Genuinely Shocking

From the New York Public Library’s collection, two photos by the Wurts Brothers. First Coney Island Hospital at Shore Parkway (the southern stretch of the Belt Parkway) and Ocean Avenue, in August 1956:

Second, the Fort Hamilton Veterans Hospital, on Battery Avenue in Fort Hamilton, in June 1950:

For some context, the (probably) first three glass-facade buildings in New York were the 1951 Secretariat Building of the UN, the 1953 Manufacturers Trust Company Bank on Fifth Avenue, and the 1952 Lever House on Park Avenue. International Style modernism was a bit slow to come to New York, and when it did it was centered at first in Manhattan. “Brooklyn” meant masonry buildings – endless rows of brownstone houses – and certainly not flashy new imported architectural styles.

It’s true that these hospitals have brick facades with strip windows rather than all-glass facades, but the machine-like regularity and the lack of any ornament other than the brise soleils – and yes, they are a form of ornament here, not being actually used for any meaningful control of sunlight – scream “modern.” I like these buildings but would not much like a city filled with this style of architecture.

Thanks to the combined effects of the Great Depression and World War II, much less was built in New York between 1930 and 1950 than any comparable earlier period. So you have to picture a city where the vast majority of people lived and worked in buildings with traditional masonry facades that were 20 to 70 years old, and then in 1950 the Fort Hamilton hospital and similar buildings were built. There’s a reason architectural critics and discussion were full of such extreme descriptions of a form of modernism that is today a little boring.