History - New York Modern

The story of architectural Modernism in the city goes beyond the familiar touchstones of Lever House and the Seagram Building.

- Samuel Medina

Eighty-five years on, the little white townhouse on East 48th Street (pictured, p. 64) by William Lescaze still startles. With its bright stucco and Purist volumes, it pulls the eye away from the do-nothing brownstones on one side and the noirish subMiesian tower on the other. The machined rectitude of its upper floors, telegraphed by two clumsily large spans of glass block, is offset by the freer plastic arrangement of the bottom levels. Le Corbusier’s five points are in evidence (minus the roof garden), suggesting an architecture ready to do battle. Built-in 1934 from the shell of a Civil War–era townhouse, this was the first Modernist house in New York City, and its pioneering feeling for futurity extended to its domestic conveniences. (A skeptical Lewis Mumford noted its central air-conditioning.)

It is an undeniable window into the 1930s, and into the brief moment when interwar Modernism fought for a place in conservative New York architecture. A purifying of the “Brown Decades,” Mumford’s term for postbellum aesthetics, the terra-cotta romance of the Woolworth Building, and Deco’s jazzy black-granite fantasias, it has few counterparts. Here, at the base of the Empire State Building on 34th Street, a piece of pseudo-constructivism all the worse for wear. There, on East 53rd Street, the forlorn stylings of the Museum of Modern Art’s original building. And on Park and 57th Street, the postwar Universal Pictures Building (1947), a wedding cake of ribbon windows.