Beekman Tower (originally Panhellenic Tower)
JOHN MEAD HOWELL’S powerfully vertical Beekman Tower is the lineal descendant of Hood & Howell’s Chicago Tribune Building and Hood’s American Radiator Building, fused with Eliel Saarinen’s “astylar” entry for the Tribune competition. The 23-story towe
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MITCHELL PLACE
o h n m e a d h o w e l l ’ s powerfully vertical Beekman Tower is the lineal descendant of Hood & Howell’s Chicago Tribune Building and Hood’s American Radiator Building, fused with Eliel Saarinen’s “astylar” entry for the Tribune competition. The 23-story tower jumps straight from its three-story base in a series of unbroken piers. Prominently situated on a corner site against an open sky, the setbacks seem to taper into lofty distances. The impact of the silhouette is striking for the building’s relatively low height. Square windows with plain spandrels are set behind deep reveals that look as if they have been gouged into a clay surface with a palette knife. From oblique angles, the windows disappear entirely, so that the whole structure seems to be composed of blind masonry piers. The Beekman is a fulfillment of Harvey Wiley Corbett’s prediction that under the new zoning code the architect would become a “sculptor in building masses,” and of the artist Hugh Ferriss’s vision that buildings were meant to be “crude clay for architects.” As with Hood’s American Radiator Building, the shaft’s chamfered corners make the eye read the orange-brick façade as a continuous surface. At the same time, monolithic framing piers at the corners—windowless except for a single bay on the beveled angle—add to an appearance of stone-like solidity. The tower is set in from the corner by a curious three-story, four-bay ell that connects it to an inconspicuous, similarly styled 10-story wing so that the main tower appears to be freestanding. Originally called the Panhellenic Tower, the building was designed as an apartment hotel and clubhouse for female college graduates who were members of Greek letter societies. Symbolic Greek letters are embedded in the base. It now functions as a suite hotel, with 12.5-foot-deep tower rooms encircling the central elevator core. Ornamentation is reduced to round-headed windows in the base, surmounted
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JOHN MEAD HOWELLS ,
1928
by frozen-fountain motifs in cast stone. The crown features an open arcade that resembles bubbles in the corona of a fountain, but the cornices of the setbacks are starkly undecorated, except for a slight battering, a development that would in turn influence Hood’s Daily News Building. The surface of orange brick is wonderfully responsive to the qualities of New York light—sharply etched in the morning and warmly lambent at sunset. Recessed spotlights in the crown add a touch of Gothic mystery at night. A more recent addition of a glassed-in restaurant, the Top of the Tower, complicates the last setback at the twenty-sixth floor, but the original outlines can still be determined.
[ 1 ] A low annex, left, sets off the Beekman Tower from neighboring buildings.
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