Farley Post Office: Neither Snow, nor Rain can Age a McKim, Mead, White Classic
                  

Photo taken from the 31st side of the Farley Post Office facing north.

When you emerge from the crowded gloomy subterranean world of Pennsylvania Station at 33^rd Street, relieved you survived its madness, you cannot help notice the grandeur of the James A. Farley Post Office building across Eighth Avenue.

Completed in 1913 and built on eight acres of land over the Pennsylvania (now Amtrak) rail tracks, this impressive beaux-arts style building features a two-block long staircase, extending almost its entire length.

From street level you climb thirty-one steps to reach twenty 53-foot high fluted columns topped off with lavish capitals.  The columns line the top step and form the world’s longest Corinthian colonnade. Behind them are intricately designed steel-laced grills just above the entrances. This leads to the two-block long service lobby parallel to Eighth Avenue with small rotundas at each end. The layered beauty of its slightly arched coffered ceilings and rich marble floors create a visual escape when waiting on long postal lines.

Designed by McKim, Mead and White who also built one of this country’s great buildings, the late Pennsylvania Station and preceded the train station at the same location. It had the same classic Roman style and enormity, but smaller columns.

The firm succeeded in creating a Roman Forum setting in midtown. Both buildings stretched from 31st to 33^rd Streets; Penn Station from Eighth to Seventh Avenues, and Penn Terminal, its original name until 1918 when it became the General Post Office, from Eighth mid block to Ninth Avenue.

Surrounded by a moat on the south and north sides that allowed natural lighting for the workers on the lower level, the post office doubled in size in 1934 reaching Ninth Avenue. Now underutilized it once housed thousands of postal employees. It also had a medical office, gym, photo studio, cafeteria and a jail.  Future plans call for converting to a rail and retail hub for Amtrak and called the Daniel Patrick Moynihan station.

Named the James A. Farley Post Office in 1982, after the 53^rd Postmaster General, it has a small Post Office museum and an Operation Santa post during the holidays. Made famous in the 1947 movie “Miracle on 34^th Street” the Farley building had 24/7 service windows until a few years ago now closed due to postal cutbacks.  On tax day, usually April 15, thousands of last-minute filers fill the lobby and the steps waiting to post their tax returns,

Prominently inscribed on the front of the building above the columns are the words

 “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

Suggested by a McKim architect it is often mistaken as the official U.S. postal motto, though it derives from “Herodotus’ Histories” about the Greeks expedition against the Persians about 500 B.C.


It is listed on the National Register of Historical Places and it is a New York City Landmark.

(This is the third and last segment of  NYC buildings to visit part of my Elk Hotel alternatives)

5 Madison Avenue: A Venetian Classic Graces Madison Square Park

5 Madison Avenue and North Annex (Credit Swisse) from 23rd and 5th Ave.

Casting a watchful eye over the serenity and beauty of Madison Square Park and its lush green lawns, colorful landscaping flowers, cherished monuments, European styled walkways and lamp posts, and magnificent century old trees, is the Metropolitan Life Tower. 

Designed by Pierre L. LeBrun of Napoleon LeBrun & Sons, the tower built in 1909, now known as Five Madison Avenue, is often over shadowed by its more famous neighbor, the Flat Iron building, on the Fifth Avenue side of the park.

Modeled after the campanile of St. Mark’s Square in Venice, the 52-story tower, at 700 feet and one inch, dwarfs its 325-foot Italian counterpart. The tallest structure in the world until 1913, when surpassed by the Woolworth building, it served as the world headquarters for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company until 2005. The tower is an add-on to the company’s block long 15 story “East Wing” built in 1893.

Part of the tower’s beauty is its sense of scale. It does not overwhelm Madison Square Park or its surroundings. With its stately clean design it feels as it rises from the park.  Only when you stand within a half block of it do you realize how tall it really is.

Built in the Renaissance style dolphin head balustrades and lion heads once decorated the tower. It lost much of its ornamental detailing during its 1964 renovation including its Tuckahoe marble façade replaced with limestone.

Used in the building of many older city structures including the Federal Building on Wall Street and the Washington Arch in the Village, Tuckahoe is a white marble of high quality found in deposits along the Bronx River in Westchester County. 

The tower still retains many distinct features. The most notable are the clocks, one on each of its four sides, located on floors 25 to 27. They measure 26.5 feet in diameter and are larger than London’s Big Ben. The clocks are inlaid with white and blue mosaic. The minute hands weigh half a ton and the numbers are four feet long.

Each floor contains three bays with three windows. This alignment graces the tower’s four sides and are bracketed by layered textured corners. This pattern extends to the arcaded loggia on the 31^st floor. Above the loggia is a pyramid style roof with small rounded English windows. A gilded cupola tops off the tower. It has what is often referred to as “an eternal light” since it remains lit even after the rest of the building’s outer lights go dark.

A three-year restoration project completed in 2002, added a multi-colored lighting system. Much like the Empire State building the tower is draped in different colors depending on holidays and special events.

The original Met Life complex also included a north annex, a 32-story building one block north. The insurance giant had initially planned a 100-story building for that site but canceled plans due to the depression. Credit Suisse occupies it today.

Future plans for the tower have varied between luxury residences and a boutique hotel.

Five Madison Avenue is a National Historic and a New York City landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
*Second part of a three part story: Elk Hotel alternatives.

Location: Five Madison Avenue between 23^rd and 24^th Streets.

Cooper Union: Lincoln, Roosevelt, 
Clinton and Obama Spoke Here

Main entrance of Cooper Union on the building's south side. 

“Fasincating” is not how I would describe the Elk, a dive hotel on West 42^nd Street in the Hell’s Kitchen section of New York City. When a friend planned her trip to the city she searched the Internet looking for things to do. And she found the Elk, a grungy hotel (see related story in this blog) on the corner of 42^nd and Ninth Avenue.

After reading Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York and Shooting New York blogs she sent me the following email,  “I find it fascinating that this hotel has remained unchanged for over a hundred years.” Immediately I thought if 100 is the magic number then she is coming to the right city. New York has many important old buildings.

If she had asked me to name three alternate choices without giving it much thought I would suggest the following. (P.S. none are are on any tourist guide’s A-list of must-see places.) They are essential to the fabric of New York, all architecturally, culturally and historically noteworthy, and I like them. The buildings and their ages are: Cooper Union, 152; Met Life Tower, 101; James Farley Post Office, although only 98 years old, work began on it in 1910. 

Cooper Union Foundation Building: Founded in 1859, by industrialist Peter Cooper in 1859, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, is tuition-free private college renowned for its three schools of architecture, art and engineering. Cooper, along with Samuel Morse, laid the first transatlantic cable. He built America’s first steam railroad engine the Tom Thumb.

With its Italianate designed facade Cooper Union is often described as a “high-rise brownstone.”

Built in a style popular with cast-iron builders it is the oldest standing steel beam framed building in America. Cooper, an iron maker as well, used rolled-iron I beams for structural support in the building.

Presidents Ulysses Grant, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Bill Clinton and most recently Barack Obama have given major addresses in the historic 900-seat Great Hall, located in the basement. Presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln gave his “Might is Right” speech on February 27, 1860. Attended by many luminaries including Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, Lincoln received rave reviews, which paved his way to the presidency.

Thomas Edison, World Trade Center architect Daniel Libeskind, sculptor George Segal studied here. Felix Frankfurter spent hours in the library. The NAACP and the Red Cross began here. It is a U.S. Historic Landmark and on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

**MY ELK HOTEL ALTERNATIVES...what one should see in NYC besides the ELK HOTEL (see Elk article in my blog). First of a three part story of 100 year-old buildings to check out.

Cooper Union is located at 7 East 7^th Street between 3 & 4^th Avenues, steps away from funky St. Mark’s Place between 3^rd and Avenue A.