The Rich Traditions of 56th Street

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The New York Sun

The holiday season draws many people to Midtown, for shopping, looking at festive decorations, dining, or going to Carnegie Hall to hear Handel’s “Messiah” (December 21–22). Hardy souls brave the overwhelming crowds and the general holiday pandemonium for a look at the tree at Rockefeller Center or the windows of Bergdorf Goodman, on Fifth Avenue between 57th and 58th streets. While the most crowded thoroughfares — Fifth Avenue and 57th Street — are busy for a reason, when I am in Midtown I am drawn to the side streets, particularly those in the 50s between Fifth and Sixth avenues. Some of these side streets, such as 52nd, are as built up as any of the avenues. But others have held fast to a special character they have retained for nearly a century now, or since townhouses began yielding to stores, restaurants, apartments, and hotels.

This past summer the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated two former townhouses on 56th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues. At 10 W. 56th St. is the former home of Frederick and Birdsall Otis Edey, built in 1901. Mr. Edey was a financier; his wife was a leader of the women’s suffrage movement. They hired a young firm called Warren & Wetmore, which was hot off the success of their New York Yacht Club (1899–1900) at 37 W. 44th St. In the early years of the 20th century, Whitney Warren, the designer in the firm, gave us some of the most beautiful houses in the city, including the Burden house (1902–05) at 7 E. 91st St. and the Marshall and Carrie Astor Wilson house (1904–05) at 3 E. 64th St. Later, Warren produced such masterpieces as Grand Central Terminal (1903-13, in association with Reed & Stem), the 927 Fifth Avenue apartment building at 74th Street. (1917), and the Aeolian Building (1926) at the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 54th Street. A superb book on the firm’s work is “The Architecture of Warren & Wetmore” (W.W. Norton, 2006) by Peter Pennoyer and Anne Walker.

Many of the leading architects of early 20th-century New York had studied in Paris, at the École des Beaux-Arts. Warren spent a longer time there than most, and his intense Francophilia shows in almost everything he designed. The Edey house is of the “modern French” type that was becoming popular at the time in New York. Note that I say type, and not style: Warren’s designs certainly possess style, but are generally not in a style. “Modern French” was a creative use of classical forms to achieve a polished simplicity in which the elegantly composed façade meant everything. And no one in New York designed façades more elegant than those of Whitney Warren. I like to think of “modern French” as the attempt to render in built form something of the sporty essence of the forthright American woman who had come to symbolize America to the world. For such architects as Warren, all-American expression did not require the xenophobic rejection of European tradition, but rather the assimilation of its classic forms to new purposes.

It’s the second and third stories of the Edey house that bear close scrutiny. The high second floor features a spectacular three-part window of the kind often called “Palladian,” with a central high, arched opening flanked by lower, flat-topped openings. Note all that goes into achieving the elegant effect. Take away anything — the balustrade at the bottom, the squared-off columns, or pilasters, submerged in the end walls, the delicate molding outlining the arch, the sweepingly concave chamfering of the arch, or the single, fabulous cartouche at the arch’s keystone — and the elegant composition would unravel. This is as good a window as there is in New York.

The Edeys sold the house in 1919, at which time a story was added and the structure was converted to retail use.

Mr. Edey worked for the banker Harry B. Hollins, whose house still stands, with alterations, next door at 12–14 W. 56th St. McKim, Mead & White designed the Colonial Revival house completed in 1901; the Hollinses departed it in 1914. A private club had the architect J.E.R. Carpenter remodel the house in 1924; 60 years later it was designated as a landmark.

This past summer also saw designation of the former home of the investment banker Henry Seligman at 30 W. 56th St. (built 1899–1901). The architect C.P.H. Gilbert was, like Warren, Beaux-Arts-trained, and designed, early in his career in Park Slope, Brooklyn, some of the most felicitous houses of the late 19th century. By the turn of the century he was designing Manhattan mansions and while his work was typically good, note how much more fussily detailed the Seligman façade is compared to the Edey.

Recently the Web log “Lost City” reminded me of a nearby “landmark” of a different sort, a restaurant I frequented when I first moved to New York and had forgotten still existed. La Bonne Soupe at 48 W. 55th St. is still going strong 33 years after it opened, serving quiche Lorraine, French onion soup, and wine at cheap prices in a convivial setting to a largely French-speaking clientele.


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