A vision of a colonial-era country mansion inside an East Side apartment lobby

Imagine the Upper East Side along the East River from the 1700s until roughly the Civil War.

In a time of booming population and rapid development, this stretch of Gotham remained sparsely populated, dotted with grand old estate houses surrounded by woods, streams, and mostly unspoiled countryside.

The Astors, Rikers, and Gracies are among the Old New York families who built unpretentious, comfortable wood-frame estate houses here, with characteristic wide porches to better enjoy the river breezes and beautiful views.

Almost all of these estates homes have disappeared, the pretty houses and spacious grounds subsumed by the march of urbanization through the end of the 19th century.

But one 1960s apartment building has found a way to memorialize the country life that existed on its footprint a century earlier.

The building is the Pavilion (below), a white-brick, luxury rental with a fountain in front of its circular driveway. It’s exactly the kind of postwar apartment house you wouldn’t expect to have a floor-to-ceiling lobby mural marking a long-gone era in Manhattan history.

Yet there it is behind the front desk: the image of an 18th or 19th century estate house overlooking a gentle East River, a sailboat on the water, pavilion on the grounds, and trees swaying in the breeze.

The artist behind the mural isn’t named, and a simple plaque states “nearby country mansion and pavilion, circa 1850.”

It’s a wonderful old-school vision inside a modern apartment house. But whose mansion was it?

The Pavilion is at 500 East 77th Street, between York Avenue and Cherokee Place. The nearest estate house in pre-Civil War Manhattan was the Riker Mansion, once “at the foot of 75th Street East River,” per the caption on the above illustration, from 1866.

The mural, then, likely honors the Riker mansion. But the porches are dissimilar, and the Riker mansion appears to have a third floor of dormer windows in the 1866 illustration.

Perhaps the artist took liberties with the image of the mansion, combining features from other illustrations—and from Gracie Mansion on 88th Street and East End Avenue, the only one of these country houses to still exist (above)—to create a composite representation of a type of house and way of life that is lost to the ages.

[Top image: NYPL; fourth image: NYPL]

Tags: NYC Country Estates Before Civil War, NYC Country Mansions 19th Century, Riker Mansion East River, Riker Mansion NYC, The Pavilion York Avenue NYC