The 1902 Thomas B. Clarke House - 22 East 35th Street

Thomas Benedict Clarke was successful as a banker and businessman, amassing a modest fortune by the last decades of the 19th century.  But his first love was art.

In 1892, he left the business world to open the “Art House” on 34th Street just east of Fifth Avenue.  From here he sold antique English furniture, Asian porcelains and Continental antiques to New York’s carriage trade.

In the meantime, he was assembling his own remarkable art collection. While millionaires were filling their Fifth Avenue mansions with European masterworks, Clarke focused on American paintings–the first major collector to do so.  In addition to early American portraits, he sought out the works of contemporary late 19th century artists such as the Hudson River School painters.

As Clarke’s high-quality accumulation of art, antique furniture and other valuable objects d’art grew, he needed a larger home in which to display the collection.  In 1901, he purchased a brownstone rowhouse at 22 East 35th Street in the fashionable Murray Hill section and called upon his close friend Stanford White to design a new home for the site.  White’s firm, McKim, Mead & White, was at the time the foremost architectural firm in the country.

Rather than raze the old building as Clarke intended, White preferred to alter it.  Performing what we would call today a “gut renovation,” the architect stripped off the façade, extended the rear portion, removed the interior walls and added a story–leaving only the side structural walls and the floors.  When he was done, he had provided Clarke with one of the most impressive and visually memorable homes in the city.

Completed in 1902, it was a five-story, neo-Georgian-style showplace of red and grey Flemish bond brick.  The entranceway was at street level, flanked by two Scamozzi pillars that supported a small balcony.  Above the entrance, an expansive, multi-paned oriel rose two stories, topped by a balcony with Georgian-style wrought iron railings.

The New York Sun described it as “an art home…a home absolutely unique, as beautiful as it is individualistic.  There is nothing like it in New York.”

While it’s proportions were overshadowed by the massive chateaux rising on upper Fifth Avenue, its elegance and airiness were unparalleled anywhere in the city.

Thomas Benedict Clarke lived with his wife, the former Fannie Eugenia Morrie, in their tasteful residence until his death on January 18, 1931.  In his home were 170 early American portraits, a collection that was deemed "the finest in the world in private ownership.”

The house sold by Clarke’s estate in 1938 to the Collectors Club of New York through the generous efforts of a member, Alfred Lichtenstein.  The club had been formed in 1896 by a group of gentlemen whose hobbies and interests were stamp collecting.  While in its early days, the club fell closely in line with other social men’s clubs.  But it soon distinguished itself.  The invitation to join described the club as a means to “gather... all the societies, all the auctions and all the philatelic interests of the city"

Endorsing its objective to “promote the hobby of philately and to provide a social, educational, and non-commercial setting for those interested in the subject,” it quickly became the one of the most esteemed such clubs in the country–later including among its honorary members Franklin D. Roosevelt and the 26th Earl of Crawford.

photo via The Collectors' Club

The club called upon member Clarence Brazer, an architect, to reconfigure the interiors to better suit its uses.  Brazer was both cautious and sympathetic in altering Stanford White’s designs, making a special point to preserve the interior staircase and stair hall.

Today the outward appearance of the Thomas Clarke house is unchanged and its interiors are sensitive to the originals.  The club’s enormous philatelic library--one of the world's largest and most comprehensive--includes more than 150,000 volumes for the free use of interested public.

photo via the Collectors' Club

NOTE:  The Collectors Club relocated around 2024.  The building is now home to Serbian Mission to the United Nations.

The Lost Mineral Water Pavilion of Central Park

As the Civil War was coming to an end, Calvert Vaux and his assistant architect Jacob Wrey Mould began working on designs for a Mineral Water Pavilion at the northwest edge of the Sheep Meadow. The pavilion had been petitioned by the owner of a mineral water company, Carl H. Schultz. New Yorkers still remembered the cholera epidemic of 1832 that took the lives of 3,515 citizens. Not only were mineral waters considered healthful, but a “spa” for dispensing the waters would attract visitors.

The Board of Health bulked at the idea, putting a temporary halt to the plans pending their investigation. Reaction from the medical community was swift. The New York Times reported on May 29, 1866 that “…we find advancing to the attack…all the principal professors and doctors of the City, in one solid phalanx, united and unbroken.” Indeed Drs. Schultz and Warker, in a letter to The Times, berated the Board.

photo via the New York City Department of Parks

“The recent action of the Board of Health in regard to the introduction of our artificial spring waters in the Park has, no doubt, greatly surprised the medical faculty of this City, who have so largely endorsed these waters as the most effective and simple means of keeping the digestive organs in a healthful condition, and as the most natural remedies in many affections of the digestive apparatus,” they wrote.

“Is it imaginable,” they asked, “that seltzers-water, the chief remedy in Asiatic cholera, the very milk of our mother earth, as it has been called by a distinguished writer, should be decreed as injurious in cholera times?”

The Board of Health, properly scolded, recanted their objections and the Mineral Water Pavilion went forward. Costing approximately $30,000, it was a Moorish, or “Saracenic,” fantasy. The tiered Oriental-style roof, ornately and colorfully patterned, sat above a colorful one-story wooden building with slender,  columns and arched windows.

from the collection of the New York Public Library

It was an immediate success. In July of 1869 The Times noted that “Thousands of people visit the springs early in the morning for the purpose of drinking the waters, and for recreation.” Residents nearby petitioned the Park Commissioners to have musical entertainment during the morning hours when most people took the water, the cost of which would be absorbed by Schultz.

The petition was approved and “The Schultz Band” began their recitals every morning during the summer months from 6:00 am through 8:00 am. According to contemporary reports the “spa,” as it was sometimes referred to, was especially popular with moneyed German Jewish immigrants.

Carl Schultz died in 1897 and Joseph Hoblitz took over the operation. By the 1920s however, the mineral springs were gone and Vaux and Mould’s exotic little building was a soft drink and candy shop.

from the collection of the New York Public Library

As with so many treasures of Central Park, the mid-20th century was unkind to the Pavilion and in 1957 it was demolished. One of Central Park’s most delightful architectural gems was lost forever.

The Flamboyant 1902 Dorilton - 171 West 71st Street

The Boulevard, as Broadway was called in the early days of the 20th century, promised great things to come. William Stoke’s elaborate Beaux Arts Ansonia apartment building was under construction at 73rd Street on the wide, spacious boulevard that evoked, at least in Stokes’ mind, the Champs Elysees of Paris.

Developer Hamilton M. Weed jumped on the French-inspired bandwagon, commissioning architects Elisha Harris Janes and Richard Leopold Leo to design a Beaux Arts concoction two blocks to the south at 71st Street. When completed in 1902, the Dorilton was an explosion of ornamentation.

It immediately drew the wrath of architectural critics for its overblown decoration.

Foremost among the building’s critics was Montgomery Schuyler of the Architectural Record. Never one to mince his words, Schuyler wrote “It not merely solicits but demands attention. It yells ‘Come and look at me' so loud that the preoccupied or even the color blind cannot choose but hear.”

He added “Everything shrieks to drown out everything else,” and “Motley elements set the sensitive spectator’s teeth on edge.”

Well-to-do apartment hunters were not swayed. Weed’s lavish building, which cost him $750,000, was quickly filled with socially-recognized names.

A year after opening, The New York Times reported that “Mrs. Hector H. Havemeyer of 171 West Seventy-first Street has cards out for Jan. 8 and 9.” Mrs. Havemeyer was, obviously, ready to receive callers. The society column later reported on Mrs. John Frank Dunham’s dinner party for Miss Marion Peckham of Pulaski, New York, listing the dinner guests and mentioning Mrs. Dunham’s “diamond ornaments.”

Millionaire Emil Wolff lived here until his death in 1918, leaving over $2 million to Jewish religious and educational charities.

The Dorilton had separate elevators for tenants and servants, French paneled rooms, filtered water and a facility to recharge tenants’ electric motorcars. But most of all, it had exterior flamboyance.

Huge statues of The Seasons stand above the fourth floor balustrade, sculptures of groaning, muscular titans support limestone and cast iron balconies, dripping brackets and vaguely Art Nouveau-inspired elements ooze from the façade. According to critic Carter B. Horsley “Although the Dorilton has not always been one of the city’s most prestigious residential addresses, it is one of the most spectacular architecturally.”

Most distinctive is the 71st Street entrance, a wide courtyard spanned by a connecting arch at the ninth floor. What Horsley calls “the most attractive entrance gate in the city” features sculpted cherubs, grand iron gates and colossal limestone columns surmounted by enormous globes. Schuyler disapproved of these, as well, saying they were “left there for titans to roll at ten pins.”

In time the matronly building suffered neglect. In the 1950s exterior elements were falling off. Entire dormers, wide sections of cornices, and other decorative components were either crumbling or gone entirely. By 1979 Paul Goldberger lamented “the sorry state of decay it has descended to.”

In 1984 the Dorilton was converted to a co-op. A year later residents began restoration efforts. More than a decade later the renovations continued: the mansard roof was re-slated, missing dormers and cresting were reproduced and a $1.5 million restoration of the roof was undertaken, headed by engineer, Robert Feuer. Interestingly, the missing 11th floor cornice was reproduced in trompe l’oeil – the empty wall painted by John Williams and John Wright Stephens to imitate the original.

As the flamboyant elegance of the building has re-emerged, modern critical appraisal is less harsh. In The AIA Guide To New York City Architecture, Elliot Willensky and Norval White call it a “cornice-copia.” And the 1983 book New York, 1900, Metropolitan Architecture and Urbanism 1890-1915 by Stern, Gilmartin and Massengale says “It was precisely the intricacy and the burly swagger of the Dorilton which was the source of its drama and expressed the optimism of the new century.”

In the sleek glass and steel environment of New York today, a little over-the-top, sugary ornamentation is a welcomed break.

historic photographs from the NYPL Collection

The 1924 Shelton Hotel -- 49th and Lexington

In the jazzy, early days of the 1920's James T. Lee had an idea – a big one. He envisioned an enormous bachelor hotel, as much a men’s club as a hotel. It would offer a swimming pool, solarium, pool rooms, squash courts – even an infirmary. When his vision was fulfilled it would encompass 1200 rooms.

Lee, the grandfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, commissioned architect Arthur Loomis Harmon to design his 34-story hotel at Lexington Avenue and 49th Street. Harmon, who would help design the Empire State Building a few years later, made visionary use of the city’s 1916 zoning law requiring setbacks on tall buildings to admit air and light to the streets below. It was the tallest hotel in the world when it opened in 1924. Architectural critics raved: this would be the benchmark for skyscrapers going forward.

The Hotel received awards from the Architectural League of New York and the American Institute of Architects.

Drawing on a mixture of styles and architectural periods – Romanesque, Lombard, Byzantine and a smattering of others – Harmon used roughened, irregular tan bricks to give the impression of a centuries-old structure. Even before it was completed, artist Hugh Ferriss depicted it in his 1922 “The Shelton Hotel,” noting “a strange yet majestic form began to loom against the New York horizon.”

The New York Times architecture critics called it “A stately, breath-taking building,” upon its opening and Commonweal Magazine’s Lewis Mumford said it was “buoyant, mobile, serene, like a Zeppelin under a clear sky.”

Hugh Ferriss's The Shelton Hotel, 1922

Because it was a men-only hotel, there seemed to be no problem that approximately 400 of the rooms shared baths in the hallway. It became a problem when later in 1924 Lee changed his mind and admitted women and families.

Georgia O'Keeffe's "Shelton Hotel New York No. 1" 1926

The Shelton almost immediately drew attention, both good and tragic.  In 1925 Artist Georgia O’Keeffe and photographer Alfred Stieglitz moved in, living in their 30th floor apartment for 12 years. The Shelton became a frequent subject for both, adding to its international celebrity.

In February of 1926 actress Pauline Armitage threw herself to her death from her 14th floor suite. Later that same year Harry Houdini had himself locked in a coffin-like box and submerged in the colorful basement swimming pool. From the gallery that overlooked the pool, spectators watched nervously for an hour until Houdini’s box was pulled out and he emerged unharmed.

Despite its colorful history and architectural uniqueness, The Shelton, as is the case with almost all aging hotels, fell from favor. There were only 11 full time residents in the mid-1970s. In 1978 it became the Halloran House when Edward J. Halloran bought the foreclosed property.  He hired Stephen B. Jacobs to redesign the interiors, reducing the number of rooms to 650.

By 2007 it was owned by Morgan Stanley, which handed operation over to the Marriott.  Now called the New York Marriott East Side, it received a $25 million room renovation.  The downstairs swimming pool was removed and the cavernous space was divided into three levels.

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Exterior restoration was conducted by Superstructures under the supervision of architect Richard Moses. Most of the original architectural detailing – griffins, gargoyles and other elements that make the Shelton a visual feast – were in good shape. Those which were heavily affected by weathering were reproduced and replaced.

The Shelton Hotel was threatened with demolition in the 1970's by then-owner Tishman Realty.  Today it enjoys new life as a stylish architectural remnant of 1920's Manhattan.

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Edward Kemeys' 1883 "Still Hunt" in Central Park

Photo by Francis Dzikowski

Things weren’t going very well for Edward Kemeys after the Civil War. A former artillery officer, he tried his hand at farming but failed. Then, hearing of available work clearing ground for the planned Central Park, he headed for New York City in 1868. Hired at $2.00 a day by the engineering corps as an axe-man, Kemeys absorbed the natural environment that surrounded him there.


One day in 1869 Kemeys was casually observing the animals in the Menagerie at the old Arsenal on the east side of the Park.  There an aged sculptor was working on the head of a wolf. The axe-man watched, transfixed.

Remembering that moment decades later, he said “Quick as lightning came the thought…I can do that!”

Untrained in anything other than artillery, plows and axes, Kemeys began practicing animal sculpture. Within three years he received a commission to sculpt the life-size bronze "Two Hudson Bay Wolves Quarreling Over the Carcass of a Deer" for Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park.  By 1877 he exhibited his work in Paris and London to much acclaim.

Kemeys established his studio back in New York where he had found his inspiration and where he subsequently produced many of his greatest works. From this studio he fostered a widespread popularity in animal sculpture in late 19th Century America.  He became interested in the large American animals threatened by encroachment of westward moving cities and he made extensive trips to the West to study the wildlife.

Kemeys’ work caught the eye of “a number of modest gentlemen” who, in 1881, wanted to present a sculptural gift to Central Park. They asked the artist to sculpt “The Still Hunt” – a life-sized mountain lion crouching in a realistic hunting pose. Two years later, on June 12, 1883, it was unveiled.

The New York Times reported that among those assembled were “Park Commissioner Wales, Park Superintendent Jones, Mr. Edward Kemeys, the uncle of the sculptor; a young woman with a red parasol, and 11 historians of the daily newspapers.”

Because the statue is installed on a stone outcropping high above the East Drive, the Park Superintendant made a perilous few attempts at unveiling the work before finally succeeding. “Then,” reported The Times, “the young lady with the red parasol said: ‘Oh, my!’ The gentlemen exclaimed ‘Ah!’ and all went round to the drive to look at the statue, while the police dispersed the crowd.”

Readers learned that “The Still Hunt represents a life-size American panther, with savage head, fierce, snarling lips and bristling hair, crouching close along the ground for a spring, with arched body and curling tail. It is facing to the north, and is in fine view from the east drive, on the gray rocks with the surrounding green.”

Edward Kemeys took no commission for his “Still Hunt.” The money donated by what The Times had called “a number of modest gentlemen” was used only for the casting of the statue at the Maurice J. Power foundries.

In 1892 he moved to Chicago for several years, creating several works for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and eventually sculpting the large bronze lions flanking the entrance to the Art Institute of Chicago. Kemeys died in May of 1907, critics praising his body of work as showing “powerful conception and individuality, as well as a keen perception of animals’ traits of character.”

Nowhere is this more evident than in “Still Hunt.”

Photograph 2000 Central Park

In 1974 vandals cut off and stole the slinky bronze tail and the statue remained defaced until 1988 when it was restored under the Municipal Art Society’s “Adopt-A-Monument” program. The missing tail was reproduced and the bronze surface was reconditioned.

Today, one hundred and thirty years after its unveiling, unsuspecting joggers and hikers – like the young lady with the red parasol – emit a shocked “Oh, my!” when encountering Kemeys’ “Still Hunt.”

The 1918 Park Avenue Racquet and Tennis Club



photo NYPL Collection

There was a time when gentlemen were expected to belong to a men’s club, while ladies joined women’s clubs. In these social strongholds men would smoke cigars and discuss business, yachting, politics and athletics. Women conducted charities, advanced social causes and discussed art and literature. The separation of the sexes seemed quite normal.
One such gentlemen’s club was the Racquet and Tennis Club. No stodgy club in which overweight millionaires gulped raw oysters and dozed in wing chairs, the Racquet and Tennis Club attracted wealthy New York men who were serious about their sports.

As taller buildings began overshadowing their 1891 clubhouse on 43rd Street, blocking the light into their skylit racquets courts and court-tennis courts, members clamored for a new building. In 1916 the board of managers accepted the offer from multi-millionaire member Robert Goelet to build a clubhouse and lease it to the club. The commission for the new building was given to McKim, Mead and White.

By this time Charles McKim and Stanford White had both died and William Mead had retired. Architect W. S. Richardson oversaw the project, which was completed in 1918. What resulted was an Florentine palazzo of brick and limestone, its height purposely twice the width of Park Avenue. A second floor loggia sat on the rusticated base of the ground floor providing the structure’s single most interesting visual element. Perched above the windowless top floors was a formal balustrade. The cornice frieze was decorated with reliefs of racquets.

Photograph American Buildings Survey - 1965

In his 2002 book, One Thousand New York Buildings, Bill Harris writes “Although far from the firm’s best work, it is still head and shoulders above just about everything else built in New York in 1918.”

Inside, at the top of the stairs on the second floor was a comfortable lounge looking out the wide loggia. A dining room, bar, library, billiard room and card room were also housed here. In the floors above were racquets courts, squash courts, changing rooms, and court tennis courts. (Court tennis must not be confused with lawn tennis; it is a completely different game involving sloping walls, bouncing balls off all four walls, changeable boundaries and intricate rules that confuse even the players.)

Four years later polo-playing member Rene LaMontagne hosted a bachelor party. As with all good bachelor parties, the guests enjoyed a few drinks. The problem was that this was during the second year of Prohibition. LaMontagne was arrested and charged with selling 316 cases of scotch, 500 cases of gin, 16,000 gallons of rye and 9,000 gallons of wine. It was apparently a good party.

LaMontagne was jailed for four months and the 60-foot long antique bar which had stood in the 43rd Street club was removed.

In the 1970s when New York real estate giants the Fisher Brothers planned their 44-story Park Avenue Plaza office tower behind the clubhouse they met with the club to negotiate air rights. The negotiations ground to a halt when a price could not be agreed upon.

The Racquet and Tennis Club, therefore, announced their plans to build a hotel over their building – effectively blocking all views and light towards Park Avenue to the Fischer's building.

A $5 million deal was signed for the air rights.

In 1987 the club’s men-only rule came under attack. Court tennis player Evelyn David lived “a few blocks” from the club and was preparing for the women’s world championships in England. Every weekend she would board a bus and travel to Tuxedo, New York; the next closest court tennis courts (there are only nine court tennis clubs in America).

David requested use of the Park Avenue courts. When turned down she offered to practice early in the mornings before members arrived. The Club stood firm.

One member told The New York Times, ''It may be regrettable, but my opinion is that she is going to have to keep making the sacrifice for her sport and commuting to Tuxedo. I trust that she, as a sportsman, will respect the rights of privacy and free association exercised by the club.''

In the end Evelyn David continued to ride the bus and today there are still no female members. Women are admitted into the club only for special affairs and then only when accompanied by members.

Today, like its 43rd Street predecessor, the Racquet and Tennis Club’s five-story Italian palazzo is falling under the shadows of glass and steel commercial towers as the atmosphere of Park Avenue continues to change.

The 1897 New York Savings Bank 81 8th Avenue

When the Rose Hill Savings Bank opened for business in 1854 at the corner of 14th Street and Eighth Avenue, it was a insignificant institution in a less-than-fashionable neighborhood.  The bank occupied the basement of a five-story building, underneath the New York County National Bank on the first floor.  “The upper floors being occupied as offices by lawyers, real estate agents, etc.” according to The New York Times.

However, as commerce moved uptown and the 14th Street neighborhood improved, so did the circumstances of the Bank. By the first day of the year in 1862 when it changed its name to The New York Savings Bank, it had become a substantial neighborhood presence.

When, in 1874, three robbers were caught trying to tunnel into the bank vault from the adjacent cellar under a “pool saloon” next door, the bank had assets of around $3 million.  As the turn of the century approached, a more suitable building was deemed necessary.  In 1896 the bank commissioned Robert Henderson Robertson, who had established his reputation designing important ecclesiastical and academic structures, to design their new bank building.

Following the Financial Panic of 1893 banks felt the need to appear solid–as though they had existed stably for centuries. The Architecture Record emphasized, “The effect of the structure must be one of great importance and simplicity.  It must make on the depositors the impression of being a perfectly safe place to leave their money and valuables."  In addition, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago had popularized grandeur in architecture as a means to enforce “order, clarity and sobriety” – hallmarks of the City Beautiful Movement.

photo NYPL Collection

Robertson’s resultant building was a Roman temple of white Vermont marble.  Finished in 1897, the three-story structure was capped by an impressive copper dome surrounded by twenty square stained glass windows.  Consistent with the Roman model, the roofline was trimmed by elegant copper artefixae.  Two imposing Corinthian columns flanked the entrance.  Inside buttery-colored marble walls and pilasters rose to a barrel-vaulted coffered ceiling.

A marvelous bronze two-faced clock on the corner of the building supports a beehive–the symbol of thrift--while industrious honeybees flit around the clock faces.

Sometime before World War II the outer entrance wall was moved forward several feet closer to the pillars in order to add administrative space on the second floor.  The modification, while well-designed and certainly not devastating, reduced the visual impact of the entrance.

On August 16, 1963 the bank was absorbed in a merger with The Bank For Savings in the City of New York and its name was changed to The New York Bank for Savings.  Shortly thereafter the building was abandoned, sitting empty for years during which time much of the copper trim of the roofline and dome was stripped off.

Finally, in the late 1980s Central Carpet took over the landmarked building and retained the sometimes-controversial architect Robert Scarano, Jr to restore the structure.  Because the interior, as well as the exterior, is landmarked, special restrictions had to be followed: nothing (such as display cases) could be attached to walls or floors and no permanent alterations made.

After a short period of vacancy when Central Carpet moved out the building became home to Balducci’s, a high-end food store, from 2005 until 2009.

In the summer of 2010 the New Jersey firm of Du-Rite Construction under the eye of Sal DeVito began another renovation to transform Robertson’s white marble temple into a CVS Pharmacy.