Municipal Building
THE MUNICIPAL BUILDING was the first skyscraper constructed by McKim, Mead & White, in the waning years of the firm’s influential Beaux-Arts career. The 40-story building, which contains 650,000 square feet of city offices, was designed by the partner
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he municipal building was the first skyscraper constructed by McKim, Mead & White, in the waning years of the firm’s influential Beaux-Arts career. The 40-story building, which contains 650,000 square feet of city offices, was designed by the partner William Mitchell Kendall. Charles McKim himself was averse to skyscrapers and the trend towards gigantism and said, “I think the skyline of New York daily grows more hideous.” The Municipal Building features some of the best aspects of Beaux-Arts architecture, which sought to be both monumental and an integral part of the city’s fabric. The 559-foot-tall building, including a 15-story tower, is superbly metropolitan: it straddles the extension of Chambers Street (now closed to traffic) with a Roman triumphal arch like a modern-day Colossus of Rhodes. The 24-story wings of the U-shaped court, covered in lightcolored Maine granite, reach out to embrace City Hall. The Municipal Building is both ceremonial and sheltering. Adolph A. Weinman’s 20foot-high gilded statue of “Civic Fame,” the largest statue in the city, holds aloft a crown with five turrets, symbolizing the five boroughs of New York City. A giant Corinthian colonnade, modeled after Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini’s colonnade at St. Peter’s, marches across the entrance, a protective yet penetrable perimeter. Vaults of Guastavino tile protect commuters in a loggia on the south concourse of the subway. Although the Woolworth Building was the first to provide sheltered subway entrances from the sidewalks of the side streets, the Municipal Building was the first to incorporate a subway station as an integral part of its base. Henry Hope Reed exulted that the Municipal Building was “the nation’s finest skyscraper,” but here we see the Beaux-Arts style stretching at the seams to cope with the new demand for height. The insistent horizontal styling of classical architecture fights with the
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sense of height, so that the building appears more like a massive wall with a tower, rather than a tall building. The crown of a Corinthian drum adapted from the Choregic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens of 334 b.c. is a kind of funerary monument for historical styles. There were simply too few models left to copy, and skyscraper design had to move forward instead of back. A comparison with developments in the other arts is telling: in 1913, the Armory Show featured new works by Picasso, Braque, and Duchamp, and James Joyce published Dubliners. However, the building’s Imperial Roman image was enormously influential in other cities, and was a prototype for Chicago’s Wrigley Building (1924) and Cleveland’s Terminal Tower (1930), both by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White; the Fisher Building in Detroit (Albert Kahn, 1928); and—strangely enough at such a late date—the main building of Moscow University (L. V. Rudnev, S. E. Chernyshov, P. V. Abrosimov, and A. F. Khryakov, 1949‒53). The Municipal Building houses a Dickensian maze of old-fashioned city offices, and dozens of couples still marry here every
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