The Hallenbeck-Hungerford Bldg - 80 Lafayette St

photo by Alice Lum

U. T. Hungerford was the guest of honor at a banquet on Wednesday night, December 14, 1922 at New York City’s Hotel Biltmore.  It was a celebration of the metal mogul’s 80^thbirthday.  Hardware Dealers’ Magazine summed up the industry’s estimation of the man saying “Because of his prominence and years of uninterrupted service in his chosen field, Mr. Hungerford is by many called the ‘Dean of the Brass and Copper Industry.’”

photo Hardware Dealers' Magazine, January 1922 (copyright expired)

By the time of the dinner, Hungerford was also president of the Hungerford Securities Corporation, founder of the Hallenbeck-Hungerford Realty Corporation, and was involved with several other firms related to the copper industry.

Hungerford was born into the copper business.  One of 12 children of John and Charlotte Austin Hungerford, his father had built the first brass mill in Torrington, Connecticut in 1834.  U. T. Hungerford arrived in New York in 1865 as the representative and manager of Wallace & Sons, a brass and copper rolling mills in Ansonia, Connecticut; then established the U. T. Hungerford Brass & Copper Co. in 1895.

The firm’s success was unparalleled and by 1909.  Its 10-story building at the southeast corner of Park and Pearl Streets bordered on the area condemned for the construction of the new Court House.  The City tossed around the possibility of including the U. T. Hungerford building as part of an extended site.

Frustrated, Hungerford and his partner in the real estate firm of Hallenbeck-Hungerford took matters in their own hands.  They purchased land on the southwest corner of Lafayette and White Streets, extending through to Franklin Street, and began plans for a new structure.  “Harry C. Hallenbeck stated last week that he has waited upon the city for about four years to formulate a decision as to what it intended doing, and had become so tired of the delay that he proposed to begin the reconstruction of the lower portion of the Park and Pearl Streets building,” reported The New York Times on July 20, 1913.

The Real Estate Record & Builders' Guide published a sketch of the proposed building on May 23, 1914 (copyright expired)

The plans for the new building were well underway by the time of The Times article.  In January that year The Bridgemen’s Magazine had announced that W. E. Austin had filed plans for a 17-story printing house with an estimated cost of $1.2 million—a jaw-dropping $27.5 million today.

On May 23, 1914 the Real Estate Record & Builders’ Guidereported that the tenant list of the uncompleted building was already filling.  “U. T. Hungerford Brass & Copper Company will occupy the ground floor, basement and second floor.  The Wynkoop, Hallenbeck, Crawford Company will occupy about four floors.  Several leases will probably be signed with other tenants within the next few days, as the demand is heavy for space from lithographers, printers, publishers and the diamond trades.”

A real estate advertisement cautioned prospective tenants that space was almost gone -- New York American Real Estate Review and Forecast 1915 (copyright expired)

By now the cost of construction had risen to $2 million.  The Guide called William E. Austin’s design “the most modern building in all its appointments downtown, and is particularly adapted for tenants using heavy machinery, where strength is necessary.”

The New York Times anticipated on April 26, 1914 that the completed building “will be the finest manufacturing building down town.”  It mentioned modern conveniences like “fast contraction elevators, mail chutes, lowerators, ventilating system, etc.”

Architecture & Building published two views of the completed building in December 1915 (copyright expired

The new Hallenbeck-Hungerford building was completed before January 1915 when Architecture and Building reported on its structural integrity and mechanical operations.  It paused in its engineering report to notice that “The marble work, mosaic and tile work was done by D. H. McLaury Marble Company, the hallway on the Lafayette Street side being paneled in marble of rich appearance.”

The lobby was decidedly no-nonsense despite the gnome-shaped brackets and "marble of rich appearance" Architecture and Building December 1915 (copyright expired)

Austin had used granite for the three-story Gothic base.  Cast metal spandrels, two-story arches and carved stone details carried on the Gothic motif.  Above, nine stories of buff brick were barely ornamented; but were capped by three stories of exuberant terra cotta that picked up the Gothic theme.

High above the street whimsical gnomes and heraldic shields carry on the Gothic theme -- photo by Alice Lum

Like Architecture and Building, The Inland Printer, in March 1915, was most interested in the engineering aspects of the structure.  But it made special note of one innovative item.  “Rest-rooms have been provided for women employees.”

As intended, the building’s ability to support massive loads drew lithographers, printers and related firms.  Among the first tenants was Craske-Felt Company, Inc., electrotypers.  “Curved lead mould a specialty,” announced an advertisement in 1917.

In January 1918 the United States Marine Corps took over the Ford Instrument Company when a strike got out of hand.  The plant was manufacturing wartime articles necessary for national defense which were deemed “highly confidential.”  When 250 men walked out because a foreman had fired a fellow employee, manufacturing could not cease.

According to The Sun on January 12, Ford Instrument officials called the police for protection.  “The dilemma was then referred to the Department of Justice, which in turn communicated with the Navy Department at Washington.

“As a result, for the first time since the beginning of the war a company of United States marines marched into the city last night and took charge of the plant.”  The presence of the military changed the minds of the strikers.  “At a later hour in the night Jules Breuchaud, president of the concern, and John B. Goldsborough, treasurer, said that the trouble had been adjusted.”

photo by Alice Lum

A month after the marines left Lafayette Street, the Hallenbeck-Hungerford Building would have something even more serious to contend with.  As the structure was still rising Building Systems Design had reported on the innovative air cooling system that used cool water from a deep well in the building’s basement.  The water would also be used for “flushing purposes.”

But someone decided that the artesian well water could be used more generally.  The Sun, on February 20, 1918, wrote “the owners sank an artesian well on the premises in May, 1915.  Water was pumped to the roof and distributed to washrooms and drinking faucets.”

What seemed like an efficient use of free, clean water turned out to be disastrous.  Julia Healy was 24-years old in 1915.  She and her sister, May, were both employed by Lupton Press in the building.  In August that year the sisters and other girls employed in the firm began to notice a strange taste and color to the water.

Julia and May Healy died within 14 hours of each other on September 13, 1915.  A Board of Health inspector found colon bacilli in the water—the sisters had died of typhoid.  At least a dozen other girls working in the Hallenbeck-Hungerford Building contracted the disease.

On February 19, 1918 a jury ruled in favor of Dennis Healy, the girls’ father, in a lawsuit against Hallenbeck-Hungerford Realty.  He was awarded $5,000 for Julia’s death.  A similar suit for May’s death was still pending.

The publicity of the tragic deaths may have discouraged some applicants when their former employer ran an advertisement in the New-York Tribune on September 14, 1919.  “Good pay, congenial surroundings, permanent positions, opportunity for rapid advancement for intelligent young ladies over 16 years…F. M. Lupton, Publisher, 80 Lafayette st. N.Y.”

The year 1919 was one of intense labor disputes within the printing industry and tenants of the Hallenbeck-Hungerford Building had their hands full.  On October 1 The Evening World reported “Further walkouts of compositors were features of the day’s developments in the labor disturbances in New York’s printing industry.”  The workers demanded a 44-hour work week and $50 scale.

At some companies, workers walked out en masse; at others foremen were informed by workers one-by-one that they were “going on a vacation.”  Among the printing firms struck that day was that of Isaac Goldman in the Hallenbeck-Hungerford Building.  Four days later the compositors of Lipschitz Press walked out, to be followed on October 9 by the workers at Bradstreet’s “in a demand for shorter hours,” explained The Sun.

The Hallenbeck-Hungerford monogram appears in the arch spandrels -- photo by Alice Lum

In the meantime U. T. Hungerford Brass Co. continued to prosper.  The successful operation demanded skilled office help and on March 14, 1920 an advertisement was placed in the New-York Tribune for a Dictaphone operator.  “Experienced, accurate transcriber, able to turn out neat, well-written work; hours 8:30 to 5; half day Saturday; state age, experience and salary desired.”  Five months later the firm was looking for typists.  “Experienced operators on Underwood machine.”  The hours were the same; but salary was “depending upon ability to produce.”

The building continued to attract large printing firms.  In August 1922 the Klim, Lindner & Bauer lithographer firm took the entire 15^th floor, signing a 10-year lease at $200,000.  The same year McClure Publishing, producers of McClure’s Magazine, was in the building.

Gardiner Binding was also here in 1922--a long term tenant -- American Printer and Lithographer December 20, 1921 (copyright expired)

Around 1970 the tenant list changed from printers and publishers to governmental offices.  The Department of Consumer Affairs, the Union Dental Center and the Child Welfare Administration all had their offices in the building until 1998.

photo by Alice Lum

Then, in 1999, New York University converted the massive structure to Lafayette Hall, a residence building housing nearly 1,100 upperclass students.  It was the scene of a bizarre accident in November 2013 when student Asher Vongtau, 19 years old, went missing for two days.  He was found wedged at the bottom of a 2-foot wide shaft between the building and a parking garage.  Somehow Vongtau had fallen off the roof and become stuck between the buildings where he was trapped for 36 hours before being discovered.

No. 3 Washington Square North

For nearly a century some of America's most famous artists passed through the doors of No. 3 -- photo by Alice Lum

In the mid-19^th century, the problem of unwanted babies born to unwed mothers was a serious problem.  The stigma surrounding a bastard birth often resulted in infants being abandoned on the steps of churches of orphanages, or worse, simply discarded.  Dr. Parry told the Social Science Association in 1871 “The mothers become outcasts from society if their indiscretion is made public, so that but one of two courses is left for them to pursue—to rid themselves of the burden by criminal means, or to abandon it.”

The death rate of the foundlings in New York at the time was around 78 percent.  However the New-York Tribune maintained on May 13 of that year “Death, however, is not the saddest fate awaiting these wretched ‘step-children of Nature.’  The hereditary taint touches soul as well as body.  A bastard child implies not only vice in the past, but hints too often at vice to come.”

To address the problem, at least in part, the Sisters of Charity established the New York Foundling Hospital on October 11, 1869.  On that same night a baby was left at the doorstep of their temporary home on East 12^th Street.   Within two months they had taken in 123 unwanted babies and on January 1, 1870 they took over the former mansion of J. Thorne at No. 3 Washington Square North.

The house was one of a row of elegant Federal style mansions that ringed the fashionable park.  The nuns’ tireless work was admired by most; however some Victorian matrons felt that harboring the spawn of illicit intercourse a bad idea.   Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose told a meeting of the Sorosis that she felt foundling hospitals “would tend to increase the crime.”

The Sun quoted her as saying “The evil would never be remedied until men were punished as well as women.  Women were ostracized, deprived of every hope for the future, while man, the enticer, seducer, the perpetrator of the crime, held up his head as high as ever, and was to be met the same as before in the church, the state, and worse yet, in the drawing rooms.”

Despite some backlash, the Foundling Hospital thrived and in 1873 moved to larger quarters on East 68^th Street.  The nuns’ departure was the first step in what would be the end of the aging mansion on the still-fashionable Washington Square.  Greenwich Village was quickly becoming the artist colony of New York.  The nearby 10^th Street Studios Building had been constructed in 1858 solely to provide housing and proper studio space for artists.

In 1884 the mansion and its stable directly behind were demolished and a studio building erected.   Completed the following year, the four-story, red brick building generally followed the contemporary apartment building plan.  A traditional stoop rose above a deep basement rose to the offset entrance that led to the stairway hall.  Floor-to- ceiling windows allowed ample natural light to flood the spaces.  Brownstone and terra cotta trim embellished the façade.  The extra height of the openings resulted in the studio building rising a bit higher than its venerable neighbors.

Large windows allowed ample natural light into the studios -- photo by Alice Lum

Rooms on a lower floor were taken as the clubhouse of the newly-formed Canadian Club.  In 1885 it advertised “The Canadian Club desires all Canadians in New-York to send their names and addresses to its rooms at No. 3 North Washington-square.”   The New York Times called the rooms “very pleasant quarters” and noted on June 28, 1885 they “are not being furnished by Herts Brothers.  The club has enrolled nearly all of the prominent Canadians residing in New-York.”   The opening dinner was held on July 1 of that year but, unfortunately, Herts Brothers was apparently late in delivery and there was no furniture.  “A few temporary decorations were put up in the large parlor last night, and two long tables were set for about 80 persons,” said The Times.

The studio building rose slightly above the old mansions -- photo Bryon Company from the Collection of the Museum of the City of New York http://collections.mcny.org/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult_VPage&VBID=24UP1GHBSDF7&SMLS=1&RW=1280&RH=894

In the meantime the building filled with some of the city’s most esteemed artists.  In 1886 Lyell Car, who studied in l’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris was here, along with Will H. Low, Walter Shirlaw and Abbott Handerson Thayer.  Shirlaw would remain in the building through the turn of the century.

Dennis Miller Bunker took the stop floor studio in 1889.  Among the works he painted here was his acclaimed “Jessica.”  He described his new living and working quarters as “a funny little hole” that was “perched way up like a pigeon-house.” Other artists in the building at the time included Thomas Dewing and Charles A. Platt.

By 1893 Mary E. Tillinghast lived and worked here.  The financially-comfortable stained glass artist and decorator hired Hugo Cedarberg in 1892 as her bookkeeper.  The 28-year old accountant, whom The New York Timesdescribed as “a Swede,” gained Tillinghast’s “most implicit confidence.”

Her confidence was shaken when she looked over her canceled checks in March 1893.  She did not remember signing a few and took a trip to her bank on Fifth Avenue and 44^thStreet.   Mary Tillinghast and the bank president, A. D. Frizzel, examined over her account and found $1,200 worth of checks made out to Cedarberg and endorsed by him.  The forgery would amount to about $25,000 today.

The Swedish bookkeeper was arrested and he explained his crimes.  Some of the money had been used “for purchases made in fitting up a good style his bachelor quarters in West Fifty-seventh Street,” said The Times.  “A good part of the money had been absorbed by a young woman named Nellie Audley, the rent of whose flat at 101 West Thirty-eighth Street he had been paying for some months.  He had also presented this young woman with a diamond pin, for which he paid $150.”

Mary took greater care in watching her bank books and continued with her art.   That same year she received a gold medal at the Chicago Exposition, and two years later earned a bronze medal at the Cotton States Exposition.  By the time she died in her studio here in 1912 it was reported “there is hardly a large city in the United States which does not own some specimen of her craft.”

While architecturally up-to-date in most respects, the building was not heated.  The artists worked in spaces warmed only by cast iron stoves and they lugged hods of coal from the basement level up to their studios.  While Mary Tillinghast worked on stained glass windows, other artists products oils, water colors and sculptures.

In October 1899 Florian Peixxoto completed a large work depicting the landing of Christopher Columbus for the new Columbian Theatre in Cincinnati.  The artist completed the 30 by 10 foot canvas in less than a month, causing The New York Times to call it “a feat hardly less remarkable than that of Millais when he painted his first Pre-Raphaelite picture.”

Sculptor and painter Benjamin C. Porter moved in just after the turn of the century, as did Frank Wilbert Stokes.    By the time he moved in in 1902, Stokes was widely known for having accompanied Admiral Peary on his Arctic exploration expeditions in 1892 and 1893.  In 1901 through 1902 he joined the expedition of Dr. Otto Nordenskjold to the Antarctic.  While on these trips, he produced dozens of canvases of the aurora borealis, icebergs, arctic animals and Eskimo life with titles like “Blueberg,” “Aurora Australis,” The Great Inland Ice,” and “The Draed and Spiral Form of Aurora.”

In 1909 Stokes would complete a series of murals of the Arctic in day and night and of the life of the Eskimos of Smith Sound for the American Museum of Natural History.

As World War I erupted in Europe, other artists established their studios here; among them were Mary Foote, Walter Ernest Tittle, and the new-comer Edward Hopper, who took the sky-lit top floor studio that Bunker had called his “funny little hole.”  In 1918 the virtually unknown Hopper entered The Sun’s “Ship Poster Competition” and won the $300 first prize by unanimous consent.  The anti-German poster titled “Smash the Hun” depicted an American factory worker welding a heavy sledge hammer against upturned bayonets.  The Sun called it “Strong, direct, easy to comprehend and easy to remember.  It gives its message in true poster style.”



Hopper's propaganda poster won first prize --photo http://www.museumsyndicate.com/images/1/9426.jpg

A student of Robert Henri of the Ashcan School, Hopper had sold only one other work to date.  It would be another five years before he sold his second painting when the Brooklyn Museum bought one in 1923.  This was the break that set Edward Hopper on the road to artistic fame.  Eventually fifty-five museums would own his paintings, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, the Chicago Art Institute, the Boston, Philips Memorial Gallery, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Terra cotta and stone trim provide the facade's restrained ornamentation -- photo by Alice Lum

 

By now the Washington Square neighborhood had changed.  The wide mansions were broken up into apartments, or razed for modern buildings.  Frank Stokes complained to The Evening World on July 19, 1920, “The new art set of the Village, with their bizarre tea rooms, advanced art and letters, have seized upon the place.  As a result the would-be Bohemians have been attracted to the Quarter for ‘its atmosphere’ and real artists are being crowded out.”

Stokes and Hopper, however, had no intention of being crowded out and hung firmly on to their still-primitive studios.  Decades later, in 1955, The New York Times would say “In his top-floor studio, warmed by a pot-bellied stove for which Mr. Hopper lugs coal from the basement, he works long over each picture.  He rarely turns out more than three oils a year.”

But the artists’ studios were threatened earlier when in 1946 New York University purchased the building.   The school was flooded with former GIs home from the war and additional space was direly needed.  The university told reporters that when leases were up, “the space will help relieve congestion from the record enrollment of 38,500 students.”

Faced with eviction, the artists dug in.  On February 4, 1947 The New York Timesdefined the “battle lines” with New York University on the offensive “bursting with 12,000 GI students” against “the tenants at No. 3, whose lofty, chilly halls have long been cherished by artists, poets and others who don’t mind a bit of discomfort if the atmosphere is right.”

Artist Josephine Barry sketched the building, in 1947, when its fate was threatened by NYU -- from the Collection of the Museum of the City of New York, http://collections.mcny.org/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult_VPage&VBID=24UP1GHBSDF7&SMLS=1&RW=1280&RH=894&PN=5#/SearchResult_VPage&VBID=24UP1GHBSDF7&SMLS=1&RW=1280&RH=894&PN=5

The university stood its ground, intent on eviction.  But the artists were equally committed.  “But we’d always been led to believe we could stay here always,” portrait artist Jane Gray told reporters.  “Walter Pach, who once taught fine arts at N.Y.U., lives here, and Edward Hopper, and F. W. Stokes, who was the artist with Peary in the Arctic.

“We can’t just slink out—even if there were other places to be had with such good lighting.  We’re going to fight, and if we must go it’ll be with our heads high, knowing that we’ve tried to preserve the tradition.”

The conflict ended up in court.  New York University art instructor Joseph Pollet, a tenant, spoke of the building “where you have to carry your own coal up and your garbage and ashes down, but the north light is perfect and the rent is within an artist’s means.”  Frank Stokes said that his parents and his brother died in the building and he “had expected to remain there the rest of his life.”

In May 1947 New York University received the news that it had lost the law suit over tenant evictions.  The artists could stay.

One-by-one, over the next two decades, the artists would leave—the leases of some terminated only by death.  On February 14, 1955 the 96-year old Frank W. Stokes died.  He had been working on sketches up to the point that he contracted pneumonia only a few days earlier.  In 1967 Edward Hopper died in his top floor studio at the age of 84.  One of his oil paintings, “On My Roof,” had depicted the rusty angles of his skylight from the tar-papered roof.

photo by Alice Lum

The building at No. 3 Washington Square North that had sheltered some of America’s most brilliant artists for more than three quarters of a century became NYU’s Graduate School for Social Work.  And it gained central heating.

photo by Alice Lum

The Benedick - New York's 1879 Bachelor Pad

It was  not always easy for Victorian bachelors to find acceptable lodging. Unmarried men, it seems, were looked upon with suspicion by many landlords and boarding house owners. “That fortunate or unfortunate class,” said the New York Tribune on August 8, 1879, were often “refused tenancy in the better class of flats.” This problem did not escape the notice of Lucius Tuckerman, a wealthy iron manufacturer who lived at No. 22 Washington Place.

Intrigued by a new concept in apartment house management, Tuckerman contracted architects McKim, Mead and Bigelow (Stanford White would not join the firm for a few months) to design an apartment building exclusively for bachelors. He chose 80 Washington Square East as the site, within sight of his elegant townhouse.

Photograph NYPL Collection

 

The Tuckerman Building was finished in the fall of 1879; a restrained red brick structure with stone trim and cast iron bay windows on the three middle floors. Probably because of his interest in the arts – not only was he vice-president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a life member of the National Academy of Design, he owned a “fine collection of pictures” – Tuckerman had four artist’s lofts constructed on the sixth floor where natural sunlight could pour in. In all there were thirty-three apartments marketed to unmarried men who would pay a yearly rent of between $350 and $550.

The tenants bathed using bowls and pitchers; the designers having opted against sinks and plumbing “for the sake of keeping out sewer gas,” as reported by The New York Tribune. There was, however, a 24-hour elevator.

To make life easier for a womanless male, the building offered maid service, a bootblack and, if the tenant desired, the janitor would provide breakfast from the basement.

Before long The Tuckerman became known by the tongue-in-cheek name, “The Benedick” – a literary nod to the confirmed bachelor in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.

Quickly, possibly because of the lofts, the building was filled largely with artists. By 1880 Winslow Homer, John LaFarge, Alder Weir and George Maynard were living there. Albert Ryder moved in and stayed for a decade.

A few years later Stanford White, whose wife preferred to stay at their Long Island estate, rented rooms here for a group calling themselves “The Sewer Club.” The architect's friend, John LaFarge, was a member. Because of White’s reputation as a womanizer, historians hint that the rooms were used for “private parties and illicit encounters,” according to Emily Kies Folpe in It Happened On Washington Square.

It was still a bachelor apartment when, in 1906, the Alpha Kappa Psi fraternity lost their meeting room at 28 East 11th Street where they had paid $1 a week rent. Their rent jumped to over $1 a day when they took two rooms and a bath at The Benedick for $31.25 a month. Four years later they added two more rooms to their lease at $51.50 a month.

In 1916 Scofield Thayer married Elaine Orr in Troy, New York.   It was a posh affair attended by Thayer’s best friend, Edward Estlin Cummings – better known later as EE Cummings. Soon afterwards Thayer became less than enthusiastic about the marriage and moved back to the Benedick; giving Cummings and Thayer’s wife the necessary latitude to carry on an affair – one by which Cummings fathered her child.  In his Benedick apartment, Thayer, at least once, wrote a check to Cummings to cover the costs of the poet's wining and dining of his wife.

New York University purchased The Benedick in 1925 and, after nearly razing it in 1927, converted it into the Pauline Goddard Hall dormitory. At some point the wonderful cast iron bay windows were removed.  Again in 1969 the school planned demolition and, again, it escaped the wrecking ball. Instead, in 1974, it was renovated as the 80 Washington Square East Galleries. Appropriately, it now spotlights the thesis exhibitions of MA and MFA candidates from the Department of Art and Art Professions.

The façade was restored in 1987 (it had been painted white) and some tolerable modernization was effected. The interiors have long ago been destroyed. Overall, however, the old Benedick retains its 19th Century charm.

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