The Steinway Hall Courtyard Site

Contents

1. Where the ground sits
2. A block two hundred feet deep
3. Lots reached only from the street
4. A hundred foot street
5. The shape of the 1925 hall
6. What the answer leaves out

The tower that Michael Stern’s JDS Development Group put up on West 57th Street was built in the courtyard of the landmarked Steinway Hall, and that phrase raises a plain question: what sort of ground is a courtyard behind a landmark on a Manhattan street? This entry answers it from maps, lot records and the description of the 1925 hall, working outward from the block to the building. It leaves the tower’s engineering aside and keeps to the land and the street.

Where the ground sits

Steinway Hall stands on the north side of West 57th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, across from Carnegie Hall, as the conservators at John Canning Studios place it.⁵ That address puts it on one of the long blocks of the Manhattan grid, and the grid is where any account of the site has to start. The courtyard is a piece of that block, enclosed by what was built around it over the following century.

A block two hundred feet deep

The street plan adopted by the city’s commissioners in 1811 set every block at 200 feet from north to south, and varied only the east to west length, according to the Museum of the City of New York’s account of the Commissioners’ Plan.¹ The blocks between Fourth and Sixth Avenues kept a length of 920 feet from an earlier survey of the Common Lands, while the West Side blocks were drawn at 800 feet.¹ A block between Sixth and Seventh Avenues is therefore a long rectangle, four times as long as it is deep.

Figure

The grid in five measurements

Width of every avenue

100 ft

Width of a standard cross street

60 ft

Width of a major cross street such as 57th

100 ft

Depth of every block, north to south

200 ft

Length of a West Side block, east to west

800 ft

The plan was an ordering system more than a picture of a place. It numbered the streets from 1 to 155, ignored most of the hills and farms it crossed, and left the division of blocks into lots to whoever owned the land.¹

Lots reached only from the street

That last point matters for any courtyard. The 1811 plan made no provision for alleys cutting through a block’s interior, so a property could be reached only from the street it faced, explains the historian Richard Howe in the Gotham Center’s notes on nineteenth century lot sizes.² The simplest answer was to split each block lengthwise into two rows of lots, each fronting its own street, with each lot running about 100 feet back to the centerline.² Howe adds that the familiar 25 by 100 foot lot was never actually drawn on the 1811 map; owners and builders cut lots to the widths they wanted, from about twelve feet to sixty and more.²

Figure

What the plan fixed and what owners decided

	Fixed by the 1811 plan	Left to owners and builders
Block depth	About 200 feet north to south	Two rows of lots, each about 100 feet deep
Alleys	None provided	Every lot faces a street
Lot widths	Never drawn on the map	From about 12 feet to 60 feet or more
Timing	Streets opened by the city	Land divided when an owner chose to sell

The buildings that filled those lots rarely used all of them. By the end of the nineteenth century, Howe counts, at least three quarters of the buildings on the island were 20 to 25 feet wide and only 60 to 80 feet deep, and nearly all stood six stories or less.² On a lot about 100 feet deep, that left a strip of open ground at the back of almost every property, and the backs of neighboring lots met along the spine of the block.

The result is a city of street fronts with private ground behind them. Open space in the interior of a Manhattan block is not a public passage and was never planned as one; it is the unbuilt part of the lots that face the streets. A courtyard, in this setting, is ground surrounded by buildings and reached through them or through the frontage of the lot that holds it.

A hundred foot street

The street out front matters as much as the block behind. The 1811 plan named fifteen east to west streets that would be 100 feet wide, against 60 feet for the rest, and 57th Street was one of them, according to Wikipedia’s article on the street.³ The street was laid out and opened in 1857, and the middle stretch became an artistic center after Carnegie Hall opened in 1891.³ By the mid 1920s, two major piano showrooms, Chickering Hall and Steinway Hall, had been built on West 57th Street.³

Width had a direct effect on what could rise from it. The city’s 1916 zoning rules required buildings to step back as they rose, so that light and air still reached the sidewalk, as 99% Invisible describes.⁶ Under that law a street wall could climb only to a height tied to the width of the street before the mass had to slope or stair step inward, and a tower of any height was allowed if it covered no more than a quarter of the lot, as Cooper Hewitt’s note on the drawings of Hugh Ferriss explains.⁷ A wide street therefore bought a taller wall at the building line. The entry on the 1916 Zoning Resolution covers the rule itself.

Figure

The 1916 envelope in four moves

1. 01
   Street wallA building could rise straight up only to a height set in relation to the width of the street.
2. 02
   Slope backAbove that line the mass had to slope or step back in a fixed proportion to the street wall.
3. 03
   Tower allowanceA tower could go to any height if it covered no more than a quarter of the lot.
4. 04
   Ferriss, 1922Hugh Ferriss drew four possible massings under the law to illustrate an article in the New York Times.

The shape of the 1925 hall

The hall of 1925 answers that street and that rule. Its plan forms an L, according to the Historic Districts Council; the Indiana limestone front climbs to a colonnade of four stories stepped in from the building line, and a second, central tower in the manner of a campanile carries a steep pyramid roof crowned by a big lantern.⁴ The setbacks, towers and massing are part of what the council cites as its distinction on the West 57th Street cultural corridor.⁴

Its street numbers run from 109 to 113 West 57th Street. Inside, the showpiece was an octagonal rotunda two stories high, about 35 feet, used as the reception room where visitors and musicians were greeted by the house.⁵

An L shaped building on a rectangular piece of ground leaves the remainder of the rectangle open. The tower’s approved description calls its site the courtyard of Steinway Hall, and notes that the 1925 building and the new tower are joined as one; it does not give the dimensions of the open ground, and none are stated here. The hall’s own story is told under Steinway Hall, while the entry on 111 West 57th Street sets out what the approved description says about the tower.

What the answer leaves out

The question was about ground, and the answer stops at the ground. How a very tall and narrow structure is made to stand and to stay comfortable in wind is a separate subject that this site does not treat at length. The entry on building through a single frontage takes up the practical side of working on land with a single way in, and the restoration entry describes the hall’s own fabric.

Put in one sentence, the courtyard of Steinway Hall is part of a 200 foot deep block on the 1811 grid, on a 100 foot wide crosstown street, beside an L shaped 1925 limestone hall by Warren and Wetmore.