Autumn in New York City brings us the annual celebration of the Big Apple's buildings, Archtober. For the entire month of October, in 29* Buildings of the Day, the Center for Architecture and more than sixty partners and sponsors shine a spotlight on architecture and design with events, tours, and other festivities.

In the Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, New York City is often our subject du jour. As in 2017, we took a tour of this year's Archtober venues and offer the following select sites to see—and resources you can use to learn more about them—at the Library.

TWA Hotel

 

One of Archtober's more far-flung venues is also one of the city's iconic airport buildings: Building of the Day for October 6—and scheduled to reopen in 2019—is the TWA Hotel.

Opened in 1962 for Trans World Airlines (TWA) as the carrier's transatlantic hub—back when the New York International Airport was called "Idlewild"—the birdlike structure touched down and looked unlike any other airport facility previously built: a curvilinear poured-in-place concrete shell with expansive windows, ribbon skylights, and interior spaces featuring TWA red carpeting and sweeping arced ceilings.

Its architect, Eero Saarinen—much more than a frequent crossword puzzle clue (last seen in the New York Times, May 2018)—is also worthy of further research, as the Finnish-American was a major modernist influence on American postwar design. His brief, brilliant career yielded the St. Louis Gateway Arch, the "Tulip" and "Womb" chairs, the John Deere & Co. Inc. headquarters, Kresge Auditorium (at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), the "Whale" ice rink in New Haven, and Washington Dulles Airport.

In New York City, Saarinen also designed CBS Corporation Headquarters on Sixth Avenue, and the Vivian Beaumont Theatre building at Lincoln Center (near and dear to our Library hearts, as it houses the stacks for the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center).

Ready for takeoff? Leave your baggage at home and grab a copy of The Metropolitan Airport: JFK International and Modern New York, and visit our colleagues in the Art & Architecture Collection to peruse numerous related materials, including Designing TWA ..., a mostly German-language book about the terminal and its design.

Milstein's photographic collections on New York Airports will also take you back to the Jet Age with views captured by C. Manley De Bevoise, Percy Loomis Sperr, Ewing Galloway, and others.

The Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division has fire insurance and farm maps that show neighborhood change over time, including aerial views from the Fairchild Aerial Camera Corporation (shown). And you can expand your horizons by reviewing these subject searches in the catalog, too: Airports -- New York., Trans World Airlines -- History, and Saarinen, Eero, 1910-1961.

Note: Beyer Blinder Belle, restoration architect of record for the TWA Hotel, serves as architect for The New York Public Library.

African Burial Ground Memorial

 

Part of a 6.6-acre site operated by the National Park Service, the October 29 Building of the Day is the African Burial Ground Memorial, also known as the Ancestral Libation Chamber.

When excavations for a government building in lower Manhattan revealed an unmarked cemetery containing the remains of 17th- and 18th-century New Yorkers, a two-year archaeological and historical investigation ensued. After examination of the remains, a scholarly review of historical burial practices in Africa and North America, and an investigation of land use in lower Manhattan—including the map shown above and others in NYPL collections (see below)—it was determined the unmarked cemetery was a burial site for free and enslaved Africans.

Protecting the site as hallowed ground, construction was halted and relocated for the government building, the area was named the African Burial Ground, and it was recognized as a National Historic Landmark in 1993 for its significance in the history of the United States. In 2003, remains were re-interred on the site; three years later, it was named a National Monument; and in 2007, the African Burial Ground Memorial opened to the public.

It is, according to the National Park Service, the "oldest and largest known excavated burial ground in North America for both free and enslaved Africans." The New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is the official repository of the site's records and related materials.

Designed by Rodney Leon and AARIS architects, the memorial is marked by Ghanaian Adinkra symbols, and features seven "elements": the Wall of Remembrance, Ancestral Re-interment Grove, Memorial Wall, the Ancestral Chamber, Circle of the Diaspora, Spiral Processional Ramp, and Ancestral Libation Court.

To research the history of African lives in lower Manhattan, one might start with the anonymously authored, hand-drawn map, reproduced in The Iconography of Manhattan Island, volume 1, and held in the Library's Print Collection. Believed to date from around 1735, it may be the oldest extant reference to the Burial Ground (see arrow in detail, below), labeled as "Negro Burying Place."

 

The Library has numerous items in the collections that detail the history of the African Burial Ground, including New Amsterdam Gehenna: Segregated death in New York City, 1630-1801 by Robert J. Swan. You can review the Draft management recommendations for the African Burial Ground published by the National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, Northeast Region; and view the Milstein Division's newspaper and magazine clippings on the subject: Cemeteries: Clippings. as well as the Landmarks Preservation Commission report that declared the site a city landmark: African Burial Ground and the Commons Historic District designation report.

For a visual of lower Manhattan land use, past and present, you can overlay these historic maps of the area on which the African Burial Ground is located, across contemporary streets, with the Map Warper:

• To His Excellency Sr. Henry Moore, Bart., captain general and governour in chief in & over the province of New York & the territories... (Ratzer, 1769)
   
• A plan of the city of New-York & its environs: to Greenwich, on the North or Hudsons River, and to Crown Point, on the East or Sound River… (Montresor, 1775)
   
• A Plan of the city and environs of New York in North America. (Hinton, 1776)
   

Extend your research using these subjects in catalog.nypl.org:

• Adinkra symbols and symbolism
• African Americans -- New York (State) -- New York -- History.
• Cemeteries -- New York (State) -- New York -- History -- 18th century.
• New York (N.Y.) -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775.
• Slaves -- New York (State) -- New York -- History.

Marcel Breuer's Bronx Community College Buildings

The Bronx Community College opened in 1894 as the University Heights portion of New York University. Initial design by Stanford White of Beaux-Arts architecture powerhouse McKim, Mead and White followed familiar designs and planning of the era, with buildings that resembled Greek and Roman temples.

Imagine, then, what a bold move it was to ask Hungarian-born architect Marcel Breuer to design a multi-building campus master plan for the site, in the 1950s.

The October 12 Building of the Day is actually five buildings: Marcel Breuer & Associates' Colston, Tech I (Carl Polowczyk), Tech II (Meister), Community, and Begrisch Halls.

Breuer went on to design the Whitney Museum of American Art (aka the Met Breuer, as shown below in a photograph from the 1960s), but had primarily served as furniture designer and architect for distinctive houses prior to the NYU master plan. New York University, on the other hand, was the "largest privately supported university in the United States," and already immersed in a "major building program" that included facilities designed by Harrison & Abramovitz (Loeb Student Center, demolished), I. M. Pei (University Village apartments), and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (Nichols Hall).

Known for his use of concrete, angular forms, dramatic cantilevers, and hyperbolic paraboloids (think: wavy roof lines), Breuer was a pioneer of a style eventually referred to as Brutalism, after Reyner Banham's 1955 essay (des matières bruts / raw materials). The Bronx campus buildings he created, with Hamilton P. Smith and Robert F. Gatje, exemplify the style.

In the fall of 1958, New York University modernized, and also got with the times: Breuer's daring interconnected buildings opened, and the "last of NYU's fourteen schools and colleges ...open[ed] its doors to women".

After a brush with bankruptcy, NYU sold the 55-acre campus in 1973; it has been home to Bronx Community College since.  

The Stanford White portion of campus is a National Historic Landmark (designated 2012), and there are other New York City landmarks on site, including the Hall of Fame for Great Americans (and some of infamy, designated 1966), and Breuer's Begrisch Hall, the trapezoid-shaped building near Sedgwick Avenue, designated in 2002. (See below for a list of designation reports.)

There's more to explore on the eastern hillside of the Harlem River, from the American Revolution (when the area was known as Fordham Heights) to Breuer and Brutalism! The Library's resources include Here to complete Dr. King's dream: The triumphs and failures of a community college by Lillian Cohen Kovar, Ezra Stoller's photographs of the Former Whitney Museum of American Art in the Photography Collection, and digitized maps of the Bronx campus in 1911 and 1938—when the campus had a Library and a book store!

If you'd like to research Bronx Community College, you might find valuable history by searching "New York University Hall of Fame" among other creative keyword search combinations. The Milstein Division has clippings on the area, too, in the catalog under University Heights Clippings.

Try these subject headings, too, for a more on the buildings, the area, and the architects:

• Bronx (New York, N.Y.) -- History
• Brutalism (Architecture)
• Breuer, Marcel, 1902-1981
• White, Stanford, 1853-1906

Lenox Health Greenwich Village

 

There are at least two layers of history beneath the October 2 Building of the Day, Lenox Health Greenwich Village. In the nineteenth century, and into the late 1930s, it was a three-story residential building, with porches referred to as  "Rheinlander Row" (and Berenice Abbott photographed it, as shown below). Those structures were demolished, after which the property was a gas station, and briefly vacant before New Orleans-based architect Albert Ledner built the headquarters for the National Maritime Union of America in 1964.

A testament to New York City's rich seafaring past, the distinctive building originally held hiring halls and an auditorium, but as traffic slowed at the port of New York, the Union shifted tack, relocated, and sold the building. Derisively called a "white elephant" by New York Magazine in 2007, it might be recognized by a generation of Gothamites who see the white building with the scalloped-edge overhang on Seventh Avenue as its second incarnation, St. Vincent's Hospital. An adaptive reuse six-story emergency medicine and ambulatory surgery facility tucked beneath a postmodern facade, St. Vincent's operated there until 2010. Since 2014, the 160-square-foot facility between 12th and 13th Streets on Seventh Avenue has been part of the Lenox Health System.

 

The Library has a few books on the history of St. Vincent's Hospital, including Ghosts of St. Vincent's by Tom Eubanks, With a Great Heart; The Story of St. Vincent's Hospital and Medical Center of New York, 1849-1964. by Marie de Lourdes Walsh, and A History of St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City by George Reilley Stuart.

Examine postmodern buildings like 30 Seventh Avenue, learn more about the National Maritime Union of America, and set sail for destination: research! If Abbott's photo has piqued your interest, you can look for  other visual ghosts of the block's past, via the Library's Digital Collections. Search for "7th Avenue and 12th Street West," and take a trip back in time.

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library

 

Finally, we're delighted that the Library's own Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture made the list this year. The Schomburg Center is a 75,000-square-foot, three-building facility that comprises the New York City landmark "McKim building" (built 1904–1905, below) and the multi-story addition by Marble Fairbanks, completed 2017. The complex was named a National Historic Landmark in 2016.

Far be it from us to summarize the history of the storied institution; you can read a short history of the Schomburg Center on the Research Library's website.

You can prepare for your visit to the Center by reviewing Library materials on collector and curator Arturo Alfonso Schomburg; the building that houses his collection, the former West 135th Street Branch; the architect of that building, Charles Follen McKim and his firm; the history of public libraries in New York State, African-American librarians, and library architecture.

For the past, turn to maps in our Digital Collections that show a neighborhood's change in 1909, 1914, and ca. 1955; photographer Percy Loomis Sperr captured the block in 1941.

And project coverage for architecture firm Marble Fairbanks' work at Schomburg can be found in Architectural Design, Architectural Review, and by searching for the firm and project name in the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals.

Building of the Day Site Details

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

(Former) West 135th Street Branch Library, Charles McKim for McKim, Mead and White, 1904–1905

Renovation and addition: Marble Fairbanks Architects (external link), 2017

135th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard (Lenox Avenue), Manhattan
 

TWA Hotel

Eero Saarinen & Associates with Kevin Roche, 1955–1962

Renovation architects: Beyer Blinder Belle, Lubrano Ciavarra Architects, 2016–Present

John F. Kennedy International Airport, Queens
 

African Burial Ground Memorial

Rodney Leon / AARRIS Architects (external link), 2007

290 Broadway, Manhattan
 

Bronx Community College (select buildings)

Marcel Breuer, 1956–1964

• Colston Hall
• Tech I (Carl Polowczyk Hall)
• Tech II (Meister Hall)
• Community Hall
• Begrisch Hall

2155 University Avenue, Bronx

Lenox Health (former National Maritime Union Headquarters)

• Albert Ledner, 1964
• Alterations for St. Vincent's Hospital: Ferrenz & Taylor, 1977
• Renovation architect: Perkins Eastman, 2015
• 30 7th Ave, Manhattan

Further Reading

Historic buildings -- New York (State) -- New York.

From the NYPL Blogs:

• Researching Open House New York Sites (2017)
• Archtober 2017 Buildings of the Day
• #ThisPlaceMatters: Preservation Month Reads (2017)

New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission Reports for these Sites:

• Lenox Health, part of the Greenwich Village Historic District: volume 1; volume 2
• TWA Hotel
• Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
• African Burial Ground National Monument
• Bronx Community College Buildings:
  • Begrisch Building
  • Hall of Languages
  • Hall of Fame
  • Gould Memorial Library and interior
  • Cornelius Baker Hall of Philosophy

Got a favorite site from Archtober, past or present? Tell us in the comments. Want to know more about researching a specific property in New York City? Check out the Milstein Division's guide to researching your NYC Home, and join us for our next class on building history!