Construction History: Replacement At The Other End

I talked recently about the Pabst Hotel being demolished because the original IRT subway needed its site to make the turn from 42nd Street north onto Broadway. The 42nd Street piece of the subway was short, extending from Fourth Avenue, where the line ran north from downtown, west three blocks on 42nd and then north again. (The Fourth Avenue portion is now part of the 4/5/6 Lexington Avenue line, the Broadway portion is now part of the 1/2/3 Seventh Avenue line, and the 42nd Street portion is a two-station shuttle.) Just as the new New York Times Building was constructed on the site cleared to construct the western curve of the subway tunnel, the Hotel Belmont was constructed on the site cleared to construct the eastern curve. Unfortunately, again, I only have low-res pictures, but let’s see what we can see. Here’s the foundation work:

The building on the right with the curving mansard is Grand Central Station, the second of the three rail terminals constructed on the site. Grand Central Depot was roughly doubled in size in the late 1890s to create the station, which would be torn down just a few years later to create Grand Central Terminal. We’re looking north here, towards 42nd Street, with Fourth Avenue (not yet renamed to Park Avenue) on the right. In the foreground, rock is being excavated. It’s hard to tell, but I think the workers on the right, who appear to be standing on a ledge, may be on the roof of the IRT tunnel.

Then we’ve got the sequence photos:

That’s 15 stories of steel (out of 23 in the building) and most of the facade put up in five months. Changes in hotel architectural style and services, and possibly the loss of business as the Depression began, doomed the hotel as a business, which meant that the building itself was unwanted. It was demolished in 1931. Here’s the last photo from the original sequence, with Fourth Avenue on the left and 42nd Street on the right:

This sequence, and others I’ve put here, show how quickly steel-framed buildings could be constructed. The flip side is that their (relatively) thin walls could be taken down much faster than older bearing-wall buildings, and their frames easily cut apart. In the early 1900s, the new skyscrapers were among the biggest buildings every constructed, but that didn’t mean they were any more permanent than what came before.