While working downtown Manhattan over the last couple of years I often took a longer walk than necessary to enjoy the day and the busy (or not so busy post-pandemic) life in the Financial District. It took me several years to realize that on my way south through Nassau Street, I always passed in front of a remarkable and pretty unique building. I finally got more curious about the beige painted, sophisticated facade just to realize, that number 93 to 99 was the largest still existing structure in New York with a cast-iron facade. The Bennett Building was built in 1873 in the French Second Empire style as a six-story (seven with the dormers) commercial structure for the Bennett family and their New York Herald newspaper business.
The building was extended in 1890, the mansard roof with the dormers was replaced and three more stories were added in the identical style as the lower six stories. Its sophisticated facade with plenty of details around the deeply recessed windows, including the pilasters with the corbels but also the decorated piers are some of the outstanding elements. Unfortunately, the more recent owners of the building sacrificed some of the originally rich features on the ground and second floor to more contemporary needs of the businesses. The Bennett Building was one of the first structures that the New York City Landmark Preservation Commission (LPC) designated as a New York City landmark. See their full architectural review here.
My fascination with this structure and the prospect of a challenging scratch-build made me decide to add it to my Westside Railroad layout. It’s from a different time and place but it would look great. And given the breadth of architectural styles in the West Chelsea neighborhood on my layout, having a structure from an earlier period won’t hurt.
Proof of Concept
To begin with, I had no idea how to model the facade. Its complexity and its depth with pilasters, capitals, lintels, and moldings appeared to be daunting. At some point I realized that I could add a separate layer for the arched lintels. But the pilasters and capitals were a different story. It was clear that pilasters had to be separate elements that would have to be inserted. If I inserted them individually from the front they would certainly not line up. The same with the capitals. They were perpendicular to the pilasters, so how could I add them on top of them? And how could I align them uniformly?
While testing a feasible approach that looked good and that would retain as much details of the prototype as possible, I found that treating the pilasters as one piece across all stories was key. This meant, however, that I’d have to insert them from the back. But then, how could I attach the window glazing between the pilasters? I realized that the only way to achieve this would be by making the window glazing the carrier layer for the facade. Keeping it as a one glass pane for the entire facade would get me a very stable construction. I could even use extruded 1/16″ thick acrylic sheet for both the pilasters and the glass pane. They cut precisely and with good resolution on my laser cutter and they can be easily glued with plastic solvent cement.
I did have to make a compromise, though, in terms of detailing. The prototype has paneled pilasters and capitals. My pilasters and capitals face the front with the lasered edge so there’s no way to also engrave the paneling.
Layered Design
To verify this design, I produced a small section of the facade. This is how the multi-layered design looked like (layers from back to front, see diagram above):
- The window glazing made of one piece of clear 1/16″ acrylic with vertical gaps cut for the pilasters.
- The pilasters insert from the back in two pieces. One for the second story and a second longer one for the third to the eight stories.
- A (painted) window layer of .017″ laser board for the window frames, sashes and muntins. This layer consists of one piece for the entire facade. Additionally, it has the same gaps as the window glass pane to ensure a perfect fit.
- The wall layer made of 1/8″ basswood that has an opening for each window which also caters for the pilasters and the capitals. It also includes (horizontal) gaps for the moldings. The wall layer has slightly engraved gaps for the lintels that make their precise fitting easier. This also reduces the size of the lintels.
- Separately added projecting lintels cut of 1/16″ MDF on top of the wall layer.
- Separately cut moldings that are inserted into the gaps in the wall. To give them a good prototypical approximation, I used three layers, each one projecting progressively above the lower layer. I used material of different thicknesses: 1/8″ basswood, then 1/16″ acrylic sheet and .017″ laser board on top.
This approach showed me that it was working. The result looked good even if I had to simplify it compared to the prototype. For the definitive design I would only make minor changes to the depth of the projected elements.
Selective Compression and Design of the Model
As always, I had to consider several parameters when deciding on how much to compress and which parts of the Bennett Building I’d model. I also had to decide what era I would use as a baseline for the design of the building. When built in 1873, the building had six stories and a mansard roof with dormers. The current building includes the alterations of 1890 and has ten stories with a flat roof. A two-story penthouse with the same cast-iron facade on Ann Street was also added with that extension.
I’d build the post-1890 structure with the two facades of Fulton and Nassau Street. I’d not include the cast-iron facade on Ann Street. Instead, I’d terminate the structure on the western and northern sides with painted and weathered brick walls. This will allow me to add a smaller building on the northern end of the Bennett Building. Also, my model would only have eight stories instead of the ten of the prototype and I would not include the penthouse.
Translating the building’s dimensions into N scale would have resulted in a sizable structure. To make it fit into my layout, I compressed the 117 (Nassau Street) by 75 ft (Fulton Street) into 7.5 and 4.4 inches. This corresponds to 85% and 78% of the prototype’s length and depth. The height of the model with two fewer stories is 85% of the prototype.
Prototypical Fidelity of the Compressed Structure
Even with a that compression, I tried to preserve the proportions and the overall structure. For instance, the facade of the model has five symmetrical bays along Nassau Street, the same number as the prototype. I could achieve this by eliminating both round corners with diagonal windows and by slightly reducing the width of the bays. The number of bays on Fulton Street is three with six large windows. My model only has the first bay (counting from west) slightly narrower with one instead of two windows on the third floor, but otherwise is similar like the prototype. The entrance on Fulton Street is in the first bay (counting from west), the same as for the prototype. On Nassau it is bays two and four (counting from south). Stories six to eight are lower than stories three to five. I made them only an estimated 87% of the higher stories below.
For the first floor (sometimes referred to as basement), I had no proper source since the layout has been changed completely in the 1980ies. We know that it housed a bank and some other stores. Of a particular challenge were the doors as they look recessed in photos and are accessed through a few steps according to an existing plan. I had to use my modeler’s license to come up with a realistic design given the overall architectural structure.
Building the Facade
Basic Facade
I started by cutting end engraving both walls from 1/8″ basswood, using the proof-of-concept approach. Then I glued the arched lintels engraved and cut out from 1/16″ MDF on the basswood wall. I used scale stucco acrylic modeling paste to close the gaps between the wall and the lintels. I then sanded the wall, primed it with Tamiya white before spray-painting it with one coating of mtn 94 bone-white. The lower two stories I air-brushed with Burnt Siena acrylic paint that I tinted with black that would give me a dark brown color. The only black-and-white photo available from the building in the 1890ies shows these stories as almost black, a color I wanted to avoid.
Below the wall I added the windows with the sashes and muntins made of .017″ laser board. I also painted them immediately before I glued them to the back of the basswood wall. I used the gaps for the pilasters as a guide and tentative added the pilasters from the back to get a precise match between wall and window layer. That was the easy part as the next steps were more elaborate.
Adding Lintels, Pilasters and Capitals
As mentioned above, I cut the pilasters from 1/16″ acrylic sheet. All pilasters from stories three to eight are made as one piece while the pilasters for the second floor are a separate piece. I primed and painted them in the same colors as the wall – dark brown the ones for the second floor and bone-white the ones above. Once all pieces were dry, I could glue them in place by inserting them from the back into the gaps in the glass pane, the window layers and the wall. Again, this approach worked out well with the laser cut gaps and inserted pilasters matching perfectly. There is a small gap between the pilasters and the wall due to the not exact perpendicular cut of the laser. The complete facade is so rich in details and depth, however, that the gap is hardly visible to the casual observer.
The final step in the assembly of the facade is the addition of the capitals under the projecting lintels. I had to cut them as individual parts from acrylic sheet that could be inserted from the outside into the precut gaps. For adjacent windows, I designed them as one piece for both lintels. Together, the horizontal capitals add to the visual complexity of the facade on which otherwise, the vertical lines of the piers and pilasters dominate.
Adding Moldings and Cornices
Again, I had to considerably reduce the complexity of the moldings and cornices so that it would work with my design. I found that a sequence of a 1/8″ basswood layer, followed by slightly overlapping 1/16″ MDF and topped by even more protruding .017″ thick laser board would look sophisticated enough. For the bottom two layers I had provided gaps in the wall that made the correct alignment easy. The top layer of laser board would just sit on the MDF. Faller Expert Lasercut glue would firmly attach the three pieces to the wall and create a prototypically looking entablatures as if they were made from one piece.
Having added the moldings and cornices I could now proceed to building the internal bracing.
Turning the Facade into a Building
Designing Internal Bracing
I designed the internal bracing in two stages. The first stage includes primary walls for the front entrances, a divider with doors across the entire building in the background that separate the side entrance from the rooms, and floors for the second, third, sixth and eighth level. I cut them from either back of white acrylic sheet and designed them with matching gaps and tabs. These primary walls and floors stabilize the building by connecting with the facade pieces through the tabs.
The second stage consists of partial walls and floors inserted through or connected to the primary walls and floors. They improve the appearance with a lit interior as they avoid the optics of a hollow interior. Some of the back acrylic walls I painted gray to improve lighting.
Ground Floor Design
From the little photographic material available of the ground floor before the building’s major renovation in the 1980s, we see that the doors were recessed behind the wall plane. The original doors did not survive the remodeling. Unfortunately, the adjustments made for a different kind of stores mostly obscure the original construction. I tried to follow the photos as well as possible. For the construction of the recessed doors, I had to add internal walls. They would become part of the internal bracing (see below). The original architecture treated what is the second floor today as the ground floor. To simulate this, I added recessed external stairs and a staircase inside the building.
On both facades I also added more details for the entrances. Photos show protruding columns on both the ground and the second floor. I laser-cut and engraved the paneled square columns for the first floor from 1/8″ basswood. I then sanded the round columns of the second floor from a 1/8″ wooden dowel until I got the appropriate diameter with a slightly conical angle. The distinctive columns painted in light sand against the dark brown wall articulate the grand design of the original entrances. I could not find any photos showing the details of the entablatures with the arched pediments above the entrances on the second floor. I omitted them for now, but I could add them easily later once I have a better understanding of how they looked.
Adding Lighting
Given the complexity of the internal structure I decided to add lighting while I was designing the internal bracing. To get prototypical lighting, I took the following steps:
- I treated the lighting for the staircases differently from the rooms located in the building center and on the left and right side. I created light channels with a specifically cut clear acrylic shape. The source for those channels are two warm white LEDs. Every floor starting on the second level would have its own light at the back (see left photo below). I filed the end of the channels into a 45-degree angle to maximize reflexion of the light.
- To avoid having to light every single room on each floor, I designed a screen from white opaque acrylic with embedded LED. The white 1/16″ acrylic sheet ensures a diffuse light from the same two LEDs that light the staircase.
- The lateral rooms have their own LEDs on the fourth and seventh floor (see center photo below). To simplify soldering of the LED contacts, I used copper strips to which I connected the LEDs.
- To create a random pattern of rooms with and without light, I glued precisely cut black paper masks on the back of the glass pane of the facades.
- The LEDs are connected to a small PCB that includes a step-down converter from 12 to 3.3 Volt. It connects to the 12 Volt DC layout bus and provides a voltage appropriate for the multiple LEDs of the same type without loss and without the use of resistors. The PCB is my own design using Fritzing and manufactured by Aisler and the converter is a MPS MEZD71201F.
I’ll deal with the lighting for the ground floor when I’ll add some shop interior. For now, I’m happy with the basic lighting. The LEDs don’t create a very bright light but that’s what I wanted.
Retrospective
When I considered scratch-building a model of the Bennett Building a few weeks ago, I wasn’t sure if it was maybe a bit too big fish for me to fry. Looking back, I’m glad that even if it took me some time to accomplish the goal, it opened my eyes to a different type of historical buildings in New York. I had to go new paths both in terms of materials and design approach and I learnt a lot. Looking at the finish product, I’m pleased that it worked out even better than what I had anticipated based on the proof of concept.
