Standing at the corner of 45th street and Fifth Avenue, Midtown Manhattan, is 551 Fifth Avenue. It is a remarkable building even for New York City. In fact it is one of a kind in the world.
This is the 38 story Fred F. French building, named for its builder the real estate tycoon Frederick Fillmore French. It is known to New Yorkers simply as The French Building.
When completed in 1927 it was the tallest structure on Fifth Avenue. Although overshadowed now for decades by taller neighborhood skyscrapers The French Building has not changed since then. For good reason it is on the National Register of Historic Places.
The French Building is a wildly imaginative art deco masterpiece. On first inspecting it the general feeling is awe.
That was my feeling when I was hired there for my first job in New York on April Fool’s Day 1997, 50 years after it topped out. This makes us both, me and the building, relics of two totally opposite but equally ebullient eras in American history.
The first known for its unimaginable wealth and arrogance. Then later in my time of violent protest, the second defined specifically in New York by a spate of FLAN bombings, the work of the Puerto Rican Independence Movement.
Just two years before I arrived the FLAN had bombed the enshrined Fraunces Tavern in lower Manhattan, the pub where Washington bade his officers farewell. It killed four, injured more than 50. During my time in the French building I would be evacuated three times for bombing threats.
Probably it was targeted because along Fifth Avenue the French building is a standout for it construction in soft orange tinted, buff brick. Also for its eclectic ornamentation in faience and bronze. These meld elements of Mesopotamian, Assyrian, Babylonia and Chaldean motifs.
This jumble of the ancient near east rests on a solid, formidable, nine story slab-like form. On this the building rises into a series of striking cut backs that are blunt and cubic, an obvious reference to the gardens of Babylon. At its 15th floor the building suddenly takes off into its soaring tower, in pure lines, a rectilinear shape that mirrors the simplicity of the base.
The building tops out in a glory of glazed terracotta depicting on the longer sides of the slender tower a vivid rising sun flanked by winged horses.
The building details are a statement of Capitalist excess, flamboyance and in-your-face bravado that marked the period directly before the Wall Street collapse in 1929. What is astonishing is that in its exuberance rather than comic kitsch the building rises to this day in stately and elegant harmony a surprising pleasure to the eye, a triumph of New-York art deco. It is quite beautiful in its own perplexing way.
Probably it is this plus the building’s auspicious and mystical crowning floor that has caused the French Building to be popular with jumpers from the day it opened.
During the five years I worked in the building there were three suicides, one which I witnessed close-up. The man’s body plummeted three feet from me, arms and legs in flailing jerks, suit coat and tie flapping across the outside of the ninth story windows of the Lockwood Trade Journal Co. Inc. He went down clawing upwards.
For sure that interrupted my idle chat with the company’s bookkeeper, Mrs. Estelle Levine. We both struck a pose of horror, then leaned to the windows to see below where his body sprawled in a broken Mr. Gumby. It had crumpled the roof of a van on 45th Street.
“May God give his soul peace,” remarked Estelle, tears in here eyes, she who was one of the great Jewish mothers in town and yet could never forgive, never listening to Bach, never buying anything made in Germany.
The French Building lobby is a jewel. It has a barreled, painted ceiling and whoever the painter he did his work with trained precision. It is a celestial panoply of bearded bulls, exotic flowers and stately hunting scenes.
Huge fantasy chandeliers hang above the travertine marble floor glittering like the earrings of an Assyrian king. They are in glass and bronze designs harkening back to the flora of an ancient river bed where civilization began.
If for nothing else the lobby is rare to us now because of an extravagant use of bronze. Bronze in burnished gold. All street and elevator doors are cast in monumental bronze with each panel depicting a different scene from the dictionary of Mesopotamian themes. All done with such artistry that here is the real signature of the French Building.
Walking into this building for my interview I recall loving it at first sight. I remember urging my household gods to please, please let me work there.
When hired I walked out of Lockwood’s in bipolar rapture so enthralled that I leapt straight into the air and upon landing twisted my angle. That so that I limped in pain throughout my first day of work.
Jonathan Bell officially disappeared into New York. I was at home on the banks of Euphrates,