Rediscover the UWS's Main Street!
"West Seventy Today" introduces you to your business neighbors along West 72nd Street, from Central Park to Riverside Park in weekly installments.
Meet your neighbors, NOW:
The Color Authority
by Claudie Benjamin

For at least ten years before the Covid period, the trend in paint colors for many apartments of the Upper West Side leaned toward variations in a palette of whites and grays. Over the last months, the mood has changed and customers are definitely painting or having their walls painted in richer, deeper and more vibrant colors. Joe Cacciola, Store Manager of Janovic Paint & Decorating Center at 159 West 72nd Street, can’t be sure if the change is attributable to the feeling that spending most of the time at home brings on a need for color, or if it’s for other reasons, “But I definitely see the change,” he says.
Joe has been immersed in color and paint for at least 20 years. “I look at color all day long.” He started out professionally as an easel painter, who ground his own pigments. He was also taking jobs to do wall painting to pay the rent. From there, beginning 15 years ago he started working at Janovic as a salesman, eventually becoming store manager. The job is in large part providing step by step guidance to do-it-yourself customers, a group that has grown in recent months. Joe and other Janovic staff also regularly address the needs of contractors working for customers and their decorators who usually know exactly what they want and expect “5 star” service. “We stand by our reputation as a ‘Color Authority’”.  KEEP READING
...and THEN:
Provident Paint
by Tom Miller

By the end of World War I, the formerly refined residential neighborhood of West 72nd Street between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenue become commercialized. The high-stoop house at 159 West 72nd Street was converted to “bachelor apartments” that year. But the end of the line for the old dwelling was on the distant horizon.

In 1932, the Provident Loan Society purchased and demolished it, and hired the architectural firm of Renwick, Aspinwall & Guard to design a modern bank building on the site. Completed before the end of the year, the one-story structure was clad in gleaming white limestone. Its sleek Art Deco façade was distinguished by two full-length fluted piers and a single soaring window. The organization’s name was announced within the stepped parapet.

In 1892, coal production in America had dropped off and stock prices and business incorporations began falling off.  The resulting recession hit the poorer classes hardest. With no money coming in and no collateral for loans, indigent New Yorkers took their possessions to unscrupulous pawn brokers to obtain cash for food and rent. It was a situation that did not go unnoticed by some of those more fortunate.

A special committee of the Charity Organization Society had recommended on May 9, 1892 that an institution be formed “to lend money at reasonable rates to the poor upon pledge of personal property.” The committee was, in fact, suggesting a government-approved pawnshop for the poor. KEEP READING
KEEP READING the history of 159 W72nd at 72 Crosstown
72 Crosstown highlights the architectural and social histories of 1/3 of the buildings along West 72nd Street. Additional sites are being researched. If you have a building you'd like us to prioritize, or a business you think we should feature, let us know!
SUGGEST a business: landmarkwest@landmarkwest.org
See you on West 72nd Street again, next FRIDAY!
LANDMARK WEST!
45 West 67th Street NY NY 10023