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Archtober Stretches Beyond the Village and Back

October is known for the autumnal changing of the leaves, Halloween, and of course Archtober, the month-long celebration of all things architecture across the five boroughs. Village Preservation, an event sponsor, highlights noteworthy historic buildings in Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo, as well as some of our city’s great landmarks that have some surprising connections to, and origin stories in, our neighborhoods, through our Beyond the Village and Back Maps. Here are some highlights:

Empire State Building 

Even though at least half a dozen buildings now reach greater heights in Manhattan, after more than 90 years the Empire State Building still stands as a shining symbol of New York City. Opened in 1931, the 102-story-high art deco skyscraper at 34th Street and Fifth Avenue was the tallest building in the world from 1931 until 1973, when the World Trade Center surpassed it. The exterior and lobby interior of the Empire State Building were designated NYC landmarks in 1981, and it was named one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

The Empire State Building replaced the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on that Midtown corner. William Waldorf Astor opened the Waldorf Hotel on the site in 1893, his cousin John Jacob Astor IV opened the Astoria Hotel next door in 1897, and the combined 1,300 bedrooms made it the largest hotel in the world at the time. But by the 1920s, the Astors decided to build a replacement for the out-of-date hotel further uptown. The old hotel closed on May 3, 1929, to make way for a new skyscraper. The stock market crash in October 1929 almost halted the Empire State Building project, but construction continued. It took over 20 years for the Empire State Building to become profitable, finally breaking even in the 1950s.

The 1,250-ft.-tall structure, however, was not the first Empire State Building. That title belongs to a still extant building in the modern-day NoHo Historic District. That story begins with the construction of a six-story brick and stone structure at 640 Broadway between Bleecker and Crosby Streets in the mid- to late 19th century, its ground floor home to the Empire State Bank. In November 1895, a fire determined to be arson burned the building to the ground and put an end to the bank, which applied for dissolution three months later. 

The owner, B. Lichtenstein, immediately moved to rebuild. He hired architects De Lemos and Cordes, who that same year designed the Siegel-Cooper Building (now part of the Ladies’ Mile Historic District), and would go on to design Macy’s Herald Square. Opening in 1897, the new 640 Broadway helped transform this neighborhood from five- to six-story loft buildings to taller structures, such as the Bayard Condict Building located around the corner at 65 Bleecker Street. In honor of his former tenant, Lichtenstein named 640 Broadway the Empire State Building, more than 30 years prior to the development of its more famous namesake.

In the years that followed, the surrounding neighborhood went into a general state of decline, but the smaller Empire State Building survived. In the 1960s, it was home to the offices of the protest group May 2nd Movement, which provided legal counseling to those seeking to avoid the Vietnam War draft. In 1971, the building housed the Law Commune, which successfully defended the Black Panthers against 156 counts of bombing, arson, attempted murder, and other crimes. They also defended Abbie Hoffman following his 1973 arrest for selling $36,000 worth of cocaine with a street value of $500,000. When arrested, he gave his address as “640 Broadway in Greenwich Village.” Hoffman skipped bail and underwent plastic surgery. After six years in hiding, sometimes dressing as an Orthodox Jew, Hoffman surrendered and was sentenced to three years, of which he served one year.

And that’s not the only connection between the Empire State Building and our neighborhoods. Read more here.

Abbie Hoffman

American Radiator Building

Sitting in Bryant Park, tourists and admittedly a few native New Yorkers often marvel at the clear sight they have of the Empire State Building. In the same field of view, the iconic tower has some competition in the standout building department from a mere 23-story landmark, resplendent in black and gold, that has a unique connection to Greenwich Village in the last century.

American Radiator Building, by Jean-Christophe Benoist
American Radiator Building, by Jean-Christophe Benoist

The building at 40 West 40th Street, completed in 1924, is best known as the American Radiator Building, even though it has been the Bryant Park Hotel since the start of the 21st century. Architect Raymond Hood designed the structure when he was a relatively obscure architect and before he became “perhaps the 20th century’s greatest molder of the skyscraper form,” according to architecture critic Paul Goldberger. Hood passed away just 10 years later, but in that time crafted many other architectural masterpieces in our city, including the Daily News Building and the Art Deco masterpiece McGraw-Hill Building at opposite ends of 42nd Street, and guided the design of Rockefeller Center.

Radiator Building—Night, New York
Radiator Building — Night, New York, by Georgia O’Keeffe

Hood’s design for the American Radiator Building “broke with tradition and utilized new forms,” wrote the Landmarks Preservation Commission in its 1974 designation report, at a time following World War I when many architects were still relying on classical details and principles of proportion in skyscraper work. He “initiated a new trend in skyscraper design … with its bold cubic massing of forms — often associated with the Art Deco style — and its freedom from the Beaux-Arts classical details that had previously encumbered in New York City skyscrapers.” Hood furthered an already impressive design with his decision to clad the building in black brick, With its gold-accented windows, the building truly came alive at night, giving off a nice warm glow in the evening — an excellent advertisement for the building’s main tenant, a company selling furnaces and radiators. The effect was mesmerizing not only for pedestrians but also for artist Georgia O’Keeffe, who captured the effect in the dynamic 1927 painting “Radiator Building — Night, New York.” 

Hood became one of the nation’s most prominent architects in the 1920s, but just a few years earlier he was floating around the city in obscurity, trying to survive on very small jobs as an architect. His lucky break came by way of the restaurant at 144-146 Bleecker Street. In 1883 or 1884, Placido Mori opened his eponymous Italian restaurant here, originally two 1832 row houses. In 1920, Mori befriended the 40-year-old still-novice architect, enough to feed him for free “when his pocket proved empty” — and to give Hood the job of designing a new facade for the pair of row houses, adding a row of Doric columns across the ground floor, imitation Federal lintels, and a setback penthouse studio. The restaurateur let him live in a small apartment on the site, the meeting site for a group of architects known as the “Four Hour Lunch Club.” Hood was soon on the road to success.

Federal Hall National Memorial

Federal Hall at 26 Wall Street is one of New York’s — and the nation’s — most historic locations. Known as the “Birthplace of American Government,” it’s the site where George Washington took the oath of office as our first President. It also housed the first Congress, Supreme Court, and Executive Branch offices. When the nation’s capital moved to Philadelphia in 1790, the building returned to use as New York’s City Hall. That ended in 1812, when the present-day City Hall at what was then the northern edge of town was opened, and Federal Hall was demolished, its parts sold for salvage.

The current structure on the site was built as a Customs House, which opened in 1842. In 1862, the building became the U.S. Sub-Treasury; tons of gold and silver worth millions of dollars were kept in the building’s basement vaults, until the Federal Reserve Bank replaced the Sub-Treasury system in 1920. By the late 1930s, the Sub-Treasury building was slated to be torn down. In 1939, a group called Federal Hall Memorial Associates prevented demolition of the building, which was designated the Federal Hall Memorial National Historic Site. It was rechristened a national memorial in 1955, designated a New York City landmark in 1965, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. The building opened to the public in 1972 as a museum.

The present-day Federal Hall is fronted by a statue of George Washington, erected in 1882 as a salute to the first president’s inauguration. But it’s not the only place in New York where that first oath of office is commemorated. Washington Square Arch, in the heart of Greenwich Village, was erected to honor the 100th anniversary of that same event.

Washington Square arches, temporary (left) and permanent

Prior to the centennial, William Rhinelander Stewart, a wealthy resident of one of the posh townhouses around the square, began campaigning to erect a temporary triumphal arch in the European tradition. He convinced his well-heeled neighbors to help foot the bill, and brought on Stanford White, of the renowned firm of McKim, Mead, and White, to create the design. The arch spanned Fifth Avenue just north of Washington Square. The temporary arch, created with wood and plaster, proved to be very popular, and soon a campaign (and more fundraising) for a more enduring version was underway.

By 1890, a new, permanent version of the arch was under construction. This one was once again designed by Stanford White, who used Tuckahoe marble for the new 30-ft-wide arch, moved slightly south to within the boundaries of Washington Square Park, a popular monument that still stands in the historic greenspace.

The connections between Federal Hall and Greenwich Village continue — read more here.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the great landmarks, and the great institutions, of New York City, the country, and the world. With more than 2 million objects in its collection, it is by far the largest museum in both New York and the nation. Covering what would be several city blocks on Fifth Avenue between 80th and 84th Streets and housing more than 2 million square feet of space, it’s roughly the size of the Empire State Building (the tall one). Designated a city landmark both inside and out, the Met offers among the most iconic images of New York, with a grand Beaux Arts facade fronted by a sprawling staircase and graceful fountains facing Fifth Avenue.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art was officially chartered by an Act of Incorporation of the New York State Legislature in 1870, and its first home opened in 1872 in a no-longer-extant former mansion at 681 Fifth Avenue near 54th Street. Led by a combination of industrialists and artists, the museum began with a modest collection — about 175 mostly European paintings and a Roman stone sarcophagus — that quickly grew. Recognizing that their Midtown home would soon no longer be adequate for their holdings, museum leaders went about commissioning a new purpose-built home — their first — that would fulfill their aspirations and physical needs.

Before such a building could be built, organizers had to find a new space. The Met decamped to what was then one of New York’s grandest private houses, the Douglas Cruger Mansion at 128 West 14th Street in Greenwich Village, on the south side of the street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. After the passing of its owner, Harriet Douglas Cruger, the museum leased the house, which offered five times the space of 681 Fifth Avenue, from April 1873 until a new home could be ready. The free-standing mansion had been built in 1853–54 by architect James Renwick, when 14th Street was, for a while in the mid-19th century, the most prestigious address in New York.

Douglas Cruger Mansion as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and an interior view

At around the same time, the Met negotiated a deal with the city allowing them sway over the section of Central Park between East Drive and Fifth Avenue, 79th and 85th Streets. Construction of that first building that became the foundation of the Met’s nearly century-and-half residency in the park began in 1874, with a structure designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould, architects of most of the early buildings and structures in Central Park. The new building, designed in the Victorian Gothic style and located well inside Central Park, opened to the public in 1880, with President Rutherford B. Hayes presiding over the dedication. The museum then outgrew that space, leading to a master plan for future expansion by Richard Morris Hunt that would embody the City Beautiful aesthetic espoused by the “White City” World Columbian Exposition of 1893, and a grand Beaux Art structure facing the avenue. The renowned architectural firm of McKim Mead & White would later expand on Hunt’s work, yielding the iconic institution we recognize today.

After the Museum moved to its permanent home in Central Park in 1878, the mansion — located on what was now an increasingly commercial street that catered more and more to the working man and woman (14th Street came to be known as “the poor man’s Fifth Avenue” for its many bargain shopping outlets) — was taken over in 1914 by the Salvation Army’s Red Shield Club for Service Men. In 1928, the Salvation Army gave up the ghost entirely and hired the architectural firm of Voorhees, Gmelin & Walker to replace the former mansion with the art deco structure we see today that serves as the Salvation Army Headquarters (a New York City landmark), a dramatic reversal of fortune for a site that once housed one of the most opulent homes in New York.

Salvation Army headquarters

That just skims the surface of the Met’s many roots in Greenwich Village — read more here.

These are just a few of the many great New York City landmarks with deep roots in our neighborhoods. Explore more about these and many other sites throughout New York City in our Beyond the Village and Back Maps

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