One last thought about the City Investing Buidling. It may have had an awkward exterior, but its lobby, like that of nearly old skyscrapers, was intended to awe. The building was overall long and narrow, with the narrow Broadway wing making it very long, and the lobby was a double-height space running the full length of the block from Broadway to Church Street. The picture above is not an exaggeration: that’s what it looks like when you have an uninterrupted 300-foot long corridor-style lobby.
That ornate ceiling was plaster on lath, hung from the floor structure above. The piers are masonry cladding hiding the steel columns for fire protection but also for looks. It’s based on, and meant to look like or maybe surpass various European historic structures with masonry vaults. In other words, it’s the height of structural dishonesty, hiding a twentieth-century steel frame in one of the (then) tallest buildings in the world behind a stage set made to look like very-old-fashioned vaulting. Whether or not that bothers you is a matter of personal taste, but this is the kind of thing that the diatribes of the early modernists, and particularly the International-Style modernists, were aimed at. It is the triumph of historicist aesthetics over…everything. That said, not everything looks old, some looks quite modern but dressed in old styles. Fore example, that dark-gray horizontal band in the picture above is a bridge over the main lobby floor, for the benefit of people at the second floor:
The curved bank of elevators on the right serves the low floors; the elevators in the distance on the left are the mid-rise bank. I assume that the bridge connects to the second-floor elevator lobby above the ornate coffered ceiling in the curved-plan area directly in front of the low-rise elevators and beyond the dark vaulted are at the floor above. The bridge seems to be a lot of ornate ironwork hiding some steel beams. On a cultural note, that appears to be a young boy selling newspapers in the foreground. Another modern element in hiding:
That’s a steel-framed stair, again, covered with ornamental iron. The stair marks the east end of the main block of the building, and everything past that is part of the narrow Broadway wing. So this is, according to the architect, the main entrance. But unless you were going to the second floor and planning on walking up that stair, you had a long walk to the elevators. The Cortlandt Street entrance was on the floor below, but put you directly opposite the elevators at that floor. And the Church Street end of the long hallway connected to the Sixth Avenue elevated. I would love to know how popular each of those three entrances actually were, as opposed to the implied primacy of the Broadway entrance. I’m fairly certain that there is no way now to find out.
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