Historical Landmarks in New York City
COMMISSION APPROVES LANDMARK STATUS FOR FORMER CITIZENS SAVINGS BANK BUILDING IN CHINATOWN
The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission today voted unanimously to landmark the former Citizens Savings Bank building at 58 Bowery, a massive Beaux-Arts style building that opened in 1924 and is currently an HSBC branch.
Citizens Savings Bank, chartered in 1860 to serve small depositors such as clerks, mechanics and servants, originally opened at 13 Avenue A. The bank moved to 58 Bowery in 1862, occupying a building at the site that was torn down to construct the existing one to meet an increase in demand for services. The bank commissioned architect Clarence W. Brazer to design the new building. Brazer spent part of his career in the offices of the noted architect Cass Gilbert, where he worked on such buildings as the State Capitol in St. Paul, Minnesota and the U.S. Customs House in Lower Manhattan, a New York City landmark.
Located on a roughly square-shaped lot across from Carrere & Hastings ornate Manhattan Bridge Arch and Colonnade (a New York City landmark), the comparatively restrained granite building is 110 feet high and capped by a low dome. The street facades feature rusticated bases and an enormous arched window framed by pilasters. The cornice is decorated with beehives _ symbols of thrift _ an eagle and seated figures of a Native American and a sailor, all derived from the bank seal. Charles Keck, whose work became well-known in mid-20th century, is responsible for the sculptures, which were intended to be visible to passengers on the former Third Avenue elevated rail line.
The design and materials were meant to convey the banks financial stability and assure the public that their deposits were safe, said Commission Chairman Robert B. Tierney. At the same time, the building was a strong visual anchor for pedestrians, El passengers or anyone coming on and off the Manhattan Bridge.
Citizens Savings Bank merged with the Manhattan Savings Institution in 1942 and became the Manhattan Savings Bank. The bank was acquired in 1990 and later renamed the Republic Bank for Savings until it was bought by HSBC Holdings in 1999.
The Landmarks Preservation Commission is the mayoral agency responsible for protecting and preserving New York Citys architecturally, historically and culturally significant buildings and sites. Since its creation in 1965, LPC has granted landmark status to more than 28,000 buildings, including 1,291 individual landmarks, 112 interior landmarks, 10 scenic landmarks, 104 historic districts and 16 historic district extensions in all five boroughs. Under the Citys landmarks law, considered among the most powerful in the nation, the Commission must be comprised of at least three architects, a historian, a realtor, a planner or landscape architect, as well as a representative of each borough.
Contact: Elisabeth de Bourbon/ 212-669-7938
LANDMARKS COMMISSION APPROVES WALLABOUT HISTORIC DISTRICT
Early Brooklyn Neighborhood, Featuring One of the Citys Greatest Concentrations of Mid-19th Century Wood Houses, Was Home to the Nations First Jewish Professional Baseball Player
The Landmarks Preservation Commission today voted unanimously to approve the Wallabout Historic District, an architecturally diverse and historically significant collection of pre-Civil War residences in northwestern Brooklyn.
The district derives its name from Waal Bogt, the Dutch appellation for the bay off the East River that was settled by a group of Walloons in the mid-17th century. During the American Revolution, as many as 11,000 Continental soldiers and sailors died on British prison ships anchored in Wallabout Bay. Their bodies were either thrown overboard or buried along shore.
The district is located between Park and Myrtle avenues just south of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which opened in 1801. It encompasses 55 wood and masonry buildings that were constructed during the mid-to-late 19th century in the Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, Italianate styles, and mainly owned by ship captains, pilots, ferry masters and boat builders.
This district is a natural for designation because of its rich and varied architecture and strong connections to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the citys 19th century maritime sector, said Commission Robert B. Tierney. It also has one of the highest concentrations of mid-19th century wood houses in New York City.
More than 60 percent of the structures were built between 1849 and 1855, including the c. 1853, Italianate style residence at 123 Vanderbilt Ave. (on the left of the two buildings at right) where early baseball great Lipman (Lip) Pike grew up. He was living there when he was recruited to play for the Philadelphia Athletics, becoming one of the nations first professional baseball players and its first Jewish professional player.
During the first decades of the 20th century, the district thrived with the opening of a number of factories nearby and the rapid expansion of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which was the largest shipyard in the world by the end of World War II, employing approximately 75,000 workers. A number of the structures fell into decline following the closure of the Navy Yard and other local industries in the 1960s, but have since been restored.
In other business, the Commission held public hearings on proposals to landmark two buildings in Manhattan: the c. 1903 Renaissance Revival style Martha Washington Hotel at 27-31 East 29th Street and the c.1898 Beaux-Arts style former R.H. Macy & Company Store at 56 West 14th Street ***
The Landmarks Preservation Commission is the mayoral agency responsible for protecting and preserving New York Citys architecturally, historically and culturally significant buildings and sites. Since its creation in 1965, LPC has granted landmark status to more than 28,000 buildings, including 1,290 individual landmarks, 112 interior landmarks, 10 scenic landmarks, 104 historic districts and 16 historic district extensions in all five boroughs. Under the Citys landmarks law, considered among the most powerful in the nation, the Commission must be comprised of at least three architects, a historian, a realtor, a planner or landscape architect, as well as a representative of each borough.
Contact: Elisabeth de Bourbon/ 212-669-7938
GRAND CONCOURSE HISTORIC DISTRICT
The Grand Boulevard and Concourse was conceived in 1891 by French engineer Louis Reiss as a means of connecting Manhattans mobile population with the expansive parks of the Bronx, and reflected the urban planning principles of the City Beautiful movement. The four-mile boulevard, with landscaped areas flanking and dividing the roadbed and elegant bridges spanning underpasses for east-west thoroughfares, was completed in 1909 and became the major north-south artery of the western Bronx.
Several factors contributed to the rapid and intensive development of the western Bronx in the period between the two World Wars, including the relatively low cost of land in the outer boroughs, the opening of subway and elevated rail lines beginning in 1908, and the 1920 passage of a state law allowing a 10-year real estate tax exemption for apartment buildings constructed between 1920 and 1924. These factors paved the way for an influx of middle class citizens into the Bronx as the Grand Concourse and surrounding area became the site of intensive residential development.1 A majority of these new Bronx residents were Jewish, having left behind the older tenements of Manhattans Lower East Side for the spacious, well-lit, and modern elevator apartments being promoted by speculative real estate developers.
The first phase of the Bronx apartment-building boom was characterized by revivalist architectural styles including Gothic, Tudor, Renaissance, and Colonial, but beginning with the Park Plaza Apartments at Jerome Avenue and 164th Street (designed by architects Horace Ginsbern and Marvin Fine and completed in 1931, a designated New York City Landmark), Art Deco and Moderne became the residential styles of choice for the Grand Concourse and surrounding streets. By the mid-1930’s, the Grand Concourse was known for its spectacular collection of Art Deco and Moderne-style apartment buildings designed by a group of lesser known yet talented architects, including Ginsbern, Martin Fine, Israel Crausman, Herbert Lilien, and Jacob Felson.
The new apartment buildings on and around the Grand Concourse were significant for their modern and sophisticated appearance, created through the inventive use of materials like polychrome brick, cast stone, metal, glass block, mosaic tiles and terra cotta, as well as through the use of features like rounded or jagged bays, corner windows, and asymmetrical fade compositions. More importantly, however, these apartment buildings represented a new and innovative form of housing the garden apartment which took shape in the late 1910s and 1920s as real estate developers discovered the profitability of building low-rise, relatively low-density apartment buildings on larger lots in areas of the outer boroughs where land was cheap and the demand for
1. Robins, Anthony, Park Plaza Apartments Landmark Designation Report (Landmarks Preservation Commission, 1981): 2.
2. Plunz, Richard. A History of Housing in New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990) 132. modern, technologically up-to-date middle-class housing was rising. Architects responded to these conditions by designing larger buildings of no more than six stories that sometimes occupied an entire city block and were characterized by groups of apartment units organized around interior and/or exterior courtyards. The large courtyards incorporated into the design of these buildings maximized exposure to light and air within each apartment and also provided the common visual element of landscaped gardens, often featuring lavish elements such as pools, fountains, ponds, and sculpture. Technically referred to as the perimeter block scheme, the garden apartment building typology achieved unprecedentedly low lot coverage and endures as among New York Citys most livable housing stock.
By the 1960’s, the West Bronx had entered into a period of profound transformation. The rapid deindustrialization of the city, increasing suburbanization, heavy-handed urban renewal policies, disinvestment by area landlords, and the redlining of much of the Bronx by local banks all contributed to the economic downturn of the neighborhood. Many of the apartment houses suffered through years of neglect as a consequence. Yet the buildings within the proposed Grand Concourse Historic District retain much of their distinctive architectural character.
The demographic composition of the Grand Concourse neighborhood has also undergone substantial changes since the first apartment buildings began to appear along the boulevard. The areas original residents, largely of European Jewish extraction, began to leave the neighborhood in the 1950’s often moving to suburbs such as Westchester County or to more modern apartments such as those in the newly-opened Co-op City. The once-homogenous West Bronx soon became a diverse urban community as African-Americans and Latin American immigrants, particularly from Puerto Rico, settled in the area.
The proposed historic district comprises approximately 73 properties in total, stretching along a section of the Concourse between 153rd to 167th Streets. A significant number of the properties are Art Deco and Moderne-style apartment buildings. Other buildings of note include Thomas Gardens, the Concourse Plaza Hotel, the Executive Towers white-brick apartment building, and the Bronx Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The proposed historic district also includes two designated New York City Landmarks: the Renaissance-inspired Andrew Freedman Home for the elderly (architects Joseph H. Feredlander and Harry Allan Jacobs, 1922-24; wings, David Levy, 1928-31) and the Art Deco masterpiece Bronx County Building (Max Hausle and Joseph H. Freedlander, 1931-35).
