Abroad in New York
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The old Board of Transportation Building, built in 1950 at Jay and Willoughby Streets in downtown Brooklyn, would strike most passers-by as nondescript – if they ever paused to consider it. Yet when it was built, Lewis Mumford, the most sensitive critic of Modern architecture, praised it to the skies in the New Yorker. It was, he said, a model for what all our office buildings should be.
Mumford often championed a “hygienic,” even puritanical, Modernism, and this building fulfilled his vision. First, it was healthful. That is, its slab form and openable casement windows ensured every office the maximum of natural light and through-ventilation. Such qualities loom large in New York, where buildings crowd one another and even private houses and luxury apartments tend to be dark and close.
“Light and air” was the mantra of the tenement reform movement. Think of the Board of Transportation Building as the “model tenement” of office buildings. Indeed, Andrew J. Thomas, an outstanding designer of garden apartments in Jackson Heights and elsewhere, helped design the Board of Transportation Building. (Thomas took over when the original architect, William E. Haugaard, died.)
Mumford also championed restrained, tasteful ornament, unlike other Modernists who eschewed ornament altogether. In the Board of Transportation building, he admired the corner subway entrances with their handsomely stylized illuminated green lettering and, in one corner, a sober and affecting World War II memorial.
We would, said Mumford, gladly trade in our ornate towers of columns and cartouches for the honesty and healthfulness of the Board of Transportation Building. Did he perhaps have in mind the former New York and New Jersey Telephone Company Building a block east on Willoughby, at Lawrence Street?
This 1898 building was designed by Rudolph Daus, who was born in Germany, studied in Paris, lived in Brooklyn, and died in Mexico. For this precursor of Verizon, Daus designed a sumptuous building that dramatically sweeps around the corner with a curving bay. The building incorporates no fewer than 17 (by my unofficial count) of those scrolled-frame forms we call “cartouches.” Look closely at its decoration and you will see old-fashioned telephone equipment. It’s in every way the sort of Beaux-Arts office building Mumford found offensive.
Mumford could not understand it when his own daughter developed a taste for elaborate Victoriana. Today, some of us have trouble projecting ourselves back to that moment when hygienic Modernism seemed the answer to our urban needs. What’s become apparent since that time is that hygienic Modernism requires fanatical upkeep. Nothing’s drearier than Modernist buildings that have gone droopy with age or “deferred maintenance.” A building like the Board of Transportation that seemed to Mumford a herald of a “healthier” city can very quickly come to look sickly.
Buildings like that of the New York and New Jersey Telephone Company, on the other hand, possess far greater tolerances – such buildings maintain their character even when worn and aged. Sure, they can look gloomy, too. But never as gloomy as the Modernist building gone to seed.