JUST outside the turnstiles in the concourse of the 14th Street station on the IND 8th Avenue line (A, C, E trains) there’s a handsomely lettered sign in the black and gold signage that marks the rest of the station, with the addition of a red arrow. It points to the Port Authority Building (111 8th Avenue) which is no longer occupied by the agency.
The builders of the Independent Subway, constructed mostly in the 1930s, decided to color code station signage according to a system largely forgotten today. Local station ID mosaics and signage were the same color…that changed at express stations. The reasons for this system are fuzzy. It has been rumored that subway stations designer Squire Vickers wanted to give people who could not read English a good idea where thery were by identifying neighborhoods with colors. Your guess is as good as mine.
The color settled upon at the express 14th Street station and local 23rd Station on the 8th Avenue line was gold (or yellow). At the 34th Street express station, the color changed to maroon. As it happens, gold signage fits in with what you find above the station, as the Port Authority Building is also trimmed in gold.
111 8th avenue is one of the few NYC buildings that take up an entire square block: between 8th and 9th Avenue and West 15th and 16th Streets. It’s an Art Moderne classic constructed in 1932 and designed by Lusby Simpson of Abbott, Merkt & Co. as the Port Authority Commerce Building. It was a multi-use building designed to be used as a trucking terminal and also to handle exhibitions and manufacturing.
At its peak in the 1930s the Port Authority serviced 8000 tons of goods in the building and as many as 650 trucks passed into the building daily. The building has 15 floors the size of football fields.
As less shipping took place on the Manhattan side of the Hudson River the building lessened in importance, but it did serve as Port Authority headquarters from 1947 to 1980 1973. For about a decade beginning in 1998 Taconic Investment Partners owned the building and used it as a data center during the internet boom.
In 2010 the building was acquired by internet giant Google, which installed large white logos on the 8th and 9th Avenue sides. However, Art Deco details in gold finish at the building’s entrances have remained intact. Too many years ago for me to remember clearly what year it was, I attended an information meeting in this building about Google Adsense, whose ads you see on Forgotten NY. About 20 minutes in, I gave up as it was too much tech gobbledygook for me to understand. I was the oldest one in the room by about 20 years.
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8/26/24
4 comments
The Port Authority Building has a west-side neighbor, the Starrett-Leigh Building, which is slightly north at 26th Street. Both were constructed at the same time, and were designed to serve the same purpose. Truck use was growing and they were an attempt to become modern freight terminals, as the movement of goods was shifting away from rail terminals. These full-city block behemoths had incredible structural capacity for manufacturing, storage and movement of goods. Today, such facilities, for companies like Amazon, UPS or Prime are located outside cities and are one-story structures that sprawl for acres in industrial parks. On the West Side in the 1930’s there was no ability for sprawl. That they could amass full city blocks for these buildings was an achievement. You had to go up, not out. To achieve that, these amazing buildings had elevators that took entire trucks up, and into, the upper floors, where they could be loaded and unloaded exactly where they were needed to be. Until at least recently, both buildings still had a handful of these massive elevators in operation. I heard a story about Martha Stewart, who had her office in the Starret-Leigh Building. It was that she used one of those truck elevators to drive her car into the building and take it upstairs to park outside the door to her office on the ninth floor. Now, that’s the way to drive to work!
May I point out a correction to the building history at 111 8th Ave. It served as the Port Authority’s headquarters from 1932, when it opened, until 1973, when the agency relocated its offices to the then-new World Trade Center, where it of course remained until 9/11. In October 1974 I began an eight-year employment with a NYS transportation agency with close ties to the Port Authority, and we shared office space with Port Authority personnel at #1World Trade Center. I left that job in 1982 and 19 years later witnessed, on television, the horrors of 9/11/01.
Link to Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/111_Eighth_Avenue
Just in case anyone is interested here is a link to the color coding chart for the colors used in IND stations (chart on nycsubway.org provided by the NY Transit Museum)
https://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/IND_Station_Tile_Colors
When the L-14th St line was extended to Eighth Av., its current terminus, in 1931, its station decor was more IND looking, which makes sense since, you’re building in the same vertical space, so if you’re the BMT, why not use the same tile masons as the City is using on the upper level? The same thing, in the same era, when the J train Fulton St stop and what then was the Broadway-Nassau stop on the A train were being built (Broad Street as well on the J-train)