A Ghost With Some Stories To Tell

I was in Midtown last week, and took a picture of this ghost, at 1146-1150 Sixth Avenue:

And a close-up:

The building on the right is 1140 Sixth Avenue (and more about it below), the building on the left with the curved cornice brackets is 1156 Sixth Avenue, built in 1911. The ghost sure looks like it started as a rowhouse and maybe had a story added on top: (1) only the top floor or so projected into the plane of the south (right) wall of 1156, (2) the rear chimney has (filled-in) hearth openings at the three lower floors but not at the top floor, and (3) if that is a hearth opening at the front chimney top floor, it’s very different in size than those at the three floors below. I’d expect the predecessor buildings to be rowhouses: Midtown wasn’t originally much of a commercial district. An 1897 map sure looks like some 20-foot wide houses on the north part of the Sixth Avenue blockfront and some weird little miniature houses or commercial buildings wrapping the corner from the south half of the block to West 44th Street. (The fact that the weird little buildings were 4 stories with basements pretty much rules them out as stables. Horses don’t like walking up stoops.)

Here’s that block in 1940:

1156 looks almost exactly the same as it does today. 1146-1150 is a store – Stewart’s Cafeteria on the ground floor and Brooks costumes and uniforms (that is some combination) above. The NYCMap, run by the city’s Office of Technology and Innovation, shows this, correctly, as an empty lot, but also gives a construction date of 1914. I’ll take a wild guess that the Brooks building was constructed in 1914, as it matches the style and general development of the area. But note that the Brooks building is much taller than the ghost, so it replaced the houses south of those that were demolished for 1156. Those houses still existed when 1156 was built or it wouldn’t have a ghost on its side wall, but they were demolished very shortly after.

Meanwhile, what’s going on over at the 1140 Sixth Avenue site to the south? Here’s the 1940 tax photo:

We’e got two buildings: a tall loft building facing 44th Street, and a short taxpayer facing Sixth Avenue. Note that we’re seeing the raw edge of structure on the west wall of the side-street loft: those are the concrete-encased spandrel beams we see as stripes on the facade over the taxpayer. Here’s that site in 1930:

The taxpayer site is two buildings, the one at the corner 4 stories tall and a smaller one to the north 2 stories tall. The mid-block building I’ve been calling Brooks is S. Bauman & his Bro; the building at the north end of the block at 1156 is Lewis & Conger. The 20-story loft building on 44th Street is the Rafel Building. (Note that its next-door neighbor is the famous Algonquin Hotel.) The closest to the present I can get with the readily-accessible records is 1955:

Fawcett Publications has taken over both the loft and the taxpayer, and the taxpayer has shrunk to one building that is only one story high. More importantly, its lot has been merged with that of the loft building, so that they were legally one structure. You might think that both buildings were demolished for the obviously-modern 1140 Sixth that you see in my photos above, except that NYCMap says that the existing 1140 was constructed in 1931. My theory – difficult to confirm without a deep dive into the city’s archive – is that Fawcett used the corner building as a store or showroom, so they replaced the two old buildings there (sometime between 1931 and 1940) with a modern 1-story taxpayer, and at some point the taxpayer was replaced with an extension to the loft, and the old building was reskinned. The raw appearance of the west wall of the loft building makes me think that capturing the corner was always planned, but had failed for some decades, possibly because the owner of the corner buildings had refused to sell.