Fifth Avenue! It’s in song and story, it’s a symbol for ‘class,’ it’s one of the world’s best-known shopping streets along with the Champs-Élysées, the Via del Corso, Bond Street and Rodeo Drive.
It’s also a kind of mirror for changes in architectural and artistic taste, as well as being home to flash and trash as well as class. On a recent weekday afternoon, I spent some time walking up and down between St Patricks and the Marble Church, and looking up and down at the sometimes harmonious and sometimes dissonant relation between street level and upper levels.
Of course, there’s more to Fifth Avenue than that; it extends far north along Central Park and into Harlem, and south to Washington Square and Greenwich Village, but that’s all farther than my day’s walk, which started near the flag-bedecked Saks Fifth Avenue flagship (oh, yeah!) store, just next to St Patrick’s.
Department stores, especially upper-range one like Saks, Bonwit Teller, Lord and Taylor have always been part of the Fifth Avenue retail mystique, but so have been specialty stores of various kinds, like what was for many years the home and bookstore of Charles Scribner Sons publishing. Even with a clothing store on the ground floor, the building has kept its elegance.
Others, like the Astor Trust Company (above) and 339 Fifth have lost their ground-floor facades to featureless stores and banks…or worse. Sprinkled among the more elegant users in the 50s are a fair assortment of garish discounters and souvenir stores.
But still, when you keep your eyes up and open, there’s plenty of detail to admire, in styles reflecting the 1890s, when mansions began giving way to offices and stores through the 1930s. After World War II, styles changed a lot.
You can see some of the variety here in this one building, where Art Deco rules, except for the Art Nouveau glass panels at bottom.
But I think (and it’s only a thought; I’m not an architectural historian) that this next picture tells an interesting story about change after World War II. All of the large and small motifs on the pre-war buildings bear close scrutiny; they are meant to be observed slowly, while walking or pausing. But the less-detailed but perhaps more visually ‘arresting’ elements of the building on the left seem to be made for drivers to notice.
I think it’s the same reason that simpler building shapes have given way to curving, swerving and bending ones. Compare the details of the two above.
The huge sign is readily apparent at speed; the finer repeated details are not.
Not every aspect of Fifth Avenue’s facades fits western styles; it’s also an avenue of tourism offices and official representatives. The Philippine Center has a traditional gable inserted into its doorway and carved motifs over its windows.
Fifth Avenue is also the venue for flagship stores of other kinds: prestige displays for today’s popular consumer brands. Here, just a few of the many… you can also find many others. Note that Skechers big store is just above another flagship, this one for a group of Hasidic Jewish congregations!
Sports are not unrepresented…
You might have noticed by now, in some of the pictures, that Fifth Avenue has quite a few narrow buildings, some of them quite tall. A few are built on narrow lots that connect to wider spaces behind, but most of the really narrow ones are the result of building new commercial space where a single mansion was before. It can get a bit extreme; the second and third images are of a building that’s half a block long and three windows wide.
Later, as building codes changed and as larger plots could be assembled, both tall and wide show in a single building. This one, 500 Fifth Avenue, faces the main New York Public Library on 42nd Street with elegant Art Deco decor and a stunningly straight-up tower. Building codes require setbacks to let light reach the street, but once you get to a certain height, well, the sky’s the limit.
New York Public Library, one of the most easily recognized on Fifth Avenue
Another easily-recognizable Fifth Avenue tower, the Empire State Building, has a base and setback that most would not recognize without looking up to see the tower itself. As for the picture below, I’m still trying to un-see what I saw when I looked up.
But for every one like that, there’s one like this: the former B. Altman department store at 34th Street, the first commercial building to replace mansions on the Avenue. It’s now home to the Graduate Center of the City University.
Two more pleasant entrances, and then our last stop…
The Marble Collegiate Church, known to many for years as the Norman Vincent Peale church, is near the end of our midtown walk. When this building was erected in 1854, the church was already 226 years old, and is now only a few years from its 400th anniversary. And it is gorgeous.
Of course, while Fifth Avenue is, in a literal sense, unique it is really not unique at all. Any street with enough years in it, and enough change will reward a nice walk with plenty to see, up or down.
Oh, about Mona. She’s shilling for a new retail opening…
UPDATE:
The ‘thing’ on the building I couldn’t unsee has now at least been identified and explained. That doesn’t mean I’m reconciled to it. Here it is as it appeared in the original blog:
And here is the ‘explanation’—the building, across the street from the New York Public Library central building (the one with the lions) is the former Mid-Manhattan Library, a large circulating branch. It is now re-opening as the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library. It is still the largest circulating branch of NYPL, and it is wearing the weird hat.