93. Tweed Courthouse
A.K.A.: New York County Courthouse, Old New York County Courthouse
Location: 52 Chambers Street
Built: 1861-1881; alterations in 1911, 1913, 1942, 1978-1979; restored in 2002
Architect: John Kellum (1861-1871); Leopold Eidlitz (1876-1881); John Waite (2002)
National Register Number: 74001277
Listed: September 25, 1974
Visited: November 15 and 21, 2008
Official Documentation: NYCLPC Report; NYCLPC Report (interior); NRHP Nomination Form; NHL Form
No building in New York has anything like the agonized life history that the Tweed Courthouse does. It took twenty years for the city to bake this wedding cake, and a hundred to swallow it.
Tweed was William M. "Boss" Tweed, who I'm gonna assume you're going to have a nodding acquaintance with thanks to high school social studies: Tweed was Tammany Hall, was machine politics, was a ring of thieves and a diamond pin, was the demon of Thomas Nast's cartoons, grinning, bulging, so very pleased with himself, offering the eyes his corruption the way a bonobo ape shows off a red butt.
The New York County Courthouse was Tweed embodied in stone and marble. A medium for funneling public monies to him and those in cahoots, nearly every contractor working on it overcharged the city, a little for themselves, some for the ring, and Tweed alone getting 25% percent. Work was slow: contractors would do work, undo work, redo work, stop, start again. After six years, it was partly occupied even though the main staircase only went up to the second floor, even though the unfinished rotunda let snow and rain in. In July 1871, after about ten and the building still incomplete, The New York Times began running articles, based on records painstakingly copied by the city's bookkeeper, a tumble of numbers laying down the levels of ridiculousness involved. As The Times would write later: "A solitary carpenter, the entries revealed, pocketed $360,751 for a month's work. About $7,500 had been spent on thermometers, $400,000 on safes." (These figures aren't even adjusted for inflation--multiply them by seventeen if you want to.) The Times estimated that the sums allotted for carpeting alone would've covered City Hall Park three times over. Originally priced at $250,000, Theodore Roosevelt's uncle, Congressman Robert Roosevelt, estimated that the courthouse cost about $13 million--more than the United States paid for Alaska, or the UK paid to build the Houses of Parliament.
The Ring thereafter fell to pieces in tragi-comic fashion, with Tweed being sent to prison, fleeing to Cuba, then Spain, where he was captured; even though the man had lost a lot of weight in the interim, authorities were able to identify him thanks to Nast's cartoons. While the civitas benefited in the long-term (in the short-term, the city government got broke as fuck very fast), the courthouse did not. Construction stopped and would not start again until 1876. It carried on without the architect, John Kellum, who had the bad luck of dying a month after The Times' first exposés. Kellum had envisioned a fine Italianate building on the order of United States Capitol, and liberally festooned it with cast-iron and plaster ornament aping pricier materials. The new architect, Leopold Eidlitz, no doubt associated such masquerade with Tweedian corruption, and rejected it in favor of the "natural" and "honest" expression of materials, subsequently redesigning unfinished interiors in brawny polychromatic brickwork. To the architectural ignoramus such as myself, it looks snazzy--history tends to flatten all distinctions, even those that cause revolutions--but Eidlitz caught hell for the mismatch: the American Architect and Building News would say "Of course no attention was paid to the design of the existing building and within and without a rank Romanesque runs cheek by jowl with the old Italian, one bald, the other florid; cream-colored brick and buff sandstone come in juxtaposition to white marble."
Its completion didn't end the embarrassment. Starting with Mayor Grant in 1888 and continuing as late as the 1970s, the city would canvas proposals for a new Civic Center that was more accommodating, more logical, more appropriate to the greatest fucking city on Earth. Most would've razed the courthouse (many would've done away with City Hall, too); The New York Times even excoriated one plan that kept it saying:
Koch and subsequent mayors threw money at it for repairs, but the building was finally given a full-blown restoration at the turn of the millennium. Among other accomplishments, it recreated the Chambers Street entrance, which had been demolished when the street was widened, and removing eighteen layers of paint from the polychrome brick and cast iron, originally applied in 1908 perhaps because it was cheaper than cleaning it, and perhaps its gaudiness was out of fashion. $80 million was spent on the restoration, up from an initial $37 million--numbers Tweed would've envied, no doubt, even if no money was stolen (and I have no reason to suspect any was).
Today you can tour the building for free. Few do--when I went a few weeks ago, there were only four people in total, two of whom were from South Africa--but if you're a New Yorker, you should. Some embarrassments are worth remembering.
Location: 52 Chambers Street
Built: 1861-1881; alterations in 1911, 1913, 1942, 1978-1979; restored in 2002
Architect: John Kellum (1861-1871); Leopold Eidlitz (1876-1881); John Waite (2002)
National Register Number: 74001277
Listed: September 25, 1974
Visited: November 15 and 21, 2008
Official Documentation: NYCLPC Report; NYCLPC Report (interior); NRHP Nomination Form; NHL Form
No building in New York has anything like the agonized life history that the Tweed Courthouse does. It took twenty years for the city to bake this wedding cake, and a hundred to swallow it.
Tweed was William M. "Boss" Tweed, who I'm gonna assume you're going to have a nodding acquaintance with thanks to high school social studies: Tweed was Tammany Hall, was machine politics, was a ring of thieves and a diamond pin, was the demon of Thomas Nast's cartoons, grinning, bulging, so very pleased with himself, offering the eyes his corruption the way a bonobo ape shows off a red butt.
The New York County Courthouse was Tweed embodied in stone and marble. A medium for funneling public monies to him and those in cahoots, nearly every contractor working on it overcharged the city, a little for themselves, some for the ring, and Tweed alone getting 25% percent. Work was slow: contractors would do work, undo work, redo work, stop, start again. After six years, it was partly occupied even though the main staircase only went up to the second floor, even though the unfinished rotunda let snow and rain in. In July 1871, after about ten and the building still incomplete, The New York Times began running articles, based on records painstakingly copied by the city's bookkeeper, a tumble of numbers laying down the levels of ridiculousness involved. As The Times would write later: "A solitary carpenter, the entries revealed, pocketed $360,751 for a month's work. About $7,500 had been spent on thermometers, $400,000 on safes." (These figures aren't even adjusted for inflation--multiply them by seventeen if you want to.) The Times estimated that the sums allotted for carpeting alone would've covered City Hall Park three times over. Originally priced at $250,000, Theodore Roosevelt's uncle, Congressman Robert Roosevelt, estimated that the courthouse cost about $13 million--more than the United States paid for Alaska, or the UK paid to build the Houses of Parliament.
The Ring thereafter fell to pieces in tragi-comic fashion, with Tweed being sent to prison, fleeing to Cuba, then Spain, where he was captured; even though the man had lost a lot of weight in the interim, authorities were able to identify him thanks to Nast's cartoons. While the civitas benefited in the long-term (in the short-term, the city government got broke as fuck very fast), the courthouse did not. Construction stopped and would not start again until 1876. It carried on without the architect, John Kellum, who had the bad luck of dying a month after The Times' first exposés. Kellum had envisioned a fine Italianate building on the order of United States Capitol, and liberally festooned it with cast-iron and plaster ornament aping pricier materials. The new architect, Leopold Eidlitz, no doubt associated such masquerade with Tweedian corruption, and rejected it in favor of the "natural" and "honest" expression of materials, subsequently redesigning unfinished interiors in brawny polychromatic brickwork. To the architectural ignoramus such as myself, it looks snazzy--history tends to flatten all distinctions, even those that cause revolutions--but Eidlitz caught hell for the mismatch: the American Architect and Building News would say "Of course no attention was paid to the design of the existing building and within and without a rank Romanesque runs cheek by jowl with the old Italian, one bald, the other florid; cream-colored brick and buff sandstone come in juxtaposition to white marble."
Its completion didn't end the embarrassment. Starting with Mayor Grant in 1888 and continuing as late as the 1970s, the city would canvas proposals for a new Civic Center that was more accommodating, more logical, more appropriate to the greatest fucking city on Earth. Most would've razed the courthouse (many would've done away with City Hall, too); The New York Times even excoriated one plan that kept it saying:
"There is no good reason why the court house should be preserved...It is not of any architectural value, it is practically the subject of complaint from everybody who is forced to inhabit it, or to make habitual use of it, and there are no associations connected with it that are not disgraceful to the city."Yet it was kept--so much money had gone into that it so relatively recently that it was thought to be slightly obscene to simply knock it down.
Koch and subsequent mayors threw money at it for repairs, but the building was finally given a full-blown restoration at the turn of the millennium. Among other accomplishments, it recreated the Chambers Street entrance, which had been demolished when the street was widened, and removing eighteen layers of paint from the polychrome brick and cast iron, originally applied in 1908 perhaps because it was cheaper than cleaning it, and perhaps its gaudiness was out of fashion. $80 million was spent on the restoration, up from an initial $37 million--numbers Tweed would've envied, no doubt, even if no money was stolen (and I have no reason to suspect any was).
Today you can tour the building for free. Few do--when I went a few weeks ago, there were only four people in total, two of whom were from South Africa--but if you're a New Yorker, you should. Some embarrassments are worth remembering.
Labels: Civic Center, John Kellum, Leopold Eidlitz
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11:01 PM
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