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RECORD   AND   GUIDE





November 25, 1922





General Business Follows Auto Trade To Columbus Circle

Character of District Once Devoted Almost   Exclusively   to   Motor   Industry
Changes When Firms in Other Lines Take Space in New Buildings





THE creation of new commercial centers in the City of
New York involves not only the erection and renting
of super-buildings, but also the more difficult task of
persuading many lines of business to leave old established loca¬
tions to which they have become wedded.

In the instance of Columbus Circle and Fifty-seventh Street
and Broadway, which localities combine to form New York's
newest commercial centre, at least two decades have elapsed
since the automobile and rubber industries began to establish
themselves in this section and to give it the character of New
Y'ork's "Automobile Row."

It remained, however, for the interests behind the new 25-
story Fisk Building, at Fifty-seventh Street and Broadway and
extending to Eighth Avenue, to accelerate the movement of
general business to this more northerly district, and to so
broaden the scope of the demand as to include lines of business
having no connection whatsoever with the automobile and rub¬
ber trades.

The Fisk Building, containing approximately 375,000 square
feet of rentable area and representing a valuation of $5,200,000,
according to the assessment valuation for the year 1923, is now
7S per cent rented to approximately 135 tenants, representing
about 30 different lines of business. This remarkable renting
record has been made by the Cross & Brown Company, agents,
in a period of about one year, and is a sufficient answer to
those real estate market skeptics who predicted that the Fisk
Building would prove to be a "white elephant."

The Fisk Building record, however, is even more remarkable
when it is considered that the building, which practically was
a pioneer, was only opened to tenants at least eight months
after the close of the renting market of 1921, while all during
the early part of the renting period it had to compete with the
millions of square feet of office space added in the Terminal
zone to meet the requirements of the temporarily active renting
market of the post-war and reconstruction period.

The Fisk Tire Company, Inc., having organized the 1767
Broadway Corporation for the purpose of purchasing the site
of and erecting the Fisk Building, in order to consolidate their
executive offices at No. 52 Vanderbilt Avenue and their sales
offices at Fifty-fifth Street and Broadway, purchased the site
of the building in May, 1920; the new Fisk Building, however,
was not completed until October, 1921. It replaced the Rutland
and St. Augustine apartment houses.

The uptown movement of the rubber and automobile trades
did not originally involve the construction of modern buildings
in the Columbus Circle district. The uptown trend had been
noted, however, by the O. B. Potter Trust, which, in 1905,
erected the building at the northwest corner of Fifty-sixth
Street and Broadway, and which almost immediately became
an automobile sales agency centre. Then, about the year 1909,
the Goodrich Tire Company moved from a store at 1625 Broad¬
way to their new 12-story building at 1780 Broadway, between
Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth Streets. This was followed by
the erection of the 21-story building, on 9,200 square feet of
ground, at the southeast corner of Fifty-eighth Street and
Broadway, by the United States Rubber Company, which for¬
merly had been located downtown, just west of City Hall Park.
This building is erected on land leased for eighty-four years
from the Estate of Mary A. Fitzgerald.

Previous to this the Ford Motor Company, about 1905, leased
and aUered the old O. S. Bailey stable on the west side of
Broadway, between Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Streets. In
more recent years, the Ford Company built its present building
at the northeast corner of Fifty^fourth Street and Broadway,
cn the one time site of the old Clermont apartment house
and the vacant lots adjoining.

At about this time the block on the east side of Broadway
between Fifty-sixth and Fifty-seventh Streets was purchased





by Robert E. Dowling, who subsequently resold the northeast
corner of Fifty-sixth Street and Broadway to the Broadway
Tabernacle, which then was located in Herald Square, at the
northeast corner of Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street, where
the Marbridge Building now stands. The Broadway Taber¬
nacle was established in 1840 and moved to Fifty-sixth Street
and Broadway in 1903. The southeast corner of Fifty-seventh
Street and Broadway, in the same block, was resold by Mr.
Dowling to the Island Realty Company, a William A. Chese-
borough Corporation, by whom the inside portion of the Fifty-
seventh Street frontage was sold to the Peerless Company,
which erected the 9-story building; the immediate corner was
improved with a similar 9-story building and leased for twenty-
one years to the Demarest Company, which then was located
at the northeast corner of Thirty-third Street and Fifth Ave¬
nue ; one lot remaining on Fifty-seventh Street was sold by
Mr. Dowling to Andrew Carnegie for an addition to the En¬
gineering Building, adjoining. Both the Peerless and Demarest
Buildings since have been acquired by the General Motors
Corporation, the corner building now being occupied by the
Chevrolet Motor Company, while the adjoining one-time En¬
gineering Building is now the home of the Ajax Rubber Com¬
pany.

Directly opposite, on the north side of Fifty-seventh Street,
between Broadway and Seventh Avenue, the costly private
riding ring and stable built by Frank Gould is now the head¬
quarters of the Lincoln Automobile Company; this building
immediately adjoins on the east the new 12-story business
building erected last year by the Excelsior Savings Bank on
the site formerly occupied by a 7-story elevator apartment
house.

The first substantial building improvement in this neighbor¬
hood after 1900 was the erection of the Woodward Hotel in
1902 by the late Nathan E. Clark, who in his time was a promi¬
nent builder of apartment houses in the Madison Avenue sec¬
tton. Shortly afterwards, in 1904, the Cumberland Hotel was
erected at the southwest corner of Fifty-fourth Street and
Broadway, on the site occupied for a number of years by the
Hotel Bayard. Two years later, in 1906, the Automobile Club
of America erected its present building in Fifty-fourth Street,
between Broadway and Eighth Avenue.

At the present time the Harriss-Colonnade Building is nearing
its completion on the square block bounded by Broadway and
Eighth Avenue, Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth Streets, occu¬
pied formerly by the Thoroughfare Building, which represented
the remodeling of a number of old buildings erected in the
dim and distant past. This property was purchased in 1907
for $1,650,000 and, it is understood, was leased to the Harriss-
Colonnade interests at a valuation approximating an advance
in value of 100 per cent over the price paid in 1907.

Just south of Fifty-seventh Street the entire square block
bounded by Broadway and Seventh Avenue, Fifty-sixth and
Fifty-seventh Streets, has been acquired by the Common¬
wealth Hotel interests, who recently demolished the Van Cor¬
lear apartments occupying the Seventh Avenue block front.
With the progress of this building, the Sonoma and Rocking¬
ham apartment houses on Broadway, together with several
private houses on Fifty-fifth Street and a small hotel on Fifty-
sixth Street, will be demolished to make way for the erection
of the Commonwealth Hotel which, if erected as planned, will
be the largest hotel in the world.

One of the most important of the early Fisk Building rentals
made by the Cross & Brown Company was the leasing of ap¬
proximately 7,500 square feet by the Tobacco Products Cor¬
poration, which then occupied about 13,500 square feet in the
United States Rubber Building. The problem of this company,
which required a very large number of small private offices for

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