Landmarks Preservation Commission July 27, 1982, Designation List 157 LP-1242 THE GERARD/later HotelLangweiVlater Hotel 1-2-3, 123 West 44th Street. Borough of Manhattan. Built 1893-94; architect George Keister. Landmark Site: Borough of Manhattan. Tax Map Block 997, Lot 19. On August 11, 1981, the Landmarks Preservation Commission held a public hearing on the proposed designation as a Landmark of The Gerard and the proposed designation of the related Landmark Site (Item No. 4). The hearing had been duly advertised in accordance with the provisions of law. One witness spoke in favor of designation. There were two speakers in opposition to designation. DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS The Gerard, an exceptionally fine brick, limestone, and terra-cotta apartment hotel, designed in 1893 by George Keister, marks a transition in both American architectural taste and in the developmental history of the west Hidtown area. Stylistically, it displays an unusual combination of Romanesque and Northern Gothic and Renaissance details found on very few other buildings in America. When it was erected, this apartment hotel was one of the tallest buildings in a predominantly low-rise residential area and it heralded the enormous change that the neighborhood was to undergo a few years later as it became the heart of New York City's theater district. The Gerard was commissioned by the developers Alexander Moore and William Rankin who employed George Keister to design the new structure. Keister ns a little-known archi tect who was active in New York City from the late 1880s through the first decades of the twentieth century. Although few buildings by Keister have been identified, those that are known forman interesting group, and examination of his work reveals Keister as one of the more innovative and interesting architects of the period. Among Keister's major works are the eccentrically-massed Romanesque Revival style First Baptist Church (1891) on the northwest corner of Broadway and West 79th Street and a group of ten row houses on East 136th Street in the Bronx, known as the Bertine Block (1891). These rowhouses bear a close stylistic resemblance to the Gerard. During the twentieth century Keister seems to have specialized in the design of theaters. These include the German-Renaissance style Astor Theat~e (1906, demolished) on Broadway and West 45th Street, the neo-Classical style Selwyn at 229 West 42nd Street (1918), the Balasco Theatre (originally David Balasco's Stuyvesant Theatpe, 1906-07), a Colonial Revival style building with elegant interior spaces, located next to the Gerard, and the Apollo (1912-13), one of Harlem's great cultural monuments. The 1893 design of the Gerard coincided with the opening of the Worlds Columbian Expo-··..,.. sition in Chicago. This world's fair firmly established Classical and Rena-issance archi tecturalsources as the preeminent design force in American architecture,, hastening what had been a slow transition from the massive, earth-toned, picturesque forms of the Roman esque Revival to a lighter, more symmetrical type of architecture. The Gerard is a building that firmly marks this transition in architectural taste. A major portion of the softly modulated facade is designed in a late Romanesque Revival manner. The Gerard's tawny brown brick facing is punctuated with Gothic and Renaissance details; the Gothic and Renaissance forms chosen by Keister are not inspired by the Italian and French sources popular with his contemporaries, but are based on German precendents. The Pictruesque juxtaposition of Romanesque forms with German Gothic and Renaissance details is typical of German architecture. In the fiftheenth and sixteenth centuries

-2- the Renaissance dominated Italian architecture, but in Northern Europe, which did not have a strong classical tradition, the Renaissance never totally displaced medieval ideas and it is common to find a basically medieval building with Renaissance surface ornament. In Germany th

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