photo by Lowell Cochran
Dowling's design for Regent House moved away from Art Moderne and towards Midcentury-Modern. Its spartan, yellow brick facade relied on its geometric shapes and complex casement windows for interest. The windows of the slightly-projecting central section wrapped the corners, and those of the set-backs were angled. Sleek metal railings protected the terraces of the upper floors. The design did not impress The New York Times architectural columnist Christopher Gray half a century later. On March 12, 2006, he described it as, "just a plain-vanilla box."
The complex windows are seen in this photograph of the newly-completed building. via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services.
Among the initial residents were journalist Cecil Broida Brown and his wife, the former Martha Leaine Kohn. Born in New Brighton, Pennsylvania in 1907, Brown graduated from Ohio State University in 1929. He and Martha were married in Rome, Italy in 1938 where, in 1940, he was hired by CBS as their Rome correspondent. That quickly ended when he criticized the Mussolini regime and was ousted from Italy.
In his Cecil Brown, The Murrow Boy Who Became Broadcasting's Crusader for Truth, Reed W. Smith writes that the Browns moved into "a penthouse apartment in a co-op complex at 25 West 54th Street, just north of the Museum of Modern Art."
Brown left CBS in 1943 after a heated disagreement with news director Paul White. On the air on August 25, Brown editorialized his newscast with the comment, "a good deal of the enthusiasm for this war is evaporating into thin air." White insisted on non-bias reporting, while Brown said he could not abide with the CBS policy of "non-opinionated" news.
Following the end of World War II, he worked as a correspondent for ABC and for NBC. While living here Brown wrote Suez to Singapore, Cecil Brown's Story, a retelling of the sinking of the HMS Repulse in December 1941. He and Martha left Regent House in 1967, moving to California to teach at Cal Poly Pomona.
On April 20, 1957, The New York Times reported, "A corporation formed by tenants in Regent House, a fourteen-story apartment building at 25 West Fifty-fourth Street, has purchased the property and will operated it on a cooperative basis."
Among the residents at the time was theatrical booking agent Charles Rapp. His business, The American Guild of Variety Artists, was in the Brill Building at 1650 Broadway. (The impressively named firm consisted of a single room and two employees.) He explained to the U.S. Congress Senate Committee on Government Operations in 1962, "I am primarily engaged in supplying entertainment to resort hotels in the Catskill Mountains." Indeed, he was. The New York Times later commented, "Mr. Rapp was considered the biggest one-man buyer and supplier of talent in the city...From July 1 to Labor Day, year after year, he booked all but a tiny fraction of the acts in the Borscht Belt."
Rapp started his career when he was 12. Aware that the son of his building's superintendent could sing and that a caterer (a friend of his father) needed entertainment one Saturday night, he introduced them. He divided his $10 fee with the singer.
Charles Rapp booked unknown singers, comedians, and dancers, many of whom went onto stardom. He discovered Jack E. Leonard, Buddy Hackett, Rip Taylor, Alan Kind, Jackie Mason and Henny Youngman among many others. Two of his clients, Red Buttons and Jan Murray, were working as social directors when he found them.
Among Rapp's neighbors in the building were attorney Sidney S. Bobbe and his wife, author Dorothie de Bear Bobbe. Born in 1895, Dorothie wrote historical works, including the 1929 Abigail Adams, the Second First Lady; Mr. and Mrs. John Quincy Adams, published in 1930; and her 1939 De Witt Clinton. She contributed articles to The New York Times Magazine and American Heritage.
Living here in the late 1970s was television host and journalist Ponchitte Pierce. Born in Chicago in 1942, she started her career as assistant editor of Ebony magazine. She first appeared on broadcast news in 1967 and in 1973 was made a special correspondent at CBS News.
Ponchitte became close friends with another resident, Megan Marshack. She was an aide to Nelson Rockefeller, whose office in the vintage rowhouse at 13 West 54th Street was just steps away. The two women were pulled into a nationwide scandal on January 26, 1979. At about 10:50 that night, Ponchitte received a panicked phone call from Marshack. Ponchitte told Jet magazine, "She told me that Governor Rockefeller had suffered a heart attack and she asked me to come immediately to 13 West 54th Street."
Pierce arrived to find her friend trying to perform mouth-t0-mouth on Rockefeller, who had suffered his heart attack during sex. Pierce said, "It seemed to me that the best thing I could do was call '911.'" She left immediately afterward and on the way to Regent House, "I saw a police car approaching and I directed the policeman to 13 West 54th Street." Craig Shirley, in his Citizen Newt, writes, "A longtime Rockefeller aide, Hugh Morrow, appeared and tried to assemble what was left of the old man's dignity before the paramedics, the police and the cream of the New York media showed up." According to Shirley, Marshack's apartment had been purchased by Rockefeller.
Ponchitte Pierce resided here as late as 1996 when she was included in Notable Black American Women.
Steven M. Kaufmann, who moved into Regent House when the building opened in 1939, was still here in 2004 when he died in his apartment in May at the age of 91. One of the most colorful residents in the building's history, he had retired at the age of 25. The New York Times journalist Cathy Horyn interviewed Kaufmann in his apartment earlier that year. She wrote,
Although I knew that name-dropping would be an inevitable part of a 90-year-old's memories, I was unprepared for what I heard: Gertrude Lawrence, Lena Horne, the 1950s star Ross Hunter, the grande dame Kitty Miller, the investor and art collector Jacques Sarlie, and Rock Hudson.
During the interview, Kauffmann motioned to a chair in his living room. It was legendary actress Greta Garbo's favorite spot when she visited. "She used to sit over in that chair," he mentioned.
Kaufmann shared the apartment with his partner of 19 years, Edward DeLuca. They met in an art gallery in 1985 when Kaufmann was 71 and DeLuca was 24. Kaufmann told Horyn, "That was the beginning of what I call the glorious years. All the events in my life cannot compare to what this relationship has meant to me."
William M. Dowling's windows have been replaced. The laudable attempt to honor the originals falls short. Nevertheless, the Regent House does not deserve the denigration of "just a plain vanilla box."
many thanks to reader Lowell Cochran for suggesting this post