Subscribe to download
Cable Building

Please leave a vote or comment if you download this asset! This is a lvl 3 High commercial 5x8 building based on the Cable building in New York in Soho.

About the model
A new model from my Soho, Noho and Nolita series. This model is one of my bigger projects. I wanted to create a very detailed model so this one has 15691 tris and a 4096x512 texture. Normal mapped, alpha, illuminationmap and specularmapped.
LoD is around 112 tris , 512x128.

You can always follow my assetcreations on the Simtropolis forums: http://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/68841-darfs-buildings-the-dorilton-new-victory-theater/ or on sketchfab: https://sketchfab.com/sannie01

RICO
This building is RICO enabled with 300 commercial jobs.

About the building
The Cable Building was built in 1892-1894. It is a steel and iron frame structure with brick, stone, and terra-cotta facing. It has a limestone base with a two-story arcade featuring show windows graced by iron spandrels and elegant keystones. It also has a prominent copper cornice with lions' faces, egg and dart moldings, and surmounting acanthus. It is believed to be the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White's first use of a complete steel frame in a commercial building.

In an article published on May 7, 1892 under the heading of "The Beginning of the Transformation of Broadway", the publication of record for New York real estate, the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, reported, "At the northwest corner of Houston Street the Broadway Cable Railroad Company (Broadway & Seventh Avenue Railroad Company) is constructing its big power station and business building from the plans of McKim, Mead & White. The contracts for this work above the foundations are still to be set.

The Cable Building was designed by Stanford White, a partner in McKim, Mead & White, the preeminent American architectural firm at the turn of the twentieth century. It is a nine-story Beaux-Arts structure, which impressively captures White's design principles of the "American Renaissance". This is the only McKim, Mead & White building in the NoHo Historic District. The building's detailing is similar to two of the firm's earlier designs: the 1887 Goelet Building, still standing at 900 Broadway, which Christopher Gray, writing in the New York Times called a "sleek, sophisticated amalgam of industrial-style brickwork"; and the long-gone 1890 Hotel Imperial, also built for the Goelet family, at Broadway and 32nd Street. Stanford White was the partner in charge for both of these projects for the family and was a close friend.

The Cable Building's dual use as both a major powerhouse and an approximately 140,000 square-foot modern office building appears unique in the McKim, Mead & White portfolio. The firm, however, designed two other significant power house structures, both in New York State: the Adams Power Plant Transformer House, part of the historic Edward Dean Adams Power Plant, the first large-scale, alternating current electric generating plant in the world, built in 1895 to tap the power of Niagara Falls; and the IRT Powerhouse, the power station of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, located further uptown in Hell's Kitchen. However, both of these structures were single use, and most of McKim, Mead & White's prolific output was for public buildings or grand houses. Besides the Goelet Building among its few other office buildings is the Gorham Building, an Italian Renaissance Revival palazzo-style building at 390 Fifth Avenue at 36th Street in Murray Hill, for which Stanford White as also the partner-in-charge; and the New York Life Building in Kansas City, Missouri, which was fully replicated in Omaha, Nebraska as the Omaha National Bank Building. The latter two buildings are believed to be the only example in the McKim, Mead & White portfolio where one set of plans spawned two identical buildings.

Of the twenty-nine American cities that built cable traction systems between 1870 and 1900 along with their accompanying cable powerhouses, this is the only powerhouse that was built by an architect of such stature, creating a building of enduring artistic refinement. A cable car powerhouse is usually a very utilitarian building, constructed for one clear purpose, as can be seen clearly in the LaSalle Street Cable Car Powerhouse in Chicago, or the Baltimore City Passenger Railway Power House and Car Barn. It was simply the mechanical back office of the cable railroad. In this instance, being situated on such a prominent street, Broadway, probably propelled the investors, with deep ties to New York business and real estate, to make a grand statement.

Changes
-