Five For One

In 1920, looking northwest from 32nd and Lexington Avenue…

…we have five very different building types in one photo. One way you can tell the rapidity of technology change is to look for this kind of overlap, a thought I’ll return to after I discuss what we’re seeing.

In the foreground is a “car barn” belonging to the Metropolitan Street Railway. You can see some of the street cars on the left, between the side-street screen wall and the barn proper, and on the right between the open end of the barn and the billboarded screen wall. Note that these are not trolleys, as there are no overhead wires: if you look closely at the tracks on Lexington Avenue in the lower right, you can make out a third line between each pair of wheel rails. Those are powered third rails in buried troughs, providing the flexibility of electric-powered street cars without the mass of overhead wires that trolleys require. The barn itself was a rather crude conversion of what had been a series of stable buildings (still housing horses at least as late as 1891) and almost certainly had a steel truss roof put on top of the old masonry walls.

On the left background is the 1878 Park Avenue Hotel, with its ornate cast-iron facade. It was on its last legs when this photo was taken and was demolished five or six years later. Despite the iron facades, the interior was ordinary nineteenth-century NYC construction: wood joists supported on masonry bearing walls. To its right is the high-rise 1913 Vanderbilt Hotel, a steel framed building with brick and terra cotta curtains walls.

The oddly slender square tower is the 1903 71st Regiment Armory, and the big block in front of the tower is the drill hall, with its steel-truss roof. Finally, on the right are four Old Law tenements, three on the left fronting on 33rd Street and the long side wall of one on the right that fronted on Lexington Avenue. The tenements facing 33rd Street were built after 1891; the one facing Lexington, between 1879 and 1891. I have to believe that living across the street from the car barn was more-than-usually annoying. Here’s a map from the same year as the photo, with 33rd Street running left-right in the middle:

In short, all of the prominent buildings in the photo were constructed in a 35 year period (1878 to 1913) and yet span from old-fashioned brick-and-wood construction (the tenements) to mid-1800s high tech (the cast iron facade of the Park Avenue Hotel) to then-modern long-span and high-rise steel framing. Thirty five years ago today is 1990, and the changes between structure then and structure today are rather smaller than what we see here. Also, everything I’ve discussed except the Vanderbilt Hotel has been demolished and replaced by more modern buildings.