Real estate developer James Carlew erected five sumptuous, 25-foot-wide townhouses on West 76th Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue in 1898-99. Designed by Cleverdon & Putzel, each of the residences cost Carlew $40,000 each to construct, or about $1.6 million in 2026 terms.
Faced in limestone, 24 West 76th Street was, like the others, four stories tall above an English basement. Cleverdon & Putzel splashed its Renaissance Revival design with Beaux Arts details, like frothy cartouches above the parlor floors. A dog-legged box stoop rose to a columned portico. The bowed second floor oriel was fronted by a stone balcony and crowned by a tiara of balustrades. The fully arched windows of the third floor sat within square-headed architraves, and the piers that flanked the fourth floor openings were intricately carved with Renaissance inspired decorations.
James Carlew sold the house to Henry Schwarzwalder and his wife, the former Louisa Finck. Louisa was Henry's second wife. He married Alice Finck (Louisa's sister) in 1877. She died shortly after the birth of their daughter, Amelia, and Henry then married Louisa. They had a daughter, also named Louisa.
Born on May 26, 1853, Henry took over the operation of J. Schwarzwalder & Sons following his father's death. (His business partner, August Finck, was the brother of his wives.) By the time he purchased 24 West 76th Street, the firm was the largest maker of beer kegs in the United States. It operated two factories--in Hoboken, New Jersey and Louisville, Kentucky. Schwarzwalder personally held several patents for improved kegs and heavily invested in Manhattan real estate, much of it on the Upper West Side.
Louisa died at the age of 48 on October 18, 1909. Oddly enough, neither daughter was mentioned in her obituary. Louisa's funeral was held in the drawing room on the 20th.
In January 1914, Henry Schwarzwalder began construction of a country home at Shippan Point near Stamford, Connecticut. The two-story mansion cost the equivalent of $1.6 million today to construct. It is possible that Schwarzwalder never enjoyed his new summer home. He died in the West 76th Street mansion on May 10, 1915 at the age of 62.
Henry's eldest daughter, Alice, who was married to Conrad Stein by then, inherited the townhouse and the Connecticut property. The couple occupied 24 West 76th Street for two years. Then, on December 15, 1917, The New York Sun reported that Conrad purchased "the tall apartment house at 311 to 317 West Eighty-ninth street." As part payment, said the article, he gave the George Backer Construction Company the Shippan Point estate and "his dwelling at 24 West Seventy-sixth street...one of the fine dwellings remaining on the West Side."
In marketing 24 West 76th Street, the new owners described the former Schwarzwalder house as "a residence superb." The George Backer Construction Company initially used it as an investment property. In March 1918, for instance, Paul Schwartz leased the house.
Then, in April 1919, the firm sold it "to a buyer for occupancy," according to The Record & Guide. The purchasers were Reid Langdon Carr and his wife, the former Eleonora Fredericksen. The couple had been married three years earlier.
Born on October 20, 1880 in Cornwall, Vermont, Carr graduated from Middlebury College in 1901 and earned his law degree from New York Law School in 1903. He taught law in his alma mater until 1916 before entering the firm of Morgan & Seabury. Apparently indefatigable, he was president and a director of the Columbian Carbon Company, and a director of the Irving Trust Company, the Frederick H. Levey Company, the Appleton Century Company, the Interstate Natural Gas Company and the Mississippi River Fuel Company.
The Carrs' country estate was at Huntington, Long Island. They owned 24 West 76th Street until 1926 when they purchased 925 Fifth Avenue. Reid Langdon Carr would die in that mansion on October 7, 1948.
The new owners were Alexander Hayes Kridel and his wife, the former Irma L. Hernsheim. The couple were married on January 11, 1906 and had two children, Elinor and James Alexander.
Kridel was born in 1877 and studied at the College of the City of New York and abroad. He was a partner in J. Kridel, Sons & Co., commission merchants, founded by his father in 1870s. The Kridels maintained two country homes, one in Scarsdale, New York and another in Deal, New Jersey.
Elinor Kridel graduated from Vassar College in 1928. Shortly afterward, her parents announced her engagement to Leonard Henry Bernheim.
By the mid-1930s, the Isaac H. Levy family occupied 24 West 76th Street. But the end of the line for the mansion as a private home was near.
via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services
The early World War II years saw 24 West 76th Street operated as rented rooms. Evelyn Clayton Lewis rather scandalously shared a room here with Frederick "Fritz" Joubert Duquesne in 1941. (Frederick was known to other residents by the surname Dunn.) Evelyn, who was 24 years old, was an "artist, sculptress and playwright," according to The New York Sun.
Frederick, who was 64, listed his occupation as "writer and lecturer." Born in Cape Colony, South Africa, Duquesne was a naturalized citizen. But, according to J. Edgar Hoover, he had "served as a spy in the Boer War and in addition was active in behalf of the German interests" in World War I. During the latter conflict, Duquesne was arrested for insurance fraud and murder in the connection of the sinking of the British ship Tennyson. While confined in a cell at Bellevue Hospital in 1918, he escaped. Several years later, the charges were dropped.
As it turned out, Evelyn and Frederick's living arrangements had nothing to do with romance. On June 28, 1941, FBI agents stormed into their rooms here and arrested the pair for espionage. Two days later, The New York Times reported that their arrest--along with 25 other men and two women--had broken a German spy ring. The article said, "The most important of the prisoners was described by Mr. Hoover as Frederick Joubert Duquesne."
Frederick Joubert Duquesne's FBI mug shot.
Frederick Duquesne would serve 12 years in prison and Evelyn was sentenced to 18 months in Atlanta "for acting as a foreign agent."
Other residents of 24 West 76th Street were, expectedly, less notorious. Living here as early as 1947 was Chester Phillips, a World War II veteran and former Boy Scout. On February 3, 1948, The New York Times reported that he and six other veterans and former Boy Scouts had established a 13-1/2 acre Boy Scout camp upstate and provided a fund "to send needy youths" to the camp.
Retired customs attorney Hartford Beaumont and his wife, Alice, lived here by the late 1950s. Around 1911, he had began working on The American Tariff System, a compilation and index of legal cases. After working on the manuscript for half a century, on Beaumont's 90th birthday, August 18, 1961, he and his wife presented his 2,000-page volume to the United States Custom Service. Five months later, on January 23, 1962, The New York Times reported on Beaumont's death here.
British-born writer Nik Cohn lived here in the early 1980s. A magazine article he wrote in 1976 inspired the movie Saturday Night Fever. He earned less positive press on May 19, 1983 when a raid on his apartment resulted in the arrest of him and 18 others for operating a "drug ring that operated out of Mr. Cohn's Manhattan town house," according to The New York Times.
Although never officially converted to apartments, there are ten rental units in the building today. From the sidewalk, the former mansion looks much as it did in 1899 when the Schwarzwalder family moved in.
photographs by the author
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