Another Moment of Transition

This a nice postcard of the north end of Union Square, using a hand-color photograph from 1910 as its basis. The centerpiece is the Metropolitan Life tower at Madison Square, seven blocks to the north of the foreground buildings on East 17^th Street. Those buildings include the Jackson Iron Works headquarters (the slender building with the big round arch at its base) and the Century magazine to its right (now a Barnes & Noble).

My attention was immediately drawn to right side of the photo, where Park Avenue South (then Fourth Avenue) has two separate construction sites as well as a cleared site waiting for new construction. Big loft buildings now make up the bulk of the avenue from Union Square to 34^th Street and they were mostly built in the 1910s and 20s. The cleared site, at the northeast corner of 17^th Street and Union Square East (Fourth Avenue) would get the Germania Life Insurance headquarters the following year, renamed Guardian Life during the World War I anti-German cultural spasm. The rowhouse next to the cleared site (with the ghost of the recently demolished neighboring rowhouse visible) is still there, very much altered into a commercial building. Beyond that we have the loft at 215 Park Avenue South in construction, with its white front facade and yellow-brick side facades partially complete, showing the steel frame above. And in the distance, past 19^th Street, we see the steel frame of the new building that replaced the Parker Building after its 1908 fire.