A crucial Guastavino connection occurred in that same space in 1961, when the art historian George R. Paul’s Chapel of 1904–1907 at Columbia University. Most memorably to me, though, is having been married beneath the majestic ninety-one-foot-high Guastavino dome of I.N.
His gorgeously tiled IRT City Hall station, inaugurated in 1904 as the southern terminus of Manhattan’s first underground mass transit line, has been closed to the public since 1945, but remains eerily well-preserved, testimony to the material’s exceptional durability. (Not least among that restaurant’s pleasures is overhearing crystal-clear snatches of conversation projected across the noisy space through an uncanny whispering-gallery effect.)Īnd one of my favorite Gotham architectural pleasures is to stand at the front window of the downtown number 6 subway between the Canal Street and Brooklyn Bridge–City Hall stops to catch a fugitive glimpse of a phantom Guastavino masterpiece. I’ve enjoyed countless lunches at the Guastavino-vaulted Oyster Bar, in Warren & Wetmore and Reed & Stem’s Grand Central Terminal of 1910–1913. Many of those locales are straightforwardly utilitarian, such as Bridgemarket, a supermarket inside the Manhattan base of the Queensboro Bridge. Time and again in old New York buildings, it’s a delight to lift up your eyes and unexpectedly find Guastavino’s distinctive herringbone terracotta tile patterns overhead. Thus I harbor an abiding personal fondness for the ingenious structural creations of the Spanish émigré master builder Rafael Guastavino (1842–1908). If all politics is local, then much architectural history is also a neighborhood matter. Rafael Guastavino’s tile vaulting for the now-closed City Hall subway station, inaugurated in 1904
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