Singer’s Beautiful Little Home
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 Singer Manufacturing Company played a large role in the history of New York City. The sewing machines the company made were important in the growth of the city’s clothing manufacturing industry. Singer’s president, Edward S. Clark, not only built the Dakota apartments, he was also the tutelary director of the early speculative development of the Upper West Side.
Befitting an industrial giant that was also a global marketing powerhouse, Singer’s headquarters at Broadway and Liberty Street, built in 1908, was the tallest building in the world – for a year. Since its demolition in the 1960s – which came after passage of the Landmarks law – the Singer Building, one of the most beautiful skyscrapers ever built, bears the distinction of being the tallest building ever torn down.
The Singer Building’s architect, Ernest Flagg, designed another, earlier Singer Building, which was used by the company for showrooms and rental space. Happily, that Singer Building, at 561 Broadway just south of Prince Street, still stands.
For sheer inventiveness, Flagg ranks with his contemporaries Frank Lloyd Wright and Bertram Goodhue. Flagg’s outstanding output includes the two Scribner Buildings, one on Fifth Avenue between 21st and 22nd Streets, the other at Fifth Avenue and 48th Street; the Oliver Gould Jennings house at 7 E. 72nd Street; Engine Company no. 33 on Great Jones Street, and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. He was also deeply involved with the model-tenement and tenement-reform movements, and was the developer and architect of the fascinating Flagg Court complex, a model development for the middle class, built in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, between 1933 and 1936.
The Little Singer Building, as 561 Broadway is popularly known, went up in 1903-04. It is one of Flagg’s best. It’s one of those buildings that catches everyone’s eye, not just the architecture buff’s.This first of all has to do with the unusual red and green colors of the facade.
The red comes from the terra-cotta panels that outline the building’s vertical and horizontal structural supports. Some of the terra-cotta squares are plain, while others bear images of wreaths, torches, and animal heads. The green is in the form of green-painted ironwork that is deliriously lacy, in the railing screens in front of the building’s floor-to-ceiling glass windows, and especially in the willowy spandrels of the five-bay-wide iron arches at the second and 11th floors. This is ironwork worthy of the art nouveau of Hector Guimard, designer of the famous Paris metro kiosks.
Much has been made of how Flagg, with this building, helped to give rational form to the steel-framed building by eschewing the classical orders deemed appropriate only to masonry construction. I have never understood this. Most of the greatest buildings in Western architectural history used the classical orders in nonstructural ways.Why that should be somehow inappropriate to steel-frame construction and not to, say, arch-and-vault construction mystifies me. Besides which, that’s no reason to admire 561 Broadway. The reason to admire it is that it is beautiful.
