Category: Architecture of the Gilded Age

The imposing United States Post Office in New York City was a very late work of McKim, Mead & White—so late that two of the firm’s namesake founders, Charles McKim and Stanford White, had been dead for several years when it was completed in 1913.

By that point, McKim, Mead & White was a well-oiled machine that ran on an army of anonymous architects, but the project is now primarily credited to William M. Kendall.

The gleaming white five-story structure occupies two blocks of prime real estate in Midtown Manhattan and was built to complement its original neighbor, Pennsylvania Station,¹ also designed by McKim, Mead & White, and demolished in 1963.

The firm’s output in later years was often unremarkable and derivative, but there’s something special about this building, which is chock-full of exquisite materials and elegant details that reveal thoughtful attention to design despite the project’s massive scale.

Built for a hefty $6 million, the original structure included over 400,000 square feet of floor space and was composed of 165,000 cubic feet of Massachusetts granite, 18,000 tons of steel, 7 million bricks, and 200,000 square feet of glass.²

Most of that glass was used in the giant skylight over the building’s central workroom, which was reportedly the largest room in the United States when the facility opened.³

The building’s public-facing interior spaces were elaborately decorated with Tennessee marble on the floors and walls, topped by ornamental plaster ceilings featuring the seals of 10 nations recognized for doing “great things for the advancement of the universal mail service.”⁴

A Harvard professor reportedly suggested that the architects add the inscription spanning the building’s facade, quoting Herodotus: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”⁵

The statement originally referred to mail service in ancient Greece, but its inclusion in the building’s design made it an unofficial motto of the U.S. Postal Service.

A portion of the building is still used as a post office, but the bulk of the structure now houses the Moynihan Train Hall, which opened in 2021.

The demolition of Penn Station is often cited as the event that launched the historic preservation movement in the United States, and the dark, dank, subterranean maze of low-slung corridors that replaced it is entirely unworthy of one of the world’s great cities.

Although that unnavigable mess still exists, the conversion of the former post office into a modern train hall has restored much-needed prestige to New York’s landscape, and it’s encouraging to see such a fine building put to a worthy new use.

Gallery

Floorplans and Sections⁶

References

1. “New York’s New Post Office A $6,000,000 Wonder”. The Sun (New York), March 2, 1913, p. 1. ↩︎
2. ibid. ↩︎
3. ibid. ↩︎
4. ibid. ↩︎
5. ibid. ↩︎
6. A Monograph of the Work of McKim Mead & White, 1879-1915. New York: The Architectural Book Publishing Company, 1915. ↩︎

The Cable Building is one of my favorite New York structures, mostly because I have fond memories associated with it, including the quiet Thanksgiving morning when I took the picture shown above.

Completed around late 1893, this 8-story steel-framed building¹ includes a full basement and fronts on Broadway, Houston, and Mercer Streets on the border of Greenwich Village and NoHo.

The Cable Building was designed for the Broadway & Seventh Avenue Railway Company by Stanford White of McKim, Mead & White,² and is a very early example of the Beaux-Arts style.

The building’s exterior was originally faced with Indiana limestone on the first and second floors, and the upper floors are covered in yellow brick and striking ornamental terracotta,³ topped by an elaborate copper cornice.

Each floor encompasses nearly 20,000 square feet⁴ and encircles a central light court of more than 3,000 square feet.^{5 6} At its opening, the building’s first floor was designated for retail use, with the top three floors designed for offices and the middle floors reserved for warehouse space.⁷

My favorite part of the exterior is the classically-inspired sculpture of two robed women guarding the portico on the east facade, designed by J. Massey Rhind.⁸

With that being said, the building’s overall design isn’t White’s best: the chamfered corners temper the appearance of bulkiness and provide interesting focal points, but the many large windows on every side of the structure clutter the composition, making it look messy and overwrought.

What makes the Cable Building impressive, however, is that it was designed to conceal a power plant for the street railway company, effectively creating “a building within a building”.⁹

Reaching 46 feet below the street surface,¹⁰ the building’s basement originally housed 550 tons of machinery that powered the company’s cable cars, including wheels measuring 32 feet in diameter and weighing 50 tons each.¹¹

The machinery has long since been removed, and today the Cable Building’s deep bowels house the Angelika Film Center, where there’s a chance you may find me some late evening, watching an indie flick as nearby subway trains rumble past.

Gallery

References

1. “The Cable Building.” The New York Times, December 19, 1893, p. 9. ↩︎
2. Baker, Paul R. Stanny: The Gilded Life of Stanford White. New York: The Free Press (1989), pp. 213-14. ↩︎
3. “The Cable Building.” The New York Times, December 19, 1893, p. 9. ↩︎
4. ibid. ↩︎
5. ibid. ↩︎
6. “A Model Building.” The Independent (New York), February 1, 1894, p. 22. ↩︎
7. “The Cable Building.” The New York Times, December 19, 1893, p. 9. ↩︎
8. Looking Up: The Cable Building – Village Preservation ↩︎
9. “Motive Force Of The Cable Cars.” The Sun (New York), November 30, 1893, p. 7. ↩︎
10. “The Cable Building.” The New York Times, December 19, 1893, p. 9. ↩︎
11. “Motive Force Of The Cable Cars.” The Sun (New York), November 30, 1893, p. 7. ↩︎