Columbia University Libraries Digital Collections: The Real Estate Record

Real estate record and builders' guide: v. 110, no. 22: [Articles]: November 25, 1922

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680 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 (Continued on page 682)