Vestiges of Murray Hill’s 19th-Century Boom
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The Morgan Library’s expansion has received a great deal of attention, naturally focused on the Renzo Piano addition. But credit must also go to the Morgan for its splendid restoration of the Phelps-Stokes house, a brownstone mansion on the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and 37th Street that was not built to be part of the museum.
Murray Hill boomed in the 1850s as the next new thing in the restless northward migration of Manhattan’s gentry. No other house in Murray Hill tells us more about the neighborhood in its early days than does the Phelps-Stokes house. Built in the 1850s by Isaac Phelps, the house is a typically capacious sandstone-fronted house of the kind New York’s haute bourgeoisie preferred for its dour lack of ostentation.
Compare this 1850s house with a 1905 granite Beaux Arts confection, the former Joseph De Lamar house, right across 37th Street. Here are rich people’s mansions from two eras, and they could not be more different in their expression. Note that they manage this extreme difference each by utilizing the elements of classical architecture.
Isaac Phelps left the brownstone to his daughter, Helen, and son-in-law, Anson Stokes. A lovely portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Stokes, by Sargent, is in the Metropolitan Museum, next to an even lovelier Sargent portrait of their son, Isaac Newton Stokes, and his beautiful wife, Edith Minturn. Born in this house, Isaac Newton went to Harvard and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. As an architect in New York, he designed the wonderful St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia, and as a historian he wrote and compiled the massive “Iconography of Manhattan Island,” which Norval White suggested was the most thorough history of a built place anywhere in the world.
The mining baron William Earl Dodge (who was married to a Phelps), lived in a similar brownstone house built at the same time as Phelps’s, next door to the south, where Mr. Piano’s new entrance pavilion is. Next south, completing the block, was the brownstone of John Jay Phelps, which later became the home of J.P. Morgan.
Morgan built his library behind his house in 1906. In the 1920s, his house was replaced by Benjamin Wistar Morris’s addition to the library, which remains an object lesson in how an add-on ought to defer to a great building. Morgan also bought the full Madison Avenue block front, tore down the Dodge house, and gave the Phelps-Stokes house to his son, J.P. Jr., known as Jack.
There Jack remained until his death in 1943. For many years the house served as the headquarters of the Lutheran Church in America, and not until the 1980s did the Morgan Library purchase it. That’s when the glass atrium was slung across the garden between the Phelps-Stokes house and the Morgan annex, to connect the house to the rest of the museum.
Do note the exquisite ironwork on the outside of the house: Added probably in the 1880s by Anson and Helen Stokes, its theatrical exuberance may be owing to Helen, who though born to Protestant probity had an eccentric, even a silly, streak. She also kept pet monkeys in the house.
