When the Vanderbilts Lived in a Slum
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Much of Manhattan’s real estate buzz at the end of the 1920s was about the redevelopment of the far East Side from the 40s up to the 80s. The riverfront was a place of tenements and factories when Anne Vanderbilt built a house at One Sutton Place in 1920. The newspapers marveled that she was moving into a “slum” – a coal yard separated her house from the river, and the view from her front windows was of the tenement across 57th Street.
By the late 1920s, however, the transformation of Sutton Place was complete. From the front windows of Mrs. Vanderbilt’s understated neo-Georgian house, she saw not tenements, but the ultra-luxurious One Sutton Place South. Similarly, Beekman Place and Tudor City had taken shape or were taking shape. Farther uptown, the streets near Carl Schurz Park, in the 80s, teemed with construction activity.
East End Avenue was booming, and with it the blocks running east to the river. In the fall of 1928, Miss Chapin’s School (now less charmingly known as the Chapin School) opened at the northwest corner of East End Avenue and 84th Street, having moved from East 57th Street. The pleasing neo-Georgian building by Delano & Aldrich is appropriate for its corner.
Vincent Astor was a major promoter of the East End. I have already written in this space of the greatest of his buildings in the area, the high-rise apartment building at 120 East End Avenue (between 85th and 86th Streets), designed by Charles Platt and completed in 1931. In 1928, Astor built 530 E. 86th Street, just off East End Avenue, a large apartment building also designed by Platt. It and its Platt-designed next-door neighbor, no. 520, built by Astor a year later, are, with their brick fronts, more modest than 120 East End Avenue, which is sheathed in luscious limestone from bottom to top.
Another bottom-to-top limestone job is the 1930 building at 10 Gracie Square. (Gracie Square is the block of 84th Street east of East End Avenue, facing onto the park.) The farthest east of the buildings on 84th Street, it was designed by two firms: Van Wart & Wein and Pennington & Lewis.The best view of it is from a block or so north on the Carl Schurz Park promenade. From there, you can look up at one of the most extraordinary water-tower enclosures in the city. In their book “New York 1930,” Robert Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman note the enclosure’s bow to the early 19th-century German neoclassicism of Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Indeed, it’s the most Schinkel-esque thing in the city.
Just behind it is another distinguished private school, Brearley, which moved from Park Avenue and 61st Street to E. 83rd Street in 1929. Other fine buildings of the period abound in this neighborhood, most in the fashionably light-and-airy classicism characterizing much of the period’s East Side redevelopment, making it easy to see why people of means flocked to the recently noisome riverfront.
