Streetscapes/The 1893 Cable Building, Broadway and Houston Street; Built for New Technology by McKim, Mead & White (original) (raw)
Real Estate|Streetscapes/The 1893 Cable Building, Broadway and Houston Street; Built for New Technology by McKim, Mead & White
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- Nov. 7, 1999
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November 7, 1999
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Section 11, Page
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THE 1893 Cable Building marked the sudden advent of a new technology, with giant basement rollers drawing cable cars along Broadway from the Battery to 36th Street -- a $12 million investment that became obsolete less than a decade later. Now the building at Broadway and Houston Street, designed by McKim, Mead & White, is on the line that divides SoHo and NoHo, as a new rush of technology allows the owner to return the building to its cable-era elegance.
Cable cars were first installed in New York in the mid-1880's, a promising advance over the slower and dirtier horse-drawn cars. But the city was divided into many surface-transit franchises, and the smaller companies did not have the financing to install cable mechanisms, so cable expansion lagged, especially in the congested city center, where construction issues also impeded progress.
So it took something like the giant Metropolitan Traction Company -- a syndicate that included a former city corporation counsel, William C. Whitney, a financier, Thomas Fortune Ryan, and a Tammany contractor, John D. Crimmins -- to raise the kind of money it took for a comprehensive change. In 1892 Metropolitan filed plans for a new eight-story office and loft building at the northwest corner of Houston and Broadway, stretching back to Mercer Street.
The upper floors were designed for offices, but the basement was given over to a series of steam engines and winding wheels -- 26 feet in diameter -- that moved one-and-a-half-inch steel cables just under the surface of Broadway from Bowling Green to 36th Street. Metropolitan spent more than $12 million on the cable system, designed by the engineer George W. McNulty.
The cables moved at a constant speed, reported as 30 miles an hour; car operators clamped on or off, and used ancillary brakes. The cables weighed 40 tons each and drew up to 60 cars at once. The company expanded the service as it bought more and more lines. By 1897 it controlled most surface transit lines in Manhattan.
According to Mosette Broderick, an architectural historian, the $750,000 Cable Building itself was designed by Stanford White, almost certainly because White and William C. Whitney had become friends and collaborators. ''It was a nice, lucrative goody in a very bad economic time -- the McKim, Mead & White office was laying off people in the early 1890's,'' said Professor Broderick, who teaches at New York University's College of Arts and Sciences and has just finished writing a book on the architectural firm and its clients.
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