Never Mind The Title

Max Hubacher, on December 21, 1954, titled this photo “New York City: Third Avenue Elevated”:

And, sure enough, there’s the el over Third Avenue on the right. The small park being enjoyed only by pigeons is Cooper Square, where (if you are heading south to north) the Bowery splits into Third Avenue (on its proper line) and Fourth Avenue (on a temporary diagonal that runs up to Union Square, where it straightens out). A large chunk of the Third Avenue el’s tracks south of 7th Street were over the Bowery. Anyway, let’s move on to more interesting topics.

The building is the 1853-1859 Cooper Union Foundation Building, for a long time the only building of the college. It’s famous for its role at the school, for being the location of one Abraham Lincoln’s great speeches, and for other important speeches in its big auditorium. It’s also famous for being one of the first buildings in the US to use wrought iron floor beams, for having an early form of terra-cotta vault floor between those beams, and for having, weirdly, a round elevator shaft that for a long time contained a square elevator. The sculpture of Peter Cooper is not part of the south facade of the building – you can see East 7th Street between the sculpture and the building – but is within that freestanding enclosure, somewhere between a garden shed and a temple.

Cooper Union was built at the beginning of the trend in New York to cover entire facades with brownstone and WOW does it look terrible here after a century of weathering. I mean, brownstone generally looks terrible unless it’s been restored within the past year or covered with stucco, but this is worse than usual. In this case the stone falling apart is particularly unfortunate since the Foundation Building, unlike a rowhouse, has been meant for 170 years to project stability. The facade has been recently restored, but the material remains one that should never have been used in our climate.