The Master

While we started in Cass Gilbert’s downtown masterpiece, The Woolworth Building, we found our way to the masterpiece of one of his disciples, architect Harvey Wiley Corbett; Riverside Drive’s Master Building.

Corbett apprenticed with Cass Gilbert before starting his own career as a preeminent advocate of tall buildings, a passion no doubt germinated while working for his mentor. But while Gilbert's Woolworth Building was, for 25 years, the world’s tallest building, Corbett’s 100-story attempt, the Met Life North Building on Madison Square Park, never made it past the 30th floor (the Great Depression intervened).

Corbett still managed to build some of our favorite deco towers including One Fifth Avenue and the Master Building on Riverside Drive. The Master, with its in-house museum, performance space and, originally, a restaurant was a true hybrid building. Opening just weeks before Black Friday (not the post-Thanksgiving one!) the opening salvo of the Great Depression, it suffered financial, but not architectural, woes and managed to survive intact.

Corbett partnered with the soon-to-be-famous Wallace K. Harrison in Helmle, Corbett and Harrison, the firm that designed The Master. Harrison went on to design the Rockefeller Apartments opposite MoMA (and part of the UN, Lincoln Center and Rockefeller Center) making clear how the idea of lineage works in the architectural world. Both worked on the 1939 Worlds Fair where the Moderne and Deco got their first mass audience.

And Corbett worked with ‘delineator’ Hugh Ferris (another Cass Gilbert alum) on the 4 famous drawings illustrating the nascent NYC zoning code, perhaps the most elegant example of wonkiness ever. Ferriss worked for Gilbert who gave him the latitude to open his own office and become, in time, the defining hand of the dark ‘Gotham City’ look we now see as ominous rather than uplifting.

Moving from an early downtown skyscraper to a riverside deco tower is moving from the center of one world (civic and financial New York) to its edge; from looking inward, in introspection, at the city’s grandeur, to peering outward, with one’s back to the city and with New Jersey on the horizon.

It is also moving from the home of the world’s ultimate merchant (Woolworth’s Cathedral of Commerce) to the artsy upper west side home of Billy Strayhorn, the Equity Library Theater, the Nicholas Roerich Art Museum and two art libraries. The Master is to culture what the Woolworth Building is to commerce; an iconic presence wrapped in an architectural monument.

And from the Master Building the remarkable river view is forever unimpeded!