An addition with skyscraper credentials

Read the credits line again: Arne G. Engberg, architect; Walter P. Moore, structural engineer; Howard & Johnson, mechanical engineers; Fretz Construction, builder. Walter P. Moore founded his engineering firm in 1931 on the proceeds of selling his Stutz Bearcat; it had just engineered Rice Stadium and would later engineer the Astrodome. Fretz Construction had lately built Congregation Emanu El’s new synagogue. A 1955 Chronicle item introduced Engberg as a former draftsman for Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, the Empire State Building’s architects.

The story does not say who commissioned the addition or who owned the building. It names City National Life Insurance Company only as the tenant of the ground floor, with apartments above, and its headline still called the property what everyone knew it was: the Masonic Temple.

One familiar wrinkle: the article calls it a four-story building. The press never settled the question, printing two, three, four, and once six stories across five decades; the 1964 drawings show three, over a basement. The addition is likely the source of some of the storefronts on East 11th, though which shops on that frontage were in the addition, in the temple, or in the separate commercial building at 215 E. 11th, across the alley at the Cortlandt end of the block, is not settled.