Emery Roth's 1931 275 Central Park West

photo by Danifel

In the first years of the 20th century, upscale residence hotels and apartment buildings lined Central Park West.  In the 1920s, a wave of modernization swept the thoroughfare, replacing the dowager structures with modern apartment buildings.

Between 87th and 88th Streets were two seven-story residential hotels--the Minnewaska and the Mohonk.  Despite the crippling Depression, real estate developer Louis E. Kleban demolished them in 1930 and commissioned architect Emery Roth to design a replacement.  The 19-story structure was completed in 1931.  Faced in gray brick, Roth's nod to the Italian Renaissance was reserved.  The entrance sat within an imposing, double-height limestone frame.  Two paneled pilasters rose to a broken pediment that extended into the third floor.  Two faux balconies clung to the Central Park West facade at the eleventh floor.  Modest setbacks at the 16th floor resulted in corner pavilions.

image via streeteasy.com

On September 5, 1931, The New York Sun described the Art Deco buildings rising along Central Park West that "proclaim an unashamed modernity as to outward design and trim."  The article said, "The exception is the nineteen-story Kleban structure at 275 Central Park West, which asserts its difference by a facade and lobby definitely Georgian in design."  (Modern architectural historians would argue with the writer only regarding the style.)

Unlike most Upper West Side apartment buildings, Kleban did not give this one a name, following the lead of upscale structures on the opposite side of Central Park.  Apartments ranged from four rooms with two baths to seven rooms with four baths.  An advertisement called it, "an apartment masterpiece!" and touted, "mansion-sized rooms flooded with sunshine."  (That sunshine would pour into the vast casement windows Roth had designed.)  The ad smacked of snob appeal by saying, "every appointment breathes exclusiveness."

The New York Sun remarked, "A special feature is an 'economy type' apartment of five rooms, containing three master bedrooms, living room, kitchen and separate dinette measuring 10x14 feet."  Rent for the six- and seven-room apartments ranged from $2,500 to $3,200--or about $5,300 per month today for the more expensive.

Among the initial residents were Archibald and Estelle Roemer Gold and their six-year-old daughter, Carolyn.  According to The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, Gold was a "destitute, Yiddish-speaking child" when he had arrived in New York City from Russia around 1900.  Estelle was born in America, one of seven children to Austrian-Jewish parents.

The couple married in 1919--both 27 years old.  By then, Archibald Gold had become an accountant and partner in a brokerage firm.  The family relinquished their Jewish roots and became members of the Divine Science Church of the Healing Christ around the time they moved into 275 Central Park West.

Carolyn Gold attended Sunday school and was educated in a private girls preparatory school before entering Wellesley College.  She married James Heilbrun in 1945, earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1959 and went on to become a prolific academic feminist author under her real name, Caroline Gold Heilbrun, and of mystery novels under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross.

Carolyn Gold Heilbrun, from the collection of James Logan Courier archives.

Also among the original tenants were attorney Abraham Kaplan and Esther Helen Gilmore.  Kaplan was born in 1887 "in midocean," according to The New York Sun.  His wife had died in 1921.  It was possible that trips in the same elevator in the building sparked a romance.  On July 8, 1932, The Sun reported that the couple had been married that day.  

Living among the accountants, brokers and lawyers in the building in 1935 were newlyweds singer Connee Boswell and her manager-husband, Harry Leedy, a part-owner of Decca Records.  The couple was married on December 14, 1935.  Connee was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1907 and performed in the 1920s with her sisters, Martha and Helvetia (known as Vet) as The Boswell Sisters.  Harry Leedy was the manager of the trio.  Although the group was successful, making recordings and appearing in motion pictures, Martha and Vet disbanded the group around the time that Connee and Harry married.  

A month after Boswell's and Leedy's marriage, on January 12, 1936, the Washington D.C. Evening Star began an article saying, "Nothing like having a business manager in the family."  It explained that Connee Boswell "married hers" and they had "set up housekeeping up at 275 Central Park West."  Their honeymoon had to be postponed.  The Evening Star reported, "They bundled the groom up and hustled him to the hospital for an operation the day after he said, 'I do.'" 

Connee Boswell, from Kraft Music Hall program, 1941

Connee Boswell's solo career soared.  She became a co-star on NBC Radio's Kraft Music Hall in 1940 and had her own radio show, The Connee Boswell Show in 1944.  She sang in several motion pictures, including the 1934 Moulin Rouge, the 1937 films It's All Yours and Artists and Models, and the Swing Parade of 1946.  Unknown to most audiences was that Boswell was confined to a wheelchair, attributed either as the result of a bout of polio in childhood or a fall from a wagon.  Like the President at the time, Franklin D. Roosevelt, her disability was carefully disguised and she was often filmed sitting.

Among the Leedys' neighbors at 275 Central Park West were State Supreme Court Justice J. Sidney Bernstein and his wife, Ida.  Educated in Ontario, Canada, Bernstein obtained his law degree at New York University Law School.  He was a member of the State Assembly in 1905 and was appointed a supreme court judge in 1938.  In the first week of December 1943, he suffered a heart attack.  He died in the apartment a few days later on December 9 at the age of 66.

Resident Jacob M. Felson was born in Russia in 1886 and received his architectural training at Cooper Union, opening his office in 1910.  His choice of 275 Central Park West as his family's home is somewhat ironic.  Felson specialized in designing apartment buildings, including the 1938 Southmoor House three blocks to the south of 275 Central Park West.  

In May 1960, Clement Greenberg and Janice Van Horne moved into an apartment here.  An art critic and essayist, Greenberg was born in the Bronx in 1909.  He had worked as an editor for Partisan Review, the art critic of The Nation in 1942, and associate editor of Commentary from 1945 through 1956.  At the time of the couple's moving into 275 Central Park West, he was an influential figure in the modern art movement.

Actress Janice Van Horne, born in New York City, studied at the Actors Studio and appeared in many Off Off Broadway plays.  She co-founded and was editor-in-chief of Madison Avenue magazine in 1974.  

Clement Greenberg died on May 7, 1994.  Van Horne donated his extensive annotated library of exhibition catalogues and publications on artists to the Portland Art Museum.  She posthumously edited two of Greenberg's works, Homemade Esthetics and The Harold Letters.  She died in the couple's apartment on October 14, 2015.

By 1966, humorist, author and publisher Roger Price occupied an apartment in the building.  Born in Charleston, West Virginia in 1918, his education was far flung.  He graduated from the Greenbrier Military School in 1934, attended the University of Michigan from 1934 through 1936, and the American Academy of Art in Chicago in 1936 to 1938.  As a writer, he worked on the staff of The Bob Hope Show, and as an actor appeared in Tickets, Please! on Broadway in 1950.  He hosted the television panel show How To in 1951.

Price invented Droodles in 1953, described by him as "a borkley-looking sort of drawing that doesn't make any sense until you know the correct title."  It grew into a book in 1953, and a Droodles television game show in 1954.  In the 1960s, he opened the first New York art gallery expressly for cartoons.

Living here at the time were attorney George J. Mintzer and his wife, the former Shirley Rubin.  Born on the Lower East Side, Mintzer worked to pay for his tuition at Fordham Law School.  He was admitted to the bar in 1921 and appointed chief of the criminal division of the office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1926.  The New York Times would recall he, "prosecuted numerous loan sharks, gangs, counterfeiters, white-slave rings and drug smugglers and peddlers."  In 1975, he was appointed as a hearing officer by the Department of Justice to rule on certain conscientious-objector cases.

It might have been Mintzer's humble beginnings that prompted a highly publicized encounter with a waiter in the Hawaii Room of the Roosevelt Hotel that year.  He and Shirley had dinner there on August 20.  Afterward, Shirley ordered a cup of tea.  It arrived cold.  The replacement cup was no warmer.  The New York Times reported that when the third cup was "judged to be tepid, if not cold, [Mintzer's] patience snapped."

The 77-year-old attorney deducted $1.50 from his bill and paid the $14 tab, adding $2 for the tip on his credit card.  As he and Shirley left the restaurant, the manager stopped them and demanded the $1.50.  Mintzer (a veteran arbitrator) explained he would not pay for the unsatisfactory tea.  The manager threatened to call the police.  "Before I knew it, two cops were there and they arrested me," Mintzer told The New York Times.

In Criminal Court, Mintzer pointed out to Judge Milton Samorodin, "you don't pay for tea in a Chinese restaurant."  The manager, Ray Chen, countered that the restaurant was not Chinese, but Hawaiian and, "We charge for tea."  Samorodin considered the arguments, then ruled, "In the interest of justice, the case is dismissed."

The following year, on May 6, 1976, Mintzer died in his sleep.  In reporting his death, The New York Times recalled, "He was especially known for his largely successful adjudication of disputes, ranging from his role as impartial chairman of the ladies' garment workers industry to his arbitration of issues raised by laundry workers, blouse makers, longshoremen and printers."

image via northernarchitecturalsystems.com

Emery Roth's reserved design survives intact, including the all-important casement windows, sympathetically replaced in 2019 by Northern Architectural Systems.