A History of New York in 27 Buildings

by Sam Roberts

  Western Union became best known for telegrams, but most New Yorkers initially looked up to its 60 Hudson Street headquarters to tell the time. (Irving Underhill/Library of Congress, 1931)

  For centuries, noon in New York was when the sun was directly overhead. Western Union changed that, revolutionizing time in the city the way it revolutionized communication. Beginning in 1877, every day except Sunday, at exactly twelve P.M., a telegraph operator in Washington sent a signal directly from the U.S. Naval Observatory. The signal tripped a circuit, activating an electromagnet that released a lever, triggering the twenty-three-foot descent of a three-and-a-half-foot-diameter copper ball down a pole atop the ten-story Western Union Building at 195 Broadway. The ball drop defined the local celestial meridian. New Yorkers could set their clocks and watches by it. Time was standardized. By 1912, George B. Post’s flamboyant Western Union tower, which had dominated the downtown skyline since it opened in 1875, had been dwarfed by neighboring high-rises (a new time ball was installed as a memorial to the RMS Titanic atop the Seamen’s Church Institute on South Street), but the company’s legacy to timely communication was just beginning.

  Once the American Telephone & Telegraph Company acquired Western Union, 195 Broadway became known as the AT&T Building. Seeking to establish its own distinct identity again, Western Union began to scout other locations. By 1924, the company was zeroing in on a perfect site: an irregular full block in lower Manhattan, bounded by West Broadway, Hudson, Thomas, and Worth Streets, and not far from its major clients. Then occupied by stables, dairies, warehouses, and other underutilized properties, the site offered eleven thousand square feet and a relatively inexpensive price tag (this was long before the neighborhood became known as TriBeCa and real estate costs skyrocketed). Four years later, with the purchase complete, Western Union announced plans to build 60 Hudson Street, a hulking twenty-four-story headquarters that, it gloated, would be the biggest telegraph building in the world.

  Western Union commissioned Ralph Walker of Voorhees, Gmelin & Walker to design 60 Hudson for a single tenant. It would be distinguished by its exclusive use of brick, structurally and ornamentally, above a three-story rose granite base. (AT&T also hired the firm for its new building at 32 Avenue of the Americas, which opened in 1932.) The design, Betsy Bradley of the Landmarks Preservation Commission wrote, “is remarkably integrated—the forms, the materials, and the ornament.” Nineteen shades of brick defined the exterior, becoming lighter in color toward the upper stories, from deep red to rose, salmon, and pinkish orange, in tapestry patterns that punctuate the building’s verticality. The variegation captured, Robert A. M. Stern wrote, what in the eyes of Hugh Ferris, the architect who delved into the psychology of urban life, was a “poetic conceit of the tall building as a man-made mountain.” Even the first-floor lobby, a church-like enclosure also designed by Walker, amplifies the seamless brick Art Deco motif, ornamented with bronze light fixtures and doors and capped with a ceiling crafted in interlocking tile developed by Rafael Guastavino. A vaulted arcade lined in polychrome brick and tile (the “only all-brick corridor in any office building in America,” a promotional brochure boasted) traverses the building to connect two vestibule elevator banks. Sixty Hudson opened with its own cafeteria, a one-thousand-seat auditorium, research laboratories, a gym, and even classrooms so Western Union’s army of messengers could continue their high school education.

  The building’s design may have been a marvel, but so, too, were the communication capabilities Western Union had been developing since its inception. Established as the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company in 1851, Western Union finally realized Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“I can put a girdle ’round the earth in forty minutes,” he wrote) with the power of the telegraph. Just as the Civil War was temporarily splitting the country apart, the telegraph was bringing the nation and its far-flung territories closer together with the first coast-to-coast telegraph link, established by Western Union in 1861. This, along with the Erie Canal and the rapid proliferation of steam locomotives (the gold spike symbolizing the completion of the first transcontinental railroad was driven in 1869), the political union that had been sealed less than a century before and that shattered during the Civil War was finally being forged into a quotidian reality.

  “The line of technological development the telegraph sparked and the social changes it wrought proved as significant to the human experience as the invention of writing in the ancient world and the printing press revolution in early modern Europe,” David Hochfelder wrote in The Telegraph in America (2012). “The electric telegraph forever liberated communication from transportation.” For the first time, there was instantaneous, real-time communication. The telegraph facilitated the imposition of standard time zones (by the railroads, not the government) and the dissemination of battle plans. It delivered the outcomes of these battles in the form of victory claims and casualty reports, geometrically expedited stock trading and made the markets more volatile, delivered birthday wishes and death notices, and accelerated a phenomenon that had begun millions of years ago with the first whispered gossip.

  But once the medium became the message, and even more so, once it became anonymous, without a face-to-face assessment of the bearer’s credibility, an ominous variable loomed larger with every dot and dash. As early as 1852, the American Telegraph magazine warned of an evil that “should call down on its authors the severest reprehension of the whole press.” The magazine reprinted an admonition to fellow wordsmiths from the New York Tribune, which continued: “We allude to the manufacture of false news, and its transmission over the telegraph wires to journals at a distance, whose editors cannot judge by its complexion whether it be true or false.”

  In 1866, Western Union (a growing monopoly controlled at the time by Jay Gould, the New York financier) had expanded from a mere messenger of information to a generator and conveyor of great wealth. It introduced the stock ticker to Wall Street and brokers around the country. It began offering money transfers five years later. By 1900, text messages, share trades, and currency consignments were speeding over one million miles of telegraph lines and two undersea cables.

  When Western Union moved into its headquarters at 60 Hudson in 1930, the telegraph was still the quickest way to spread news and money. (Less than a century later, from the very same site, information would flow even faster and farther, traveling so organically on the internet to be plausibly dubbed as viral.) Some seventy million feet of wire and thirty miles of conduit originally snaked through the building, which had taken fully two years to finish. The technology had advanced so far that even the switch from Walker to Hudson Streets did not disrupt service, and when the move was complete, about one in eight of the more than two hundred million telegrams that Western Union and its army of mad-dashing messengers delivered annually were being transmitted through 60 Hudson Street. One night, Lowell Thomas broadcast his national radio program live from Western Union’s fourteenth-floor operating room and asked his listeners to send him a telegram. About 250,000 did so.

  Telegrams immortalized famous words and the words of the famous, especially of writers whose unpublished musings might otherwise have been lost to history. (When the humorist Robert Benchley arrived in Venice for the first time, he cabled Harold Ross, the editor of the New Yorker: STREETS FULL OF WATER. PLEASE ADVISE.) Email, texting, and other instantaneous means of communication have rendered the neatly pasted printed paper strips obsolete, though. By the late twentieth century, as the telegraph era ended, only about twenty thousand were transmitted annually. It was a whimpering finale to the proud history of 60 Hudson Street as the source for those dreaded “we regret to inform you” messages from the War Department that William Saroyan’s Homer grimly dispensed in The Human Comedy, “send money” pleas, singing birthday congratulations, and various other mostly mundane missives that always seemed more momentous when they were hand-delivered in those evocative canary yellow envelopes. The last
Western Union telegram was delivered in 2006, likely by someone vying to become a historical footnote.

  Western Union’s headquarters remained in the building until 1973, when executives relocated to Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. The company sold its lease a decade later and eventually moved the rest of its operations. But before it did, the dot and dash were already giving way to the 0 and 1, even at 60 Hudson Street. While Western Union may be best remembered for paper telegrams, beginning in the 1960s, it was the prime contractor for a Defense Department computerized message switching system called the Automatic Digital Network, or Autodin, which was succeeded by Arpanet, which was conceived in the late 1960s and became the prototype for the internet.

  And, as Andrew Blum wrote in Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (2012), “it wasn’t the end for the building—and certainly not the end for the tubes under Church Street. Sixty Hudson’s reinvention came with the deregulation of the phone industry as AT&T’s monopoly was chipped away by the federal courts.” While Western Union left the building, it retained carrier rights to its network, including the ducts connecting 60 Hudson to the basement of AT&T’s long-lines building at 32 Avenue of the Americas, four blocks uptown. MCI immediately moved into 60 Hudson and, with AT&T ordered by the courts to let competitors access its network, effortlessly tapped in.

  The internet, when it arrived with a vengeance, rendered the telegraph anachronistic and seemingly deprived 60 Hudson Street of its original currency, transforming the headquarters of a worldwide communications monopoly into a warren of disconnected offices. But despite its evanescence, the internet is also very much a physical phenomenon. It is humming servers, wires, air-conditioning ducts, biometric and retina scanners for security, a rainbow of labyrinthine wires, and rows of little undulating lights signifying something. “In basest terms, the Internet is made of pulses of light,” Blum wrote. “Those pulses might seem miraculous, but they’re not magic. They are produced by powerful lasers contained in steel boxes housed (predominantly) in unmarked buildings. The lasers exist. The boxes exist. The buildings exist. The Internet exists—it has a physical reality, an essential infrastructure, a ‘hard bottom,’ as Henry David Thoreau said of Walden Pond.”

  Since the 1990s, 60 Hudson Street has been reborn. Equipped with its own ten-thousand-amp power plant and fuel tanks that hold more than eighty thousand gallons, its circulatory system of conduits and pneumatic tubes that once shuffled telegrams from one office and floor to another survived and has been revived and retrofitted. In its second life, those tubes are now packed with bundled copper wire and fiber optic and coaxial cables, some the tail ends of transatlantic undersea cables that make landfall in New Jersey and eastern Long Island. They carry trillions of gigabytes, transforming 60 Hudson into one of the world’s largest carrier hotels—intersecting central switchboards where hundreds of networks of internet service providers and data centers converge in a fifteen-thousand-square-foot hub and connect in a neighborhood where (with 32 Avenue of the Americas, the former AT&T Building, which is owned by Rudin Management; and 111 Eighth Avenue, recently bought by Google) they are, perhaps, more concentrated than anyplace else in the world. The convergence also lures talent, which is another reason a mini-version of Silicon Valley has sprouted in New York. Cornell Tech opened its campus on Roosevelt Island in 2017, and by the end of that year, technology firms occupied nearly thirty million square feet, or 8 percent, of the city’s office space. New media now employs more people than the apparel, banking services, construction, and legal services businesses.

  Google spent $1.9 billion to buy 111 Eighth Avenue, in the nation’s biggest real estate transaction of 2010, and another $2.4 billion to purchase Chelsea Market in 2018. Both are situated in a western satellite of Manhattan’s Silicon Alley, atop the so-called Ninth Avenue fiber optic highway that the Hugh O’Kane Electric Company installs and maintains for Empire City Subway, the nineteenth-century subsurface wiring firm that actually predates the underground mass transit system. ECS has the franchise to bury conduits beneath the streets and is now owned by Verizon. “Inevitably, those networks began to connect to one another inside the building, and 60 Hudson evolved into a hub,” Blum wrote. “It’s the paradox of the Internet again: the elimination of distance only happens if the networks are in the same place.” By sharing space in the same carrier hotel, networks save space, power, personnel, and other expenses. Meanwhile, revenue from pop-up ads, paywalls, subscriptions, and other encroachments support what many people naïvely believed would forever remain a completely free medium.

  When tweets originated in 2006, they were limited to 140 characters so they could be accommodated by wireless carriers’ text-messaging services. Email, too, is studded with hyper-condensed words and phrases and emoji that, for hurried multitaskers, can often substitute for elegiac sentiments worth cherishing. Theoretically, the length of telegrams was defined not by technology, but, unlike the internet, by cost and by the sender’s verbosity (the so-called Long Telegram, the Cold War analysis that the American diplomat George F. Kennan sent from Moscow to the State Department in 1946, contained roughly twenty-nine thousand characters). Perhaps Hamlet was right, after all, about brevity. When Mark Twain’s publisher demanded a short story in two days, Twain replied in a telegram: NO CAN DO 2 PAGES TWO DAYS. CAN DO 30 PAGES 2 DAYS. NEED 30 DAYS TO DO 2 PAGES.

  Western Union charged by the word, which was one reason that correspondents contrived versions of “cablese” to condense their messages. The shortest telegram on record, though, is one of those too-good-to-be-true stories.

  It’s attributed to Oscar Wilde, who, inquiring about sales of a new novel, supposedly dispatched this wire to his publisher: ?

  To which the publisher exuberantly replied: !

  Telegrams became ancient history, but the hardware has been repurposed. For all its evanescence, the web has a physical home, too. (George Samoladas)

  EPILOGUE

  E. M. Forster’s rallying cry was “only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted.” When Robert A. M. Stern wrote that “people want to look at buildings and make connections,” did that suggest that architects impart their passion to the buildings they design, or do the buildings themselves wordlessly communicate that passion as public art? If you believe Winston Churchill, it doesn’t really matter. “We shape our buildings,” Churchill said. “Thereafter they shape us.”

  In one way or another, that’s true of the landmarks profiled in this book. Some, like the Bowne House in Queens, have survived thanks to prescient historians and civic-minded preservationists or were deemed obsolete only after legal protections against wanton destruction were in place. Others, like Grand Central, had, and continue to have, a monumental impact on urban planning and density. Still others, like Jean Herman’s brownstone apartment, might not qualify as official landmarks, but, for better or worse, expose the pitfalls that tenants and developers can face just trying to survive in the city or make what passes for progress. Other buildings endured because they were repurposed or simply too costly to tear down.

  What constitutes progress is in the eye of the beholder. Some people crave novelty. Others fear flux. “Buildings long outlive the purposes for which they were built,” the architect Edward Hollis wrote, “the technologies by which they were constructed, the aesthetics that determined their form; they suffer numberless subtractions, additions, divisions and multiplications; and soon enough their forms and functions have little to do with one another.” In his The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (2009), Hollis concluded existentially, “the life of the building is both perpetuated and transformed by the repeated act of alteration and reuse.”

  New York is not like London or Paris or many other Old World cities, a large part of whose charm is derived from the undeviating low-rise eighteenth- and nineteenth-century block-fronts that temper the hullabaloo of the modern built and mobile urban environment. What drives
New York has been its resiliency, its capacity for reinvention, not all at once, but piecemeal, according to the plots laid out in the grid imposed by the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 and by its successors and the developers who conglomerated parcels on which to temporarily leave their footprint. Instead of a uniform look, Alexander G. Passikoff, in his 2011 book about New York, A Façade of Buildings, identified a minimum of thirty basic designs that only hint at the diversity to be found on a door-to-door walking tour of the city. In a congested skyline, much less a pedestrian streetscape, even the most idiosyncratic buildings rarely exist in a vacuum. “Buildings are seldom isolated facts,” the sociologist Richard Sennett said. “Urban forms have their own inner dynamics, as in how buildings relate to one another, to open spaces, or to infrastructure below ground, or to nature.”

  So why these twenty-seven? This is not the list of landmark buildings that have defined New York. It’s my list. It’s subjective and abridged. The challenge was whittling it down to twenty-seven from scores of other candidates. How, some readers will ask, could I possibly have neglected the Woolworth, Chrysler, and RCA (now Comcast) buildings? The Dakota apartments, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fraunces Tavern, the Conference House on Staten Island, Tammany Hall, and Hamilton Grange? My goal was to tell the story of the city through a handful of defining edifices, but also to stimulate debate: What makes a building transformative? Why do some survive? Which deserve to? What is the cost to society of sacrificing a transformative site to the future? How does the collective legacy of landmarks contribute to our understanding of who we are today? In a world of virtual reality, what is the value of authenticity?

  Which ones would be on your list of twenty-seven, and why? Send your choices to 27buildingsnyc@gmail.com.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS