The Bayard–Condict Building (formerly the Condict Building and Bayard Building) is a 12-story commercial structure at 65 Bleecker Street in the NoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, United States. Built between 1897 and 1899 in the Chicago School style, it was the only building in New York City designed by architect Louis Sullivan, who worked on the project alongside Lyndon P. Smith. Located in the NoHo Historic District, the building was designated a New York City landmark in 1975 and a National Historic Landmark in 1976.
The building occupies a rectangular site and has a terracotta facade divided horizontally into three sections. The lower two stories consist of ground-story storefronts with ornate columns, with an arched entrance in the westernmost bay. On the upper stories, piers separate the building vertically into five bays, each with ornate spandrel panels. There are six winged angels just below the cornice at the top of the building. On the inside, the first two stories are used for retail, while the upper floors generally contain large loft-like spaces and a steel structural frame. A mechanical core with elevators, utilities, and stairs is in its western end.
The Bayard Building was developed by the United Loan and Investment Company, who acquired the land in 1897 from the Bank for Savings in the City of New York and named the edifice after the Bayard family. Due to disputes over construction methods, United Loan was forced to give up the building before it was completed, and Emmeline G. H. Condict had acquired it by June 1899. It was sold in 1900, and again in 1920, before coming under the control of the Shulsky family in the 1940s. The storefronts were replaced in the 1960s, followed by the lobby in the 1980s. The facade was restored during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Site The Bayard–Condict Building is at 65 Bleecker Street in the NoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, United States. It is on the north side of Bleecker Street between Broadway and Lafayette Street, at the northern end of Crosby Street. The land lot is rectangular and measures around , with a frontage of and a depth of along Bleecker Street. The Robbins & Appleton Building adjoins the Bayard–Condict Building on the same block directly to the north, and an entrance to the New York City Subway's Bleecker Street station is immediately to the east. Other nearby structures include the Schermerhorn Building to the northeast, 339 Lafayette Street to the east, and 640 Broadway to the southwest.
Before the early 19th century, what is now NoHo was part of the farms of numerous families, such as the Bayard, Bleecker, Herring, Pero, and Randall families. West–east streets were laid through the area by the early 19th century, and row houses were built along these streets. This was followed by institutions like churches, libraries, and schools in the 1830s and 1840s, then by store and loft buildings in the 1850s, which catered to the area's wealthy population. With the advent of curtain walls, steel frames, and fireproof elevators, these store and loft buildings were being built as tall as 12 stories by the 1890s. The Bayard–Condict Building was among these early high-rise loft buildings.
Architecture The Bayard–Condict Building is the only structure in New York City designed by Louis H. Sullivan, a Chicago school architect, as well as his first completed design after his partnership with Dankmar Adler dissolved in 1896. Sullivan is sometimes cited as the building's sole architect, although he was assisted by New York architect Lyndon P. Smith. Sullivan, who was only licensed to practice architecture in Illinois, frequently formed such partnerships with local partnerships when he took out-of-state commissions. George Elmslie helped design the decoration.
The building was one of the first skeleton frame skyscrapers in New York City, and the Department of Buildings raised numerous objections to the design before the plans were finally accepted. Measuring tall, with 13 stories, it was considered an early skyscraper. It was similar in design to an unbuilt skyscraper for the St. Louis Trust and Savings Bank that was designed in 1895. According to Sullivan's protege Frank Lloyd Wright, the Bayard–Condict Building was Sullivan's favorite design.
Exterior
The Bleecker Street elevation of the facade is clad in white glazed terracotta over a masonry wall. The facade has relatively undecorated mullions and pilasters, which accentuate its height and divide the facade vertically into five bays. The Bleecker Street facade is divided horizontally into three sections—an ornamented base, a shaft of identical stacked floors, and a decorated crown—illustrating Sullivan's views on skyscraper design. The terracotta was deliberately constructed in thin layers, visually emphasizing the columns in the building's superstructure.
Whereas the protruding mullions and pilasters were intended to draw attention to the superstricture, the superstructure's horizontal beams were deemphasized and covered with wide spandrel panels. According to Herbert Muschamp, the emphasis of the vertical elements may have been intended to represent "maximum development of a small urban site by thrusting against gravitational force". Sullivan's ornate floral designs decorate the facade's base and top, as well as the spandrels below each window opening. The facade's other three elevations are made of red brick on common bond. At the rear are light courts overlooking an alley.
Lower stories The lowest part of the Bleecker Street facade contains a concrete water table. The entrance to the building is through the westernmost bay. The doorway is flanked by piers, above which are a small cornice and an ornamented lunette with "organic" motifs such as spirals, leaves and tendrils. The lunette is topped by geometric designs and leaves. The base of the building originally contained storefronts separated by octagonal columns, above which were ornate capitals that also depicted leaves. The original columns were removed in 1964 and restored in 2002. Above each of the ground-story storefronts are spandrel panels with more organic motifs. These storefronts resemble the Trust and Savings design closely, with slanting clerestory windows. To give the impression that the building's base was two stories high, Sullivan did not use mullions and pilasters on the lowest two stories.
Upper stories
On the upper stories, the bays are separated by pilasters, which correspond to the internal structural system; each bay is topped by a large arch. Above the second floor, the bays are further subdivided into two sash windows per story, separated by a narrow mullion. The windows between the mullions and pilasters are wide, nearly filling their respective sub-bays. The pilasters and mullions created what Sullivan biographer Narciso Menocal described as contrasting rhythms—a design technique Sullivan had previously used in the Prudential Building in Buffalo, New York, and the Wainwright Building in St. Louis, Missouri. There are recessed terracotta spandrels with geometric and organic motifs above the pairs of windows on each story. The spandrels above the 11th floor are decorated with lions' heads.
The top two stories (the 12th and 13th) were intended to resemble a single story from the outside. On these stories, each bay contains an arch at the 12th and 13th stories, and there is a trefoil motif in the spandrels of each arch. The arch itself includes smaller arches between each ilaster and mullion, topped by porthole windows that sit beneath the larger arches. A heavy cornice projects from the facade above the thirteenth floor and contains decorative soffit panels. There are round motifs and leaves above the cornice, but the roof of the building is otherwise flat.
There are six winged angels just below the cornice. For many years, it was widely believed that Silas Alden Condict, a lawyer with religious aspirations who had briefly owned the building, had wanted the angels to be included. Condict allegedly wanted the angels to represent the six working days of the week (excluding the Sabbath). Sullivan had allegedly initially objected to the presence of the angels; according to The New York Times, Sullivan had asked Condict, "Do you want a commercial building or do you want a church?" Condict's role in the angels' inclusion is disputed by historians Sarah Landau and Carl W. Condit, who wrote in their 1996 book Rise of the New York Skyscraper that Sullivan had used winged-angel motifs in his design for the Transportation Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Menocal wrote that the architect had previously used similar angels on the Trust and Savings Bank and that these were, in turn, similar to those of the Reims Cathedral. The sculptures had been depicted in a Brickbuilder magazine article in June 1898, before the Condict family had even bought the building.
Interior According to the Architectural Review, the Bayard–Condict Building was a speculative development "designed to be used for offices or light as to the upper , and for shops in the ground and first floors". When the Bayard–Condict Building was built, the ground story had two shops and an entrance. It generally contained large loft-like spaces on the upper stories. The lofts could be divided into smaller offices and were illuminated by natural light, which was maximized by the presence of setbacks at the rear of the building. There was also a mechanical core with elevators, utilities, and stairs.
Originally, the building was to contain brick curtain walls with a uniform thickness of . The interior would have been supported by a type of freestanding steel frame called the Gray system, which used columns attached to cast-steel bases. Sullivan and Dankmar Adler had previously used the Gray system at the Prudential Building, but New York City officials were loath to approve the use of the Gray system. As a result, the curtain wall measured thick between the floor slabs for the first and fifth stories; thick between the fifth and ninth stories; and thick above the ninth story. The interior columns were also thickened, measuring between across at the ground story and across on the top two stories.
By the late 20th century, the building was accessed through the westernmost bay on Bleecker Street, which led to a north–south hallway. The hallway had terrazzo floors, plastic wall tiles, and acoustical ceiling tiles. A pair of elevators was positioned at the center of the hallway, while the rear end of the hallway had a stairway adjacent to a storefront. The staircase had an ornate balustrade between the basement and third story, stucco-and-plaster walls, and a plaster ceiling. On the upper stories, there was a hallway on the western end of each story connecting to the elevators and stair. The remainder of each story was divided into office or industrial space, with tile floors, plaster walls, and plaster ceilings. Ceiling heights range from on the first floor to on the 12th floor. The 13th floor functions as a gallery level surrounding a double-height space on the 12th story.
History The Bayard–Condict Building was constructed on the former site of the Bank for Savings in the City of New York, also known as the Old Bleecker Street Bank. The bank building on the site burned down in 1895. The bank itself relocated to Fourth Avenue in the late 19th century.
Development