Abroad in New York
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
St. Luke’s Place is one block long, yet has it all: significant architecture, a rich literary heritage, and Hollywood stardom. To top it off, one of the city’s most colorful mayors lived on the block for many years.
St. Luke’s Place is actually the block of Leroy Street between Seventh Avenue South and Hudson Street in the West Village. A long row of south-facing houses, built in 1851-53, represents one of the first appearances of the “Italianate” row house style in New York. We associate this style, with its emphasis upon lushly carved stonework, with the city’s countless brownstones, faced in the soft sandstone that was easy to carve. What makes the St. Luke’s houses so interesting is that they use the sandstone only for ornament and trim.
The facades are largely of brick, as in the Greek Revival houses that had lately abounded in the Village. An impressive scale (note the high, wide stoops leading to paneled double doors), air of sumptuousness, and carved stone details (especially brackets carved in elaborate, even showy floral forms), put these among the city’s handsomest row houses. Remarkably, given the row’s harmony, they were not all built by the same developer, though clearly the different builders acted in concert.
Hollywood has liked these houses. No. 4 was the home of Audrey Hepburn in “Wait Until Dark” (1967). And as the tour-bus guides never fail to note, no. 10 served as the Huxtable residence in “The Cosby Show” – though it is set in Brooklyn!
On a loftier plane, writers have flocked to the block. By my calculation, 1923 was the annus mirabilis when the St. Luke’s Place tenures of Theodore Dreiser (no. 16), Sherwood Anderson (no. 12), and Marianne Moore intersected. Moore was the longest-tenured of St. Luke’s literary lights. She lived with her mother in the basement apartment at no. 14 from 1918 to 1929, when the two moved to Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
At the same time, Jimmy Walker, the flamboyant Jazz Age mayor of New York – and popular songwriter (“Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?”) – resided at no. 6, the house where he’d lived since age 5.
During part of her time on St. Luke’s Place, Moore worked across the street at the Hudson Park Library. Hudson Park? That’s the sad part of the St. Luke’s Place story. Many of the houses face across the street to James J. Walker Park. This is a perfectly nice playground and athletic park. But it replaced Hudson Park (1898), which had been designed by Carrere & Hastings as a terraced formal garden, a beautiful and unusual thing in a city that largely rejected formal gardens in favor of an English picturesque approach.
Hudson Park, fine as it was, was ripped up in 1946. Imagine St. Luke’s Place with the houses facing a formal garden through a veil of ginkgo leaves. It’s hard to imagine a lovelier scene. Then again, St. Luke’s Place is plenty lovely as it is.
