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Only the ruins of the Madison Avenue façade of
the Squadron A Armory remain between 94th and 95th Streets.
Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins and David Fishman, "New York 1880,
Architecture and Urbanism in the Gilden Age" (The Monacelli Press,
1999):
"The Eighth Regiment acquired a new building designed by John R. Thomas
in 1888-90. It too faced Park Avenue but was far uptown from the
Seventh's home, on the west side of the avenue between Ninety-fourth
and Ninety-fifth Streets. Thomas had been chosen in a competition held
in 1884. the participating architects including Charles W. Clinton,
Hugo Kafka &Co., Lamb & Rich, and A.B. Jones. According to the Real
Estate Record and Buildings' Guide, the winning scheme showed; a free
treatment of the style that flourished in Scotland in the twelvth and
thirteenth centuries, giving means of offense and defense, as well as
habitation. The plans originally called for an armory filling the
entire block west to Madison Avenue. The design was scaled back,
however, and in 1887 Thomas had to replan the building to fit only that
part of the block extending three hundred feet west of Park Avenue,
leaving room for a future armory on the west end of the site, which
Thomas would design for Calvary Squadron A in 1894-95. A
180-by-300-foot drill room built in the first wave of construction
served both units and lay between the two administration buildings,
because it served a calvary unit, this room provided stables and had a
dirt floor. The cornerstone of the Eighth Regiment Armory was laid in
October, 1888, with the regiment marching to the construction site of
its new home from its old Armory on Twenty-third Street, which had been
ravaged by fire on Fburary 17, 1878. Like the construction of the
Twenty-seond Regiment armory, that of the Eighth was plagued by
problems, not the least of which was the destruction by gale-force
winds of a high wall in November, 1888. The editors of the Real Estate
Record and Builders' Guide deemed Thomas's design the best of the batch
of armories following that of the Seventh Regiment, all of which they
deemed superior to Clinton's, 'the front of which already looks
antiquated, though in fact it is so nearly new.' While they found fault
with Thomas's drill hall, which they believed, as in all other similar
cases, to suffer form being too low for its size, they took pleasure
inthe overall exteior effect: 'The material is baked clay, and is
almost entirely common bricks, selected for their color, which is
excellent and deep. Terra cotta is used in the crenellated copings that
crown walls and towers while a brown sandstone is introduced very
sparingly indeed, the sills of the openings and the water-table being
composed of it.' The New York Times wen ton to priase it as a model
public building: 'To the citizen and taxpayer it possesses an interest
beyond its commanding position, its formidable proportions, its
straetegic importance, and its evident adaptability ot the purposes for
which it is designed. for it is that rara avis on these days of
official shortsightedness and shortcomings in high places, an 'honest'
building, a structure built within the amount of the original
appropriation and pronounced by experts, after painstaking critical
inspection, to be comlete and substantial as a whole and in detail.'
With its massive crenellated round towers at the Two park Avenue
corers, its smaller turrets, its flights of stairs leading to the
elevated main floor, its altogether articulated composition, and the
predominance of wall over window, Thomas's design unquestionably used
in a new phase of armory design: bold massing and simplicity replaced
the sketchily picturesque effects of the Gilden Age, reflecting the
calm authority of a new era dedicated to scholarly composition and
monumental civisism."
Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins and David Fishman, "New York 1960,
Architecure and Urbanism between The Second World War and the
Bicentennial"(The Monacelli Press,
1995):
"The monumentally scaled brick building, which resembled a
fourteenth-century French fortress, complete with square towers, round
turrets and a crenellated parapet, had originally been used by a
volunteeer unit called the first New York Hussars or the First Dragoons
and later by a National Guard unit; after being used during World War I
by the 101st Machine Gun Batallion, it served as one of New York's most
unusual recreational facilities: indoor polo grounds. In the early
1960s the building was targeted as the site of a school and subsidized
housing. Although the mixed-use project was subsequently abandoned as
economically unviable, the armory building was given to the Board of
Education for use as the Intermediate School 29. The board concluded
that the building could not be structurally transformed to suit the
school's functional requirements and rejected proposals by the
Municipal Art Society and the New York Chapter of the American
Institute of Architects that it be used as a sports center or that a
new school building be built within its shell. Late in 1968, after
significant portions of the armory had already been torn down to make
way for a new building to be designed by Morris Ketchum Jr. &
Associates, public protest succeeded in halting the demolition and
drawing the attention of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which
designated the remaining western facade, facing Madison Avenue, a
landmark on October 19, 1966. Ketchum, who would later serve as a
member oif the Landmarks Preservation Commission (1972-79), designed a
fortresslike building for Intermediate School 29, with castellated
brick facades. He retained the one remaining facade of the former
armory as a dramatic backdrop for the school's playground. The
Citizens' Housing and Planning Council, which had not favored the
designation of the armory facade, dismisssed it as looking 'like a sand
castle built partly beyond the reach of the biggest waves.' As for the
decision to incorporate the facade into a the new building design, the
counil said, it was the result of a 'a moment of bemused
sentimentality' and was based on questionable motives:....Although most
preservationists welcomed the commission's shift in emphasis toward
less obvious designations, the transformation of the building into what
amounted to be a monumental sculpture took the concept of adaptive
resuse to an almost absurd extreme.'"
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