The 1894 Hotel Gerard - 123 West 44th Street

Photo NYPL Collection

Once Charles Frohman built the Empire Theatre at Broadway and 41st Street in 1893 the development of the entertainment district in Times Square was on.


As the theatres cropped up, developers William Rankin and Alexander Moore seized the newly-created opportunity. That same year they commissioned little-known architect George Keister to design a smart, residential hotel that could conveniently house well-to-do tourists and long-term occupants involved in the theatre.

In 1894 Keister’s hotel was completed. The tallest building in the area, it was meant to impress. A sophisticated blend of styles – Renaissance, Gothic and Romanesque – it rose 13 stories with bay windows, arches and balconies. Prominent, steep gables, reminiscent of Hardenbergh’s Dakota Apartments of a decade earlier, flanked central, exuberantly-decorated dormers.

The 362-room Hotel Gerard attracted the well-heeled, as intended. In January 1898 Colonel and Mrs. Richard Henry Savage celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary in the banquet hall. High-ranking military officials attended, as well as dignitaries from Russia, Siam, Austro-Hungary and Germany. The room was the site of similar impressive gatherings for years – such as the Baltimore & Ohio’s grand dinner for 250 in 1914.

Fortune, however, would not smile on the Hotel Gerard for long.

In 1916 and fire in the kitchen ousted 350 guests in their Edwardian night clothes into the street and caused $10,000 in damages. Some trapped guests clambered over the roof of the adjoining theatre and down through the skylight. The New York Times reported that “For half an hour after the fire the orchestra looked like a refugee camp.” The women, the paper said “were almost helpless through fear.”

Although the hotel remained a favorite among the theatre set – actors Albert Phillips, Arthur Burckly, character actress Josephine Williams (who lived here 25 years) and playwright Augustin Machugh all long-time residents – the hotel was attracting a seedier clientele.

In 1921 Harriet Pendleton Hunt, “of a well-known Cincinnati family,” was arrested in her room for passing a worthless $10,000 check. On October 29, 1923 a shoot-out among convicted bank robbers took place in the ninth-floor corridors. One escaped convict, 23-year old Thomas J. Gillen, was shot three times in the stomach while six others escaped.



Photo http://www.hotelaka.com/

More trouble came for the hotel, now called the Hotel Langwell, in 1928 when Metropolitan Opera diva Mme. Marie Rappold was drugged by a thief using a passkey to her room. She reported $75,000 worth of jewelry stolen. And in 1932 resident John Evans, whom The New York Times deemed “a thug,” was arrested for pistol possession and assault.

The hotel became the site of repeated suicides. Here William James Henderson, one of America’s most influential music critics shot himself; as did Washington Seligman, the brother of Mrs. Benjamin Guggenheim. Several female guests, by the 1940s, threw themselves from their hotel windows.

During the Depression, the Langwell was lost to foreclosure and sold by the Harlem Institution at auction in 1934 for $585,000. Twelve years later when it was sold again the building was cited for numerous fire hazards as the property continued to decline. Once again, in 1950, it was taken by foreclosure and sold for $700,000.

As the Times Square area eroded, the once-proud hotel fell into decrepitude. Apartments which at one time boasted libraries and sitting rooms were now broken up to tiny single-room occupancy warrens. On January 25, 1969 a raid on the Langwell seized over $1 million in pornographic tapes.

By the time Seymour B. Durst owned it in the 1970s, it was a squalid, welfare hotel called the 123 Hotel. The New York Times complained in June of 1973 that “the city's Human Resources Administration, through its welfare arm, is placing hundreds of drug addicts, mental cases and other unstable people into some 20 seedy hotels in the Times Square area, creating sanctuaries for thieves, pimps, prostitutes and muggers who, the police say, prey on pedestrians in the Times Square district.”

With the renaissance of Times Square in the 1990s came a reprieve. In 2007 the building was renovated and restored by Korman Communities as AKA Times Square – a post residential hotel of 105 suites, including duplex penthouses with terraces.

Photo http://www.hotelaka.com/

When the building was landmarked in 1982, the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission noted that “As in 1893, the Gerard dominates West 44th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues.  The handsome facade with carefully executed brickwork and curving bays and the striking gables and dormers make the Gerard among the most prominent buildings of the theater district.”

Manhattan and the Time-Ball



The world's first time-ball, built in 1833, sits atop the Royal Observatory in Greenwich -- photo by Jake Keup


Victorians had a problem when it came to their watches: How could you be sure your watch was accurate?

Before satellites or digital technology a slow watch could gradually become significantly off by ten minutes or more within just a few days. How could a railroad engineer make sure he was on schedule and, if he was, how could a passenger be positive he would arrive at the station on time?

The problem was acerbated by major cities running on their own time. Because of its more westerly location, noon in Savannah came 24 minutes later than it did in Washington DC.  Railroads in the United States pushed for standardized national time system as late as 1883; the companies arguing that such a system would simplify schedules and preclude train collisions.

One Georgia citizen was incensed at the idea, writing to the Savannah Morning News “The railroads can’t stop the sun, and they can’t dictate to the working world when it shall be 7 o’clock in the morning or 6 o’clock at night.”

But slight differences in time could not be tolerated by sailors. Navigation was dependent on accurate timepieces. If chronometers were inaccurate by only a few minutes, a course deviation of hundreds of miles could result.

To fix the problem the time-ball was invented.

British sea captain Robert Wauchope came up with the idea in 1818 and 15 years later passed along his perfected notion to the Admiralty, suggesting that a time-ball be erected in Greenwich.

The concept was, in fact, quite simple. A lightweight leather-covered wooden ball with a 20-foot flagstaff running through its center would be erected on a tall building. The ball would rise to the top by the use of halyards where an electro-magnet held the ball in place. When the ball-keeper received the signal announcing the precise time, he would interrupt the current and the ball would drop.

Anyone watching the ball could adjust their timepieces as the ball fell.

In October 1833 the Lord Commissioners of the Admiralty gave notice that “a time-ball will henceforth be dropped, every day, from the top of a pole on the Eastern turret of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, at the moment of one o’clock PM mean solar time.”

To give mariners ample time to prepare, the ball was hoisted half-way up the pole at five minutes as a warning. Three minutes later it rose to the top signaling that the ball drop was imminent.

Time-balls began appearing across the globe. They necessarily were associated with an observatory or connected to one by telegraph in order to discern the exact time.

When the British Government opened a hospital for sick seamen on the Island of St. Helena in 1856, it included “a Time-ball office for rating and correcting ships’ chronometers, at which the ball drops twice daily for the benefit of the shipping.” The Observatory overlooking Sydney Harbour in Australia was built in 1855 specifically to house the time-ball that fell for the first time in 1858.

A time-ball sits above a two-story building in Wellington Harbor, New Zealand

But while major towns and ports of call were installing time-balls American cities were not among them. In 1859 Taliaferro Preston Shaffner in his The Telegraph Manual complained “In America, we have a National Observatory, and though it has had but a few years’ existence, its fame has spread throughout the civilized world, and added new luster to our glory; but we have no time-balls in our maritime cities, to indicate the hour and the movement of the pendulum at Washington in our National Observatory.” Frustrated, he point out that in England where several time-balls had been installed “Persons can regulate their own timepieces, without the aid of the watchmaker.”

The 1855 time-ball in Deal, Kent, England

Finally in September 1877 New Yorkers had their own time-ball.  Western Union employee George M. Phelps designed and built a ball made of semicircular sheets of copper.  The sheets, some of which were crescents, reduced wind resistance.

The ball was installed on the top of the Western Union Building at 195 Broadway.  The ten-story building was, at the time, the tallest building in the city.  New Yorkers for blocks around could see the ball and easily adjust their watches.

As with most time-balls, it was hoisted partway up the staff at five minutes before the hour and all the way at two minutes before.  A signal from the U. S. Naval Observatory in Washington DC would drop the ball precisely at noon.  In the days before time zones, New York's ball would drop fully 12 minutes before the one in Washington in order to account for longitudinal differences.

By 1881 the U.S. finally had a few time-balls and the Western Union Telegraph Company of New York launched an investigation to test the accuracy of the device. According to S. P. Langley, Director of the Observatory in Washington D. C. on June 5 of that year, after a daily comparison of three separate locations and times, “The mean error of dropping such a time-ball here through the year would be less than one second.”

Time-balls were becoming indispensable, cropping up in the Cape of Good Hope, Madras, Bombay, New Zealand, Brighton and Washington DC.

Williamstown, Australia had a time-ball by 1861.

Adolph Ochs stole the time-ball idea for a marketing scheme. Ochs was the owner of The New York Times and in 1904, the year the newspaper opened its new Times Square headquarters, he put on a fireworks display at midnight on New Year’s Eve to show off his new building.  With around 200,000 people crowding into the Square, it was the beginning of a New York tradition.

But Ochs wanted something new and more iconic. For the 1907 celebration he had the firm’s chief electrician Walter F. Palmer build a lit time-ball that would drop from a flagpole at midnight from the top of One Times Square.  And with that another tradition was born.

By 1912 the Western Union Buildling had been dwarfed by skyscrapers rising around it.  The time-ball was obscured and ceased operation.  A new time-ball was badly needed.

When the RMS Titanic sank in April of that year, citizens of New York erected a monument in the form of a lighthouse in memory of the victims.  Included in the design was, finally, a time-ball for New York Harbor.

The lighthouse and time-ball were erected in 1913 at the top of the Seamen’s Church Institute Building on South Street. The ball was gilded to catch the sun and was dropped precisely at noon upon a signal from the Western Union offices– unlike many of the time-balls, such as the one in Greenwich, which dropped at 1:00.

After a year without one, New York harbor had a time-ball.

The Titanic Memorial Lighthouse and Time-Ball -- NYPL Collection

The ball dropped every day for decades, precisely at 12:00 noon. On March 1, 1962, however, it dropped twice. No sooner had the ball reached the bottom of the pole that day than it was quickly hoisted up again.

At 12:05 it was dropped again to signal the official start of the ticker-tape parade up Broadway honoring astronaut Lt. Col. John H. Glenn, Jr. The New York Times remarked that “None of the historians at the South Street institution could recall that the ball had ever done double duty before.”

Only six years later the Seamen’s Institute building was demolished and the lighthouse and time-ball were removed to South Street Seaport where neither functions.

The Times Square time-ball still drops, of course, every New Year’s Eve at midnight. However it is not recognized as a functioning time-ball because it does not do (and never has done) daily duty.

Manhattan's remaining functioning time-ball does not get official recognition due to its infrequent schedule.

Only four time-balls remain functioning world-wide since the historic tower of the Lyttelton Timeball Station in New Zealand was destroyed by the earthquake of June 2011.

The historic time-ball tower Christchurch, New Zealand was destroyed in 2011.

The Father Francis P. Duffy Statue -- Times Square

photo museumplanet.com

“I am a very Irish, very Catholic, very American person, if anybody challenges my convictions.  But normally and let alone, I am just plain human.”

And that is how Father Francis Patrick Duffy described himself in the preface to his 1920 autobiography “Father Duffy’s Story.”   New Yorkers, however, disagreed.  Father Duffy was anything but “just plain human.”

Things started out calmly enough for the priest.  He was ordained in 1896 and, upon graduating from the Catholic University of America in Washington DC, he was sent to St. Joseph’s Seminary in New York as Professor of Psychology and Ethics.  Duffy had been Army chaplain during the Spanish-American War and, after becoming pastor of Our Savior Catholic Church in the Bronx, was made chaplain of the 165^th National Guard Unit of the 42^nd Division – formerly the 69^th  Infantry Regiment  – the year World War I broke out in Europe.

And that’s when things changed for the Irish priest.

The unit was dubbed “The Fighting 69^th” by Confederate General Robert E. Lee and remembered in an Irish-American folk tune “The Fighting 69^th” for its Civil War exploits.  The 165^th would always be the 69^th to its soldiers.

With America’s entry into the war in 1917, the regiment was shipped off to fight.  Among the soldiers was poet Joyce Kilmer, a sergeant.  On the ship transporting the troops across the Atlantic, he described the men lining up for confession with Father Duffy “as long as the mess-line.”

If officers expected the chaplain to wait passively for the soldiers to return so he could administer rites and dispense priestly wisdom, they were wrong.  By the end of the war, Duffy was the most highly decorated chaplain in U.S. Army history – earning the Distinguished Service Cross and the Distinguished Service Medal from the U.S. and the Legion d’Honneur and Croix de Guerre from the French military.

While on the front lines, Joyce Kilmer was writing the story of the regiment in battle.   A year after the unit’s deployment, the writer was killed at the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918, at 31 years old.  Father Duffy picked up Kilmer’s notes and finished the project.

When the war was finally over, Duffy quietly returned to New York City to take up his duties as pastor of Holy Cross Church in Hell’s Kitchen, just a block from Times Square – a gritty area of mostly Irish immigrants living in poverty.  He died on June 26, 1932.

Almost immediately a movement was begun to honor the hero priest with a monument.    On September 10, 1935 the Municipal Art Commission gave preliminary approval to a model of a statue designed by sculptor Charles Keck to be erected in the large, triangular traffic island in Times Square where Broadway and 7^th Avenue intersect above 47^th Street.

The dramatic and powerful design depicted Duffy in the uniform of the 69th, helmet at his feet, holding a bible.  Behind the soldier-priest a monolithic green granite Celtic cross rose.

The monument was completed in the Spring of 1937 and as the city prepared for its unveiling, renowned photographer Berenice Abbot chanced upon the tightly-wrapped statue one day in April.    The unusual subject was too much to pass up and Abbot began assembling her tripod and setting up the shot.

Before long a curious crowd assembled to watch the photographer’s work.   A Times Square beat cop was not as interested in her art.  Berating her for causing a public disturbance he ordered her to move on.  Abbott took one hasty shot and packed up.  “I wasn’t smart about fighting back them,” she later lamented.

A few days later, on May 2, the statue was unveiled.  “Before the eyes of 30,000 persons massed in Times Square yesterday,” reported The New York Times, “white surpliced altar boys held aloft a crucifix and candles, there was unveiled the statue of a Roman Catholic priest in the uniform of a soldier of the A. E. F.”

Berenice Abbot's pre-unveiling shot produced a curious crowd and the ire of a Times Square cop.

The finished bronze statue is nearly 8 feet tall and the green granite cross tops 17 feet.  The traffic island on which it sits was renamed Father Duffy Square.   Only eight years after it was dedicated, the statue was nearly lost when the city considered melting it down in 1943 for scrap metal for the war effort.

In 1941, the year the U.S. entered World War II, sailors admire the Duffy statue.  Two years later the City would decide whether or not to destroy it for scrap metal -- Rodney McCay Morgan/New York City Parks Photo Archive

Father Duffy Square has seen dramatic changes since that Spring day in 1937 when the statue was unveiled.  Throngs of tourists and New Yorkers alike pass the monument daily in bustling Times Square.  The modern TKTS booth now forms the statue’s backdrop.

Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia presides over the dedication ceremonies on May 2, 1937 -- photo army.mil

The monument was restored in 1997 with money provided by the Times Square Business Improvement District when it was conserved and repatined.    The powerful depiction of Duffy was included on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001.

Thomas Lamb's 1928 Paramount Hotel -- 46th Street and Broadway

photo by Alice Lum

In the first decades of the 20th Century the theater district was establishing itself in the Time Square area.  Architect Thomas Lamb was busy designing ornate theaters like the Mark Strand, the Rialto and the Rivoli Theatres, all in the Times Square neighborhood.

A change of pace would come for the architect when Spear Construction Company bought up a group of small lots at 8th Avenue and 46th Street, then sold them as a package in 1926. Speculative investors Isidore Zimmer, Frank Locker and Samuel Reznick purchased the property with big plans in mind.

The New York Times reported that the team would erect an 18-story hotel costing $3.5 million called the Hotel Paramount. There would be 612 rooms, a grill room complete with dancing and entertainment, and a theater.

The lobby and mezzanine would be in the Spanish Renaissance style. There would be an intimate dining room for 22 patrons, and a row of nine retail shops along 46th Street. And theater architect Thomas Lamb would design it all.

The owners promised New Yorkers that the proposed hotel would “meet the demands of discriminating patrons who desire first-class accommodations at a moderate cost. This hotel will compare with the finest hotels in the city.”

The gargantuan structure, a story higher than originally planned, was completed in 1928, one of the first of the Times Square hotels. There were fully 700 rooms in the hotel and at the formal opening on June 5, 1928, 2000 keys were turned over to the custodians.

postcard from author's collection

Lamb combined his sense of drama so necessary in theater design with the lofty, elegant elements expected in a top notch hotel. His soaring French Renaissance pile sat on a series of two-story white marble arches that created the retail and lobby openings, crowned at the top by a massive multi-story copper mansard roof.

Terra cotta moldings, swags and keystones were reserved for the lower floors, visible to the passersby, while on the top most floors enormous urns, pediments and balconies drew interest from the distance.

Enormous urns, brackets and window pediments ornament the upper floors -- photo by Alice Lum

The grill room inside was modeled after a Spanish patio and featured dancing and live entertainment. The space was “cooled by refrigerated air” to refresh Jazz Age diners during the hot summer months.

The Grill Room featured top-notch entertainers and nearly was padlocked during Prohibition -- postcard from author's collection

Unfortunately, those same diners were refreshed by other means during those Prohibition days and in July of 1930 a padlock suit was brought against the grill by the Assistant United States Attorney on liquor charges. The grill managed to survive, however, and featured jazz performances for years.

A stylized, 1950s depiction of the hotel -- postcard from author's collection

Prohibition and the Great Depression dealt a serious blow to the Hotel Paramount and by 1935 it was in foreclosure; yet it managed to plod along through a series of ownerships.

Billy Rose, the Broadway song writer and impresario, opened “Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe” nightclub in the lower level of the Paramount in 1938. Here “Billy Rose’s Long-Stemmed Beauties,” the chorus girls, performed along with some of the nation’s most celebrated entertainers; among them Dick Haymes and W. C. Handy.

The club inspired the 1945 musical motion picture "Diamond Horseshoe," featuring Betty Grable and was notorious, according to Ruth Prigozy’s book “The Life of Dick Haymes,” for “cheap food and drinks and scantily clad chorus girls.”

The Diamond Horseshoe continued entertaining tourists and New Yorkers alike until 1951.

Like many of the vintage Time Square hotels during the later years of the 20th Century, the Hotel Paramount suffered neglect, declining into a dingy and avoided relic by the time Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell purchased it in 1986.  Two years later Schrager closed the entire hotel for a year-and-a-half renovation. The exterior, not yet landmarked, was restored rather than modernized.  Schrager’s remodeling worked and, when it reopened, the hotel more than doubled its previous occupancy.

Two years later, in 1990, Schrager commissioned Philippe Starck to redesign the common areas and reopened it as the Paramount Hotel.  The theatrical, period interiors by Lamb were replaced with the sleek lines and bold tones that had made the designer famous. New York Magazine called it a “time capsule of late20th century chic…a grand staircase with a glass-walled banister touches down in a landscape of mismatched furniture – fuchsia couches, rustic armchairs, and sleekly lacquered mahogany desks.”

Philippe Stark's lobby design -- photo by Paramount Hotel

Again in 1998 a renovation was done, lasting seven months and costing $7 million, which included lobby lighting.

Ian Schrager sold the Paramount to Sol Melia Hotels and Resorts and the Hard Rock Café as a joint venture in 2004 for $126 million. The buyers did a $40 million renovation in 2009; the same year the building was deemed a New York City landmark. Stark’s lobby was modernized and public spaces totally redone.

By 2011 it was owned by Walton Street Capital and Highgate Holdings when, on February 11, Crain’s New York Business hinted that “The Paramount Hotel, a godfather of the boutique lodging industry, is going on the block.”

The hint came to fruition when in June German-born Aby Rosen, who already owned familiar Manhattan properties like the Seagram Building and Lever House, purchased the hotel for $275 million.

While the often-changed interiors are apt to get another make-over with the latest change in owners, the exterior of Thomas Lamb’s grand French Renaissance hotel remains unchanged; a dignified and lavish standby in the Times Square district.