55. Park Row Building
A.K.A.: Ivins Syndicate Building; The Syndicate Building; 15 Park Row at City Hall Park
Location: 15 Park Row
Built: 1899
Architect: R.H. Henderson
National Register Number: 05001287
Listed: November 16, 2005
Visited: March 2, 2008
Additional Documentation: 15 Park Row at City Hall Park website; Tom Fletcher's NYC Architecture webpage; Christopher Grey's NYT article
It was the tallest, once. Tallest in the world, from 1899 to 1908.
Today, it doesn't even have the honor of being tall. In New York City alone, there are 367 buildings that are bigger. Nor does it have much aesthetic virtue to compensate. The Woolworth, the Chrysler, and the Empire State buildings were all world-champeens in their hey-days, but remain beloved because they are beautiful. The Park Row Building is not beautiful. Not ugly, but not beautiful.
It has a perfectly adequate Beaux-Arts façade, if a little dull. Tall buildings from the Potter Building to the Empire State Building the World Trade Center used long upwards lines on the building surface to emphasize verticality. The Park Row Building uses a lot of horizontal lines in its rustication, ornamental balconies and ledges, while many of the vertical lines on the buildings are interrupted, as if neutralize the offense of its height. The one way it unapologetically expresses verticality is in its profile. There's no steppy setbacks or ziggy-zagginess, which is what architects added to later high-rises to allow air and light to the street; no, it goes straight up, ZWOOP! and stays up until the roof, where there are two domes to give it a little bit of distinction. Without the domes, it'd look like a box--but only if you were looking at it from City Hall Park or the little islands of land near where Broadway and Park Row meet; that is, from north and west sides. Walk around and you'll see it's not quite that simple.
The Ann Street side shows the building has a interior courtyard with a series of braces to stabilize the building's two parts. Walk a little further down...
...and there's another thin strip of building reaching out to provide an entrance to Ann Street, and another courtyard. And another part of the building open to another street, this time Theatre Alley. But unlike the Park Row and Ann Street faces, the Theatre Alley side doesn't even bother giving it much of a look--no rustication, no balconies, just columns of windows. Several of the building's sides don't even have that, just thirty bleak stories of brick wall almost completely uninterrupted by window.
The building perimeter is thus shaped like an eccentric W (there's a floor plan on Tom Fletcher's site). There were rational reasons for this: for one, the building stands on what were originally seven different plots of land; the courtyards are added to allow light to penetrate the building interior as much as possible (remember, this was built in 1899, when electric light was still fairly novel). Further, I'm guessing those walls of brick might've left blank intentionally in anticipation of other tall buildings being built on neighboring sites.
Technological innovation of many sorts, along with the public's fear of a future city populated by volume-filling monsters, would lead future high-rises to be constructed a little more thoughtfully, but it's the Park Row Building's awkwardness that makes me like it so much: it's skyscraper form in its gawky pre-adolescent phase; it's fascinatingly unique because future New York City architects were sensible enough not to repeat its flaws.
Another reason the building is so interesting to me is that out of all the landmarks I've covered or will cover, it's the one I know most intimately. The block on Park Row, between Beekman and Ann Streets, are dominated by J&R, one of New York City's retail colossi. Only a block away from the World Trade Center, J&R was always a good way to spend a lunch hour. Mainly I'd go and get CDs from their music store a few blocks down, but the Park Row Building location had the computers and software. I spent quite a few longueurs spent debating whether I should buy a certain piece of graphics or websmithing software (all outdated crap now) that, if applied with confidence and patience, would enhance my creativity. Or a game that would end up wasting it.
It was on just such a trip that I first paid attention to the Park Row Building. I had been going to J&R for years already without any inkling of its history or its claim to fame, but one day I looked up and saw the braces. It didn't occur to me they might have structural value; I wondered if they were bridges. It took a while to realize they weren't. Even with their purpose unclear, I thought they were a fine thing to have, a little something for the people in the upper stories to contemplate. Other features fell into focus. There was the light falling on the expanses of brick, the shadows in the courtyard. The green domes, squat like knobs. Windows. Before they left my sight, I toyed with the irrational feeling that, somehow, this building magically appeared only a week or so ago. Or maybe I was on the wrong block. After all, if such a grand (not beautiful--grand) building was really there all this time, surely I would've noticed it.
Location: 15 Park Row
Built: 1899
Architect: R.H. Henderson
National Register Number: 05001287
Listed: November 16, 2005
Visited: March 2, 2008
Additional Documentation: 15 Park Row at City Hall Park website; Tom Fletcher's NYC Architecture webpage; Christopher Grey's NYT article
It was the tallest, once. Tallest in the world, from 1899 to 1908.
Today, it doesn't even have the honor of being tall. In New York City alone, there are 367 buildings that are bigger. Nor does it have much aesthetic virtue to compensate. The Woolworth, the Chrysler, and the Empire State buildings were all world-champeens in their hey-days, but remain beloved because they are beautiful. The Park Row Building is not beautiful. Not ugly, but not beautiful.
It has a perfectly adequate Beaux-Arts façade, if a little dull. Tall buildings from the Potter Building to the Empire State Building the World Trade Center used long upwards lines on the building surface to emphasize verticality. The Park Row Building uses a lot of horizontal lines in its rustication, ornamental balconies and ledges, while many of the vertical lines on the buildings are interrupted, as if neutralize the offense of its height. The one way it unapologetically expresses verticality is in its profile. There's no steppy setbacks or ziggy-zagginess, which is what architects added to later high-rises to allow air and light to the street; no, it goes straight up, ZWOOP! and stays up until the roof, where there are two domes to give it a little bit of distinction. Without the domes, it'd look like a box--but only if you were looking at it from City Hall Park or the little islands of land near where Broadway and Park Row meet; that is, from north and west sides. Walk around and you'll see it's not quite that simple.
The Ann Street side shows the building has a interior courtyard with a series of braces to stabilize the building's two parts. Walk a little further down...
...and there's another thin strip of building reaching out to provide an entrance to Ann Street, and another courtyard. And another part of the building open to another street, this time Theatre Alley. But unlike the Park Row and Ann Street faces, the Theatre Alley side doesn't even bother giving it much of a look--no rustication, no balconies, just columns of windows. Several of the building's sides don't even have that, just thirty bleak stories of brick wall almost completely uninterrupted by window.
The building perimeter is thus shaped like an eccentric W (there's a floor plan on Tom Fletcher's site). There were rational reasons for this: for one, the building stands on what were originally seven different plots of land; the courtyards are added to allow light to penetrate the building interior as much as possible (remember, this was built in 1899, when electric light was still fairly novel). Further, I'm guessing those walls of brick might've left blank intentionally in anticipation of other tall buildings being built on neighboring sites.
Technological innovation of many sorts, along with the public's fear of a future city populated by volume-filling monsters, would lead future high-rises to be constructed a little more thoughtfully, but it's the Park Row Building's awkwardness that makes me like it so much: it's skyscraper form in its gawky pre-adolescent phase; it's fascinatingly unique because future New York City architects were sensible enough not to repeat its flaws.
Another reason the building is so interesting to me is that out of all the landmarks I've covered or will cover, it's the one I know most intimately. The block on Park Row, between Beekman and Ann Streets, are dominated by J&R, one of New York City's retail colossi. Only a block away from the World Trade Center, J&R was always a good way to spend a lunch hour. Mainly I'd go and get CDs from their music store a few blocks down, but the Park Row Building location had the computers and software. I spent quite a few longueurs spent debating whether I should buy a certain piece of graphics or websmithing software (all outdated crap now) that, if applied with confidence and patience, would enhance my creativity. Or a game that would end up wasting it.
It was on just such a trip that I first paid attention to the Park Row Building. I had been going to J&R for years already without any inkling of its history or its claim to fame, but one day I looked up and saw the braces. It didn't occur to me they might have structural value; I wondered if they were bridges. It took a while to realize they weren't. Even with their purpose unclear, I thought they were a fine thing to have, a little something for the people in the upper stories to contemplate. Other features fell into focus. There was the light falling on the expanses of brick, the shadows in the courtyard. The green domes, squat like knobs. Windows. Before they left my sight, I toyed with the irrational feeling that, somehow, this building magically appeared only a week or so ago. Or maybe I was on the wrong block. After all, if such a grand (not beautiful--grand) building was really there all this time, surely I would've noticed it.
posted by Michael at
10:42 PM
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