Then and Now
on the Upper West Side
Update 10/29
To someone whose English ancestors worshipped in a church built in 500 AD, preserving an architectural heritage that didn’t exist before 1900 can seem like an oxymoron. But in the here and now of New York City, buildings put up as recently as 1904 are historic landmarks. And so they should be.
But where do we find the elusive link that connects West Siders with our neighborhood’s distant past, when it was rolling farmland and the southern tip of the Manhattan was New Amsterdam? To Broadway itself, which spans the centuries and defines the development of the West Side.
Broadway — An Indian Warpath
Originally an Indian trail, it has been successively a Dutch settlers' cartway, the Bloomingdale Road, the Boulevard, and finally, since 1899, Broadway.
One source notes the Indian nations spread out east to west, with hostile tribes doing the same to the north and south. Hence, east-west trails were peace paths. Broadway, running north-south, was a warpath. When I moved to the West Side in 1953, it was still a warpath.
Around 1670 an enterprising Dutchman persuaded some of his compatriots to join him in settling the rich farmland at what is now 125th Street and Broadway—hostile Indian territory then. The settlement of New Harlem Heights used the warpath as a cartway connecting it to New Amsterdam at the southern tip of the island.
The fertile soil and lovely countryside along the trail soon attracted both farmers (tobacco was a popular crop) and wealthy downtown merchants, who built their splendid country estates along the banks of the Hudson.
By the 1700s there were two new villages, Bloomingdale and Harsenville. The Dutch often named places in their new homeland after the towns they'd left behind: New Amsterdam, New Harlem, and Bloemendahl, after the flower-producing town near the original Harlem in Holland.
Mrs. Trollope, an English writer visiting the West Side from England in the 1830s, regarded Bloomingdale Village, lying on the bank of the Hudson from 100th to llOth Streets, as the loveliest place on the upper island. (Map of Upper West Side in the 1800s, shows locations of family residences.)
Also in the 1830s, the Orphan Asylum Society of New York moved from increasingly urban Greenwich Village to a new home in Harsenville on the site presently bounded by Riverside Drive, West End Avenue, West 73rd and West 74th Streets. The trustees commented "the grounds afforded ample room for exercise and recreation, the garden supplied the inmates with fruit and vegetables, and there being pasture for several cows wholesome milk had been added to their simple breakfast; while the abounding river invigorated the frame by a saline bath and by casting a net into it furnished an occasional dinner of fresh fish." Completed in 1840, the imposing new asylum survived until 1902.
It takes a village…
Harsenville, which started at 68th Street, took its name from the first farming family on the site. In 1701, Cornelius Dyckman purchased a 94-acre farm at Broadway and 73rd Street for £450. His daughter Cornelia married young Jacob Harsen, and there was a Harsen living on the land until 1804. The Harsen homestead was not torn down until 1893.
Next to the Harsens, the other great farming family in the area were the Somarindycks, whose land stretched from Columbus Circle into the 70s. Many historians believe the future King Louis Philippe of France and his two brothers lodged at the Somarindyck house at Broadway and 75th Street during their exile in the United States.
A second house belonging to the Somarindyck family was located at roughly Broadway and West 77th Street. In the late 1840s, Fernando Wood purchased this house and used it as his country seat. He was living here when he was mayor of New York City.
The Central Savings Bank (now Apple Bank) published an illustrated booklet on West Side history when they opened a new branch at Broadway and 73rd in 1928. The writer remarked: "If anyone had suggested 75 years ago that such an establlished financial institution should erect a massive building for its business as far north as the hamlet of Harsenville, he might have been considered a fit subject for treatment at the newly established asylum of the New York Hospital at Bloomingdale."
In 19th-century New York, eccentrics were not labeled "crazy." They were "ready for Bloomingdale."
Columbia University's Low Library occupies the site where the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane stood. When it was criticized for mismanagement, the Asylum was moved to White Plains, NY.
Most of the original asylum was demolished, but one building remains part of the Columbia University campus—Buell Hall, next to the Low Library. Buell was a residential facility for wealthy insane men so they wouldn't have to mix with the hoi polloi in the asylum's more "institutional" main buildings. In other words, a home for the insanely rich.
The Fashionable Bloomingdale Road
New Yorkers, who had been predominantly Tory during our own Revolution, had Francophile tendencies, which made the area popular with French émigrés—it didn't matter much whether they were fleeing the Bonapartists or the Bourbons. Mme. D'Auliffe, a former lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, built her 16-acre estate, Chevilly, on the Bloomingdale Road at 73rd.
The charming lady enlivened the social life of the neighborhood, counting among her frequent guests the Duc D'Orleans and Talleyrand, who had rented an impressive white frame mansion up the Road at 75th Street. Unique in his own age and a phenomenon in any, Charles-Maurice, Prince de Talleyrand, 1754—1838, was a statesman of outstanding ability and extraordinary contradictions. He was a world-class rogue—a well-known opportunist and a notorious bribe taker—who held high office in five successive regimes. A supporter of the Revolution, after the fall of the monarchy he fled to England and then to the United States, returning to France two years later to serve under Napoleon.)
One of the earliest photographs in existence shows a New York country estate on the Bloomingdale Road, referred to as "a continuation of Broadway." It sold for $62,500 at Sotheby's auction house in New York in March, 2009. The 5½"x4" black and white daguerreotype dates from 1848.
Among the great estates along the Bloomingdale Road was Baron John Cornelius Vandenheuvel's summer place at 79th Street. The grounds sloped down to the riverbank and had an unrivalled view of the Jersey Palisades. His town house was opposite City Hall (a New York street directory of the period lists him at Park Lane). The baron married a daughter of the wealthy lawyer, Charles Ward Apthorp, whose estate stood at what is now Columbus and 91st Street.
Apthorp was an important figure in pre-Revolutionary New York. A loyal British subject and successful merchant, he was a member of the Governor’s Council from 1763 through 1783 when the war ended. His house was one of the grandest on the island of Manhattan, reached from the Bloomingdale Road by a 40-foot-wide lane, with another connecting it to the Post Road (now Fifth Avenue).
Story has it that General Washington headquartered at the Apthorp house after his defeat at Kips Bay and was about to dine with his staff one evening when he got word the British were fast approaching. Washington made a hasty departure with his troops, and the English General Howe sat down to the meal.
In the 1800s, the Vandenheuvel and Apthorp mansions became fashionable resorts. Tom Rogers, landlord of the successful Burnham's Tavern, leased the Vandenhevel place in 1839 for $600 a year and converted it to a roadhouse he called The Mansion.
Burnham's, which had been doing business on the Bloomingdale Road at 74th Street since 1820, catered to day trippers, who came in their horsedrawn carriages (or, in winter, their sleighs) for a day in the country. The Mansion was a stop on the Broadway Stagecoach line, which had one car, one driver, a once-an-hour run, and a 25¢ fare, making it transportation for the affluent.
The Apthorp mansion and its grounds became a beer garden, inn and picnic ground. Called Elm Park, it was popular with Manhattan's large German immigrant community. In 1870, Elm Park was the site of the first Orange riot, in which Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics clashed and eight people were killed.
The Apthorp house fell victim to urbanization in 1891, when the city razed it in order to extend 91st Street. The New York Times lamented the loss, saying “New York City does not possess so many genuine specimens of old colonial architecture that it can afford to part with a single one of them, but it must soon part with the Apthorp mansion.”
A century before historic preservation was heard of, one our most historic and architecturally important structures was ripped down for a strip of asphalt. Today, the stately residence where Revolutionary War history was written is largely forgotten.
Another of the "country" estates along the Hudson belonged to Dr. Valentine Mott (1785-1865), one of the most influential American surgical leaders of his time. He received his medical degree from Columbia Medical College and was the first American to ligate a great number of large arteries successfully. In addition, Valentine Mott performed nearly 1,000 amputations and other operations.
A more recently lost neighborhood structure: the Colonial Club, which opened at Broadway and west 72nd Street in 1892. Its golden age was brief, and because it had undergone major alterations, the landmarks commission had little interest in preserving it. During its brief heyday, it boasted a billiard room overlooked by a café, a bowling alley, a dining room, wine cellars, a library, and a ballroom. Gentlemen arrived by way of a handsome porch on Broadway. The women’s entrance, just as elegant, was around the corner on 72nd Street.
In its final years, the building's street level corner was taken over by a food market, where we often stopped for fresh produce on the way home from work.
The club’s greatest distinction may have been its relatively enlightened attitude about women. It was “the third social club in the city to admit ladies to the privileges of its restaurant,” and in 1893 The New York Times reported, “One of the elevating purposes of the club was to enjoy the society of pure and honorable women.”
History…same old, same old
Fernando Wood, photographed
by Matthew Brady
John Bigelow, an author and
statesman who knew Fernando Wood well,
remarked: 'He was the handsomest man I ever saw, and the most corrupt
man that ever sat in the Mayor's chair."
Wood was a millionaire in the real estate business by the age of 37. Using his wealth to buy votes, on January 1, 1855, he became Mayor of New York City. He immediately inserted himself as head of the Municipal police graft-gravy-train, charging new police captains $200 a year for a promotion to their $1000-a-year job.
The police captains in turn received $40 a year from each patrolman under their commands. The policemen, in turn, shook down honest citizens and protected the dishonest.
Not pleased with these arrangements, the New York State Legislature passed an act creating a new Metropolitan Police Force, which led to constant battles between the two forces culminating in riots in 1857. The courts next ruled that the Metropolitan Police was the only legitimate police force in town, and the Municipals were disbanded. (The Mets wore copper badges, not gold like the Municipals, which gave birth to the term “coppers,” then “cops.”)
In 1861, when Abraham Lincoln was elected President, it seemed certain the Southern states would secede from the Union. New York’s rascally Mayor Wood, famous during his first term for inciting a police riot, suggested New York also secede from the Union.
"Why should not New York City, instead of supporting by her contributions in revenue two thirds of the expense of the United States, become also equally independent? As a free city, but with a nominal duty on imports, her local government could be supported without taxation upon her people. Thus we could live free from taxes, and have cheap goods nearly duty free.…?"
Raise your hand if you remember a mayoral candidate making a similar proposal just decades ago.
Nor is our romance with royalty new. In 1860, Wood thrilled the West Side neighborhood by feting Baron Renfrew, as the British Prince of Wales (later Edward Vll) liked to style himself when traveling abroad, with a lawn party at his country house on Broadway at 77th Street that rivaled the garden parties at Buckingham Palace.
Resistance to proposals that would alter our accustomed traffic flow has been characteristic of West Siders from the start and can lead to unexpected alliances. We can thank real estate interests for their critical role in preventing the New York City end of the George Washington Bridge from being at 72nd Street. Just imagine what our neighborhood would be like today if proponents of the 72nd Street terminus to the Bridge had won.
East Side/West Side rivalries have roots in our past, as do complaints about city services. Records of a West Side Improvement Association meeting in the late 1800s read: "This wicked street cleaning department…carrying garbage through the Central Park transverse and dumping it on the West Side " And when, in 1886, smallpox broke out in the neighborhood and was traced to a shanty family in the West 8Os, the shanty dwellers were evacuated—to the East Side.
Evacuating the problem was a common solution. Boss Tweed succeeded in domiciling a flock of sheep in Central Park. They grazed by day on the Sheep Meadow and slept at night in what is now the Tavern-on-the-Green, along with the resident shepherd. Olmsted, the Park's architect, objected that they would disrupt traffic when they were driven across the drive to and from the Meadow twice a day. Olmsted was right, of course. The sheep did disrupt traffic, right up until 1934, when a reform administration claimed that the now inbred flock was producing malformed lambs. What to do? Why, banish them to Prospect Park in Brooklyn!
And so it goes. Change and growth march right along side more of the same.
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The rise of our own West Side
Little more than a century ago, the Upper West Side was still open country, an area of farms, colonial mansions, country estates of the wealthy, shanties of the poor. Although the street plan had been accepted in 1821, actual cutting of the cross streets did not begin until the 1860s.
Why the late development? Real estate records of 1898 suggest it was just easier to continue the avenues northward in their straight lines. Nor did they want to interfere with the magnificent views, believing this was to become the choicest area in the city.
The West Side Association agreed about the superiority of the area, but had also recognized in 1871 there would be no development without public transportation.
 By 1879, the els were operating all the way to 155th Street and Eighth Avenue, and between 1885 and 1900 the West Side was transformed almost overnight from rolling countryside to an urban environment. To avoid falling hot oil and sparks from the el, main building entrances were on the side streets, and building cornerstones at second floor levels served as station references for el riders. (This image has become a logo symbol for W75BA.)
Two of our most notable apartment houses date from the arrival of West Side transportation: the Dakota, built in 1884, and the exuberant Ansonia, erected from 1899–1904. They stood alone, awaiting further residential development.
Henry J. Hardenbergh was commissioned to design the Dakota by Edward Clark, head of the Singer Sewing Machine Company; he later designed the Plaza Hotel.
According to popular legend, the Dakota was so named because at the time it was built, the Upper West Side of Manhattan was sparsely inhabited and considered as remote as the Dakota Territory. Since the earliest recorded appearance of this account is in a 1933 newspaper story, it is more likely the building was called "The Dakota" because of Clark's fondness for the names of the new western states and territories. High above the 72nd Street entrance is the figure of a Dakota Indian. The Dakota was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972, and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976.
For many, the Dakota will be forever remembered as the home of former Beatle John Lennon from 1973 on, and as the location of his murder by Mark David Chapman on December 8, 1980. Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, had spent the evening at a recording studio working on a song called "Walking on Thin Ice." As they neared the entrance to the Dakota just before 11 p.m, Chapman, who that same afternoon, at the same entrance, had asked for and received an autograph from Lennon, waited with a gun.
In 1985, New York City dedicated an area of Central Park directly across from The Dakota as Strawberry Fields, where Lennon had frequently walked. In a symbolic show of unity, countries from around the world donated trees and the city of Naples, Italy, donated the Imagine mosaic centerpiece.
Other residents of the Dakota have included Boris Karloff, Rosemary Clooney, Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall, Jason Robards
The Ansonia, erected between 1890 and 1904, is listed in the National Registry of Historic Places and was designated as a New York City landmark on March 14, 1972 by the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission, which called its effect one of "joyous exuberance profiled against the sky."
The Ansonia's guests and residents over the years include opera stars Geraldine Farrar, Feodor Chaliapin, Lauritz Melchior, Ezio Pinza, Lily Pons, musicians Arturo Toscanini, Igor Stravinksy, Mischa Elman, Yehudi Menuhin and impresarios Florenz Ziegfeld and Sol Hurok, authors Theodore Dreiser, Cornell Woolrich, and Elmer Rice, athletes Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth, actors Angelina Jolie and Nicole Kidman, and mobster Arnold Rothstein. (The West Side has long had the reputation of being home to New York City's cultural and artistic residents, while the Upper East Side is traditionally perceived to be home to commercial and business types.)
Before moving to a midtown location, Keene's Chop House was on the ground floor, as was Child's Restaurant, where famed bank robber Willie Sutton was arrested. During the 1960s and 1970s the Ansonia housed an infamous gay bathhouse, the Continental Baths, in its basement. In 1977, the club became Plato's Retreat, a heterosexual swing club. Bette Midler started her singing career at the Continental Baths, with Barry Manilow as her accompianist.
Other West Side apartment buildings merit attention.
The Apthorp was built on land acquired by William Waldorf Astor in 1879. The full-block luxury apartment building consists of flats organized around a private central court following the example of the Dakota. Residents have included Nora Ephron, Al Pacino, Conan O'Brien, Cyndi Lauper, Rosie O'Donnell,and Steve Kroft. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.
At Central Park West there is the San Remo, a luxury co-operative apartment building with captivating views of the park whose board has a "reputation for lenient admissions standards" compared to the conservative, old-money boards on the east side of the park.
It is the work of architect Emery Roth, a Jewish emigrant from the Austro-Hungarian Empire whose background limited his chances for commissions to build on the posh east side of the park. During the Great Depression, many of the larger units in the building were subdivided to make them easier to rent.
Since then, the San Remo has become one of the most desirable and expensive apartment buildings in Manhattan. It converted to a coop in the 1970s.
Past and present residents of the San Remo include such famous personalities as Steven Spielberg, Donna Karan, Steve Jobs, Demi Moore, Glenn Close, Dustin Hoffman, U2 frontman Bono, Steve Martin, Bruce Willis, Eddie Cantor, Robert Stigwood, Marshall Brickman, Jackie Leo, Don Hewitt, and Texas natural gas heiress Adelaide de Menil. Rita Hayworth spent her last years there.
A few blocks north, at 81st and Central Park West, is the Beresford, another Roth design. Peter Osnos, in a 2004 New York Times article,wrote that in 1962, when the building went co-op, his parents bought their first apartment there for $18,000. In 1939, they had escaped to the United States from Poland. The Beresford, Osnos said, "with its ornate trimmings and moldings, the door and elevator men, the view of the park, represented the lifestyle they had expected for themselves before the war. It had taken them 20 years to do it, but when they moved into the Beresford, they had completed their journey back to where they felt they belonged. I don't remember them ever speaking about this, yet I know how important it was for them to reclaim graciousness in their lives to match the courage and energy they had expended in rescuing themselves and their sons."
LIke the San Remo, the Beresford accepts celebrities and politicians as residents. Current residents include comedian Jerry Seinfeld in Isaac Stern's former apartment, singer Diana Ross, actress Glenn Close, Betsy Gotbaum and Victor Gotbaum, magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown, reporter John Stossel, and movie producer David Brown, actor Andrew McCarthy, tennis player John McEnroe, Coach CEO Lew Frankfort, and Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit.Former residents have included historian Alan Brinkley, diplomat Richard Holbrooke, Tony Randall, Rock Hudson, Margaret Mead, Laura Nyroand Beverly Sills.
Overlooking Riverside Park, 33 Riverside Drive is probably best known for its most famous former residents, George and Ira Gershwin. The musical brothers occupied adjoining penthouses during the late 1920’s, where they threw parties that were the talk of the town. An oft-quoted account from Ethel Merman says the young stenographer and soon-to-be star wasn’t sure what to be more excited about when she was invited to 33 Riverside Drive—the chance to audition for a part in a Broadway show by the Gershwins, or getting to see the famed penthouse.
On the cross streets, and on Riverside Drive and West End Avenue, the standard West Side lot size of 25' x 100' dictated the builders' choice between large houses for the affluent or tenements for the poor. At a time of abundant capital, when a New York City of private homes still seemed possible, speculative builders erected architecturally sophisticated row houses. Characteristic of the West Side, these elegant homes were the work of newly available architects. There had been no professional architects in New York until 1853, according to Henry C. Brown, founder of the Museum of the City of New York. Most building was the work of contractors who hired masons and carpenters to follow not-too-complicated plans. Hence the blocks of unvaried brownstone facades you see elsewhere in the city.
The first West Side row houses were built on West 73rd Street alongside the Dakota. They were described in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians as "stripped down chateauesque." Four-story structures with high stoops, their facades were of contrasting textures and colors: olive sandstone at basement level and brick, by then cheaper and more durable than brownstone, on the upper stories. The fronts along the row varied, with second-story bays alternating with recessed arches over balconies. The result was a "ripple of light and shadow" that set the look of the West Side. As the neighborhood grew, often a single architect would create an entire block of residences, giving it variety with harmony.
Verdi Square was acquired by the Parks Department in 1887 and was named in 1921. In the early 1900s the square served as a gathering place for musicians, including Enrico Caruso and Arturo Toscanini. In 1974, Verdi Square was designated a Scenic Landmark by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, one of only nine public parks to receive this distinction.
In the center of the square is the handsome monument to opera composer Giuseppe Verdi, erected in 1906. The statue of him by Pasquale Civiletti is at the top and statues of four of his most famous characters (Falstaff, Leonora of La forza del destino, Aida and Otello) are on the base below him. The monument was restored in 1997 with funds from the Broadway/72nd Associates.
The fashionable residential district was bounded by 72nd and 82nd Streets, close to the North River as the Hudson was then called. In 1898, the NY Herald listed a six-room apartment at 166 West 79th Street for $30 a month and a seven-room for $40–45 a month.
Among the city's turn-of-the-century multimillionaires, only Charles Schwab chose to live on the West Side. Where Schwab House stands today, Charley's chateau was the most lavish of the villas on Riverside Drive. Intent on outdoing Andrew Carnegie, his partner in the United States Steel Corporation, Schwab purchased the site of the Orphan Asylum Society for $865,000. It was an unprecedented sum for a building lot in 1901. Construction began in 1901 and lasted six years. Read more about Charley's castle on the Hudson in a Block Association newsletter (November 2004). Charley definitely had a West Side spirit!
In the late 1870s, the NY Daily Tribune wrote "that this section is possessed of advantages superior to any other part of Manhattan Island is no new discovery … unequaled views, pure air, proximity to the city's pleasuring grounds are substantial inducements for residential settlement." Except for the pure air, that could have been written about the West Side today.
—Mary Ratcliffe
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Click on any image to enlarge
Harsenville started at 68th Street and took its name from the first family to farm the site, which had been purchased in 1701 by Cornelius Dyckman for £450. His daughter Cornelia married young Jacob Harsen, whose house was photographed in 1888.
The Teunis Somarindyck farmhouse stood on the Bloomingdale Road at 75th Street. Many historians believe the exiled Prince Louis Philippe lived here until he was able to return to France as king. The house was demolished in 1868 to make way for the Boulevard.
The Great Somarindyck Farm in 1862, looking north from Columbus Circle.
A second Somarindyck house, at Broadway and 77th Street, was bought by NYC Mayor Fernando Wood with newly acquired wealth from a suddenly successful shipping business and advantageous political fortune. It was here that he feted the Princeof Wales, later Edward VII.
In 1792, John Cornelius Vandenheuvel, former governor of Demerara, built his mansion on the Bloomingdale Road at 79th Street. It was later converted to a roadhouse called The Mansion. It was demolished in 1879 to make way for the present Apthorp apartments.
The residence of Charles Ward Apthorp, merchant and member of Governor's Council in New York from 1763–1783, on the Bloomingdale Road at 91st Street in 1790 — later Elm Park Resort. An Apthorp daughter married Baron Vandenheuvel.
A photo of the Apthorp house in 1891, shortly before its demolition.
Burnham's Tavern was established in 1820 on the Bloomingdale Road at 74th Street. It catered to day trippers, who came in their horsedrawn carriages (or, in winter, their sleighs) for a day in the country.
This 1848 photo—one of the earliest in existence—sold at Sotheby's in 2009 for $62,500. It
shows an estate on the Bloomingdale Road.
Dr. Valentine Mott's summer home, which he built in 1835 just above 93rd Street in what would today be the middle of Broadway. Mott, wrote Peter Salwen, was a "master of the bold, rapid (surgical) technique needed before the era of anasthetics."
 The Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, one of the first institutions of its kind in America, opened in 1821 on land now occupied by Columbia University.
Buell Hall is the oldest building on the Columbia campus and was originally a residence for wealthy insane men at the New York (later Bloomingdale) Lunatic Asylum so they wouldn't have to mingle with the hoi polloi in the other buildings.
 Before Charley Schwab built his chateau on the Hudson, the site was occupied by the New York Orphan Asylum, built in 1840. Photo: Museum of the City of New York.
In our research, we came across this photo of what had been the Colonial Club at Broadway and 72nd, built in 1892. We often shopped in the corner store for fresh produce after getting off the crosstown bus.
The dining room at the Colonial Club
An 1896 photo of a house at Boulevard and West 75th Street, where the Astor Apartments are today. Is it the house that Talleyrand rented? Yes.
 Image caption: "… House in which Talleyrand Lived Bloomingdale Road Near Hudson River at 75th Street"
In 1844, Edgar Allan Poe moved to a farmhouse near today’s West 84th Street and Broadway. A 1900s postcard calls Broadway “St. Nicholas Place,” but the New York Times in 1893 wrote: “The house where ‘The Raven’ was written stands… a few hundred feet from the corner of 84th Street and St. Nicholas Boulevard, formerly the Bloomingdale Road.”
When the American Museum of Natural History was created in 1869, its home was the Central Park Arsenal. By 1862, it had outgrown that space and the museum bought Manhattan Square across Central Park West from 77th to 81st Streets. The first building opened in 1877.
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The Museum grew; when this photo was taken ca 1900–1910 it was more like the AMNH we know today..
The Dakota in 1895 stood alone in the landscape. Despite the oft-told tale, it probably was not so named because it might as well have been in the Dakota Territory.
The Imagine mosaic in Central Park's Strawberry Fields, across from the Dakota, memorializes John Lennon.
The exuberant Beaux Arts-style Ansonia in 1905. Residents would include Florenz Ziegfeld, Ezio Pinza, Theodore Dreiser, Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Arturo Toscanini, and Igor Stravinsky.
The Apthorp, like the Dakota, is built around a central courtyard.
In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, shantytowns sprang up from coast to coast. One of the largest lay in Central Park. Angry, cold, and hungry Americans who had no other place to live dubbed the shantytowns Hoovervilles, blaming President Herbert Hoover for the downfall of economic stability and lack of government help.
The Charles Schwab mansion stood on grounds that stretched from West End Avenue to Riverside Drive, 73rd to 74th Streets. The chateuesque estate was razed in 1947 to make way for the current apartment house.
Apple Bank, which is a replica of the Medici Palace in Florence, Italy, is one of the West Side’s protected historic landmarks. "Since it was built 1928, the majestic Central Savings Bank building—now home to the Apple Bank for Savings— has been an astonishing place to make a deposit."—Christopher Gray, architectural historian
This writer banks at Apple largely because its splendid interior with that coffered ceiling makes me feel as if there's serious money in my accounts.
The San Remo seen from the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. The building's architect, Emery Roth, built this first of New York's twin-towered apartment blocks. Construction began in 1929, weeks before the market crash initiated the Great Depression. When the building was completed in the early 1930s, New York was headed into economic distress and World War II.
Unlike the numbered apartment houses along Fifth and Park Avenues, the named Central Park West residences of the early 20th century, includng the San Remo and the Beresford (above), were not "restricted."
As the situation worsened in Europe in the late 1930s, many wealthier Jews who escaped found new homes in these Central Park West buildings.
A Real Estate Record ad in 1916 said of 325 West End Avenue, with its New-Renaissance-style facade, "this apartment house represents an investment of half a million dollars.…"
The fortress-like building at the NW corner of W75 and West End Avenue ca. 1915, before 325 WEA was built. Way to the left are 309–313 W75, landmarked buildings designed by Clarence True, a major West Side architect perhaps best known for his Riverside Drive homes. Photo: Museum of the City of New York
George and Ira Gershwin had adjoining penthouses in 33 Riverside Drive, a handsome, 17-story building that was erected in 1927 and converted to a cooperative in 1989. Their apartments were scenes of many famous parties and were partly responsible for the new sense of glamor that became attached to roof-top apartments in the late 1920s Jazz Age.
The Verdi monument in Verdi Square. On the base are four of his most famous operatic characters: Falstaff, Leonora of La forza del destino, Aida. and Otello.
Row houses characteristic of the Upper West Side, with their undulating facades very different from the unvarying brownstones erected elsewhere in the city.
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