Posted May 13, 2011, 11:06 AM
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New Yorker for life
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Borough of Jersey
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/reales...bow-room-streetscapesseventh-avenue.html
A Hotel With a Luxury: More Sidewalk Elbow Room
The Hotel Pennsylvania on Seventh Avenue, in 1919. The hotel is to be demolished.
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY
May 12, 2011
Quote:
IT is a favorite game to scout Pennsylvania Station, on the west side of Seventh Avenue from 31st to 33rd Street, for relics of the original 1910 building, demolished in the 1960s. Searchers find old handrails, stairways, columns and other elements.
But hunters should also look on the east side of Seventh, opposite the station, where the largest survivor remains undisturbed, an odd 15-foot setback 400 feet long. It runs in front of the old Hotel Pennsylvania, to be torn down by Vornado Realty Trust to make way for a 67-story building. But it looks as if the peculiar recess, established to create a forecourt to the old station, will survive.
When the Pennsylvania Railroad began buying property for its new building around 1900, it did not plan on going into the real estate business, as had the New York Central Railroad, the developer of not only Grand Central Terminal but also its surrounding blocks. Indeed New York Central, which had controlled much of the area for decades, envisioned a great income-producing tower directly above the station.
But the “Pennsy” started with nothing, and strained its budget just buying the dozens of properties it needed between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, from 31st to 33rd Street. Half a dozen proposed designs for Grand Central and its neighborhood exist. But no significant variants of the Penn Station plan survive, just the familiar monumental four-sided colonnade.
...The Hotel Pennsylvania is not much more than a big box with a dollop of classical features; it is strange how little ornament it takes to separate our conception of the historic from the disposable.
In 1916, when the hotel project was just forming, the railroad put in place a restriction: “No building or other structure shall be erected upon any part of the surface of the 15-foot strip of land fronting on Seventh Avenue” except for a portico. That requirement was to remain in place for 21 years from the completion of the hotel.
As it happened the architects, McKim, Mead & White, designed only a small portico, six projecting Ionic columns running just half the length of the facade and about six feet out, so the bulk of the setback area was essentially public space.
The intended effect of the setback — a plaza — was compromised by the scale of the 22-story hotel, which dwarfs the extra 15 feet. It does show how the builders of Penn Station considered their surroundings important and their station a civic monument, but it is next to absent from critical writing about the station and the hotel.
In 1921 the railroad sold the blockfront south of the hotel to Equitable Life, which echoed the earlier setback with the office building known today as 11 Penn Plaza. For a 22-story building on a 200-foot front, that’s 66,000 square feet, quite a sacrifice for aesthetics, since the original size of the plot was 51,000 square feet. Even doubled in span, the 15-foot recess is hard to see amid the jumbled skyline around Penn Station, which never got the coherence of Park Avenue north of Grand Central.
New York’s grid plan is a jealous god, and infractions like the Pennsy setback are rare. Among the others is one on Madison Avenue at 41st Street. The east side of Madison was widened a few feet in the 19th century, although thousands walk along daily without registering the change.
...Drawings for the Vornado tower, which was approved last year but now appears to be on hold, respect the setback — Vornado did not try to recover the lost space. So it appears that the strange 15-foot gap along Seventh Avenue will, like Jauncey Lane, survive far beyond the railroad station it was intended to honor.
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