Looking Up on 72nd Street

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The New York Sun

West 72nd Street at Central Park West is where the Upper West Side began — not in time, but in spirit. The myth of the Dakota states that the building was so named because it was located so far from the center of the city.

But that isn’t true. By the time the Dakota received its first tenants in the early 1880s, Central Park was already the popular attraction it remains to this day. The part of Manhattan stretching between the park and the Hudson River had, for many years, been the scene of grand plans and intermittent construction.

What is true is that the Upper West Side suffered a painful gestation, as the fall of the Tweed Ring and a national depression led to abrupt and protracted suspensions of city-funded road- and park-building projects that left most of the area a vast, abandoned construction zone, populated by squatters.

Edward S. Clark, developer of the Dakota, saw anew the possibilities for the area, following the opening of the Ninth Avenue El. Largely because of Clark, the area took shape through the 1880s and 1890s as a mixed row-house and apartment-house district, perhaps the first urban district in America built from the very beginning to accommodate apartment houses.

The apartment houses tended to be on the avenues, the row houses on the side streets. One of the periodic extra-wide crosstown thoroughfares in the city’s grid, 72nd Street took shape with both types of dwelling. After 1900, though, commerce, and other factors, began to render many of the thoroughfare’s distinctive buildings invisible — unless you look up.

Across the street from the Dakota stands the Majestic, dramatically twin-towered, wonderfully named, and for all that a tad dull. The famous developer Irwin Chanin built it in 1930-31. To its west, Emery Roth’s Oliver Cromwell apartments (you know, not everyone would want to live in a building by that name), with a dramatic tower shooting 335 feet in the sky, dominated the view of Central Park West from the east for four years, until the 11-foot-higher Majestic went up and rendered the Cromwell — despite its size and splendor — all but invisible.

At the southwest corner of 72nd Street and Columbus Avenue stands a lovely 1892-93 office building, an elegant essay in rustication and cartouches, designed by McKim, Mead & White. Note the beautiful way the building’s corner is sheared off to create an intersection-facing storefront, now occupied by a Swatch shop, and to give the building a real presence when viewed from along either Columbus or 72nd Street. This has long been one of my favorite Upper West Side buildings.

On the north side, at 137 and 139 W. 72nd St., between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues, we find a pair of 1880s Gothic Revival row houses that architects Thom & Wilson designed as a unit, with marvelous bulging towers at either end, conically roofed and with lots of lilting medieval detail. The towers occupy fully half the width of each house, and are sheathed in limestone, while the rest of the façade is red brick trimmed in stone, for one of those beautiful contrasts in color and texture that the 1880s were so good at.

But 99 of 100 people would walk right past these houses without noticing them. In 1925 (according to Christopher Gray) a storefront was slung across the houses, coming out to the street and rendering the richness above invisible. Yet there is also something magical in the way the fantastic structure rises up from the modern storefront, and it’s at any rate well worth seeking out.

Cacophonous storefronts again obtrude upon a mansion’s first two floors at the northeast corner of 72nd Street and West End Avenue, where a massive corner tower rises three stories above the storefronts to a conical roof, and is but part of a varied, finely etched, and terra-cotta-enriched skyline. (Look up.) The house was built in 1897 and designed by Gilbert Schellenger.

Though not obscured by stores and signage, 72nd Street at Riverside Drive brings us a trio of mansions — 311 W. 72nd St., 1 Riverside Drive, and 3 Riverside Drive — designed by C.P.H. Gilbert, who is known for his fine houses in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and for plutocrats’ mansions on the Upper East Side.

Yet while Gilbert’s limestone work could at times be stolid, he had (as his 20 houses on Park Slope’s Montgomery Place attest) a streak of picturesque as profound as that of any architect of his time. The house at 1 Riverside Drive (what an address), at the northeast corner of 72nd Street, was built in 1899-1901 and is one of Gilbert’s best.

The whole house is practically a great, fat, rounded tower rising from a rusticated base up to a very shallow conical roof, like a knitted cap on a boy’s head. The elegant window enframements, judiciously placed cartouches, and a handful of other discrete details help the house turn the corner as though with a single, great, forceful stride — a site-appropriate gesture too often lacking in New York architecture. But also one that, alas, may make the house less visible than it might otherwise be.

fmorrone@nysun.com


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