A Pioneer, Gone

Hidden in that picture is one of the early skyscraper factories, the 1889 Western Electric Building at the corner of Thames and Greenwich Streets. Here it is, with its newer and taller neighbors cropped out:

Despite its industrial use, it had some pedigree: the Western Electric Company was at the forefront of new electrical technology at the end of the nineteenth century, and the architect was Cyrus Eidlitz, a man with some real talent and reputation. A sense of the building can be gleaned from an article describing how modern everything other than the structural system was: here. Ultimately, the success of electric technology and the company were what doomed the building’s original function: it was replaced by the much larger complex now known as Westbeth in Greenwich Village.

A contemporary architectural description pointed out how difficult it was to actually see the building. Thames Street, at the north facade, is all of 21 feet wide; Greenwich Street was the route of the Ninth Avenue elevated train. The demolition of the el left the west facade open to a view down Albany Street from the west, which is the picture I took above.

It’s gone. It was demolished a few years ago and the site is now under construction for a not-quite supertall. There was a brief effort to save it, but honestly most people in the preservation world would have been hard-pressed to identify it from a photo. If it were not for the Eidlitz connection, even that effort might not have happened. I’m not sure how much effort I think needed to made. It’s annoying that it was demolished while there are several vacant lots nearby, but that’s the nature of development on privately-owned land. There are other sites nearby occupied by nondescript buildings that could have been demolished but again, that’s in the hands of the individual property owners. It was a somewhat historic, reasonably good-looking building, quite small by today’s standards, and that’s just not a compelling argument in favor of saving it.