LeBrun's 1894 Engine Company No. 14

Just prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, Philadelphia architect Napoleon LeBrun moved his family to New York City. LeBrun won the enviable position as official architect of the New York City Fire Department in 1879. A year later when his son Pierre joined him in business, it became LeBrun & Son. In 1888 younger son Michel would also join the firm, subsequently renamed LeBrun & Sons.


Unlike the work of Nathaniel D. Bush, the architect for the New York Police Department during the same period, who created several carbon-copy station houses; LeBrun’s fire stations were nearly all unique. Each of the 42 LeBrun stations became progressively more ornate and in 1894, a year before designing their final firehouse, Engine Company 14 was erected at 14 East 18th Street.  The architect had gone all-out.

LeBrun produced what the AIA Guide to New York City called “A delicate Italian Renaissance town house for fire engines.” Corinithian columns on the third floor support decorative arches over the windows with deeply-recessed carved fans. Between the second and third floors, swirling ribbons flank large terra cotta medallions pronouncing the date of construction.

“High above,” said the AIA Guide, “the frieze and cornice are rich in far-out, far-east detail.”

On September 11 the next year, Mayor A . Krebs and the Fire Commissioner escorted Colonel Varigault, the head of the Paris Fire Department, on a tour of New York fire headquarters. The French fireman was visiting New York to learn up-to-date practices and technology. The party then boarded carriages and “inspected the quarters of Engine Company No. 14,” according to The New York Times.  The sparkling new station house was presented as the typical example of New York fire stations.

As evidenced by the 1896 station blotter, the Victorian fire fighters assigned to Engine Company 14 were not without a tender side. On July 22 of that year the blotter read “5:00 A.M. – Peter, cat, transferred to Bergh Society.” Peter had unfortunately eaten a poisoned rat.

A month later an entry documented “Aug. 25, 11:25 A.M. – While responding to an alarm for Station 343, Chops, cat, jumped from seat of tender at Broadway and Eighteenth Street, and was killed by being run over and having neck broken.”

The New York Times reported the next day “There was a sort of a wake over Chops at quarters last night, and a debate about the funeral. Arrangements were not perfected, but the cat will not be sent to the Potter’s Field for its kind – Barren Island. Fireman 'Joe' DeSize and Engineer A. W. Melvin are to devise a plan of last honors.”

For over a century the firefighters of Engine Company 14 have served the city valiantly, sometimes at the price of life. In 1956 Company No. 14 fought the tremendous Wanamaker fire on Broadway and Astor Place for a full day before bringing it under control.

LeBrun’s Italian Renaissance structure is as delicate and beautiful today as it was in 1894, still serving the city as an active fire house.

The 1929 Art Deco Chanin Building

from the collection of the New York Public Library

As the 1920s roared on in New York City, Irving Chanin was busy building.  The developer was responsible for several Garment Center buildings, as well as the famous Roxy Theatre, the Majestic Apartments and the Century Apartments on Central Park West, and the Royale and Majestic Theatres.

His signature building would rise at 122 E. 42nd Street at Lexington Avenue, The Chanin Building.  Chanin commissioned architects Sloan & Robertson to design his 56-story tower. It would be the first major Art Deco office building in the city and, according to The City Review, “the finest expression of Art Deco in the city.”

Mayor James Walker was on hand for the dedication of the building in January 1929. It heralded the beginning of an age of iconic Art Deco buildings in Manhattan: Rockefeller Center, the Chrysler Building, and the Empire State Building would all rise in a matter of years.

Although the bulk of the structure, complying with the city’s demand for set-backs, has been declared somewhat unexciting; the crown of the building with its buttresses and piers has been called the finest in the city.  What no one complains of, however, is the exuberant Art Deco decoration.

In their New York 1930, Architecture And Urbanism Between the Two World Wars, Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins write:

Above shop fronts sheathed in bronze and black Belgian marble, a bronze frieze narrated the story of evolution, beginning with the lower marine forms and then bursting forth with fish and birds.  This formed a plinth for a two-story colonnade of massive Norman piers whose squashed cushion capitals were carved with writhing sea monsters.  The fourth story was sheathed in terra-cotta panels rendered with a bold overall pattern of abstract floral patterns.

The frieze depicting evolution stopped at geese; the designers no doubt feeling that including man in the process, only four years after the Scopes Trial, might be too controversial.

Chanin used his own architectural department head, Jacques I. Delamarre and Rene Chambellan, an architectural sculptor, to decorate the interiors.  Fantastic Art Deco grills, elevator doors, mailboxes and sculptures greeted the visitor.  Two bronze-painted plaster reliefs by Chambellan represent Achievement and Success.  The means by which to gain these are represented in six matching reliefs: three are physical, Effort, Activity and Endurance; and three are mental, Enlightenment, Vision, and Courage.

On the 54th floor was an roof top observatory and on the 50th and 51st floor a 200-seat theater decorated in silver and black for the tenants’ sole use.  Later the space was converted to offices.

Chanin installed his own offices on the 52nd floor, lavishing it with Art Deco ornamentation, including bronze gates. Below ground, the Baltimore Ohio Railroad Company leased space for ticket offices, waiting rooms and a bus terminal–complete with an immense turntable to turn the busses around.

Hugh Ferriss's "Chanin Building"

The Chanin Building was perhaps solely responsible for making 42nd Street the premier commercial address of the time.  The imposing structure became the subject of one of Hugh Ferriss's architectural paintings. 

Throughout the 20th century to the present it remains a striking presence in midtown--an Art Deco masterpiece.

The 1888 Excelsior Power Company -- 33 Gold Street

Photo by Ken Mac

Somehow in 1887 Martin B. Brown convinced William Milne Grinnell to design the new headquarters for his Excelsior Power Company. Grinnell, while trained as an architect at Yale, never practiced. According to the 1922 State of New York Thirty-Third Annual Report of the State Hospital Commission, “He devoted himself largely to travel and the collections of works of art, and having a penchant for oriental art, spent much time in Egypt, Algiers, Tunis and Persia, occasionally extending his trips to China and Japan.”

Nonetheless, Grinnell paused in his travels long enough to design Brown’s building.

Brown’s firm, originally called the Excelsior Steam Power Company at 13 Spring Street, converted steam to electricity. As the population became familiar with electricity and its safety became more apparent, demand increased. Brown, who was also the printer for the City of New York, needed a more suitable building. (The very interesting Brown was also Fire Commissioner, President of the Queens Ice Company, Vice President of the 19th Ward National Bank, invented the steering wheel for fire trucks and built the first “cable road” in New York at 125th Street.)

The seven-story building at 33-38 Gold Street was completed in 1888, a sturdy red-brick Romanesque design with Queen Anne touches. Red terra cotta tiles, rough-cut stone blocks and multiple heavy arches gave interest to the substantial façade.

Above the entrance a cast-metal sign pronounced the building’s name over the terra cotta date – perhaps the structure’s single most interesting feature. Writing in the AIGA Journal of Design over a century later, Paul Shaw called the sign a“gutsy nameplate” and said “the proto-Art Nouveau letters, one of the great examples of architectural lettering in New York, are cast in metal and affixed by screws. Oddly, the date does not match the nameplate. Instead, it is cast in terracotta in Gothic revival style.”

Photo AIGA Journal of Design

Along with the power company and his printing business, Brown filled the building with other printing firms and jewelry manufacturers. In September of 1891, an exhibition was held here demonstrating a new printing press that “will print 24,000 to 40,000 shop bills in an hour and will use two miles of paper in that time.”

Other tenants included Patterson Press, Clark & Zagalla printers, C. P. Goldsmith jewelers and Stern Brothers & Co., a jewelry manufacturer who remained for decades.

In the first decades the new building seemed cursed by fire. A fire on Fulton Street on July 29, 1894 damaged the rear of the building. Four years later, on June 1, 1898 the Clark and Zugalla company on the fourth floor caught fire doing $3000 damage. Again, on January 25, 1901 the building caught fire. Through it all the substantial building never sustained serious structural damage.


The Excelsion Power Company building in 1895 -- "King's Photographic Views of New York" -- author's collection

No. 33 Gold Street’s back luck was not limited to fire. On September 10, 1892, 15-year old Frank Cowey got his hand caught in a pipe-cutting machine in the shop of E. F. Keating. The boy walked, with help, to the Chambers Street Hospital where doctors performed an amputation of a finger. When the ether cup was removed from his face, the boy was dead.
At the inquest a week later, the jury exonerated the doctor from all blame in the matter. It decided that “death was caused by an injection of cocaine administered by Dr. Cushing with proper judgment and was in a measure due to ‘a peculiar unknown existing idiosyncrasy.’”

Another boy died at No. 33 Gold when 16-year old Francis Faeth, a worker at Stern Brothers, climbed out on the fire escape on the 6th floor to witness the excitement of a jewelers strike on the street below. The boy fell to his death.

Here, in 1921 Special Deputy Commissioner Carleton Simon seized a large quantity of opium and counterfeit revenue stamps in the jewelry firm of Sebastian Fagella. A few months later Fagella was arrested again, this time for producing forged fight tickets for the Dempsey-Carpentier bout.

The narrowness of Gold Street, originally laid out for horse carts and pedestrians, discouraged the growth of retail or office space. No. 33 Gold Street, therefore, retained nearly all of its architectural integrity – never being seriously altered with shop windows or pseudo-modern fronts.

Photo Wally Gobetz

Now converted to residences, its over-sized entrance arch has been bricked up, the original windows have been replaced by an unsympathetic modern mish-mash, and a truly unfortunate choice of a metal “Dutch door” with scalloped edges around the window serves as an entrance.

Nevertheless, one of William Milne Grinnell’s rare buildings – if not his only one – survives remarkably intact and essentially overlooked.

The 1924 Greenwich Savings Bank - 1352 Broadway

Broadway Facade -- photo by Haier

On July 31, 1893 business was not as usual for the Greenwich Savings Bank. The institution, which had started out as a small Greenwich Village bank, had grown substantially; and was now housed in an impressive Victorian building on 6th Avenue at 16th Street.

That day, as with the other banks across the city, there was a run on the bank caused by a temporary shortage of cash. “Women largely predominate as depositors in the Greenwich Savings Bank,” reported The New York Times, “…and although the majority of the depositors there were well dressed and apparently in good circumstances they seemed to be just as much excited as did the less fortunate-looking people in the crowds at the east side banks.”

The Greenwich Savings Bank at 6th Avenue and 16th Street in 1898

The women tested the patience of Bank President James Harsen Rhoades. “There is absolutely no reason for a run on our savings bank,” he said. “People seem to have the idiotic idea that drawing money out of a bank is the best way to meet a panic. The fact is that it is the very way to increase it.”

Greenwich Savings Bank, as did the rest of the banks, survived the crisis and continued to grow. By the end of World War I the institution needed a new headquarters. On April 21, 1921 a plot of land was purchased from the Van Ingen estate for $1.5 million. The Times reported “The Greenwich Savings Bank, the third oldest institution of its kind in New York City, will build a monumental banking and commercial structure at the northeast corner of Broadway and Thirty-sixth Street.”

And monumental it would be.

On December 6, 1922 William Rhinelander Stewart laid the cornerstone, initiating the two-year construction of an imposing new bank building

Architects Edward Palmer York and Philip Sawyer, renowned for designing bank buildings, were given the commission. Both architects had formerly worked for McKim, Mead & White and the classical tradition of that firm left its mark. They were faced with a difficult plot of land, an irregular quadrilateral formed by the diagonal orientation of Broadway as well as the downward slope of 6th Avenue towards Broadway.

Drawing inspiration from Imperial Rome, they created an epic Roman structure. The three exposed facades feature colossal Corinthian columns supporting a heavy corniced attic. The ground floor forms a rusticated base, punctuated by bronze-grilled windows and heavy bronze doors. Behind the colonnade on the Broadway side are three immense arched windows, while the 6th Avenue exposure has a single, central window. Using visual slight-of-hand, the architects managed to obliterate the building’s peculiar dimensions.

6th Avenue Facade

Sawyer’s interior reflected stability and security to the depositor. The great oval banking room was surmounted by shallow-coffered ceiling with an enormous stained-glass dome. Bronze teller’s cages on marble counters, contrasting Indiana limestone and sandstone walls, and inlaid marble floors combined to inspire awe.

Photo GothamHallEvents.com

On May 17, 1924 “in armored-cars and under the protection of machine guns,” as reported  The New York Times, the bank moved its cash and securities to its new home.

The Greenwich Savings Bank remained in the building until 1980. Two decades later Chinese-based appliance and digital manufacturer, Haier America purchased the structure for its headquarters. The magnificent banking hall was stripped of its teller cages and bronze-and-marble transaction counters and renovated as Gotham Hall, an elegant and cavernous party venue.

Photo GothamHallEvents.com

The monumental Roman building is bathed nightly in what Haier calls “showers of blue light.” The building is a designated New York City Landmark.

Photo by Haier

The 1900 Stokes-Moore Mansion - 4 East 54th Street

As the construction of his extravagant Ansonia Hotel on upper Broadway was nearing completion, the somewhat eccentric millionaire William Earle Dodge Stokes paused before a photographer’s shop on Fifth Avenue. There in the window was a portrait of 19-year old Rita Hernandez de Alba Acosta.

Rita Acosta was a striking beauty. The New York Times would later report, “her beauty has made her famous in the social world...She is a tall brunette, with a perfect figure, high color, and large black eyes.” 

The 43-year old Stokes was immediately smitten.

On January 3, 1895 the couple was married in the bride’s parents’ mansion at 48 West 47th Street where Archbishop Corrigan performed the ceremony in front of 1000 guests. “No wedding this season in New-York has attracted more interest among society people” reported The New York Times.

Although those “society people” generally looked askance at Stokes – he preferred not to engage in social affairs and dressed “oddly” – he attempted to fit in for the sake of his bride. In 1897 he rented the Newport cottage of publisher James Gordon Bennett where Rita hosted an opening dinner party for 300.

A year later, on June 7, Stokes spent $140,000 on the two 4-story brownstones owned by Mrs. Caroline G. Reed at Nos. 4 and 6 East 54th Street. In their place he commissioned McKim, Mead and White to design a white marble mansion for his new bride. The firm produced an Italian Renaissance-style town house worthy of 5th Avenue, just around the corner. A carved marble balcony stretched the length of the second story above a rusticated ground floor protected by a marble and cast iron fence.

The home rose five floors to an elegant, classic marble balustrade on the roof.

However things were not going well in the Stokes household and, just as the house was nearing completion, Stokes sold it on December 14, 1899 for $325,000. Four months later Mrs. Stokes filed for divorce.

On April 5, 1900 The New York Times reported that “It has been known for some time that there was a rupture of the friendly relations existing between the couple, but the utmost secrecy is being observed as to the details of the case.”

Years later Rita’s sister, Mercedes de Acosta, would write “when Rita finally decided to marry Will Stokes it was, I believe, because she felt his wealth could open doors. . . . But she paid a high price for any material gain.”

The elegant marble mansion was purchased by Chicago lawyer and business mogul William H. Moore and his wife Ada. The fantastically wealthy Moore was the founder not only of U.S. Steel, but of American Can Company, Diamond Match Company, National Biscuit Company (later renamed Nabisco) and several railroads and banks.

Reporting on the sale, The Times said the house “may safely be classed as one of the finest private dwellings in the city.”

The Moores were important social figures, Mrs. Moore filling the house with Asian antiques and hosting numerous lavish parties for opera figures and New York’s elite.

William Moore died in 1923 and Ada remained in the house until her death in 1955. Subsequently the home was used by a succession of commercial and charitable tenants; yet none of them disturbed the original interiors.

When, in May of 1993, the Banco Di Napoli purchased the mansion from the government of Indonesia for $12.8 million, the original stained glass, the five-story winding marble staircase, the inlaid floors and the ceiling details were all intact.

The bank commissioned Americon, Inc. to restore and renovate the structure, adding two floors in the process, invisible from the street.

No. 4 East 54th Street looks today much as it did when William and Ada Moore first entered it in 1900; an elegant and beautiful survivor of 5th Avenue’s magnificent residential era.



 
 
 
 
Photo Wally Gobetz

The 1809 Gideon Tucker House - No. 2 White Street

Photo NYPL Collection



Elsewhere in the city in 1809 houses in the new and fashionable Federal style of architecture were rising.  Gideon Tucker, however, preferred the traditional 18th Century Dutch style for his residence.

Tucker was a successful businessman and politician, a partner in the Tucker & Ludlum plaster factory, school commissioner, Commissioner of Estimates and Assessments and an Assistant Alderman. His property, on which his factory sat, was considerable. When White Street was laid out across his land in anticipation of residential development, he built his modest but comfortable home at the end of the block at West Broadway.

No. 2 White Street, in all probability, always had a store on the ground floor with the residential area above. Build of brick and wood, it featured a distinctive gambrel roof familiar in the earlier Dutch homes, splayed stone window lintels, and handsome prominent dormers.

Despite his substantial wealth, Tucker apparently remained in the unpretentious house until he died in 1845. He left a large amount of real estate, including one plot between the Bowery and 5th Avenue, from 10th to 12th Streets, which sold for $1,250,000.

As the neighborhood around it changed, the little house at No. 2 White Street went through a multitude of uses; reportedly having a dance hall called “Shadow City” in the basement around the time of the Civil War.

For decades during the 20th Century, when high rise office buildings crowded in around it, the White Street building housed a liquor store. In the 1980s a bar, taking its name from the surviving painted glass window signs, opened.  "The Liquor Store" prospered for a decade.

Then, In 1990, a mosque opened at 245 West Broadway. Because the state’s Alcohol Beverage Control law prohibits establishments selling liquor within 200 feet of a house of worship, the bar was notified that its liquor license would be revoked. The mosque, in the meantime, insisted it had no objection to the nearby bars.  “We don’t dictate other people’s behavior,” an official said.

Eventually the bar became a men’s clothing store, still clinging to the name “The Liquor Store.”

No. 2 White street was designated a New York City Landmark in 1966. Two centuries after construction Gideon Tucker's quaint little house is in a remarkable state of preservation – the great miracle surrounding it being that the it has survived at all.

Paris on Perry Street - No. 70 Perry

photo by Wally Gobetz

In 1867, two years after the end of the Civil War, prosperity manifested itself in Greenwich Village with blocks of substantial upper-middle class homes.  On Perry Street, between West 4th and Bleecker Streets, elegant brownstone residences reflected the success of their owners.


At No. 70, Walter Jones broke free of the expected Italianate style. He, instead, turned to the new French Second Empire manner which was sweeping Paris and Washington DC.  Jones acted as owner, builder, and the architect for the cutting-edge residence.

Bill Harris, in his One Thousand New York Buildings, pointed out that “Although it is twenty feet wide, like all its neighbors, its proportions make it seem larger than the others.”

Slim floor-to-ceiling arched windows on the parlor floor mirror the arched entrance with its double, black walnut, heavily-paneled doors with quarter-round overlights. The second floor rather unexpectedly repeats the floor-to-ceiling height windows with less dramatic elliptical arches, while the third floor windows forego the arch altogether.

The top floor was housed in a stylish mansard roof.  Below street level was the English basement. The light-colored stone contrasted dramatically with the chocolatey brownstones along the block.

The broad entrance staircase spilled from the door to the sidewalk, flanked by heavy cast iron railings and newels in the Italianate style.

Jones built No. 70 as an investment property, renting it to well-heeled residents; however only four years later he lost the property to foreclosure. The subsequent owner continued renting the house for 25 years before selling it to real estate agent Albert Messinger in 1896.

Messinger lived here until 1912. Afterwards, the house became home to poet Shaemas O’Sheel.  O'Sheel, who, in addition to his writing, ran twice for the Republican Congressional seat, was active in the Irish Independence Movement (although he had never been to Ireland and was born James Shields) and was a literary critic for both The New York Times and Harper’s,

During his 1920 run for Congress he asserted that he “will stand for the Republican policy of protective tariff, development of the merchant marine, and for the improvements of the Port of New York, and is opposed to the League of Nations, prohibition, socialism, and radicals who…are made not by agitators but by ’25-cent sugar and 20-cent milk,’” according to The New York Times.

Today even the walnut interior window shutters remain in place and No. 70 Perry Street, which the AIA Guide to New York City called “the architectural gem of the block,” remains an graceful private home in impeccable condition.