If you’ve walked or driven along Broad Street near Military Park, you might have noticed the name GRIFFITH carved into the stone above the entrance of an empty tower at 605-607 Broad Street.
Now, the Griffith Building is coming alive again. After decades of vacancy and years of redevelopment plans, the nearly century-old tower is being restored and reopened as a mixed-use property with residential apartments and retail space. Its return gives Newark an opportunity to take a look at what the building was before it emptied of bodies and activity, and before it became a redevelopment project. It also gives us a reason to look at Newark during a period when Broad Street was not only the city’s commercial spine, but also part of its musical life.
The story begins with Parker O. Griffith.
Griffith founded the Griffith Piano Company in 1911, opening a storefront at 605 Broad Street. By about 1917, the business had expanded into the neighboring property. As the company grew, those original buildings were eventually demolished to make way for something far more ambitious: a headquarters designed by Newark architect George Elwood Jones. Construction began in 1927. The new Griffith Building opened for business on June 1, 1928.
It arrived at a particular moment in Newark’s growth. Downtown was changing quickly. Department stores, office towers, hotels and theaters were transforming the city’s skyline and the way people experienced its center. Hahne & Company stood next door. Bamberger’s enormous new department store was rising farther down the commercial district.
In the early decades of the 20th century, Broad Street was becoming a destination in its own right. The Griffith Building reflected that confidence. It was not designed simply as an office tower with a piano store downstairs. The building included piano salons, display spaces, offices and an intimate recital hall. Music was worked into the life of the building itself. When the property was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, its significance was recognized across architecture, commerce and music.
And Griffith was not alone.
Historical documentation for the Military Park Commons Historic District describes the piano showroom as a recognizable Newark commercial building type and identifies Griffith as the best known among a group of piano enterprises operating along Broad Street. The Lauter Piano Company was nearby at 591 Broad Street. The concentration offers a glimpse into a downtown where buying a piano, attending a recital, shopping at a department store and going to the theater could all happen within a relatively small stretch of the city.
But the Griffith story became larger than the business of selling instruments. Parker Griffith and his brother Paul built the company, but Lena Donaldson Griffith, Parker’s wife, helped turn the Griffith name into a cultural institution.
In 1936, Lena Griffith formed the Essex County Symphony Society. Two years later, she established the Griffith Foundation, an organization devoted to expanding the understanding and appreciation of music throughout Essex County. The Foundation and its Griffith Music Institute operated from the Broad Street building, using its salons and recital hall for classes, performances and educational programs.
That work also reached well beyond the building. The Griffith Foundation helped underwrite major performances in Newark, many of them at what was then the Mosque Theatre, now Newark Symphony Hall.
Historical records name orchestras from New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Cleveland among the ensembles brought to the city through the Foundation, along with the NBC Symphony under Arturo Toscanini, pianist Ignace Paderewski, Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and the Agnes de Mille Dance Theatre.
The Griffith Foundation also worked to make music part of civic and educational life. It sponsored chamber music inside the Griffith Building, outdoor concerts at Newark City Stadium for nominal admission, programs for music teachers and master classes with working musicians and composers.
During the 1940s and 1950s, figures including composer Aaron Copland and singer Beverly Sills participated in programs at the building. The Institute also organized annual auditions for young New Jersey musicians. Winners were invited back the following year to perform individual recitals in the Griffith Recital Hall. Young people’s orchestral concerts were held on Saturday mornings at the Mosque Theatre.
The building was commercially successful because people bought instruments there. But the people behind Griffith also understood that a music business could participate in something larger: selling instruments, presenting artists, teaching educators, creating opportunities for young musicians and giving audiences access to performances within their own city.
That history teases out some of the shorthand people tend to use when remembering Newark. There is a temptation to remember the city through a handful of familiar eras: its industrial strength, the rebellion of the late 1960s, and the redevelopment now reshaping downtown. Buildings like Griffith offer another lens.
They reveal a Newark that was also building cultural institutions, producing audiences and creating spaces where commerce, education and art overlapped. They remind us that the buildings lining Broad Street were not simply structures occupying valuable downtown real estate. People gathered inside them. Ideas moved through them. Businesses, organizations and cultural institutions helped shape the life happening around them.
The Griffith is now being returned to active use as residences and commercial space.The purpose is different. No one is trying to recreate a 1928 piano salon or turn the building into a monument to another era. Cities change, and buildings have to change with them. Nearly one hundred years after the Griffith Building opened, people are once again entering its doors as part of their daily lives.
Some are building and constructing. Some will live there. Others will eventually shop, dine or do business there. Many may never know that the same address once contained piano salons and a recital hall, or that people working from offices inside the building helped connect Newark audiences, teachers and young musicians with some of the most accomplished artists of their time.
The sounds coming from inside 605 Broad Street are different now. The recital hall no longer defines its purpose. The people passing through its doors are arriving for different reasons. But carved above the entrance is still a name from an earlier Newark—a reminder that before this was an apartment building, it was a place where the city gathered and many from across the country converged around music.
