Randomness

When you study history, one of the things that takes a while to really accept is the random nature of events. People think they are in control and shape, at least to some degree, the future. When some truly random event occurs, we often attribute it to someone else’s will, unable to accept that sometimes things just happen. This problem, people not wanting to acknowledge the presence of randomness in their lives, is one of the driving factors in conspiracy theories. This is all a long-winded way to say that sometimes an old building survives long enough to become a landmark through sheer dumb luck. Here’s the fifth store for Lord & Taylor, as it looked shortly after it opened in 1870. Those are cast-iron fronts on both Broadway and 20^th Street, supporting an interior structure of brick-vault floors on wrought-iron beams. That was, for that time, considered to be a fireproof building.

Lord and Taylor moved to their last location, on Fifth Avenue, in 1914, and this building was converted to other uses. There was a peculiarity to the building from when it was first built: it was constructed on multiple leased lots, with two separate land owners. After 1914, the two portions of the building, on 20^th Street and on Broadway, went their separate ways, so to speak. If you look at the site today (or in 1977, when the Landmarks Preservation Commission took this photo), you see two seemingly unrelated buildings:

You’ve got the cast-iron building on 20^th Street and a masonry-front building to its left, on Broadway. If you look closely at the windows, you’ll see that the floors align. I’m fairly certain that the Broadway building was refaced – the cast-iron replaced with masonry – rather than the whole building being demolished. That’s a structural alteration, as the cast-iron facade was a bearing wall, but still much easier than building a new building. The whole area is now the Ladies’ Mile Historic District, so the masonry building is landmarked, but the cast-iron building was an individual landmark before the district existed.

So, randomness: that the building was built on lots with two owners, who were able to undo the joint property when the original tenant left; that one chose to modernize and one chose not to; that an early landmark designation may have saved the cast-iron building when the neighborhood was at its least popular; that the later historic-district designation preserved the weird relationship between the two halves of the formerly single building.