Seaport Park, 117 Beekman Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 117 Beekman Street by Carter Horsley

This prominent, 7-story building at the inland entrance to the South Street Seaport was built in 1918 as the Volunteer Hospital and was designed by Adolph Martin. 

It subsequently became the Beekman Downtown Hospital and then the Riverview Nursing Home that was owned by Eugene Hollander who was convicted in 1976 of Medicaid fraud and lost his license to operate nursing homes. 

The next year he got a permit from the city's Department of Buildings to convert the building to a 63-room hotel, a plan that was opposed by some residents of the large Southbridge Towers housing development across the street who maintained it would become a single-room occupancy building with many residents on welfare. 

In 1981, Symposium Realty, a group of European and South American investors, gutted the hospital building and replaced two white-brick façades with dark red brick and converted the building to 23 condominium apartments and retail space.  

The conversion was designed by Rafael Vinoly, who would much later design the supertall tower at 432 Park Avenue. 

It is the most visible building in the South Street Seaport Historic District as it is located near the entrance to Schermerhorn Row and is set in the attractive, landscaped plaza behind the Titanic Memorial Lighthouse at Fulton Street between Pearl and Water streets.  The lighthouse was installed in 1976 at the park but had been originally installed in 1913 atop the Seamen's Church Institute Building at 25 South Street overlooking the East River in Jeanette Park.  That building had been designed by Warren & Wetmore but was subsequently demolished when the institute moved in 1991 to a new building designed by James Stewart Polshek. 

Several subway lines are about a third of a mile away.

Bottom Line

A pleasant, mid-rise building in a park with a lighthouse at the entrance to the South Street Seaport.Historic District.

Description

The designation report for the historic district noted that this building rose high above the district and "its early 20th-century design displays some neo-Renaissance features and contrasts markedly with the very early commercial structures nearby." 

"The building is set on a rusticated limestone basement with arched windows and square-headed doorways.  The next five stories are face with yellow brick, contrasting with the limestone trim at the top story which defines square brick panel.  A deeply projecting dentilled cornice crowns the building," the report continued. 

The building has a two-story arcade facing the lighthouse and park and its southern façades are red-brick.  Its northern façade is white brick and has a canopied, recessed entrance with openings on two streets.  It has a rounded corner on its north end on Water Street. 

The Fifth Edition of the A. I. A. Guide to New York City by Norval White, Elliot Willensky, and Fran Leadon, which was published in 2010, said that "the combination of old and new" at this converted building "is a handsome neighbor to the Seaport." 

Amenities

The building has a full-time doorman, live-in superintendent, bicycle room and a roof deck.

Apartments

Apartments have high ceilings. 

Penthouse  7 is a two-bedroom unit with a small entry foyer and hall that leads to an 11-foot-long "study area and an angled 20-foot-long living room that opens onto a 12-foot-wide dining area next to the enclosed and windowed, 10-foot-long kitchen.  The 13-sided master bedroom is off the study area and has the entrance to the 35-foot-wide south terrace that opens to the 65-foot-long west terrace that has a curved north end. 

Apartment 4C is a one-bedroom unit with a 10-foot-wide entry foyer that leads diagonally to a 14-foot-long open kitchen and a 26-foot-wide living room with broad curved bay windows and a three-step-up curved and windowed home office. 

Apartment 6B is a one-bedroom unit with a small entry foyer that leads to a angled, 30-foot-long living room with an open, windowed kitchen.

History

The South Street Seaport Museum was founded in 1967 by Peter and Norma Stanford. When originally opened as a museum, the focus of the Seaport Museum conservation was to be an educational historic site, with shops mostly operating as reproductions of working environments found during the Seaport's heyday. 

In 1982, redevelopment began to turn the museum into a greater tourist attraction via development of modern shopping areas. The project was undertaken by the prominent developer James Rouse and modeled on the concept of a "festival marketplace," a leading revitalization strategy throughout the 1970s. On the other side of Fulton Street from Schermerhorn Row, the main Fulton Fish Market building, which had become a large plain garage-type structure, was rebuilt as an upscale shopping mall. Pier 17's old platforms were demolished and a new glass shopping pavilion raised in its place, which opened in August 1983. 

The original intent of the Seaport development was the preservation of the block of low-rise brick buildings known as Schermerhorn Row on the southwest side of Fulton Street, which were threatened with neglect or future development, at a time when the history of New York City's sailing ship industry was not widely valued. Early historic preservation efforts focused on these buildings and the acquisition of several sailing ships. 

Docked at the Seaport are a few historical sailing vessels, including the Wavertree. A section of nearby Fulton Street is preserved as cobblestone and lined with shops, bars, and restaurants. The Bridge Cafe, which claims to be "The Oldest Drinking Establishment in New York" is in a building that formerly housed a brothel. 

One of the largest companies in the South Street Seaport area was the Fulton Fish Market, opened in 1822. In 2005, it was moved to the area of Hunts Point, Bronx 

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy heavily damaged the Seaport; tidal floods (seven feet deep in places) inundated much of the Seaport causing extensive damage that forced an end to plans to restore the Museum's fortunes by merging it into the Museum of the City of New York. The South Street Seaport Museum re-opened in December 2012. 

The Seaport is currently owned and managed by the Howard Hughes Corporation. Formerly, it was run by General Growth Properties, who acquired the Seaport's longtime owner, the Rouse Company, in 2004. As part of its restructuring, General Growth spun off the Howard Hughes Corporation, which demolished in 2013 Pier 17, its main shopping venue, and replaced it with a new structure that made no attempt to contextually related to the historic district. 

Historic photos of the East River frontage in Lower Manhattan in the 19th Century showed a very imposing forest of sailing masts that is now only recalled by the Wavertree that was built in Southampton, England in 1885 that eventually became a floating warehouse in Chile and then a sand barge in Buenos Aires in 1947. 

According to Wikipedia.com, it was acquired by the South Street Seaport Museum in 1968 and restored in 2015 and returned to the seaport in 2016.