The brick and stone subway station entrance at 72nd Street and Broadway was designed by Heins & Lafarge and built in 1904. The number of subway riders who use this entrance today far exceeds its designers' modest expectations.

The interior of the control house is an Interior Landmark. It was rebuilt in 1989. The station platform below the street is extremely narrow and doesn't allow for passengers to transfer between the uptown and downtown sides. It has become extremely uncomfortable and is in constant threat of demolition.

Designed by Henry J. Hardenbergh, the Dakota apartment hotel took four years to build. The immense structure could be seen from both rivers. "People who like to live between life and movement, and yet to have pure air and quiet and to be near some of the great parks, naturally gravitate to upper Broadway." -- New York American, "Renting Guide to High Class Apartments," 1911.

Visible in this 1907 photo of Sherman Square are, from left to right behind the control house, the Colonial Club, Rutger's Church and the Ansonia Apartment Hotel.

Built the same year as the station, the Ansonia was designed by Graves and Duboy. Duboy was particularly enamored of the forms of Parisian apartment buildings. Such notables as Flo Ziegfeld and Igor Stravinsky have stayed here.

Heins & Lafarge designed these black-painted cast-iron and wired glass subway kiosks at 23rd Street and 4th Avenue (1905). The number of kiosks at any one station varied from two to eight and each was slightly different from the others. All have been destroyed over the years. The one pictured in color below is a modern reconstruction at Astor Place.

These brick and stone entrances were once called "control houses," the idea being that once you entered you were under the "control" of the Transit Company. The term control house is no longer used. This Heins & Lafarge control house once stood at 116th Street and Broadway.

Once a bucolic, tree-lined boulevard with a scattering of private homes, Broadway, thanks to the subway, is now a congested, commercial thoroughfare. The churches around Sherman Square made way for shops and banks. In 1906 the Colonial Club Building, seen here behind the station, was renovated to be used as offices.

he subway station control house which occupies its own island at 72nd Street and Broadway on Manhattan's Upper West Side, is one of only three left in all of New York City. With its buff-colored brick and limestone quoins and stringcourses, this building is a silent reminder of the once glorious past of an underground system of transportation now largely taken for granted. The architect team of Heins & Lafarge designed control houses such as this, as well as a number of spectacular stations, for the first portion of the subway system at the turn of this century. They also laid out the initial plans for the Bronx Zoo and designed the original portions of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine which, if it were ever completed, would be the largest Gothic structure in the world.

THE UPPER WEST SIDE

West 72nd Street in New York City was once an unpaved, picturesque boulevard and main carriage route from Central Park to Riverside Drive. It traversed what was essentially countryside until June of 1879, when the New York Elevated Railroad began carrying passengers up Ninth Avenue (later named Columbus Avenue) to the Harlem River at 145th Street. The train brought an ever increasing number of people north. According to Egbert L. Viele, the engineer of the railway, many began to see it as an area "for development on a higher order of domestic architecture than had been the good fortune of New York to hitherto possess."

The most adventuresome of the new breed of developers was Edward Clark, head of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, who after building a row of 27 private homes, invested $1 million in his family hotel at Central Park West and 72nd Street, later known as the Dakota. Immediately following the success of the Dakota (every apartment was rented by opening day) other apartment hotels sprang up nearby.

Toward the end of the 1890s, William Earle Dodge Stokes decided to build the world's grandest hotel on the Upper West Side, a great Beaux Arts style mass of scrolls, brackets, balconies, and cornices called the Ansonia. By 1895, $2 million had been invested in buildings in the area, according to The New York Times in an article headed "West Side is itself a Great City."

This unprecedented development beyond the city limits would only continue with the advent of the new underground train system called the "subway." Just as changes in the neighborhood would determine the future configuration of the subway, the subway itself would dramatically change the future of the neighborhood. Private homes gave way to enormous apartment buildings, especially near the 72nd and 96th Street express stops. Broadway became a commercial thoroughfare. In 1906 the Colonial Club Building was renovated to be used as offices; churches around Sherman Square made way for offices and banks.

UNDER THE CITY'S STREETS

Serious consideration was given to building a rapid transit system in New York City as early as the 1860s, when the streets of lower Manhattan were choked with slow-moving traffic. Many proposals were made, most inspired by the first subway in the world, which opened in London in 1863. After delays in construction due to expense, political squabbling, and technological obstacles, a plan allowing a subway to be built with city funds was overwhelmingly approved in a referendum in 1894. A public rapid transit board was formed and laid out the route, which ran from a point near City Hall to 42nd Street, then west to Times Square, and then north to Broadway to 96th Street, where the line divided. One branch continued along Broadway to 242nd Street, the other went along Lenox Avenue and under the Harlem River to the Central Bronx. Bids were solicited in 1900; the contract awarded for $35 million to the Rapid Transit Subway Construction Company, leased the subway to the contractor for fifty years.

Construction began in March of that year with a ground breaking ceremony at City Hall. In 1902 the Interborough Rapid Transit Company was formed to operate the subway. It was awarded a second contract to build a line running south from City Hall under Broadway and the East River to downtown Brooklyn.

Although trained as an engineer, William Barclay Parsons, Chief Engineer of the Rapid Transit Commission, appreciated the architectural possibilities of the subway project. He saw the subway as a unified structure, more like a "horizontal building" than a tunnel, deserving of coherent design. He also recognized that these were exciting times for architecture itself. New technologies and materials, such as reinforced concrete, were making structures possible that were until now unimaginable. It was Parsons who found the team to bring all this together, George C. Heins and Christopher Grant Lafarge. They were appointed architectural advisors on March 7, 1901 at an annual fee of $2,500.

THE SUBWAY'S ARCHITECTS

Parsons couldn't have found a better team. Heins & Lafarge were already well respected architects working on a number major projects in the city. They were also the brother-in-law and the son, respectively, of John Lafarge, the muralist and stained glass designer who was a leader in the Arts and Crafts movement. Christopher Lafarge inherited his father's sense of color and design and was a leader, in his own right, in the revival of the decorative arts. Heins acted essentially as the builder and administrator for the firm while Lafarge was essentially the designer.

Heins & Lafarge designed a number of distinguished religious and public buildings. In 1891 they won a competition for the initial Byzantine-Romanesque design of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine; the choir, crossing, and the side chapels were added by the firm between 1892 and 1911 (after the death of Heins the firm was replaced by Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson). Heins and Lafarge also designed the Clergy Houses of Grace Church (1892), the administration building (1899) and six animal houses (1910) at the New York Zoological Gardens in the Bronx. The Bronx Zoo is the largest zoo in the United States and is a leader in the care, feeding, and exhibition of animals.

KIOSKS AND CONTROL HOUSES

Although New York modeled its subway on the London Underground, planners adopted the Budapest station plan; the subway in Budapest opened in 1896. The Hungarians, unlike the English, did not build surface structures that resembled railroad terminals. Instead, they borrowed a design from the gardens of ancient Persia and Turkey, where oddly shaped summer houses, called "kushks" abounded. New York's subway engineers Americanized the word kushks to kiosks. The first subway, under City Hall, consequently had strangely ornamental mosque-like kiosks, which Heins & Lafarge designed to be fabricated out of steel and wired glass instead of stone and tile. Kiosks also were believed to be functional; without such protection rain would pour in and platforms would become flooded.

Where roomier "islands" on the city's streets allowed, so-called "control houses" were built as entrances to the subway. On upper Broadway, Heins & Lafarge designed three stone, skylighted control houses at 103rd and 116th Streets as well as at Sherman Square. They also designed control houses for Bowling Green in lower Manhattan and at Boerum Hill in Brooklyn.

A great deal of care went into the look of the system. The main power house for example, at 59th Street and West End Avenue, could easily have been a typically innocuous, industrial structure. Instead, it is a magnificent Beaux Arts building designed by Stanford White. In a detailed description of the subway's construction, published in 1904 by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, it is noted that "strength, utility, and convenience have not alone been considered, but all parts of the railroad structures and equipment, stations, power house, and electrical sub-stations have been designed and constructed with a view to the beauty of their appearance, as well as to their efficiency." New Yorkers had good reason to be proud of their subways.

Find out more about Heins & Lafarge and the amazing decorative tiles used in the first subway stations.