St. George Tower, 111 Hicks Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 111 Hicks Street by Carter Horsley

This 30-story tower was once part of the full-block St. George Hotel complex that was the largest in the city and one of Brooklyn’s major landmarks. It was erected in 1929 and designed by Emery Roth, the architect famous for the San Remo and Beresford apartment buildings on Central Park West, and the Ritz Tower on the northeast corner of 57^th Street and Park Avenue.

It has 275 co-operative apartments. The Tower and Grill buildings in the complex were converted to co-ops in 1984.

It is within the Brooklyn Heights Historic District, the first to be earn that designation.

The last section of the block that operated as a hotel burned down in 1995.

The hotel’s previous main entrance at 100 Henry Street was known as the Weller Wing and is now part of the Educational Housing Services that provides dormitory service to university students in the city. EHS now houses 1,200 students and opened a new wing in 2005 over the site of the hotel destroyed by fire in 1995.

An Eastern Athletic gym occupies four floors in the complex.

Bottom Line

Next to the glorious Bums (The Brooklyn Dodgers), the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights was the heart of Brooklyn when its swimming pool and ballroom were the largest of the whole city. The hotel's size suffered over the years and its complex has shrunken greatly, but its Emery Roth-designed tower now holds co-operative apartments. Long live Brooklyn!

Description

There is a large entrance marquee on Henry Street. According to the tower’s website, the hotel’s original entrance on Clark Street no longer exists and “the large arches on the Hicks Street façade, now bricked in, were originally windows like the three that remain above [the] front door.”

The hotel once occupied seven buildings on the site.

Amenities

24-hour concierge, laundry rooms on every third floor, live-in superintendent, handicapped access, roof deck, bicycle room, laundry, storage and a sports-club next door. Pets are welcome.

Apartments

Apartment 13MNO is a three-bedroom unit with an entry foyer next to a 14-foot-long kitchen and a 24-foot-long living/dining room with a 11-foot-long office and a 9-foot-wide storage area.

Apartment 5P is a two-bedroom unit with an 8-foot-wide entry foyer across from a 7-foot-long windowed enclosed kitchen that is next to a 16-foot-wide living room that opens onto a 2,825-square-foot shared terrace.

Apartment 7BC is a two-bedroom unit with a 10-foot-wide dining area near the entry foyer that leads to a 22-foot-wide living room and a 13-foot-wide enclosed and windowed kitchen next to angled bathroom.

Apartment 5H is a one-bedroom unit with a 7-foot-wide enclosed kitchen, a 13-foot-long dining area next to a 15-foot-wide living room.

Apartment 5J is a one-bedroom unit with an entry foyer next to a 6-foot-wide alcove and a 10-foot-wide kitchen that is adjacent to a 9-foot-long dining area and an 18-foot-long living area.

Apartment 7G is a studio unit with a 14-foot-long entry foyer across from an enclosed 8-foot-long kitchen and next to a 15-foot-long living area with an 8-foot-long alcove.

History

In his December 29, 2002 “Streetscapes” column in The New York Times, Christopher Gray wrote that Capt. William Tumbridge, who was born in Cape Town in 1845 and served in the Union Navy in the Civil War, built the original structure on the north side of Clark Street, between Hicks and Henry Streets.

In 1885, "Tumbridge added sections on Pineapple Street, directly behind the original structure, and in the 1890s he had the architect Montrose Morris add other sections, like the lacy Renaissance-style part at midblock facing Clark Street."

This structure had a roof deck, flagpoles and a lighter palette than the original red-brick section. 

Tumbridge had the reputation of being disputatious but his temper did not seriously interfere with his hotel. 

"Tumbridge died in 1921, the next year his family sold the St. George to the real estate development group Bing & Bing [which] added a giant revolving beacon on the roof, visible for 50 miles and meant to serve as a navigation market for aircraft. The McAlpin and Beacon Hotels in Manhattan also had such beacons, although they were soon discontinued at the request of the government, which felt they might distract pilots.”

Mr. Gray also noted that by the mid-1980s, “many elderly tenants still in the older hotel section were the victims of muggings by drug addicts and derelicts who had access to what had become one of the city’s largest problem buildings, with a topless club called Wild Fyre on the found floor.”

In his great book, “Mansions in the Clouds: The Skyscraper Palazzi of Emery Roth,” Steven Ruttenbaum wrote that “The Hotel St. George was established in the mid-nineteenth century on the block bounded by Henry, Clark, Hicks and Pineapple streets,” adding that “Over the decades, it was expanded through several new buildings within the block, and in 1924, Bing & Bing commissioned Roth to design a twelve-story addition.”

“This residential hotel, designed in the Italian Renaissance revival style and crowned with a lavishly executed cornice and a triple-arch water tower, originally contained approximately 370 rooms. The construction of this building provided a special challenge to Roth and his structural engineer because the corner of the site was covered by a leased store, and just below the surface was an existing subway station that contained three enormous elevators that carried passengers 200 feet between the subway platform and the street. None of these facilities could be disturbed during building operations. The problem in erecting the hotel was to bring down columns, elevators, stairs, plumbing pipes and other mechanical equipment without interfering with the existing facilities. This was done by combining the new building with an adjoining eight-story laundry building. The elevators for the new structure were placed in the laundry building and extended to a height of twelve stories. The stairways and mechanical appurtenances of the hotel were shunted off the laundry building at the second floor, and lars-span girders were employed to support the superstructure with a minimum of columns. Then the laundry building converted to studio and residential space for artists because of its high ceiling and large factory-style windows.”

“Roth’s twelve-story addition was so successful in attracting a new middle class clientele that, four ears late, the owners asked him to design yet another addition within the block that would double the hotel’s capacity.  The 32-story St. George Tower planned to provide permanent, low-cost living quarters for the young men and women who worked on Wall street, which was just one subway stop away. There were 1,200 rooms in the new tower.  Added to the other buildings on the block, this brought the total number of rooms to 2,632 – exceeding that of every other hotel in the city.  Because the building was intended for people of modest means, each room was quipped only with a clothes closets and a sink.

"There were no separate baths in any of the units, but on each floor there were several toilet rooms and bathrooms equipped with tubs and showers, several of the floors were rented exclusively to men and others to women."

“The St. George Tower was designed to be a city within a city.  Besides the guest rooms, the building contained the city’s largest indoor swimming pool, and it was filled with salt water from well drilled deep below the foundations. Willy Pogany was commissioned to design a dramatic setting for the pool the walls of the two-story natatorium were covered with gold mirrors and the columns were enclosed with emerald green and gold tiles.  Illumination was provided by unique underwater and overhead lighting that suffused the room with a greenish brilliance.  And bordering the balcony overlooking the pool were a series of illuminated marine panels executed in white relief on a black ground.

“The hotel’s other public rooms, which were designed by Winold Reiss, exhibited some of New York’s most striking Art Deco interiors.  Reiss was a German-American artist and interior designer who enjoyed much success in this era.  He decorated the Apollo Theater in New York City as well as several restaurants including Rumpelmayer’s in Roths’ Hotel St. Moritz.  ….The St. George ballroom was of such unusual character that a contemporary write declared it to have no parallel for comparison.  Its decoration was accomplished entirely by lighting effects.  Its wall and ceiling were finished in flat white, and its maple flooring was painted jet back.  On the wall, balconies, columns and ceiling there were saw-tooth reflections behind which yellow, red, green and blue lights were installed. All these lights were controlled by a color organ (or ‘colorama’).  Without the illumination, the ballroom was as plain as the inside of a white box, but with the lights in operation, effects of every conceivable character were obtainable in a range of colors that covered the spectrum.….

In their great book, “New York 1930: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Two World Wars,” authors Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins provide the following commentary about the building:

“Emery Roth’s 400-foot-high tower addition to the venerable St. George Hotel in 1930 brought skyscraper sophistication to an outer borough hotel.  Roth’s tower capped the hotel’s gradual expansion from its original building of 1885 through extensions made by Augustus Hatfield in 1890-1923.  Occupying a full city block along Clark Street, between Hicks and Henry streets in Brooklyn Heights, the St. George had become the largest hotel in the entire city.  While the design of Roth’s addition, besides adding a new peak to Brooklyn’s own emerging mountain range of skyscrapers, was not particularly noteworthy.  Winold Reiss’s exotic design for the 11,000-square-foot, thirty-one-foot-high ballroom, reputedly the largest in the United States, introduced a spectacularly modern ambiance that made it the single most startling interior public space of the time in New York.  Even in its not quite completed state, with the walls unpainted and still chalky white, T-Square found the ‘stepped-back planes which lead to the ceiling [and] the ingenious indentations in the beams which floodlight the stark wall spheres…highly imaginative.’ But as completed, with its myriad of colored lights articulating every facet, the ballroom was a brilliant tour-de-force, a real life version of movie-modern, a last blaring wail of jazz-age stylishness at its very best.  Notable also was the St. George’s indoor swimming pool, reputedly the world’s largest, which sat in a huge-two-story hall supported by tiled piers.  The ceiling was mirrored, as were the walls on the aisle that wrapped around the pool, stretching the space toward unfathomable vistas.”

An August 11, 1929 article in The New York Times noted that the hotel’s buildings “have set what they claim to be a record in rapid construction of a building of this type,” adding that “in eighty-five days, they reported yesterday, all steel was erected, the structure was completely closed in by brick, all floors cast and nearly 50 percent of the white plastering finished.”

On September 1, 1929, The Times reported that Bing & Bing had just finished the drilling of six salt-water wells 110 feet deep beneath the tower and that “a characteristic of this water is that it is only 25 percent as saline as ocean water, giving it all the advantages of ocean water for bathing, with none of its detriments.”

Columbia Records used the hotel’s grand ballroom for several recordings by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic and according to Wikipedia “part of The Godfather was filmed in the St. George.”

According to 111hicksstreet.com, “the name of the original Hotel St. George derives from the St. George’s Tavern that stood on the same location between 1776 and 1783.”

“Between 1963 and 1968,” the website continued, “the hotel was sold several times, often with difficulty and under threat of foreclosure, sometimes involving complex lawsuits and bankruptcy proceedings.  Its occupancy rates continued to dwindle and, by 1975, only about one-third of its 2,000 rooms were occupied, some sections or whole floors were unused and in poor repair, and the hotel employed only 40 full-time staff.  In the late 1970s, the Tower and Grill buildings, Cross Hall and Pineapple buildings were sold to a developer whose intention was to convert them into luxury rental apartments.  The conversions did indeed take place, though not without unhappy tenants, rent strikes, lawsuits and other problems.  In 1982, the owner and his development group proposed to convert the Tower and Grill buildings into co-op apartments.  That proposal became a reality in 1984.”

A March 10, 2014 article at ScoutingNY.com noted that the “hotel was famous for its 168,000 gallon salt-water Olympic-sized pool, with an enormous mirrored ceiling, a waterfall, mosaics, and art deco accents.”  “As the decades passed, the pool was eventually opened up to outsiders for a fee and became a favorite among locals,” the article continued, but “sadly, by the end of th3e 1960s, the St. George’s prestige had begun to wane, and the hotel soon fell into disrepair.  The pool was drained in 1974 and later removed.  Today, a gym occupies the site.”

The article sparked a very long spate of fond and nostalgic comments about the pool that had emerald-green tiled columns and an observatory.

On October 15, 2015 joelg69 posted that he had “attended Pratt Institute Art School in the mid 50’s and at least once a week went swimming at St. George’s. 85 cents including towel & bathing suit. Once an hour the waterfall poured down on us. Those who’ve never experienced a salt water pool (especially indoors in mid-winter) –well, what can I say.”

Five days later, Robert Naranda posted the following comment:

“I found this description of the pool and area in a letter from a WW2 soldier:

Sgt. Andrew Ferrence, 33231659; 80^th Adrm Sqdrn; Somewhere in New Guinea

March 31, 1944

He writes his girlfriend/future wife Margaret Cullen, a student at Georgia State College for Women located in Milledgeville, GA:

Sometimes when were both in New York City, I’d love to take you to the pool at Hotel St. George in Brookyn. It’s the loveliest pool I’ve ever seen. It has salt water, clear and cool, with an artificial waterfall at one end and different colors of light changing behind it that makes it look wonderful. The whole interior, walls and ceiling, are solid mirrors. There is a balcony for onlookers and visitors. Sun tan lamps, Turkish Bath and a gym are all accessible. They also have a motion picture program showing cartoons and shorts right in the pool while you’re swimming. They project the film from one side to the other side of the pool. It’s beautiful dear. You’ll have to see and visit it to appreciate it. Sometime maybe I’d love to take you there.”

Celebrities

In 1894, Hetty Green, a banker and private money lender usually referred to as the wealthiest woman in the United States, was discovered as a guest at the St. George, registered as ‘Mrs. H. Gray.’  Like other hotels before the advent of the better-class apartment building, the St. George offered shelter to both transients and permanent residents. The 1905 census records the family of the prominent chinaware merchant Theodore Ovington, including his dauther Mary White Ovington, 40, a Radcliffe graduate. In 1909 she was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; in 1911 her book ‘Half a Man’ cast light on the troubles of African-Americans.