The Seventh Regiment Armory in New York City - restoration of the historic site in New York

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1999 by Mary Anne Hunting

The fair also provided a variety of entertainments, which included ventriloquists, shooting galleries, magic shows, gypsy fortune-tellers, Punch and Judy shows, an exhibition of nearly two hundred European and American paintings and prints from private collections, and an exhibition of yacht models from the New York Yacht Club. There was a grocery store, Moses' Turkish Bazaar, a tobacco room, toy store, candy store, Old Curiosity Shop, and Oriental Tea Room. As the attractions varied each day, it behooved visitors to rerum frequently - and they did. The New York Times reported:

A peculiarity of the Seventh-Regiment New Armory Fair is that every day the crowd is larger, more enthusiastic, and more liberal in their purchases, and more reckless in their patronage of prize drawings than on any preceding day.(12)

The fair raised $140,550 - the equivalent of $2.2 million today.(13) Harpers Weekly reported that such "extraordinary results" were "evidence of the high place which the Seventh Regiment now holds in the hearts of the people of New York."(14)

The armory was designed by the New York architect Charles William Clinton under the close supervision of Colonel Emmons Clark (1827-1905), the regiment's commander from 1864 to 1889. Clinton too was a member of the regiment and had created four company rooms in the Tompkins Market Armory. His design for the Park Avenue armory is riotously eclectic, with romantic, exotic, and purely military elements, and an emphasis on castellation. Strong, dignified, and impenetrable, the armory became increasingly medieval as plans progressed, despite the Second Empire mansard roof.

Originally three stories high, the classically proportioned front facade was dominated by a slender central tower flanked by two stabilizing turrets capped with battlements [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. The base of the building is rusticated granite on which rest two-foot-thick walls of Philadelphia pressed brick accented with horizontal bands, sill courses, and quoins of granite. The entrance in the base of the central tower - with six-inch-thick oak doors wide enough to admit four men marching abreast - is protected by an immense bronze gate made by Mitchell, Vance and Company (1860-1933) of New York City, that is topped by the regiment's coat of arms.

Sadly, much of the original monumentality was lost during a restoration begun in 1909. A fourth floor was inserted into the mansard roof, and the slender top of the central tower was removed, to be replaced by the present crenellations (see Pl. II). The roof line was altered again in 1931 when a fifth floor was added.

Taking inspiration from the architecture of railroad terminals, where the train shed extends behind the terminal building, the architect planned for two buildings joined: the Administrative Building and the Drill Room. Clinton's specific inspiration was Grand Central Depot in New York City, which was built between 1869 and 1871. Its train shed, at the time the largest unobstructed interior in the United States,(15) was supported by a wrought-iron truss system engineered by Robert Griffith Hatfield (1815-1879), who also served as a consultant on the Drill Room, which was developed by Charles Macdonald (1837-1928), the president of the Delaware Bridge Company. The so-called balloon-shed construction consists of a vault supported by eleven wrought-iron arched trusses, each spanning 187 feet from side to side. The building is reinforced by masonry buttresses. The Drill Room was one of the first privately built structures in the United States to use iron trusses, and it is today the oldest extant building of this kind in the country.(16)