Curran O’Toole Building
Icons at Risk
By David V. Griffin | From Preservation | May/June 2008
St. Vincent's wants to tear down nine Greenwich Village buildings, including Albert C. Ledner's 1964 O'Toole Building, formerly known as the Joseph Curran Buiding, headquarters of the National Maritime Union.
Credit: Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation
Curran O'Toole Building
Location: New York City
Architect: Albert C. Ledner
Year: 1963
Designed as the headquarters for the National Maritime Union and now a part of Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers, this midcentury classic, set in historic Greenwich Village, is one of the most flamboyant in New York. With cantilevered levels and a facade covered in tiny white tiles, the structure is a playful anomaly among more sober neighbors, its highly expressive style reminiscent of buildings by Edward Durell Stone. It is also massive, spanning an entire city block. In 1964, architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote, "There is no reason why the [National Maritime Union] could not have … added another cheap, dull, routine box with a shiny facade and a big sign to the New York scene...It decided, instead, to go for architecture. Whatever reservations may be held, New York needs more of those decisions." Today, the financially beleaguered Saint Vincent's wants to construct a new, more manageable hospital on the site, leaving the fate of Albert Ledner's building in doubt.
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Comments
Submitted by appalled at: June 10, 2008
This building is ugly. It was ugly then. It's ugly now. It will always be ugly. I am a lifelong 5th generation New Yorker rooted in lower Manhattan. I rue the day that this monstrosity designed by a reverse carpet-bagging architect from New Orleans took form and I cringe every time I pass it. The very people who are claiming this as a "dear friend" are the same people who along with the LPC, had they been around in 1963 would have railed against the demolition of the block of buildings razed to make way for this "thing". I suspect they are simply afraid of change. It is the nature of an urban environment that it's very life evolves through constant change. If one wants everything to remain forever the same, one should move to Montana. Make no mistake. Ms Huxtable did not endorse the design. She used its process as an example of decisiveness in matters of design. She never said this was a good building. She indirectly said it's not a cheap dull box. Cheap it wasn't. Dull would be an improvement. Architecture it ain't