Bradford Lee Gilbert (March 24, 1853 – September 1, 1911) was a nationally active American architect based in New York City. He is known for designing the Tower Building in 1889, the first steel-framed building anywhere and the first skyscraper in New York City. This technique was soon copied across the United States. He also designed Atlanta's Cotton States and International Exposition of 1895, the Flatiron Building in Atlanta, and many railroad stations.
Background Bradford was born in Watertown, New York, the son of civil engineer and banker Horatio Gates Gilbert and his wife Marie Antoinette (née Bacon). His uncle was Jasper W. Gilbert, a justice with the New York Supreme Court.
He attended Siglar's School in Newburg and the Sedgwick Institute in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Later, he had private tutors at home in Irvington, New York to get ready to attend Yale University, rather than his father's alma mater Norwich University. However, Gilbert decided to forgo college as he was very anxious to learn architecture. He became a student with the architectural firm J. Cleveland Cady in New York City for five years, beginning in 1872.
In 1876, Gilbert was hired as an architect for the New York, Lake Erie and Western Railroad, under engineer Octave Chanute. Through his work with the railroad in the northern and northwestern states, Gilbert earned a reputation for originality. Although his body of work is diverse, he preferred Romanesque style and consistently featured "sinuous, interlaced patterns, virtuoso brickwork and deep red color effects".
By 1890, Gilbert opened a firm in his name at 1 Broadway in New York City, initially specializing in railroad and public buildings. He said, "It certainly costs no more, often not such much, to design a building that is architecturally correct, of good, quiet contour, the whole effect gained by constructional outlines, in place of the fancy 'ginger-bread' work too often adopted; and with the interior arrangements designed to meet every requirement."
Throughout his career, Gilbert also designed apartment buildings, churches, clubs, exhibition buildings, hospitals, hotels, houses, and office buildings. Gilbert did not just design buildings, he also managed the projects and visited the construction sites; this was documented in newspapers articles announcing his arrival in town to check on the progress of the projects.
This attention to detail may have paid off as many of his other projects steamed from his railroad connections, including designing residences for William H. Baldwin Jr. who was president of the Long Island Railroad, Alfred Skitt who was president of the New York City Interborough Railway Company, Arthur M. Dodge whose father built the Macon and Brunswick Railroad, Benjamin A. Kimball who was president of the Concord and Montreal Railroad Company, and William Greene Raoul president of the Atlantic and Birmingham Railway, the Central Railroad and Banking Company of Georgia, the Mexican National Railroad Company, and the Southwestern Railroad.
Projects
Railroad stations
As an architect with the New York, Lake Erie & Western Railroad, Gilbert designed many railroad stations and related buildings. Through his private practice, his railroad clients included the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad; Boston & Maine Railroad; Central Railroad of New Jersey; Concord and Montreal Railroad; the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad; Flint & Pere Marquette Railroad; Georgia Railroad Company; Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad; Illinois Central Railroad; Intercolonial Railroad (Canada); Michigan Central Railroad; Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad; New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad; Norfolk and Virginia Beach Railroad; Northern Pacific Railway; Old Colony Railroad; Philadelphia & Reading Company and others. In 1901, he designed the Ottawa Central Railway Station. Page 73. He also designed stations, offices and terminals for the National Railroad of Mexico.
Gilbert designed the Illinois Central Terminus (also called Central Station) at 12th Street in Chicago—it was constructed in nine months for the 1893 for the World's Columbian Exposition. The location and use of the building created certain challenges given the brief that all fair buildings have impact and beauty; Gilbert's solution was to increase the size of the station and give it strong Romanesque details, as "the first impression gained of the building by the general public would be regarding its general contour and 'massing' as well as the outline skylines". In other words, it needed to be impressive at a distance. His design included a ten-story office building, with lobby and offices connected via a pneumatic tube service. The first three stories were built from dark speckled granite, with buff brick for the upper levels. The roof was dark glazed Spanish tiles, along with a coppery dome. Gilbert was also instructed to make the building fireproof. He achieved this in part by using the building's adjacent tower as a series of fire-proof vaults. The 15-story tower was also a functional clock tower. The cost of this project was over a million dollars, including the passenger station, waiting rooms, restaurant, office building, and a train shed that covered eight tracks. The waiting room was the largest in the world, at and high. This elaborate structure remained in use until it was demolished in 1974. It was called "the gateway to the city."
Gilbert was also the architect for the 1898 remodel of New York City's Grand Central Terminal—a project started in 1892 where "no expense is to be spared in making the building attractive". The actual cost was around $175,000 (equivalent to $ in today's money). Gilbert designed the ten-story building in the Romanesque style. The front of the building had ornamental bronze panels and bay windows on the second story. The lower level was granite, with Indiana Limestone on top. Inside, there were tiled floors and deeply paneled ceilings, as well as pneumatic tubes to connect the lobby to the offices. This building was replaced by the current Grand Central Station in 1913.
Whether designing a large railroad station for New York City or a small station for a Mexican village, Gilbert believed the structure should be comfortable, functional, and aesthetically pleasing to be an asset to its community. In Engineering Magazine, Gilbert wrote, "No excuse should exempt a railroad company from being amenable to 'local pride.'" He also criticized designing public buildings in Queen Anne or other overly decorative styles as being both expensive to construct and to maintain.
World's Columbian Exposition In 1893, Gilbert designed an exhibition building for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago for his clients the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad along with The Wagner Palace Car Co. The building contained wings on either side for railroad engines; inside was an exhibit showing photographs and sketches of Gilbert's work on railroad station architecture. The Exposition's board of directors gave Gilbert a gold medal "for a new type of American architecture". In 1895, the exhibit illustrations were published by Railway Gazette as a book, Sketch Portfolio of Railroad Stations and Kindred Structures. Gilbert noted that railroad buildings had been overlooked in the past, but were an excellent place "to illustrate the modern architecture".
Mason Stables Edmund Coffin Jr., a prominent real estate investor and lawyer in New York City, hired Gilbert to design the Mason Stables. This project took three years to construct and was divided into two phases, 1881–1882 and 1883–1894. When completed, the Mason Stables were one of the most extensive livery stables in New York City. The five-story stables included 158 stalls and room for more than 300 carriages. Primarily Romanesque Revival in style, the building was decorated with some Celtic-style ornaments, repeating patterns in variegated orange-yellow and orange-red brick, and rows of repeating slender windows. One modern writer says, "The stables were nearly abstract, a field of dreams in orange, red, and yellow masonry." The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission says, "Color and texture, rather than ornament, were skillfully used to give the structure its simple, yet monumental character."
Another unique aspect of the Mason Stables was its layout, as the stables wrapped around other buildings, resulting in three entrances—76th Street, 77th Street, and Amsterdam. Two of the entrances featured step-gables, a characteristic of Dutch Renaissance Revival style that Gilbert used with other public buildings in New York City as a nod to the city's origins as New Netherland. In 1912, the stables were remodeled into a car park and were renamed the Dakota Stables (not to be confused with a 19th-century facility with that name), and the Pyramid Garage in the 1950s. Over the years, the building lost many of its period details; it was demolished in 2011.
YMCA Gilbert designed a Queen Anne style building for the YMCA in the Bowery. Known locally as The Bunker, the building was constructed in 1884. This was the first YMCA in New York City. It was converted into residences in 1932 and survives today as a New York City Landmark.
In June 1886, Gilbert was hired to design a building for the Harlem Branch of the YMCA. The building was located between 5th and 6th Avenues on the north side of 125th Street. It was brownstone on the lower levels and brick and terra cotta on the upper levels, with step-gables in the Dutch Renaissance Revival style at the 125th Street entrance. The $65,000 (equivalent to $ in today's money) building included a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a bowling alley, five classrooms, a library, a parlor, a reception room, a reading room, and an auditorium that seated 800 people.
Tower Building
John Noble Sterns, a supporter of the Cremorne Mission where Gilbert was a trustee, hired Gilbert in 1888 to design an eleven-story office building in New York City. For such a tall building, traditional construction methods required very thick walls that would have dominated the lot that was just wide. Calling upon his railroad background, Gilbert thought of turning a railroad bridge on end, with iron girders to support the floors and external walls. This innovation of "skeleton construction" with "steel-framed curtain walls" allowed him to construct a skyscraper without having thick load-bearing walls. Another benefit of this construction technique was that it was fireproof.
To work around local building ordinances, Gilbert constructed a foundation that was four stories or tall, essentially the height of the adjacent buildings. This foundation was constructed of iron and Little Falls stone. Next, came ten stories constructed in Philadelphia and Tiffany brick, with an octagonal roof covered in Spanish tiles. The brickwork was colorful, and there was Celtic ornamentation similar to that of Mason Stables.
Opening in 1889, the Tower Building is considered New York City's first skyscraper and the first curtain-wall building in the world. It was initially greeted with great skepticism, with members of the public predicting it would blow over. Some people walked around the block rather than walk by it. Some engineers declared it "unsafe and impracticable". To assure the public of its safety, Gilbert moved his offices to its top floor and remained there until he stopped practicing. He also scaled the building in the middle of an 1889 hurricane to prove that the building was not vibrating with a plumb line. In 1889, Engineering News called it "a most skillful solution of an exceedingly difficult problem". Kobble's New York and Environs wrote, "The Tower Building, of No. 50 Broadway, with its fifteen stories, is a remarkable example of a clever utilization of a narrow plot of ground."