1904: The new Broadway IRT Subway line: " Just half an hour from City Hall to Audubon Park," would change everything!
Circa 1900: Audubon Park from Boulevard Lafayette.
Image courtesy of Mr. Mathew Spady. For additional insights into Audubon Park's remarkable history, please consult: http://www.audubonparkny.com/
Brand new row houses designed by Washington Height's resident Henri Foucheaux. George Blake Grinnell's substantial house, the Hemlocks is is the distance.
1905: The Church of the Intercession amidst bucolic, still suburban, Audubon Park; by 1911 apartment buildings stretched up both Broadway, Riverside Drive and the streets in between.
Image courtesy of Mr. Mathew Spady, the scholarly Webmaster for AudubonParkNY.com. Having researched the community for neary a dozen years, Mr. Spady is hard at work on an eagerly anticipated book offering wonderful insights into Audubon Park's remarkable history. To learn more please consult: http://www.audubonparkny.com/
1911: The Broadway IRT stop at 157th Street.
Around 1840, the naturalist John James Audubon, born in 1785, who died in 1851, built Minnie's Land, his estate near the current location of The Riviera Apartments, north of 155th and today’s Riverside Drive. Gradually filling with clapboard villas, becoming known as Audubon Park, this remote local was where Mrs. Clarence Day chose to have her reluctant husband baptized, in secret, as “no one knows us way up there…” Half a century later, row house construction had arrived. After a far shorter span apartment houses housing thousands where but a few hundred had lived before came onto the scene. What fueled their development most was improved transport. By 1904, both the Broadway Inter-borough Rapid Transit Subway Line and the protracted extension of Riverside Drive, would spur more development over the next 10 years than had occurred over the past century.
1912: Olmsted Brothers and architect Arnold Bruner devise an unrealized plan for Riverside Drive.
So, alert to the future, around 1913, the Parks Department unsuccessfully sought to acquire the old house John James Audubon built. They had hopes of to relocating it to Fort Washington Park. Alas, it was sold in 1931 to an apartment developer. Local historian Reginald Pelham Bolton tried to mobilize for its resurrection. Undertaking to raise $25,000, to lift the house intact up to Riverside Drive and move it onto city parkland he could not have chosen a worse time with a financial climate a more dire to grass-roots historic preservation. The developer, the Brandt Construction Company, was at first cooperative, but then demanded a $50,000 guarantee in case of delay.
With this last abortive 11th hour rescue attempt, the old Audubon house was torn down. Even though substantial portions of the original fabric were valiantly moved to a nearby city lot, funds for reconstruction failing to materialize as the Great Depression worsened, efforts to save the great naturalist's last home were quietly abandoned, and soon enough, even the whereabouts of its remains were forgotten as well.
George Bird Grinnell.
1889: Double house on West 156th Street by William M. Grinnell.
1910: Trinity Studios, Broadway at 153rd Street, was designed by Emory Roth.
Overlooking historic Trinity Cemetery, at 3681 Broadway Emory Roth's Halidon Court is among the finest buildings of its type in the nation!
Diagonaly across Broadway from the Trinity Studios, on the southwest corner West 153rd Street sits Emory Roth's equally evolcative Halidon Court. This Full-blown rendition of Viennese secessionist design has the distinction of having been the home of future writer Jerome David Salinger for the first nine years of his life.
In order to reduce costs, Roth utilized cheap colored concrete in adition to extravagant carved stone ornament.
Even the stock cast iron railing and tiled floor were combined in a distinctive way.
William A. Wheelock's 1860's Italianate villa amidst the considerable chaos caused by the Riverside Drive extension's construction.
The Riverside Drive extension and viaduct under concurrent construction. The former was built of reinforced concrete, faced in Manhattan mica-schist excavated from the site, the latter has a steel skeleton.
The beloved villas of yesteryear, wall off from the world...
Erected between 1926 and 1928, the Riverside Drive Viaduct bridging 155th and 161st Streets, was an enclosed structure of granite, glass and concrete, with 77,000 square feet of interior space available for city use.
1929: The completed roadway, sheltering warehouses, with the distant George Washington Bridge well underway.
1908: Riverside Oval .
1911: Riverside Oval completed.
John Audubon's debased house.
The Grinnell was named for local old-timers, the family of investor George Blake Grinnell, which had live at Audubon Park since 1852. Completed in 1911, the building at 800 Riverside Drive, 20 Edward Morgan Place and 605 West 157th,cost $600,000. Altogether it boasted 83 apartment suites, three of which were duplexes. Designed by prolific Schwartz & Gross for the Centre Realty Corporation, the ‘flat-iron’-like Neo-Renaissance structure was one of several apartments from the early 20th-Century molded on the famous Florentine Medici Villa.
Aesthetically, Certainly, it must be it’s unusual triangular shape that lends the Grinnell its greatest distinction. Indeed, given the unusual layout, what seems rather remarkable, is the conventional plan the designers devised. Like several other Renaissance style apartment houses of the time, occupying half a block or so, despite not being remotely square or rectangular, it features a large central courtyard. As at Clinton & Russell’s Graham Court of 10 years earlier, grand gated, arched entries led to the court, with three elevator halls tucked into each corner.
Without being as conspicuous as their home’s architecture, the Grinnell’s tenants, lawyers, doctors, bankers, minor executives, professors and the like, were equally representative.
An exception might Mrs. Henry L. Gillespie, better known in her day as operetta diva Christie McDonald. She was married first to William W. Jefferson, son of the famous actor Joseph Jefferson, in 1901. Not too many years later this union ended in divorce, which among actors and actresses, and in high society, was becoming far more common. In 1903, What happened next still uncommon however. Miss MacDonald conceived a child with the prominent theatrical promoter and New York State Senator, Timothy Sullivan. As evidence that “illegitimacy” was still deemed to be highly irregular, her new-born child was soon placed in the New York Foundling Hospital.
By 1911 Miss MacDonald had married Henry L. Gillespie, the scion of a successful Pittsburgh contracting dynasty. And on November 11, 1914, congratulations were in order when the Gillespie’s daughter Christie was born, as was frequently the custom then, at home.
Celebrated almost as much for a becomingly petite figure, and masses of dark golden hair, as for her lovely lyricism, Miss McDonald appeared in several Broadway hit musicals, including the premiere of Victor Herbert’s Sweethearts, in which she played the princess.
In addition to being the first African American woman to Receive an Obie Award actress, playwright, and author Alice Childress, was also among the first of her race to reside at the gracious Grinnell. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, her parents separated when she was nine. This was how Childress came to move to Harlemwhere she lived with her grandmother on 118th Street, between Lenox and Fifth Avenues. Bereft herself of formal schooling, Childress’ grandmother encouraged her to cultivate a talent for writing. Attending Wadleigh High School for Girls, her grandmother’s death meant Alice Childress had had to abandon her studies to work as a maid.
Determined, she more than made up for this painful interruption. By 1965 Childress was featured in the BBC presentation “The Negro in the American Theatre”. She was scholar-in-residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study from 1966 to 1968. Alice Childress best remembered literary works are A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich, from 1973, her 1979 novel A Short Walk, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and Those Other People which appeared in 1989.
Without doubt the most colorful episode of the staid Grinnell’s saga, was it’s acquisition and ownership by "celebrity preacher", Daddy Grace. Born Marcelino Manuel da Graça on January 25, 1881 or 1884, he became much better known, first as, Charles Manuel, then as, "Sweet Daddy" Grace, or, unadorned, as ‘Daddy Grace’. Cars, houses, clothes, bling, trophy girlfriends and trophy real estate all seemed to fascinate him equally. Fortuitously, during an epoch of hard times, ‘Bishop’ Grace, proclaiming himself ‘God incarnate,’ similarly fascinated the oppressed, mostly hard-working, but poor people, who were mostly black. Certainly, sporting shoulder-length tresses, wearing boldly-colored suits with contrasting piping and bright buttons, 5 foot 8 inches tall, his skin the hue of burnished bronze; indulging every poor person’s fantasy, of living large, Bishop Grace certainly seemed to fit his role.
Purchases of trophy properties like the Grinnell, or Emory Roth’s Eldorado on Central Park West were not limited to the city. Prime holdings located coast-to-coast made up Grace’s portfolio and were part of a multi-million dollar estate left when he died in 1960.
The 1911 Riviera Apartments cost $1,700,000 and were designed by architects Rouse & Goldstone, With 12 stories. Designed as a Beaux-Arts Classical interpretation of a neo-Renaissance palazzo, it had 150 units, with 4-10 rooms, totaling 1,500 rooms. Located at 790 Riverside Drive it was then Manhattan’s third largest apartment building.
1912: The Riviera lobby featured marble floors, Oriental carpets, palms, cushioned seats and velvet curtains.
Roman Centurions and emblazoned escutcheons decorate the simple leaded windows.
Notable Riviera residents have included Random House founder Donald Klopfer, Random House publisher and humorist Bennett Cerf, who lived here as a boy, as did economic journalist Merryle Ruckeyser, freedom fighter Stokely Carmichael, R & B singer Wolf Johnson, Avon Long, Broadway actor and singer, esteemed British poet James Fenton and his partner, respected novelist Darryl Pinkney, Law and Orderactress S. Epatha Merkerson and celebrated Russian pianist, Konstantin Soukhovetski!
Most of these residents knew a changed place, sans a house telephone, live-in servants, velvet curtains, deep carpets, potted palms and two mail deliveries daily, to one’s door. By 1938 the ravages of the Great Depression and reduced investment income, converged. So it was that the subdivision of suites in two wings of The Riviera produced 52 new units, for a total of 202 apartments in the building.
1912: Numerous attendants in livery augmented the Riviera's lavish lobby appointments.
Crusading freedom fighter Stokely Carmichael.
Before the fountain.
Number 788 Riverside Drive, built as the Rhinecliff was designed by architects Simon I. Schwartz and Arthur Gross and opened in 1911.
At 11 stories, the Rhinecliff is one of the tallest buildings in Audubon Park and cost an estimated $400,000.
George and Edward Blum designed the Vauxhall with a decided Arts and Crafts sensibility, ever disciplined by a rational plan for an irregular site, and the suave articulation of their original, yet ultimately Classical vocabulary, consisting of conventionalized plat forms. Completed in 1914, the building that employs a prominent canted, multi-storey bay window to camouflage its odd shape, was the last of the subway boom apartment buildings built in Audubon Park. Like the others, it sat on the eastern side of the curving Drive where its occupants commanded magnificent views far out over the Hudson and beyond– at least that is, until 1932. That was the date the obstructing presence of 765 Riverside Drive appeared.
Originally, a rental building that advertisements in the New York Timespromised held ample rooms, southern exposures, large closets, spacious foyers and vestibules, as well as amenities such as dumbwaiters and twenty-four hour phone service, what the copywriters neglected, was the Blum brother’s flair for arresting decoration.
The Vauxhall, 780 Riverside Drive, 1914, Blum & Blum.
Originally, a rental building that advertisements in the New York Timespromised held ample rooms, southern exposures, large closets, spacious foyers and vestibules, as well as amenities such as dumbwaiters and twenty-four hour phone service, what the copywriters neglected, was the Blum brother’s flair for arresting decoration.
If the telephone room, is now empty, its antiquated equipment, a mere outmoded curiosity, just beyond the lobby, the metal grill ventilating the room, composed of stylized pomegranate boughs, survives to delight as much today as in days past. As for the impossibly ornate molded-plaster ceiling, so deftly juxtaposed with smooth, unadorned expanses of wall, no one matches the Blum’s dexterous ability to create a pleasing tension of contrasts. Finally, there is the fireplace mantel, made from ordinary tapestry brick, with a rich layer of mortar, thickly lain between each course, like the building’s façade, it’s liberally studded with jewel-like tiles from the Encaustic Tile Co. of Zanesville, Ohio. With such economy, both of means and of expression, did George and Edward Blum make building into architecture. It was as neat a trick as their resourceful planning that made use of every scrap of space as well a giving rooms dignity.
No wonder as early as 1920, forty of the tenants bought the building and operated it as a co-operative apartment house. Eventually, with the Depression’s upheaval, it reverted to a rental building.
Gracefully punctuating the hill-top, south-west corner of Riverside Drive at 158th Street, the attached houses at 809 and 811 Riverside Drive are by far the most elegant dwellings to survive in all of Audubon Park. Set under a single sweeping hipped roof clad in green Mediterranean-inspired tiles supplied by the Ludowici-Celadon Tile Co. of New Lexington, Ohio, each, though designed to accommodate one family, was meant project externally, the image of a single handsome villa at the shore. Elegant, they were also commodious houses, even with but three-rooms-per-floor at number 809. Next door, 811 has four rooms on the first story.
Built as a highly urbane ensemble, both the apartment house at number 807, and the houses at 809 and 811 Riverside Drive were constructed by Nathan Berler. “My family lived in Harlem. My father built a two-family house on Riverside Drive.” This was the intelligence I gained one afternoon at the Museum of the City of New York from a dear old lady of almost 90. ‘What did your father do?’ I’d asked with rapt attention. I learned that Mr. Berler, an immigrant from Austria, was a wholesale clothing manufacturer for the firm of Baren, Lehman & Berler, in addition to being a real estate developer in a modest way. Built in 1920, designed by architects Fred W. Moore and Frank L. Landsiedel, who were ordinarily sought out as apartment house specialist, Berler’s houses were a wager on his hunch, that there was a ready market for imposing two-family houses with river views. Intending for the distinctive pair of houses to serve as a showcase for this development strategy as late as 1930 he lived in 809 with his wife Sadie, their children, and a man-servant.
That his partner, Charles S. Levy, a lawyer, is listed as the owner on the original building application, afterward living at 811 with his wife Bertha and their children, is telling. Just four years after the partners moved into their $50,000 investments, evidently having reconsidered their original strategy, as the Enesbe Realty Corporation, they constructed the six-story apartment building at 807 Riverside Drive. With a projected cost of $160,000, 807 Riverside Drive was one of the less expensive apartment houses built in district. Enjoying a frontage on both Riverside Drive and West 158th Street and entered via a landscaped garden-court, upon completion it provided heat and hot water for the smaller, earlier buildings abutting to the north. Intriguingly, although it features the same a red-brick facade, spare Mediterranean-derived terra-cotta ornament and green roof tiles as its neighbors, the architect is different, yet another apartment specialist, George Pelham.
Hung with antique gold and polychromed, velvet, lighted by crystal chandeliers, a private ballroom, “suitable for all social functions…” accessed by an outside entrance at West 158th Street, helped to set 807 Riverside Drive apart from other apartment buildings. The lobby fireplace and arcade also lent the building quiet dignity. Otherwise number 807’s suites of two to six rooms, for a total of 52 units, by the standards of the time, were modest indeed.
In 1942, 811 Riverside Drive was purchased by Dr. Luigi Capobianco, who began renting rooms in the house. By the mid-1950s, number 811 had been officially converted into a multifamily dwelling. Now, one family occupied each of its three floors. However, the Berler house at 809 Riverside Drive remained a single-family residence.
The great-granddaughter of a freed slave, her grandfather a pharmacist, her father a physician, her mother a physical education teacher, it’s no surprise that Jewel Plummer became a research scientist. Born in Chicago in 1924 Cobb had concentrated on biology in high school. Educated at the University of Michigan, according to an article in the Chicago Defender, her chance to become one of the country’s foremost biologists as an African-American pioneer was nearly thwarted. Initially, she'd been denied the NYU fellowship she'd just won, on account of her race. Cobb’s groundbreaking research with cancer cells, leading to strides in the field of chemotherapy, were only possible because she'd refused to give in. Gaining an appointment with the department head who had rejected her, she’d talked until she finally won him over. Hence in 1947, “Miss Jewel Plummer” was residing at number 809 Riverside Drive, Audubon Park’s most picturesque dwelling, while working as a teaching fellow in biology at New York University.
Graves & Duboy's Hotel Ansonia completed on Broadway in 1904 was one of the buildings that inspired the Sutherland.
The Sutherland at 611 West 158th Street, designed by Emery Roth, was finished in 1910.
Contributing to the elegance of the Sutherland, which only cost $200,000., was the astute sensibility of its owner,Floyd de L. Brown. Mr.Brown was by trade both an architect and a partner in the firm of contractors Brown Brothers Inc. After graduating from the School of Architecture at Columbia in 1907, he attended L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The Sutherland was the first structure erected by Brown upon his return to New York. Although he went on to organize the Bethlehem Engineering Corporation, which focused solely on commercial construction, and which was responsible for building landmarks like the National Broadcasting Company’s building and the Embassy Theater, clearly the Sutherland exhibits an appreciation for the gracious charm of the Parisian apartment houses of his school days..
A banded column.
Book-matched marble panels in the Sutherland foyer.
A pair of wall-fountains have lost their masks.
A mirrored 'opening' balances an opposing window.
The marble mosaic floor has a dark double border.
A cast plaster festoon of bay leaves.
Columns and pilasters flank the simple leaded sash windows.
The Armidale, at 870 Riverside Drive, the old Boulevard Laffayette, has an entrance loggia and bowed facade based on Rome's Palazzo Massimi. It was designed by Young & Wagner and completed in 1915.
Ionic columns ans a carpet-like tile floor grace the entrance into the Armidale.
The Armidale lobby takes the form of a domed rotunda.
The Loyal Apartments at 884 Riverside Drive, mimicking Venice's Doge's Palace, was designed by Harold L. Young. Supplied by the New York Terra-Cotta Company, the building's ornamentation included a cresting of crocketed pinnacles, which unfortunately fell prey to renovation around 1979.
The Loyal Apartments .
The Deluxe at 910 Riverside Drive was finished in 1915. Built of red tapestry brick, this building, based on Henry VIII Hampton Court Palace, was identical to its neighbor to the southeast by Young & Wagner, except for a curving conture and gray bricks.
Number 765 Riverside Drive, completed in 1932 was built barely a year after the Audubon house was razed. An apartment specialist architect Albert E. Schaeffer worked in association with Harry B. Rutkins, as this job required expert engineering skills. Crenellated and buttressed to sujests some Lombard castle, The structure was gracefully curved to the very edge of the lot line in order to maximize rentable floor area. Beling any romance of the Middle Ages, of vast expense, but completely unseen are an array of steel structural piles. In November 1932, the New York Times reported that the foundation at number 765 alone contained over 1,600 tons of steel, which runs forty-five feet below the curb, and then another forty feet down to bedrock. In yet another concession to the modern era, space below grade, once Audubon's lawn, was used to form a series of much welcomed garages.
Fitted out with marble wainscoting, a terrazzo floor and leaded casement windows, the lobbies of 765 Riverside Drive contradicted the late completion date of 1932.
Recalling a hall in a Tudor era manor house, the lobby came with an elaborate mantelpiece, replete with decorative electric logs in the grate.
Pastiche Linen-fold paneling.
Convincingly like time-mellowed old oak, the beams, paneling and ornate doors are all made of "Oakast", a mass-produced composition product, made by Fischer & Jirouch Company, who are still active in Cleveland, Ohio.
This is an interesting history of New York apartments. I hope I can see a similar post that would feature apartments for rent in Parkland WA.
Posted by: Henry Drake | 04/07/2013 at 11:06 PM
This is a perfect post to spend my morning coffee with.
Posted by: Connie Lee | 04/08/2013 at 08:34 AM