The Overhaul of the Upper West Side
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The Landmarks Preservation Commission’s designation in May of 40 houses as the Manhattan Avenue Historic District calls to mind not only those picturesque rows but also the complicated fate of this part of the Upper West Side.
New Yorkers of a certain age will remember when the Upper West Side was not only not fashionable, but when it endured social strife and high crime. One blighted area — between 87th and 97th streets, and between Central Park West and Amsterdam Avenue — was designated as the Upper West Side Urban Renewal Area. Robert Moses had earlier proposed Manhattantown, a massive residential development on the present site of Park West Village, on Central Park West between 97th and 100th streets. The city acquired the land using federal funds, then turned it over to a private company that, instead of building Manhattantown, sat on the property and milked it. The boondoggle hastened the denouement of Moses’s career. At last, the city fired Manhattantown, Inc., and brought in the developers Webb & Knapp to create Park West Village, which rose during 1957–61 to designs by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. It comprised seven buildings of 17 to 20 stories, with 2,700 apartments. Part of the complex has since been converted to co-ops.
The subsequent planning for the urban renewal area we credit not to Moses but to James Felt, City Planning Commissioner under Mayor Robert Wagner. The methods employed received much notice at the time. “Urban renewal” typically meant wholesale bulldozing. The Upper West Side Urban Renewal Area involved the renovation of 500 side-street row houses together with the creation, mainly on the avenues, of high-rise subsidized housing, both low-income and, under the state’s Mitchell-Lama law, middle-income complexes.
If you want to look at the new historic district, I suggest taking in a bit of the general area. The urban renewal area’s rehabbed houses include the ones on 95th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues. On the north side, at no. 115, lived little Virginia O’Hanlon who in 1897 wrote her famous letter to The New York Sun asking if Santa Claus really existed. Father Charles Vissani commissioned no. 143, a magnificent Gothic townhouse from 1889, designed by James W. Cole. Father Vissani resided there with fellow Franciscan priests who raised funds to preserve landmarks in the Holy Land.
Walk up Amsterdam to 98th Street. The Happy Warrior Playground opened in 1965 and soon became famous for its playground basketball games featuring such legendary local athletes as Lew Alcindor, Connie Hawkins, Joe “The Destroyer” Hammond, and, above all, Earl “The Goat” Manigault, whose academic and drug problems foreclosed his opportunity to become a pro star, but who later rehabbed and worked among local youth. At 99th Street stands stately St. Michael’s Church (Episcopal) from 1891, by Robert W. Gibson. It’s well worth an inside visit.
Walk to Columbus and 100th Street. To the south stands the vast Park West Village, built as middleincome housing. To the north stand the equally vast Frederick Douglass Houses, designed by Kahn & Jacobs and opened in 1958. The low-income project comprises 17 buildings between 100th and 104th streets and Amsterdam and Manhattan avenues. Which brings us to Manhattan Avenue.
I’ll bet many Manhattanites have never heard of Manhattan Avenue. It runs between 100th and 125th streets, midway between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. The historic district begins at 104th Street, where the Frederick Douglass Houses end, and runs two blocks to 106th. The houses date from the late 1880s, and exemplify that most varied and picturesque period in our architecture. They form three groups. On the west side, between 104th and 105th, are Queen Anne and Romanesque Revival houses designed by Edward Angell from 1889. A block north, on the west side, stand houses designed by Joseph Dunn and built in 1885. At the time, the critic Montgomery Schuyler described their style as “reign of terror.” On the east side range Queen Anne and Romanesque Revival houses, from 1886, by C.P.H. Gilbert, one of New York’s greatest townhouse architects who in this early phase of his career worked mainly in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and who would later design lavish mansions for Upper East Siders like Otto Kahn and Felix Warburg.
One man’s “reign of terror” is another’s exuberance accompanying a city filling out its island, incognizant of things such as urban renewal and historic districts.
