Emery Roth's 1924 Hotel Whitby - 325 West 45th Street

image via caldwellbankerhomes.com

Developers and contractors Bing & Bing often worked with architect Emery Roth.  Separately and together, they were among the most influential apartment building developers and architects in New York City in early 20th century.  In 1923, Bing & Bing, in cooperation with Gresham Realty Company (of which Alexander Bing was head), acquired the old buildings at 325 through 329 West 45th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues.  The firm hired Emery Roth to design a ten-story residential hotel on the site.  (Although tenants of residential hotels had long leases, like apartment buildings, they enjoyed the amenities of transient hotels, like maid service.)  

Completed in 1924, the Hotel Whitby was faced in beige brick and trimmed in limestone.  Roth's U-shaped, tripartite Renaissance Revival-style design placed the entrance deeply and dramatically recessed between the main wings.  Double-height stone architraves with large, full-relief daisy-like rosettes in their spandrels lined up along the base and decorative piers with sweeping volutes flanked the entrance.

The spartan, six-story midsection was sandwiched between intermediate cornices.  The top section featured double-height, Renaissance-inspired arches that framed stacked pairs of openings, each separated by Scamozzi columns.

The Hotel Whitby attracted artistic residents early on.  Among the initial tenants was silent film critic for The New York Herald Tribune, Harriett Underhill.  Beginning her career shortly after her marriage at the age of 16, she played minor parts on the stage and in road shows.  She was a chorus girl in the original Floradora company.  She joined the The Herald Tribune in 1908.

Also living in the Hotel Whitby at the time were artist Carl Wuermer, singer Ivan Alexis, and writer Mary Margaret McBride.  Born in 1899, McBride contributed articles to periodicals like Liberty, Pictorial Review and Delineator, and was the author of Jazz and Charm.  She would become the host of a radio interview show that lasted more than four decades.

Ivan Alexis was, in fact, the stage name of Ivan Alexievitch Romanoff, a nephew of the late Grand Duke Nicholas and the son of Prince Nicholas Feodorovitch Romanoff, a former attaché of the late Tsar.  He came to New York City in 1921 for "training his voice for grand opera," according to The New York Times.  In January 1929 the 27-year-old basso was appearing in The Red Robe.  After the performance one night, he stopped into Joe Ward's Uptown Club on West 125th Street where Evelyn Nesbit was conducting a revue.

Nesbit had been a central figure in the murder of architect Stanford White by her husband, Harry Thaw in 1906.  She was now married to Jack Clifford, her former dancing partner.  On February 6, 1929, three weeks after Alexis walked into the cafe, Evelyn Nesbit announced their engagement to reporters. 

"I am still the wife of Jack Clifford," she said, "but I expect to get my divorce in New Jersey very soon.  I vowed I would never marry again, but this is a real love affair, and when I get my divorce I shall become Princess Evelyn."

Alexis was no doubt well acquainted with another resident, William J. Guard, who had been the press agent for the Metropolitan Opera Company since 1910.  A widower, he was described by The New York Times as "one of the most colorful and familiar figures in musical circles."  Born in Ireland in 1862, he had been involved in the opera long before joining the Metropolitan Opera.  He downplayed his importance to those he represented.  "Hammerstein never needed a press agent, and Gatti-Casazza doesn't need one either," he once said.  Nevertheless, he made stars of rising singers.

On February 25, 1932, Guard suffered a heart attack.  A week later, on the night of March 3, he died in his apartment in the Hotel Whitby.  Within 30 minutes, the moving electric bulletin on Times Square notified crowds as they left the theaters.

Guard donated his body to a medical school for dissection.  He bequeathed his estate to a niece, Marguerite McAllister Taneyhill with one stipulation.  If his cousin Lorna Barrett Hall "learns shorthand and typewriting and can prove herself self-supporting," said his will, she would inherit one-third of the estate.

Former vaudeville entertainer Frank Wallace lived here as early as 1935.  In April that year, he wrote to Register of Deeds George A. Bowman saying:

Kindly advise me of proper steps necessary to obtain a photostatic copy of my marriage license to Mae West April 11, 1911.  Let me know what evidence or information you require.

Wallace told a reporter from the Associated Press that he had not publicized his marriage to the famous actress through the years "because I didn't want to pull Mae down."  But recently he read an article in which "Miss West told at length her reasons for remaining a spinster."  Wallace said that when he saw the article, "it was like a great light dawning and I saw no reason to deny it any longer."  The Racine Journal-Times quoted him on May 2 saying, "Everybody who knows me on Broadway believes I was Mae West's husband.  Why, Wall street is betting 4 to 1 on me."

Frank Wallace and Mae West in 1911.  (copyright expired)

More than two years later, on July 7, 1937, The New York Times reported, "Mae West, screen actress, admitted for the first time today that on April 11, 1911, she was married to Frank Wallace, former New York vaudeville performer."  The star was forced into the admission in order to fight Wallace's attempt "to establish a community property interest in Miss West's holdings."  West finally obtained a divorce on May 7, 1943.

Grover Cleveland Alexander lived in the Hotel Whitby by 1941.  Born in 1887, he was known to baseball fans as "Old Pete" and "Alexander the Great."  The former pitcher was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1938.   

Grover Cleveland Alexander in 1915 while playing with the Philadelphia Phillies (copyright expired)

Fame did not translate to fortune, however.  After he was found on the sidewalk on Sixth Avenue at 39th Street with a cut above his left eye on August 25, 1941, The New York Times remarked that he "has been appearing in a sideshow in a West Forty-second Street amusement hall.  A New York morning newspaper has been raising a fund for his benefit."  (Alexander would be played by future President Ronald Reagan in the 1952 film The Winning Team.)

Actor, director and producer Clarence Derwent, who was born in England, was president of the Actors Equity Association in 1949.  He left his apartment in the Hotel Whitby that year with 14 other actors to perform for United States troops in Germany.  Upon his return on August 17, he was detained by immigration officials at La Guardia Airport.  He was heatedly questioned about any affiliation with the Communist Party.  Back in his apartment, he told a reporter, "It was a surprising end to what has been a wonderful, exciting trip.  I repeatedly asked whether there was anything I was charged with or accused of and I got no answer of any kind."

Clarence Derwent, from the collection of the New York Public Library

Four years earlier Derwent had established the annual Clarence Derwent Awards "for the best performers in supporting roles."  He was the president of the Dramatic Workshop and Technical Institute and established a two-year scholarship to the facility in 1952.  He published his autobiography, The Derwent Story in 1954.

In the summer of 1959, Clarence Derwent was in rehearsals for the NBC television show The House on High Street.  When he did not show up at the studio on August 6 and friends could not reach him, the Hotel Whitby's manager used a pass key to enter the apartment and found him dead of natural causes.

Other thespian residents in the 1950s were singer and actress Lillian Boardman Smith, known on stage as Lillian Boardman; and her actor husband Howard Smith.   Lillian began her career in revues and in vaudeville.  Although she retired in 1930 after marrying Smith, he continued to act.  In 1953 he appeared in A Red Rainbow on Broadway.

Among the tenants in the building in the 1970s were actor and director Fred Stewart, a co-founder of the Actors Studio; character actor Joe E. Marks, best known perhaps for his portrayal of Pappy Yokum in the stage and screen versions of Li'l Abner; and dramatic actress Grania O'Malley, widow of William Dunham, her former vaudeville partner.  Also here in the 1970s were husband and wife actors Nina Olivette and Harry Stockwell.   (Stockwell was the father of actors Dean and Guy Stockwell.)

Joe E. Marks in his role as Pappy Yokum.  from the collection of the New York Public Library.

In 1988, the owner of the Whitby began selling the 200 apartments as cooperatives.  Writing in The New York Times on January 4, 1988, Elizabeth Neuffer explained, "Should 15 percent of the apartments be sold by summer, the entire building would go co-op."  The residents were fearful, she said, that it would alter "its affordability and its bonhomie."

"The Whitby, its residents say, is not just any apartment building."  Neuffer wrote, "Since 1923 [sic] it has been home to generations of struggling chorus girls, traveling jazz musicians, theater stars and fresh-faced Broadway hopefuls.  Whitby lore has it that Doris Day lived there, as did Betty Grable, and even today, the Whitby's apartment directory--if it had one--would read like a Stagebill."  (Incidentally, there is no firm evidence that either Day or Grable lived here.)

The conversion from residential hotel to cooperative apartments was finalized that year.  Twenty-four years later, The New York Times journalist Matt A. V. Chaban returned to see what the change had made.  The title of his article said much:  "At 90, Still a Haven for Broadway Performers."

The result, Chaban found, was "rather than being a haven for struggling artists, the building is now much more a home for successful ones."  Still living here since 1983 was rehearsal pianist Paul Ford, "a frequent Stephen Sonheim collaborator," according to Chaban.  Other residents at the time were dancer Michael Apuzzo, who performed with the Paul Taylor Dance Company; and actor Austin Colyer, whose Broadway shows included Singin' In the Rain, I remember Mama and Pal Joey.  (Colyer would die in his apartment here on June 25, 2015 at the age of 84.)

photograph by Michael Bednarek

Well maintained, The Whitby survives not only as a handsome example of Emery Roth-designed works, but an important part of New York theatrical history.

many thanks to reader "Fat Al NYC" for suggesting this post