Geo. F. Pelham's 1926 310 West 106th Street

 

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Born in Canada, George Frederick Pelham was eight years old when his architect father, George Brown Pelham, moved the family to New York City and opened his office in 1875.  The boy learned his father's office and become a draftsman.  In 1890, he struck out and opened his own architectural practice.  (He abbreviated his name professionally, always being listed as Geo. F. Pelham, or Geo. Fred. Pelham.)  Pelham became known for his apartment building designs that drew from historical prototypes.  And that would be the case in 1926 when he was hired by the Harrod Construction Corporation to design a 15-story and penthouse apartment building at 310-316 West 106th Street.

Completed in 1927, Pelham's restrained Renaissance Revival design was faced in gray brick and trimmed in limestone and terra cotta.  The entablature of the noble entrance enframement was carved with foliate decorations that flanked a blank cartouche.  Its cornice supported a broken pediment from which rose a stone framing with swirling volutes that embraced two openings.  The 11-story midsection was relatively unadorned, save for stone quoins that ran up the sides, and a handsome stone balconette at the 13th floor.  Interestingly, Pelham executed the terminal cornice in cream-colored terra cotta.

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The apartments of three or four rooms were described as having "excellent closets" and "modern kitchens."  The commodious living rooms measured 18 by 21 feet.  Rents started at $70 for a three-room apartment and $90 for the larger suites.  (The more expensive base rent would translate to about $1,860 per month in 2024.)

Among the initial residents were Sam Leavin and his wife.  Sam's brother, William, shared the apartment.  The brothers, who worked in the apparel industry, had started out humbly, but were now earning respectable incomes.  And in the summer of 1928, their fortunes seemed to be about to swell.

A decade before the DuPont company would invent nylon hose, American women dealt with expensive silk hosiery that easily snagged and ran.  And so, in 1923, the Leavin brothers had begun working on a machine that would repair runs in silk stockings.  They put their life savings into the project, which no doubt explains why they shared living space.  Now, five years later, they had a prototype.

The investment had been a substantial risk, especially for Sam and his wife, whose first baby was born that summer.  Sam's wife told the Yonkers Statesman, "Just before the baby was born we had our worst days, too.  I thought surely the baby would be sickly and sad, as a result of all our worries."

In August 1928, the Leavin brothers received an offer on their invention--$1 million, the equivalent of $17.8 million today.  But, somewhat surprisingly, on August 13, the Yonkers Statesman began an article saying, "They know what it is to be hungry, but William and Sam Leavin, brothers, of 310 West 106th Street, today had waved aside $1,000,000."  The article said the men decided their machine "is worth more than that.  So the $1,000,000 was given the go-by."  Sam told reporters, "We felt after we worked five years on this thing we couldn't part with it too easily.  There's a certain amount of price, you know, and wisdom mixed with it."

Sam's wife stood by their decision.  "Sam staked his future on the idea," she said.  "If I hadn't had so much confidence in him, then life wouldn't have been tolerable.  But I was sure it would be successful."  The Yonkers Statesman said, "She suffered with her husband and his brother through the lean days and now she joins in their hope of making financial connections for marketing the invention."  In the meantime, the new baby was blissfully unaware of the passed-up fortune.  Mrs. Leavin said, "she's the best, smiliest baby ever born.  Maybe she realizes our good fortune."

Marcus and Florence Loeb were also early residents.  Born in 1892, Loeb had started out as a salesman with the Reich-Ash Corporation, makers of toilet articles in 1910.  His rise within the firm was swift and on January 1, 1931 he was elected president.  Tragically, his professional triumph would be short lived.  Five months later, the 39-year-old entered Mount Sinai Hospital for an operation.  He died there on June 1.

Not all the residents were so upstanding.  Pete Balitzer, a.k.a. Pete Harris, and his wife lived in the penthouse here in 1936.  They also rented another apartment for business purposes.  Baltizer was described by the Forth Worth Star-Telegram as the, "biggest 'booker' of prostitutes in the city," on May 29, 1936.  The article added, "Mrs. Baltizer [is] a link in the vice chain herself, (madame of a bordello beneath her penthouse)."

The couple's names would become known nationwide when the Federal government set out to break up the crime syndicate of Italian-born mobster Lucky Luciano.  The Balitzers realized that things were getting heated when, according to William Donati in his Lucky Luciano, The Rise and Fall of a Mob Boss, "Thelma Jordan was arrested as she walked toward 310 West 106th Street, the apartment where Pete Balizer lived."  The arrests came swiftly after that and both Pete and his wife turn against the mob boss. 

Even before the jury in his case could be selected, Balitzer "pleaded guilty to compulsory prostitution," reported The  Courier-Journal of Louisville, Kentucky.  And Mrs. Balitzer testified against Luciano at his trial on May 28, 1936.  The Fort Worth Star-Telegram said she:

...looked the swarthy Luciano right in the eye as she told how he had been introduced to her as "the boss" by her husband.

She went further.  She told how Luciano had forced her husband to stay in the racket.  She said when she begged Luciano to let Balitzer go straight, the cobra-eyed gangster coldly dismissed her with, "You know he can't get out unless he pays the money he owes us."

The defense turned on Mrs. Balitzer, going after her "hammer and tongs," according to the newspaper.  The article said she was "soon forced...to admit that she had been married three times, that she started taking drugs in 1932, [and] that she had a daughter."

Understandably, two apartments in 310 West 106th Street became available soon afterward.

In 1952, newlyweds Stanley Zabar and Judith Segal moved in.  Zabar's father, Louis, was the founder of the well-known Zabar's grocery store, which by now had several branches.  Their daughter, Lori, who was born on July 16, 1954, noted in her 2022 book Zabar's, A Family Story, with Recipes, "my parents rented a one-bedroom apartment at 310 West 106th Street...and furnished it in the prevailing Danish modern style."  The couple had had to cut their honeymoon short, to be back in New York "for the opening of a new Zabar's supermarket at Ninety-Sixth Street and Broadway."

Among the Zabars' neighbors were David J. Dallin and his wife, the former Lilia Estrin.  Born in Rogachev in the Russian Empire in 1889, Dallin was arrested in 1909 while he was studying at the University of St. Petersburg.  He was imprisoned for anti-tsarist political activity.  In 1911, he fled to Germany where he received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Heidelberg two years later.

Dallin's history of conflict with political powers continued when he returned to Russian following the February Revolution of 1917.  He was elected to the central committee of a group within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.  He was arrested by the Bosheviks in 1920, and once again fled to Germany in 1922.  When the Nazis came to power, he and his wife, Eugenia, escaped to Poland in 1935.  He divorced Eugenia before relocating to the United States in 1939 with the outbreak of World War II.

He and Lilia lived together before marrying in 1944.  Dallin joined the staff of the anti-communist magazine, The New Leader, a position he would hold for two decades.  While living at 310 West 106th Street, he published ten important works on the Soviet Union.  Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko described his 1955 Soviet Espionage as "undoubtedly the major work on Soviet spy activities."

Dallin died in the couple's apartment on February 21, 1962 at the age of 72.  In reporting his death, The New York Times described him as, "an authority on Soviet affairs and an anti-Communist leader in Russia, after the Bolshevik revolution."

An interesting resident in 1970 was Constantin Antonovici.  Born in Romania in 1911, he studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Jassy and the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Vienna, Austria.  Before arriving in America, Antonovici worked in Paris, Northern Italy and Austria.

Among Antonovici's works was the tomb of William Thomas Manning, Bishop of New York, for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.  (Antonovici said during testimony in 1970 that it was "sculpted out of a four ton block of Carrara marble.)  Other works were a wooden statue of St. Luke for St. Luke's hospital, and a marble bas-relief, the Praying Madonna, which was commissioned by the Vatican .

Bernard G. Richards lived here at the time.  The Jewish leader and author, born in 1877, had an astounding career.  He was a member of the American Jewish delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference after World War I, and in 1936 founded the Jewish Information Bureau.  His two-room office on West 57th Street "made a business of supplying instant information," according to The New York Times.  People could call or write in with questions like, "Where can Nazi victims register claims?"  Hoping to educate youngsters on Judaism, he published a series of leaflets, explaining that better Jews become better Americans.  Richards died in St. Luke's Hospital while still living here on June 26, 1971 at the age of 94.

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A century after the first resident moved in, the exterior of Geo. F. Pelham's restrained, Renaissance-inspired building is greatly unchanged.