PhillyHistory Blog

Just as Howe and Lescaze were getting to work on their PSFS Building in the late 1920s, Harry Sylk was starting up his Sun Ray drug store chain. Before long, the two would play out their similarities and differences—International Style versus Pre Populuxe—on the street. And where these design cousins would never intersect, they would redefine one of Philadelphia’s most dynamic intersections.

Twelfth and Market Streets had been Philly’s hot corner since the 1890s, when the Reading Railroad installed its masonry cliff of a head house in front of a giant train shed. Its interior was spoken for, but people animated the sidewalk. Pictures of 12^th and Market from 1911 and 1914 confirm: this intersection was the heart of Center City, and possibly its soul. Problem was, the blank, anonymous corner niche of rusticated head house didn’t add all that much. It cried out for a kiosk – and a domed version, visible in the 1911 picture. The corner demanded little attention, only the decision to walk straight, right or left.

Until PSFS. In the early 1930s, Howe and Lescaze’s monumental curve of granite, steel and glass put the Reading Terminal Headhouse in perspective. So 19^th century; so out of date. Could the power of PSFS possibly inspire its opposite corner to move into the 20^th century?

It could. And in true 20^th century fashion, it took the swagger and shamelessness of American retail to take up the challenge.

In the late 1920s, brothers Harry, Albert and William Sylk started with a “cut rate” store on Ridge Avenue and built a retail empire. The Sun Ray chain eventually grew to more than 150 stores in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey and Maryland.

The Sylks were promoters as much as retailers. When flying saucers were spotted in Roswell, New Mexico Sun Ray promoted its new Patterson, N.J. store by dropping discs from an airplane and offering free ice cream for anyone who could bring one in. At Easter, Sun Ray gave its customers free chicks. The Sylks didn’t just advertise on radio, they bought two stations: WPEN AM and FM.

Store location remained their first priority. “Wherever there was a Woolworth’s store,” Harry Sylk told the Inquirer, “we tried to open a store right next to them…”

Signs became Sun Ray’s other first priority. The Sylks likely stood on the sidewalk across from the commanding curve of PSFS, appreciating Howe and Lescaze’s commitment to retail at the street level. This was their same language, only the Sylks spoke it with an earthier accent. Their corner, the Sylks figured, could update the Victorian kiosk with modern lines and materials. They would brag and holler where PSFS purred.

“Sun Ray; Super Kiosk,” proclaimed their first sign as it curved around the corner. Over time, and abiding by the time-tested principle that there’s no redundancy when it comes to promotion, the words “Super Kiosk” were replaced with “Sun Ray Drug Co.” Neon lit it all.

Powerful? Sure, especially at night. And cluttered. And disappointingly unanimated. Why use neon halfway, asked Max Sarnoff, the Sylk’s sign man extraordinaire? While on the West Coast, Sarnoff had seen the light: “…I wanted to put show biz in the sign business.” Back from Hollywood, via Miami Beach, Sarnoff later told the Sign Builder Illustrated how proud he was of his giant, neon mortar and pestles for Sun Ray. But nothing Sarnoff did combined lights and action like his giant Sun Ray sign with neon bands chasing around the corner of 12^th and Market.

A bit of Las Vegas in the Quaker City.

Between 1890 and 1950, the city had more than doubled in population, from about one million to just over two. But in the second half of the 20^th century, Philadelphia’s population dropped by more than 550,000—a loss, on average, of more than 110,000 residents every decade. It was a remarkable reversal that redefined the city in the second half of the 20^th century.

From the Civil War to after World War II, construction and employment booms powered Philadelphia’s expansion. Mile after mile of meadow and farmland had been transformed into red brick neighborhoods. They stretched, as far as the eye could see, interspersed only by churches, factories and freight lines.

By 1890, a short hike from the Odd Fellow’s Cemetery, bordering the lower branch of Cohocksink Creek, surveyors extended Penn’s original grid up to North Penn Village. Speculators divided the grid which now extended northward from Center City, into more development-friendly rectangles. Between York and Dauphin were cut smaller streets: Arizona and Gordon. And along the 400 feet, from corner to corner, speculators put up one more block of two-story row houses. By 1895, thirty stood between York and Arizona, 26^th and 27^th.

Open space just about disappeared as North Philadelphia rose up. Until the middle of the 20^th century, anyway. Then, not only did growth come to a screeching halt, it did an about face. In the Spring of 1954, when city photographer John McWhorter photographed a vacant lot on the 2600 block of West Arizona Street, vacant lots were still the exception. Over the next half century, many more of the original thirty houses on that rectangle between York and Arizona, 20th and 27^th disappeared. Today, only half remain.

We were reminded in a recent Inquirer story, accompanied by a useful map, that eight North Philadelphia census tracts each dropped by more than 10,000 residents from 1950 to 2010. What remains today at 26^th and Arizona was at the heart of this precipitous decline. It’s census tract: 169.01 – Susquehanna to Lehigh, 25th to 31^st– lost 10,780 residents, falling from 16,604 to 5,820. This 65% decline, more than double the citywide drop of 26.7%, outpaced even Detroit’s 61% decline in the same time period. Among Philadelphia’s 385 census tracts, 169.01 and five adjacent tracts lost more than 49,000 residents between 1950 and 2010—more than one-eleventh of the city’s total decline in population.

Are there any clues as to how this dramatic demographic shift played out? Any why this particular neighborhood was hit so hard?

Manufacturing, and manufacturing jobs, once thrived along the nearby Glenwood Avenue corridor. The 1910 Philadelphia Atlas shows coal yards, brick yards, lumber yards, planning mills, furniture factories, brass foundries, factories making pipes, pumps, processing tobacco, weaving textiles – plenty of places for employment. But when the Great Depression hit, and unemployment for the general population stood at 24.75%, unemployment among African Americans was as high as double that rate. And in the depth of the Depression, as we know from J. M. Brewer’s color-coded real estate map, 26^th and Arizona was an African-American community.

As Amy Hillier tells us, the Brewer map and the subsequent Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps, “established highly racialized neighborhood standards” and were used by mortgage companies to inform their lending decisions. Red shading on the Brewer map shows 26^th and Arizona as “Colored” and the quality of the housing there “lower of working class” to “decadent.”  Two years later, a data sheet accompanying the HOLC map describes the entire area west of Broad to Fairmount Park between Poplar and Cumberland as “solid town, two and three story, brick houses, forty years old or more,” a neighborhood that “originally housed a large part of the city’s more prosperous middle class” but “is now fast approaching obsolescence, with its population almost entirely Negro.” The neighborhood stood out in red, which signified “hazardous.”

By the 1950s, after two decades of disadvantage and disinvestment, conditions in North Philadelphia were about to get even worse with a steep decline of Philadelphia’s manufacturing economy. At its peak in 1953, a hearty 45 percent of the city’s entire labor force worked in industrial jobs. But by the start of the 21^st century, this had fallen to an anemic 5 percent.  Once again, North Philly’s neighborhoods would be among the biggest losers.

Before long, vacant lots would become the rule in North Philadelphia, not the exception. For a time, some would say, the terms “vacant lot” and “North Philadelphia” were synonymous.

We’re dealing with “a Bird of bad moral Character,” wrote Benjamin Franklin. The bald eagle, agreed William Bartram, was nothing more than “an execrable tyrant” who “supports his assumed dignity and grandeur by rapine and violence, extorting unreasonable tribute and subsidy from all the feathered nations.”

But the bird had been good enough for the ancient Romans who mounted miniatures on their standards as they marched to battle. And, as we saw in our last post, the eagle would suffice for the new Republic. In almost no time, on wings of patriotism and the desire to create a national iconography, the image of the bald eagle lifted from the Great Seal to, larger than life, the hearts and minds of the new Americans.

In his museum on Independence Square, artist Charles Willson Peale exhibited portraits of the Founding Fathers and a living, breathing bald eagle that screamed at him in recognition. Peale had great expectations for the nation and, so too, for his eagle, hanging its cage with the sign: “FEED ME DAILY 100 YEARS.” Peale’s eagle lived for a decade in captivity, from 1795 to 1805, and after it died he resurrected it, posed and stuffed.

In the new century, the prolific chisels of Peale’s sculptor friend, William Rush, secured for the bald eagle a permanent place in the American decorative motif. Rush’s carved and gilded eagles appeared in churches Saint John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church (it’s now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) and on public buildings, including Fairmount Waterworks (this piece is now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art). Carved, cast or painted, eagles were becoming the go-to patriotic icon.

By the mid-century, the place of the eagle was secured not only in the American hearts and minds, but on America’s streets. In 1848, the Philadelphia Gas Works welcomed home soldiers returning from the Mexican-American War in a display at Independence Hall. An eagle with “a halo of stars” hovered above a thirty-foot “Goddess of Peace,” one of the many “figures in fire” of bent gas-pipes lit by 4,000 gas jets.

Eagles appeared on buildings throughout the city: Chestnut Street; 8^th Street: and Broad, where John McArthur, Jr. (later the architect of Philadelphia City Hall) mounted a giant eagle six stories above the entrance, above the cornice of his new luxury hotel, LaPierre House.

When the nation celebrated its 100^th birthday in 1876, the roof line of Memorial Hall crackled with personifications of Industry and Commerce, Agriculture and Mining, Science and Art. On each of four corner pavilions were perched four eagles, 16 in all, made of galvanized zinc and with huge wing span. Sometime after the Centennial, Memorial Hall’s eagles had no problem taking off, never to be seen or heard of again.

At Philadelphia City Hall, on the other hand, the eagles mounted at the foot of the Founder stayed put. Sculptor Alexander Milne Calder topped City Hall tower with four bronze eagles with 14-foot wingspans.

With a second new century came still more eagles. After the Louisiana Purchase exhibition in 1904, John Wanamaker bought and installed in his department store August Gaul’s giant bronze bird. And, as Penny Balkin Bach tells us in Public Art in Philadelphia, when New Yorkers decided to demolish Pennsylvania Station in 1963, Philadelphia’s Market Street Bridge got four of Alexander Weinman’s 22 granite eagles. The rest were distributed to locations around the country. But Americans everywhere knew Weinman’s eagles from his representation on the reverse of his “Walking Liberty” half dollar.

After more than 200 years, could we possibly be growing weary of the eagle, tired of its fierce and serious pose? Not so long as we continue to interpret the bird freshly, which may mean ironically, satirically or humorously, whether in blinking neon or bronze. “The important thing,” as Jacques Lipschitz sculptor of the “Spirit of Enterprise” on Kelly Drive put it, is finding and working with “some kind of freedom in expression.” And wasn’t that one of the freedoms the Founders had in mind?

To a wide-eyed boy, the gigantic neon eagle on Market Street just west of 11th seemed fierce—and fun. In fading evening light, oblivious commuters on the sidewalk below went about their business, seemingly unaware as the eagle glowed and flapped. As I sat in the passenger seat of my father’s Ford station wagon idling at the stoplight, I knew one thing: I would forever look forward to seeing the Market Street eagle again.

Eagles were part of our lives in the patriotic mid-century. I had seen plenty of them—cast on aluminum screen doors in my parents’ West Oak Lane rowhouse neighborhood, embroidered on quilts, stitched on flags, printed on labels of the beer cans my father popped open on hot summer days. I had seen how sign makers borrowed wings from eagles to keep horses aloft (Mobilgas) and rendered them in neon at Flying A Service stations. Wings were always spread, but but not nearly so dramatically or dynamically as the Market Street eagle. This glowing creature could out not only catch a PTC bus, it could devour it, as well.

Other cities had their neon eagles. In 1950, the Artkraft-Strauss Sign Corporation of New York filmed the real thing in flight and created a series of giant neon facsimiles for Anheuser-Busch breweries. Before long, Anheuser-Busch mounted one on the Brill Building in Manhattan, two blocks from Times Square. Breweries in Newark, Saint Louis, New Orleans, Houston and Los Angeles soon had their own, which made sense: Anheuser-Busch had adopted the eagle for a logo in the 1870s. But even this was hardly an original idea. The first barrels of Yeungling rolled out of their Eagle Brewery in Pottsville, Pennsylvania back in 1829, and the eagle had been its logo ever since. Brewers weren’t the only ones who saw something special in eagles. Newspaper publishers liked them. So would fire companies, banks, sports teams, musical groups and pencil manufacturers, among others.

The eagle is universally admired as patriotic, independent, precise and powerful. Americans (except Benjamin Franklin) have officially liked the eagle since 1782. Franklin famously preferred the Wild Turkey for the Great Seal of the United States, although he was also partial to the rattlesnake. But the eagle v. turkey v. snake debate was short lived. Charles Thomson’s design (illustrated here) for the Great Seal had little serious opposition and soon, the eagle forever became something for our collective awe, appreciation, adaptation, and imitation—so much as humans might be able.

And they would try. Toward the end of World War One, photographers Arthur Mole and John Thomas arranged 12,500 military officers, nurses and others stationed at Camp Gordon outside Atlanta in a unique patriotic formation—a giant version of the Great Seal, eagle feathers delineated by the strategic placement of contrasting uniforms.

When and where, exactly, did the eagle first fly off the page and onto the streets, military bases, breweries and pencil factories of America? That took only took a few short years after the eagle’s adoption. In the 1790s, when Philadelphia was temporarily the nation’s Capital, Alexander Hamilton got his plan approved for a federal Treasury. And without an architect to help guide the way (Benjamin Henry Latrobe wouldn’t arrive until the Spring of 1796), Samuel Blodgett, Jr. supplied a design. With one eye on the Royal Exchange back in Dublin (now Dublin City Hall) the newly-minted Americans put up their First Bank, also the first of many marble facades designed to project a sense of pride and security for the citizenry.

What would occupy the First Bank’s triangular pediment, the most symbolic space over the entrance of this most symbolic building? An eagle, of course. Even better, a riff on the Great Seal, with all of its correct attributes: an eagle with a fist full of arrows, a shield with thirteen stars and stripes, an olive branch, and, since the building was intended to support national well being—a lavishly stocked cornucopia.  Clodius LeGrand, a woodcarver and  stonecutter newly-arrived from France is thought to be responsible for the sculpture, which is considered “an elaborate masterpiece.”

Critics raved, calling it “the first finished building of any consequence wherein taste and knowledge has been displayed in this country.” But Latrobe, who meant to upgrade the American taste for such things, remained unimpressed. The white marble’s “bluish and yellowish veins” bothered him, as did the heights of the blocks and their off-level joints. As for detailed carvings and LeGrand’s eagle, Latrobe simply wrote: “the sculpture is not good.” Within a few years, Latrobe had won over Philadelphia, as well as the new District of Columbia, and LeGrand left for Santo Domingo—never to be heard from again.

Thanks to LeGrand, the American eagle had made its way from the new nation’s seals and coins to find a perch, for the first time, on the streets of America.

What kind of a city should Philadelphia be? Ponderous, historical and homey, stuck in its quaint ways, admiring of its own image in the review mirror? Or should Philadelphia throw in its hat and become lively, contemporary and international, willing to join the what’s what of World Cities?

Developer Williard Rouse didn’t think it was a real choice as he put the make-it-or-break-it question to the people of Philadelphia in the Spring of 1984. Rouse proposed breaking the city’s “gentleman’s agreement,” that quirky, decades-old a pact more ephemeral than legal. It had never been on the books but had been kept alive in the boardrooms as a ready-made, self-deprecating put down. Anyone suggesting a project over 500 feet would be brought up short by city planner Edmund N. Bacon with the same line:  ‘It’s only a gentleman’s agreement. The question is, are you a gentleman?’”

There were a lot of places in the city where you couldn’t even see City Hall tower or the statue of the founder. “If you stood at Rittenhouse Square right now and looked for William Penn,” Rouse pointed out, “you would not find him.”  According Benjamin M. Gerber’s chronicle of the gentleman’s agreement’s demise, the Inquirer editorial board agreed: “much of the symbolism of Penn’s supremacy was already lost amidst ‘a stubby tide of undistinguished office buildings already [lapping] just shy of Penn’s pantaloons.’”

Inquirer architecture writer Thomas Hine had seen it coming. “The breakthrough might come in private office building, or as a public monument,” he wrote in 1983, “but it seems that sooner or later, the city will rise over William Penn’s head.” When, the following April, Rouse presented two projects, a short one and a tall one (he only intended to develop latter). The debate that ensued became “The Battle of Billy Penn” as Gregory L. Heller tells it in his new biography of Bacon. It played out everywhere: in the streets, in the media, and in the public mind as Philadelphia redefined itself at the end of the century that began with the installation of the 37-foot bronze founder above the a humble skyline.

“The way people talked about One Liberty Place when plans for this skyscraper were announced,” wrote Paul Goldberger in the New York Times, “you would have thought that this was not a new building but some sort of nuclear weapon. One Liberty Place would be the ruination of Philadelphia, cried the project’s opponents, the sign that this somewhat genteel city had sold out to real-estate developers and become just like anyplace else.” The crier-in-chief, of course, was the retired Bacon, whose energy, style and way with words fueled the debate. The height limitation “sets Philadelphia apart from all other” cities. And Bacon warned: “once smashed it is gone forever.”

Liberty Place was built, of course.

In 1987, when it opened, some couldn’t forget that architect Helmut Jahn adapted it from a much taller, unbuilt tower proposed for Houston. They couldn’t forgive that it looked like a bulked-up version of New York’s Chrysler Building. Hine wrote that Liberty Place “loomed,” but appreciated how, amidst the “stubble” of existing office buildings, it turned “the uninspiring commercial agglomeration into a complete visual composition.” Liberty Place stood “like a mountain among the foothills.”

Philadelphia’s height limitation had been “an empty gesture, hollow and pretentious,” wrote Goldlberger in the New York Times. “The urban order that Philadelphians had for so long cherished was a myth… it was a fallacy to pretend that City Hall still commanded the skyline…William Penn barely stuck his head above his grim surroundings.” With Liberty Place, “City Hall…is still there, still great, and still at the critical center of the city. The only thing that has been lost is the illusion that William Penn was lording over it all.” Goldberger glowed that Liberty Place “transcends the old order, and establishes a new one, at a level of quality good enough to justify throwing away the old.”

Liberty Place would “dislodge this historical center which… informed our city from the beginning,” predicted Bacon. “In our arrogance, we replace it with a floating center up for sale to the highest bidder.” In that sense, Liberty Place and the still taller Comcast Center confirmed his worst fears.

But in the end, what was sacrificed? Sure, the skyline would never be the same. It would never again take on the same kind meaning. In the debates of the 1980s, Philadelphians were forced to think long and hard about where they found substance and where they found meaning. “We may be giving up something insubstantial, but not meaningless,” observed one architect.

In the 21st century, Philadelphians would search for substance and meaning in places other than the skyline. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Contemplating “that vast gray labyrinth” of Philadelphia, with “great Penn upon his pinnacle like the graven figure of a god who had fashioned a new world,” G. K. Chesterton imagined Philadelphians could “feel the presence of Penn and Franklin” just as his English brethren could “see the ghosts of Alfred or Becket.” But Philadelphians didn’t need to use their imaginations. They could literally see Penn from every quarter of the city, miles from the center, where a giant statue of the founder had been installed 500 feet up, on top of City Hall tower.

Philadelphia’s love affair with the Founding Fathers would persist, but they’d soon turn on their late-19^th century City Hall. By the 1950s, when Lewis Mumford lectured at Penn, City Hall was seen as “an architectural nightmare, a mishmash of uglified Renaissance styles welded into a structure rugged enough to resist and atomic bomb…” It is “woefully obsolete,” wrote Mumford, but “the problem of whether to do away with it…is not an easy one to solve…because wrecking it would wreck the wrecker.”

But for the cost of demolition, City Hall survived. And as long as it had to remain in the center of the plan, city planner Edmund N. Bacon was going to make the most of it. In a new biography, Gregory Heller tells us Bacon “saw the dominance of City Hall tower in the skyline as a critical element to the city’s historical continuity.” Bacon “created an unwritten ‘gentleman’s agreement’ that no building would rise above the statue of William Penn atop City Hall.”

“Developers would periodically meet with Bacon and propose a building taller than City Hall tower,” Heller learned in his interviews. “They would query whether the height limit was legally mandated, to which Bacon would respond: ‘It’s only a gentleman’s agreement. The question is, are you a gentleman?’”

Throughout the 20^th century, gentleman’s agreements were mostly associated with spurious and immoral practices: limiting Japanese immigration, preventing the employment of African Americans or denying real estate to Jews. Legal scholars begin discussions of the practice with this somewhat amusing (or chilling) definition: “A gentlemen’s agreement is an agreement which is not an agreement, made between two persons, neither of whom is a gentleman, whereby each expects the other to be strictly bound without himself being bound at all.”

Bacon used the idea of a gentleman’s agreement to challenge the civility of (and presumably quickly end meetings with) developers audacious enough to bring him proposals for skyscrapers. But was there an actual gentleman’s agreement, or was it just a useful ploy to bury projects that would alter the city’s skyline? Over the years, the origins of the gentleman’s agreement have remained a mystery.

On April 28 1956, seven years into Bacon’s tenure as Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, The New Yorker published the first of Lewis Mumford’s two articles that, interestingly, do not mention Bacon, but do introduce Philadelphia’s “gentleman’s agreement.”  With the “Chinese Wall” coming down, Mumford concludes the city was looking up, although how far up wasn’t open to discussion. “Without legislation and with nothing more solid than a gentleman’s agreement, the tallest of the city office buildings have been piously kept lower than the bronze figure atop” City Hall. “Sentiment and symbolism have made unnecessary—temporarily at any rate—any legislation.”

In 1963, when a developer proposed a sixty-story building, Bacon responded that “for the first time in the history of Philadelphia” a project “would violate the gentleman’s agreement that William Penn will not be topped by private construction.” The Planning Commission responded by approving a “height limit ordinance” of 450 feet that made its way through the Mayor’s office and to City Council, where it eventually died. The gentleman’s agreement remained, though worse for wear, its authority unclear.

The following year, another developer proposed a tower taller than City Hall for 15^th and Market Streets and Bacon found himself at odds with his own Planning Commission. As built, the project came in shorter than proposed, but the challenge now seemed possible. “Not all Philadelphians favor squat skyscrapers,” wrote Glynn D. Mapes in The Wall Street Journal of November 29, 1967.  Philip Klein, vice chairman of the Commission, hankered for a proposal “that would top William Penn.” Said Klein: “It’s time Philadelphia did something like this. I’d fight for it all the way. No city can be a big city without tall buildings.”

Philadelphians loved tradition, something like what Chesterton appreciated and Bacon perpetuated. “It still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did one hundred years ago,” Chesterton had written in 1922, “I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.”

OK, Philadelphia was different from other American cities. But a real challenge to the city’s traditional skyline, gentleman’s agreement or not, was mounting. And in 1984, the question would again be posed: Could Philadelphians maintain an honest love affair with the past if the past didn’t also dominate their city’s skyline?

No matter that New York’s Empire State Building, which opened in 1931, was more than two-and-a-half times taller than Philadelphia’s PSFS Building. The Quaker City’s skyscraper was many times more modern. Philadelphia had “gone Gershwin” with an architecture “slick and sheer and shining…alive to the tempo of the day.” So refreshing compared with “the frumpy, bastioned City Hall” a few blocks to the west. The PSFS embraced modernism not for its own sake, but because it offered solutions that were, above all, functional. As urban planner Frederick Gutheim later gushed, “When functionalism in the United States was raw, red and steamy new it found few more devoted followers than Howe and Lescaze.”

”The sleek, streamlined bank and a 27-story slab of glass-walled office space by architects George Howe and William Lescaze turned out to be “the biggest and proudest thing in Philadelphia.” Known for its commanding role in the skyline with four, 27-foot-tall letters in red neon, PSFS provided an even more innovative achievement closer to the ground. There, its architects solved the difficult question of how a skyscraper might relate to, and make the most of, a busy urban intersection.

That design question fascinated bank president James M. Willcox, who wasn’t interested in style per se, but was committed to where and how to most effectively, practically, and aesthetically design and build. Willcox balked at Howe’s traditional-looking, first proposal in 1926 and instead had him put up a temporary, ground level bank to test customer demand. Meanwhile, Willcox commissioned Howe to design a set of neighborhood branches, two identical pairs that started historical and wound up modern. Then, in 1928, Howe left his longtime firm (Mellor, Meigs & Howe) and he left historicism for modernism.

For the 12^thand Market Street site, diagonally across from the Reading Terminal, Willcox had an ambitious array of demands. He wanted a bank, commercial space, hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space, and, for a time, he even demanded five stories of above-ground parking. By late 1929, when Howe and his new partner, the young, progressive Swiss architect William Lescaze got to work on the revived project, the biggest question was how to acceptably address Willcox’s complex program for the street level. He distrusted “ultra-Modern.” What he wanted, Willcox later explained, was “ultra-Practical.” It was the architects job to prove that modern and practical were one and the same.

If some savvy Gatsby type had whispered a single word to guide the architects to a smart, elegant and ultimately “ultra-practical” design, that word would have been “steel.” Even though Howe was not used to, or comfortable with the material, the PSFS commission obliged Howe “to face the problem of steel construction.”

And steel’s possibilities “startled” Howe. He wasn’t used to such “novelty,” such “frank interpretation of modern functions,” and soon realized he was now free to get at “the underlying principles governing architectural design.” Lescaze showed the way, with drawings envisioning something complex, elegant and modern, a building like no one had seen in America. According to William Jordy, Lescaze’s street level promised a building “bathed in a mysterious luminescence… weightless as it rises effortlessly in the night above its scrubby competition.”

The weight of the office tower would be supported by rows of steel columns. And a giant steel truss would bridge the banking floor with a 63-foot span. Howe and Lescaze delineated their 2^nd-story banking hall with a giant, sweeping band of windows, leaving “the ground floor free for…the kind of shopping traffic from which the bank drew its clientele.” Above, three more floors of bank offices served as a transition from the base to a boldly-cantilevered, 27-story office tower. Then came the great, groundbreaking neon sign.

Before Howe started the project, he and his partners used architecture to help clients avoid reality, and in particular, the realities of the city. “The critical weakness of the romantic architect,” Lewis Mumford criticized Howe in 1925,” is that he is employed in creating an environment into which people may escape from a sordid workaday world.” By the end of the decade, with the encouragement of an enlightened patron and the vision of a creative partner, Howe managed to make a complete aesthetic conversion. In the PSFS building, Howe and Lescaze addressed the purpose of architecture: “to remake the workaday world so that people will not wish to escape from it.”

The PSFS building turned out to be “much more than a superb marriage of function and technological innovation,” wrote Robert A. M. Stern. “It is a superbly crafted object, refined in its every detail…that rarest of phenomena of our time, a working monument.” And its style wasn’t one more in a long line of styles; the PSFS showed the way to live in the world, and a way to make the most of it.

This might have been called many things. In 1931 they called it Modernism.