CARNEGIE HALL/CARNEGIE HALL TOWER

156 WEST 57TH STREET (hall); 152 WEST 57TH STREET (tower)

Developer: The City of New York (hall); Rockrose Associates (tower)

Architect: William B. Tuthill with Richard Morris Hunt and Dankmar Adler as consultants (hall); Henry J. Hardenbergh (tower additions 1894); James Stewart Polshek & Partners (hall renovation); Cesar Pelli & Associates (tower)

Erected: 1891 (hall); 1986 (hall renovation); 1990 (tower)

By Carter B. Horsley

Many great cities are simplistically defined by their unique international icons: Paris has its Eiffel Tower; London has "Big Ben" and the Houses of Parliament; Rome has the Vatican and the Coliseum; Madrid has its bullring; Washington has the Washington Monument, the Capitol and the White House; Venice has its great tower, St. Mark's and the Doge's Palace; Rio de Janeiro has its mountain-top statue of Christ; Moscow has the Kremlin and its bulbous domed churches; Athens has the Acropolis; and New York has the Statue of Liberty, its skyline; the canyons of Wall Street; the Great White Way of Times Square; Rockefeller Center, and Carnegie Hall.

While Carnegie Hall is primarily a concert hall, it has become the definitive embodiment of the ne plus ultra, the attainment of extraordinary excellence. For over a century, it has been the dream and crowning achievement of every musician to perform at Carnegie Hall.

Before the erection of its adjoining office tower in 1990, Carnegie Hall, shown in the foreground in the photograph at the right, was not very imposing on the outside, a caramel-colored brick and terra-cotta building in an Italian Renaissance-revival style that had been substantially altered in the first decade of its existence and is marred by fire escapes on its Seventh Avenue facade. While its arches and belt courses and cornices were pleasant, the building's exterior was more cozy than cosmopolitan, more mundane than monumental. Its 2,760-seat, multi-balconied, main concert hall, however, was, and is, very handsome in its dimensions and most notably in its acoustics. The concert hall's design was attractively Palladium in its Classical touches, but not lavish. The emphasis was, and is, on the music.

Apart from its acoustical heritage, the original building and its small tower additions at its west and south ends were very important precursors of the major mixed-use building type for they contained offices and studios that over the years have housed many famous musicians, architects, agencies and dancing classes. Indeed, wandering through its office and studio floors is one of the great experiences in the world. Although it was not based on Carnegie Hall, Francois Truffault's greatest film, "Tirez Sur Le Pianiste" (Shoot the Piano Player, see The City Review article)," has a scene that wonderfully epitomized such an experience. The film's lead, Charles Aznavour, plays a pianist who goes to an impresario's office for an audition. A woman violinist is shown walking down a long corridor after having just left the impresario's office that Aznavour has just entered. Half way down the corridor, she hears heavenly piano music coming from the impresario's office and the camera lingers on her mesmerized frustration as she continues down the corridor trying to contain her awe and anger and the remnants of her life. Such incidents must happen regularly in these precincts. The office and studio floors have broad corridors and wide staircases with ornate balustrades and because many of offices and studios are double-height it is very confusing with many levels that are not subject to simple numbering.

The Carnegie Hall building also contains a smaller recital hall and, in its basement, a very elegant auditorium that for many years until 1997 was the city's most attractive movie theater, the Carnegie Hall Cinema, with an entrance on Seventh Avenue. Carnegie Hall subsequently announced it would raise funds to convert it to a concert hall. The new Zankel Hall was scheduled to open in late 2003.

The new office tower is the city's greatest contextual construction project and befitting the heritage of its namesake the most fantastic encore to one of the city's craziest building escapades.

The 60-story tower can only be likened to the great tower in Venice and the Duomo's campanile in Florence.

Cesar Pelli has taken the architectural vocabulary of Carnegie Hall and composed a brilliant and original essay on high-rise design and urban sensitivity.

The tower's highly patterned facade echoes the concert hall's orange and brown colors but also introduces a dark green banding near the top of its east setback and the crown of the tower, presumably a reference to a green mansard-style roof that Barbaralee Diamonstein mentions in her book, "The Landmarks of New York," published in 1988 by Harry N. Abrams Inc. She wrote that the mansard roof was removed in 1894 "to build the crowning studio floor."

The tower's remarkably thin slab extends through the block from 57th Street to 56th Street and would be widely considered New York's most dramatic "sliver" building were it not for the fact that its west facade faces smack into the black facade of the Metropolitan Tower (see The City Review article), which is almost as tall and the separation between the two is only about 20 feet, the width of the Russian Tea Room building nestled between them.

Harry B. Macklowe, the developer of the Metropolitan Tower, originally planned a much larger development that would have included not only his own site, but also the restaurant's and the lot on which Carnegie Hall Tower was erected. He had reached tentative agreements with Carnegie Hall about its lot, but Faith Stewart-Gordon, the owner of the restaurant, refused repeated offers from Macklowe, and later from the Elghanayan brothers who own Rockrose Development Corporation that built Carnegie Hall Tower.

As a result of her intransigence, two very tall towers, both slightly under 800 feet in height, were built rather than one that would have been more efficient and economic, with greater benefit to Carnegie Hall, as well as having made better planning sense.

The escapade was compounded by the concomitant planning and controversy of CitySpire directly across 56th Street from both the Metropolitan and Carnegie Hall towers. CitySpire is the tallest of the three, but its mid-block location on a sidestreet makes its presence somewhat less visible as the two other towers obstruct most of its views to the north.

This "tuning fork" trio of resonating verticality is without precedent in the city as far as their precipitous proximity to one another. Not even Wall Street's famed canyons have anything comparable. Across town, the Trump Tower (see The City Review article) and the IBM and Sony Buildings, on the same cross streets as this trio, perform an equal function of architectural interplay but on a lower and broader scale.

Pelli properly took his design cue from Carnegie Hall and not the tower's two arrogant and older neighbors. His tower is not only the perfect backdrop and foil for the famed concert hall, but also raises it to a very noble height by its superb quality, awesome and fine proportions and exceeding handsome facade and coloration. While it bears some spiritual kinship with the Fred F. French Building (see The City Review article) on Fifth Avenue and the Lincoln and Chanin Buildings on East 42nd Street, Pelli's tower combines a simplicity of form and richness of patterning that raise it above those building's fine standards.

But Pelli, whose first major design was the abstract and decidedly modern Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, whose first building is affectionately known as the "Blue Whale," is not limited by rigid "isms" and this Post-Modern tower has a brilliant modern crown. While not a Deconstructivist, Pelli has experimented with structural expressionism and here he has reinterpreted the cornice in a highly imaginative way. Instead of a projecting decorative cap, Pelli has protruded spokes on three of the tower's top facades that clutch at the proverbial passing clouds and passionate dreams wafting up from the concert hall. Not trellises, nor pergolas, nor gargoyles, they are merely symbolic, aggressive but minimalistic, and decidedly modern. While he clearly made the right decision, it would be interesting to hear Pelli explain why he chose not to wrap them continuously around the three facades and instead contained them on each facade. It would also be interesting to know how he convinced the developers to go along with such an interesting experiment, which is very effective if not beautiful. Bravo for courage!

The building has a through-block lobby that is handsomely designed with red and green marble and has vaulted, metal grill ceilings and metal grill wall lamps, as shown at the right.

In her book, "The City That Never Was," published in 1988 by Penguin Books, Rebecca Read Shanor recounts the origins of Carnegie Hall:

"In the spring of 1887, Walter Damrosch set sail from New York City to his native Germany for a summer of study with the renowned conductor Hans von Bulow. It was a busman's holiday of sorts for the twenty-five-year-old musician, who in the two years since the death of his father, Leopold Damrosch, founder of the Oratorio Society and the New York Symphony, had become known to music lovers in New York as the baton-wielding figure at the Metropolitan Opera House. Little did the young conductor guess that the summer was also to be the prelude to his father's fondest dream: a great concert hall for New York City.

"As fortune would have it, Andrew Carnegie, czar of America's steel industry, was also aboard the steam packer, bound for Perth, Scotland, with his bride to enjoy an extended honeymoon....Soon into the voyage, the two men were introduced. Having served on the board of the Oratorio Society, Carnegie was well acquainted with the elder Damrosch's lifelong efforts to bring music to the masses, and he commended Walter for having chosen to follow in his father's footsteps....More than once during their discussions, Damrosch suggested to Carnegie that he build the concert house New York lacked....In 1889, Andrew Carnegie presented the city of New York with a $2-million gift, still on paper, called Music Hall. The site purchased by the philanthropist for the concert house (renamed Carnegie Hall in 1898) was located on Seventh Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, near a stretch of vacant lots, coal yards, and scattered rowhouses. Only the Osborne, a gracious apartment house built a few years earlier and situated catty-corner from the concert hall to be, foretold the elegant future that Carnegie's 'tone temple' would bring to Fifty-seventh Street....The architect retained to design Music Hall was William B. Tuthill, a thirty-four-year-old New Yorker who in all likelihood won the important commission by virtue of his reputation as a gifted musician and a fine singer - which, in 1889, far outstripped his reputation as an architect."

The hall's great acoustics eventually became the home of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and the favorite hall of the world's greatest musicians such as Rachmaninoff and Vladimir Horowitz. In the 1950's, however, the orchestra planned to move to new quarters in a major urban renewal project known as Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side and Robert Simon Jr., who had bought Carnegie Hall from Carnegie's estate, indicated it might be demolished for redevelopment.

In 1956, developer Louis Glickman took an option on the Carnegie Hall property and the next year, his architects, Pomerance & Breines, published a rendering of the hall's replacement, a 44-story office tower, clad in red porcelain enamel, without setbacks set in a sunken plaza with a bridged entrance over the plaza. The startling and rather daring design set off alarms in the music world, but the city was a decade away from designating and regulating landmarks. Glickman ultimately decided not to exercise his option, but by early 1960 Simon announced he would demolish the hall that summer.

Isaac Stern, the violinist, organized a committee to try to save the hall and eventually was able to convince State Senator MacNeil Mitchell to introduce two bills in the State Legislature to authorize the city to issue bonds for a nonprofit organization that would operate Carnegie Hall, which was designated an official city landmark in 1967.

Stern remained a stalwart supporter of Carnegie Hall and was deeply involved in its $50 million renovation in 1986. James Stewart Polshek & Partners oversaw an admirable and sensitive reconfiguration of the hall and its public spaces that was a substantial improvement with a good deal of taste.

Carnegie Hall's superb acoustics survived the rehabilitation while the acoustics at Avery Fisher Hall at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts that had become the new home of the renegade New York Philharmonic were not very good to begin with and did not get much better after a couple of major renovations. Maybe there is justice!

The renovation unfortunately left the fire escapes on Seventh Avenue that were not part of the original design and which have been the greatest blight on the city's architecture even if they serve an important safety purpose.

In addition to the concert hall, the building contains about 170 studios in a 15-story tower on 57th Street, a 12-story tower on 56th Street and directly above the concert hall. The studios were created especially for music rehearsal, dance and small performing states and were the result of a plan by The Art Students League and Andrew Carnegie. No two are alike and many are duplexes and have large skylights. the first tenant was the American Academy of Dramatic Art and among the residents and students who have been in the studios are Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Isadora Duncan, Jerome Robbins, Agnes de Mille and Leonard Bernstein. Enrico Caruso was said to have found the acoustics of Studio 826 so good that he made his first recording there with RCA Victor. The only floor that connects the North and South towers is the eighth.

The Carnegie Hall Corporation began to warehouse some of the studios in 1991 and by May 2007 only 55 remained occupied but were given notices of eviction.

An article by Daniel J. Wakin in the October 11, 2007 edition of The New York Times reported that the architectural firm of Natan Bibliowicz had been hired to design a $150 million expansion of Carnegie Hall into the studio towers. Mr. Bibliowicz is the son-in-law of Sanford I. Weill, the chairman of the Carnegie Hall Corporation and the former chairman of Citigroup. The article said that the corporation was "impressed by a previous design by his firm: the design of the well-regarded new home of hte Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, where the chairmwoman is Mr. Bibliowicz's mother-in-law, Joan H. Weill. Mr. Weill and his wife have given more than $50 million to Carnegie Hall over the years, according to the article.

Apart from the question of the possible impropriety of the appointment of Mr. Weill's son-in-law for the expansion, the expansion itself is highly questionable, especially given the fact that there were in 2007 several very major new building projects planned in the vicinity that could easily accommodate whatever educational expansion plans Carnegie Hall has.

The warren of studios is quite extraordinary and without question one of the city's most important cultural landmarks and their destruction is equal in egregiousness to the demoliton of the great studio builidng at 51 West 10th Street (see The City Review article). (12/24/07)

An article by Wendy Goodman in the December 30, 2007 edition of New York magazine reported that "there are 33 occupied apartments remaining" and the the others are being gutted and remodeled by the Carnegie Hall Corporation to convert them to "educational facilities" for young musicians. The article said that the corportaion has "promised to find comparable apartments for the seven rent-controlled tenants...and to pay the difference in rent for the remainder of each tenant's life, but the 26 non-rent-controlled commercial and residential tenants...have no such guarantee, and received eviction notices last year," adding that "In December, a New York City civil court judge ruled in favor" of the corporation, but that the group of tenants is appealing.

The article highlighted pianist Donald Shirley, 80, who has lived there since 1956 and has 34-foot-high ceilings, Josef Astor, a photographer who has a triplex studio on the eighth floor since 1985, Editta Sherman, a photographer who has been in the building for 58 years, and Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, architects, who have been in the building for 34 years. (1/2/08)