Emery Roth's 1925 310 West End Avenue

 

Emery Roth is perhaps best known for his sophisticated Art Deco style apartment buildings.  But in 1924, when he was hired by the 310 Corporation to design a 15-story structure at the southeast corner of West End Avenue and West 75th Street, he turned instead to the Italian Renaissance for inspiration.  Completed the following year, the building was clad in brown brick and trimmed in stone and terra cotta.  

The two-story entrance framework included crown-capped Renaissance style shields, elaborate capitals, decorative finials, and a complex carved frieze that included portrait rondels.  Other romantic details were stone balconettes at the 13th floor that supported double-height arcades.

An advertisement in The New York Times on May 20, 1925 stressed the "oversize" apartments, saying that a five-room apartment was "equal to a splendid 6-room suite."  The apartments, said the ad, were "built to an ideal" with "spaciousness the keynote."  A five-room apartment included two bedrooms, a dining alcove, foyer, "five large closets," two baths and a servant's room.  The ad noted each apartment had a separate delivery entrance.  There were also 3- and 4-room apartments available.  Rents for a five-room unit ranged from $2,800 to $3,400 a year--equal to about $4,525 per month for the most expensive in 2024 terms.

Among the early tenants was actress Anna Laughlin Monroe, known to theater audiences nationwide as Anna Laughlin.  On April 6, 1937, the Springfield [Missouri] Leader and Press commented that she lived "in a richly-furnished apartment on West End avenue."

Born in Sacramento California in 1885, Laughlin began appearing on stage as a child.  In 1902, at the age of 16, she was cast in the role of Dorothy Gale in the new play The Wizard of Oz, which opened in Chicago and played on Broadway through 1904.  The Associated Press called her "the toast of Broadway when Fred Stone was doing his scarecrow dance in the 'Wizard of Oz'." 

In 1904, a diamond merchant named Dwight "Van" Monroe saw Laughlin on stage and was smitten.  "Every night for four weeks he bought a ticket--an aisle seat on the fourth row--to hear Anna Laughlin sing 'Rosalie'," recalled the Associated Press in 1937.  The couple was married in 1906 and had a daughter, Lucy.

Anna Laughlin appeared in 18 silent films between 1913 and 1915, and following her husband's death in 1925, she returned to Broadway in The Fall Guy, after which her theatrical career came to an end.

Anna Laughlin, from the collection of the New York Public Library.

In the meantime, Lucy Monroe had taken over the spotlight.  Anna had encouraged her daughter's musical ambitions and in 1925 Lucy joined the Ziegfield Follies.  By the time her mother moved into 310 West End Avenue, she was known nationally as a singer.  Her stellar career drove a wedge between her and her mother, and eventually led to Anna Laughlin Monroe's death.

On April 5, 1937, Anna wrote a long, accusatory note that read:

This is goodbye.  People are dreadful.  I love my child.  I have given all I have in the world to put her where she is now.  She has gone.  This is a suddenly strange place.  I want her.  I ask my God from heaven--let me in.

Lucy is never coming back.  Where did I fail?  What is wrong?  She does not know what she is doing.

I had intended to sublet, but no one came.

Oh, I hate to dim out the light and turn my back upon all the things so dear to my heart.  Forgive me, dear God.  We were so eager to see things together, but my darling daughter has forsaken me.  Please, Heavenly Father, watch over my child and protect her.

She then pulled a kitchen chair up to the range, opened all the gas jets and placed her head in the oven.  She was found dead later that day.

The building continued to attract well-heeled tenants through the Depression and World War II years.  On August 25, 1941, for instance, the New York Sun reported that John Wershing had taken an apartment "of five rooms and two baths," noting he was the "owner of a sugar plantation in Puerto Rico."  Living here at the time were David Zimmern and his wife, the former Sadie Goodstein.  A retired diamond importer, he had been a partner in Zimmern, Rees & Co. for six decades.

Joseph Hunt Bourland was born in Clarendon, Texas on January 31, 1911.  After graduating from Texas A. and M., he entered the Naval Academy.  He and his wife, Gertrude, lived here when the United States entered World War II and Bourland, now a Lieutenant Commander, was called to action.

On July 30, 1943, the 1,525-ton submarine Runner was commissioned with Bourland assigned as the skipper of its 65-man crew.  Gertrude Bourland received the worse imaginable news three months later.  On October 27, 1943, The Times Record reported, "The Navy today announced the loss of the submarine Runner, presumably in the Pacific."

The second half of the century saw an influx of residents involved in the arts.  Amy Zahl, who lived in apartment 12C, had a long-term houseguest in writer Adele Wiseman from September 1960 through June 1961, according to Ruth Panofsky's The Force of Vocation.  Born in 1928 in Canada, Wiseman's first novel, The Sacrifice, was published in 1950.  While living here she wrote "Duel in the Kitchen," a short story published in Maclean's magazine in January 1961.

According to Kate Bassett in her 2014 In Two Minds: A Biography of Jonathan Miller, British theatrical director, actor and author Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller and his wife, Rachel Collet, rented an apartment here while living in New York City in 1964 while Miller directed Robert Lowell's The Old Glory at the American Place Theatre.

By 1967, the year that 310 West End Avenue was converted to a cooperative, artist and sculptor Clara Shainess lived here.  Born in 1896, she was known for her geometric abstractions.  Listed in Who's Who of American Women and Who's Who in American Art, her work was exhibited at the 1939 World's Fair, and in gallery exhibitions for decades.

Ronald Steven Lauder and his wife, the former Jo Carole Knopf, were residents starting around 1987.  Born in 1944, Ron Lauder was one of two sons of Estée and Joseph Lauder and an heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics company.  He was, more importantly, a politician and activist.

In 1984, he was made Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Policy at the Department of Defense.  Two years later, President Ronald Reagan appointed him U.S. Ambassador to Australia.  After leaving that position in 1987, he returned to New York City.  While living here in 1989, he ran for mayor of New York City, losing to Rudy Giuliani.

Emery Roth's staid brown brick building is little changed since it opened in the spring of 1925.

photographs by the author