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About Zeckendorf Towers, 1 Irving Place
One of the city's most important development projects of the 1980's, this full-block complex not only led to the renaissance of Union Square Park, but also anchored the phenomenal emergence of Park Avenue South and the Flatiron District as a chic neighborhood.
The four-towered condominium enclave, which was completed in 1987, replaced many run-down low-rise buildings, several of which had comprised the S. Klein Department Store, one of the city's famous discount stores for decades.
The 26-story towers are each capped with screens in the forms of pyramids that are illuminated at night providing a handsome complement to the famous illuminated clocktower of the larger and older Con Edison Building directly across Irving Place.
The lit tops are a welcome addition to the skyline, especially when seen from the south with the lit towers of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings in the background. From the west, however, the towers partially obstruct views of the Con Ed tower, long the most visible landmark in the area.
The base of the Zeckendorf Towers building contains several hundred thousand square feet of office and retail space. The entrance to the former is through a multi-story atrium fronting on the park that had been famous in the 1930's for demonstrations, but which had become a drug haven in the 1970's and early 1980's.
The city has since renovated the park and its vast subway concourses so that it is now quite attractive except for the ugly trucks of the very popular weekend farmers' market that occupies most of the street area at its north end. For most residents of the area, including nearby Gramercy Park, of course, the farmers' market is a significant and welcome addition to the neighborhood with its variety of fresh produce.
As the city's only four-towered building, Zeckendorf Towers has already earned its place in history, but its real importance is its demonstration of how one major project can turn a neighborhood around. It may well prove to be the most important achievement of the developers: William Zeckendorf Jr., Abraham Hirschfeld, Irwin Ackerman and others. To go forward with such a mammoth project in the heart of an unattractive, crime-ridden, heavily trafficked area in a no-man's land between the established residential communities of Greenwich Village to the south and Gramercy Park to the north was a major act of courage. Zeckendorf, it should also be noted, was one of the major partners in the World Wide Plaza development on Eighth Avenue and 50th Street, another very pioneering project.
As designed by Davis Brody & Associates, one of the city's premier residential architectural firms, Zeckendorf Towers affords residents few apartments per floor and many excellent vistas, all highly desirable features. Of course, there are penalties for building four towers instead of just one or two: they are not as economic to build and elevators are a big factor, here there are 134 apartments per elevator, a high ratio.
The towers are clad in a warm red brick and the window frames are arranged to give vertical accents, while the fifth and top floors of the office portion of the base have arched windows, a design motif perhaps meant to echo the lovely new subway entrances in the park. The motif, however, does not relate to the rest of the building, but it is not too jarring, although it looks a bit suburban.
Davis Brody have designed some of the most daring and bold residential towers in the city such as Waterside Plaza and Central Park Place, but here the magnitude of the venture probably dictated conservatism. The result is that the project is awkward and a bit ungainly in appearance. The towers are, in fact, very well proportioned, but sited on the city's grid and set back from the angled Fourth Avenue/Union Square West/Park Avenue South street on which the building faces.
The 670 apartments themselves are quite conventional and the project offers a health club, pool and sundeck as well as a garage. The immediate area, sadly, has lost much of its history.
Directly across 14th Street, Luchow's, the city's most famous German restaurant, closed its doors several years ago and was replaced by a lackluster new residential building. Just a bit down 14th Street from Luchow's was the Academy of Music, one of the city's largest theaters that used to show two feature films, previews, newsreels and a vaudeville show for about $1 in the 1950's, and which became the Palladium discotheque in the 1980's. The Palladium's interior was designed by the great Japanese architect, Arata Isozaki, and was spectacular, but New York University demolished the building for yet another dormitory, somehow missing the fact that it is not nice to destroy a world-famous and world-class interior and that perhaps the university might be better served by having a great theatrical space. Clearly, the university did not have the civic-mindedness of William Zeckendorf Jr.
Architecturally, one might quibble that limestone towers might have better suited the project and that the design could have been more modern, or even Post-Modern. Such fantasies, however, overlook the great urban achievement here and the pyramid roof-tops are just fine.
In their fine book, "New York 2000, Architecture and Urbanism Between The Bicentennial and The Millennium," Robert A. M. Stern, David Fishman and Jacob Tilove noted that the design by Davis, Brody & Associates, "vaguely imitating the Italian architect Aldo Rossi's interpretative drawings of some of New York's skyscraper icons, did not capture much support with the public or the architectural press."
"At the same time," the authors continued, "city history buffs and preservationists began to draw the public's attention to the S. Klein site's rich architecture, which included the former Union Square Hotel (1872), designed by James Renwick Jr., architect of St. Patrick's Cathedral. To realize the Zeckendorf plan, the site needed to be rezoned, a move that was rigorously opposed by the Union Square Coalition, a group largely made up of newer residents who had moved into lofts and apartments and feared the impact of real estate speculation on their rented homes....Though banal in their detailed design, the scheme of slender, salmon-colored brick-clad towers, each topped by an open-work pyramidal crown - dismissed by the editors of the AIA Guide as "illuminated levitating...yarmulkas" - minimized shadows on the square and blockage of views from it to the tower of the Consolidated Gas Company Building (Warren & Wetmore, 1926), which they were intended to complement....In its bland uniformity and lock-step regularity, Zeckendorf Towers was hardly inspiring, but it did help the reemerging district turn the economic corner."
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