Abroad in New York
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

In the 19th century, Washington Square was a bastion of Manhattan’s bourgeoisie. By the early 20th century, however, the square divided an Italian immigrant neighborhood of tenements to the south from the tattered remnants of gentility to the north. This was the Greenwich Village of low rents that attracted artists, writers, and bohemians. Number 3 Washington Square North, part of the elegant row of Greek Revival town houses built in the 1830s between Fifth Avenue and University Place, was remodeled to suit a tenancy of painters, including William Glackens, Rockwell Kent, and Edward Hopper.
The bohemian Village soon enough attracted the sons and daughters of the uptown plutocracy. The daughters of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and of Otto Kahn moved on down, and soon the Village began to experience what did not have a name yet: gentrification.
The 1910s and 1920s saw the unexpected vogue for living where horses had once resided, and the mews of converted stables became almost a cliche of a certain kind of urban glamour. We see this at brick-paved Washington Mews, right behind that stately row on Washington Square North. One may enter the mews from either Fifth Avenue or University Place. (A corresponding mews, MacDougal Alley, exists behind the houses of Washington Square North between Fifth Avenue and MacDougal Street, but it cannot be entered from Fifth Avenue; Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney resided there.)
On the north side of the mews stand the old stables that served the grand houses. In 1916 the property’s owner, Sailors’ Snug Harbor, the home for retired sailors on Staten Island, hired Julius Franke of Maynicke & Franke to transform these stables – together with the buildings along the south side of Eighth Street to the north – into quaint houses. Franke’s use of stucco and tile calls to mind the slightly earlier renovations by Frederick Sterner on the “Block Beautiful” of East 19th Street, near Gramercy Park. In the 1930s, the ground leases of Washington Square North reverted to Sailors’ Snug Harbor. In 1939, they filled in the ample rear gardens of the stately houses with the small, quaint houses along the south side of the mews. These houses were brand new, but they were clearly meant to seem like converted stables, so powerful was the allure of such dwellings.
A grander indicator of Village gentrification stands at the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Washington Mews, extending north to Eighth Street. This is the 29-story “apartment hotel” at One Fifth Avenue. This was built in 1926-27, in the stepped-back form typical of the era’s skyscrapers. Helmle, Corbett & Harrison designed this Art Deco gem, which represented the movement downtown not only of the children of the Upper East Side but of its architectural style as well, replete with penthouse apartments.
This was the beginning of a process that continues to our day, when the Village has become one of the most expensive neighborhoods in New York. That may have surprised the bohemians of 1910, as it would surprise no one today.