If you miss Part One in last month’s issue, you can read it at https://westviewnews.org/2015/04/capping-tammany-hall-part-one .
Michael Buckley, speaking for the current owner, Liberty Theaters, said at a meeting with BKSK Architects, members of the Union Square Community Coalition and Community Board Five, that they had a long term commitment to theater, but that ground floor retail, with offices above, would best meet the potential of this historic building. While the zoning law would allow an additional 42,000 square feet to the top of the existing 37,000, the architects propose only two partial floors of 11,000 square feet contained under an unusual partially transparent dome which turns up at the edges to admit daylight and views to and from Union Square.
“The concept came to us in a flash,” said the architects Harry Kendall and Todd Poisson. The original Tammany Hall had a statue of Chief Tamanend of the Lenni Lenapi Tribe, the patron saint of Tammany Hall, with his foot on a turtle shell, recalling Venus emerging from a seashell. Tammany Hall members consisted of thirteen tribes, each headed by a chief or Sachem, who formed the board of directors of Tammany. This shell inspired the dome with which BKSK decided to cap the roof of the two additional partial top floor offices, which would float over the roof edged by a waist high railing overlooking the views.
“When we looked at expansion of this historic building, we looked at its history,” added architect Harry Kendall. Months of analyses of domed buildings throughout history are shown on scores of elevations, including the Pantheon in Rome and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Each shows a complete circle whose center is contained within the facade. The singularity of this revived Tammany Hall is apparent in the power and whimsy of the new dome, lifted off the roof and presenting Union Square’s diverse building styles. Characterized by the Venetian Decker Building along the west side to the Queen Anne Century Book building on the north, to the mammoth Germania Life Building with its massive Mansard roof on the north east, to the Corinthian capitals of the Union Square Savings Bank along the west side by Henry Bacon, (architect for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.,) Union Square has no unity of style or roofline. Instead it is an eclectic chorus of somewhat discordant show-offs. The new Tammany Hall follows that tradition in an exuberant, joyful, somewhat playful manner. We all should celebrate this latest arrival.
At its November 25th public hearing the Landmarks Preservation Commission reached no decision. According to Harry Kendall of BKSK Architects who presented the elegant proposal, LPC Chair Meenakshi Srinivasan “closed with a call for NYC to be as progressive and ambitious as the European cities in which some of our examples were taken. She asked us to consider a rooftop structure that either alluded to hipped roof examples in some way, or to pursue the dome/cap approach in in a simplified form.”
On March 10, BKSK Architects received approval from the Landmarks Preservation Commission to revise the dome using a more classical approach which still retains the joyous purity of the original concept. The design leaps from the superficial stagecraft of the 1929 pseudo-Georgian Boss Tweed building to a purer, more graceful and functional form.
