It is October, which means it’s Archtober, New York City’s Architecture and Design Month. Archtober is an annual celebration of architecture and design that takes place throughout the month. Organized by the Center for Architecture, in collaboration with over 100 partners and sponsors, the festival offers events ranging from daily building tours and lectures by design experts, to architecture-themed competitions and parties.
Department of Buildings - Manhattan Block and Lot Collection, 1866-1977
For the researcher investigating the built environment of New York City, material contained within the Municipal Archives is a gold mine. Recent blogs have described three of these resources, the Assessed Valuation Real Estate Ledgers, the Manhattan Department of Buildings docket books, and the Manhattan building plan collection, part 1, and part 2.
This week’s subject is another series from the Department of Buildings Record Group (025)—the application permit folders, a.k.a. the block and lot folders. The series is a subset of the Department of Buildings Manhattan Building Plan Collection, 1866-1977 (REC 074).
Totaling approximately 1,230 cubic feet, the permit folders provide essential and detailed construction and alteration information for almost every building in lower Manhattan from the Battery to 34th Street. In addition, a wide range of historical subjects can be explored using these records including the effect of planning, zoning and technology on building design, the role of real estate development as a gauge of national economic trends, and the evolution of architectural practice, particularly during the period of professionalization in the latter part of the 19th century.
Established in 1862, the Department of Buildings (DOB) “had full power, in passing upon any question relative to the mode, manner of construction or materials to be used in the erection, alteration or repair of any building in the City of New York.” All DOB personnel were required to be architects, masons, or house carpenters. Then, beginning in 1866, New York City law required that an application, including plans, be submitted to the DOB for approval before a building could be constructed or altered.
The provenance of the collection in the Municipal Archives dates to the 1970s when the DOB began microfilming the application files and plans as a space-saving measure. They intended to dispose of the original materials after microfilming. The project began with records of buildings in lower Manhattan, proceeding northward to approximately 34th Street when it was discovered that the microfilm copies were illegible. The DOB abandoned the project and the original records were transferred to the Municipal Archives for permanent preservation and access.
New Building (NB) Applications
In theory, there should be an NB application for every building constructed after 1866. Unfortunately, prior to the mid-1960s, DOB policy was to dispose of the files of buildings that were demolished. The result is that the Municipal Archives collection generally comprises only records of buildings extant as of the mid-to-late 1970s.
The NB application provides the most complete and detailed information about a structure. The form includes location (street address and block and lot numbers); the owner, architect and/or contractors; dimensions and description of the site; dimensions of the proposed building; estimated cost; the type of building (loft, dwelling factory, tenement, office, etc.); and details of its construction such as materials to be used for the foundation, upper walls, roof and interior. Every NB application was assigned a number, beginning with number one for the first application filed on or after January 1, up to as many as 3,000 or more by December 31, each year.
As buildings incorporated new technologies such as elevators and steel-frame construction, the approval process became more rigorous, requiring more extensive information about the proposed structure. Permit folders for larger buildings often contain voluminous back-and-forth correspondence between the DOB examiners and the owners and architects. If any part of an NB application was disapproved the owner or architect was obliged to file an “Amendment” form stating what changes would be made to the application so that the building would comply with building codes.
When the DOB approved a NB application, they issued a permit and construction could begin. Periodically during construction, inspections would be made by DOB personnel and their reports would also be included in the application file.
Other Applications
After a building was completed and the final inspection report submitted, any subsequent work on the building would require a separate Alteration (ALT) application. As building technology became more complex, the DOB began to require separate applications for elevator and dumbwaiter installations, plumbing and drainage work, certificates of occupancy and electric signs. The permit files also contain numerous Building Notice (BN) applications pertaining to relatively minor alterations. The DOB also mandated a “Demolition” application to raze buildings. The permit files generally do not include documents related to building violations.
The DOB organized all applications and related correspondence into folders according to the block and lot where the building was situated. After 1898, each block in Manhattan was assigned a number, beginning with number 1 at the Battery, and each lot within the block was also assigned a number. The original block and lot filing scheme has been maintained by the Municipal Archives for the block and lot permit collection. An inventory of the permit folder collection is available in the new online Municipal Archives Collection Guides.
The Municipal Archives has also maintained the original permit folders, whenever possible. The folder lists the application paperwork contained within and serves as a table of contents. If paperwork related to an application listed on the folder is missing, it is possible to trace at least basic information about the action using the DOB docket books as described in a recent blog Manhattan Department of Buildings docket books.
The collection provides detailed data about specific buildings and enables the researcher to explore broader topics. For example, one theme of interest to architectural historians is the impact of New York’s 1916 zoning ordinance. The regulation had been imposed partly in response to construction of the massive Equitable Building on lower Broadway, but more generally to reduce the growing density of the built environment. It is usually argued that the law was responsible for the setback style of New York skyscrapers constructed throughout the 1920s. In an examination of the NB applications for several skyscraper buildings erected before the Depression, such as the Irving Trust tower at 1 Wall Street, it was found that very often the original NB application was disapproved, in part because the building plans violated some part of the 1916 zoning ordinance. In response, however, the architects did not revise their plans, but instead appealed to the City for a variance and invariably received permission to proceed with their original plans.
The permit folder collection also provides ample opportunity for researchers to study the long tradition of adaptive re-use of buildings in lower Manhattan. Although many of the buildings in these neighborhoods pre-date establishment of the DOB, the collection is rich with applications submitted for later alterations, as architects, homeowners, and developers converted older structures into “modern” dwellings by removing stoops and covering facades with light-colored stucco, mosaic tile, and shutters.
The permit folders, along with the associated building plans, contain documentation for the study of individual architects, as well as architecture as a profession. Scholars will find an abundance of unique materials that detail the professionalization of the field, especially during the latter half of the 19th century.
Together with the Assessed Valuation of Real Estate ledgers, the several Department of Buildings series—docket books, architectural plans, and the permit folders, provide an unparalleled opportunity for detailed research on the built environment. Few other cities in the nation possess a body of documents whose scope and completeness can compare with these New York City records.
Building Histories, The Bellevue Psychopathic Hospital and the Rivington Street Bath
In last week’s blog, Amy Stecher adapted her “Lunch and Learn” presentation about the Manhattan Building Plan collection project. This week, co-presenter Alexandra Hilton highlights two architecturally significant buildings documented in the collection – the Bellevue Psychopathic Hospital and the Rivington Street Bath. Future blogs will feature the plans of other unique buildings that have been identified in the processing project.
Bellevue Psychopathic Hospital
The Bellevue Psychopathic Hospital, as it was called at the time, was built in 1931 by Charles B. Meyers in the Italian Renaissance style. The building is still standing alongside the East River on First Avenue between 29th and 30th Streets, occupying an entire city block. When constructed, it joined the growing Bellevue hospital complex, and was intended to match the existing buildings, which were designed by architects McKim, Mead & White – same color brick, embellished with granite base course, limestone and terra cotta trimmings. By then, McKim, Mead & White was barely active; Meyers had just designed the Tammany Hall building and was a favorite of then-Mayor Jimmy Walker.
Prior to its construction, Bellevue’s mental-health facilities were part of the main hospital and included an 1879 “pavilion for the insane,” and an alcoholic ward was added in 1892. Dr. Menas Gregory, a well-known psychiatrist who spent his career working in Bellevue’s psychiatric division, is credited with the idea for a psychiatric building after a trip to inspect similar institutions in Europe – a “Temple of Mental Health,” as he called it. Wanting to create a very clean and stately environment for the new hospital was right on brand for Dr. Gregory. In his position, he had already changed the terminology – preferring “psychopathic” to the word “insane,” thinking this would help make the patients seem curable. He had also removed the iron bars from the old pavilion’s windows and had lessened the use of narcotics and physical restraints on the patients. Dr. Gregory was seen as a good guy in the field, at a time when most medical professionals were largely ignorant about mental illness.
Before the hospital was built, The New York Times said it would be “one of the finest hospitals in the world for the treatment of mental disorders” and “thoroughly modern” at a cost of $3,000,000. (Unsurprisingly, by the time it was finished, the cost would be $4,300,000 ($66,000,000 today). It was designed as a single building with three separate units: 1) 10-stories to house administrative services, doctors’ offices, labs and a library; 2) 8-stories, for mild cases; 3) 8-stories, for more advanced cases. There were facilities for recreation and occupational therapy; physio-, electro- and hydro-therapy; an out-patient clinic; teaching facilities for medical students, and a special research clinic for the study and treatment of delinquency, crime and behavior problems, in collaboration with the Department of Correction, Criminal Courts and Probation Bureau.
Rooms were designed to house either one, two or three patients at a time. In a Mental Hygiene Bulletin, it was written that “special consideration has been given in the plans to incorporate within the building the appearance and aspect of home or normal living conditions with simple decorations and color tones believed to have the most soothing effect upon the patient.” One hundred of the six hundred beds were dedicated for the study and treatment of children, under the supervision of the Department of Education.
Completing the building was nothing short of dramatic and filled with accusations of corruption and mismanagement. Its lavish exterior juxtaposed against the great depression couldn’t have been more tone deaf to the city’s residents. When ground was broken on June 18, 1930, it was thought the building would be completed at the end of 1931. Almost a year later, in February 1931, the cornerstone was just being laid. Delays were plentiful. It reportedly took a year to choose the architect and another year to draw the plans, and then, according to the Acting Commissioner of Hospitals, “after the contractor had collected all the funds he could get, he left for Europe.”
The hospital partially opened in May 1933 with the 600-bed facility only ready for 375 patients. A formal dedication occurred later that year in November, where tribute was paid to Dr. Gregory for his vision. Dr. Gregory resigned from his post in 1934, amid an investigation of his division by the Commissioner of Hospitals, Dr. S. S. Goldwater. This formed a spectacular tit-for-tat-type relationship between Dr. Gregory and Dr. Goldwater, which The New York Times covered extensively. Dr. Gregory died in 1941.
Over the years, the building went from temple of health to a scary place you didn’t want to go, and was the subject of many films, novels and exposes. The hospital saw many celebrity patients. Norman Mailer was sent there after stabbing his wife in a drunken rage. William Burroughs after he chopped off his own finger to impress someone. Eugene O’Neill had several stays in the alcoholic ward. Sylvia Plath came after a nervous breakdown. And infamous criminals like George Metesky the “Mad Bomber,” and John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman, were briefly committed to the hospital.
In 1984, the city began transitioning the building into a homeless shelter and intake center, but much of it was left empty. Around 2008, a proposal to turn the building into a hotel surfaced. To developers, the building was naturally suited to such a use, given the H-shaped layout with long hallways and small rooms.
Rivington Baths
The Rivington Street Bath House at 326 Rivington Street, later renamed the Baruch Bath House, was the first in the city to be built with public funds. The ground-breaking for the bathhouse took place in December 1897; it opened on March 23, 1901.
Architects Cady, Berg & See designed the large, neoclassical building. They had become the go-to designers for municipal bath houses after the success of the People’s Bath, a public bath that had been privately funded by the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (the AICP). The People’s Bath opened in 1891 at 9 Centre Market Place, near Broome Street, on the block where the old Police Headquarters building still stands. The architects and Dr. Simon Baruch, regarded as the “father of the public bath movement in the United States,” were keen on German design and their widespread use of showers – which, at the time, were referred to as rain baths or ring showers because of the circular shower head, designed to keep hair dry. The Germans were using showers for mass bathing situations, such as in military barracks. Showers were cheaper to build, easier to keep clean, used less water and could get people in and out faster, and became the staple of bathhouses.
Dr. Simon Baruch, who the Rivington Street Bathhouse was eventually named after, emigrated from Germany to South Carolina when he was a teenager. He studied medicine and joined the Civil War as a surgeon on the confederate side. Captured at the Battle of Gettysburg, he was held as a prisoner of war for the duration of the conflict. He made his way to New York City in 1881, served as a physician on the Lower East Side, and achieved prominence in the New York medical field.
Dr. Baruch began advocating for public bathhouses in 1889. He was big on hydrotherapy, at the time a new concept in the United States, and this guided many of his endeavors. Municipal officials weren’t as sold on this concept that poor sanitation would equal poor physical health, but Baruch was tireless in promoting the utility of water and importance of a public bath system. For some reason, he was in the minority – even though in 1894, only 306 out of 255,000 tenements in New York City had bathtubs. “The people won’t bathe,” said then-Mayor Hugh Grant. But by 1895, Baruch finally convinced the State Legislature to pass a law that mandated cities with a population greater than 50,000 to establish and maintain free bath facilities.
Logistics around the new bath law and facilitation of public bathhouses caused some lag. One of the hiccups concerned their locations. Tompkins Square Park on the Lower East Side, then a predominantly German and Irish neighborhood, had been chosen as the location for the first bath. The residents couldn’t have been less thrilled by this prospect. They did not want to be living in the community thought to be so poor that they needed a public bath. Essentially, they said it should go to the newer Jewish and Italian immigrant communities, located further south. And they did not want the bathhouse to take away from their already too-little park space. Their opposition was heard; Tompkins Square was no longer a contender. There was also a question of whether public baths even had to be located in parks; the mayor and his committee on public baths thought it did; Baruch said they did not. Somehow, they came over to Baruch’s side and the spot on Rivington Street, already owned by the city, was chosen.
The style of the Rivington Street Bathhouse influenced the style of subsequently built baths in the city. William Paul Gerhard, author of Modern Baths and Bath Houses (1908), said that the exterior of a people’s bath – or public bath – should be easily recognizable so it would be easily found. But he also warned that it shouldn’t be so lavish that the poor wouldn’t want to come. The Rivington Street bath design wasn’t exactly modest and met criticism for its extravagance and cost—eventually totaling more than $95,000 ($2,995,000 in today’s dollars). Of course, after its immediate success, the AICP recommended that another 16 bathhouses be built to the same specifications, saying it was actually more economical to build (cost less per shower compartment) and to maintain for the long haul. They aimed for the ancient Roman public bath-look with classical pilasters, columns, arches and cornices, constructed with hefty materials like brick, terra cotta, stone marble and copper, and with ornamental iron work. Whatever its appearance, the bathing experience was pretty much the same throughout the city’s bathhouses.
At Rivington Street, the three-and-a-half story building was divided into two spaces for a dedicated men’s and women’s area, each with a waiting room. The men’s area was about 2/3 of the building with 45 rain baths, or, showers; the women had 22. A handful of bathtubs were on the upper floors. Each bath cubicle was divided into two parts – a dressing area and a shower, separated by a curtain. When a patron entered the bathhouse, they were given a number, and then they would wait for their number to be called for the next available cubicle. They usually had 20 minutes to undress, bathe and redress – Rivington had the capacity to accommodate 3,000 bathers per day on this timetable. Attendants controlled the water temperature, which ranged between 73 to 105 degrees F, and the duration of the shower – I’m sure it will come to no surprise to learn that the attendants soon began running a scheme, where patrons could sneak them five cents for a limitless bath time. Eventually they got caught and were fired. Pools were later added to the complex in 1917.
In 1939, Bernard Baruch, Dr. Baruch’s son, donated the land around the bathhouse to the city, and jurisdiction of the building went to the Parks Department. They renovated the bathhouse as a recreation center and added Baruch Playground. In the 1950s, the New York City Housing Authority built Baruch Houses, Manhattan’s largest public housing complex adjacent to the bathhouse. By 1975, the city’s fiscal crisis forced the facility to close, and has pretty much sat unused
In the Details
In the summer of 2018, I began work at the Municipal Archives as the lead archivist on the Manhattan Building Plans Project, a much-anticipated, years-long undertaking to process and rehouse more than 100,000 architectural drawings that had been filed with the Department of Buildings between 1866-1977. The drawings had been transferred to the Archives from the Department of Buildings in the aftermath of a less-than-successful microfilming project in the late 1970s. The microfilming vendor, believing the original material was going to be disposed of, haphazardly and messily re-wrapped the plans in acidic paper. They tightly tied each “bundle” with damaging twine and labelled with minimal, and often insufficient, identification.
My colleagues and I are processing and rehousing the plans to reestablish intellectual control over the material and to create more optimal retrieval and storage conditions. To do so, we un-roll the dusty bundles, identify the plans, sort, flatten, repair if damaged, count and catalog, carefully and neatly re-roll onto acid-free tubes, wrap with protective Mylar, and store in acid-free boxes.
We are organizing the plans according to BBL, or borough, block, and lot number, so that all the plans for all the buildings or structures built on a particular city lot, and all the changes and alterations made to an already existing building on that lot, are stored together. When sorting the plans, we verify the block and lot information and record it, as well as addresses, quantity of plans, dates, notes on architects, important features, and condition concerns. To date, we have processed and rehoused over 22,000 plans for buildings in lower Manhattan. They comprise all manner of architectural drawings—sections, elevations, floor plans, and details—as well as engineering and structural diagrams for every conceivable type of building—industrial, manufacturing, retail, financial, and residential. From stables to skyscrapers and everything in between.
Among the plans are obvious showstoppers, beautifully rendered elevations of well-known buildings splashed with color and architectural detail--what people think of when they think of historic New York City architecture. But most building plans are not that, and the vast majority of the tens of thousands of plans that we have viewed are far humbler and more mundane. They show alterations, fireproofing, elevator and boiler installations, signage, electrical work, and plumbing, plumbing and more plumbing. And they reveal a lot about the true nature of the building, the people who made and used it, and the city itself.
When you look through 22,411 plans of the details of New York City, day in, day out, what catches your jaded eye? What are the small things that delight or confound you and make you stop for a moment and show your colleagues or take a photo with your phone to refer to later or simply to show a friend? For me these stop-and-look-closer moments seem to fall into three different categories:
1. The “Awww! Pretty!” Plans
Finding beauty in unexpected places has been one of the highlights of the project. To see the intricate parts of a building drawn in two dimensions provides a new perspective that gives you the ability to appreciate the complexity and precision of something as ubiquitous as a foundation or a column or a plumbing fixture in a brand-new way.
2. The “Wait, what?” Plans
We process so many plans that you can’t take too much time perusing every drawing. But when a confounding phrase or image is spotted, you can’t help but look a little closer and do a bit of research. You can’t just let the Coloramas, movie theater train cars, and doughnut computers of the world pass you by.
3. The “That’s so cool!” Plans
There are some things that are just too fun not to pay attention to. Whether it’s a hand-drawn detail that shows a draftsman taking artistic liberties or a floor plan that proves New York City building façades could contain any and all sorts of interesting enterprises.
And I’ll close with one of the first drawings that caught my eye and is still one of my favorites It spans all three categories. It’s a beautiful drawing of a beautiful object, its history certainly deserves some further research, and the structure is a cool, and recognizable detail of New York City architecture.
Like many New Yorkers, the Building Plans Team is telecommuting now, and the plans are waiting for our return. And with many tens of thousands of plans remaining, who knows what else we’ll find.