Abroad in New York

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The New York Sun

The intersection of Park Avenue and 34th Street, both broad thoroughfares, creates an unusual openness. The buildings at the corners respond to this circumstance with varying degrees of success. The orange-brick behemoth at the southeast corner, 3 Park Avenue, built in 1976, strove to overcome the blandness of its generation of skyscrapers. The unusual color, the unusual top, and the diagonal orientation to the corner all signaled a desire to break away from orthodoxy, and presaged the flamboyant skyscrapers of the 1980s. I think the architects-more precisely, the zoning code-erred in providing so much space around the building, such that it fails to contain the already difficult spaciousness of the intersection.


At the southwest corner, the former Vanderbilt Hotel is a large, bland building. Its one glory is the restaurant in its 33rd Street corner, now called Wolfgang’s. Its walls and ceilings covered in Rookwood ceramics and Guastavino tiles, this is as handsome a restaurant as New York possesses. As for the rest of the building, it undoubtedly was better before its street-level modernization when some years ago the hotel became an office building.


The intersection’s best building is at the northwest corner, where Helmle, Corbett & Harrison’s 10 Park Avenue rose in 1931.This is geographically the first of Park Avenue’s great apartment palisade. The cleverly massed Art Deco high-rise retains all its original manypaned casement windows, which lend a fascinating rhythm to the two exposed facades.


The intersection’s best story is at the northeast corner. Here is 7 Park Avenue. (There are no numbers 5, 6, 8, or 9.) Once, the mansion of Mrs. Robert Bacon stood here. Its address was 1 Park Avenue. However, when the city renamed a portion of Fourth Avenue (as Park itself had once been known) as “Park Avenue South,” the renamed avenue began not south of 34th, as one would guess, but south of 32nd.The stretch from 32nd to 34th became part of Park Avenue, necessitating a renumbering. (This was all done allegedly at the behest of developers.) Mrs. Bacon, distraught over the loss of her distinctive address, henceforth commanded that her mail be addressed to “Park Avenue at 34th Street Northeast.”


The mansion left the scene in 1953. In 1931, a 22-story apartment hotel by the illustrious Emery Roth had risen adjacent, on 34th, with a narrow Park Avenue frontage (and thus a Park Avenue address) to the north of the mansion. The Bacon house fell for an infill addition to the apartment building. Alas, this being 1953,the addition was in a modern style that made no attempt to relate to the older, neo-Ro manesque building.


The older building, the lovely “Green Park” (after developer Vivian Green), is now a co-op, with restored details and a handsomely remodeled lobby. The newer structure is the sort of thing some landmarks boards now mandate for additions to historic buildings, on the grounds that additions must be “of our time,” a nonsense notion that infects architectural thinking like an unstoppable virus.


The New York Sun

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