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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/re...capes.html?hpw

Ghost Buildings of 1929

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DEEP-SIXED The Watergate apartments, left, were planned for Midtown, on the banks of the East River. Center, a colorful 40-story building on West Street was to have housed financial workers. Right, Metropolitan Life had designs on the clouds.

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY
April 23, 2009

ALL over New York, projects that broke ground with irrational exuberance are topping out in uncertain conclusion. But others that are only in the planning stages have gone to the back burner, perhaps never to surface again.

When the stock market crashed in October 1929, many ambitious plans that would have changed the face of New York simply vanished.

For real estate developers, 1929 seemed like a slot machine stuck in the pay position. In Manhattan in 1928, plans were filed for 14 buildings of 30 stories or higher, but by the next year the number was 52. Only with the passage of time did it become clear that of these 52, just 19 would be built.

This ambitious cohort included designs that were indeed completed, like the Waldorf-Astoria and the Empire State Building. But it also encompassed major projects in unexpected locations, like a 40-story apartment hotel designed by Emery Roth for the northwest corner of 106th Street and Central Park West, an area of third-rung apartment houses.

Other buildings of 40 stories or more were planned for 70th and West End Avenue; 85th and Central Park West; 87th and Park Avenue; 90th and East End Avenue; and 105th and Broadway.

Of the many fallen visions, three stand out in particular: an East River idyll, a richly colored West Street enclave and a Madison Square tower that was to have been the tallest in the world.

Early in 1929, a syndicate including Douglas Elliman and the architect-developer Eliot Cross announced plans for the blockfront on the East River from 48th to 49th Streets, to be known as Watergate. Working with Rosario Candela, the group proposed an asymmetrical assemblage of Gothic-, Tudor- and Venetian-style towers, with its own garage underneath a 10,000-square-foot waterfront courtyard.

A medieval-style drawbridge at river level dropped to a boat landing for co-op owners, and a bridge was to connect the swanky complex to Beekman Place, to the north. A warehouse for The New York Times was part of the design.

In April, a group headed by Albert Mayer, an architect and planner, acquired a swath of West Street south of Rector Street for a mixed-use development of offices and apartment houses.

Calling itself Downtown Homes, the consortium proposed an initial 40-story building of 428 apartments and 255 bachelor rooms, with a gym, banquet hall and handball courts. The idea was to accommodate the rapid increase of financial district workers in the growing crop of skyscrapers downtown.

The blocky tower was to have a white brick top with a gold cap, illuminated at night. But even more spectacular was the body of contrasting sections of red and buff, designed by the architects Thompson & Churchill. They are now known for the voluptuously pink faience tile entrance of their Hotel Lowell, at 28 East 63rd Street, built in 1927.

Henry S. Thompson of Thompson & Churchill told The New York Times in 1929 that he was introducing the cascade of color to fight what he called “the monotony of flat surfaces” common in emerging modernist designs.

In September 1929, news got out that the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company was considering a 100-story tower on the block just north of its distinctive campanile of 1909, at 24th and Madison. The company released a drawing by its architects — the skyscraper advocate Harvey Wiley Corbett and Dan Everett Waid — showing a faceted, somewhat oval column, made up almost entirely of glass and metal.

Mr. Waid told The Times that the tower would eschew all “extraneous ornament or embellishment which has not a rational meaning and practical use” and that it would be “unhampered by archaeological precedent.”

All three projects foundered at various points after the stock market crash that October. Mr. Cross’s Watergate simply vanished; the site is now occupied by the cool, glassy United Nations Plaza apartments of 1966.

Excavation for Mr. Mayer’s visionary Downtown Homes did begin in December but got no further, and the site was sold in a foreclosure in 1932 for $250,000. It is now the location of the entrance to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.

In November, Frederick H. Ecker, the president of Metropolitan Life, said that Mr. Corbett’s designs were tentative. The 28-story building now on the site went up in 1938.

The theory in the real estate industry was that happy days would soon be here again because the stock market had drained investment capital that might otherwise have gone into bricks and mortar.

In December, Alfred E. Smith, the former New York governor, told The Real Estate Record and Guide that “I haven’t much use for pessimists who say we are building too fast.” He was involved with the construction of the Empire State Building.

And in January 1930, Roland F. Elliman, vice president of Douglas L. Elliman & Company, assured The Times that the real estate industry in New York was far too prudent for speculative ventures.

In any event, he said, fail-safe protection was provided by “the conservative policies of lending institutions, whose executives refuse to make loans in excess of conservative valuations.”