The rumble and clatter of the third Ave El can be heard almost before the train can even be seen. Taking the 18 degree bend in the tracks where the Bowery links up with third avenue, the friction between the wheels of the train and the rails below them produces a whine and clatter, the whole commotion magnified by the train's height one story above the ground. Towering above the El...well not really towering. . .One story above all that, the finishing touches are being added to the Abram S. Hewitt Memorial Building. Named in honor of Peter Cooper's son-in-law and mayor of New York, the Hewitt building was to have a much mightier presence on Bowery than the present day façade presents. Shrouded by the El for nearly half its life, and now seemingly near demolition, we here at The Pioneer office, nestled deep within the light-less subterranean bowels say "Hewitt, we hardly knew ye." In a two part piece we ask what is the story of this place, and what is its fate?
The Hewitt building is almost entirely a building composed of stairs. The main floor is nearly fifty percent circulation, with four grand cases all landing on the same hallway in the floor above. Why, the Cooper freshman, eyes still bright, might ask, are there so many stairs in a two story building? According to sources within Cooper, the Hewitt Building intended to stand seven floors above the street. All those stairs would have been needed to carry the bulk of the student body up and down seventy feet of building.
So what happened? Some say bad soil. The serpentine curve of the Bowery lies on the path of least resistance for the earliest settlers of new York. In a 1755 map of the area, the Bowery is labeled as "The High Road to Boston." Heading north, to the left of the "high road" lay the good rocky soil that holds up our mighty foundation building. To the right, squalid swampy runoff. If geology has any practical effect on present day New York City, it is a hard thing to see. But it did have effect, and the great height was reduced, but the stairs remain as vestigial testament to a lofty goal imagined in 1908, but still unrealized in 2002.
The other possibility for the squat posture of the Hewitt Building is a familiar demon to modern Cooper: Money. They simply couldn't raise the funds to raise the roof. Now it's too late for that strategy. The technology that would have held up the building eighty years ago, is now insufficient. Modern demands for electrical systems and air conditioning just can't be crammed into a building without extreme finacial investment. As Cooper's buildings and grounds department explains, "If we have a leaky pipe we fix it. We just installed two new drinking fountains. But are we going to make any big changes [to the Hewitt Building]? No. . . A new building could have much more efficient systems built in."
Opposed to its current status as a basically empty shell for studio space and a offices, the Hewitt building was once the home of the Engineering school. According to the original blueprints, the basement once held materials testing laboratories. "There were still Bunsen burners in here when we moved in." Steven Hillyer from the School of Architecture explains their space behind the auditorium on the second floor mezzanine.
The transition to a new facility was probably a much needed change. Can you imagine trying to study in those last crucial few minutes before a test only to be distracted by the constant rattle and screech of the elevated subway cars only a few feet outside the window? The Third Avenue El wasn't dismantled until 1955. Four years later, the engineering building was constructed and the Hewitt building became the repository of most of the school's office functions. After the administrative wing moved to 30 Cooper Square, the Hewitt building was given over primarily to classrooms and studios, leaving it in the state that we find it today.
The Hewitt Building was built to fill the needs of an expanding school. Although proposals have been made in the past to bring the Hewitt up to the high standards of collective imagination of the Cooper Union, nothing major has ever been accomplished. The Pioneer will profile those struggles in our next edition. Unable to meet the spatial and financial demands of a new generation of challenges at Cooper, it seems to be going the way of the El, disused, disliked, and dismantled. »»