A Century Passes

That’s the west side of Union Square, between 14th and 15th Streets, a little over one hundred years ago. It’s worth the effort to click on it to look at the bigger version. Personally, I love the facade signage.

The building on the far left, partially cut off, is 1 Union Square West and it’s one of several in New York named “The Lincoln Building.” Its architect, R. H. Robertson, designed a number of early skyscrapers including the American Tract Society Building and the Park Row Building. It stands today barely altered since that photo was taken.

The building in the middle, 5 Union Square West, was built a few years later. It’s a fairly standard loft building of the 1890s, although with more street-facing windows than most of the narrow and deep buildings of that type.

Here are those two buildings in 2014, looking much the same as in the earlier photo: street view. You’ll notice that the third building, on the right, has either been replaced or altered beyond recognition. In the early 1900s it had a classical cast-iron facade; in 2014 it is covered in glass. The answer is somewhere in between replacement and alteration.

15 Union Square West was built as the headquarters for Tiffany before the company moved to Fifth Avenue. It was a fairly normal cast-iron front loft building, which meant that the structure wasn’t really compatible with conversion to a modern and taller building with irregular floor plans. Ultimately, a new building was constructed around the old facade, incorporating the cast iron behind the new glass curtain wall. The idea was that the iron would be visible from the outside, showing the past within the present, as seen in the promotional pictures. Unfortunately, glare off the glass facade makes the iron invisible from many angles much of the time.

In all, not a bad result. We could just as easily have lost all three buildings to a white-brick apartment house.