The Charms of Third Avenue
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.
Between 1878 and 1955, the elevated railway’s shadow fell heavily over Third Avenue between Canal and 143rd streets. The city dismantled the main sections of the Ninth, Sixth, and Second avenue Els around 1940. On the west side, new subway lines superseded the Els’ routes. On the east side, the Third Avenue El stayed up longer to give the city time to complete the Second Avenue subway. Property owners eager to see rejuvenation optimistically prevailed upon the city to demolish the blighting structure ahead of schedule — presuming that the new subway could not be too distant. In the El days, tenements and bars lined the avenue. Billy Wilder’s “The Lost Weekend” (1945), contains much location footage along Third Avenue, El roaring overhead, giving an excellent sense of the old avenue.
Following the El’s dismantling, Third Avenue underwent a dramatic transformation that continues to this day. As usual in New York, a transformation may be dramatic, but is seldom complete. A stroll down the avenue from 32nd Street shows 19th-century tenements, 1960s white-brick high-rises, and spates of 1980s and ’90s towers reflecting those decades’ real-estate booms — not to mention dorms reminding us of New York University’s relentless expansion in recent years.
One of Third Avenue’s most distinctive buildings, The Future (200 E. 32nd St.) opened in 1992. The 35-story apartment building sports an unusual aluminum facade with balconies angled out from the building’s face at 45 degrees. Costas Kondylis, a prolific architect of Manhattan apartment buildings, designed it, but we credit the “styling” to design consultant Paul Rudolph, one of the most famous names in the history of modern architecture. Apartments in The Future went on sale in 1990; a two-bedroom sold for $384,470. According to the Inflation Calculator Web site, that apartment in today’s dollars should be $602,903. In fact, a two-bedroom in the Future now costs almost $2.3 million.
Chesapeake House, at the northeast corner of 28th Street, rose in 1966, part of the first generation of post-El buildings. The 1960s brought the white-brick highrise, which many New Yorkers once fashionably scorned, but which has now achieved 21st-century retro hipness. These buildings catered to single people and childless couples who developers thought represented the sole market for city apartments. The white-bricks appealed to single “career women” — book editors, schoolteachers, and so on — who found clean, safe, and affordable elevator apartments, with balconies and laundry facilities and doormen, inthesebuildings, astep up from rickety brownstones and tenements. The shiny white brick announces “sanitized for your protection.” Today most white brick rentals have gone co-op; a Chesapeake House one-bedroom can go for more than $1 million in 2007. So much for single career women of modest means.
A 1960s restaurant, Rolf’s, remains at the southeast corner of 22nd Street. The German eatery, built to serve the white-brick residents, bears its era’s hallmark overstuffed design: The 1960s and 1970s denizens of modern high-rises liked a 19th-century ambience in their bars and restaurants.
The Gramercy Park Flower Shop has been at the northwest corner of 21st Street since 1904. Turn right off Third Avenue and you enter the delectable Gramercy Park enclave that, despite its slice-of-old-New-York reputation, has changed dramatically since the days when the El cast a pall over the row-house blocks between Third Avenue and Irving Place.
Rolf’s remind us of the German heritage of part of Third Avenue. On the west side between 17th and 18th streets, Scheffel Hall opened as Goerwitz’s bar in 1885. In a 1919 memoir of the National Conservatory of Music, the ill-fated academy founded by Jeannette Thurber around the corner on 17th Street, critic James Gibbons Huneker wrote of Goerwitz’s, and of nearby Gus Lüchow’s, at 14th Street, as establishments along the “Thirst Belt” of Germanic watering holes. Carl Goerwitz added the elaborate facade we see today in 1894, renaming the bar for the German poet Scheffel. In 1909, O. Henry set his story “The Halberdier of the Little Rheinschloss” at Scheffel Hall. In the 1930s it became Joe King’s Rathskeller, and in 1969 Tuesday’s restaurant. In 1979, Tuesday’s opened a jazz club, Fat Tuesday’s, on the premises, and for 16 years it ranked as a premier jazz spot.
NYU dorms dominate the east side of Third Avenue from 14th to 10th streets. Kiehl’s, the ancient pharmacy between 14th and 13th streets (on the east side), dates from 1851 at this location; in 1963 Kiehl’s introduced the Original Musk Oil. What further reminder do we need that Third Avenue’s currents of history run deep?
