More AM&A stuff

Click this link to see why AM&A might be architecturally and historically significant, after all. Props to the not-updated-since-November-2004 Greater Buffalo Blog. Here's an excerpt:

More on AM&A (originally J.N. Adam Co.) Starrett & van Vleck were the premier department store architects in the United States between 1914 and 1945. They were also accomplished skyscraper architects, designing the pioneering Art Deco Downtown Athletic Club in New York in 1926, among others. Flagship stores by Starrett & van Vleck include Lord & Taylor (1914), Sak’s 5th Avenue (1924), Abraham & Strauss (Brooklyn, 1929, ’35), Bloomingdale’s (1930), Alexander's (Bronx, 1938), and J.N. Adam, 1940, 1945 The Buffalo design owes a debt to Louis Sullivan’s Carson-Pirie-Scott store of 1899-1904 in Chicago, as modern in its horizontality (and ahead-of-its-time) as the Guaranty was modern in its verticality. Dean of American architectural historians Vincent Scully: “In the Carson-Pirie-Scott, which we should regard as the last of [Sullivan’s] epoch-making metropolitan images, Sullivan suppressed the vertical columns in order to stress and even to exaggerate the horizontality of the structural bays...The upper floors [are] liberated to take on a kind of horizontal velocity, like that of the busy street they so splendidly define...[The original cornice enhanced] that movement. The building still rides to its intersection as the most effective embodiment so far created of the lush and exhilarating life of the downtown, big-city shopping street.” “In urbanistic terms, the Carson-Pirie-Scott Store was the horizontal, space-defining complement to the…freestanding tower of the Guaranty. The two types…were to shape the major new urban groupings of the middle of the coming century.” Sullivan’s influence can be seen in futuristic drawings of the architectural renderer Hugh Ferris, especially in his detail of Hoover Dam of 1936 and Edward Durrell Stone’s Museum of Modern Art (1939). Terminating the building against the sky without resorting to mere decoration is a central problem in modernist design. In Ferris’s drawing of Hoover dam and Stone’s Met, the cornices consist of a receding top cast in deep shadow by an overhanging planar roof, the edge of which is pratically flush with the wall plane. Hence, in feel, a classic and properly heavy termination of the wall in a sheltering roof without resort to decorative effects which belie the materials and construction techniques used. These buildings can be seen in Starrett & van Vleck’s J.N. Adam store as completed after WWII. Obliquely, the cornice becomes a narrow horizontal slot reinforcing the run of the street. At night, the effect is reversed. The upper floor windows glow from within, while the stout columns are floodlit. Everything above is black. Minoru Yamasaki’s M&T Bank next door attempts a similar effect much less successfully, as do later buildings by Stone, such as the Huntington Hartford Museum in New York and the Buffalo News in Buffalo. The setting back of the M&T building in a deep plaza along Main Street and Eagle somewhat diminishes the effect and intent of the AM&A Eagle Street elevation. It was conceived when the taller Iroquois Hotel rose sheer across Eagle Street. The slot-like openings toward the rear of the Eagle elevation stream like pennants from a glass block vertical shaft marking the division between the Main Street front and the rear.