posted 01-10-2011 12:27 AM            

quote:

---

Streetscapes | Fifth Avenue and East 28th Street
Apartment Houses: The Early Story
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY
Published: December 30, 2010

THE Dakota, the Gramercy, the Chelsea, the Windermere ... all these and more have, on occasion, been set forth as the oldest (or even the first!) apartment house in Manhattan. The game of superlatives is always chancy, but the obscure little Black, Starr & Frost building, erected in 1874 at Fifth Avenue and 28th Street, has an inside track — even though no one has lived there for decades.

The Black, Starr & Frost Building, shown around 1880. The 1874 structure, one of New York’s earliest apartment houses, had a store on the first floor. The mansard probably housed servants’ rooms; the tower may have been an artist’s studio.
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

The Black, Starr & Frost Building today, shorn of its tower.

The burdens and wastefulness of private house life in Manhattan were apparent as soon as land values forced houses to four and five stories — how many bedrooms can a widow, or a couple without children, or a professional man actually use? Before the 1860s the options were either living in a hotel, with its dreaded common dining room, or a boarding house, about as homelike as a railroad sleeper car.

The Black, Starr & Frost building was built by William Black, head of the silver firm later known as Black, Starr & Gorham. Mr. Black was mixing business with business. He moved his firm to the ground floor, and leased apartments above.

The tenants of 1 East 28th Street were people like Asa Wilkinson, a chemist who had patents on many gas illuminating devices; George C. Barrett, a playwright and lawyer who in 1871 played a key role in removing the Tweed Ring from power; and John B. Bristol, a Hudson River painter who had been living in the big artists’ studio building at Park Avenue South and 23rd Street. He was listed in an 1886 article in The New York Times as one of the “old fogies” of the National Academy of Design, along with Frederic Church and Jasper Cropsey, who opposed loosening exhibition and membership restrictions.

Although plans and descriptions of the original layouts have not yet surfaced, the households were small, often just husband and wife and a servant. It seems likely that there would have been two apartments each on the second through fifth floors, and extra servants’ rooms behind a screen of tiny dormer windows on the mansarded sixth floor. The corner of the sixth floor was built out, with large circular windows facing Fifth Avenue and 28th Street, suggesting a special use: was this perhaps Mr. Bristol’s studio?

There was an artistic cast to the early apartment house, an offshoot of the artists’ studio buildings of the 1850s and later. The tea dealer John C. Runkle, another tenant, had a major collection, including works by Millet, Daubigny, Gérôme and Bouguereau. His firmly Francophile taste perhaps made for an awkward moment or two with Mr. Bristol in the elevator. All save Mr. Wilkinson had one or more servants.

The Black, Starr & Frost building came only four years after the Stuyvesant, completed in 1870 at 142 East 18th Street, now demolished and generally considered the first structure for people who would otherwise feel some embarrassment at living in a multiple dwelling. That it was put up by the aristocratic developer Rutherford Stuyvesant and designed by the influential Richard Morris Hunt certainly helped, but the need was clear. In 1868, The Real Estate Record and Guide predicted that “whole streets of them would be built before the supply could meet the demand.”

Elizabeth Collins Cromley’s 1990 “Alone Together: A History of New York’s Early Apartments” closely analyzes the evolving terminology used by the Department of Buildings for this new development. Until the mid-1870s the new “French Flats” were categorized with private houses under “First Class Dwellings,” even though they were technically tenement houses.

Both “Alone Together” and “New York 1880,” by Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins and David Fishman, list New York’s earliest possible French Flats, and of their combined tally, only one earlier than the Black, Starr building survives: the architect Detlef Lienau’s chaste set of buildings of 1870 at the northeast corner of Third Avenue and 71st Street. But, to judge from census returns, their tenants were not of the same economic class; none had servants.

Mr. Black’s architect was George B. Post, almost as prominent as Mr. Hunt, and one of the few architects to be listed in the New York Social Register. The structure he created was heavy with brick and dark masonry, but positively debonair on New York’s brownstone streets.

In the 1880s the area around Fifth and 28th became a nexus of early apartment design, with the Knickerbocker at the southeast corner, and two early cooperative “Home Clubs” on Madison and 28th and 30th Streets. But by the turn of the century, the Black, Starr apartments were outmoded; it appears that the building was converted to commercial use around 1915, with its top-floor mansard built out square.

The Black, Starr building has been brought low by age, the topmost tower shorn off, the brick and brownstone painted, the balconies removed. Whatever its position in New York’s architectural history, it hardly stands out among the architectural miscellany of lower Fifth Avenue.

---

posted 01-10-2011 10:14 AM            

I love Gray's Streetscapes column. It's always interesting. Highly recommended for anyone interested in NYC, history, or architecture.

posted 01-10-2011 12:37 PM            

Thanks, Kelly