Low-Rise

From the Wurts Brothers, probably in the 1930s, a two-story building that was at that time either a warehouse or a small-scale manufacturing plant for pharmaceuticals. The Ketchum company is best known today for Preparation H.

The building was more recently built than those beautiful brick arches might suggest: in 1894 the site at 50-60 Vandam Street was a bunch of small wood frame buildings with brick facades:

Note the Bradley & Currier Company factory. We’ll be seeing that again in a moment.

By 1903 there was that low-rise building, a workshop for Pittsburgh Plate Glass:

Note that 50-60 Vandam Street is part of a PPG complex that covers half the block and, for some reason, has a tunnel connecting it to the Garvin Machine Company over on Varick Street. Perhaps Garvin was buying steam from PPG rather than running its own boilers. The rest of the PPG buildings were 8 stories high. PPG has taken over the Bradley & Currier building and apparently extended it up a story. The old B&C power plant in the back of the building had 4 boilers (the black rectangles), a decade later the old boiler room is called out as an engine room and there’s a new boiler room further east (down the page) with ten boilers. I’m not sure when PPG got rid of the two-story building, but obviously some time before the Wurts photo was taken.

That building is famous for its occupants from 1990 to 2019: Rafael Viñoly Architects. In their retrospective, the interior photographs show the phoenix columns that supported the interior.

The entire block was demolished and replaced with a new building, completed in 2023.