Underhill again, in 1936, showing us the former Cities Service Building, 70 Pine Street, by looking down Pine Street from the east. We’re on the east side of Front Street looking west. As a reminder, Front Street is two blocks into the landfill along the East River, while 70 Pine is on Pearl Street, at the original shoreline.
An aside about the silliness of addresses: 70 Pine is between Pine Street and Cedar Street, or in other words a full block north of Wall Street, but it used to be known as 60 Wall Street because (a) there was a bridge connecting it to the much smaller and older building at that address and (b) apparently “60 Wall Street” sounds more important than “70 Pine Street.” It’s all fun and games until you spend half an hour wandering around the wrong street looking for the building you want to go to.
70 Pine is a good example of why people fixate on superlatives: the biggest, the longest, the fastest. When it was completed in 1932, only the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building were taller. Third tallest in the world is, in my opinion, pretty impressive, but I’d guess not one in ten people reading this blog post has ever heard of it. In any case, that building represents modernity, as the new kid on the block when the photo was taken.
The three buildings in the foreground – one on the left that we cannot see very well, and the two flanking Pine on the west side of Front – represent, at that time, middle age. These are late-1800s office buildings, from a period of transition for this micro-neighborhood. When Front Street was created by landfill in the 1700s, it was a working dock area, and had small low-rise warehouses and loft buildings devoted to ship-repair trades. The last remnant of this is now preserved as a landmark district centered around Fulton Street. Most likely, when these office buildings were constructed, the original dock-related buildings on the sites were demolished.
The third generation, old age, consists of those old dock-industry buildings, and a few can just barely be seen by looking down Pine Street. The two blocks from Front Street to Water Street to Pearl Street are landfill and former dock areas, and some of the old buildings there survived into the 1930s.
The mistake most commonly made in visuals for historical and future fiction is making everything the same age. New York in 2100 will have a lot of 1900s buildings still present; New York in 1900 had a good number of 1700s building still present. Different generations of buildings – and as seen above, they may be wildly different – coexist.
