Tag Archives: landmark

Gilsey House Hotel

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Gilsey House Hotel is one of the last reminders that this stretch of Broadway – between Madison Square and Herald Square – was the social center of the city. There were six theaters on the three blocks between 28th and 31st Streets; so many music publishers were on neighboring 28th Street, the sound of their pianos gave rise to the name “Tin Pan Alley.” A block west, meanwhile, was the notorious “Tenderloin” district of brothels and gambling clubs.

The Gilsey House Hotel was among the most luxurious in the city, but a legal battle between the Gilsey family and the hotel operator shut the property down. In 1911 the Gilsey House Hotel became lofts serving the garment industry. In 1980 the building was converted to condominium apartments, and the facade was restored in 1992 – though missing most of the outer set of columns, which had extended over the building line. (See the Wikipedia article for a photo of the original design.)

Gilsey House Hotel Vital Statistics
  • Location: 1200 Broadway at W 29th Street
  • Year completed: 1871
  • Architect: Stephen Decatur Hatch
  • Floors: 8
  • Style: Second Empire
  • New York City Landmark: 1979
  • National Register of Historic Places: 1978
Gilsey House Hotel Recommended Reading

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Johnston Building

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Johnston Building, aka NoMad Hotel, was built in 1903 as a store and office building. It is notable for its limestone facade – an expensive finish for an office building – and for its corner tower and cupola. Last but not least, it is also notable (for 1903) that the owner was a woman: Caroline H. Johnston.

After a lengthy conversion (2008-2012) by Sydell Group, the building is now a Parisian-inspired boutique hotel with interiors designed by Jacques Garcia.

Sydell Group also operates the Ace Hotel – the former Breslin Hotel – located one block to the north.

Johnston Building Vital Statistics
  • Location: 1770 Broadway at W 28th Street
  • Year completed: 1903; 2012 (conversion)
  • Architect: Schickel & Ditmars; Stonehill & Taylor (conversion), Jacques Garcia (interiors)
  • Floors: 12
  • Style: Beaux Arts
  • New York City Landmark: 2001 (Madison Square North Historic District)
Johnston Building Recommended Reading

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St James Building

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St James Building was among the earliest highrise office buildings in the NoMad neighborhood, replacing the St. James Hotel. It is considered among Bruce Price’s most important designs, after Quebec City’s Château Frontenac Hotel.

The St James Building was a favorite home for architects, including Daniel Burnham, Henry Pelton and John Russell Pope – as well as Bruce Price. Remarkably, after more than 115 years the building is still home to dozens of architects.

The steel-framed building follows the traditional base-shaft-capital design; the base and capital are of limestone, with prominent arched windows and bays; the shaft is of brick indented to simulate the deep rusticated joints of stone. Elaborate and massive terra cotta decoration is used throughout.

Architect Bruce Price has another claim to fame: Price invented, patented, and built the parlor bay-window cars for the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Boston and Albany Railroad. (See Wikipedia.)

Historical Note: Washington didn’t sleep here, but Golda Meir worked here in the early ’30s according to “All Around the Town: Amazing Manhattan Facts and Curiosities, Second Edition (Empire State Editions).”

St James Building Vital Statistics
  • Location: 1133 Broadway at W 26th Street
  • Year completed: 1898
  • Architect: Bruce Price
  • Floors: 16
  • Style: Beaux Arts
  • New York City Landmark: 2001 (Madison Square North Historic District)
St James Building Recommended Reading

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McIntyre Building

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McIntyre Building is one of New York’s quirky oddities. For starters, people can’t agree on its architectural style, because architect Robert H. Robertson mixed several styles in the design. People don’t always agree on the building’s name – it was built by Ewen McIntyre, but the lobby mosaic spells it “Mac Intyre” – and the typo is how many refer to 874 Broadway. The owner was a druggist, but he never used the building – the ground floor was occupied by a now-defunct bank.

Over the years, occupants sometimes blurred the lines. In the ’60s, people started to live in the building – though it didn’t have a residential occupancy permit. A seventh-floor nightclub, Cobra Club, operated illegally in the ’70s. The club’s trademark snakes reportedly escaped the glass terrariums from time to time, and live snakes were reported on the loose for years after. It’s currently a co-op – and one that’s spent big bucks to preserve the McIntyre Building’s unique style. The residents even paid to restore century-old wooden windows rather than replace them with modern metal sashes.

McIntyre Building Vital Statistics
  • Location: 874 Broadway at E 18th Street
  • Year completed: 1892
  • Architect: Robert H. Robertson
  • Floors: 11
  • Style: Romanesque Revival
  • New York City Landmark: 1989 (Ladies Mile Historic District)
McIntyre Building Recommended Reading

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Engine Company 14

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Engine Company 14 is typical of early New York City firehouses – typically ornate, that is. The Department’s official architect, Napoleon Le Brun, made each house different.

The care given to firehouse design reflected the Fire Department’s campaign to raise the department’s professionalism, as it shifted from a volunteer to paid force.

Engine Company 14 Vital Statistics
  • Location: 14 E 18th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues
  • Year completed: 1895
  • Architect: Napoleon Le Brun & Sons
  • Floors: 3
  • Style: Beaux Arts
  • New York City Landmark: 1989 (Ladies Mile Historic District)
Engine Company 14 Recommended Reading

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Chanin Building

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Chanin Building is among New York’s most prominent Art Deco towers (and cater-corner from the most prominent, the Chrysler Building). It was designed by Sloan & Robertson, who also designed the Art Deco Graybar Building, on the next block.

The Chanin Building’s base and its lobby are boldly decorated with terra cotta and bronze. The first story, dedicated to retail shops, is clad in Belgian black marble. That is topped by a bronze frieze depicting evolution from low marine life forms to fish and birds. Two floors of bronze-framed casement windows, set between limestone piers, come next. The fourth floor is clad in a floral patterned terra cotta band. Fourth floor windows align with the bays above, creating vertical lines to emphasize the structure’s height.

One critic – Carter B. Horsley writing in City Review – observed, “It is interesting to note that the Chrysler Building has the city’s greatest crown but a rather prosaic base. Imagine if it had the base of the Chanin Building, or vice versa?”

Above the base, the Chanin Building’s form was largely dictated by New York City’s 1916 zoning law, which required setbacks proportional to the width of the facing streets. From the 17th to the 29th floor the building tapers to a 22-story slab tower, capped by a four-story buttressed crown. The 50th and 51st floors originally held a theater (one line of Chanin’s businesses), and the 54th floor had an open-air observatory. The tower was once (briefly) the third-tallest in New York. Now, it is rarely appreciated.

Chanin the owner was every bit as impressive as Chanin the building – you can read more in the Landmarks Commission’s designation report and in The New York Times article.

Chanin Building Vital Statistics
  • Location: 122 E 42nd Street at Lexington Avenue
  • Year completed: 1929
  • Architect: Sloan & Robertson
  • Floors: 56
  • Style: Art Deco
  • New York City Landmark: 1978
  • National Register of Historic Places: 1980
Chanin Building Recommended Reading

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Century Building

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Century Building, since 1995 a Barnes & Noble store, was also associated with publishing when it was built in 1881. Century Publishing Company leased the fifth floor and hung its sign outside – which led to the name. Retailer Aaron Arnold (Arnold Constable Department Store) built the landmark as a speculative venture – no prime tenant was signed.

The NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission cited the structure as “a rare surviving Queen Anne style commercial building.” The Century Building was vacant at the time that the Commission designated it a New York City landmark. Barnes & Noble took it over in 1995, according to Daytonian in Manhattan.

The two-story oriel windows and gambrel roof are quite picturesque from Union Square Park. Although the Century Building extends through to E 18th Street, that facade is relatively plain.

Century Building Vital Statistics
  • Location: 33 E 17th Street between Broadway and Park Avenue South
  • Year completed: 1881
  • Architect: J. William Schickel
  • Floors: 7
  • Style: Queen Anne
  • New York City Landmark: 1986
  • National Register of Historic Places: 1997
Century Building Recommended Reading

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Jane Hotel

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Jane Hotel, built in 1908 as the American Seamen’s Friend Society Sailors’ Home and Institute, once hosted Titanic survivors. It was designed by William A. Boring, who was also the architect for Ellis Island’s immigration station. Restored in 2008, the Jane Hotel now hosts financial survivors – in tiny rooms with shared bath priced as low as $79 per night.

The distinctive octagonal tower originally had a beacon, to welcome sailors. The beacon is gone, but other nautical connections remain. For starters, Jane Hotel rooms are called cabins. How tiny? A “remarkably cozy” 50 square feet. Some with bunk beds. The New York Times quipped, Popeye Slept Here and Now Olive Oyl Can, Too. the developers, Sean MacPherson and Eric Goode, also run the Maritime Hotel – a former sailor’s hostelry run by the National Maritime Union.

In 1931 the Home and Institute was downgraded to annex status, and in 1944 the YMCA took over the property, removing the beacon in 1946. Also in 1946, YMCA sold the building; it changed hands several more times over the years, finally becoming Riverview Hotel before MacPherson and Goode took over. (See the Corbin Plays portfolio for historic photos of the building with beacon. The PreservationNation Blog has current interior photos.)

In the 1970s and until 2005, the Jane Street Theater called this home.

The Greenwich Village waterfront now attracts joggers instead of sailors. The Jane Hotel is an architectural reminder of New York’s history as a seaport – and a haven (says the hotel) for travelers “with more dash than cash.”

Jane Hotel Vital Statistics
  • Location: 113 Jane Street at West Street (aka 505 West Street)
  • Year completed: 1908
  • Architect: William A. Boring
  • Floors: 6
  • Style: neo-Classical
  • New York City Landmark: 2000
Jane Hotel Recommended Reading

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Beekman Regent

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Beekman Regent is the private development of a New York City-owned property, P.S. 135 (originally Primary School No. 35) in the Turtle Bay section of Manhattan.

The original buff-colored five-story Romanesque building of 1893 was used as a school until the 1970s, when the Board of Education decided to sell it. The prospective developer intended to demolish the building, but neighborhood groups fought to save the school.

Preservationists succeeded in getting the building listed in the National Register of Historic Places – but not NYC Landmark status. Nonetheless, the city relented and required preservation of the school facade as a condition of the school’s sale. A decade later, the city found a developer that would observe those terms.

Within the first five floors – the original building height – are retail space (currently a Duane Reade drugstore) and four floors of loft apartments with 14-foot ceilings and 10-foot windows. Above that are duplex, standard and penthouse condominium apartments – homes, in developer-speak.

The apartment tower and historic base are different colors and architectural styles. The effect isn’t as drastic as the glass and steel tower that erupts from the Hearst Building (Eighth Avenue at W 57th Street), but it is odd, like the NYU dorm built behind a fragment of St. Ann’s Shrine Armenian Catholic Cathedral on E 12th Street.

Beekman Regent Vital Statistics
  • Location: 931 First Avenue / 351 E 51st Street
  • Year completed: 1893 (original); 2002 (conversion)
  • Architect: George W. Debevoise (original); Costas Kondylis & Partners LLP Architects (conversion)
  • Floors: 21
  • Style: Romanesque
  • National Register of Historic Places: 1980
Beekman Regent Recommended Reading

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Whitehall Building

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Whitehall Building is actually two buildings: the original 1904 20-story structure facing Battery Place, and a 1910 32-story annex directly behind that, facing West Street.

(A third building, added to the complex in 1972, is not included in this gallery. Now named One Western Union International Plaza, that 20-story office building was built in a completely different style and is now under different ownership.)

Whitehall Building was a little bit of a gamble – its location was two blocks off Broadway, the most desirable address. But the park across the street guaranteed unimpeded views; with lower-than-Broadway rents, the building was an immediate success. The owners, Robert and William Chesebrough, started buying up adjacent lots for an annex even before the first building was completed. (Robert Chesebrough was the inventor of Vaseline Petroleum Jelly.)

Henry J. Hardenbergh was the architect for the Whitehall Building. Among his prior commissions were the Dakota Apartments (1884), the original Waldorf (1895) and Astoria (1897) hotels, and the Western Union Telegraph Building (1884). His design for the Whitehall was quite colorful for the times and the location, including five different shades of brick and stone in the Battery Place facade.

The records don’t say why Hardenbergh wasn’t selected to design the annex – but it may have been because he was busy designing the Plaza Hotel. In any case, Clinton & Russell was selected for the job. Their annex, Greater Whitehall, was much larger than Whitehall Building; in fact, it was the largest office building in New York at the time.

The upper floors (14-31) of both buildings have now been converted to rental apartments – Ocean Luxury Residences.

Whitehall Building Vital Statistics
  • Location: 17 Battery Place
  • Year completed: 1904; 1910 (annex, aka Greater Whitehall)
  • Architect: Henry J. Hardenbergh; Clinton & Russell (annex)
  • Floors: 20; 31 (annex)
  • Style: neo-Renaissance
  • New York City Landmark: 2000
Whitehall Building Recommended Reading

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