Hidden Landmarks: Commercial Spaces

Lower Broadway AKA Soho New York. 490 Broadway developed in 1857 as the home of E.V.Haughwout & Co. a fashion emporium. .Mary Todd Lincoln had official white house china made here.

In this membership-drive mini-series, Tommy Silk, a licensed New York sightseeing guide, @LandmarksofNY on Instagram, and the author of Hidden Landmarks of New York: A Tour of the City's Most Overlooked Buildings (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2024), joins us to talk about some of the lesser-known historically significant buildings of NYC. Today, Today, we hear stories about buildings involved in buying and selling.

=>EVENT: Join Tommy Silk in conversation with Jack Coyne at Grace Church Wednesday, 10/23 at 6:30pm. Reservations requested.

Title: Hidden Landmarks: Commercial Spaces [music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Quick program note, I will be back tonight at eight o'clock with the latest edition of our national call-in series that we're doing on Wednesday nights here in the home stretch of election season called America, Are We Ready? Tonight, me and my co-host from Marketplace, Kimberly Adams, will be looking at the Harris and Trump positions on the care economy. They're both trying to stake out positions on the best way to help people pay for childcare, elder care, care for people with disabilities in our households, which is such an economic burden on people these days.

America, are we ready to do something about the care economy? Tonight at eight o'clock here on WNYC and lots of public radio stations around the country. Tell your friends. For our last segment here this morning, did you hear we're celebrating 100 years on the air? Duh. There's so much history all over the city, not just us. Do you stop and read the plaques on places you pass ever? My next guest does, and he has a book out today that talks about some of them.

The book is Hidden Landmarks of New York: a Tour of the City's Most Overlooked Buildings. For the remainder of this membership drive, we're ending the show each day with tour guide and now author Tommy Silk. He was here yesterday to talk about private homes of note around the city. Today, we're going to tell some other stories. You may already know his popular Instagram account @landmarksofnewyork. Hey, Tommy, congratulations on the book. Thanks for coming on again.

Tommy Silk: Thanks, Brian. Thanks for having me back.

Brian Lehrer: In deciding what group of buildings to focus on today, we considered churches, but given New York City's history as a former Dutch colony founded for profit, not religion, it seemed even more appropriate to consider commercial buildings. Let's start with Delmonico's, the restaurant in the financial district. It was the first of its kind. Why is this in your book?

Tommy Silk: We could spend an entire show talking about Delmonico's. We'll go with the cliff notes version here. Basically, Delmonico's is the first modern restaurant that you and I would recognize in New York. The name might be misleading. Delmonico's was founded by the Delmonico brothers in 1827 as a bakery on William Street. The Delmonico brothers weren't Italian. They were actually from the southern portion of Switzerland.

Once they moved from a bakery to a fine dining establishment, they brought over the trends from Europe. The current building is the last remaining Delmonico's. They did eventually franchise out, but this was the third iteration of their flagship dining facility. It went up in 1891. It was such a popular place with the rich and famous of New York. You had different chefs who were experimenting with different foods.

Some foods that can claim their heritage back to Delmonico's are things like Lobster Newburgh, Baked Alaska, and a semi-dubious claim, which there are disputes with other restaurants, Eggs Benedict is possibly an original of Delmonico's.

Brian Lehrer: It might be best known to musical theater fans as the setting for Hello, Dolly! I want to go next to the EV Haughwout Building in Soho on Broadway. What's that?

Tommy Silk: If your listeners actually see this in text, it looks like it's EV Hogwart, but it's Haughwout. This is one of the first department stores in New York City. This is in Soho. This was when Soho was really coming into its own as New York's premier shopping district. The building goes up in the 1850s, 1857, and it's one of the earliest cast-iron buildings that's going to give Soho its distinct architectural look. A few firsts. It was one of the first buildings to have the Otis elevators used in it as a commercial building.

It also was one of the first buildings in New York to have a steel-framed skeleton. This would be a precursor to skyscrapers, where you don't need to have the load of the building on the facade, but instead inside the building, which allowed for these beautiful cast iron sculptures to be placed along there. I think most notably, is that it was famously the location where Mary Todd Lincoln went on a little shopping spree before moving into the White House to furnish it with some fine china.

Brian Lehrer: There are so many other landmark commercial buildings that we could cite out. We'll only have time for one or two more. One that a lot of people have probably seen, or at least pictures of, is the Williamsburgh Savings Bank building. Williamsburgh spelled with an h at the end in Williamsburg, no h, Brooklyn. Such a fancy building, but no longer a bank, right?

Tommy Silk: Yes. It's currently an event space. Your listeners might be familiar with it as this beautiful domed building on the Williamsburg side of the Williamsburg Bridge, across from Peter Luger Steakhouse. This was the headquarters for the Williamsburgh Savings Bank from 1875 until it would move to One Hanson Place, formerly the tallest building in downtown Brooklyn. The architect of this was a guy by the name of George Post.

He is pretty notable for some of his other works, notably the New York Stock Exchange and the Center for Brooklyn History, formerly the Brooklyn/Long Island Historical Society.

Brian Lehrer: Want to do one more? The Studebaker Building. I think you have to be a certain age to even know that there used to be a car called the Studebaker, but there's still a Studebaker Building in Crown Heights, which is pretty distinctive. Why the Studebaker Building?

Tommy Silk: It's interesting in a city where so few of the population actually own cars, that has some of the most magnificent buildings devoted to cars. This was a four-story Studebaker showroom and office building. The first two floors had massive glass windows so you could see these beautiful old, not old at the time, cars. Then the dealership would sit on the two levels above that. Because of the size and the footprint of the building, once Studebaker went bust, it turned into a textile manufacturing facility.

Then in 2001, they updated it to become low-income housing, but if you look at it, you still see very ornamental Studebaker logos along the facade and just little nods and motifs to its automotive history.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you again, Tommy Silk. Again, his new book, Hidden Landmarks of New York: a Tour of the City's Most Overlooked Buildings comes out today, and there's a launch event tonight. We're going to tell you about this, folks. It's at Grace Church at 6:30 PM. It's free, but they are asking that you reserve a spot, or at least you can reserve a spot through the Strand Bookstore's website in case it's overloaded. We'll have a link on our webpage as well.

Hidden Landmarks of New York: a Tour of the City's Most Overlooked Buildings, out today in the Grace Church launch event at 6:30 tonight. Tommy's going to be back with us again tomorrow to talk about other hidden landmarks of New York. Tommy, thanks.

Tommy Silk: Really appreciate it, Brian. Thank you.

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