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3-image composite taken with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FS3.
The first Childs Restaurant was launched in 1889 by brothers Samuel S. Childs and William Childs on the ground floor of the Merchants Hotel (current site of One Liberty Plaza, also previously the Singer Building) at 41 Cortlandt Street (between Broadway and Church), in New York City's Financial District.
Childs Restaurants was one of the first national dining chains in the United States and Canada, having peaked in the 1920s and 1930s with about 125 locations in dozens of markets, serving over 50,000,000 meals a year, with over $37 million in assets at the time. Childs was a pioneer in a number of areas, including design, service, sanitation, and labor relations. It was a contemporary of food service companies such as Horn & Hardart, and a predecessor of companies such as McDonald's.
The following is an article about the restaurant in Coney Island that was published in the New York Times on 21 July, 2002:
Streetscapes/The Former Childs Restaurant in Coney Island; Colorful Terra Cotta and Stucco Homage to the Sea
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY
BUILT in 1924, the Childs Restaurant building at West 21st Street and the Boardwalk was one of the last gasps of elegance for Coney Island, and its fireproof construction saved part of the neighborhood in a massive 1932 blaze. Now a preservation group says it wants the Brooklyn building to be made a landmark, an idea the current owner, whose family has owned the structure for a half century, sees not as a benefit but a problem.
By the turn of the 20th century, Coney Island was attracting millions, and many of the amusement-park operators adopted fantastical architectural designs, like those at Luna Park and Dreamland Park, both once on Surf Avenue between West Eighth and West 11th Streets.
Most buildings at that time were put up along Surf Avenue, a block from the beach, but in the early 1920's the arrival of the subway and the construction of the Boardwalk encouraged development outside the center of the amusement area.
In 1924 Childs, the quick-lunch chain known for its simple meals, built an imposing steel-framed restaurant building. Childs was founded in 1889 on Cortlandt Street in Manhattan by the brothers Samuel and William Childs, who sought to serve the rushing ferry crowds in downtown New York. By the mid-1920's they were grossing $25 million a year from more than 100 branches, half of them in the New York area.
William oversaw the operational end and Samuel handled the real estate side. Presumably it was Samuel who oversaw the restaurant chain's trademark design in the 1910's -- storefront establishments that were white-tiled, efficient and clean, responsive to what The New York Times called the American ''lust for sanitation.''
For their Coney Island building, however, the brothers brought in an elite architectural firm, Ethan Allen Dennison and Fredric C. Hirons, who had both studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The architects embraced the Coney Island aesthetic with creative gusto. Against a soft gray stucco field they set a wild profusion of terra cotta ornament in varied colors, with a rooftop pergola apparently meant as a dining area.
From a distance, the Childs building offers a nice but fairly standard neo-Spanish colonial design with classical elements. But closer, it is clear that the detailing is all ''marine to the last degree -- and even submarine in part,'' the magazine of the Atlantic Terra Cotta company said in 1924; the company had executed the ornament for the building. Wherever there was an opportunity for a scroll or a bracket, the architects put in sea life: seaweed, fish, snails, sea horses, conchs, crabs, shells and scallops, in scarlet, gold, green, aqua, blue, white and other colors. This sense of absurd surprise makes the building pleasing beyond its architectural accomplishment.
In 1924 the critic F. S. Laurence, writing in American Architect, particularly admired the modeling of the marine life, ''so lifelike that they might easily have floated in with the tide from Barren Island.''
The Childs brothers' earlier buildings had been objects of derision by architectural writers, and the sudden burst of ambitious design was unusual. Just after the new Coney Island Childs, the restaurant hired William Van Alen to design an Art Deco jewel-box restaurant, much altered but still recognizable at 604 Fifth Avenue, near 48th Street. It is now a T.G.I. Friday's.
Samuel Childs died in early 1925. After his death, William Childs took over the company. A dedicated vegetarian and teetotaler, he gradually removed meat from the company's menus. Earnings dropped from $2 million to $1 million, the stock dropped from 74 in 1925 to about 52 in 1928, and he was ousted.
In July 1932 a fire that caused $5 million in damage swept the Coney Island oceanfront, leaving 1,000 people homeless and destroying bathhouses, rides and homes from West 24th Street down to Childs at West 21st Street. The restaurant was damaged, but it blocked the advance of the flames farther east.
In the 1930's, Robert Moses finished a series of parkways connecting Jones Beach to New York City. ''That's when Coney Island died, when everybody got cars,'' said Robert V. Ricci, who now owns the old Childs building.
The Childs chain sold the Coney Island branch in 1947, and Enrico Ricci, Robert V. Ricci's father, bought the structure in the 1950's. Since then the Ricci family has oper ated the Tell Chocolate Company from the building. It has kept up the stucco walls, removed graffiti, kept the building watertight and cared for the terra cotta. But with its windows sealed for factory use, the building has a forlorn air. Noticeable chunks of ornament have been removed, but large sections remain.
Mr. Ricci said that in the 1980's he had 150 people making candy but that now he has only one employee, and that revenues have gone from $2 million a year a decade ago to $200,000 in 2001. He has rented out most of the ground floor to a book distributor and is offering the dusky, cavernous main floor for rent. Leftover candy-making machinery lines the room, with a 24-foot-high ceiling, a terrazzo floor and terra cotta similar to that outside.
HE said that annual commercial rents are less than $5 a square foot in the neighborhood -- 21st Street is well away from the current amusement area, between West Eighth and West 16th Streets, not that that section is a high-rent district either. The old Childs is flanked by large weed-choked vacant lots and backs up onto a city social services office.
A year ago, after urging by the Friends of Terra Cotta, a preservation group, the Landmarks Preservation Commission listed the old Childs for a hearing, but the hearing has not yet taken place. Sherida Paulsen, the commission chairwoman, said she hoped to hold a hearing on the property in the next year. Susan Tunick, the founder of the terra-cotta organization, said that the Childs is ''culturally, historically and architecturally significant.''
''The Riccis have taken great care of it,'' she said, ''but every building that's not designated has a possibility of being damaged or lost.''
Mr. Ricci bristles at the idea that someone else would help him take care of the building his family has looked after for a half century. ''The Landmarks commission told me designation is not a big deal,'' he said. ''Hey, I have to keep a business together.'' He said that seeking commission approval if he wanted to make a change in the building would make things more difficult for him. ''I repaired stuff all over this building, not because anybody asked me, but because I like it,'' he said.
Beyond the ring of vacant lots around his building lie ramshackle houses and subsidized housing, although the new KeySpan Park for minor league baseball opened last year at West 18th and Surf Avenue.
Mr. Ricci said that some people have suggested that the building be turned into a restaurant or a night club using the architecture's fantasy theme but that he considers the idea ludicrous.
The stadium area, he said, still has empty storefronts. ''There's no carnival spirit here,'' he said. ''It's a ghetto. It's an inner city.''
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I've never eaten here.
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