The 1% in My World

For the purposes of this post "My World" extends only one single block from my New York apartment on East 63rd off Madison. It is an artificial world, I'll admit, heavily colonized by the so-called 1%. When I was born at the end of 1945, great private fortunes in America were on the wane. The city palaces and country estates of the robber barons were falling one by one, and they continued to fall for another forty years. I loved those houses and grieved over their destruction. Now the tide has turned the other way and the world around me is re-gilding itself, house-wise anyway. But I'm a grownup and I can see how ordinary people are struggling harder and harder to survive, while the 1% get richer and richer. How tedious it is to hear Republican candidates repeatedly proclaim, with straight faces, that the only way to fix things is to keep lowering taxes on rich people. Of course, if the country changed from the direction it's traveling in now, people would stop fixing up old houses. So... a moral dilemma, for me anyway. The house above is across the street from my apartment. It's been an empty wreck for years, but an attractive young fellow has just bought it and plans to renovate and live in the whole thing himself. OK, I admit that I'd like to do that myself. (I probably wouldn't mind living there with him). This is what's happening on my block, while a very great number of my countrymen couldn't sleep last night for fear of becoming homeless altogether.





Clearly this front door needs work. Given the elevated level of taste in today's city renovations, I'm sure next year it will look quite elegant.





The house next door, as you can see, is in the midst of a gut renovation. If you can believe it, this place was ALREADY gut renovated only two years ago. As soon as it was finished, the owner put it on the market, which was when I saw it on a brokers' tour. It was a beautiful place - a bit contemporary for my taste, but certainly luxurious and finished in a first class manner. Whoever bought it tore everything out, right down to exposed floor joists, and is essentially rebuilding from scratch. I guess I rejoice for him, since I've already admitted that I'd love to renovate a brownstone myself. But buy one that's done, rip it all out, and start all over again? I read in the papers today that Tiger Wood's divorced wife demolished a $12 million house she only just bought too.





This front door, under the protective plywood, was made quite elegant in the last renovation so I don't envision many changes there. Interestingly, during that recent renovation the brownstone facade on this house was stripped off and replaced with a replica of itself in marble.





This building originally housed the Hangar Club, designed in 1929 by Cross and Cross for a private organization of early aviation aficionados. It's now the elegant private residence of our block's billionaire.





I forgot whose house this used to be, but New York University owned it for years before selling it to a Russian oligarch. Not much has been happening since the sale, save for a slightly slap dash coat of paint on the iron fence and removal of the institutional sign over the front door.





I'm hoping the damaged frieze over the door will be repaired. We brokers have the impression that Russian oligarchs can afford to fix anything.





I have no idea who owns this magnificent townhouse and have never even seen a light on inside. I envision its owners gliding around the world from one splendid house to another, unconcerned about having money to pay the bills.





Quite aside from the issue of economic injustice in the world, this front door is a thing of beauty.









I'm not zeroing in on exceptions here. The houses above are all private, all magnificent, and chosen at random from a dozen candidates - OK, more than a dozen, and all within a block of my apartment.





This facade is not perhaps as successful as some of those above, but the interior is gorgeous. I remember it from when the house used to be the office of The New York Observer. It's again a private residence.





This one was just renovated too, after many years of absentee ownership. Conventional wisdom has it that modern zillionaires find avenue corners too exposed, although someone evidently disagrees.





Returning now to earth, here's my apartment house on East 63rd, and that's my terrace on top at left. You probably wouldn't recognize it immediately, but my building was once two skinny brownstones wedged between the white house on the left (another private single family, natch) and the two stoop-less brownstones on the right. A developer after the Second World War bought my site, demolished the brownstone facades, and replaced them with this vaguely Art Moderne design. From the back yard, my building still looks like two old houses.




Here I am, home again on my terrace. See that brownstone with the high stoop across the street? My building used to look like two of those.

Three More Houses

I'm done writing "Old House" articles for the Millbrook Independent, and what a shame something that used to be so much fun has come to an end. However, that is not the total of my life. My daughter is having a baby girl, which is sufficiently joyful to offset most everything else. Also pleasurable is a new assignment - for pay, no less - to write a monograph on a neighbor's house. This has turned out to be as much fun as my old Independent articles, but it's taking a huge amount of time. My blog is suffering from inattention, and I love my blog.

For this week's post I revisited the same file I raided last week in order to extract another trio of old friends. The house above was occupied by a fancy customer I had many years ago, who wanted to rent a Manhattan pied a terre. He wasted no time in telling me about the swell house he was selling near Bernardsville, NJ. The broker representing him wasted no time sending me a courtly letter and photos. That broker also offered to give me a tour, but as I had no customer I didn't feel it was right to inconvenience a colleague, or to get his hopes up for nothing.




Here's the other side of the house, with the obligatory vintage Packard or Stutz (or whatever it is) parked out front to conjure images of Gatsby in the buyer's mind. I wish I knew where this house was located, aside from being "somewhere near Bernardsville." I wish I knew who designed too, as it is such a knockout. The broker was calling it Villa d'Andre, but I can't vouch for the historical accuracy of that name.








How about these interiors? I love Daheim, but this is really my kind of house.




This is George Gould's Lakewood, NJ estate, Georgian Court. It's a college now, and the house has survived in good condition. Gould was the son of railroad manipulator, Jay Gould, and the husband of actress Helen Kingdon. He was an elegant chap with a huge amount of money, both of which factors managed to counter-balance the effects of national hatred directed at his father and snooty attitude directed at actresses by society people of the time. Socially, the Goulds were, as the saying goes, "on the green but not dead to the hole." Georgian Court was designed by Bruce Price, famous for among other things, the original club, gate complex, village and cottages in Tuxedo Park. Most of Georgian Court is comprised of elaborate gardens and a sporting complex that still contains one of the handful of Court Tennis courts in the United States. The estate grounds are so elaborate that the house seems almost an afterthought. I like its heft and especially its ornate double height main hall. I also like the look of it covered with ivy, no longer there these days. Georgian Court was by far the grandest estate in Lakewood, whose fashion as a resort was as fleeting as it was unexpected. The area today is mostly characterized by undistinguished suburban development.




Here's the interior of the double height hall. It's a wonderful house, both grander and heavier than Bernardsville above.






Although no longer very well maintained, these sorts of gardens are all over the place at Georgian Court.




Here's a house that really came and went in a flash. It was called Brookholt, built by the famous society figure and female suffragist Alva Belmont (the former Mrs. William Kissam Vanderbilt), and located just southwest of today's intersection of Merrick Avenue and Front Street in Uniondale (or West Hempstead), Long Island. This was once an area of tender rural beauty, not one trace of which remains today. Alva had Hunt and Hunt, successor sons of Richard Morris Hunt, design the house just before the First World War. For a short period, she operated the estate as a training school for female farmers, but soon tired of the project. After the war she moved to France to be near her daughter, Consuelo Balsain (the former Duchess of Marlborough) and devote her architectural energies to renovating a chateau that had belonged, appropriately, to Joan of Arc's sponsor.




This is a blurry newspaper photo of the other side of Brookholt, taken from a 1934 article about the fire that destroyed it. Alva sold it in the 1920s to investors who planned to open a country club. The plan never came to pass and the house was rented to people who, as it turned out, converted it into a gigantic Prohibition-era still. The newspaper description of the federal raid is full of juicy details about Mrs. Belmont's satin bedroom full of barrels and her ballroom dominated by distillery tanks. Apparently the floors became so impregnated with alcohol that one day the old place - not so old, really - practically exploded in flames. It looks like it was a maintenance monster, what with all those columns and curly capitals, but quite beautiful still and all.




This 1914 map locates the sites of Brookholt's main house and stables on either side of Front Street - the house is to the south, the stables to the north. The distinguished neighbor immediately to the east was Arthur Brisbane, editor of William Randolph Hearst's "Evening Journal."




Here's google maps screenshot of the same location today. Goodbye Arthur Brisbane; hello Waldbaum's.

Three Random Houses

I have a friend who, a few years back, was sufficiently exercised at the world to start a website he called rant.com. He then proceeded to get everything that bugged him out of his system online, after which a period of intellectual languishing ensued. Now rant is again going strong. Recently I have discovered myself ranting a bit on Big Old Houses. I guess in the context of the Universe, it doesn't matter that much if people muck up the top floors of old houses, or paint the stonework, or make any of the myriad architectural blunders on which I've fixated of late. I keep a file on the third floor of Daheim that's packed with miscellaneous print material picked up over the years, that pertains to big old houses that have caught my imagination. I dredged through it between Xmas doings this weekend - P.S. Xmas day was my 66th birthday - and came upon some old friends.

The very grand house in the aerial photo above is called Salutations, located on its own 60-or-so acre island, connected by causeway to woodsy suburbs north of the small Long Island city of Glen Cove, NY.




I wouldn't call this my absolute favorite style of house, but it's certainly grand. And we like grand. The architect was Roger H. Bullard, about whom I know very little. The client was Junius Spencer Morgan III, son of J.P.Morgan Jr, who in turn was the son of the great financier J.P.Morgan. In 1928, Morgan III built the house on an island adjacent to his father's sort-of island. The latter was a picturesque bulge of land that is almost, but not quite, surrounded by water. The paternal island is now coated with suburban houses which, however nice, will never be nice enough to excuse the destruction of the magnificent Georgian mansion and grounds they replace. But...I'm ranting.




Morgan III, who was, among other things, a director of Morgan Guaranty Trust Co., died in 1960. His widow survived him by many years, although seemingly not all of them were spent in this house. In the late 1970s, a glamorous Texan named John S. Samuels burst onto the New York social scene with pockets full of cash and an elevated sense of cultural mission. Within a very few years, by dint of strategic donations, he had become chairman of the City Center, the City Opera, the City Ballet and the Vivien Beaumont Theatre. Samuels was the eminence grise behind something called the "Artistic Directorate" that aspired to multiple productions in the performing arts. It included luminaries like Woody Allen an Edward Albee. Unfortunately, by the early 1980s Samuels' businesses had crashed and he was ducking the law. For a short while, he occupied Salutations, but it's not clear that he ever owned it. When Mrs. Morgan died in 1993, it was her estate that sold the property to the present owner. It's private and intact today.




Here's Crossroads, the Old Westbury, Long Island estate of William Russell Grace Jr., a director of W.R. Grace & Co, Vice President of Ingersoll-Rand, grandson of a two-time New York City mayor of the same name, and all around glamorous, polo-playing, Long Island socialite.




The house was designed by James O'Connor and built in 1919 in the midst of what was then Long Island fox hunting country. It is a perfectly enormous place, notable for its immense indoor tennis court and a similarly gigantic ballroom which, aesthetically anyway, owes more to an English pub than a czarist palace.




Here's the tennis court, which I believe is still intact. Whether it's used or not, I cannot say.






When I went through this house, now many years ago, it had been unoccupied for years and didn't look at all as appealing as these photos. In the 1930s and '40s the Long Island squireocracy managed to thwart William Moses' plan to run the Northern State Parkway through the middle of their estates. However, they were either less focused, less powerful, or their number had simply diminished by the time Moses planned the Long Island Expressway. Today all eight lanes of it run along the southern border of the former Grace estate. When you're on the property, you can't see the highway, but you sure can hear it. The last time I drove by the gate, the shrubs and lawn around it were looking a little shaggy. The property was intact as recently as the late 1960s - complete with quarter mile race track. The house today stands on 8 acres.




Years ago I had a real estate client who worked for an outfit whose business was, among other things, auctioning houses. In the depths of today's foreclosure crisis, we hear about house auctions all the time. Twenty years ago, I'd never heard of such a thing. There was to be a final auction of an apparently unsaleable estate - at least, all other efforts had failed - located in the hinterlands of upstate Delaware County, NY, near the town of Delhi, and my client invited me. I'd never been to Delaware County, which turned out to be a world of big open spaces, muscular rolling hills, and no zoning.

The estate was called Aknusti which, according to one amusing although probably unreliable account, means "expensive proposition" in some Indian language. It was designed in 1912 (a vintage year for big old houses) by Walker & Gillette (a top drawer firm) for Robert Livingston Gerry, son of Elbridge T. Gerry. That name, incidentally, is pronounced with a hard "G" and sounds like "GARY." I recognized the name immediately since Gerry "pere" was not only a Gilded Age commodore of the New York Yacht Club but also owner of a famous Manhattan mansion that stood on the site of today's Pierre Hotel. A distinguished ancestor, also named Elbridge T. Gerry, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and fifth Vice President of the United States. Commodore Gerry's son Robert's Aknusti stable sent thoroughbreds to Saratoga, Belmont and even the Kentucky Derby. Robert's brother-in-law was New York Governor Averell Harriman.

Whew.



In 1953, Aknusti was gutted by fire. The exterior reconstruction was disappointing to say the least. Yes, the columned porch in the image above occupies the same position as the porch in the vintage image above it. Aknusti's reconstructed interior was equally disappointing, as well as being just plain weird. The house I saw on the day of the auction contained a collection of banal rooms with not much more style than a suburban subdivision house. Those interiors, however, occupied only half of the original main block. The other half was a yawning shell, still scorched, completely demolished but totally unfinished, rising to a height of two and a half floors and lit by staring windows.




There was a tent on the lawn on auction day, trays of champagne, and an atmosphere of anticipation, However, no bidder topped the reserve and Aknusti didn't sell. Eventually an investor group bought it and announced plans to transform it into an elite resort called Broadlands. As far as I know that never happened. I'm not sure what's going on there now.

Transformation

Here's a type of old house that happily has not vanished from our world. Variations abound in Harlem, inhabit great swaths of Brooklyn, and are found in abundance in many old American and English cities. I like this one for several reasons: 1) It's on a corner (70th and Lexington) in a neighborhood with very few surviving corner houses (this corner actually has one on all four points); 2) Despite the street level store conversions and the two bay addition on the left, it is remarkably intact (it brims with mid-Victorian gravitas); and 3) It was originally the end house in a row of otherwise identical late 1860s spec brownstones, and constitutes a wonderful contrast to the early twentieth century neo-Jacobean renovation next door, a house whose facade probably once looked exactly like it.





Here's another corner spec house from the same period, this time located on Madison and 67th Street. Basically, the same things were done here as on 70th, namely installation of street level stores and construction of an addition in the back. But hoo boy, talk about a heavy hand. You know, people just shouldn't paint stone. I guess brick is OK sometimes, but painted stone always winds up looking shabby - and not just after it weathers. For years some benighted decision makers at the Pierre Hotel have OK'd painting the limestone walls on the hotel's lower floors. If they think it looks good - even when it's fresh - they're extremely wrong. It looks like a cheap shortcut which, of course, is exactly what it is. I remember years ago the Metropolitan Club was painted too. Stripping it off and restoring the marble facades contributed in no small way to the club's social and financial renaissance.





Here's 67th and Madison from the side, showing the addition quite clearly. Even the hugest mansions had a little room in the back. This particular house had a reasonably sized back yard whose frontage on the side street made an income producing addition irresistible. The big problem here, aside from the ill advised removal of the cornice, is the paint job.





Lo and behold, look what's happening now. The building is swathed in scaffold and netting, beneath which the paint has been stripped and the stonework carefully restored. The bricks on the addition don't match the originals very well, an instance where painting is acceptable.





Here's a closeup of the view above, as much a testament to Photoshop as the work itself. When I snapped this picture, the black netting virtually obscured what was beneath it. Not now. (Insert silly smiley face here)





Here's the house from the front. Photoshop or no, it's almost impossible to see what's going on.





What's going on is the reconstruction of the original window surrounds. These would have been made of brownstone when the house was new. Now they're made of molded stucco painted brown, which will be virtually indistinguishable from the original. Edith Wharton once remarked, on the subject of intricate papier-mache interior cornice moldings, that as long as they looked like plaster, they were fine.





This house is across the street, on the northeast corner of the intersection of 67th and Madison. I don't quite understand what's going on, since this exterior was recently restored, the scaffolding removed, and now it's back up again. What they did here is precisely what's going on beneath the netting on the other side of the street - which I hope will include re-installation of a roof line cornice.





Here's a closeup of the image above. Isn't that little draped shield atop the oriel window a charming detail.





Replacing missing architectural window surrounds - shaved off either as part of ignorant alterations or in lieu of expensive maintenance - makes a huge difference in the appearance of a vintage building. Here's another corner house, this time at Madison and 62nd, purchased and renovated a few years ago as an annex to the Hermes store across the street. When first completed, Hermes elected not to replace window surrounds that had been removed many years earlier. Despite the considerable sum spent on the alteration, the house looked bad. To their credit, Hermes immediately put the scaffold back up and finished the job correctly.





The Hermes house was also part of a spec row, built in the 1870s judging from the fashionable Eastlake motifs incised into the stone. Hermes replicated the surrounds and their decoration using surviving details on the adjoining houses as a template.





Speaking of window surrounds, here we are back on Lex and 70th, looking at a house without any. The commercial street level alteration is typically uninspired; the back yard extension rises only one floor; and someone along the way has shaved off the window surrounds. I'll bet somebody else then decided to paint "decorative" (yeah, right) black borders around the naked windows. Years ago, I bought a house on West 81st St. from a nice old lady who'd run it for years as a rooming house. When I asked what had become of all the Victorian mantlepieces - alas, not a one had survived - she told me she'd pulled them all out and thrown them away because people only wanted "modern."





OK, this is a bit of a non sequitur, but while concentrating on Madison and 67th St., I came across this vintage image - taken in the late 1940s, if that is indeed a '45 Chrysler in the foreground - of Peck and Peck, the chic women's store that went bust in the 1970s. What a grand old mansion it's in, located on the southwest corner of the intersection. I've always wondered what used to be there, because what's there now is....





...this horrible building, truly a seven-story basement above ground. There's another of these on the next block up, just as intrusive, just as destructive to the texture of the neighborhood. These buildings predate the establishment of the Upper East Side Historic District and this one, anyway, constitutes eloquent justification for landmark law.