An 1887 example of apartment living in Yorkville

The Upper East Side’s Yorkville neighborhood is dense with brownstones, tenements, and high-rise residences.

But hiding in the middle of all that stone and glass is one of New York City’s first-ever apartment buildings—an 1887 red-brick dowager with a combined name that harkens back to the German immigrants who began populating Yorkville in the late 19th century.

This early residence containing individual apartments is actually two buildings at Second Avenue and 89th Street, according to Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts. (The official address: 1716 and 1720 Second Ave.) The name of the two: the Kaiser and the Rhine.

“The Romanesque Revival buildings were named to evoke German nobility, and appeal to Yorkville’s middle class German residents,” stated the Friends in a 2020 newsletter.

The name also served as an homage to the Rhinelanders, the old New York family who developed the apartments. The Rhinelander family bought land in Yorkville in the early 19th century, and generations later cashed in when the enclave lost its rural feel and filled with people during the Gilded Age.

1929 map of the block between Second and First Avenues and 89th and 90th Streets, with the Kaiser and the Rhine on the lower left.

Their calculated attempt to appeal to German immigrants was crucial to making the apartments a success. Prior to the early 20th century, apartment living was a hard sell. Any New Yorker who could resided in their own single-family house, and only the poor or working class dwelled in separate units under one roof.

But by branding them “French” or “Parisian” flats and hiring prominent architects to design spacious, stately units, apartment buildings slowly began to catch on.

The first, The Stuyvesant Apartments, was designed in 1870 by Richard Morris Hunt on 18th Street near Gramercy Park. By the 1880s, a French Gothic apartment building had gone up on East 17th Street. The Dakota on the West Side, The Osborne on 57th Street, and the spectacular Navarro Flats on 59th Street were also filling up with tenants.

The Kaiser and the Rhine boasted refined architectural touches like large arched windows and balconies (plus a shared courtyard behind the building), but compared to the bells and whistles of the Navarro Flats, these apartments are relatively low-key.

It was the Rhinelander family’s second French Flats building in Yorkville; the first was the Queen Anne-style Manhattan, which still exists on Second Avenue and 86th Street.

With 134 years on this corner (and one disastrous fire in 1904, where firemen were credited with saving 40 women and children from a “flat house fire”), the combined Kaiser and Rhine is still a rental and blends into the neighborhood.

Empty storefronts on the first floor provide something of a ghostly feel, and it’s easy to walk past these apartments without noticing some of the 19th century architectural touches. But behind its exterior just might be the kind of large, light, airy homes New Yorkers always dream of inhabiting.

[Fourth image: NYPL Digital Collection]

The beautiful apartment house hidden from view

1940 tax photo via New York Landmarks Conservatory; third photo:

The Dakota, the Ansonia, the Chelsea, the Apthorp: most city residents recognize these as some of New York’s earliest and most magnificent apartment houses.

But the Windermere? Hidden behind scaffolding for years, this Renaissance Revival beauty on Ninth Avenue and 57th Street (above, mostly scaffold-free) has been forgotten.

Still, imagine how lovely the romantically named Windermere must have been in 1881, when it was one of the first apartment houses on the rapidly developing West Side—home to well-off residents, then “bachelor girls,” and a century later, SRO tenants.

“The interior is separated into five divisions, which comprise 38 suites of apartments, each containing from seven to nine rooms, and each furnished with a buffet, sideboard, and pier glass,” the New York Times described it.

“For the convenience of tenants who do not wish to cook in their own apartments, large kitchens are situated in the basement.”

With the noisy, belching Ninth Avenue Elevated railroad so close, the Windermere wasn’t top-of-the-line luxurious.

But it had plenty of amenities: three resident elevators, steam heat, a telephone, electric bells that rang attendants, a fire alarm, an open-air inner courtyard, uniformed “hall boys,” and separate passageways for delivery wagons.

The rent? Between $600 and $1,000 yearly, according to Landmarks Preservation Commission report from 2005.

By the 1890s, the Windermere advertised itself as an apartment house for the independent New Woman of the era, who was educated, employed, and desired a place of her own.

That often meant renting a room in one of the larger apartments. The Windermere offered single women “a congenial home where she can live at moderate cost,” reported the Times.

During the 1900s, the bachelor girls began moving out; the neighborhood’s slide into a more working-class enclave meant that tenants in what was now Hell’s Kitchen were now stenographers, chauffeurs, and waiters.

Fires plagued the building. Owners came and went. By the 1960s, drug users and prostitutes moved in . . . and a not-yet-famous Steve McQueen.

In 1985, the Windermere’s owner—who tried to harass the few remaining tenants into leaving—made the Village Voice‘s list of the city’s worst landlords.

The scaffolding and netting began wrapping the building at least a decade ago. Fire safety inspectors forced the remaining tenants out in 2007.

A new owner came in (and was named to another worst landlord list) with plans to turn the Windermere into a boutique hotel.

Perhaps this diamond in the rough will emerge a beauty again.

[Top and fourth photos: Michaelminn.net; second photo: 1940s NYC Municipal archives photo via the Wall Street Journal; third photo: 1940 tax photo via New York Landmarks Conservatory]