Architect J. M. Felson kept busy throughout the Depression years designing, for the most part, apartment buildings. They ranged from splashy Art Deco designs with colorful terra cotta panels to much more sedate versions of the style. Among the latter examples was 137 East 38th Street, completed in 1936. The 12-story-and-penthouse structure was faced in ruddy red brick. Stone appeared only at the water table; the stoic, two-story entrance surround; and two three-floor frames at the eighth through tenth floors. The slender panes and shallow transoms of the casement windows were important to Felsom's design. A series of setbacks provided terraces to the eleventh through penthouse levels.
The setbacks and all-important casements can be seen in this 1941 photograph. image via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services.
There were nine apartments each on the second through tenth floors, seven on the eleventh and twelfth, and five on the penthouse level. Among the initial residents were Chester and Beryl Halley Falkenhainer. Falkenhainer had served in World War I as a Marine. Now an insurance executive, he was earning $5,000 a year, according to Jacob L. Bapst and Ivan M. Tribe in their Beryl Halley, The Life and Follies of a Ziegfeld Beauty, 1897-1988. The couple paid $125 per month for the apartment, or about $2,770 in 2024 terms.
Born in Bladen, Ohio in June 1897, Beryl Halley first appeared on Broadway in the musical comedy Tangerine in 1921. Beginning in 1923, she was a member of Florenz Ziegfeld's famous Follies. Halley essentially retired from the stage following her marriage to Falkenhainer on September 30, 1933.
Beryl Halley, International News, 1926
Franklin Benjamin and Esther Leeming Tuttle were also early residents. They moved in following their wedding on June 14, 1940. Like Chester Falkenhainer, Ben (he went by his middle name) Tuttle was an insurance executive and, like Beryl Halley, Esther Leeming had given up her stage career after marrying. She had debuted on Broadway playing the part of a Mexican maid in The Petrified Forest with Leslie Howard and Humphrey Bogart.
In her 2003 autobiography No Rocking Chair for Me, Esther (known to her friends as Faity) mentions that their 10th-floor, two-bedroom apartment, "had a great view looking south over the city." She busied herself for the next few decades volunteering and raising three children.
Esther Leeming Tuttle's astounding career would happen long after moving from 137 East 38th Street. Following Ben's death in 1968, she returned to acting. "I thought I might as well try being a granny model," she told a reporter from the New York Post in 2005 (she was in her 90s at the time of the interview). And, in addition to her many commercial roles, she was highly involved with the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, serving as its Board Chair from 1970 to 1977, overseeing its incorporation, and producing a series of horticulturally themed films. She died on July 9, 2015 at the age of 104.
Resident August L. Janssen--who moved in with his wife, Alice, shortly after the building's completion--was familiar to many New Yorkers. Described by The New York Times as "one of the best-known restaurateurs in the city," Janssen was born in Emden, Germany, in 1865. He arrived in New York at the age of 20 and, while working for a caterer, saved enough to open the Hofbrau Haus restaurant in 1898 on Broadway at 30th Street.
The New York Sun later remarked, "such notables as Enrico Caruso, Victor Herbert and President[s] Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft were among his regular patrons." At one point Janssen had two branch Hofbrau Hauses, but the anti-German sentiment during World War I forced him to close them. By 1928, he operated a restaurant in New Haven, Connecticut and five in Paris. Janssen died in the Lenox Hill Hospital on November 16, 1939 at the age of 72.
A fascinating resident was Dr. Kristine Mann. She graduated from Smith College in 1895 and she taught English at the University of Michigan, Vassar College and the Brearley School before turning her attention to medicine. She studied at the Cornell University Medical College and earned her Doctor of Medicine in 1913. Dr. Mann's focus was on the conditions of working women.
From 1914 to 1916, she headed an investigation into the physical condition of saleswomen in New York stores. During World War I, she "represented the Ordnance Department in overseeing the health conditions of women working in munitions plants," according to The New York Times, and from 1920 to 1924, was director of the Health Center for Business and Industrial Women in New York City. She told a reporter in 1921 in part:
Every woman, whether she expects to marry or not, should possess the feeling of self-reliance which comes with earning a salary. The young wife who knows that, if necessary, she can resume her place in the business world, has a much greater chance of maintaining an equal part in her household than has a young wife who must rely absolutely on the support of someone else.
In 1925, Dr. Mann began studying with Swiss psychoanalyst Dr. Carl Gustav Jung, returning to Switzerland every three years until 1938. When Dr. Jung was in America in 1936, he gave a seminar at Dr. Mann's summer home in Maine. She was still living at 137 East 38th Street when she died at the age of 72 on November 12, 1945.
Living here at the time was songwriter and author Dorothy M. R. Stewart. Born in Australia, she immigrated to the United States in 1924 and became a citizen in 1938. Her 1948 song Now Is the Hour, recorded by Bing Crosby, was a chart topper. But she soon recognized a problem--royalties (or lack thereof) from jukeboxes.
In 1953 she testified before Congress, "When my Now is the Hour was a jukebox favorite, I first became aware that our copyright laws do not provide for compensation to writers for such an obviously commercial use of our works." Pointing out that dramatic rights were accorded in 1856, and performing rights in 1897, she stressed, "the jukebox industry can well afford to pay a small charge to authors, else they would not spend so much money in putting fancy trappings on the machines that play our music."
Another successful immigrant resident was Albert van Sand, who was born in Denmark in 1881. A graduate of the University of Copenhagen, he came to America at the age of 20. He began his career as a dancer, associated with society dancer Vernon Castle. Then, in 192o, he changed course, becoming editor of the Danish language newspaper Nordlyset (Northern Light). Six years later he acquired the weekly.
Living here with his wife, the former Rose Delar, Sand helped organize the Free Danish Committee in New York City during World War II. In appreciation, Denmark bestowed the King Christians Order of Liberation on him in 1947, and a year later he was awarded the Order of Danneborg by King Frederik IX.
The replacement of the casement windows greatly upsets J. M. Felson's restrained Art Deco design. The building's somewhat unassuming outward appearance belies the often compelling stories that have played out inside.
many thanks to reader Lowell Cochrane for suggesting this post
photographs by the author
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