George F. Pelham's 1899 300 West 107th Street

 

Real estate developer George Klingman hired George F. Pelham to design a "stores and flat" building on the southwest corner of West End Avenue and 107th Street in the spring of 1898.  Pelham's plans, filed in July, projected the construction costs at $70,000, or about $2.73 million in 2025 terms.  Completed in 1899, the seven-story structure was designed in the Renaissance Revival style.  

The basement and first floor were clad in limestone.  Possibly because of the noticeable incline of 107th Street, Pelham placed the stores in the less visually obtrusive basement level.  The entrance atop a short stoop sat within a handsome portico of paired Ionic columns upholding an entablature of intricate Italian Renaissance-style carvings.  The upper floors were clad in deep red brick.  Pelham rounded the northern corners and gave the second and seventh floors decorative terra cotta bands.  Elaborate terra cotta bandcourses defined the four-story mid-section.  

image via Landmark West!

The entertainments held by the building's well-do-to tenants appeared in the society columns.  Such was the case on December 6, 1903, when The New York Times reported on Mrs. Meyer Heineman's large musicale "in honor of Mrs. Charles Fleischman, mother of Mayor Fleischman of Cincinnati, and Mrs. Louis Meyer of Cincinnati."  Eight artists performed that afternoon.

Among the several physicians who lived here in 1909 was Dr. Harry McDonald Peggs and his bride, Helen Crosby.  Peggs earned an annual income equal to $255,000 today according to court papers.  The couple was married on June 2 that year.  Unfortunately, their union was not a blissful one.  According to Helen two years later, almost immediately Dr. Peggs began a "reign of terror," by "cursing and beating her." 

On June 2, 1910, Helen reminded Harry that it was their first year anniversary.  He replied, "We won't be living together next year."  Harry, it seems, was already shopping for a new romantic companion.  On October 7, 1910, he did not come home and Helen later discovered he had "been in the company of a Miss Oliver Palmer" that night.  Afterward, he "paid attention to a Miss Dunston," according to Helen's divorce filing in October 1911.  The New York Times reported, "She said she found the doctor and Miss Dunston in his motor car before 993 Columbus Avenue at a quarter of twelve one night and told Miss Dunston that her companion was her husband and she should leave him."  Miss Dunston, according to Helen, "paid no attention to her remarks."  After the incident, Harry returned to 300 West 107th Street only to get changes of clothing.

While the Peggs faced off in court, the family of Simon Docter had an even more serious issue with which to deal.  Caroline Docter went missing in October.  After a search of several days, her body was discovered "in some bushes at 190th street and Fort Washington Avenue," as reported by The Sun on October 29, 1911.  On October 31, the newspaper reported, "The autopsy showed that Miss Doctor [sic] had died of carbolic acid poisoning and the case was entered as a suicide."

The forensic evidence of the scene where Caroline's body was discovered, however, prompted Coroner Feinberg to reconsider the suicide ruling.  The following day, The Sun reported, "he believed that the body had been carried there after her death."  Caroline's dress had been neatly arranged and the shrubbery was undisturbed.  (Feinberg explained that death by swallowing carbolic acid would be accompanied by "death struggles.")  Importantly, there was no bottle found at the scene.  Had Caroline taken the poison at the location, the container should have been nearby.  Feinberg ordered police to conduct a search for witnesses.

Dr. George Peasles Shears and his wife, the former Susan H. Moore, lived here at the time.  Shears was born in Dutchess County, New York on January 15, 1860 and graduated from the New York University Medical School in 1889.  He was assistant surgeon at the Babies' and Mother's Hospital and an instructor of obstetrics at the Cornell University Medical School.  

The New York Times noted that he "was the author of various monographs on medical and allied topics."  But medicine was not the physician's only passion.  The Evening Post said, "Dr. Shears was deeply read in metaphysics and was in particular a student of German thought."

Among the white collar tenants in the World War I years were William R. Clendinning, a 1915 graduate of Yale; George Jacob Soper, a director of the Metropolitan Designing Co. and treasurer and director of the Unity Brotherhood Association; and Edward M. Biggs, a director of Brokaw Brothers.  (Soper's wife filled her time with various causes.  In 1920 she was a member of the International Sunshine Society, the Legislative League, the Health Protective, and the Woman's Forum.)

Teresa Collins shared an apartment with her sister in 1925.  The 23-year-old, who worked as a private secretary in a large rubber firm, was instrumental in catching a conman that year.  Teresa's sister went on a vacation to the West and on the evening of August 10, while a female relative was visiting, someone knocked on the door.  The caller identified himself as "Detective Sergeant McDonald from Commissioner Enright's office," and said charges had been made against her, but "the matter could 'be straightened out for $500.'"

Upon telling the man that her sister was in Wyoming, he pulled his revolver and ordered the women into the bathroom.

"How about the money?" he asked.

Teresa and her visitor gathered up $300.  The detective left, saying he would return for the balance.

The savvy young woman immediately called the police.  They arranged a scheme by which Teresa would give a signal to the hall boy (an employee in high-end apartment buildings who were on call for helping with packages and such) to notify Detectives Fitzgerald and Josephs.

The next morning, the "detective" returned and demanded his $200.  Acting on the arranged signal, the hallboy called police headquarters.  Teresa stalled long enough for Fitzgerald and Josephs to arrive and arrest Joseph O'Leary.  As it turned out, O'Leary had been a policeman until being fired three years earlier.

In 1930, Mrs. A. Wells Green invited Lillian Reute to stay in her fourth-floor apartment while her houseguest underwent treatment.  Lillian, who was 63, was the widow of a General Electric Company executive and lived in Schenectady.  On June 24 she fatally plunged to the sidewalk.  The Standard Union reported, "Detectives believe she had fallen from a chair on the fire escape landing."

Lillian Reute fell to her death from the fourth-floor fire escape.  image via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services.

A renovation completed in 1948 resulted in three or four apartments per floor.  Among the first residents of the remodeled suites were Dr. Siegfried Boxer and his wife, the former Ella Weinberger.  Born in Vienna, Austria, Boxer graduated from the University of Vienna and served as chief of obstetrical surgery at the Lucina Hospital.  He escaped Nazi Austria to America in 1940.  When the couple moved into 300 West 107th Street, he had been director of the clinic at Gouverneur Hospital for four years.

Boxer assuredly was well acquainted with another tenant, gynecologist and obstetrician Dr. Robert Koehler and his wife, Mitzi.  Like Boxer, Koehler was born in Vienna and graduated from the University of Vienna.  He headed the Vienna Women's Hospital until 1938 when the Germans occupied Austria.  Like the Boxers, he and his wife fled to New York.  He was resident gynecologist at the Brooklyn Hebrew Home and Hospital for the Aged and served as a gynecologist at Beth Israel Hospital.

In the spring of 1960, Clara Panken moved into an apartment here.  The 41-year-old had suffered recently.  She and her former husband, attorney Morton L. Panken, were divorced in 1954 and Clara was given custody of their adopted daughter Bess, who was five at the time.  On March 24, 1960, a few weeks before moving into 300 West 107th Street, Bess, now nine years old, fell to her death from a window of their West End Avenue apartment.  After an investigation, the girl's death was ruled accidental.

Shockingly, on July 2, Clara Panken walked into the 126th Street police station and confessed that she had murdered her adopted daughter.  Described by police as being "conscience-stricken," she said that on that afternoon she picked up Bess at P.S. 75.  At home, she took her into the bathroom, "which has a 20-by-30-inch window," according to The New York Times, and told Bess "she would teach her to fly."  She persuaded her to climb through the window and onto the ledge, then pushed her to her death.  Clara was charged with homicide.

A fascinating tenant arrived in 1962.  Artist Alice Neel was born in 1900 in Philadelphia, but spent most of her life in New York.  Self-taught, she painted mostly portraits, using as models her Harlem neighbors, "as well as artists, activists, mothers, children, and a series of pregnant women, a subject long ignored in the history of art," according to her biography by the MoMA.  In 1974, the Whitney held a retrospective of her work.

Alice Neel died in 1984.  Afterward, Phoebe Hoban visited her eight-room apartment.  In her 2010 Alice Neel, The Art of Not Sitting Pretty she writes:

There are paintings everywhere--on the walls, stacked in the hall.  Everything has been left just as it was when Neel lived and worked here, covering hundreds of canvases with ruthlessly honest portraits of the people who intrigued her, from neighborhood children to Andy Warhol.

Alice Neel's family retained the apartment, keeping it as a type of time capsule of her residency here.

Alice Neel's granddaughter, Olivia, looks over her shoulder in this January 5, 1979 photograph in the apartment.  Alice Neel, People Come First, by Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey

The building was remodeled again in 1986.  Other than the commercial basement level, little of the building's exterior has been changed.

photographs by the author