Apartment hotels were marketed to young families, bachelors, and widows—people who couldn’t afford private homes but wanted self-contained, relatively private residences and wouldn’t move into tenements. So they took suites of rooms, but generally had no kitchens and ate in a common dining hall, served by building staff who also handled housekeeping for all, spreading out the cost of servants and obviating the need to buy furnishings. Residential hotels had first sprung up before the Civil War and afterward became quite popular—in a sense, the condominiums of their day. Lavish, expensively furnished, and expensive to live in, they were the first sign that Central Park West had burst to life as an alternative to Fifth Avenue, complete with the requisite “teas, receptions, theater parties, [and] balls,” a local paper reported.
“Undine had early decided that they could not hope to get on while they ‘kept house,’ ” Wharton wrote, because “all the fashionable people she knew either boarded or lived in hotels.” As she unlocked the city’s social codes, she realized that her launchpad was a world away from Fifth Avenue, the home of “New York’s golden aristocracy.” The West Side was disdained by the city’s better sorts. Undine found herself in exile, suffering “the incessant pin-pricks inflicted by the incongruity between her social and geographical station . . . and the deeper irritation of hearing her friends say: ‘Do let me give you a lift home, dear—Oh, I’d forgotten! I’m afraid I haven’t the time to go so far—’ ”
Still, the Dakota wasn’t alone for long and was first joined by the Beresford, a six-story family hotel across from Manhattan Square, the four-block-long extension of Central Park occupied by the American Museum. It proved so popular that it was enlarged in 1892 to take up the whole block between Eighty-First and Eighty-Second Streets. Next came the Hotel San Remo at Seventy-Fifth Street in 1890 and the Hotel Majestic, with a grand restaurant, dancing salon, and roof garden. Erected by developer Jacob Rothschild, a German-born milliner-turned-developer, and his German-educated architect Alfred Zucker on an empty lot directly across Seventy-Second Street from the Dakota in 1894, it was known to its neighbors as “the Jewish place.”
Although those hotels occupied the same corners and bear the same names, they were not today’s grand Beresford, Majestic, and San Remo apartment houses. But the earlier edifices, along with a series of institutional buildings—the American Museum of Natural History, schools and hospitals, churches and a synagogue—and a few lesser apartment houses filled in all the empty spaces along the west bank of extrawide Central Park West and combined to give the street a special character that set it apart from the other avenues of the West Side.
In 1895, just as the frenzy of row-house building subsided, the New York Times consecrated the entire western district as “Itself a Great City” in the headline over a boosterish story that sprawled over three pages of the newspaper, touting the new neighborhood as a “model community” with “pure air and perfect sanitary conditions surrounded by pleasure grounds, crossed by fine boulevards and wide streets lined with artistic buildings.” In the years since the opening of the Dakota, $200 million worth of buildings had been erected in a burst of progressive development. The new residents of the area were, the Times continued, cultured and refined. The announcement that Columbia College would soon build a campus near the West Side’s northern end seemed to ensure that the young and the intelligentsia would become a permanent part of the new community. Businesses from banks to yacht clubs moved in, and the price of row houses rose steeply, from an average $15,000 in 1890 to $64,000 a dozen years later. By then, row houses were so expensive they would rarely be built again.
Even the Boulevard came alive at last with apartment houses, hotels, an armory, and many churches. Briefly, at the turn of the century, when its name was changed again, it even appeared that this new, uptown extension of Broadway would become the long-promised grand boulevard. The arrival of the first New York subway had proved a watershed. Underground rapid transit had first become a reality in London in 1863. An underground rail line running up Broadway was approved in the last years of the nineteenth century, with its first section opening in 1904 and the whole finished in 1908. Subways spread throughout the city, and the new Broadway was finally connected to the downtown business district.
In 1897, building laws changed, allowing apartment houses to rise to twelve stories and 150 feet, and in 1901, changed again; multiunit residential buildings of those heights were henceforth only allowed on broad avenues such as Broadway and Central Park West. The Dorilton, a twelve-story rental apartment house that was, depending on one’s taste, either garish or exuberant in its overdesigned beaux arts ornamentation, opened on Broadway in 1902. The next year, at Broadway and Seventy-Third Street, the eighteen-story Ansonia Hotel, another extravagant beaux-arts-style building, began accepting guests and was an instant hit with the culturati, attracting the likes of Enrico Caruso, Florenz Ziegfeld, and Fyodor Chaliapin.
By that time, Central Park West above Sixty-Seventh Street was almost entirely built-up. The American Museum finished its stately new façade along Seventy-Seventh Street in 1900. A few years later, the New-York Historical Society would erect the central section of its library and museum facing the park. The next residential building on the avenue, the El Dorado (a name alternately rendered, sometimes in a single document, as Eldorado), filled the block between Ninetieth and Ninety-First Streets and was touted by the Times as “the most notable apartment house on Central Park” when it opened in 1902. “Central Park West is given over to them that live in apartment houses,” the architecture critic Montgomery Schuyler observed in 1902. “For the two miles, almost, from Seventy-second to One Hundred and Tenth, the frontage of the park is an almost continuous row of apartment houses.”
Soon after, the last two empty lots above Sixty-Sixth Street were filled by the only buildings large enough to bear comparison to the Dakota for years to follow, the Langham, a 1905 rental a block to the north, with an ornate lobby, a conveyor system to deliver mail, and a built-in vacuum-cleaning system; and the St. Urban, on the south corner of Eighty-Ninth Street, its French Second Empire design and mansard roof over dormer windows reflecting the lingering notion that apartment living was a little foreign and outré, if now certifiably chic. At Sixty-Fifth Street, the Prasada, another mansard-roofed Second Empire–style confection, opened in 1907 with a Palm Room topped by a barrel-vaulted skylight in its lobby. The main rooms in the Prasada’s apartments were designed to be opened and combined for entertaining—an innovation that other architects would soon follow.
When grand apartment houses finally came to the East Side a few years later (at 998 Fifth), they reflected the luxurious style of pioneering West Side builders from the Dakota’s Edward Clark to the St. Urban’s tragic Peter Banner, who defaulted on his mortgage and was paralyzed before going bankrupt in 1906. Banner had, for instance, separated public from private rooms and added such luxurious accoutrements as parquet floors, custom hardware, paneled walls, built-in safes, in-apartment ice makers, and private basement storage rooms. But East Side buildings tended to be restrained in design and, instead of the colorful names given to apartment houses across town, were typically known only by their street address. A good part of 15CPW’s success can be attributed to its adoption of these elements of East Side style on its more offbeat side of town.
Between 1903 and 1919, six studio buildings were erected on Sixty-Seventh Street off Central Park West, the grandest of which was the Hotel des Artistes in 1914. Not actually a hotel, but rather a cooperative with hotel services, it harkened back to the original nineteenth-century co-op concept and was created by and for artists (albeit prosperous ones), who wanted to combine double-height studios that had northern light with spaces suitable for living and entertaining. The seventeen-story Gothic building attracted buyers with a central kitchen, restaurant, full staff of housekeepers, squash courts, a basement swimming pool, rooftop skating rink, theater, and ballroom (the last two are now part of the ABC Televis
ion studio complex next door). Over the years, it became home to artists Howard Chandler Christy and Norman Rockwell, the dancer Isadora Duncan, screen star Rudolph Valentino, the writer Alexander Woollcott, and the virtuoso polymath Noël Coward.
Following his 1901 success with the Graham Court Apartments at Seventh Avenue and 116th Street, a palazzo with a lavish interior courtyard like the Dakota’s, William Waldorf Astor, the expatriate son of John Jacob Astor III, erected another, far larger courtyard-equipped apartment house in 1908 on land acquired almost fifty years earlier by his uncle William Backhouse Astor. The Apthorp, as he called it, bore the name of one of the neighborhood’s colonial-era residents and occupied an entire block at Broadway and Seventy-Ninth Street. A year later, another developer erected the Belnord at Eighty-Sixth and Broadway, boasting an interior courtyard touted as the world’s largest. Both would inspire Robert A. M. Stern’s design for the gated motor court at 15CPW.
In 1909, the architectural team of Herbert Spencer Harde and R. Thomas Short (fresh from their triumph creating the most expensive rental building in Manhattan, Alwyn Court, a François I–style fantasia totally covered in terra-cotta ornamentation and boasting two fourteen-room apartments per floor), announced plans for 44 West Seventy-Seventh Street. Across the street from the south side of the Museum of Natural History, their cooperative packaged food service (as at the Dakota, but supplied by a restaurant next door) and double-height studios like the Hotel des Artistes in a hybrid Gothic-Tudor-style wrapping.
Early in 1915, the wryly named Ye Olde Settlers Association of Ye West Side held its fifth-annual dinner at the Hotel Majestic. Homeowners whose local roots dated back to the era of gentlemen’s farms, river-view mansions, and horse-drawn trolleys gathered to indulge in nostalgia and celebrate the changes that had raised the West Side’s profile and the profits that flowed from its development. Their dinner menus traditionally featured before-and-after neighborhood photos, and that year’s contrasted the onetime home of Mayor Fernando Wood on Broadway at Seventy-Sixth Street with its replacement, another apartment block built and owned by Astor. A reporter covering the dinner drew the obvious conclusion: “Not only the west side, but every section of the city, has virtually been made over within a startlingly short period.” But then, America entered the World War and the building boom that had remade the city was over. There would be no more steel to build skyscrapers until the war ended.
The intersection where Eighth Avenue and the Bloomingdale Road crossed Fifty-Ninth Street was formally laid out and named the Grand Circle in 1869, according to Frederick Law Olmsted’s plan for a significant circular gateway to Central Park. It was renamed Columbus Circle in 1892 after Italian Americans donated an eighty-foot column of Carrera marble to be placed at its center and, two years later, Gaetano Russo’s statue of Christopher Columbus was placed atop the column. But it and the blocks just above it were not beneficiaries of the extreme residential makeover of the West Side in the early 1900s.
Directly above Columbus Circle were the lots on which 15CPW now stands, all of which changed hands repeatedly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Until 1902, there was nothing at all on the Broadway side of the block and just a small, one-story, wooden structure on Sixty-Second Street. It was otherwise vacant. The corner of Broadway and Sixty-First Street had long belonged to the Methodist Church, then passed to Jeremiah Campion, a merchant turned mortgage banker and real estate investor. On his death in 1916, it was left to his children, who held on to it for two more decades. Campion also owned an adjacent lot on Sixty-First Street, which he sold in 1889 to Amos Eno, who also bought another lot on the block.
Born poor, Eno had gone from store clerk to store owner to real estate investor just before the Civil War. He built the Fifth Avenue Hotel on a block he owned that faced Madison Square. He also owned the narrow triangle of land nearby now occupied by the iconic Flatiron Building and accumulated a fortune of $25 million, the equivalent of $641 million today, before he died in 1898 and his properties were auctioned off.
Eno’s midblock lot was sold to Ella Virginia von Echtzel Wendell, a recluse with a family fortune inherited from a fur trader who decreed on his deathbed that his descendants should “buy, but never sell, New York real estate.” Three generations later, Ella was one of six sisters and a brother dedicated to preserving a $100 million fortune. Dominated by their brother, who was obsessed with the family legacy, only one of the sisters ever married. When another briefly escaped, at age fifty, for a rare night on the town, her brother had her committed and declared insane. Sister Mary married late in life, but all the Wendells lived in a mansion at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-Ninth Street, and its rooms were slowly closed up as the siblings died, until it became a spooky tourist attraction known as “the house of mystery.” When Ella, the last of the Wendells, died in 1931, it was still illuminated with gaslights. A telephone had been installed only when Ella was on her deathbed.
Her lot on Sixty-First Street was transferred, according to that ancestral injunction, to the Wendell Foundation. Meantime, another building next door was sold several times before it was rented in 1924 to Selznick Distributing, a movie-distribution firm formed by Myron Selznick just after the bankruptcy of Select Pictures, the studio he’d run for a decade with his brothers Louis and David. David O. Selznick had left for Hollywood, where he became a legendary movie producer. In 1929, their building was sold to Trebuhs Realty. Trebuhs, which is Shubert spelled backward, was owned by the family of producers that established Times Square and Broadway as the American theater’s center of gravity. In 1970, the Shuberts would also acquire 1880 Broadway at Sixty-Second Street, once briefly owned by Mayor Fernando Wood and later by the Wendell Foundation, which transferred it to the Jewish Guild for the Blind in 1943.
Before World War I, ground-floor space in most of the buildings around Broadway south of Fifty-Seventh Street were leased out to automobile dealers such as Cadillac, Stutz, Cutting Larson, and DeSoto. After the war, that “automobile row” stretched north into and past Columbus Circle. Car culture would define the district’s street-level image for years to come. It displaced a smaller version of the restaurant and theater district in today’s Times Square just north of Fifty-Seventh Street.
With the June 1887 opening of the New Central Park Garden, a summertime concert space on the triangular block where Broadway and Central Park West diverge, Columbus Circle had briefly come alive as an entertainment zone. Orchestras entertained and drinks were served on what had been an outdoor ice-skating rink. A review of the Garden’s opening noted that the land was still thought “isolated.” By November, the Garden was kaput and plans were filed to turn it into a riding ring with stables on Sixty-First Street. Durland’s Riding Academy opened in February 1887, with a party attended by three thousand guests and three hundred horses.
Durland’s was still operating a decade later when the New York Tribune reported rumors that a syndicate was considering leasing the block for a circus. Even after that plan fell through, attempts continued to turn the Grand Circle into an entertainment hub to rival Longacre Square. Columbus Circle was a natural link in the chain of uptown growth that had led from Union Square to Madison, Herald, Longacre (now Times), and Greeley Squares and would eventually end, decades later, at Lincoln Center.
William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper baron, was the next up to bat. He already owned a small piece of land at the circle’s southern end, purchased in 1895 as a home for his first New York newspaper, the New York Journal. But it proved too small and he’d simply held it. In 1903, he headed a group that opened a theater on the west side of Columbus Circle as a legitimate theater. Called the Majestic, it was unrelated to the hotel a dozen blocks uptown and was the site of the debuts of The Wizard of Oz and Babes in Toyland. But by 1908, it had failed and become a movie theater. Wags dismissed its location as the Arctic Circle, a far-off place where legitimate theater was guaranteed a cold reception.
Still, in the years after it and Pabst’
s Grand Circle Palm Garden joined Faust’s beer hall and Reisenweber’s restaurant and cabaret (home of Sophie Tucker, the Red Hot Mama) on that block, the circle finally became a destination, luring others in show business to the north—and East Side swells to the west. Renamed the Park, the theater hosted the American premiere of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion in 1914. In “May Day,” his first novelette, published in 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald described the scene at 4:00 a.m. at Childs’, a Columbus Circle cafeteria filled with “a noisy medley of chorus girls, college boys, debutantes, rakes, filles de joie—a not unrepresentative mixture of the gayest of Broadway, and even of Fifth Avenue.”
Fifth Avenue types had by then been eyeing the circle for some time. In 1905, a theatrical impresario, Heinrich Conrad, announced the formation of a syndicate of wealthy men to back his plan to build a National Theater, as he called it, on Central Park West between Sixty-Second and Sixty-Third Streets, where he planned to produce both opera and theater. For $100,000, subscribers would each get perpetual rights to one of thirty boxes in an elite social horseshoe overlooking the stage. Rechristened the New Theater, Conrad’s building, designed by Carrère and Hastings, opened in 1908. Despite backing from Otto Kahn, J. Pierpont Morgan, John Jacob Astor III, Harry Payne Whitney, August Belmont, and several Vanderbilts, it lost $400,000 in its first two seasons; bad acoustics, high operating expenses, and the unfashionable location were all blamed for its failure.
Finally, it was leased to other theater managers, who rechristened it the Century Theater. But not even Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Stravinsky’s American debut of Firebird, a basement nightclub run by the speakeasy queen Texas Guinan, or a Midnight Frolic review mounted in a rooftop cabaret by the famous showman Florenz Ziegfeld (and briefly, George Gershwin as rehearsal pianist) could save it. Prohibition would finally force the closure of the Century’s roof garden, as well as Reisenweber’s, with its Paradise Room and Viennese Four Hundred Club, all run by the same owner. Though the Century held on under the ownership of the Shuberts, by 1929 it was well past the prime it had never really had.
House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World’s Most Powerful Address Page 4