Biography | Arthur Loomis Harmon — The Setback Tower He Built Here Before the Empire State

Arthur Loomis Harmon is remembered, when he is remembered at all, as the third name in Shreve, Lamb & Harmon — the firm that built the Empire State Building. He earned that partnership here, on Lexington Avenue at East 49th Street, seven years before the firm existed. Harmon was born in Chicago in 1878, studied a year at the Art Institute, and finished at Columbia's School of Architecture in 1901. Nine years at McKim, Mead & White followed, during which he oversaw construction of a major addition to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. From 1913 he worked largely on his own. In late May 1922 he filed plans with the New York Department of Buildings for a thirty-one-storey residential hotel on this corner, and construction began that August. The city's 1916 zoning law had fixed how high a building could rise before it must step back from the street, but almost nobody had yet built to it; construction had stalled through the war years. The Shelton was among the first to take that rule and make a shape out of it. Harmon's move was small and physical. He battered the walls, sloping them slightly inward and increasing the incline at each setback, so the tower would not appear to splay outward when read from the pavement below. Brick piers run unbroken from the first setback to the top, and the ornament thins as the building rises. The hotel opened in stages from the autumn of 1923; by March 1924 it advertised itself complete, with 1,200 bedrooms for single men, a swimming pool, squash courts and an infirmary. Unable to fill them, the management opened the building to women that October. Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz took an apartment on the 28th floor in November 1925 and stayed eleven years, painting and photographing the city out of its windows. The Architectural League of New York and the American Institute of Architects each gave the building a gold medal. In 1929 Harmon joined Richmond Shreve and William Lamb, and within two years the three of them had the tallest building in the world. The Historic American Buildings Survey credits him, in those same years, with three of the American Battle Monuments Commission's battlefield monuments in France: Sommepy, Cantigny and Tours. The Shelton is now the New York Marriott East Side. New York's Landmarks Preservation Commission designated it on 22 November 2016 and called it "remarkably intact". Photo: Lumitone Photoprint postcard, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the building from Lexington Avenue in 2012 — Reading Tom, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.