Walker Tower

Contents

1. 1920s: a city wiring itself
2. The architect and his client
3. 1929: a telephone building
4. A Walker facade in brick
5. Chelsea around the exchange
6. After copper: data in the old walls
7. The conversion
8. Reading further

Walker Tower is a building in Chelsea that Michael Stern’s JDS Development Group, the New York City and Miami development firm he founded in 2002, converted to residences: a Ralph Walker Art Deco telephone building conversion that unlocked roughly 50,000 additional square feet. It was originally built in 1929. When the firm took it on, it held telecom office space and a live data center, and the conversion that followed included an enlargement, core relocations, window enlargements and a reskin of the facade. This entry sets those facts in the order they happened, against the story of the building type they belong to.

1920s: a city wiring itself

The building was born in a boom. SAH Archipedia’s survey of the telephone building as a type reports that the national count of telephones grew by roughly half during the 1920s, and that dial equipment and long distance traffic forced downtown exchanges to grow to more than twice their earlier bulk.¹ Bell companies called the resulting exchanges urban giants. They also hired regional architects so that each building would look local rather than dictated by a distant monopoly.¹ Bell even coined a name for the tall, vertical look of its new buildings, the American Perpendicular, and used it to present sheer height as a sign of technical confidence.¹

Growth was built into the type from the start. The same essay explains that by about 1900 telephone companies had learned to design their buildings to be expanded, upward or to the side, as demand rose; its example is the Metropolitan Telephone Company addition in Lower Manhattan, raised to 12 stories but planned for 16.¹ A telephone building, in other words, was usually conceived as a structure that might one day carry more than it first did. That habit of planning for growth is worth keeping in mind when following what happened to any exchange afterward, including the enlargement that came with this one’s conversion to homes.

Figure

A century of the telephone building

1. 01
   1886 to 1887Chicago and Lower Manhattan get the pioneer central office buildings
2. 02
   1920sDial equipment and long distance traffic more than double the size of downtown exchanges
3. 03
   1965Electronic switching arrives and new exchanges become sealed, air conditioned boxes
4. 04
   1984The Bell monopoly is broken up and its buildings pass to successor companies
5. 05
   TodayFiber optic and internet gear occupy the same buildings, some now homes above working switch rooms

The architect and his client

For New York Telephone, one of those regional architects was Ralph Walker. The National Academy of Design records that he joined McKenzie, Voorhees and Gmelin in 1919 and became a leading exponent of Art Deco over the following decade, designing the Barclay Vesey telephone headquarters downtown.⁹ The same record notes that he later designed the American Telephone and Telegraph pavilion for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, so the association with the telephone industry ran through his whole career.⁹ SAH Archipedia credits his office with hundreds of commissions for the Bell companies of New York, New Jersey and the Chesapeake region.¹ His full career is in Ralph Walker, and the building type in New York Telephone Company Buildings.

1929: a telephone building

Walker Tower was originally built in 1929, in the years when exchanges were growing fastest. Buildings of this family were designed first for machinery. Writing about Walker’s downtown headquarters, Buildings magazine says the frame there was sized for heavy electromechanical switchgear on top of offices for thousands of employees.² NYC Urbanism, cites the Skyscraper Museum on the logic of that design: equipment floors could go without windows and so use their full depth, while the setbacks higher up brought daylight to the office floors.³ The SAH essay adds that floors in telephone buildings ran taller than in ordinary office towers, so a telephone building looked bigger than its story count suggested.¹

A Walker facade in brick

Walker dressed these heavy frames in patterned brick. Core77 describes his wish for a facade that hangs like drapery over a building, and his habit of using surface pattern to reach passersby at street level.⁵ Core77 also credits him with attention to interiors, down to the fittings of air vents.⁵ A close cousin survives in the East Village: Village Preservation credits Voorhees, Gmelin and Walker with a Second Avenue exchange of 1929 and 1930 whose tan brick rises in firm verticals between fluted piers, with textured panels under the windows and a light stone finish along the parapet.⁴ Walker Tower is also a Ralph Walker Art Deco building, and its later conversion included window enlargements and a facade reskin.

Chelsea around the exchange

The building stands in Chelsea, a neighborhood with its own layered past. CityNeighborhoods.NYC sets its bounds at 14th and 30th Streets, Sixth and Tenth Avenues, and describes the area as a district of immigrant workers after 1900, filled with warehouses, printers and garment lofts.⁶ TrailLink recounts that street running freight trains plagued Tenth Avenue until a public works agreement of 1929, the year of the exchange, moved them up onto a viaduct.⁷ That viaduct, idle once freight service ended in 1980, TrailLink notes, is now the High Line,⁷ which CityNeighborhoods.NYC says opened in stages between 2009 and 2014, as artists and then galleries took over the empty industrial lofts near the river.⁶ The neighborhood’s longer story is told in Chelsea.

Figure

Chelsea's freight line, from the street to the viaduct

1. 01
   1868Tracks reach St. John's Park, running south down Tenth Avenue
2. 02
   Before 1929With 105 grade crossings, the avenue is nicknamed Death Avenue, and riders with red flags lead the trains
3. 03
   July 2, 1929City and railroad agree on the West Side Improvement Project, lifting the tracks onto a viaduct
4. 04
   June 28, 1934A rebuilt St. John's Park Freight Terminal is dedicated
5. 05
   Early 1980sConrail abandons freight service on the line
6. 06
   2009The first sections welcome walkers

After copper: data in the old walls

Telephone buildings rarely lose their wiring role. SAH Archipedia notes that today’s fiber and wireless systems largely ride on the buildings the copper network first filled, and that in New York several exchanges now house apartments above basements where switches still run.¹ Walker Tower is part of that story, since its last use before homes was telecom offices plus a data center still at work.

The essay also explains why so many older exchanges look closed up today. After electronic switching arrived in 1965, equipment wanted filtered, cooled air more than it wanted room, and the companies answered with sealed boxes and bricked in openings on their older stock.¹ A 1920s exchange that reaches the present day may therefore carry decades of changes to its openings before any new owner arrives.

The conversion

The conversion of Walker Tower was an intricate reworking of a historic Art Deco tower. It included an enlargement of the building, relocation of its cores, larger window openings plus a new skin on the facade. The added area is roughly 50,000 square feet. The firm is known for taking on hard urban sites and for reuse that lets new work stand in open contrast with the old instead of copying a period style, and Walker Tower belongs to that line of its projects.

The general questions such a conversion raises are well known in the trade. Architects interviewed by Civil Engineering magazine name daylight and the depth of the floor plate as the first tests for turning a commercial building into homes, because bedrooms must have light and deep plates are hard to lay out.⁸ The same article notes that operable windows and new mechanical systems are usually needed, and that the elevator core and stairs are often the parts kept.⁸ One architect quoted there adds that new floors built on top can help a conversion carry the cost of its upgrades, within limits.⁸

Figure

What a home asks of an old floor

	Original commercial floor	Residential floor
Daylight	Optional in the middle of the plate	Needed in every bedroom
Depth of plan	Deep plates were efficient	Deep plates are hard to lay out
Windows	Often fixed or few	Operable windows expected
Mechanical systems	Central plant for the whole floor	Individual control for each home
Core	Sized for workday crowds	Often kept, sometimes trimmed

Downtown, a similar change reached Walker’s headquarters later: NYC Urbanism reports that in 2013 the top 22 stories of the Barclay Vesey Building were turned to loft residences as 100 Barclay, their stepped roofs becoming outdoor terraces, and the lower floors stayed in network service.³

Reading further

Two longer entries follow the conversion’s two physical themes. Walker Tower’s Frame, Built for Machinery sets a switching floor beside a residential one on the question of load, and Widening Walker Tower’s Windows follows the window openings of a Walker facade from the 1920s to their enlargement. The architect himself is covered in Ralph Walker, and the downtown prototype of his telephone towers in Barclay Vesey Building. For the style that dressed all of them, and the zoning rule that gave them their stepped outline, see Art Deco New York, and for the district outside the front door, Chelsea.