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FIFTH AVENUE, NOS.
4, 6, 8 FIFTH AVENUE, NO.
8 (MARBLE HOUSE) No. 8 Fifth Avenue, one block from Washington Square at the corner of West 8th Street, was built in 1856 for John Taylor Johnston, president of the Central Railroad of New Jersey. Johnston's house, constructed entirely of white Vermont marble, stood out among the elegant brick homes of New York's prominent families clustered around the Square. Johnston himself became a leading collector of contemporary American art, following in the footsteps of his father James Boorman Johnston, who had fostered the growth of American art by commissioning the Studio Building on West 10th Street. John Taylor Johnston housed his art collection in the second story of the stables behind his home. In 1870, he was named the first president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Johnston's house was built on land belonging to William C. Rhinelander, whose mansion (1839) was the first home built on the Square; its stable entry is visible in Abbott's photograph (far left). No. 4, built by 1889, and no. 6, built in 1857, belonged to members of the Rhinelander family. In 1928, the Johnstons relinquished their lease in light of the Rhinelanders' plan to build an apartment building, a plan scuttled by the depression. When Abbott photographed the site, No. 8 had been subdivided into apartments and named the Marble House. It was not until 1952 that the mansion and the adjacent Rhinelander properties were demolished for a huge apartment building, 2 Fifth Avenue. The morning sun gave Abbott's photograph a particularly strong graphic intensity. The huge shadow of the new apartment building at One Fifth Avenue filled the foreground, the bright sunlight bounced off the white marble facade, and the architectural details of the three facades stood out in sharp relief. In 1938, Abbott returned to photograph the opulent cornice over the door of Marble House. Return to Greenwich Village |