The IRT Powerhouse has been designated as a New York City landmark. First, as the pictures may make clear, this is a huge building that is quite visible: it fills the block between 58th and 59th Streets, and between 11th and 12th Avenues. In other words, it’s 200 feet wide and about 600 feet long. As striking as it is now, its original appearance, with the cornice intact and six smokestacks (which, as the plant used to burn coal, almost certainly were belching black smoke) was otherworldly. Except…
It’s not every day you see a purely industrial building designed by the likes of McKim, Mead & White. The exterior facades follow the general rules for classical architecture – more specifically, for the American Renaissance style – so that when I look at a single bay I could be looking at a bank or department store. It’s only when I look at the whole building that its size and use are apparent.
Even more remarkable is that a lot of the interior is open space. Since this is an electric generation station, built to supply power to the original subway and now supplying high-pressure steam to midtown buildings, it’s full of boilers. This building could have had the exact same steel frame it has and been sheathed in corrugated iron sheets, but instead it’s stone, brick, and terra cotta. The IRT company went to great lengths to make the first subway in New York attractive, from the stations to the street-level station entrances, to the powerhouse, to the local power substations. I’m not sure if it helped the IRT’s public image any – New Yorkers liked to complain about the subway in 1904 as much as they do today – but it left a good-looking legacy behind.
It’s also nice to have at least one designated landmark of an industrial building that hasn’t been and won’t be converted to condos.
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