audio books owe a debt to Manhattan lofts / WPA edition of a weekend diversion

I loves me some ‘net
In linking today to this Maggie Gram piece on n+1 (and excerpting a paragraph) I am sure that Andrew Sullivan meant only to tie the modern fascination with audio books to efforts to respond to World War I veterans blinded in gas warfare. But when Manhattan Loft Guy, being easily distracted by all manner of bright shiny objects on the inter-tubes, came across the “project operated out of a converted loft on Manhattan’s Tenth Avenue” in the origin story, well, I got distracted.

I read the Gram confession first, which I liked except for the fact that she didn’t think it important to focus on Manhattan lofts in her own damn personal narrative. It’s worthwhile; read it. Later 😉

Because The Google is my friend it did not take long to find The Unseen Minority: a social history of blindness in the United States (2004, by Frances A. Koestler), which identified the Manhattan loft building on Tenth Avenue as 475 Tenth, at the corner of 36th Street, where workers who had been assembling “Talking Book machines” at a foundation for the blind began the WPA project (page 163). Over 7 years beginning in 1935, over 23,000 Talking Book machines were produced here for $1,181,000.

To a loft snob like me, going through Manhattan loft neighborhoods and being able to identify specific buildings that did specific things that are interesting is … cool. (Such as knowing that 15 Union Square West was the original Tiffany’s cast-iron flagship; see my July 7, 2006, dynamic city / time runs out on a stripped Tiffany’s.) Next time I go up Tenth Avenue I will look at the northwest corner of 36th Street and think of the origin of audiobooks and the WPA, as well as the fancy pants there now (below).

Manhattan lofts: where the past meets the present, and sometimes the future!

I’d love to know other things about the history of this circa 1915 building, but I will share what I quickly discovered (but lingered over, in parsing, sigh; so distractable).

Community Walk tells me that it was built for a publishing company, Hill Publishing Company, and was the first McGraw-Hill Building, so that’s a good start. (I wonder if the McGraw-Hill people donated space to the Talking Book machine project; or, would capitalists not have supported a WPA project like that in the 1930s?) The Property Shark photos show a 13-story building with walls that are mostly windows and the high ceilings that would bring light well into the interior (if the spaces are open); in other words, classic industrial loft space.  

Community Walk pegs architect I M. Pei as a past tenant.  Google Maps tells me that current tenants include a roster of creatives / media types, including:

• Gwathmey Siegel, well-known architects
• 1100 Architects (less well-known, to Manhattan Loft Guy, at least)
• Richard Meier & Partners, (d’oh) well-known architects
• designer Isaac Mizrahi
• headquarters for the Morgans Hotel Group
• gallery Exit Art
• Laird+Partners (of whom I have not heard, but you can not get closer to the “creatives” than with “a leading New York-based creative agency specializing in fashion, lifestyle, and luxury branding and communications … offer[ing] a range of capabilities ranging from traditional advertising to digital services”)
• Studio Instrument Rentals (you’ve seen their red SIR trucks on the streets, and in the PShark photo; how analog!)

The Observer chimed in (in 2011) that designer Mark Ecko,

whose hipness has lately gone the way of rip-off track pants, recently anointed fallen child star Lindsay Lohan as his half-nude “digital muse.” In a move scarcely less edgy, he’s taken 18,500 square feet at up-and-coming 475 10th Avenue for two years.

“Up-and-coming”! A “move scarcely less edgy”!! The O adds 2 more to the tenant roster:

Fellow strivers in the turn-of-the-last-century building include Isaac Mizrahi, Richard Meier Architects, Time Out New York and Donna Karan Home Collection.

(“Fellow strivers” is a nice bit of snark.) As a den of fashionistas, the building hosted 3 fashion week shows on February 8. (And probably more, later in Fashion Week, which really interested people can easily track through that same link.)

LivePerson (“a world of experts”) seems to be on an edge of new media; it is headquartered on the 5th floor of 475 Tenth Avenue. The “14th” floor houses a philanthropic foundation started with wealth from what is now the Sara Lee Corporation (over $400,000,000 in assets in 2009). There is an inspiring quote on the cover of the foundation’s 2001 annual report:

Nothing will ever be

accomplished if all

possible objections

must first be overcome.

But I digress…

One last datum (I promise!) on the creative front in the building: you missed the 2010 exhibit Corpur Esurit, or we all deserve a break today, which involved feeding ants nothing but McDonald’s happy meals for 30 days. (Don’t tell Sen McCain.) In between the 1930s and the creatives, the neighborhood went to hell (the kitchen, at least), with hookers and busses and whatever. I wonder what the tenant roster was like in the challenging 1970s and 1980s… 

You want more related to 475 Tenth Avenue? You play with The Google; see if it is your friend, too.

what the well-read blind person in the 1930s was to be offered aurally
The heavy hand of Big Government picked the winners (and ignored the losers) on America’s bookshelf. The early Library of Congress project dictated the sequence in which public domain materials would be recorded (note that we were a different country then), at Koestler, page 155:

• first, the 4 Gospels, then Psalms, and only after that dose of religion,
• “selected patriotic documents”, including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, selected Washington and Lincoln materials,
• then poetry (unspecified)
• then Shakespeare (As You Like It, Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, sonnets)
• then 6 works of fiction, only one of which I have even heard of

I love it when the inter-tubes bring me interesting stuff. And Manhattan lofts. At the same time. Especially when I am in need of a weekend diversion.

© Sandy Mattingly 2012