A Victorian Neighborhood Remade

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The New York Sun

My favorite blocks in Manhattan include the side streets that fill the area between Gramercy Park and Madison Square: 20th, 21st, and 22nd streets between Park Avenue South and Broadway.

These blocks were, in the middle of the 19th century, an extremely fashionable residential section. Several houses from that period, since made over to other uses, remain to attest to the days when this neighborhood was the latest fashionable faubourg in upper-class Manhattan’s once relentless uptown trek.

The best sense of the Victorian residential heyday of the neighborhood can be found at a building that, as it happens, was built in the 20th century. At 28 E. 20th St. stands the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site, a reconstruction of our 26th president’s birthplace.

Theodore Roosevelt was born in 1858 in a brownstone built on this site 10 years earlier. T.R.’s family (which included brother Elliott, the father of Eleanor Roosevelt) remained in the house until 1872.

In 1916, by which time this had long ceased to be a chic area, and most of the row houses had been remodeled into stores or replaced by lofts, the Roosevelt house was torn down. In 1923, four years after T.R.’s death, the grief-stricken Women’s Roosevelt Memorial Association had the house reconstructed. There’s nothing unusual about reconstructing historic buildings. It’s highly unusual to do it a mere seven years after the original building’s demolition.

The Roosevelt house was a Gothic Revival brownstone, and the reconstruction shows it as it appeared with the mansard roof that was added in the 1860s. Across the street, at 35 E. 20th St., is an 1840s Greek Revival brick-fronted row house — but you have to look up to see it. In 1908, the lower part was remodeled into a store.

Today the retail space is occupied by Moore Brothers Wine Company, the outstanding wine store that had operated in Delaware and New Jersey before opening on 20th Street in 2006. I’ve never known a wine store — or, indeed, a store of any kind — as fanatically devoted to quality and value as this purveyor of artisanal wines from Germany, Italy, and France.

The Moores’ presence on 20th Street exemplifies the stunning adaptability of old New York blocks, recalling the title of Stewart Brand’s brilliant 1994 book on how buildings grow and change like and with the people who occupy them: “How Buildings Learn.”

One of my favorite New York bars and restaurants, Gramercy Tavern, occupies the ground floor of 42 E. 20th St. This isn’t an adapted house but an eight-story loft building from 1898-99. This beautiful building, with bold quoins, elaborate window enframements, a fine cornice, and a lovely cast-iron storefront, was designed by the great apartment building architects Neville & Bagge.

On 21st Street, two buildings stand out. The “French flats” (as promoters called early New York apartments to evoke sophistication and distinguish them from the tenements of the poor) at 21 E. 21st St. may be the most evocatively Victorian thing in Manhattan. This Queen Anne delight, which has a wonderful three-story rounded oriel with its original multipaned windows (so important to the visual effect), bears proud inscriptions of its architect’s and builder’s names: respectively, Bruce Price, the most underrated architect in American history, and David King. The date is 1878, six years after the Roosevelts’ decampment from the neighborhood. A few years later, Price and King teamed up again, at the King Model Houses, or “Strivers’ Row,” in Harlem.

Across the street at 28 E. 21st St. is a sort of super-brownstone, an imposing Italianate house from about 1850, with a beautifully proportioned stoop and expertly handled parlor-floor rustication. Richard Morris Hunt, one of 19th-century America’s most influential architects, kept his office in this house from 1871 to 1879. He was succeeded in the space by the Society of Decorative Art, which ran a school there. Its teachers included Candace Wheeler, the textile and interior designer who founded the society, and Louis Comfort Tiffany.

Parts of these 20th and 21st Street blocks are included in the Ladies’ Mile historic district. None of the 22nd Street block is. But I like it just as much. The street was once all row houses. (One that remains, no. 34, is a startling instance of adaptive reuse of old houses: It’s a parking garage.) On the north side, however, when lofts and other buildings replaced the brownstones, the new structures rose from the line of the housefront, not the line of the sidewalk, typically separated from the housefront by a stoop and small front yard. The result is an unusual spaciousness.

This enabled the tableware store Stupell International to create one of the most striking modern storefronts in the city. Big, aluminum-framed show windows not only display an impressively large number of items up front, but allow for views deep into the spacious shop. In a strip above the windows, the name of the store appears in bold, slanted, modern lettering — one of the best signs in the city. But what’s truly striking is how the unusual scale of the block allows the storefront to be set behind a lushly planted front garden, a dramatic sight on a street of lofts, such as Stupell’s own 12-story building from 1907.

These side streets, with their ground-floor restaurants and stores and their upper-floor lofts, both commercial and residential, are Manhattan in microcosm: a lesson in how city blocks learn.

fmorrone@nysun.com


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