90. Building at 254-260 Canal Street

A.K.A.: The Bruce Building
Location: 254-260 Canal Street
Built: 1856-1857
Architect: Probably James Bogardus
National Register Number: 06000475
Listed: June 07, 2006
Visited: November 15, 2008



254-260 Canal Street is also known as the Bruce Building, the Bruce here being George Bruce. The National Register of Historic Places registration form quotes a source calling him the "'father and chief' of typography in America." Not being in the field, I suppose I can't bring his publishing innovations to a height lower than a little over my head, but I do "get" the utility and beauty of the typefaces his foundry birthed, including Ornamented No. 1514 a.k.a. Gold Rush a.k.a. Klondike, a type I had to fake when designing one of my just-about-dead blogs.



Of the thirty-seven buildings known to be or suspected to have been designed by cast-iron pioneer James Bogardus, only five survive. Of the remaining five, the Bruce Building is closer to "suspected" than "known," as we have no direct proof of Bogardus' involvement; however, Bogardus did list Bruce as a client a year after this building was completed, and the Medusa heads topping the fourth-story arches are known to be characteristic of his work. I think it's also possible there's significance in Bruce's background, as several of James Bogardus' largest known works were built for publishers, including the Sun Iron Building and the Harper & Brothers Publishing Plant; perhaps it was thought of as a minor specialty of Bogardus. It's not much of a stretch to imagine the intuitive appeal a cast-iron building might have to someone who works with movable type, as both the printed page and something like the façade of 254-260 Canal Street are the fruits of individual pre-fabricated metal parts that can be mixed 'n' matched in infinite permutations.

81. E.V. Haughwout Building

Location: 488-492 Broadway, on the northeast corner of Broadway and Broome Street
Built: 1856-1857; restored 1995
Architects: John P. Gaynor; Daniel D. Badger (iron components); Joseph Pell Lombardi (restoration)
National Register Number: 73001218
Listed: August 28, 1973
Visited: June 21 and 24, and August 5, 2008

"If any building in New York deserves to be preserved in aspic, the Haughwout Building is it. With its skeleton of cast iron and its Otis elevator, this building is the best example of skyscrapers' roots." John Tauranac, The Empire State Building

Until the late 18th century, most buildings had their walls carry the weight of everything above them: such walls are called load-bearing walls. These walls, when made of brick, stone, or wood, will allow you to build only so high. For example, the north end of Chicago's Monadnack Building is one of the tallest brick load-bearing wall structures ever, but in order to carry the weight of all sixteen stories, the walls at the bottom floor are six feet wide. Theoretically the building could go even higher, but that'd mean the walls would need to be even thicker--and the thicker the walls get, the less space people have to occupy. New options arose with the mass production of metal alloys such as cast-iron and steel. A building could be construction from a frame of steel carries the weight of the exterior walls and everything else, and thank to steel's strength and lightness compared to other materials, these frames can be built very tall, allowing buildings to scale skyscraper heights.



The Haughwout uses metal as a structural element, and in that, it does prefigure the skyscraper. It also has a cast-iron façade whose repetition of prefabricated elements also serves as a prophecy of modern architecture, too. (I say more about this idea here.) But it doesn't actually have a "skeleton of cast iron," per se: its beams are timber and its north and east sides (the ones you can't see from the street) are good old-fashioned load-bearing masonry walls.

But yes, it had an elevator--the world's first passenger elevator. And I don't think I need to explain the importance of elevators to high-rises beyond pointing out that without an elevator, a great height is not something people are gonna want to scale on an everyday basis. This was the work of Elisha Graves Otis: while lifting devices were known at least since Archimedes, his wrinkle was a mechanism that would lock what was being lifted in place should its hoisting rope break, thus making vertical transportation reasonably safe for human use. It was steam-powered, did not have a fully-enclosed cab, and took a minute to go five stories; primitive, and not even that safe-sounding, but the company Otis founded would later be responsible for the elevators in such landmarks of New York height as the Flatiron, the Singer, the Woolworth, the Chrysler, the Empire State, and the World Trade Center. Today Otis Elevator is the biggest elevator company in the world.



It was built for the E.V. Haughwout & Co., a dry-goods purveyor of some repute. As Haughwout & Dailey, they supplied the Pierce White House with china; later Mary Todd Lincoln paid a visit to purchase a new set. Like the near-contemporary buildings for fellow retailers Cary, Howard & Sanger and Arnold, Constable & Company, and A.T. Stewart, the Haughwout was designed to overwhelm both the consumer and the passerby with bounty, inside and out. (It occurs to me that perhaps these stores aimed for an experience akin to the busyness of New York in microcosm.) Even twelve years after it opened, The New York Times could still describe the store as "colossal" in a A guide to Christmas shopping that also exhaustively enumerates the wares for sale:

"Besides their immense stock of crockery, glassware, chandeliers, gas fixtures, &c., of every descriptions, the HAUGHWOUTS have their store literally crammed from top to bottom with holiday goods. Bronzes of all varieties and patterns, statues, statuettes, Parian marbles, the Rogers groups, jardinieres, vases, artificial flowers and bouquets, bonbonnieres, jewelry, perfumery and handkerchief boxes, nicknacks of every description, in bronze and glass, and suited to the most moderate as well as the most expensive tastes..." The New York Times December 18, 1869

This, mind you, was only three floors (the top two were dedicated to decoration and manufacture) on a 6,000 square feet lot. Small as it was by our standards, an 1859 lithograph shows that in a city still dominated by small and sober Greek Revival buildings, it must've been received like a iron angel floated down from a cloud. Modeled after Biblioteca Sansoviniana in Venice, the façade's basic element is a window framed by an arch on top of two fluted Corinthian colonnettes, then framed again by two full columns of similar design. This gets repeated nearly a hundred times on the Haughwout's south and west faces, letting the wide and high windows shoot light through the interior. The result is the building seems both "richly sculpted," as Christopher Gray calls it, and as porous as a sponge.



Subject for further research: based on Google Books and the New York Times archive, it seems to me the Haughwout languished in a kind of fully-public obscurity once cast-iron façades went out of style, going about largely unremarked by the architectural intelligentsia for close to maybe half a century or longer, and had to wait quite a bit after the skyscraper retroactively rewrote much of architectural history in its image until it was recognized as an omen of things to come and re-recognized as beautiful. Even after that happened, even after it had been landmarked by the city and appeared on the National Register, it still took a while before it got properly restored--photos taken as part of the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1967 and 1970 make it look as if the windows above the first floor hadn't been washed for decades. Finally, in 1995, it got repainted--a cream instead of the black it had for a while--and had missing details replaced.

Only thirteen years later, it looks like it could use another coat of paint, with rust streaks running down here and there. No wonder cast-iron façades in New York City seem to have been designed with less and less detail as the 19th century progressed, evolving from the richly textured Cary and 75 Murray Street buildings to blunter, sparer neo-Grecs: after a while people musta realized that more detail meant more to paint and more to clean.

80t. SoHo Historic District

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26; August 8 and 31, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



Built in 1890 and designed by Richard Berger, 112-114 Prince Street is one of the last buildings in SoHo constructed with a complete cast-iron façade. (According to Margot Gayle, 550 Broadway, completed in 1895, is the city's last. No picture, sorry.) Christopher Gray called it "...nothing special, just a typically ornate SoHo cast-iron facade..." which sounds damning only if you discount the amazingly high quality of SoHo cast-irons--are there any boring or bad ones in the neighborhood? Does it even make sense to say there are, given how cumulative their effect is?



What makes the building stand out from the others, though, isn't its façade but its simulated continuation on a formerly blank wall by the artist Richard Haas. The 1975 mural has some rep as a local landmark, and when it was in better shape (something like this), I'm pretty sure it fooled me at least once. But I think it's too gimmicky a gesture, and it loses its charm once the initial shock is lost. Its historical grasp is a little tenuous as well. To incorporate two existing windows into the mural, Haas painted several bays narrower than the others, creating a vertical asymmetry I don't think any 19th century architect would allow in a ground-up design. And I can't think of any non-street, non-entrance building side in SoHo that receives the level of architectural treatment the mural depicts. There were practical reasons architects left them blank back in the day. After all, why add a lot of decorative doo-dads when they might get compromised or destroyed by a new neighboring building? Cast-iron façades also gained value from their relationships to sidewalk filled with consumers peering into wide store windows, or walking in and out of dramatic, kingly entrances. Cast-irons are grand because they had beauty and utility; in contrast, this mural is corny.

80s. SoHo Historic District

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26; August 8 and 31, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



In 1892 Moses King called 549-555 Broadway (Alfred Zucker, 1890) "...the tallest mercantile building of the longest, most varied and most interesting avenues in the world." "This store of stores is 75 by 200 feet in area, and has twelve floors, each floor being equal to six city stores of 25 by 100 feet, making 72 stores of large size in one building." Contemporary department stores are bigger than 180K square feet as a matter of course, but in its day it was described as "...the great curiosity shop of America," filled with "...almost everything that could be though of for the ornamentation of a mansion or the recreation or amusement of its occupants..."



The man behind the store, Charles Broadway Rouss, was as outsized as his creation. He made some money in retail back in Virginia, fought in the Civil War, lost the money, moved to New York, made some money, lost it all again, spent time in debtor's prison, then made some real fucking money. During the store's construction in 1889, a sign was placed on the site that celebrated Rouss' triumph at reaching a third act in life:

"He who builds, owns and will occupy this marvel of brick, iron and granite, thirteen years ago walked these streets penniless and $50,000 in debt. Only to prove that the capitalists of to-day were poor men twenty years ago, and that many a fellow facing poverty to-day may be a capitalist a quarter of a century hence, if he will. Pluck, adorned with ambition, backed by honor bright, will always command success, even without the almighty dollar."

Some of the architecture guides that quote it--and how could one resist from quoting it?--neglect to mention that it was written in an aggressively non-standard English, as Rouss was a partisan for phonetic spelling, even going so far as to publish a monthly industry journal with it. Then he went blind. In an unsettling detail, Rouss paid another blind man a dollar a day to undergo treatments (one account says it was from at least 180 doctors) to see what, if anything, worked. Nothing did.



A few years before he died in 1902, he expanded the building by about 25 feet to the north. Christopher Gray says the two triangular dormers were added perhaps because Rouss could feel them easily on an architectural model, an observation which makes a lot of intuitive sense; he also adds that the "...meeting point between the original building and the addition is evident to the careful observer..." which I admit I don't see, possibly thanks to a careful restoration a few years ago that also simplified its color scheme from one with all manner of pinks and buffs to a glistening beige. Floodlights were also added to the façade, giving it some show-stopping, attention-grabbing drama; even if Rouss couldn't see them, he'd understand them.

80r. SoHo Historic District

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26; August 8 and 31, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



Apart from its long stretch of ten whole bays stretching down Greene Street, 109-111 Prince Street's most striking feature is its chamfered corner. A little bit of real estate surrendered to the sidewalk pays back dividends in drama: an entire side of a building dedicated to your grand entrance.

Jarvis Morgan Slade designed it. He died at 30, only two months after construction began in 1883. A fucking bummer to think about, for two rather different reasons: he was robbed of the chance of producing more and doing better than he did--and yet even with seven years fewer years than my own time on earth, Slade still managed to made his mark on the Manhattan so much more permanently and effectively. (Are there 30-year-old architects in the city building big today?)



I feel guilty that I keep going back to initial circa '93-'94 memories of SoHo, but when the Replay here was the Replay Country Store it was an alluringly shopgasmic experience. As its name suggests, its organizing theme was "the West", an already a series of clichés without connection to the lived experience to most Americans but oversimplified yet again by European sensibility. In other words, it was false and silly and yet...and it was perhaps the closest thing I know to what all the old retail emporiums of 19th century must've been like, a valiant attempt at getting everything under one roof. There were stacks of wearables everywhere; the walls were as bric-a-bracked-out with old kitsch as a T.G.I. Friday's. When you were finished exploring one floor, there was another. It seemed endless. It seemed like everything was on sale. There was no way to handle it. I could never concentrate enough to even begin to decide what to buy. Yeah, it didn't last. I went again last year. They cleared everything out, surely years ago; got rid of all the complexity, surface overwhelming purchasable items. It seemed creepy and sterile, smaller.



(Conflict of interest alert: I've worked with the principals of the firm behind 109's 1993 renovation when my firm teamed up for a few project proposals we didn't win, IIRC.)

80q. SoHo Historic District

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, and August 8, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



569-575 Broadway (Thomas Stent, 1882) is currently Prada's New York flagship. Can't say much about the interior of the store because...well, can't take any pictures of it as it's private property. OK, OK, I haven't even been inside. I'm a guy! Oops, wait, it's got menswear, too. Yeah, I've been lazy.

Prior to that, it was the Guggenheim's SoHo branch. Originally envisioned as extra offices and storage, it became a full-fledged exhibition space that both served as the anchor for a downtown "Museum Mile", and an opening volley of the feverish expansion plans the Guggenheim tried to realize throughout the nineties and early aughties. I have fond memories of the SoHo branch, particularly the John Cage Rolywholyover: A Circus show staged only two years after he died. In it, artwork by and about Cage, his compatriots, and from city museums were displayed in four rooms according to chance operations in a kind of well-curated anarchy; some of them would hung and rehung at odd places on the museum walls, leaving many a hole from the vacated nails. I thought it was so neat.



I took my friend Colin Meeder there when I wanted to show him New York City in general and SoHo in particular. (He was impressed.) I am almost embarrassed to say that now. Did I become too hip for SoHo or did SoHo become too unhip for me? I don't know. The loss of the artworld, even in the canon-ready form that the Guggenheim offered, meant the area became less fun to me--that I know. In my mind the show was the last broadcast from SoHo's artside carnivalesque (even if it was a traveling exhibition): soon after, I stopped thinking of the neighborhood as something other than a shopping epicenter. Of SoHo's museums on Broadway, the Guggenheim SoHo died in 2001, the New Museum shuffled off to the Bowery, the Museum of African Art is moving uptown, and the Alternative Museum is now online-only.



And way way way before all that, the building was one of the homes of the pioneering men's clothier Rogers, Peet & Co. 14to42.net (who I really must put on my links list) lists the company's innovation: "they attached tags to garments giving fabric composition, they marked garments with price tags (the established practice was to haggle), they offered customers their money back if not satisfied, and they used illustrations of specific merchandise in their advertising."

The building itself is charmingly brawny. Although its partly-swizzly columns on the ground floor and its cornice are iron, I think it might've been designed to stand out amongst the neighborhood's cast-irons, of which I bet fickle New York was tiring in the 1880s: ivory paint replaced by furious red brick; instead of the dazzling repetition of forms, the Broadway side gives every story gets a markedly different treatment.

80p. SoHo Historic District

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, and August 8, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



Which twin has the Toni?

As you can see from the photo, two buildings. The one on the right, 103-105 Greene Street, was designed by our old friend, Henry Fernbach, back in 1879. It's a lived a life of silk goods and shirtwaists, then bohemian rediscovery, fabulous restaurant, expensive apartments, nice stores. The usual, thanks. Its mirror image, 101 Greene Street, was built at exactly the same time and lived an identical SoHo life.

...until it burned down in January 1957. A one-story garage took its place, or was fashioned from its remnants; the 1973 Landmarks Preservation Commission report on SoHo stated that "Although filed as an 'alteration' the changes were so extensive that they practically constitute a new building."

I know, I know. You're looking at that picture above and thinking Waaaait a minute. A garage. I should be seeing a garage here, and yet I am not seeing one--I see two buildings, conjoined twins, identical in every respect including, presumably, age. But no. Thanks to an ambitious collaboration between developer Goldman Properties, architect Joseph Pell Lombardi, and cast-metal specialists Historical Arts & Casting, Inc., the old 101 Greene Street was resurrected in its entirety, façade and all--indeed, the first new cast-iron façade built in SoHo in over a hundred years--using 103-105 as a model.

To take a building of no great reputation and bring it back to a state of wholeness it hadn't known in fifty years: what a wonderfully needless thing to do. Whether they're in a historically-sensitive building or no, people are still gonna buy the lofts, because lofts are big and spacious and sexy; save for a tiny coterie of the architecturally-aware, people'll pass 101 by and think--if they think about it all--that it was always like that. So I think 101 was done the way it was done out of a love of SoHo, corny as that sounds. From what I can tell, the whole thing was the brainchild of Goldman Properties; if you go to their website, wait about ten seconds, and turn up the volume on your computer, Tony Goldman himself will tell you how much he loves historic preservation in goofy dazzled prideful tones, sounding not unlike Jean Shepherd in A Christmas Story. Mr. Goldman, I salute you. One hates to give it up for a developer--distrust is always the safer position--but there we are.

80o. SoHo Historic District

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, and August 8, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



A wall of cast-iron--with a curve.

Some of my guidebooks mention that the Gunther Building (Griffith Thomas, 1872) was built for William H. Gunther of C.G. Gunther's Sons, perhaps the pre-eminent furrier of New York City in the 19th century. What they don't mention is its connection to a mayor of New York City. Charles Godfrey Gunther was the oldest of C.G. Gunther's sons and part of the family business (which occupied 502-504 Broadway for a time). A Copperhead elected at the tail-end of a Civil War he opposed, he--rather ironically--foiled a Confederate plot to burn the city down, and, less than a year later, stood by as Abraham Lincoln lay in state at City Hall after his assassination. This posthumous bio says he "attended strictly to his private business" after his 1864-1865 term, which says to me it's possible he was still part of C.G. Gunther's Sons when the Broome Street location was completed in 1872.



Other than the way it dominates the streetscape, the most striking thing about the building is that one of its bays--windows included--curves to meet the corner of Broome and Greene Streets. The second-story bay is capped with a pediment telling future generations, even those with no clue to its significance, that this is the "GUNTHER BUILDING," damnit. Apparently there were once life-sized statues on the pedestals at the sides.



The Gunther Building's partner-in-crime next door, 477-479 Broome Street (Elisha Shiffen, 1873), was yet another home to SoHo silks. But at time, the Cheney Brothers were the Magilla Gorilla of all American silk operations, with The New York Times describing their Connecticut factories as the places where "American dress silks were first manufactured in any large quantity"; Moses King's 1892 Handbook describes the company as "outranking all others in America."

After the Industrial Revolution completely streamlined silk production, demand for the material sunk thanks to competition from synthetic materials like nylon. The Cheney Brothers lingered around and shriveled until they were purchased by the J.P. Stevens company in 1955--the same company behind the story of Norma Rae.

If you were wondering--and I'm sure you were--Dick Cheney is at best only distantly related to the Cheney Brothers. As far as I can tell, anyway.

80n. SoHo Historic District

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, and August 8, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



Last entry I was mourning how the SoHo of my researches was shaping up to be a landscape of almost-nameless hat factories and silk stores, but I spoke a little too soon. 47-49 Mercer Street (Joseph M. Dunn, 1873)was owned by Alexander Roux, a cabinet-maker maybe only known to American antiquarians, but still, what a relief to encounter somebody who's left traces beyond mangled scans on Google Books.

Roux's work is at the Met, the Brooklyn Museum, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, and on eBay for prices that are more than I make in a year. And they are rather incredible. I know nothing about antiques and have never really had much desire to reverse the situation, but...I respect these pieces. Well-trained hands and sharp tools made some pieces of wood sing with a human voice. The care could break your heart. The slopes of lines, rococo crannies. Tiny inlays. The grain of wood followed. Techniques learned in guilds and passed down from generation to generation. They don't make 'em like this anymore. Well, I'm sure somebody does, somewhere. But it's rare. No demand for it. Roux had the demand, he had the workers (120 by the 1850s) and the techniques (steam-powered saws!) to produce $250-$500K of furniture a year (about $5 to $11 million today). That's an enterprise roughly comparable to one of your 21st-century suburban kitchen cabinet barns. Today, when Americans want to buy furniture with this level of craftsmanship, they just buy antiques. And most don't. (My apartment is entirely furnished with about a thousand bucks of IKEA--they make furniture for people who don't want to care about furniture.)

This furniture made me curious why this cast-iron, as lovely as it is, wasn't built to suggest their level of detail: they could've maybe indulged in a Gothic fantasy like 448 Broome or something as obsessively ornate as the Haughwout. Costs, I guess. Fashion and fitting in are other possible reasons. Maybe Roux was already looking ahead to his next address and being mindful of resale value. (I'm sorry I keep peppering the blog with so many questions I can't answer.) The LPC report says this was a store--as was nearby 53 Mercer, also factory space--but it's not clear what kind of status it had compared to Roux's other locations. Most are gone, except for 827-829 Broadway, one of the finest cast-irons outside SoHo, smothered in butterscotch.

80m. SoHo Historic District

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, and August 8, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



The King of Greene Street. At five stories high and ten bays wide, it's an imposition: only a few buildings on the street take up so much room. But as with The Queen of Greene Street, its two middle bays project onto the sidewalk just a little bit, making it look somewhat "evolved" next to the buildings on the street that keep their façades flush with each other, like the three-dimensional sphere compared to the Flatlander square.

Unlike most of the landmarks we've visited so far, I can actually show what the building looks like on the inside thanks to racked.com's pictures of 72's interior. They show quite a lot of empty space barely interrupted by a line of spindly things in the middle, probably made of cast iron like the façade. Iron wasn't merely good for pretty Grecian and Italianate exterior effects but got some use as a structural material as well, at least until the far stronger cast steel became a mass-produceable commodity. As The New York Times noted:

"More than this, cast-iron was strong: its tall, thin columns could support large, open interior spaces with high ceilings and big windows--just what department-store owners wanted for their showrooms during the age of the gas light."

As racked.com's photos show, it's still good for showrooms, even in the age of electric light. (Parties, too.)



In spite of 72-76's grandeur, I can't tell if the stores of its early years were especially ritzy. I've found a furrier and a wholesale silks outfit. The upper floors appear to have been devoted to the storage and/or manufacture of things like caps and wigs. Which is numbingly predictable, actually. During our little SoHo jaunt, I've been laboriously going through mentions of each address in Google Books and The New York Times archives, seeing if there is some fresh insight, some hidden irony about these buildings that I can share with you, gentle reader. Mostly what I've discovered are names after names of apparel companies that bequeathed no obvious progeny to history: they started up, labored on for a while, then went out of business, often when the owner died or faced bankruptcy during one of the 19th century's many economic busts. SoHo is so dense with these little businesses sometimes seems as if the linchpin to New York's Gilded-Age economy was women's apparel.

Also utterly forgotten: Isaac F. Duckworth, the architect of both the King and Queen. The 1973 LPC Landmark Designation Report for SoHo flat-out says he "was a New York City architect about whom little is known"; there are only two contemporary mentions in The New York Times, and both involve legal action between he and a John Roach. The nature of these suits are not detailed, but if this is the same John Roach as the New York shipbuilder, it might've been about both men's construction material of choice: iron.

80l. SoHo Historic District

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, and August 8, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



It is affectionately known by those in the know as The Queen of Greene Street. Forget my photograph, capturing No. 28-30 Greene (Isaac F. Duckworth, 1873) towards the end of a well-deserved renovation. Instead, take a look at the cover of Margot Gayle's 1974 survey Cast-Iron Architecture in New York; see how its stern windows stare down the reader with royal hauteur, see how they're framed by a tiled mansard roof the way a ruff frames an Elizabethan head.

A former warehouse, but like the Fleming Smith, like 176-170 John Street, like many buildings in SoHo, a warehouse that got above its raisin', a building much too elegant to simply hold stuff. But what it held in its day, though, was possibly appropriate anyway: silks and ribbon and lace, fancy frills.

80k. SoHo Historic District

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, and August 8, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



From left to right: 65, 67, 69-71, 73, 75, 77, 79 and 81 Greene Street. Save for two, all the buildings were designed by one man, Henry Fernbach. He is the best-represented architect in the SoHo historic district, with thirty-four buildings to his name, twenty-five of them on Greene Street alone, in fact. Many are defined by rows of simple Tuscan columns, often supporting some seriously chunky arches whose name (if they even have one) escapes me.

Possessing both consistency and prodigiousness leaves an architect open to charges of hackery, and requesting a building that blends in rather than stands out leaves a client open to charges of immature taste. ("I want the same thing as that, only different. A little bit different.") On the other hand, the relative homogeneousness of Greene Street (as well as the rest of SoHo) might've been something collectively sought by architects and clients alike. How else to explain the spectacle of 65 and 67 Greene Street, the grey building on the left which is actually two separate buildings built by two separate architects (J.B. Snook and Fernbach respectively) for two separate owners, yet joined by a common façade? The result may have looked good. Even today, even after so much has come and gone in the neighborhood, even with the disfiguring fire escapes and new interlopers in former parking lots, when certain blocks are given a wide-angle view--say, looking down a street from somewhere in its middle--the brain and eye delights in blurring out all the nominal differences between buildings and connecting what they have in common until what it sees are faint and broken lines all merging towards a point on the horizon. But architectural homogeneity also had a more practical value, too, I'm guessing. It likely underscored the buildings that didn't fit in, which in the 1870s would've been the vice-breeding remnants of the neighborhood's residential and entertainment life--the very thing the industrialists and retailers moving into the area would want to isolate and destroy, physically and psychologically.



Fernbach is primarily remembered for his work on Central Synagogue, which is something else altogether from his stern neo-Grecs--it's...a polychrome celebration. He is sometimes cited as New York City's first Jewish architect of consequence, or even the first Jewish person to practice architecture in the country, though his sometime collaborator Leopold Eidlitz has been called similar. That this bellwether of cultural acceptance comes after nearly two hundred years of a Jewish presence in the city genuinely shocks me--though that's probably because I'm shamefully ignorant of Jewish history. Give me time.

80j. SoHo Historic District

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, and August 8, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



Vaux, Withers & Co. did this one in 1872. Calvert Vaux you might already know, (if not: he was half of the team behind Central Park), Frederick Clarke Withers you probably don't. Together they were instrumental in popularizing Gothic architecture in the non-native soil of America. One of the more obscure works of the firm (perhaps the most famous is the Jefferson Market Library), 448 Broome is an attempt at adapting the churchy style to the mass-produced aesthetic of cast-iron on store...and it doesn't really click: the broad windows don't give the ornamentation enough room to breathe, I think. To be fair, it's hard to see this building for what it is, or was. Fire escapes now cover three of its four bays on four of its five floors, and even worse, its cornice--looking very much like Withers' altar and reredos for Trinity Church--was removed at some indeterminate point, possibly because it wasn't stable, possibly because it was old-fashioned. Sadly, what's left is easy to ignore. (The poor thing.) The most distinctive thing about it is the woolly vegetation growing from the fifth floor.

80i. SoHo Historic District

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



Some very brief words about cast iron. The subject is so rich I have been stupidly avoiding it for fear of getting lost in its nooks and crannies and missing self-imposed blogging deadlines. Well, enough of that.

For millennia, architecture was defined by timber, stone, and earth; today, what dominates the world's cities is glass and steel. Metal had been used for roofs, for decorative elements, for structural reinforcement since the Romans, but it is only until the Industrial Revolution that the techniques required to produce metal alloys suitable for architectural construction in large quantities are discovered. One of them is cast iron. Cast iron is a high-carbon iron alloy that, when liquified, can be...cast--that is, poured into molds. The alloy was used in bridges and domes and mills. Eventually the Americans James Bogardus (whose work we've discussed before, briefly) and Daniel Badger would develop a brilliant method of manufacturing many individual cast-iron parts (such as columns) that could be bolted together to create a building façade.



This use of cast iron was an extraordinary conceptual leap for architecture. Even though a building with an iron façade such as 427-429 Broadway (Thomas Jackson, 1871) apes styles hundreds of years old--Joseph Pell Lombardi Architects says it's "Venetian Renaissance style with French Renaissance detailing"--they are deployed in a thoroughly modern way. Much like building with Lego bricks, creating a façade from multiples of a finite number of standardized pieces encourages an economy of form in architecture, and repetition on a scale rarely seen in Renaissance architecture. As Philip Johnson, in his forward to Margot Gayle's book on Bogardus, wrote:

As an influence on my own design work Bogardus looms larger, let us say, even than Louis Sullivan. Even Richardson, a greater architect, was not such a direct ancestor of mine as James Bogardus. It is, fortunately, easy to say why. With his cast-iron facades, he acquainted Americans with modular rhythm, which is the basis of modern design. Imagine Mies without a module. Imagine Le Corbusier wihout the basic freedom of evenly spaced windows.

More about cast-irons in subsequent posts. (Phew, this one got in right under the wire.) But what of 427-429? The Joseph Pell Lombardi website calls it both "The A. J. Ditenhoffer Building" and "The A. J. Dittenhoffer Building"; the LPC designation report favors the latter spelling. And both are probably wrong. The building's namesake is almost certainly A. J. Dittenhoefer (note the "oe."). He was one of New York's hardcore Republicans, having been involved in the campaigns to elect
Lincoln. He was a judge, and later, more famously, something of a Gilded Age celebrity lawyer, successfully defending Enrico Caruso charges of sexual molestation, and The Metropolitan Opera Company against Cosima Wagner and Siegfried Wagner, who sought to prevent all staged performances of Richard Wagner's Parsifal outside of Bayreuth. And that's really all that I can say about the building--what Dittenhoefer was doing with a cast-iron as lovely as this, sadly, I don't know.

80g. SoHo Historic District

A.K.A.: SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District
Location: roughly bounded by West Broadway, Houston, Crosby, and Canal Streets
Built: from early 1800s to today; most cast-irons date from 1870s
Architects: multiple
National Register Number: 78001883
Listed: June 29, 1978
Visited: June 21, 24, and 26, 2008
Additional Information: LPC Landmark Designation Report



The New York Times, 1875:

We certainly owe it to the well=known house of [D.] Appleton & Co. that it is now possible to get American books which, in respect to typography, paper, and illustrations, are in all respects equal to the best works turned out from British houses...It is the simple truth to say that no American firm could, or at any rate did, attempt to rival the best works of both London and Edinburgh till within the past ten years. In that period there has been an immense advance in American printing, and no house has done more in this forward movement than that of [D.] Appleton & Co."

(An aside: when did it become redundant to assert American quality in this fashion? When--if ever--will we stop affecting surprise when China or India equals or excels in something we Americans assume America is the best at?)

So, D. Appleton & Co. Along with limitless vistas of the forgotten, they were responsible for the memoirs of Matthew C. Perry, William Tecumseh Sherman, and William H. Seward; and, heading the charge for native intellectual respectability, served as the American publishers of such eminent Victorians as Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Charles Lyell, and--most monumentally--Charles Darwin. The evidence allows for no easy conclusion, but their neo-Renaissance office at 443-445 Broadway (Griffith Thomas, 1860) may be where On the Origin of Species was first published in the United States. It is a handsome focal point for in an intellectual revolution.



I might as well explain why I haven't talked about SoHo's cast-irons yet. I'm covering structures in rough chronological order, from the surviving Greek Revivals to the 21st century invading species; we're at about the early 1860s and the most interesting cast-irons come a touch later. (The exception is what's maybe the most famous thing in all of SoHo, E.V.Haughwout Building of 1857, but as it was landmarked separately, it'll be covered separately.) 18 Mercer (John Kellum, 1861) is an interesting cast-iron from this time, perhaps only for accidental reasons: a mossy green in contrast to the white and ivories throughout SoHo, and stripped of nearly all its ornament (no column bases, and only two capitals left), it is an unwitting precursor to Ian Schrager's 40 Bond Street. A shame about the hideous tacked-on sixth floor, though.

71. Building at 361 Broadway

A.K.A.: 361 Broadway; James S. White Building
Location: 361 Broadway
Built: 1881-1882
Architect: W. Wheeler Smith
National Register Number: 83001718
Listed: September 14, 1983
Visited: May 21 and 24, 2008



I believe most of these landmarks will last forever. I do. I really, absolutely do. I must believe it. It will cripple me to think otherwise. There will be no suitcase nuke in Herald Square, the oceans will rise but not totally engulf New York City, gray goo will be containable, the Mayans were wrong or maybe mistranslated or something. The Manhattan of 3008 will have pockets of familiarity, SoHo and Greenwich Village looking more or less like SoHo and Greenwich Village, but with lasers and robots. WELL IT FUCKING BETTER, anyway. And when humans evolve into super-intelligent abstractions shed of all ties to time, space, and matter, we'll just loan out our old habitats to a bright young up-and-comer species that deserves a nice break.





After a long period of less-than-optimal treatment, New York's cast-irons have by and large made into the twenty-first century in fine style. 287 Broadway, called The Leaning Tower of Broadway when the demolition next door caused it to tilt eight inches, is an obvious exception. So is 361 Broadway seven blocks down the street, although its structural integrity isn't question. Yet the elements are still taking it back. Its surface is tinted with rust. Paint's flaked off, exposing dark metal underneath at corners and edges and making it look like it's being attacked by black fungus.

It's possible this decay is a relatively recent development. The National Register nomination form published in 1983 (and available at the New York State Historic Preservation Office website) describes it as "well cared for" and the attached photos bear this out. The images at Tom Fletcher's site show a little rust but nothing like the encrustations you see today. It's sad to see 361 crumble away, ever so slightly, dispersed to the world. It'd be better if it was sparkling white. Yet the decay is oddly flattering to the building. The swirls of orangey rust on the columns, contrasted with the teal window sills: an excavation from Pompeii on Franklin Street.



361 Broadway is now home to one of the branches of Nyack College. Traditionally, 361 was home to textile concerns, but Scientific American also had their offices here at the turn of the century. Ideally they should pitch in some loot towards the restoration of the building. Not just for old times sake--I mean, c'mon, do they fucking care about the future or not?

69. Building at 85 Leonard Street

A.K.A.: The Bogardus Building; Kitchen, Montross & Wilcox Store
Location: 85 Leonard Street
Built: 1860-61
Architect: James Bogardus
National Register Number: 80002675
Listed: April 23, 1980
Visited: May 18 and 21, 2008



James Bogardus' cast-iron façade for 75 Murray Street partitions floor from floor and window from window using thick and gooey detailing. His work for 85 Leonard, built only a few years later, is an altogether different expression. Designed in the "sperm-candle" style popular in its day, it has long above-ground columns that straddle two stories, and restrained spandrel panels separating unusually wide windows. These details emphasize continuity rather then segmentation--as well as verticality, in what was perhaps a reflection of an embryonic building-height arms race.

As you can see from the photo, 85's neighbors on Leonard also partake in the sperm-candle style. Even though they're done in brick and stone rather than iron, together they create a continuous stretch of architectural forms as pleasuable as any townhouse row in Greenwich Village.

64. Cary Building

Location: 105-107 Chambers Street
Built: 1856-57
Architect: King & Kellum
National Register Number: 83001719
Listed: September 15, 1983
Visited: April 13, 2008
Additional Documentation: NYC PLC report



The Cary, Howard & Sanger dry goods store offered an overwhelming consumer experience when it first opened. In 1872, some eleven years after Cary died, the store (then known as Howard, Sanger Co.) was so o'erstuffed the New York Times took it upon itself to describe the goods sold at the store in numbing detail, floor by floor: brushes, toiletries, hosiery, fabric, leather goods down to "memorandum books, pass-books, marking chalk for lumbermen, violin strings, toy paint-boxes, and agate buttons in thousands of packages." Today, it's unfathomable that such an little thing, lost in Tribeca, could ever have been a major retail hub. In terms of volume, the building is likely dwarfed by your average suburban supermarket.



If it still transmits an echo of commercial extravangance--of attentions being sought--it's thanks to the façades on its Chambers and Reade Street sides. Like other New York City cast-irons of the 1850s, it takes after the Italian palazzo, even going so far as to include rustication. Traditional, yes, but it's all in cast-iron, not stone or brick, and glowing unearthily clean and white. Sadly, a widening of Church Street in the '20s knocked down the building right next to it, leaving a brick wall barely enlivened by some windows added much later.

63. 75 Murray Street Building

A.K.A.: Hopkins Store
Location: 75 Murray Street
Built: 1857
Architect: James Bogardus
National Register Number: 73001213
Listed: April 3, 1973
Visited: April 13, 2008



As I snake my way towards Soho this spring and summer, this blog will be covering many examples of this neighborhood's signature architectural mode, the cast-iron building. James Bogardus is considered its daddy, but for all his importance, few of his buildings survive. Of those that do, only some can be definitively identified as being one of his babies. A building permit is a good source of this kind of information, but the systematic regulation and monitoring of building construction in the city really starts with the establishment of Manhattan's Department of Buildings in 1866, by which time cast-iron architecture as a fashion was already at its peak. The NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission report on the building, authored in 1968, doesn't even mention Bogardus, and the third edition of AIA Guide to New York City doesn't identify 75 Murray as being his.



So how do we know it's a Bogardus? Christopher Gray relates the story in a 1994 Streetscapes column of how one day in 1980, the paint on the steps flaked off enough to reveal Bogardus' foundry mark. Prior to that, historian Margot Gayle had well-deduced suspicions in the early '70s based on its similarities to other works known to be by Bogardus.



One similarity is the Medusa-head keystones, also used in Bogardus' ill-fated Laing Stores. To protect homes from the entrance of evil, the Greeks sometimes used the figure of Medusa's terrible gaze to protect objects, including the "eyes" of buildings, its windows and doors. Like Oswald Wirz' Green Men and countless gargoyles everywhere, the Medusas are another pagan relic popping up in the middle of a New York steeped in the Abrahamic religions. Then again, so are the building's columns--much of what the West has borrowed from Greek Architecture comes from surviving temples like the Parthenon.