The most elite apartment building in Harlem

When the stately Beaux-Arts apartment building at 555 Edgecombe Avenue opened in 1916, it rented to white tenants only.

But the population of Harlem was already changing, from mostly Irish and Jewish residents to African-Americans.

By the 1940s, the building, located on 160th Street at the edge of the posh Sugar Hill neighborhood, was exclusively black.

Sitting high on a bluff and commanding gorgeous views of the treetops of Edgecombe Avenue and across the Harlem River, these 13 floors plus a penthouse were home to Harlem’s elite.

That included academics, entertainers, and athletes such as Count Basie, Joe Louis (below), Sonny Rollins, sociologist Kenneth Clark, and Paul Robeson (above).

And though today it’s officially within the borders of Washington Heights, 555 Edgecombe is historically identified as part of Harlem.

It’s not an especially distinctive building architecturally, but it is handsome and sturdy, an emblem of the neighborhood’s prime years as a center of artistic and activist achievement.

[Photo right: Property Shark]

Mysterious male names over tenement doorways

Ever notice that when a tenement building has a name, it tends to be female? Bertha, Florence, Rose, Sylvia—names popular at the turn of the last century, when so many tenements were built, are etched above doorways all over the city.

But a handful of tenements buck the trend and appear to be named for a man. Is it the developer himself, or just a random name that happen to appeal to circa-1900 ears?

I wonder if that’s the case with Jerome. It’s the name of a tenement in Morningside Heights, perhaps a nod to Leonard Jerome, a flashy 19th century financier whose name still graces a park and thoroughfare in the Bronx? He’s also the grandfather of Winston Churchill.

Theodore, on the Upper East Side, could be a tribute to Theodore Roosevelt. Or the builder’s son or brother?

The Roger, on 160th Street and Edgecombe Avenue in Washington Heights, is named for Roger Morris, a British army colonel who fought in the French and Indian War.

In the 1760s, he retired to an Upper Manhattan estate (now known as the Morris-Jumel Mansion) that still stands today.

I don’t know who Edgar was or why a tenement on West 125th Street was named for him. But instead of the name being carved above the door, it’s laid in tile on the floor.

A 10th Street studio brings artists to the Village

In 1858, as Pfaff’s beer cellar at 647 Broadway began attracting an arts-oriented crowd, a new building just blocks away on 10th Street would further build Greenwich Village’s reputation as a neighborhood of artists.

Called the Tenth Street Studio Building, it was a handsome three-story structure made up of 25 studios plus communal space.

“[The studios were] an attempt to create a place for visual artists and architects to live together, to have affordable studio space, and to sell their works,” wrote Michelle and James Nevius in Inside the Apple.

Designed by Richard Morris Hunt, the building, at 55 West 10th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, was a hit with artists.

Winslow Homer, John LaFarge, Frederick Church, Alexander Calder, Worthington Whittredge (above), and William Merritt Chase all took studio space there.

Chase even made the interior of his studio, crammed with objects and art collected during his travels, into a subject numerous times. This painting, from 1880, features an attractive young woman, a Bohemian feel, and a shadowy profile of Chase (below) on the right.

The Tenth Street Studios inspired the building of other artists’ spaces in the neighborhood, which drew more artists and art lovers to Greenwich Village. Ever since, the Village has been known for its creative culture.

Too bad the Tenth Street building that started it all no longer exists. Photographed by Berenice Abbott in 1938 (top), it was knocked down 18 years later to make way for an apartment house.

The Tombs: New York’s notoriously named prison

Can you imagine if the city of today sold postcards of Rikers Island?

At the turn of the last century, however, it apparently was no big deal to put an image of New York’s house of detention on penny postcards and sell them to tourists.

This city jail was built in 1902, taking its nickname from the infamous penitentiary that had occupied the same site since 1838.

That first Tombs had been modeled on an Egyptian mausoleum. The ungainly building, where accused men and women lived while awaiting trial, occupied an entire block on Centre Street. Unfortunately constructed on swampy, stinky land over the polluted Collect Pond, it immediately began to sink into the ground.

“What is this dismal fronted pile of bastard Egyptian, like an enchanter’s palace in a melodrama?”, Charles Dickens reportedly wrote in his 1842 book chronicling his trip to the U.S., American Notes.

That’s the Bridge of Sighs connecting the jail to the courts building—named after the original Bridge of Sighs in Venice.

The “counting houses” of Schermerhorn Row

At the very end of Fulton Street, just steps from where trading vessels departed and docked 200 years ago, stand these handsome Flemish bond brick and slate-roof buildings.

You wouldn’t know it from the retailers occupying the ground-floor storefront space, but they make up a slice of early New York history called Schermerhorn Row.

The land beneath them isn’t much older than the buildings themselves.

Constructed on fill between 1811 and 1812 (predating the steam-powered Fulton Ferry!) by merchant Peter Schermerhorn, they served as “counting houses,” or commercial offices, for the new shipping companies that powered the city’s 19th century economy.

“Built as a group like residential row houses, counting houses represent an early phase in the development of commercial architecture in New York when buildings had not yet acquired architectural individuality based on their function,” explains New York Architectural Images.

Like so much of old New York, they’ve changed significantly over the years. ”Dormer windows were added later and project from steeply pitched roofs,” the site adds. “Chimneys and party walls were built high to prevent the spread of fire across rooftops.”

After the Civil War, storefronts were carved out of the counting houses and businesses moved in, followed by hotels, then boarding houses.

Rescued from redevelopment by preservation-minded New Yorkers in the 1960s, Schermerhorn Row is now a centerpiece of the South Street Seaport and home to the South Street Seaport Museum.

I love that the chimneys of each building line up a little like smokestacks on an ocean liner.

Once a police precinct, now a West Village condo

How cool would it be to find out that your apartment was once a holding cell?

Some residents of 135 Charles Street can answer that question. This stately limestone and granite building is the former Ninth Precinct, a circa-1890s station house that since the late 1970s has been a residence near Greenwich Street called Le Gendarme (“the policeman”).

Dedicated in 1897 by police commissioner Teddy Roosevelt, the precinct was the real deal, complete with holding pens, cell blocks, and stables for police horses.

Apparently no notorious criminals were booked there. But over the years, several officers associated with the station were killed in the line of duty—not surprising, as this was a gritty, industrial area near the waterfront that probably saw its fair share of crime.

After the precinct closed in 1969, a developer ”added a floor and created 42 apartments out of the police locker and meeting rooms and arraignment areas,” explained a 1978 New York Times article.

“But his imagination was really tested in figuring out how to convert the 32 holding pens into ‘luxury’ living quarters.”

 

Today the station, with a facade that’s changed very little over the years (see the photo above, from 1928), blends right into the upscale far West Village.

But signs of its police past abound: from the Ninth Precinct lettering carved above the entrance to the figures representing the city of New York seal to the plaque in the hallway marking is dedication in 1897 by police commissioner Roosevelt.

And then there’s the charming “police patrol” window on the building’s wing, a spot that reportedly held troughs for police horses, according to a longtime resident.

[Plaque photo: Ward Kelvin; 1928 photo: NYPL]

Le Gendarme isn’t the only police station repurposed into apartments. The former police headquarters on Centre Street is now a luxury residence.

How little Union Square has changed since 1910

What I love most about this vintage postcard is that so many of the buildings on the 17th Street side of Union Square going up Broadway still exist.

The Tammany Hall building on Park Avenue South and 17th Street hasn’t gone up yet. Nor has the W Hotel building across the street.

But there’s the brand-new Everett Building on the opposite corner, and the 1881 Queen Anne-style Century Building next door, the current home of Barnes & Noble. On the corner is 860 Broadway. It’s now a Petco, but once housed the last incarnation of Andy Warhol’s Factory as well as a basement club.

Union Square changed a lot in its first century of existence, as this post reveals.

Outdated subway signs that still point the way

There are regular subway signs, and then there are the ones that give clear directions—in these cases, using names no longer widely used.

The Port Authority Building, the Art Deco structure built in 1932 that stretches from 14th to 15th Streets on Eighth Avenue, must have been important; it scored its own sign in the station at that corner.

Google bought it in 2010, and it now serves as their famous New York City headquarters. I wonder what old-school Port Authority employees would think of the trick doors in the library and Lego play area.

Here’s a peek inside, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal.

I’d never heard of the B and D trains referred to as “concourse trains.”

But they made up a branch of the IND called the Concourse Line, opened in 1933 and running from 145th Street (where the photo was located) and 205th Street in the Bronx, under the Grand Concourse.

Penn Railroad sounds quaint, but it’s easy enough to decipher. I wonder how many tourists and new New Yorkers know what BMT and H&M mean—and no, it certainly has nothing to do with the store!

A founding father’s country home in Harlem

Today, wealthy New Yorkers boast of luxury estates upstate and in the Hamptons. But two centuries ago, prominent residents chose Upper Manhattan as the location of their grand manors.

These scenic estates had names like Pinehurst, Minniesland, and Mount Morris (former home of Aaron Burr and his wife and now known as the Morris-Jumel Mansion).

Ex-Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, the face of the $10 bill, also had an uptown estate, which he called the Grange, after his father’s ancestral home in Scotland.

In 1802, disenchanted with Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, he “threw himself into building a house in northern Manhattan nine miles from town,” writes Richard Brookhiser in Alexander Hamilton, American.

Hamilton commissioned architect John McComb Jr. (the designer of Gracie Mansion) to build a Federal-style mansion on 32 acres near today’s 143rd Street and Convent Avenue in Harlem.

It was a simple, dignified house on a high foundation amid fields and woods.

“The bay windows had sweeping views of the Harlem River to the east and the Hudson River to the West,” writes Brookhiser.

Front and rear porticos were complemented by side piazzas. On the lawn, Hamilton planted 13 sweet gum trees (for the 13 colonies), gifts from George Washington.

Hamilton only had the house for two years. In 1804, he was fatally wounded during his infamous dual with political rival Burr.

Yet the Grange lived on. After changing owners several times, it was moved to Convent Avenue and 141st Street in 1889.

There, sandwiched between a church and an apartment building (above photo), it fell into disrepair as Harlem became urbanized.

In 2008, the Grange was trucked to its third location: inside St. Nicholas Park at the end of brownstone-lined Hamilton Terrace, with the Gothic City College campus overhead.

Maintained by the National Park Service, the Grange has been beautifully renovated and is open to the visitors.

[Second and Third photos: NYPL Digital Collection]

Secret signage of defunct New York hospitals

Ever found yourself on the FDR Drive near the South Street Seaport staring at this kind of spooky structure?

It’s set amid 1970s-era apartment buildings and housing projects, making its rounded wings and red brick exterior stand out considerably.

There’s an interesting history behind it. This is the back of Gouverneur Hospital, founded in the late 19th century to serve the crowded immigrant communities of the Lower East Side.

This particular building was constructed in 1897, and it’s marked by a lovely terra cotta sign and ornate carved front entrance at 621 Water Street.

As for its curious rounded design, it served a health purpose. “[It] was believed that tuberculosis bacilli hid in corners, so the shape was an early attempt at preventive medicine,” explains this New York Times piece.

Gouverneur Hospital still exists in a more modern facility nearby on Madison Street. The 1897 building, though, now provides housing for New Yorkers living with HIV and mental illness.

I love the lettering on this sign for Union Hospital of the Bronx, opened here in 1922. It’s not easy to see beneath the contemporary signage for Union Community Health Care, a facility that took over this space on 188th Street in the Bronx.

Here are a few more old city hospitals that have been repurposed into—what else?—high-end apartments.