Model tenements named for a forgotten bishop

Few modern-day New Yorkers recognize the name Henry Codman Potter. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Potter was a towering public figure.

Born in 1834, Potter (right) became the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York in 1883. He served as a rector at Grace Church, the city’s elite house of worship, and laid the cornerstone at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1892.

In such a prominent position, his name was regularly in newspapers. Yet Potter made headlines not for proselytizing but for tackling the city’s social ills and assisting the “lowest and the least cared for classes.”

“Potter not only believed that the wealthy were responsible for using their resources to meet the needs of the poor; he also believed that they should do so in a way that decreased the dependence of the poor on help from others,” wrote Michael Bourgeois in his book about Potter, All Things Human.

Potter visited midnight missions and ministered to inmates on Blackwell’s Island.

He took on temperance by recognizing that the saloon was the “poor-man’s place of resort and recreation.” Rather than shutting down bars, he advocated reforming them so they served no alcohol. (That didn’t work, as his Subway Tavern experiment proved.)

He also addressed the problem of housing, leading the fight “of providing comfortable, healthful homes to the poor of the city,” according to the New York Sun.

So it makes sense, then, that four years after Potter’s death in 1908, “his friends raised money to erect the City and Suburban Homes Company’s Bishop Potter Memorial, a pair of model tenements on East 79th Street,” wrote Andrew Dolkart.

City and Suburban Homes was a housing company with prominent backers dedicated to building livable, affordable apartments for working-class families in the early 1900s—in contrast to the airless, cramped firetraps that passed for housing at the time.

The model tenements they built along with the Bishop Potter Memorial buildings stand between York Avenue and the FDR Drive. Each 2-4 room flat has windows in every room, fireproof walls and doors. The 6-story buildings feature wide, dignified courtyards that let in light and air. (Average weekly salary for each family who rented one of these apartments: $15.73.)

Codman may be forgotten, but these model tenements, now landmarked and perhaps simple and plain by our standards today, remain.

[Second photo: Wikipedia]

Tags: Bishop Potter NYC, Henry Codman Potter, Model Tenements 79th Street, Model Tenements Bishop Potter, Model Tenements City and Suburban Company, tenements in New York City