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New York
transformed
The Architecture of Cross & Cross
2
R e s i d e n t i a l N e w Yo r k
New York
transformed
The Architecture of Cross & Cross
P e t e r P e nn oy e r a n d Ann e Wa l k e r
Foreword by Robert A. M. Stern
New Photographs by Jonathan Wallen
T h e M o nac e l l i P r e s s
Frontispiece: Chickering
Hall, 27–29 West 57th
Street, New York, New
York. Cross of the Légion
d’Honneur and gilded
pipers and lyre players
at the top of the building.
Left: RCA Victor
Building, 570 Lexington
Avenue, New York, New
York. Vents and floor detail
in the lobby.
Copyright © 2014 Peter Pennoyer, Anne Walker,
and The Monacelli Press
All rights reserved.
First published in the United States by The Monacelli Press
Library of Congress Control Number 2013950594
ISBN 9781580933803
Designed by Abigail Sturges
Printed in China
www.monacellipress.com
Contents
Foreword Robert A. M. Stern / 6
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 The
/ 10
Cross Brothers / 16
Residential New York / 24
Houses / 26
Clubs / 34
Apartment Buildings, Hotels, and Real Estate Development / 44
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Country Houses / 76
Shaping the City and Beyond / 140
Civic and Institutional Projects / 142
Chapter 5
Banks, Offices, and Commercial Buildings
/ 145
Catalogue Raisonné / 216
Notes / 222
Bibliography / 231
Acknowledgments / 232
Appendix: Known Cross & Cross Employees / 232
Index / 233
Photography Credits / 240
Foreword
“It is better to understand our heritage than to
try to produce in a void without direction.” 1
I
— James Frazer Stirling
can think of four important reasons to write history: to set the record straight;
to illuminate a prior moment; to recuperate a lost talent or idea; to influence the
present. Peter Pennoyer and Anne Walker’s series of monographs, of which this is
the fourth, satisfies all of these requirements. In their books we are introduced to representative American architects working in the traditional styles who flourished during the first half of the twentieth century—Delano & Aldrich, Warren & Wetmore,
Grosvenor Atterbury, and now the partnership of John and Eliot Cross—but whose
work and the ideas that lay behind it began to disappear from our collective consciousness as the single-minded trajectory of ahistorical modernism pushed aside virtually
all other modes of expression in art and architecture. Between about 1940 and 1970,
modernist missionaries such as Alfred H. Barr Jr., founding director of the Museum of
Modern Art, imbued with a “progressive” idea of art, saw the trajectory of creativity
as a high-speed torpedo leaving the past with its competing modes of expression to sink
in the wake of a singular line of endless innovation. Belief in Barr’s modernist torpedo
began to falter around 1960, opening space in the world of art, including architecture,
for a reexamination of work that had been cast aside. As a result, young talents began
to recuperate vanished means of expression such as figurative painting and traditional
architecture.
But so much had been lost: the impact of modernism swept all study of the classical
canon from architecture school curricula and only a few architects, such as Raymond
Erith in England, continued to work in a traditional way. Consequently, those younger
architects hungering for connections with the past turned for inspiration to a few works
of historical scholarship, most notably written by Americans: Vincent Scully’s The
Architectural Heritage of Newport, Rhode Island, written with Antoinette Downing (1952),
and especially his The Shingle Style (1955).
My own George Howe: Toward a Modern American Architecture (1975) may have also
made a contribution linking traditionalism and modernism. Allan Greenberg was
Lee, Higginson & Co.
Building, 41 Broad Street,
New York, New York.
Griffith Baily Coale’s
mural A Pageantry
of the History of
Commerce at Sea,
mosaic columns and
marble wainscoting in
the main banking hall.
6
7
even more significant in breaking down false barriers between these two modes of expression with
his exemplary analysis of the space planning of
Sir Edwin Lutyens, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le
Corbusier.2 Then Scully’s student Leland Roth
opened the door to the past a bit more with his
book on the work of McKim, Mead & White.3
The text of Roth’s book, based on his Yale dissertation, is comprehensive but the presentation of photographs and drawings left much to
be desired. Soon enough these were supplied
in 1977 by an affordable reprint of the 1915 A
Monograph of the Works of McKim, Mead & White.
Subsequent books by others, notably Stanford
White’s great-grandson Samuel G. White, also an
architect,4 have significantly added to our understanding and appreciation of the work, as have
the flood of publications about Lutyens, including, in 1984, a reprint of the glorious three volumes originally published in 1950 as a memorial
monograph.5
After the 1975 exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art The Architecture of the École des BeauxArts, there was no turning back—key texts to
enable a long view of architecture as evolutionary
rather than a myopic one of successive revolutions
began to flood the bookshops, providing architects with a foundation for their own designs and
inspiring a new generation of patrons to have confidence in their preferences and “dare” to commission traditional work. A monograph on the work
of John Russell Pope, based on a dissertation, is
very useful, if somewhat apologetic in tone and a
bit short on illustrations;6 a monograph on James
Gamble Rogers also lacks the wealth of illustrations it deserves and also has about it an apologetic tone7—yes, he designed beautiful buildings, it
seems to say, but it’s not “significant” work, as that
of his modernist contemporaries is deemed to be.
Recently, the work of Carrère & Hastings, young
rivals of the McKim firm, has been documented
in a beautifully printed two-volume set. Regrettably, the book is compromised by an accompanying
text of many chapters written by different authors
without the benefit of an overarching historical
narrative.8
This brings me to the welcome series by Pennoyer
and Walker, who provide us with straightforward,
carefully researched monographic accounts. Some
of the architects they write about might correctly
be considered to be members of the second-tier
8
f o r e wo r d
of their generation, who along with others like David
Adler have recently been written about but with somewhat less scholarly authority.9 Perhaps, Pennoyer and
Walker have turned their attention to the second
tier for the simple reason that the big guns have
already been tackled. But I think they have a bit
more in mind: I believe they’ve done so out of a
sense that the relatively relaxed approach to tradition of the second tier, combined with the circumstances of their careers, especially as they
embraced a surprisingly diverse and characteristically modern range of building types, have specific
lessons for today.
The straightforward approach of Pennoyer
and Walker’s monographs is subversive in the best
sense, removing the ideological insecurities that
have prevented some of their predecessor historians from accepting the work of traditional architects on its own terms. Free of ideological baggage,
these monographs written by an architect and a
scholar set the work in its historical context so that
we may not only appreciate the skill and craft that
gives traditional work so much of its authority and
appeal but also see it against its enabling social,
political, and economic context.
One of the most widely held beliefs is that the
modernism of the first half of the twentieth century was the sole appropriate expression of modernity, while traditionalism was an escapist dream.
However, this series of monographs makes it clear
that traditional architects were not the suburban
fantasists modernists frequently labeled them, but
down-to-earth practical professionals who took on
the full range of modern assignments from houses
to skyscrapers, that the traditionalists were every
bit as engaged in the modern world as the modernists. Consider that the work of Delano & Aldrich,
best known for houses and academic buildings,
also included two skyscrapers (Brown Brothers &
Company, 59–63 Wall Street, New York, 1927–29,
37 stories; Carew Tower and Netherland Plaza,
Cincinnati, 1930–31, 48 stories)10 and two major
New York City airports; or consider Warren &
Wetmore’s embrace of large-scale infrastructure
at Grand Central Terminal and the partnership’s
ability to give form to the needs of mass tourism
in a series of sophisticated urban and resort hotels;
or that Grosvenor Atterbury not only designed private houses and a model garden suburb but also
social housing while developing a system of prefabricated construction.11
So we come to the latest in the Pennoyer and
Walker series, documenting the work of two
brothers, John and Eliot Cross, whose names are
hardly known today, even among the growing
circle of traditional architects and enthusiasts.
But how wise our authors are to write about this
firm, architects of many buildings in and around
New York that are admired even though the
names of their designers are virtually forgotten.
The buildings of Cross & Cross are not erudite
archaeological reproductions. They are imaginative works of interpretive architecture seeking to meet the needs of modern clients. The
firm’s range of expression moves from various
vernaculars to a version of classicism that flirts
with stylistic modernism via Art Deco. The Cross
& Cross portfolio of building types encompasses
country estates, townhouses, and clubs, as well
as commercial projects, especially large apartment houses, and one unforgettable skyscraper.
For example, though their reputation as designers
of apartment houses is overshadowed by Rosario
Candela and Emery Roth, they also played a critical role. Though they are typically overlooked
among the skyscraper architects of the interwar
years—Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, William Van
Alen, Ralph Walker, and Raymond Hood—their
RCA Victor (now General Electric) Building on
Lexington Avenue is one of the most inventive
of all the romantic towers in New York, a brilliantly massed needle enriched by modern Gothic
detail. Their Tiffany headquarters building, with
a monumental sales room that, when opened in
1940, was the largest column-free space of its
kind in the country, is the last great merchant
palace Fifth Avenue was to see.
Cross & Cross were shrewd in recognizing that
the increased scale of professional work architects
were being called on to tackle sealed the fate of the
small office. As a result, they frequently joined other
architects in partnership as associate or supervising
architects, including Candela; Eggers & Higgins;
Warren & Wetmore; and James E. R. Carpenter, in
order to handle larger and more complex projects
than any one firm could handle. Even more adventurously, at a time when such was frowned upon by
the American Institute of Architects, Eliot Cross
entered directly into the field of property development as a founder of the real estate development
firm Webb & Knapp, so that he and his brother
could at once benefit from the financial rewards
of property development while seeing to top-quality buildings. That legacy continues to this day:
in 1938 William Zeckendorf (1905–1976) joined
Webb & Knapp and in 1949 he took over the firm,
associating it with the most visionary developments
of the post–World War II era. Though he was not
an architect, Zeckendorf carried on the Cross &
Cross synthesis of development and architecture
by establishing an in-house team of talented architects led by I. M. Pei (b. 1917) that included Henry
Cobb (b. 1926), Ulrich Franzen (1921–2012), and
James Stewart Polshek (b. 1930), an arrangement
that shocked the architectural profession but is
now widely accepted.
We are in debt to Peter Pennoyer and Anne
Walker for helping us to recover from the amnesia
that continues to cripple architecture and we look
forward to their next title, which will surely further
widen our horizons.
R obert A. M. S tern
9
Chapter 1
Introduction
W
hen John W. Cross (1878–1951) and Eliot Cross (1883–1949) formed their
architectural practice in 1907, New York City was a burgeoning metropolis, fueled by the extensive American economy and attracting citizens from
around the globe. And when misfortunes hit, as they did with particular force in such
financial panics as the great Knickerbocker crisis of that year, the power structure,
which consisted of a small circle of elite, could normally be counted on to resuscitate the
economy, or at least restore faith in the markets. Pierpont Morgan’s ability to gather his
wealthy allies in his McKim-designed library for a marathon meeting and emerge with
a scheme to quell the panic that was radiating out from Wall Street through regional
banks to the whole country was emblematic of the concentration of power that narrated the triumphs and failures of the first decades of the new American century.
The particularly American aspect of Cross & Cross’s ascendancy as a firm was embedded in the brothers’ idealism—almost altruism—born of the pervasive and generally
uplifting myth that underneath every great fortune lay a mission informed by Christian
values. The belief that business (and architecture) were tools of the civic virtue that was
making America grow and prosper gave John and Eliot the confidence to bring their
imagination to a variety of architectural challenges. Because the well-bred Crosses were
at the center of the world of the powerful, their dreams as architects and capitalists were
closely bound to their class’s idealism about the American future. This was a generation
that bridged the culture of the old world with the raw energy of the New York boulevard
and the outlying Main Street. The brothers lived and worked during a difficult span in
American history that involved many pivotal events, but they managed to prosper almost
continually. As Eliot Cross’s wife, Martha McCook Cross, recounted in 1952, “We certainly lived through some extraordinary days. The First World War, the period of fantastic
prosperity, the Depression and the Second World War.”1 Indeed, the Crosses experienced
a period of great change, wealth, and upheaval—an era of enormous opportunity but
also of hardship. In 1907, when the brothers established their first office at 527 Fifth
RCA Victor Building,
570 Lexington Avenue,
New York, New York.
Crown of the tower with
open tracery with gold
outlining, copper finials,
and fifty-four-foot effigies.
10
11
View looking northeast
from 42nd Street and
Seventh Avenue, 1905.
Avenue, they were moving into a profession rich with
prospects. The Beaux-Arts-trained John and the
Harvard-educated Eliot easily fell into the group of
well-connected architects that was advantageously
positioned to insert their hands into the changing
cityscape of New York and definitively influence
taste. In effect, Beaux-Arts-trained architects were
something of stylistic ambassadors, the prestige of
Paris undeniable. Men returned having imbibed the
logical and reasonable instruction endorsed by the
school but with the ability to transform its lessons
and styles into something distinctly American. And
Americans, eager for a cultural expression of their
arrival and rootedness, embraced what these architects had to offer.
New York’s landscape was on the verge of a
dramatic change in 1907. At that time, the city
still existed mainly as a low-rise metropolis rife
with tenements, stables, slaughterhouses, breweries, and factories. However, the construction of
new subway lines and the lowering of the New
York Central Railroad’s tracks beneath Park Avenue—once a disruptive and dirty chasm down
the center of Manhattan—were opening up new
opportunities for development. Areas that had
12
i n t ro d uc t i o n
long been considered undesirable were suddenly
cast in a more favorable light. Park Avenue above
42nd Street, for example, became a hotbed of
construction, while Lexington Avenue, accessible
via the IRT in 1918, was transformed into an
upscale commercial and residential strip. Meanwhile, as the march of development continued
uptown, Madison and Fifth avenues below 57th
Street lost some their prestigious residential glow,
as interloping stores and offices began to reshape
their character. The city’s growth was accompanied and fueled by unbridled wealth. As Cross
& Cross’s practice grew into its maturity in the
1920s, fortunes soared and buildings—whether
apartment houses, banks, or commercial structures—became freestanding advertisements as
businesses lavished money on building tangible if
not glorified identities. But while the Crosses were
busy designing houses, estates, clubs, offices, and
banks, the booming economy and the potential
of real estate speculation was not lost on them.
They were able to achieve what few architects
of following generations could imagine: vaulting over the obstacle that commissions require
clients. Creating opportunities for profit in their
planning, they became their own patrons and drew
financing for their own projects. The architects
initiated several developments, and Eliot went on
to found the real estate firm of Webb & Knapp,
which often worked alongside the offices of Cross
& Cross. Nonetheless, they always persisted in
giving more to their designs than simple profit
motive dictated.
As extraordinary income poured into the city,
the population swelled and construction boomed;
new building types began to emerge. Apartment
buildings, once thought to be the precincts of the
lower and middle classes, gained wide acceptance
among the wealthy. Starting in the 1910s and gaining momentum in the 1920s, the city’s elite—those
who colonized mansions on Fifth and Park avenues
and the side streets in between—began to accept
and embrace the idea of communal living. A far
more luxurious breed of apartment house emerged
that combined the comforts of a house within a
sophisticated and elegant high-rise building yet
did not require the same amount of upkeep and
staff. Architects specializing in apartments, such as
J. E. R. Carpenter (1867–1932) and Rosario Candela (1890–1953), as well as Cross & Cross—who
also collaborated with both Carpenter and Candela—brought the design and planning of luxurious and ample suites to a new plane. The pressure
and incentive to build up—the result of rising
property values—simultaneously affected the commercial sphere, as tall loft buildings and skyscrapers reshaped the streetscape and the skyline. With
the shifting dialogues between private house and
apartment building, as well as between low-rise and
skyscraper, dramatically unfolding, the moment
for architects and developers to step in was well at
hand. Adept at both building types, Cross & Cross
was incredibly well positioned to take advantage of
the various opportunities the era afforded it.
Stylistic preferences were also shifting. As the
over-the-top extravagance and florid archaeology favored by the rich became passé, architects
began to work in more nuanced and restrained idioms, interpreting Italian Renaissance and French
styles more freely. At the same time, as Americans
searched for a means to express their rootedness
and tradition, the Colonial grew tremendously
popular as an inspirational outlet. Nostalgia for
the pre-industrial past, coupled with the desire to
assert America’s progress as a world power, fueled
13
Park Avenue and 51st
Street with open tracks,
1905.
Fifth Avenue after a
snowstorm, c. 1905.
the movement’s momentum. In the hands of
architects, the lessons of Paris were transformed
into an enduring American style that drew from
the tenets of the Beaux-Arts and from Georgian
and Federal precedent. As described by Donald
Albrecht and Thomas Mellins in The American Style,
the period between 1876—the country’s centennial—and the 1930s produced the most creative
and evocative examples of Colonial Revival architecture and decorative arts; the 1920s and 1930s
were its heyday.2 When McKim, Mead & White
began to reintroduce its discreet and subtle allure
into the Manhattan streetscape at the turn of the
twentieth century, many architects, such as Delano
& Aldrich and Grosvenor Atterbury, followed
suit. The Colonial Revival—its restrained planar
facades, minimum of ornament, and rectilinear
quality—was particularly well suited to New York.
Not only did it reference the city’s prerevolutionary past, but it was readily adaptable to the new
types of buildings emerging on the skyline.3
In 1909, the week-long Hudson-Fulton celebration commemorating the 300th anniversary of
Henry Hudson’s discovery and the 100th anniversary of Robert Fulton’s navigation by steamboat
of the Hudson River took hold of the city’s imagi14
i n t ro d uc t i o n
nation. The history of New York was glorified in
a series of parades, floats, exhibits, and programs
throughout the city, including the Metropolitan
Museum of Art’s first major exhibition of early
American furniture, which highlighted the inherent quality and craftsmanship of the American
decorative arts. The museum’s celebrated American Wing was born out of the popularity of the
Hudson-Fulton exhibit. Its integrity as a display
firmly established, H. Eugene Bolles’s 434-piece
collection of important early American furniture,
which had formed the core of the event, was purchased by the museum soon after. Over the next ten
years, museum trustees Robert de Forest, Henry W.
Kent, and R. T. Haines Halsey led an initiative to
gather historic rooms and architectural elements to
create the framework for what would become the
American Wing—a section of the museum housed
behind the classical marble facade of Martin Euclid
Thompson’s United States Branch Bank (1824–36),
once located on Wall Street, in which decorative
arts would be shown in the type of environment
for which they had been intended. “American art
lost its distinctive charm of simplicity” in the larger
galleries, according to de Forest, the president of
the museum’s board, and “could be adequately
shown only in the modest rooms for which it was
made.”4 According to architectural critic Royal
Cortissoz, the American Wing “rendered a service
so intensely national in character.” The assemblage
of historic rooms, architectural fragments, antiques,
and decorative arts in a museum setting “ha[d] an
educational value beyond measurement,” spurring
a succession of period rooms and house museums
across the country.5
Like the best of the Beaux-Arts-trained firms,
Cross & Cross was talented at designing anything
from an elegant Georgian townhouse to a stripped
modern skyscraper. And though adept at a variety of styles, the firm particularly excelled at the
Colonial Revival. As John Cross succinctly put it,
“[O]ur people always want a tie to the past. They
will not feel at home in a house which does not
acknowledge any precedent.”6 To that end, Cross
& Cross reveled in the historic, often incorporating
antique rooms, architectural fragments, paneling,
and furnishings—even before the opening of the
American Wing sanctioned the practice—to create that vital link. For example, the firm’s house for
Henry Francis du Pont in Southampton, New York
(1926)—a succession of period rooms, new rooms,
and fragments—gave rise to the shell that shaped
one of the era’s most important American collections and inspired the Winterthur Museum. The
Crosses understood the allure of the Colonial and
its unpretentious, time-honoring attraction. But
the firm was by no means stuck in a time warp. In
effect, the firm crafted entire environments—from
the Sutton Place enclave to the Barclay Hotel and
the William Sloane Y.M.C.A.—in which American
architecture and furnishings were the selling point.
But, at the same time, these projects—and many
others—were undeniably modern and well conceived to appeal to prevailing sensibilities. Simultaneously, the firm’s soaring skyscrapers captured
the vitality and excitement of the 1920s as the
race for height entranced the city. Cross & Cross’s
confidence buoyed the iconic RCA Victor Building, a commercial cathedral adorned with pagan
angels set behind an actual Christian church that
was seen not as blasphemy but as a natural solution to expressing the great power and potential of
the radio wave for both the company and America
itself. As the country moved from the heights of
economic excess to the frugality of the Depression
era, Cross & Cross demonstrated the adaptability
of traditional styles, scaling back its articulation
to produce a sleek, spare idiom more appropriate
to the era’s reduced circumstances. At the 1939
World’s Fair, labeled the “World of Tomorrow,”
for example, Cross & Cross’s associations with John
Hironimus and Jan Cybulski and Jan Galinowski
produced modern and futuristic buildings far
from the classical canon: the Cosmetics Building,
a streamlined glass building resembling a makeup
container, and the Polish Pavilion, a medieval
tower flanked by modern wings.7 New York architects to the core, Cross & Cross’s thirty-five-year
tenure generated a great number of buildings in
and around the city. And though each project differed in size, scope, and style, each exhibited that
characteristic Cross & Cross touch wrapped in an
optimism that marked the capitalist engine in New
York and America. Many of the firm’s designs survive to epitomize the glamour and transformative
power of the city during the first quarter of the
twentieth century.
No office tower expresses more subtly its place
in the context of the city or more brilliantly its role
as a beacon of corporate identity than the RCA
Victor Building. No apartment house can match
the opulent luxury of One Sutton Place South,
with its vast penthouse perched between the forest of midtown skyscrapers and the East River.
The 1910s and, in particular, the 1920s heralded
a period during which it seemed the sky was the
limit, and in what they sought to do, the Crosses
succeeded brilliantly, bringing their imagination
and dignified, refined style to the streets of New
York, and beyond.
15
The Powel Room,
1765–66, in the
American Wing of the
Metropolitan Museum
of Art, from the Powel
House, Philadelphia.