-wing political activity. Today, the building is a home for The New School.
43-47 East 10th Street, the L. Sachs & Bros. Building
The brick, cast-iron, and terra cotta building at 43-47 East 10th Street (University Place and Broadway) was commissioned by fur manufacturers/importers Louis and Samuel Sachs and designed by Richard Berger in 1891 to house small factories in its upper floors. The structure is distinguished by its cast-iron infill that accommodates wide expanses of windows topped by three arches on the fifth floor and 12 round Romanesque arches on the top floor along with a bracketed cornice. Berger was a distinguished architect of cast-iron fronted structures (many more of his works can be found in the SoHo Cast-Iron Historic District)
The British publishing firm Lovell, Coryell & Company’s first U.S. offices were located here, and helped bring to this side of the Atlantic the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes and pioneer in the crime literary genre, and science fiction pioneer Jules Verne. Other publishing houses soon followed, including University Publishing Company and William Wood and Company, the second-oldest publishing house in New York. The building was converted to residences in 1973.
There are more buildings and histories to explore South of Union Square. Follow our comprehensive set of tours of the proposed district here, learn more about our campaign here, and make your voice heard to designate this neighborhood as a historic district here.