West End Avenue & 77th Street

I was rewatching the beginning of PBS’s documentary on New York the other day (which by the way is pretty awesome – get it from the library), and the point kept getting hammered home that unlike the majority of early U.S. colonies, this city was founded to make money. From the very beginning it was a commercial venture by the Dutch West India Company, not a religious retreat, not an attempt at a new beginning. In fact the Company waited four years before even forming a religious congregation. In 1628 they met as the Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church, in the loft over a gristmill on South Williams Street. Their first building went up five years later, on Pearl Street, then the eastern shoreline of Manhattan. Today it’s the oldest continuous Protestant congregation in North America.

Though it’s not housed on Pearl Street anymore. The direct descendant of the original congregation is the Marble Collegiate Church, on Fifth Avenue and 29th Street. Up until 1871 the various Dutch Reformed Churches in Manhattan, all having sprung from the Collegiate Reformed, shared ministers and administrative duties in what was called the Collegium. Four churches, including Marble Collegiate, keep the Collegiate name today. The other three are Middle Collegiate, Fort Washington Collegiate, and West End Collegiate, on West End Avenue and 77th Street.

That particular church was finished in 1892, during the fifteen year period that saw the rapid development and urbanization of the Upper West Side. The church was built, appropriately enough, in a Flemish Renaissance style, modeled after the 1604 Vleeshal (or “meat-hall”) in the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands. The church stands next to the independent Collegiate School, a private K-12 boys school that claims to be the oldest school in the United States (although others claim it wasn’t an official entity until 1638, two years after Harvard University). The school itself traces its beginnings to 1628, when the first minister of the Dutch Reformed Church started teaching the catechism to Indian children. Now I don’t know, I’ve always personally been told that once you start teaching a brief summary of the basic principles of Christianity in question-and-answer form to Native American children – within city limits – well uh, you got yourselves a school there.

The block diagonally opposite the church is beautiful, as are a number of blocks that run between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive, in the West 70s. The earliest surviving buildings in the area date from 1885, marking the point when the Upper West Side finally began to catch up with its East Side counterpart in land development and housing construction. The completion of the Ninth Avenue Elevated in 1879 helped a lot, connecting the area to the rest of the city. Even more relevant to the far West Side was the creation, starting in the 1870s, of Riverside Park. Frederick Law Olmstead was the chief landscape architect – it was his decision to build Riverside Drive as an extension of the Park itself, following its contours. By the late 1890s the street, and those surrounding it, were full of large single family houses and was considered amongst the most attractive and fashionable residential districts in the city. Today the whole area marks some of the last row houses to have gone up in Manhattan. By the turn of the 20th century land value had risen so steeply that even wealthy New Yorkers could hardly afford the cost of a single family dwelling. In response, residential hotels and apartment buildings became popular and acceptable alternatives. By the 1920s many row houses on West End Avenue, some less than twenty years old, were being torn down to make way for these much larger apartment buildings.

So the ones that still survive are pretty awesome to look at. With so many houses going up so quickly, architects were left free to design in whatever style they desired. As such, you get a very eclectic mix – they were intentionally going against the uniform row house design of earlier decades.  The original idea, before development began, was that West End Avenue would be a commercial center, housing establishments to serve the residents of Riverside Drive.  That never came to pass, instead people wanted to live here.  Today I’d say it offers one of the best “urban canyon” views in the city, the flat facades of the taller buildings melding into one another as far as the eye can see, cut here and there with row houses.  It feels so permanent.  It also feels, perhaps because of that, like the part of town where grandmas and great uncles live, carving their tiny paths among the monoliths.

(Originally posted Oct. 30th, 2009 on Takethehandle.com)

Broadway & 73rd Street

Surprise! I’m back on to the rich folks people. I can’t help it; they seem to have built everything around here. And because they had a lot of money their stories were well recorded too. I can actually find out about them, these people who died decades before I was born, whose lives had absolutely nothing to do with mine. I don’t even know as much about my own great-grandparents (okay, maybe my own great-great-grandparents). It points towards one reason humans build giant houses and monuments — to make sure they are remembered, to have their names stuck on to something physical. And guess what? It works. So much of the history I learn is incidental. It’s because of what I see around me, and look into.

But guess what again? It’s all just a drop in the bucket isn’t it? Our lives I mean, who we’re actually going to touch in the long run. What’s even a thousand years, in the scheme of things, especially when you’re no longer living? But isn’t that inspiring? Really, I’m serious. When I read about someone who’s dead and gone, someone I never knew, I often get that faintest whiff of their life, the world they lived in and the way it thought. Just enough for me to think, “well huh, that’s how they did it. I guess I can do anything I want. I think I’ll try it this way.” Honestly, sometimes the assholes inspire me more than the good ones. They hammer home the fact it’s all a choice. It’s all a choice. Who do you do it for? That’s up to you. Who ultimately judges your life? Well I don’t know. Uh, me? No wait, my mother! Oh yeah, or nobody.

Or maybe yourself. I wonder how William Earl Dodge Stokes rated his own. He was the gentleman who financed and built the Ansonia Hotel as well as a lot of other property on the Upper West Side. He was born into a wealthy family in New York, the grandson of Anson Greene Phelps, co-founder of the Phelps, Dodge & Company mining business and the Ansonia Clock Company. And he seemed to be a bit of a bastard. When his father died in 1881 he contested the will and sued his brother, earning a million dollar inheritance out of the affair. Four years later he began building brownstones in the Upper West Side, at a time when it was still considered the Manhattan frontier, undeveloped and cut off from the rest of the city. It was his belief that Broadway, then called the Grand Boulevard above 59th Street, would become the premier thoroughfare in New York. He was a big player in getting the city to pave the road in 1889 (ahead of Fifth Avenue) and ten years later he opened his Ansonia at 73rd Street and Broadway, the “monster” of all NYC residential buildings.

By then he’d already been divorced from his teenage wife, with the cash settlement of 2 million dollars said to be a record for his day. He’d go on to marry a much younger tenant of the Ansonia years later, ending in another litigious divorce, but that was after being sued for child support by another woman and before being shot and wounded three times by a third. I feel like Daniel Day-Lewis probably wants very badly to play this guy in the biopic of his life. His style seemed to fit, or maybe set the tone for the Ansonia. Its ornate, Beaux Arts exterior was matched by an equally sumptuous inside, including the largest swimming pool in the world in its basement, sound-proof and fire-proof walls (he hated insurance companies and did without them) and steel pipes in the walls that pumped frozen brine in the summertime, keeping the building at a uniform 70 degrees. Oh, he also kept farm animals on the roof, until the Board of Health shut him down in 1907.

It makes sense then that, despite appearances, the Ansonia was never considered fashionable by New York’s elite. It was run as a residential hotel, with furnished apartments that tenants could check in and out of as they wished. It was tied early on with pro-athletes, musicians, gamblers, and various sundry and shady types. Babe Ruth lived here and supposedly liked to stroll the halls in his silken bathroom. Chick Gandil lived here too; it was in his room that the plan was made for the Chicago “Black Sox” to throw the 1919 World Series. The opera star Toscanini, and composers Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, and Mahler, all called it home as well. You get the idea: it was a rockin joint. A lot of names, a lot of personalities. And what are they to us now? Just stories really, right? Just moods. I feel like Babe Ruth today, strolling down the hallway. I feel like 1919. I’m going to stare up at this building. I’m going to snap my suspenders, stick my hands in my pockets, and say “shucks.” You wanna buy a paper mister?

(Originally posted June 5th, 2009 on Takethehandle.com)