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The Western Union Building (1928-30), designed by Ralph Walker, one of New York's foremost architects of the period, is a recognized achievement in modernistic skyscraper design. The building is characteristic of a group of communications buildings designed by Walker in the late 1920s, primarily for the telephone companies, in which he developed a distinctive design approach related to the contemporary Art Deco style. The design of the Western Union Building was influenced by the work of the German and Dutch Expressionist architects, and drew upon Walker's well-defined design theory emphasizing harmony and unity. The integrated aesthetic of form, material, and ornamentation incorporates such elements as patterned brickwork, dramatic entrances, faceted wall planes and trim, and complex and asymmetrical massing. The innovative, cliff-like form of the Western Union Building departs from the shape of the site and includes a low screen that conforms to the Hudson Street lot line. The exterior brick walls are carefully articulated in a textured, curtain-like manner, parting as proscenium-like openings at the ground story. The building was among the first to have a graded brick color scheme, from dark at the bottom to light at the upper stories, which was "a pleasing exaggeration of the natural play of light." Commissioned by Newcomb Carlton, president of the Western Union Telegraph Company, the new headquarters building allowed the consolidation of all operations in one location, "the largest telegraph building in the world"; the modernistic design helped to reestablish a corporate identity for Western Union after its dominance by the American Telephone & Telegraph Company. The Western Union Building remains in use as a communications center, housing both equipment and offices.

With the design of the Western Union Building, described at the time of its construction as representing the modern American style of architecture, Walker moved beyond the model of the Barclay-Vesey Building, with its complex ornamental program, toward the expressionistic vocabulary of the later communications buildings.

The building stands apart from the other buildings in the series in its exclusive use of brick for ornamentation of both the exterior of the building and the public interior spaces of the first story.

The design of the Western Union Building is remarkably integrated -- the forms, the materials, and the ornament -- and demonstrates Walker's achievement of harmony and unity in skyscraper design.

The massing of the Western Union Building belies the dictates of the building's irregularly• shaped lot; apparently Walker was responding to Lewis Mumford's criticism of the 'awry' shape of the Barclay-Vesey Building due to its filling the entire irregular site. Walker later wrote of the lasting effects of Mumford's comments and his 'early appreciation that the shape of the lot did not necessarily control the form of the building' and stated that 'a building could take its own form regardless of the land below.'20 He employed this idea in the form of the Western Union Building, and developed an inventive massing solution which departs considerably from the footprint of the lot. At the Hudson Street end of the block, three slabs, which rise sheerly to the first setbacks, meet the angled Hudson Street lot line behind a two-story screen -- a series of opening enframements -- that serves as a traditional base for the main facade. The massed piers of the screen ground the soaring corner piers 6 of the two northern slabs. The architect explained that the adoption of this unusual scheme was due to 'the superior massing of rectangular forms and through the powerful verticals rising, without interruption, at the corners of each setbaCk.'" With highly visible, vertically articulated facades on all four sides, the Western Union Building, 'a huge red rock projecting out of the city,'" is solid and cliff-like, suggesting an interest in the natural and irregular forms of palisades and cliffs as shapes to be replicated in building masses. Upon close inspection, the building is a complex and sculpted form, with greater irregularity at the Hudson Street end of the building; in contrast, the stepped massing of the West Broadway end of the building is relatively straightforward and symmetrical. with the setbacks extending along most of the long north and south facades. A low tower, which rises only slightly above a central slab, unites the mass of the building." The brick exterior walls of the Western Union Building can be likened to curtains which part at the major openings at the street level. The contemporary critic Paul T. Frankl wrote of such 'brick tapestries hung from the sky,' 'mosaics of colored stone or tinted brick' which emphasized the natural beauty of the material and were free from unnecessary detail." Incorporated into the curta

Fred Tunstall
Born 9 May 1891 in Melrose MA

Influential Harlem jazz pianist. He played with Lucille Hegamin’s Blue Flame Syncopaters (and other groups) in the early 1920s. Tunstall travelled to France on a musical engagement in 1919.

“Fred Tunstall was a real dandy. I remember he had a Norfolk coat with eighty-two pleats in the back. When he sat down to the piano, he’d slump a little in a half hunch, and those pleats would fan out real pretty. The coat was long and flared at the waist. It had a very short belt sewn on the back. His pants were very tight.

He had a long neck, so he wore a high stiff collar that came up under his chin with a purple tie. A silk handkerchief was always draped very carefully in his breast pocket. His side view was very striking.”

Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2001 by Whitney Balliett