The Astor Building 6

December of 1901 at the construction the St. Regis Hotel, temporarily called “the Astor Building.” At the beginning of the month, the steel skeleton, the concrete floor slabs, and the heavy masonry facade were all simultaneously in progress. The 55th Street (north) side: And the Fifth Avenue (west) side: I mentioned in the last part of this series how out-of-scale the building was with its neighbors, rowhouses on Fifth and more-pretentious single houses on 55th. Obviously that disparity only got worse as the building got bigger. The bare steel frame also provided a stark contrast to the masonry all around, although that disparity got smaller as the facade of the new building was constructed, hiding the metal. In these pictures, and particularly the view from 55th, note how many floors of bare steel there are, with only temporary planks laid over the beams and no facade yet nearby. This looks like a temporary failure of planning on the part of the contractor, although of course it’s…