(Ian Evans is mentioned third paragraphs down; hardcopy follows to you by
mail, Ian, for framing or other purpose. Thanks for your help.)
From The New York Times of January 9, 2000
written (and posted by) Christopher Gray
Their delicate wooden porches have been sheared off, crusts of roofing tar
coats their slate shingles, their round windows have been punched out - but
the saggy 1884 row of houses at 411-423 West 154th Street are still one of
the more intriguing in Manhattan. When first built they had ridge-top views
far to the south. Those are long gone, as the most recent cohort of owners
adapts these Victorian buildings for a new century.
In 1883 the developer John Kelly began a set of 11 houses at the northwest
corner of 154th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. His architect, James Stroud,
set the houses on an elevated plateau, emphasizing what were already
commanding views of the city downtown - the land drops away steeply to the
south.
The magazine Building said the interiors of the three-story houses were
trimmed with ash and cherry, with tiled fireplaces, built-in rolling wooden
blinds, and, in the windows, "glacier decorations", a term Ian Evans, the
Australian preservation writer, believes is a reference to imitation stained
glass.
Stroud designed the facades in the recently fashionable Queen Anne style, a
mixture of Victorian and colonial decoration that rebuked the uniform
brownstone of prior decades. The first stories were enclosed by lacy wooden
porches and the third floors were a bewildering array of towers, mansards and
gambrel-ends, like a toy railroad town designed by the cartoonist Charles
Addams. The houses are set well back from the street, and the steep grade
makes for some awkward approaches - the ascent to 411 West 154th is almost
two full flights of stairs.
The corner house was later demolished, but the row of seven stretching from
411 to 423 West 154th Street still forms a dramatic group. The first tenants
were people like George H. Putnam, who lived at 417 West 154th and was the
head of the publishing company G. P. Putnam's (and son of its founder George
Palmer Putnam). An advocate of the League of Nations, he wrote widely on
copyright law, books, censorship and the Civil War, in which he served on the
Union side.
The architect Carl Pfeiffer, who had designed the original Plaza Hotel in
1883, lived in 421 West 154th, and John C. Bliss, pastor of the Washington
Heights Presbyterian Church at 155th and Amsterdam, lived at 423. Census
records show prosperous households, but as time went on, they went through
typical changes: Albert Pritchett, a toilet articles manufacturer, lived at
411 in 1910 with his wife, son and sister-in-law, but by 1920 his wife Mary,
a widow, remained there with her sister and four unrelated women - she was
renting out rooms.
Now there are only outlines of the wooden porches and stairs, and the
embankments and front yards have been rebuilt. Most of the projecting window
bays have been removed or clad in galvanized iron or aluminum; the oval
windows in the top floor mansards have almost all vanished; many of the
rivet-head details on the deep red brick have been shorn off.
But most of the slate roofs are intact, the dormer windows have their
projecting wooden shades and the brick work has generally escaped major
changes.
Emilio Frederick, a Con Ed engineer, lives with his family at 413 West 154th
Street, which he bought in 1983. He had to gut much of the fire damaged
building after a fire, but salvaged many of the doors and some woodwork. He
took off a two-story high brick porch - "I knew that wasn't right" he says -
and he still wants to recreate a period railing. "It's a battle of love -
there's always work to do with a 100 year old house" he says.
His neighbor, Dennis Derryck, a professor at the New School University
[Robert J. Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy] bought 415
West 154th in 1992 with his second wife, tk, and their children. "We moved
from 138th off Broadway - that was becoming a drug den - and we were looking
for something 21 feet wide" he says. He and his wife have a fairly large art
collection and "wanted a place we could let the light in" so they opened up
the back of the house to make a double-height space. Dr. Derryck says that
when he moved in he found trophies and photographs from the career of the
tennis star Althea Gibson, and gave them to the Schomburg Center for Research
in Black Culture - she sometimes stayed with Moulton and Rhoda Smith, who
owned the house before the Derrycks.
Next door, at 417, Joseph Brown says he was renting a room until a year ago,
when he bought the house after the owner died. The house still has other
roomers, paying him $40 to $85 a week. But he says one tenant hasn't been
paying rent for over a year - "this isn't a business" he says. "I'm paying
$900 a month in the winter just for oil, and then there's liability insurance
and Con Ed, and taxes - and the city makes it so hard to get them out when
they don't pay. But there's a need for housing like this, for people just
getting started" he says. Mr. Brown now lives in the parlor floor; its
intact woodwork and tiled fireplace are still crowded by the medicine
cabinets and other elements added for rooming house occupancy, and the
construction supplies for his own renovation.
The house at 419 is entirely occupied as a rooming house, and looks ragged -
but the outer door still has its original brass doorknob escutcheons
(although no doorknobs) and the vestibule walls have some ancient figured
wall covering - right underneath a hole in the ceiling.
Baron Taylor lives all alone in 421 West 154th Street, but the house is full
of his heavy wood antiques, bronze sculpture and artwork. His house is
almost completely intact, with its sliding doors and front and back
fireplaces. But he had to strip the wood himself after he moved in with his
late father about 10 years ago - "Oh, that was a job" he recalls. It's quiet
in these houses - the English clock on Mr. Taylor's mantel is the loudest
thing a visitor hears.
The last house in the row, 423 West 154th Street, was completely refaced with
stone in the 1950's, and is now owned by Monica Braggs. The prior owners had
heavily remodeled the ground floor, and she has enlarged her parlor floor
into a beauty spa. She lives there with four generations: her mother, Rose
Aska; her daughter, Shawnee Mays and son-in-law, Lamar Mays; and their son,
Kingsley, age 6.
Although it is quite different from 1884, the Braggs house also captures the
warp and woof of life of the block: the original tile floor in the vestibule
butts up against with the aluminum door installed by the prior owner, and
original woodwork in the hallway contrasts with the ultra-modern fittings of
her beauty spa. The 1950's kitchen, unchanged down to its dishwasher, has
become an artifact in its own right, a historic piece of the modern past in
this unusual row.
Caption 1: Architect's rendering of West 154th Street rowhouses, 1883 (Linda
Hall Library)
modern photo: entire row from the street - needs a really wide shot from the
top of the high stoop of, say, 418 West 154th Street
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