Inside New York: The City’s landmarked interiors

Editorial Staff Exhibitions, Furniture & Decorative Arts

More than just a display of handsome pictures, Rescued, Restored, Reimagined: New York’s Landmark Interiors, an exhibition at the New York School of Interior Design (to April 24), tells the stories behind a variety of landmark interiors that have been preserved throughout the city. It includes familiar sites such as Radio City Music Hall, but focuses primarily on the more obscure gems that few people have visited, despite their offi„cial status as public spaces. Th…ese include several that were rescued from destruction, some that were meticulously restored after neglect or misguided “modernizations,” and others saved by creative conversions to new and sometimes surprising functions. Their stories reveal a common thread of concern about how to balance e‰ffective preservation with eff„cient function in spaces that may have been designed for very diff‰erent circumstances than those of the present day. …They highlight the di„fficulties of preserving interiors, and the di‰fferent approaches to saving and restoring them. Once an interior is designated, its preservation is ensured by the requirement that any changes be approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC).* Nevertheless, preserving an interior presents a unique set of challenges – challenges rarely faced in caring for a building’s exterior.

Interiors are constantly changing, especially those subjected to heavy use, which is certainly the case for virtually any public space designated as a landmark. Daily wear and tear takes its toll; walls and ceilings must be periodically repainted, worn carpet and textiles replaced, broken or lost parts replicated, and furniture refi™nished or reupholstered (though movable furnishings are not included in landmark designation). Beyond that, improvements in lighting and climate control, or legally mandated adaptations for security or visitor accessibility, may call for changes that the original designers never anticipated. Small wonder then that owners and operators of important spaces have often resisted landmark designation. In recent years, however, that attitude has been changing, as the cause of preservation has gained ground. …The prestige associated with owning a historic site has become an attraction for tenants, restaurant and theater patrons, and tourists.

Among the attractions of landmark interiors are their histories and the exhibition supplies these narratives. Two of the most intriguing are those of City Hall, the oldest designated space, and the Ford Foundation building, the youngest.

Built in 1811, City Hall, the third structure to bear that name, was the result of a collaboration between two architects, the American John McComb Jr. and the Frenchman Joseph-François Mangin, resulting in a classic Federal style building with grace-note Gallic touches. The beautifully preserved interior that visitors see today belies its crisis-ridden history; it survived two fires, and was more than once threatened with demolition by plans to develop a grand civic center on the site. The building was saved by landmark designation in 1966, but its interior was not protected until a decade later, and remained largely neglected until falling plasterwork compelled the allocation of funds for a top-to-bottom restoration, completed in 2013 by Beyer Blinder Belle (see Fig. 2).

The Ford Foundation’s story is far more pleasant. Universally admired from the time it was erected in 1967, and landmarked as soon as it was eligible in 1997, the glass-walled International style building by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates encloses a unique interior (see Figs. 4-6). It is actually an enclosed outdoor space—an extraordinary atrium garden by the great modernist landscape architect Dan Kiley—a novel feature at the time that became the inspiration for countless atrium designs in commercial buildings around the country. Access to the space—separate from the private entrance for foundation sta‰ff- is through an allée of trees, up granite stairs, into a densely planted terraced space with a square pool at its center and a skylight overhead. …The garden slopes gently upward, conforming to the site itself. …The plants and foliage create an intimate feeling, but are visible through glass walls from the street. …The building was designed as headquarters for one of the largest private foundations in the country, which chose to forego the opportunity to build a conventional offi„ce building with rentable space in favor of an architecturally important—and image-enhancing—structure, and a grand gesture to the city. Its maintenance has been ongoing, and unchallenged.

*According to the 1973 legislation that amended the 1965 New York City Landmarks Law, an interior may be proposed for designation if it is at least thirty years old, “customarily open or accessible to the public,” and of special historic or aesthetic interest or value (though venues of worship are excluded). Anyone can put forth a proposal, and decisions are made by the LPC, an eleven-member group appointed by the mayor, after research reports and public hearings.

Among the interiors that have been converted to other uses are Loew’s Paradise Theater in the Bronx and the original Williamsburgh Savings Bank in downtown Brooklyn. The Paradise, dating to 1929, was one of the city’s five grand Loew’s movie palaces (see Figs. 1, 3). Architect John Eberson conceived the idea of theater interiors meant to evoke exotic lands and he worked with his wife Beatrice Lamb, an interior decorator, to make the forty-five thousand-square-foot Paradise a mélange of marble, mirrors, and multicolored plaster, with an auditorium replicating an Italian palazzo courtyard, including a faux-sky ceiling and even artificial clouds. Remodeled into a quadriplex and damaged by fire, it was rescued, paint and plasterwork restored by EverGreene Architectural Arts, and finally designated in 2006. It was reincarnated as a church in 2012, gaining a new audience of admirers.

The Williamsburgh Savings Bank headquarters, another space that has been reimagined, was built in 1875, when it signaled a new approach to the design of bank interiors, adopting a classical aesthetic to convey an air of dignity and trustworthiness. The architect, George B. Post, created a complex building with not one but two banking halls, each crowned by a dome (see Figs. 8, 9). The first, an intricately decorated blue-and-gold-patterned focal point by architect and painter Peter B. Wight, covers a large open space with polychrome plasterwork and a marble mosaic floor. The second domed hall was added in 1908 to accommodate women who, having gained financial independence and the right to control property even before the right to vote, had begun to represent a large part of the bank’s clientele. Creating a special space for women was thought to be more welcoming than the customary bank interior. But with the 1996 merger and departure of the bank, and the sale of the building in 2010, the interior fell into disrepair. Happily, imaginative new owners saw the attraction of a historic location, and the building reopened in 2014 as a special events space, wittily adopting the bank’s monogram (it appears on walls, windows, even doorknobs of the interior) in naming the new venue Weylin B. Seymour’s.

Opening the exhibition, and encapsulating many elements of the landmark interiors story, is Radio City Music Hall, built in 1932 as the central attraction of Rockefeller Center. It was threatened with demolition when the Landmarks Planning Commission designated its grand interior spaces in 1978. Donald Deskey, favoring modernism over the then popular Beaux-Arts style for theaters, designed more than thirty art deco spaces including distinctive lounges or smoking rooms. The glories of Radio City include the three-story, gold-ceilinged grand foyer and the spectacular sixty-two-hundred-seat auditorium (see Figs. 10, 11), the world’s largest indoor theater. But the beauty of the interior couldn’t compensate for the fading appeal of the movie-and-stage-show format in an era of television and the multiplex. No longer profitable, Radio City was only saved by public protests (including a line of Rockettes who danced on the steps of City Hall). After landmark designation and considerable legal wrangling, a new management structure was installed, and Radio City reopened in 1980. In 1999 Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer and Rockwell Group undertook a total rehabilitation, removing interim changes and restoring the original design details, making the theater once again among the city’s star attractions.

The exhibition ends on a cautionary note, with a reminder that a number of deserving spaces still remain unprotected, such as the New York Public Library’s Rose Main Reading Room, the mural-adorned lobby of One Wall Street, Carnegie Hall’s Isaac Stern Auditorium and Ronald O. Perelman Stage, and the Promenade of Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater. It also notes the difficulties of landmark protection for modern glass-walled buildings-such as the Manufacturers Trust Company building at 510 Fifth Avenue, now two retail stores-where interior and exterior are integral to one another and cannot be considered separately. For those of us who value the documentation and preservation of historic sites in a city committed to growth and the pursuit of something new there is much to think about here. In conjunction with the exhibition, NYSID has launched a website (landmarkinteriors.nysid.edu) that documents all 117 landmarked interiors, with photographs, design details, and links to related websites for additional information. An interactive element will allow readers to submit their own suggestions for interior landmarks.

With the support of NYSID president David Sprouls, Rescued, Restored, Reimagined was organized by a curatorial committee led by architect Hugh Hardy and including designer Kitty Hawks, preservationist Kate Wood, and this writer, a design historian and NYSID faculty member. It features striking new photography by Larry Lederman and was designed by PS NEW YORK. Monacelli Press will publish a companion book featuring some forty-five interiors in September.

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