by Sam Roberts
As an architectural paragon, the Empire State is singular. Carol Willis, an architectural historian who heads the Skyscraper Museum in Manhattan, calls it “the quintessential monument of the golden age when New York reigned as the unchallenged leader in skyscraper design and construction. A study of the forces that shaped it is the story of all high-rises of the period. At once typical and extraordinary, it was a work of genius in which the operating intelligence was not a brilliant designer, but the genius loci of the capital city of capitalism.”
Grimly, the Empire State Building’s title as New York’s tallest was restored, with no fanfare, following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. It retained the title until 2012, when the new World Trade Center topped out at an official 1,776 feet. In 2015, the Empire State was relegated to third when it was surpassed by the 1,396-foot residential skyscraper at 432 Park Avenue in midtown.
Still, what has distinguished it for nearly a century cannot be measured with a yardstick. It cannot be quantified by the number of floors that it encompasses as much as it can by the profusion of stories that it has inspired and continues to generate. Plenty of runners-up, old and new, can claim second place, but no other building, no matter what its height, enjoys the same stature or evokes the same twinges of nostalgia. It dominates midtown, illuminated at night above the seventy-second floor (the first light show was a white beacon celebrating FDR’s election in 1932, before Al Smith defected to attack the New Deal and, in 1936, finally deserted Roosevelt and endorsed Alf Landon) and crowned by a 620-watt, ten-inch-diameter flashing red aircraft warning light at 1,452 feet, 6 9/16 inches above Fifth Avenue.
“I look at the Empire State Building and feel as though it belongs to me,” said Fay Wray, who famously scaled the building clutched by King Kong, and was entitled to stake her claim to the tower as much as anyone.
“Or,” she added, “is it vice versa?”
Even after it was no longer the city’s tallest, the Empire State Building remains the most recognized building in New York. (George Samoladas)
24
THE HUNTER COLLEGE GYMNASIUM
By process of elimination, at the last moment, this Bronx campus briefly became capital of the world. (New York Times, 1946)
A century and a half before the Bronx saw its brief moment as the center of the world, a man named Lewis Morris futilely tried to claim it as the center of the country, offering his sprawling estate to the novitiate U.S. government as the nation’s new capital. Morris, an aristocratic landowner, was known as “the Signer,” not because he had successfully closed so many real estate deals, but because he was one of the delegates to the Continental Congress who autographed the Declaration of Independence.
As Congress grappled at Federal Hall downtown in 1789–90 with whether to remain in New York or move to Philadelphia, a plot on the Potomac, or some other site that would better reflect the growing nation’s geographic pivot and center of population, Morris touted his elevated property, only eight miles from the city limits. Morrisania, he crowed, offered “the necessary requisites of convenience of access, health and security” and was “perfectly secure from any dangers either from foreign invasion or internal insurrection.” Just in case anyone missed the point, Morris took a not-so-subtle swipe at Philadelphia, with its wimpy (and abolitionist) Quakers, and the gentlemen of Virginia whose political, economic, and cultural agenda warranted that for the states to remain united the nation’s capital must be permanently emplaced in the South. “There are more fighting men within a sweep of 30 miles around Morrisania than perhaps within the same distance around any other place in America,” he wrote, compared with “many populous places which contain large proportions of inhabitants who are principled by religion against bearing arms, and other places which contain negro inhabitants who not only do not fight themselves, but by keeping their masters at home, prevent them from fighting also.” And in contrast to the swamp that Congress was considering on the Potomac, Morris proclaimed that his estate (which he had recently incorporated as a township to facilitate the transfer to the federal government) was noted for its salubrity. “Persons from other places, emaciated by sickness and disease,” he wrote, “visit it for health restoration, and after a short visit they recover and are speedily reinforced in health and vigor.”
Congress was unmoved by his arguments, and therefore, was unmoved to Morrisania. The Residence Act of 1790, which established a new federal district, seemed custom-made for someplace else anyway. (The district was to be a maximum of one hundred square miles; the District of Columbia today is sixty-eight, while the entire Bronx is only forty-two.) So instead of embracing the Bronx, the government decamped for a decade to Philadelphia, the Quakers notwithstanding, before arriving in 1800 in the unfinished national capital in Washington (which Lewis Morris’s brother, Senator Gouverneur Morris, immediately pronounced as “the best city in the world to live in—in the future”).
While Morris’s dream to make the Bronx the nation’s permanent capital flopped completely, James J. Lyons succeeded, briefly, a century and a half later, in bestowing a global legacy on the beleaguered borough, which was still reeling then from Ogden Nash’s 1931 couplet in the New Yorker: “The Bronx? / No thonx.” (In 1964, Nash wrote a mea culpa to the president of Bronx Community College: “I can’t seem to escape / the sins of my smart-alec youth; / Here are my amends. / I wrote those lines, ‘The Bronx? / No thonx’; / I shudder to confess them. / Now I’m an older, wiser man / I cry, ‘The Bronx? God / bless them!’ ”) Lyons, New York City’s longest-serving borough president, had been elected just two years after Nash’s jibe and died two years after the poet delivered his apologia. The son of an Irish immigrant, he dropped out of school at thirteen and went to work as an office boy for a leather company, where he proved himself a born salesman (claiming to have purveyed enough hide to equip every woman in New York with two pairs of shoes).
Early in 1946, though, Lyons confronted his toughest customers: jittery foreign diplomats unfamiliar with American quirks, much less the machinations of the real estate market, and growing increasingly desperate as they searched to find a temporary home for the neophyte United Nations organization. Convening in London in 1945, a preparatory commission had finally favored a site somewhere within the forty-eight states (neutral Switzerland was considered until its government declared that no vote to deploy troops in a military engagement could legally be taken within Swiss jurisdiction). Even Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet ambassador, agreed that not only was the United States “located conveniently between Asia and Europe,” but that “the Old World had it once, and it is time for the New World to have it.”
But where? New York was so confident of winning the siting sweepstakes that the city didn’t bother to send a delegation to London. But after the search committee arrived in the United States, its members became dead set against the city as a permanent home for the newly minted world organization. They complained about the lack of office space in Manhattan. They blanched at a proposed site in Corona, Queens, that some delegates dismissed as a former dump. And they hoped to settle in a suburb or small town where they could establish their own identity instead of being subsumed in what was already a world city. They refused even to accept New Yorkers’ two-foot-square, leather-bound promotional brochure with its ten-by-five-foot map of the metropolitan area. Instead, they imposed a twenty-five-mile minimum distance from the city as a criterion and began to gravitate to a leafy site that straddled the border between Westchester and Fairfield Counties in the suburbs north of New York.
Meanwhile, though, the Security Council was scheduled to meet in March, the General Assembly in September, and neither had found an interim home. A skeleton staff was living at the Waldorf-Astoria and working out of 610 Fifth Avenue in Rockefeller Center. None of them had heard of James Lyons. And while he was all too familiar with finicky shoe buyers and wily fellow politicians, his foreign policy agenda had been confined to proclaiming Red Army Day du
ring World War II and gallantly, but fruitlessly, planting his borough’s flag in Marble Hill, a ninety-three-acre neighborhood on the mainland that is legally part of Manhattan (it was once separated from the Bronx by Spuyten Duyvil Creek), and symbolically claiming it for the Bronx.
This time, Lyons was looking for more than symbolism of that annexation. The Bronx, he proclaimed, “is the borough of universities, the Hall of Fame, the home of champions. Most important, it has fine and tolerant people.” (He stopped short of invoking Lewis Morris’s avowal about its surfeit of fighting men.) With the clock running out, competitors suggesting alternative sites, and UN functionaries frazzled, Lyons unilaterally offered up a solution: the campus of Hunter College, a six-square-block complex overlooking the Jerome Park Reservoir in the borough’s Bedford Park section.
The Hunter campus had been largely farmland, and the reservoir, built in the late nineteenth century to store Croton water, had been originally developed by August Belmont Sr. and Leonard Jerome (the maternal grandfather of Winston Churchill) as a racecourse. Until 1890, it was the home of the Belmont Stakes. The campus, which was built on forty acres of the racetrack, was designed by Thompson, Holmes & Converse (they were also responsible for Tammany Hall on Union Square, where the marathon 1924 Democratic National Convention was held, and for the Bellevue Psychopathic Hospital) with the architect Charles B. Meyers (who designed the Department of Health headquarters downtown on Worth Street). The Bronx campus took shape in the early 1930s, when the college transformed itself from a teachers’ training institute to one with a liberal arts curriculum and outgrew its 1873 Gothic red-brick building on Park Avenue in Manhattan (which was gutted by a fire in 1936 and replaced by the modern structure designed by the architects of the Empire State Building).
Contracts were signed in 1929, but the Depression delayed completion of the campus until 1936. The three-and-a-half story Neo-Georgian gym vaguely resembled Federal Hall on Wall Street, where George Washington was inaugurated. The three academic buildings accommodated twenty-five hundred students, but early in 1943 the campus was relinquished to the Navy Department as the main boot camp for women, known as WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). USS Hunter could train six thousand women at any given time. The navy decommissioned the camp early in 1946, just in time, Hunter officials, students, and the Board of Higher Education figured, to get classrooms ready for the fall.
Until Lyons came along. Dr. George N. Shuster, the college president, predicted that the foreign incursion of delegates and hangers-on would be “disastrous,” what with twenty thousand or so veterans also hoping to resume their educations when the semester began in September. But Grover Whalen, the city’s official greeter and liaison to the global organization, embraced Lyons’s offer as “ideal.” So did City Hall, perhaps hungry for the estimated nine-thousand-dollar-a-month rent from the world body. And on February 25, with the first Security Council session less than a month away, Mayor Bill O’Dwyer agreed to make the gym building temporarily available. On March 6, the United Nations accepted the offer. David K. Owen of Britain, the executive secretary to UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie of Norway, assured the displaced students that having the Security Council on campus would be “a great opportunity for young people studying politics, a precious opportunity right on your doorstep.” They were not mollified.
The Bronx was better known than many member nations of the new world body, but even with the spate of World War II buddy films, the Yankees, and a sarcastic raspberry jeer associated with the borough, it ranked far below Brooklyn in name recognition. H. D. Quigg of the United Press felt compelled to explain to his global readership that the Bronx was home to “1,437,000 gentle persons and 2,500 wild beasts and boids.” For world leaders—and New Yorkers—unfamiliar with the Bronx, much less the Bedford Park neighborhood, the New York Times published a timely primer. At the time, the paper felicitously explained, the borough was still expanding (it would actually hit its twentieth-century peak population of 1.5 million in 1950). If the Bronx were a separate city then, it would have been the nation’s fourth largest, after New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. While it was home to the world’s largest housing project (Parkchester, with forty thousand racially segregated apartments, developed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company), the borough also still had 144 acres of farmland. Manhattanites, Lewis Bergman wrote in the New York Times Magazine, still “think vaguely of the Bronx as a kind of vermiform appendix that the city was born with but which is not worthy of notice unless inflamed.”
With the Security Council scheduled to convene on March 22, an army that swelled to two thousand carpenters, electricians, telephone installers, and other craftsmen working sixteen-hour shifts descended on Gillet, Davis, and Students’ Halls and on the turreted Neo-Georgian Gymnasium Building to install ten miles of electrical wiring, green carpeting on the basketball court, rose pink and buff drapes to camouflage the inhospitable bare walls of the gym, and cement blocks over the swimming pool to transform the space into a press room. The one-hundred-by-seventy-two-foot gym could accommodate one thousand. Smaller gyms were converted into committee rooms, offices, and lounges (a paperwork glitch required an emergency meeting of the State Liquor Authority before the twenty-foot bar in the delegates’ lounge could open). Meanwhile, the hundreds of delegates and secretariat officials filling the Henry Hudson and Pennsylvania Hotels in Manhattan were scrambling for housing, vying for desk space, and tentatively navigating the subway to the 205th Street Station on the IND line.
Lyons had assumed that once the UN settled in the Bronx it would never leave. Other city officials disagreed, but figured that if adequate temporary facilities were found in New York, the world body would agree to remain there permanently. It was beginning to look as if they were all wrong. On March 19, three days before the scheduled Security Council meeting, Grover Whalen informed his colleagues on the city’s host committee that the delegates were already unhappy with Hunter and envisaged no way that any building on the campus could accommodate the General Assembly, which was scheduled to convene after the summer. A stopgap for the fall was finally agreed to: after its first session at Hunter, the Security Council would confer at the old Sperry Corporation plant in Lake Success, and the General Assembly would meet at the New York City Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair site in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, where Robert Moses had been attempting to lure the United Nations from the very beginning. “I felt that this was the one great thing that would make New York the center of the world,” Moses said.
The delegates were still intent on permanently transplanting themselves to the northern suburbs, but they discovered that while the UN was being wooed by cities all over the country, the one place that the global organization wanted to move had already rebuffed it. Residents of the tony town of Greenwich, Connecticut, which abuts Westchester, voted by better than two-and-a-half-to-one against welcoming the world body. To make matters worse, in October 1946, when future New York governor Nelson Rockefeller invited a thousand delegates and alternates to a welcome party at his Pocantico Hills estate, most of them got lost. As the Times snickered, half the delegates, though “long accustomed to complications of international politics, were baffled when confronted with the geographical problems of navigating darkest Westchester in chauffeur-driven cars.” With the United Nations poised to decamp for Philadelphia (which was already condemning buildings to build the headquarters)—where the federal government had moved on its way to Washington in 1790—or to San Francisco, in December, Rockefeller redeemed himself. He persuaded his father, the financier and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr., to buy an East River parcel from the developer William Zeckendorf for $8.5 million and replace the site’s slaughterhouses with a permanent home for the United Nations. With a handshake, Zeckendorf and Wallace K. Harrison, the architect of Rockefeller Center, sealed the deal on a napkin at a table at the Monte Carlo Club in midtown.
At two thirty P.M. on Monday, March 25, 1946, with
a single blow of his gavel, Dr. Quo Tai-chi of China opened the first session of the Security Council at the Bronx campus of Hunter College in New York. In fifteen days, workers had finished renovations that would normally have take as long as six months (Trygve Lie, the Norwegian diplomat and first UN secretary-general, pronounced the transformation “marvelous”). Spectators had slept on blankets outside overnight to get tickets. U.S. marines guarded the gates (they even stopped Governor Thomas E. Dewey, who lacked the requisite credentials and insisted plaintively: “But you know who I am”). Fifty-one flags of the member nations flew in the traffic circle out front, positioned alphabetically (and repositioned after sharp-eyed diplomats discovered that the ensigns of Paraguay and Yugoslavia were flying upside down and South Africa was placed with the S’s instead of the U’s—for “Union of”; the Soviet Union was with the U’s, but aligned under “united” instead of “union”). The main flagpole remained bare because the pale blue United Nations flag had not yet been delivered.
The first major policy debate was over Iran’s demand that Soviet troops leave the country, a kerfuffle that prompted a thirteen-day boycott by Andrei Gromyko, the veto-wielding Russian ambassador. Still, as A. M. Rosenthal recalled years later in the Times, a “sense of exhilaration came from the freshness of it all, the sharing in an adventure that—who could say—might just possibly work out somehow, somewhat, someday.” Without agencies, panels, commissions, corporations, programs, funds, unions, organizations, associations, and banks all over the world staffed by battalions of anonymous bureaucrats, the newborn United Nations still operated in a spirit of spontaneity and optimism. “Even Soviet and American diplomats meeting in a pizzeria in a Bronx Little Italy near the first United Nations home,” Rosenthal wrote, “couldn’t glare too fiercely while wiping tomato and cheese off the mouth with a soggy napkin.”