Crosstown Spring
How about a crosstown trip on 38th St.? Beginning in the east, the Corinthian apartment tower, with its bay windows, was constructed in 1987 by architect Michael Schimenti at #645 1st Ave. between E. 37th and 38th. According to Jim Naureckas of New York Songlines, Corinthian “is used to mean ‘luxurious’ because Corinth was the party town of ancient Greece—noted as the home of Aphrodite’s sacred prostitutes. The fountain in front of the building is called Pierene—named for the fountain in Corinth where the flying horse Pegasus was captured.” When I hear “Corinthian,” I recall Neil Gaiman’s character from his Sandman comic book series in the 1990s. At first a killer and later more sympathetic, the Corinthian usually wore sunglasses, to hide the fact that his eyes were open mouths full of teeth.
E. 38th St. crosses approach and exit roads of the Queens Midtown Tunnel, which goes under the East River and feeds traffic to and from the Queens Midtown Expressway (I-495) which becomes the Long Island (Horace Harding) Expressway and runs east to Riverhead in Suffolk County, characterized by some as “the world’s longest parking lot” because of its frequent jams, though plenty of NYC roads can claim that title.
The tunnel was designed by Norwegian American engineer Ole Singstad and opened in November 1940. Its approach roads still boast their original “Machine Age” lampposts, something George Jetson would be familiar with. To me they’re architectural marvels. They’ve been given fresh paint jobs in black in recent years. Parts of the Queens Midtown Tunnel run beneath E. 38th, and the eastbound tube of the Lincoln Tunnel runs under W. 38th.
Murray Hill is generally accepted to lie between E. 34th and 40th Sts. between Madison Ave. and the East River. It’s named for the mercantile Murray family, who migrated to New York from North Carolina and Pennsylvania in the mid-1700s. Patriarch Robert Murray lived in a grand mansion called Inclenburg at today’s E. 36th and Park Ave.; a plaque on a building marks the site today. Inclenburg was situated on a high hill that’s since been leveled, but there are still a number of inclines remaining in Murray Hill, particularly on 3rd Ave. in the 34th St. vicinity. Today its chief public attraction is the J.P. Morgan mansion at Madison and E. 36th, which is now the Morgan Library and Museum. Mrs. Robert Murray, according to legend, was responsible for delaying the British advance on Manhattan Island by having British officers in for tea and cookies at Inclenberg.
Murray Hill was known as a carriage district and one of its more picturesque ones can be found at 149 E. 38th, just west of 3rd. The George Bowdoin Stable is a landmarked structure dating to 1902 (the date is emblazoned between the second-floor windows). The stepped facade was a hallmark of Flemish architecture. It was built for a local honcho, Richard Martin, but acquired by Bowdoin, a business partner of J.P. Morgan, in 1907. What does the bulldog represent?
West of 6th Ave. we plunge into NYC’s still-vibrant Garment District. Clothing wholesalers pack the side streets, as they have since the early-20th century. More than any other NYC neighborhood, “faded ads” advertising such wholesalers are still inscribed on the tall office buildings that line these streets. Most of them are now fading into illegibility. The Garment’s one of the largest of NYC’s mercantile “fiefdoms,” running from about W. 29th Street north to W. 41st between 6th and 8th Aves.
A milliner’s a manufacturer and/or distributor of women’s hats, and the Garment District featured dozens if not hundreds of hat manufacturers in an era when men wore flat brimmed hats of various shapes and sizes, and women wore hats, one more outrageous than the next, in the early to mid-20th century after which hats decreased in popularity beginning in the 1960s. So many Jewish milliners and other clothing manufacturers worked in the area that the Millinery Center Synagogue was established in 1933, with the present building by architect H.I. Feldman went up in a striking Moderne building at 1025 6th Ave., just north of W. 38th, in 1948.
Here’s the impressive Midtown West branch of the post office, with its Corinthian pilasters, or half columns. On 221 W. 38th, just east of the building, is a still-visible painted ad for Globe Electrotype, located in the building from 1912 to 1932. Midtown west, in the upper-30s, had been a hotbed for printers and typesetters. 45th St. on the east side (where I worked for Photo-Lettering for seven years) is another. I briefly worked in a type shop on W. 38th, Line & Tone, in early-1992. I found the co-workers difficult to talk to. One day, someone confided that the owner went through people so quickly, it was no use getting to know them. I was laid off after three months, when they would have to start paying health insurance. (Another instance of this occurred in 2012—relative silence from coworkers followed by dismissal after three months—at Medallion Retail, another print operation I was briefly involved with.)
Accompanied on both sides of 8th Ave. by high-rise office buildings built in the 1920s and 30s, #300 W. 38th St., on the southwest end of what was Times Square’s sleaziest district holds forth bowed, perhaps bloodied over the years, but still intact. It was constructed in 1903. #300 W. 38th was built as a hotel catering exclusively to actors that appeared in the many Broadway theaters located on the blocks north and east of this corner. Its chief architect was Hungarian immigrant Emery Roth (1871-1848) who became one of the pre-eminent architects of hotels and residences in NYC—among his later designs were the Warwick Hotel, as well as the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn and the twin-towered San Remo and Normandy Apartments in Manhattan. The firm Emery Roth & Sons is still active today and has designed dozens of prominent NYC buildings including the Pan Am, now Met Life, Building and with Minoru Yamasaki, the first World Trade Center.
A couple of doors away is #304 West 38th, a 1928 building designed by William I. Hohauser that appears to have a lizard on the heraldry within its ogive-shaped entrance. This is a stylized representation of a salamander. Real ones are small-to mid-sized amphibians which resemble lizards but are soft to the touch and spend some of their time in the water, like frogs. In the medieval period, salamanders got the reputation of being able to survive fire and in fact, it was believed that they had the ability to extinguish fire. They became heavily represented on royal crests and other ornamentation, and Alwyn Court terra cotta carvers took license with the creatures, giving them claws and showing fire coming out of their mouths. Some firehouses around town also feature decorative salamanders.
W. 38th Street ends (or begins) at 11th Ave. at the north end of the green, glassy Jacob Javits Convention Center. The “Jav” replaced the New York Coliseum as NYC’s premier convention center in 1986, though both the Democratic and Republican parties have continued to use Madison Square Garden as a presidential nomination venue since that year when in New York. Primary events in recent years have been the New York Auto Show and Comic Con. In 2020, it was employed for a time as a field hospital for Covid patients.
Sen. Jacob Javits (1904-1986) was that now extinct beast, a “liberal” Republican. He served from 1957 to 1980, when he was defeated by Al D’Amato, who in turn was defeated by Democrat Chuck Schumer after three terms. Only three men have held the senior senator seat in New York for 66 years.
—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)