Appellate Division Courthouse of New York State
The Appellate Division Courthouse of New York State, First Department, is a courthouse at the northeast corner of Madison Avenue and 25th Street in the Flatiron District neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City, United States. The courthouse is used by the First Department of the New York Supreme Court's Appellate Division. The original three-story building on 25th Street and Madison Avenue, designed by James Brown Lord, was finished in 1899. A six-story annex to the north, on Madison Avenue, was designed by Rogers & Butler and completed in 1955.
Location
1896–1899[2]
James Brown Lord
Rogers & Butler (1952 annex)
Late 19th and 20th century revivals, Renaissance Revival
06101.001808
0235, 1098
July 26, 1982
June 11, 1982[3]
June 7, 1966 (exterior)
September 22, 1981 (interior)
The facade of both the original building and its annex are made almost entirely out of marble. The courthouse's exterior was originally decorated with 21 sculptures from 16 separate artists; one of the sculptures was removed in 1955. The main entrance is through a double-height colonnade on 25th Street with a decorative pediment; there is also a smaller colonnade on Madison Avenue. The far northern end of the annex's facade contains a Holocaust Memorial by Harriet Feigenbaum. Inside the courthouse, ten artists created murals for the main hall and the courtroom. The interiors are decorated with elements such as marble walls, woodwork, and paneled and coffered ceilings; the courtroom also has stained-glass windows and a stained-glass ceiling dome. The remainder of the building contains various offices, judges' chambers, and other rooms.
The Appellate Division Courthouse was proposed in the late 1890s to accommodate the Appellate Division's First Department, which had been housed in rented quarters since its founding. Construction took place between 1896 and 1899, with a formal opening on January 2, 1900. Following unsuccessful attempts to relocate the court in the 1930s and 1940s, the northern annex was built between 1952 and 1955, and the original courthouse was also renovated. The structure was again renovated in the 1980s and in the 2000s. Throughout the courthouse's existence, its architecture has received largely positive commentary. The Appellate Division Courthouse is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and its facade and interior are both New York City designated landmarks.
Site[edit]
The Appellate Division Courthouse is in the Flatiron District neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City, on the northeast corner of the intersection of Madison Avenue and 25th Street.[4][5] The rectangular land lot covers approximately 14,812 square feet (1,376.1 m2), with a frontage of 98.5 feet (30.0 m) on Madison Avenue to the west and 150 feet (46 m) on 25th Street to the south.[6] The original structure measured 150 feet (46 m) wide along 25th Street, with a depth of 50 feet (15 m) on its western end (facing Madison Avenue) and 100 feet (30 m) on its eastern end.[7]
Madison Square Park is across Madison Avenue, while the New York Merchandise Mart occupies a site directly to the north. Other nearby buildings include the New York Life Building one block north, the Metropolitan Life North Building across 25th Street to the south, and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower one block south.[2][6]
Reception[edit]
At the time of the courthouse's construction, the American Architect and Building News predicted that "the rest of the country will envy New York the possession of this building".[12] The New-York Tribune wrote that the building "will have no peer, it is confidently believed, even among the imposing-looking courts of justice which the Old World is able to present".[23] When the courthouse was nearly finished, The New York Times likened the building to a "handsome modern courthouse" because it had so many murals.[113] The New York World said that the courthouse "gave New York an opportunity to study and admire an example of that new architecture which should fix the type and standard of our public buildings hereafter".[157] The World article likened the courthouse to non-municipal buildings such as the New York Public Library Main Branch and U.S. Custom House, rather than to municipal buildings like the Tweed Courthouse and the City Hall Post Office.[157]
After the courthouse opened, Charles DeKay wrote in The Independent that it "shines like an ivory casket among boxes of ordinary maple".[12][24] DeKay believed that the small size of the Madison Avenue frontage gave the appearance that the building was "part of a larger structure".[94] Richard Ladegast wrote for Outlook that Lord should be "complimented upon his good taste in building, as it were, a frame for some fine pictures and a pedestal for not a few imposing pieces of sculpture".[95] The Scientific American said the courthouse "is the most ambitious attempt yet realized in this country of a highly decorated public building".[47] The same publication described the murals as merit-worthy but too "abstract and philosophical" for an American courthouse.[47] The Municipal Art Society of Baltimore used photographs of the completed courthouse as an inspiration for decorations on Baltimore's then-new Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse.[158] One of the courthouse's original justices said the decorators and artists "seem to have conspired with the architect to woo our spirits back from these sombre robes and waft us back to youthful dreams of fairyland".[159]
In 1928, The New Yorker called the building "the rather pleasant little Appellate Court House with its ridiculous adornment of mortuary statuary."[2] The building was featured in a 1977 exhibition, "Temple of Justice", at the clubhouse of the New York City Bar Association.[160] Writing about that show, architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in The New York Times that the building was "a compendium of classical culture backed up against the featureless glass facade of a recent office tower", the Merchandise Mart.[160] Another New York Times columnist likened the interiors to the "residence of a Middle Western industrialist",[161] while yet another reporter for that paper described the edifice as a "small marble palace".[151] Eric P. Nash wrote in the Times in 1994 that the courthouse's design "details attract the eye and engage the mind", particularly the sculptures and the murals.[162]
Commentary of the building continued in the 21st century. Matthew Postal of the LPC described the building in 2009 as an "outstanding" example of the City Beautiful movement.[5] The historian Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel wrote in 2011 that "the interiors represent a zenith in the synthesis of architecture, decorative arts, and fine arts".[13]
Explanatory notes
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