Old, Massive, Illustrious and Somehow Overlooked

"Its delicate Renaissance-style exterior could just as well have clothed an opera house, although the five colossal stacks gave it away." 

Photo: New York City Municipal Archives, via NY Times

Preservation groups are circling the deliciously decorated Con Ed powerhouse at 11th Avenue and 59th Street, as the 1904 structure, designed by Stanford White, nudges up for a third time to landmark designation. At the same time, a similar grand structure sits alone without fuss or bother, just working hard in elegant industrial simplicity ...

Click here to read the full article by Christopher Gray, in which he looks both at the West Side's IRT Powerhouse and, across the island, at an East River contemporary.

Stanford White: The original "starchitect"

This week marks New York Magazine's 2nd Annual Yesteryear Issue.  Many in the LW! office are already regular NY Mag readers, but an issue focused primarily on history, with glimpses of architecture to boot?  Count us in!

via New York Magazine

The subject of the magazine this week is scandal, New York City style.  And wouldn't you know it, the 1906 death of architect Stanford White, of the illustrious firm McKim, Mead & White, is among those scandals documented (read more here!).

via National Park Service

Though his high-profile personal life and death were the focus of what newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst's publications dubbed the "Trial of the Century", Stanford White's professional legacy is no less astounding.

According to NY Mag's Lee Siegel, "Stanford White just about single-handedly invented the American facade."  One such facade was that of the former IRT Powerhouse, an Upper West Side "landmark in waiting" on West 59th Street at Eleventh Avenue.  This monument to Beaux-Arts style architecture was recently named to the Preservation League of New York State's "Seven to Save" list of endangered places.

After you've sated your appetite for scandal with the magazine article, learn more about Stanford White's firm's masterful IRT Powerhouse on the Save the Powerhouse blog.  

To dig deeper into the history of the firm, we recommend the book Triumvirate: McKim Mead & White - Art, Architecture, Scandal, and Class in America's Gilded Age by Mosette Broderick, architectural historian and Director of the Urban Design and Architecture Studies program at New York University.