Postcard Thursday: Gilded Age Walking Tour -- Oct 7 at 11:00am

NEW YORK IN THE GILDED AGE WALKING TOUR   Sunday, October 7, at 11:00 a.m. Come Explore Beaux-Arts Grandeur   Authors James and Michelle Nevius have been exploring New York and writing about the city for many years. This week, James had a story in The New York Post about the rivalry between Chicago and New York brought about by the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, also known as the "White City" World's Fair. This Columbus Day weekend, celebrate the 125th anniversary of the fair and the architectural movement it helped create, by joining James and Michelle for a guided walk in Midtown Manhattan of some of the iconic landmarks from this Beaux-Arts boom. New York between 1893 and 1913 remade itself as the "Paris of America" and the true world city. From the Broadway theaters that moved to Times Square at the turn of the 20th century to giant public spaces like Grand Central Terminal and the New York Public Library, this tour will feature some of the best Gilded-Age architecture in the city. $15 per person for blog readers. Please register ASAP as space is limited.

REGISTER NOW Your name The number in your party A cell phone in case we need to reach you the day of the tour MEETING PLACE WILL BE SENT WITHIN 24 HOUR OF RECEIVING YOUR RESERVATION (use the button below or email walknyc@gmail.com) SIGN UP NOW STAY INFORMED F O L L O W on F A C E B O O K F O L L O W on T W I T T E R F O L L O W on I N S T A G R A M

Times Square at the turn of the 20th Century

Postcard Thursday: Grand Central Terminal

The above advertisement for Grand Central Terminal, produced in 1918, shows the area around Park Avenue and 42nd Street before most of the current skyscrapers were built. (You can see the Yale Club, which James wrote about for Curbed a couple of years ago, on the Vanderbilt Avenue side of the terminal; it opened in 1915.)

On the right side of the flyers is a partial list of some of the "unusual features" that set Grand Central apart from its competitors:

Indeed, this novel system of moving pedestrians around the terminal was a great contrast to the deep staircases at Penn Station. It was later adopted both by other railroad stations and classic airport terminals, such as the TWA terminal by Eero Saarinen at JFK.

Commodore Vanderbilt's original impetus to put Grand Central Station on 42nd Street was a New York City ordinance that forbade steam locomotives traveling farther south. Before 1871, teams of horses were hitched to passenger cars and the carriages were hauled down to the depot farther downtown. Vanderbilt rightly surmised that if the terminal was moved to 42nd, the city would ultimately come to him. By 1918, theaters had moved to Times Square and the IRT subway connected downtown to the Upper West Side via 42nd Street (and a stop beneath Grand Central), making the street the most important in the city.

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Read more about New York City history in our two books:

Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers
and

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

Happy Birthday, Pan Am Building

It only came across the Inside the Apple newswire late last night that yesterday was, in fact, the fiftieth birthday of the Pan Am Building (or, if you must, the Met Life Building) that stands atop Grand Central Terminal. Significant for a plethora of reasons--not least of which is that it is the only building by the Bauhaus’s Walter Gropius in the city--it has long been the building that New Yorkers love to hate. Or simply hate.

The Pan Am tower came into being in the mid 1950s. As America’s transportation needs shifted from railroads to automobiles and airplanes, the owners of Grand Central Terminal and the surrounding Terminal City needed to find ways to increase revenue. After rejecting plans for a skyscraper that would have required demolishing the station, developer Erwin Wolfson proposed a three million-square-foot tower to stand between the terminal and the railroad’s headquarters, the 1929 New York Central Building. In 1958, Emery Roth & Sons submitted designs for a slender tower for that spot in keeping with their other Park Avenue skyscrapers, such as the Uris and Colgate-Palmolive buildings. Wolfson, fearing this new tower lacked architectural panache, brought in Gropius and Pietro Belluschi to enliven the 49-story building.* Gropius and Belluschi changed the building's massing, created its unusual octagonal shape, and, most noticeably, shifted its axis so that it stood completely blocking views up or down Park Avenue.

When the building opened on March 7, 1963, it had more interior square footage than any office building in the world. Twenty-five percent of those offices were leased to the building’s name tenant, Pan American airlines, which also installed a helicopter landing pad on the roof. This allowed commuters to land at any of the area’s major airports and be whisked to the heart of Manhattan. Due to construction delays and lack of public support, the helipad did not open until 1965 and then was only used for three years. After nearly a decade, it reopened in 1977; on May 17 of that year, the landing gear on a helicopter failed just after it had touched down on the roof of the building. The resulting accident killed five people and closed the helipad for good.

The building was derided from its opening. Then New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable famously called it, "gigantically second-rate." In 1987, New York magazine conducted a poll of New York City leaders to discover what was the worst building in the city. Pan Am topped the list. In 1991, the airline--which was already on life support and occupied only a fraction of its original office space--left the building, and the skyscraper's owners, the Metropolitan Life Insurance company, replaced the iconic Pan Am logo with their own. Though that logo remains, Met Life sold the building in 2005 for a record $1.72 billion to a consortium headed by Tishman Speyer, but which also includes the New York City Employees' Retirement System and the Teachers' Retirement System.

So, if you are in midtown today, instead of raising your fist at the shadows cast on Park Avenue, raise a glass instead to this monument to modernity. 

* Pan Am stands 808 feet tall -- approximately 59 stories -- but the bottom ten stories don't exist in order for it to float over Terminal City.

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Read more about Grand Central and midtown skyscrapers in

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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Showdown with the Soviets in Grand Central Terminal

This week marks the fifty-fourth anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1, the Soviet satellite that was the first to achieve a successful low Earth orbit. Sputnik was launched during the International Geophysical Year (IGY), which ran from July 1, 1957, to December 31, 1958. (The IGY was supposed to foster international scientific cooperation; it did that, but it also gave the Americans and the Soviets and excuse to try to out-do each other in what would soon be known as the "Space Race.")


Both the United States and the Soviet Union had announced in 1955 that they would put a satellite in orbit during the IGY. At first, the United States backed the U.S. Army's Explorer program, which planned to use a Redstone ballistic missile to launch a satellite. When the IGY began on July 1, 1957, the United States had little to show for it. So, the Chrysler Corporation, the Redstone's manufacturer, decided it would show the American public just how impressive its products could be, and arranged to have a missile installed in Grand Central Terminal.


In the first week of July, the missile arrived by train from Detroit; the cargo was shunted onto track 16, because the entrance to that track (today partially hidden by a food vendor) was the only one wide enough for the missile to pass through. Over the next few days, the sixty-eight-foot tall Redstone was assembled in Grand Central's main hall. Though the missile was short enough to fit, it needed to be held in place by wires at the top. To achieve this, a hole was punched into the roof--and it's still visible to this day. If you look at the zodiac on the terminal's ceiling, find the fish that make up Pisces; near one of the fish is a dark circle in the roof: that's where the missile was held aloft.

The Redstone stood for three weeks, allowing thousands of commuters to see the weapon that the New York Times said could "[deliver] an atomic punch 200 miles." Which was to say--we may not have a satellite in orbit yet, but we can blow you away.

By the time the Redstone was put on the display, the U.S. had moved away from the Army's Explorer program in favor of the Navy's Vanguard program. However, when Sputnik achieved orbit on October 4, 1957, it lit a fire under the United States and government rushed back to the Explorer program. On January 31, 1958, Explorer 1 achieved orbit and began the United States' exploration of space. The Explorer program is still active to this day.

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Read more about Grand Central Terminal in
Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York

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