Last year, I looked at a lot of photos from Berenice Abbott’s “Changing New York” project. In many of them she lined up her view so that the photos contained something new (circa 1934) and something much older. Here’s a photo she didn’t take but which has that kind of extreme contrast:
That very gothic building in the foreground is the St. Nicholas Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, constructed in 1872 for a congregation that was formed in 1628, when New Amsterdam was about three years old. It was at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 48th Street, so the two towers are the US Rubber Building on the left and the RCA Building on the right, both part of the first phase of Rockefeller Center. US Rubber topped out in 1939, and the church was sold for demolition in 1949, so the photo is from the decade between.
Unsurprisingly, the church’s lot was redeveloped with a tall building. Unfortunately, the 1952 Sinclair Oil Building has neither the corporate-art-deco flair of Rock Center nor the early-International-Style belief in clarity. Oh well.
Seeing churches surrounded by skyscrapers, and churches demolished for skyscrapers is a function of urban growth patterns: a formerly residential area has become a mixed-use or commercial district. In the case of Midtown, a mostly residential area became, after 1900, New York’s second “downtown1” that eventually surpassed the original in size. So there are a lot of buildings that have been repurposed – rowhouses that are now restaurants, for example – and a lot of losses like this church.
- The scare quotes are because the first “downtown” was downtown. ↩︎
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