Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
The Tunnel’s terra-cotta medallion was uncovered about five years ago as the garage was about to be razed
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY
Published: September 9, 2010
CONSIDER the lowly garage, usually placed somewhere between the tenement and the outhouse as a fit subject for architectural appreciation and historic preservation. But public garages, which appeared in the early 1900s, often rose to respectable, even exciting, heights.
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Courtesy of Jerome Weinstein
The Alan Garage on East 87th Street, near the end of construction in 1930.
After an initial burst of architectural exuberance, most garage designs were uninspired, but in 1917 the architects Hunt & Hunt designed a garage at 337 East 64th Street using tapestry brick and large arches. It was to be cooperatively owned, and some measure of its patronage is indicated by the destruction wrought by a floor collapse in 1957. The resulting pancakes included a 1928 Hispano-Suiza and a 1928 Bugatti.
The architect Hector Hamilton was little known when he designed the two-story Tunnel Garage, at Broome and Thompson Streets, in 1922, for George Stivers, a Charlton Street physician. Mr. Hamilton gave it hypnotic, wavy, aqua-colored bands — the Hudson River, perhaps? — and a large terra-cotta plaque showing a car in a tunnel, certainly the projected Holland Tunnel, built from 1920 to 1927. Mr. Hamilton became prominent in 1932 when the Soviet Union gave first prize — shared with two Soviet architects — for his new Palace of the Soviets, only to cancel the award without explanation a few months later.
Another garage in which terra cotta played a part was the Alan, put up in 1930 at 164 East 87th Street and designed by Frank Schefcik. The light yellow, white and green glazes of the ornament created a distinctly un-utilitarian building, with a delicate crisscross design on the head house. Because of restrictions on projecting signs, Mr. Schefcik emblazoned the front with two-foot-high glazed red letters announcing THE ALAN GARAGE. Emanuel Ornstein, the builder, named it for his grandson.
Garage architecture waxed in the 1920s, and the next few years brought a rush of unusual designs. In 1929 the architects Seelig & Finkelstein designed the eight-story Aristocrat Garage at 17 East 12th Street, dark red brick with a moody, medieval feeling.
The following year seven well-to-do East Side families banded together to graft a tennis club onto an old two-story garage on 65th Street east of Third Avenue. Their architect, James W. O’Connor, made the place look like a Regency town house.
The income from the downstairs Devon Garage was used to operate the upstairs as the Courthouse Club. In 1930, a hundred people attended a coming-out party in a tennis court canopied with blue gauze dotted with stars; the Happy-Go-Lucky Boys sang during supper. The club also had a squash court, a card room and a swimming pool painted with scenes from “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.” A typical activity was a dinner in 1939 followed by a talk, “Trout Fishing Under Difficulties.”
In the late 1920s, Milton A. Kent, a Westchester life insurance salesman with a big idea, got financial backing for his Kent Automatic Garage, building high-rise garages on 44th east of Third, and at 61st and Columbus, the latter with spectacular polychrome terra cotta. Mr. Kent’s bold concept was a machine that hooked onto a car’s axle and moved it within the building, entirely “untouched by human hands” according to an ad in The Times in 1930. He went bankrupt in 1931.
Also of the Jazz Age, but smaller, is the zigzag-style Croyden Garage of 1930 at 406 East 91st, designed by Horace Ginsbern.
Of the garage designs after 1930, one stands out: the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority’s Battery Parking Garage of 1950, at the entrance to the Battery Tunnel. Designed by Ole Singstad with narrow slit windows and a corrugated concrete facade, it has a squinty, bunkerlike aspect consonant with the age of nuclear weapons.
In recent years the Garage Deluxe, on East 73rd Street, and the Kent Garage, at 61st and Columbus, have been designated landmarks, but generally, garages have not received much attention. The Tunnel was demolished several years ago, over preservationists’ late-breaking objections, although the terra-cotta plaque has been re-erected on the subsequent apartment house. The Devon and its upstairs club came down years ago. But the Ritz, the Croyden and others are still generally intact.
A pitiable exception is the Alan Garage, so notable for its unusual decorative character which, as of 2009, appeared to be in perfectly sound condition. Last year the owner carefully stripped off every last bit of ornamental terra cotta, leaving a mongrel work. The Alan backs up to low buildings on 86th Street and Lexington, an area that has seen intensive development, and something about the thoroughness of what was termed in the building application “facade repair” suggests an attempt to preclude future landmarks interference.
But Michael Walsh, an engineer with PCS Engineering, which did the work, said it was just that stripping off all the detail was “very economical, especially these days when there are a lot of contractors looking for work.”
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