Stanford White's 1901 Henry B. Hollins House -- 12-14 West 56th Street

photo by Alice Lum

The years following the Civil War saw New York’s wealthy citizens inching northward along Fifth Avenue.  As the turn of the century approached, the avenue below 59^th Street was lined with the mansions of the Vanderbilt family and their social equals.  Wide brownstone rowhouses on the side streets, originally built for middle-class families, were either razed and replaced with fashionable residences, or  remodeled and updated for their new, moneyed owners.

West 56^th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues would become known as Bankers’ Row as financiers like Henry Seligman, E. Hayward Ferry and Arthur Lehman of Lehman Brothers built elegant residences.   Here Harry Bowly Hollins would join the crowd.

Hollins was a close personal friend of J. P. Morgan.  A respected banker and broker, he founded the investment firm of H. B. Hollins & Co.  In 1899 he purchased the still-undeveloped lot at 12-14 West 56^th Street and his business partner and close friend Frederick Edey purchased the adjoining lot at No. 10; their planned homes would fill the last two empty lots on the block.

A snag due to an 1881 prohibition on construction as far as the lot line for twenty years forced Edey to wait two years to begin building.  In the meantime Hollins steamed ahead.   The foremost architectural firm in the country at the time was McKim, Mead & White and Hollins went right to the top.  Stanford White would take on the project, designing a cutting-edge neo-Georgian brick and limestone home.

The choice of the refined Georgian design was somewhat surprising.  While the Centennial had awakened interest in things colonial; New York’s upper class was still building Italian palazzi and French chateaux.  It would still be a few years before society embraced the style with such mansions as the Andrew Carnegie or Paul Tuckerman homes.  The Architectural Record recognized the trend and commented that “It is because McKim, Mead & White have been consciously seeking to naturalize certain European architectural forms in this country that they place their work in vital connection with the one living American architectural tradition.”

Completed in 1901, White’s structure was understated elegance.   The entrance was centered in the rusticated limestone first floor, above which three stories of brownish-red brick supported a stone cornice and balustrade.  White left a narrow courtyard between the Hollins house and the proposed Edey mansion.  



Miniature evergreens and vines grace the balconies five years after the house was completed -- Architectural Record July 1906

The Hollins property extended to West 55^th Street where an existing stable still stood—previously owned by Robert Bonner for his famous trotting horses.  Hollins and his wife, the former Evelina Knapp, moved in with their children, Marion, John, Harry and McKim.   Mrs. Hollins did not fit the mold of the socialite whose soul interests were gossip and teas; she was a member of the Archaeological Institute of America and a keen collector of fine art.

The 56^th Street mansion was used throughout the New York social season.  During the summer and early autumn months the Hollins lived and entertained in their Islip, Long Island estate Meadow Farm.

Things were going well for the family – or at least it seemed so to New York society and the banking industry—until October 1913 when the Hollins family quietly moved into the fashionable Hotel Gotham.   Hollins leased the mansion, fully furnished and including Mrs. Hollins’ valuable paintings and rare works of art, to Mrs. John Astor.  Mrs. Astor, the mother of Vincent Astor, agreed to pay $25,000 rent for the winter which included use of the adjoining 55^th Street stables.

The stables, in the meantime, were sold to a developer who intended to erect a “large apartment hotel” there; with the agreement that demolition would not start until Mrs. Astor’s lease expired.

A month later an attorney affixed a court order to the brass gates of Hollins’ grand Wall Street office.  The New York Times reported that “Then it was publicly known that one of the most highly regarded houses in Wall Street had collapsed.”

The scandal was no doubt crushing to the family which was referred to by The Times as “notable in New York’s society life.”    They left Manhattan and moved permanently into the Long Island home.   In January 1915 Mrs. Hollins’ collection of art and antiques from the 56^th Street house were auctioned off by the Anderson Galleries.  Included were paintings by Thomas Lawrence, Joshua Reynolds, Caravaggio and Romney.  The two-day auction netted $84,481.

Six months earlier the Calumet Club had met to vote on moving north from the clubhouse at Fifth Avenue and 29^th Street where they had been for a quarter of a century.   The Hollins house was suggested as a possibility; certainly taking over the mansion would preclude the expense of building.   Before 1915 the house was purchased for $400,000 and the club was opened in the new location.

The house was conveniently within what was becoming the new club district.   The Brickbuilder magazine noted in January 1916 that “The clubs in New York have been steadily moving farther and farther north, and while the University Club was for many years a solitary outpost at 54^th street and Fifth avenue, it is now no farther north than many of the others.  The pleasant new building of the Calumet Club is on 56^th street, just west of Fifth avenue.”

The club had been formed in 1879 by twenty young men from distinguished families.  They named it after the calumet, a tobacco pipe that the American Indians used in peace treaties.  Membership was limited to 300.

In 1924 architect J. E. R. Carpenter was commissioned to renovate the building.  He added a two-story extension in the courtyard, set back behind a one-story arched entrance.  The original centered entrance and portico were replaced by a window that deftly blended with the others.

Carpenter's addition included a new entrance, replacing the original centered doorway -- photo by Alice Lum

Despite being one of the oldest social organizations in the city, the Great Depression proved too much to withstand.  On May 31, 1935 the club was disbanded and the clubhouse closed.   In September the Hollins house was sold at foreclosure and became home to the antiques dealer Charles of London.

For the next decade commercial tenants would come and go, with the house sitting empty for periods.  The Salvation Army acquired it in 1943 to be used as a servicemen’s canteen during World War II.

Over the door a handsome cast iron ornament simulates a leaded fan light -- photo by Alice Lum

Finally in 1947 the government of Argentina purchased the mansion, renovating it as the Argentine Consulate.    The Hollins mansion remains astonishingly preserved; one of the few residences in the area to survive without significant commercial alteration.  The handsome Georgian house was designated a New York City landmark in 1984.

The Lost 1910 Pennsylvania Station

Pennsylvania State Archives

As McKim, Mead and White began their designs for the newest Pennsylvania Station just after the turn of the century, they turned to Imperial Rome for inspiration. When they were done, they presented New York City with the most dramatic and impressive train station in the country.

ArchitectureWeek.com W.W. Norton

Completed in 1910 at a cost of $112 million, the immense structure ran the length of two city blocks along 7th Avenue. Eighty-four giant pink granite columns supported the cornice and porticoes. Two grand carriage entrances mimicked the Brandenburg Gate. Carved granite eagles, each weighing 5,700 pounds perched on the cornice. Covering over seven acres, it was as historian Jill Jonnes called it, a “great Doric temple to transportation.”

Brandenburg Gate-Inspired Carriage Entrance 1910 NYPL Collection

The interior, however, was the show-stopper.

In its 1939 “New York City Guide” written for the Works Progress Administration, Random House described the progression of spaces. “The interior is a sequence of tremendous spaces. From a long, barrel-vaulted arcade, lined with shops, a marble stairway and escalators lead to the floor of the main hall. In this vast Hall, which is a copy of the Tepidarium of a Roman bath, are ticket booths and the information desk. Six murals by Jules Guerin depict scenes of the area served by the Pennslyvania Railroad. Along the west side are twin waiting rooms. Beyond them a great glass-roofed concourse gives access to the track platforms.”

The main hall was a copy of the Baths of Caracalla on a larger, grander scale. The vast space was approximately equal to the nave of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome – the largest interior space in the city, rising 15 stories upward. The concourse – a soaring conservatory of iron arches supporting a glass ceiling – was breathtaking. Writer Thomas Wolfe, overcome by its immensity, said that Penn Station was large enough to "hold the sound of time."

Glass and Iron Concourse 1935  NYPL Collection

Over 2000 railroad employees worked within the station and tens of thousands of passengers passed through it daily.  The station yard, part of which was below the concourse, covered 350,000 square feet requiring 650 steel foundation columns to support the floor.


Author Richard Guy Wilson in his 1983 “McKim, Mead & White Architects” said it “…was one of McKim's most monumental and moving designs, a giant of a building that still retained a human scale. In catching or meeting a train at Pennsylvania Station one became part of a pageant—actions and movements gained significance while processing through such grand spaces."

By the 1950s train travel was severely on the decline. The automobile and airplane took over as the preferred means of travel and the Pennsylvania Railroad felt the financial pinch. The cost of maintaining the colossal structure forced the railroad to attempt to divest itself from operating costs. Plans were announced to join forces with Madison Square Garden in 1961. The deal would provide the railroad with a new, air-conditioned station and a one-quarter stake in the new Madison Square Garden Complex.

Initially, nearly no one truly thought the monumental station would be demolished.

As plans progress, however, New York and the country in general, broke into two factions: those who felt that the razing of the old station and replacement with a new facility was progressive, and those who rallied against the loss of an architectural and historical treasure. There were no landmark preservation commissions nor legal means by which the destruction could be stopped, however.

On August 2, 1962 over 100 protesters wearing black armbands of mourning, almost all of them architects, picketed in front of Pennsylvania Station with placards that read “''Shame'' and ''Don't Amputate -- Renovate.''

Irving Felt, president of Madison Square Garden, found the preservationists to be a nuisance.  As the picketers marched he derided “Fifty years from now, when it’s time for [the new Madison Square Garden] to be torn down, there will be a new group of architects who will protest.”

But despite cries from the press, politicians and architects, the largest, grandest train station in America was pulled down.  Irving Felt offered no regrets. "It was not, architecturally, a monument," he said.

The world at large disagreed.



In its editorial “Farewell to Penn Station” on October 30, 1963 The New York Times wrote "Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance. Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed”

The American Institute of Architects lamented “New York seems bent on tearing down its finest buildings… No opinion based on the artistic worth of a building is worth two straws when huge sums and huge enterprises are at stake.”

And architectural critic Louise Huxtable chided “We are an impoverished society. It is a poor society indeed that can’t pay for these amenities; that has no money for anything except expressways to rush people out of our dull and deteriorating cities.”

Adding insult to injury, in place of the pink granite temple, New York received an eyesore. Costing $116 million, the new Madison Square Garden complex was, from the day it was dedicated, considered unattractive at best. Carl Condit called it a “prime candidate for the most poverty-stricken architecture in New York — indeed, it is questionable whether the structures and enclosures can be regarded as architecture at all.”

If anything positive was born from the destruction of Pennsylvania Station, it was the outrage felt throughout the city and the country. Within two years the Landmarks Preservation Commission was created and Penn Station was a rallying cry for preservationists nationwide.

The immense granite eagles survive, scattered around the city and in New Jersey. A few other architectural remnants were salvaged by art museums. But, otherwise, one of New York City’s monumental treasures is lost forever.