The picture above shows the nearly-complete Astor Court Apartments, on Broadway between 89th and 90th Street, in 1915. (As a side note, we’ve got some heavy hitters involved: the architect was Charles Platt, the contractor was Marc Eidlitz & Son, and the photographer was Irving Underhill.) Over one hundred years later, the building is still there, and thriving as a co-op.
If you know anything about residential architecture, or even if you don’t but think about it for a minute, there seems to be a problem here. The Broadway block-front is 200 feet long, and the street facades are 170 feet long. How did rooms in the middle of a 34,000 square-foot plan get windows? The answer is a light court, in this case a single very large one that turns the building plan into a large squared-off U.
Most apartment house of this era used several smaller light courts and the courts were often facing the street. By using one large court, Platt made sure that the court-facing windows weren’t looking at another wall fifteen or twenty feet away. By putting the court in the rear, he gave the building a more impressive street presence. But enough about architecture…on to the structure!
That’s my favorite stage in these construction photos, as everything is going on at once. At the roof, we still have bare steel; at the next three floors we have steel and floor slabs; at the floor below that we have fireproofing piers being built around the columns; and below that the facade is being finished. Apparently the building has fireplaces, since the big thing that looks like a wall a little inboard from the corner on the right facade is a masonry chimney. There are a few more of those visible down that side of the building. We’ve also got a heavy-timber sidewalk shed protecting pedestrians. A little earlier, we get the frame almost pure:
You can see the chimneys down the left side in this one. The totally bare frame is arguably a scheduling error: it’s more efficient to have the facade being built while the steel work is still going on. Given that the date on that last photo is July, it wasn’t freezing weather delaying the maosnry.
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