Art: Blueprint for an Avenue

To transform one of Manhattan’s frowziest avenues into a thing of beauty would be a man-size job. In fact, it would be as big a job of city reconstruction as was ever undertaken in the commercial bowels of a modern metropolis. Last week Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue Association Inc. blueprinted the job.

The ever-growing curse of the congested business streets of most big cities is their lack of coordination. Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue has been one of the world’s most turbulent and cross-purposed examples. Its elevated railway, originally constructed for steam trains, clattered relentlessly over a darkened street where tramcars, busses, taxis and trucks cacophonously disputed passage. Beneath its vibrating steel structure, messenger boys of the world’s biggest clothing center further clotted the traffic by trundling loads of furs, hats and dresses in pushcarts. Sixth Avenue bristled with slums that had once been factories, factories that had once been office buildings, office buildings that had once been homes.

Two years ago the city, having already banished Sixth Avenue’s trolley cars, tore down its elevated. That only lifted Sixth Avenue’s veil. It needed its face lifted too.

The Sixth Avenue Association’s plan calls for redesigning the Avenue’s 27 midtown blocks. Between two focuses—a gigantic garment center and a music center which would eventually replace Carnegie Hall—it would become the “Avenue of the Americas,” a broad, tree-lined boulevard hedged with buildings housing the Manhattan interests of all the Latin-American republics.

Other proposed features: 1) an auditorium and studio building to house Manhattan’s musicians, 2) an art center to take the place of the scores of art dealers’ galleries now scattered along Manhattan’s 57th Street and elsewhere, 3) a barrel-topped terminal for Central Railroad Co. of New Jersey, 4) a health and recreation building with courts, rinks and swimming pools, 5) a large hotel especially designed for conventions of out-of-town industrialists, 6) a fashion center for wholesaling, distribution and display of the garment industry, 7) many-storied underground garages, wide sidewalks, rooftop restaurants, glass-enclosed subway entrances and combination sunken-garden and retail shopping areas.

To work out this plan with blueprints and models, the Association appointed one of Manhattan’s most modern-minded architects: bald, 39-year-old Edward D. Stone. Architect Stone, who had already left his mark on Sixth Avenue as the chief designer of Radio City Music Hall, set to work with enthusiasm.

How this project was to be paid for was a problem the Sixth Avenue Association had not solved. They expected Sixth Avenue’s property owners to do their own building, hoped that post-war economic conditions might help their project along.