Changing New York; Park Avenue and 39th Street
The all-steel House of the Modern Age with the Princeton Club (left) and the Murray Hill Hotel (right). In the background are the towers (from left to right) of: 10 East 40th Street, 22 East 40th Street, the Murray Hill Building, the Lefcourt Colonial Building and the Lincoln Building.
For six months in 1936, this “House of the Modern Age” — a prefabricated, modernist, all-steel, one-family home — stood on a Park Avenue “million-dollar lot.” The house, advertised as “fireproof, cyclone-proof, termite- and lightning-proof,” was designed by Chrysler Building architect William Van Alen and assembled by National Houses, Inc., at a cost of $10,000. One of many experimental houses built during the Depression, it attracted 110,000 visitors who paid ten cents a tour. Abbott photographed the house the day before it was torn down, showing it surrounded by relics of Victorian Murray Hill, including the Murray Hill Hotel, which in turn were encircled by new skyscrapers. Today the “million-dollar lot” is occupied by an office building.."
