Silver Towers/University Village, north of Houston Street between Mercer Street and La Guardia Place. (Photos: New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission)Silver Towers/University Village, three concrete towers designed by I. M. Pei that were part of Robert Moses’s vast urban renewal program for Greenwich Village, was one of seven landmarks officially designated on Tuesday by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.
The six other newly designated landmarks include aluminum-clad low-rise office building by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and a late 19th-century cast-iron commercial building.
The process of designating Silver Towers as a landmark started in February, although the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and other advocacy groups have been pushing the idea since 2003. New York University, whose proposed campus expansion has caused concern in the surrounding neighborhoods, backed the designation, as did, among others, Sylvette David, a former muse for Pablo Picasso and the inspiration for “Bust of Sylvette,” the 36-foot-tall concrete sculpture that has rested among the buildings since 1968.
The westernmost of the complex’s three towers, at 505 La Guardia Place, is a middle-income cooperative, where the owners and residents supported the landmark designation. N.Y.U. owns the other two towers, on the eastern side, which house faculty members and were named the Silver Towers in 1974 in honor of Julius Silver, a lawyer and a donor.
The three identical reinforced-concrete 30-story towers were part of a five-acre residential “superblock” complex, just north of Houston Street, between Mercer Street and La Guardia Place, that was completed in 1967 and designed by the architect James Ingo Freed of I. M. Pei & Associates. The towers reflected the ideas of Le Corbusier. Each floor has four or eight deeply recessed horizontal window bays and a 22-foot-wide sheer wall.
“It’s widely known as one of the finest modern residential complexes in the city,” said Robert B. Tierney, the landmarks commission chairman. “The configuration, style and park-like setting of the towers create an undeniable tension between the buildings themselves and the space they occupy.”
Guardian Life Insurance Company of America Annex
The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America Annex facade on East 18th Street. The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America Annex, at 108-116 East 18th Street and 105-117 East 17th Street, is a modernist, 77,000-square-foot, four-story structure that runs the width of a whole city block, from north to south, just east of the 1911 neo-Classical style Guardian Life building at 17th Street and Park Avenue South. (That earlier structure is already a landmark.)
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed the annex in the International Style, with anodized aluminum panels and tinted glass windows. The annex, completed in 1963, was modeled after the firm’s Pepsi-Cola Building (1960) on Park Avenue.
Mr. Tierney said the building reflected the achievements of European Modernism. “The crisp curtain walls and large, almost square, plate glass windows on the north and south sides of the building bear the influence of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe,” he said. “Its scale and understated style also show enormous respect for its nearby, low-rise residential neighbors at Gramercy Park.”
Guardian Life was founded in 1860 as Germania Life, but the name was abandoned in 1917 amid the anti-German sentiment during World War I. The company occupied the tower and annex until 1999, when it moved to Lower Manhattan; both buildings were bought by the Related Companies. The tower is now a hotel, but the annex continues to serve as office space.
Morris B. Sanders Studio and Apartment
The Morris B. Sanders Studio and Apartment, at 219 East 49th Street.The Morris B. Sanders Studio and Apartment is a 5½-story, dark-blue-glazed and vacuum-glass brick building at 219 East 49th Street, between Second and Third Avenues. Completed in 1935, it was the Arkansas-born architect’s home and office and one of the city’s first structures to reflect the Modernist principles of Le Corbusier and others, with its absence of ornamentation, its use of industrial materials, and its bold colors.
Town houses of the time were generally were designed in variants of the classical style, with elaborate porticos and cornices, Mr. Tierney noted.
Sanders, a Yale alumnus who studied cabinet making, was known for his designs of interiors, ceramics, lighting and furniture. His design for the house was most likely influenced by his fellow architect William Lescaze, whose 1934 alteration of his home and office at 211 East 48th Street is considered the city’s first modern structure, according to the commission.
Sanders died in the house in 1948. It was sold a year later, and remains a private residence.
Pratt Institute Building
The Pratt Institute Building, at 144 West 14th Street.Completed in 1896, the Pratt Institute building at 144 West 14th Street, between Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas, is a Renaissance Revival-style, seven-story loft building with a facade of limestone, tan brick and terra cotta. It was commissioned by real estate developer and philanthropist Joseph Buttenwieser and designed by the architectural firm of Brunner & Tryon, which designed synagogues and other Jewish institutions in New York City.
The big array of tenants who’ve used the buildings over the years include R. H. Macy’s, which made flags and silk underwear there; the silversmith Graff, Washbourne & Dunn; and Epiphone, a stringed instrument maker. It was where the jazz guitarist Les Paul assembled the first “solid body” electric guitar, the model for today’s electric guitars, in 1941.
Pratt, based in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, acquired the building in 1999 and has used it as its Manhattan campus since 2001, after an extensive restoration by Ehrenkrantz, Eckstut & Architects.
Baumann Brothers Furniture and Carpets Store
The New School/Baumann Brothers Furniture and Carpets Store, at 22-26 East 14th Street.The Scottish textile merchant James McCreery commissioned D. & J. Jardine, one of the city’s most prominent architectural firms in the late 19th century, to design the through-block, five-story, timber-and-iron-framed building, with a full cast-iron facade that incorporated ornamental influences from the neoclassical, neo-Grec and Queen Anne styles. It was completed in 1881.
The Jardine brothers, David and John, also of Scottish ancestry, designed the former B. Altman & Company Building at 625-629 Sixth Avenue, as well as many warehouses, office buildings, religious structures and apartment buildings.
Baumann, a furniture and home furnishings manufacturer, occupied the building at 22-26 East 14th Street until 1897. The ground floor was then used by a number of 5-, 10- and 25-cent stores, beginning in 1900 with Woolworth’s and ending with McCrory’s, which left in the late 1970s. The upper floors were leased to makers of girdles, garters, trousers and boxing gloves. The building also housed a gym for the Delehanty Institute, which trained Police Department and Fire Department candidates.
The New School acquired the upper stories of the building in 1979 to serve as an annex to what is now Parsons the New School for Design. The ground floor remains in commercial use.
Red Hook Play Center and Pool
The Red Hook Play Center & Pool (Sol Goldman Recreation Center and Pool), at 155 Bay Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn.Wedged on a landfill along the waterfront between the Red Hook Houses, the Henry Street Slip and the Gowanus Canal, the pool was one of 11 that opened in the summer of 1936 under Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia and the parks commissioner, Mr. Moses, with financing from the federal Works Progress Administration.
The Red Hook pool, the last to open in 1936, is the 10th and last to receive landmark status by the Landmarks Preservation Commission.
The Art Moderne-style pool, 330 feet long by 130 feet wide, opened on Aug. 17, 1936, and held more than 4,400 swimmers. In the shape of a long, low C, the pool features horizontal bands of windows, long cast-stone sills and segmental arch openings. It was renamed in 1986 for Sol Goldman, a Brooklyn-born real estate executive who helped to finance the renovations of the Moses pools.
Fire Engine Company No. 54
Engine Company No. 54, at 304 West 47th Street.
A four-story, Romanesque Revival-style structure completed in 1888, the firehouse is one of 42 designed for the Fire Department by the architectural firm Napoleon LeBrun & Sons from 1879 to 1895.
The facade — with a cast-iron base, a wide entrance, terra cotta decorative details like sunflowers and sunbursts, and a pair of small pediments supported by corbelled brick brackets — is nearly identical to the former Engine Company No. 53 firehouse at 175 East 104th Street in East Harlem, which received landmark status on Sept. 16.
The Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, founded in 1967, converted the building to a 194-seat auditorium in the late 1970s.
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