Walking in a Winter Wonderland

From Tiffany’s to the newly reopened Russian Tea Room, from Bergdorf’s (with its showstopping holiday windows) to Carnegie Hall (where tonight and tomorrow night two different choruses perform Handel’s “Messiah”), it’s likelier than not that a New Yorker will traverse 57th Street between Fifth Avenue and Broadway in December. It’s a good opportunity to look at some of the overlooked gems on our most elegant crosstown thoroughfare.Music sounds the major chord on 57th Street, beginning with Chickering Hall, at no. 29, a 1924 building by the consistently excellent Cross & Cross. While the “ski slope” façade of the massive 9 W. 57th St. next door may seem aggressively anti-contextual, it does preserve an unobstructed view of the ornate east face of no. 29. The giant medallions at the top represent prizes won by Chickering pianos at the 1867 Paris Exposition. Chickering is gone, but the building happily still houses a piano showroom.At no. 111, between Sixth and Seventh avenues, Chickering’s illustrious competitor built Steinway Hall in 1925. An earlier Steinway Hall, on 14th Street, was the New York Philharmonic’s home before Carnegie Hall opened. The present Steinway Hall still presents recitals, as well as serves as the flagship showroom of the world’s most famous piano manufacturer, founded in Manhattan in 1852. The building, by Warren & Wetmore, is a small masterpiece exemplifying that firm’s unrivaled skill at elegant composition.The Russian Tea Room, at no. 150, reopened this fall after its second fouryear hiatus in 11 years. From its 1927 opening to 1995, the restaurant — its interior like a Hollywood set of the court of the tsar — flourished as a New York institution. Whether it shall become one again remains to be seen.In 1891 the Philharmonic moved into the new Carnegie Hall, at the southeast corner of Seventh Avenue and 57th Street. The hall’s architect, William B. Tuthill, is surprisingly obscure. But it’s hard to think that any more celebrated architect would have created a finer mecca of musical New York.Diagonally across 57th Street from Carnegie Hall stands the Osborne (1883–85), one of the oldest still-standing luxury apartment houses in the city. James E. Ware, who designed the buiding, had recently produced the prototype plan for the classic New York “dumbbell tenement” mandated by the Tenement House Law of 1879.The American Society of Fine Arts Building (1891–92), at no. 215, housing the Art Students League, is the most visible reminder that fine art defines 57th Street just as music does. The street once boasted galleries that occupied their own purpose-built buildings, but they are all gone. If you look up, you will see many galleries’ names in the upper floors of buildings. The Art Students League, housed in a sumptuous building by Henry J. Hardenbergh, boasts a faculty that has included such legendary teachers as painter Robert Henri and color theorist Hardesty Maratta.You can see why guidebooks call 57th Street New York’s Rue de la Paix.fmorrone@nysun.com

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

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