Steinway Hall's Interior and Its Conservation

Contents

1. The limestone front
2. Repair and replication
3. Cleaning the masonry
4. Copper at the crown
5. The windows
6. The rotunda dome
7. Canvas and plaster
8. Faux marble
9. What was left alone

Steinway Hall, the 1925 Warren and Wetmore building that Michael Stern’s JDS Development Group joined to the new tower of 111 West 57th Street, meets the sidewalk with sculpture before it shows anything else. Low on the front, Leo Lentelli’s carved figures take music as their subject, and above them a band of roundels carries the faces of pianists who also composed, as the Historic Districts Council describes the street face.¹ In the tympanum over the great window, the carving shows Apollo with a muse of music.⁷ This entry describes the hall the way a visitor meets it, from that carving upward to the roof and then inward to the painted rotunda, and records for each element what its conservation involved, as the firms that did the work have described it.

The limestone front

The street facade is Indiana limestone. The stone comes from quarries around Bedford and Bloomington in south central Indiana, where quarrying began in 1827, and it became known as the national stone because it is about 97 percent calcite, durable and easy to cut, explains Quarry Magazine.³ Around 1900 Indiana supplied close to 80 percent of the limestone used in the United States, and by 1929 its quarries were producing some 12 million cubic feet of usable stone a year.³ The Steinway front belongs to that peak. The stone’s evenness is what let Warren and Wetmore carry carved ornament, from the lunette to the frieze, across a whole street front at a single tone.

Figure

Indiana limestone in four figures

Year the state's earliest quarry, Richard Gilbert, was established

1827

Calcite content, which makes the stone durable and easy to cut

97%

Share of United States limestone Indiana supplied around 1900

About 80%

Stone from Empire Quarry used on the Empire State Building

19,000 tons

Repair and replication

Even uniform stone weathers unevenly on a city street. The preservation architects Jan Hird Pokorny Associates prepared a conditions assessment and construction documents for the exterior, and list limestone repair and replication among the work, prepared to the standards of the Landmarks Preservation Commission.² Repair keeps an original unit in place and mends it; replication replaces a unit too far gone with new stone cut to match.

Cleaning the masonry

Masonry cleaning appears on the same scope.² The federal guidance on this step is cautious. The National Park Service’s Preservation Briefs include one devoted to cleaning and water repellent treatments for historic masonry, which steers owners toward the gentlest means that will work, and another warning against abrasive methods such as sandblasting.⁴ A companion brief covers repointing mortar joints with materials suited to the old wall.⁴

Copper at the crown

Above the stone rises the central tower, with its steep pyramidal roof and lantern. The Pokorny scope names copper roof replication.² Copper is chosen for roofs because its surface protects itself. Within days of exposure a new sheet turns from bright metal to chestnut brown, darkening over years toward chocolate, and continued weathering can bring the green patina associated with old copper, according to Architects Datafile.⁵ The rate depends on how long rain sits on the surface and on pollution, and for restoration work, the same article notes, copper can now be patinated at the factory to match a sample taken from the building.⁵

Figure

How copper weathers

1. 01
   DaysThe bright mill finish oxidizes to a chestnut brown.
2. 02
   YearsThe brown darkens gradually toward chocolate.
3. 03
   DecadesContinued weathering can produce the familiar green, or blue near the coast.
4. 04
   RateRain dwell time and airborne pollution set the pace, so exposed roofs turn faster than walls.

The windows

Window replacement completes the exterior list.² On a designated facade, replacement windows are reviewed for how closely they follow the originals in material, profile and division, because windows set much of the character of a masonry front. The Park Service briefs treat historic windows at length, alongside roofing and masonry.⁴

The rotunda dome

Inside, the showpiece is the reception rotunda, where customers once met the firm’s staff. Its shallow dome carries four large allegorical panels, and the artist credited with them is Paul Arndt, a New York painter, reports Traditional Building.⁶ The room was meant to be seen as well as entered: the council notes that it shows to the street through a large display window and opens from a hallway that leads on to the elevator lobby.¹ The same account in Traditional Building describes what the conservators of John Canning and Co. found when they arrived: some 15 years of water intrusion and thin upkeep, and panels darkened under repeated coats of shellac applied to hold the paint in place rather than to conserve it.⁶

Canvas and plaster

The dome is mixed media. The main figurative panels were painted on canvas in the studio and then adhered to the ceiling, while other passages were painted directly onto the plaster, so the team faced two substrates needing two treatments.⁶ Shellac yields to denatured alcohol, and swabbing it away brought back the original colors; where water had caused efflorescence in the plaster and lifted the paint, the conservators consolidated the paint layer by brush or injection.⁶ The canvases had also been tacked to the ceiling, so even where the glue failed, the tacks had held them.⁶ John Canning Studios’ project page sets out the full treatment plan, from paint analysis to a final protective coat.⁷

Figure

The mural treatment, step by step

1. 01
   AssessAn initial survey of the murals and a historic finishes investigation of the paint layers.
2. 02
   Clean and consolidateSurface cleaning, then consolidation of the paint layer where it had lifted.
3. 03
   RemoveVarnish removal across the murals and removal of heavy overpaint.
4. 04
   Fill and inpaintInfilling of losses, an isolating varnish, inpainting and a final protective coating.

Faux marble

The surprise of the job was stone that was never stone. The arches and entablatures read as black, green and veined white marble, and the team had been asked to prepare a marble cleaning program before discovering that they were paint over plaster.⁶ Canning’s portfolio records that these faux marble finishes were conserved and cleaned rather than replaced, and that the same crew restored the painted finishes of the adjoining vestibules and of the elevator lobbies on two levels.⁷

What was left alone

The Canning team came to the room with a Warren and Wetmore pedigree of its own: a few years earlier the firm had conserved the sky mural in Grand Central Terminal, which Traditional Building calls the architects’ best known work, and its principal described the Steinway murals as a point of pride after that commission.⁶ The same principal traced the rotunda’s finish work to the 1920s, when the decoration was carried out by the finest craftsmen then working in the country.⁶ The entry on Warren and Wetmore covers the architects.

Not everything was brought back. One lunette was so deteriorated that stripping its later finishes would have left almost nothing, so it was kept as found, and the firm routinely leaves small untreated swatches as evidence for conservators who come later.⁶ That practice is a quiet signature of good preservation: a patch of the building’s own history left legible beside the repaired surface.

The hall that results is limestone, copper, clear glass, canvas and painted plaster from 1925, restored by stone, metal and paint specialists, and it now stands joined to a SHoP Architects tower whose skin sets terra cotta beside bronze and glass, with neither pretending to be the other. For the hall’s hundred years, see Steinway Hall; the Indiana limestone and copper entries take the materials further.