THE soaring Beekman Tower Hotel, at First Avenue and 49th Street, was an out-of-place landmark for years, until the United Nations went up. These days its dramatic Art Deco profile is not quite as prominent, a streamlined orange brick shaft built in 1928 as Panhellenic House, a residence for college women. The 61-year-old developer was Emily Eaton Hepburn, a real estate novice who created one of New York’s most distinctive skyscrapers.
Emily Eaton graduated from St. Lawrence University, class of 1887. After her marriage to Barton Hepburn, a banker and lawyer, she energetically promoted women’s suffrage and projects like the re-creation of Theodore Roosevelt’s house on East 20th Street. She was a key supporter of the City History Club, established to give children an appreciation of New York’s colonial heritage.
In 1922 Mrs. Hepburn’s husband was struck by a bus at Madison Square and died. Perhaps it was only coincidental that at this point she acquired more ambitious goals, joining in 1924 with Anne Morgan and others to build the American Woman’s Association, a high-rise hotel-clubhouse for working women, at 353 West 57th Street.
Mrs. Hepburn developed her own ideas along these lines and in 1926 began fund-raising for Panhellenic House, a 380-room apartment hotel intended for college graduates who were sorority members; she herself was a Kappa Kappa Gamma.
The boxy, unornamented American Woman’s Association clubhouse had been simple to the point of drab, the International Style with a migraine, designed by the otherwise traditionalist Benjamin Wistar Morris. Mrs. Hepburn went to John Mead Howells, the son of the writer William Dean Howells, and a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts.
He had been pursuing an agreeable career as an upper-class architect of schools and mansions when, in 1922, he won an international competition for a new headquarters for The Chicago Tribune. The soaring neo-Gothic tower was a decade out of date, but the commission gave him and his partner, Raymond Hood, distinct skyscraper cred.
For a site for her project, Mrs. Hepburn looked east, to the still-industrial precincts of the far East 40s. Although adjacent to the old brownstones of Beekman Place, the area to the south was one of slaughterhouses and factories. She bought the northeast corner of First Avenue and 49th Street, and Howells designed for her a brooding orange-brick monolith, 26 stories high, with pointing colored to make the brick facade look like a single mass. The rich, rippling brickwork owes something to German and Scandinavian modernism, and is unlike Howells’s earlier work.
The Panhellenic has decorative touches in the Art Deco style, but the overall tower has thick projecting piers that hide the narrow lines of windows and give it a blank aspect, like a high-rise medieval keep fortified to keep out invaders — invaders like men? Although Mrs. Hepburn wanted traditional furniture, what she got was modernist chairs, tables and décor.
In a 1927 interview in The Saturday Evening Post, Miss Morgan said that she hoped the West 57th Street building would be “a training school for leadership, a mental exchange” for women. Mrs. Hepburn expressed similar ideals, but more in the context of her own work on the Panhellenic.
“I wanted to prove that women could do big business,” she is quoted as saying in “Daughter of Vermont,” a 1952 biography of her by Isabelle Savell. She also built and occupied the apartment house at 2 Beekman Place.
In the early 1930s, faced with falling occupancy rates, Mrs. Hepburn decided to allow men as residents, and renamed her project the Beekman Tower Hotel. The parent organization, Panhellenic House, continued to run a yearly essay competition for college students on the subject of what they would most want to see in New York. In August 1935 Sylva Goodman of Wayne State University won for her answer: a tugboat and a courtroom. Upon visiting, she said what she really appreciated were the smells of the city — the saltwater, the pushcarts, the florists and even the saloons.
That November, Vera Stretz (New York University, class of 1926) was taking advantage of the hotel’s new policy while wearing a cerise nightgown in the room of Fritz Gebhardt, a German industrialist. She shot and killed him, claiming as her defense his “unnatural love practices,” according to The Daily Freeman of Kingston, N.Y. She was found not guilty.
Now the owners of the hotel are finishing up an exterior renovation project, and the tarps and rigging that give the tall shaft the aspect of a climbing wall should be down by the end of the year. Russell Newbold, the project manager for Israel Berger Architects, says that reconstruction was extensive in part because the projecting piers make so many corners.
At the moment, the scaffolding makes it difficult to see, but Emily Hepburn left a personal touch around the main entrance: a spray of the Greek letters that inspired her unusual project.