image via LandmarkWest!
In 1894, developer Charles Buek commissioned George
Keister to design two similar apartment buildings on the western blockfront of
Manhattan Avenue between 102nd and 103rd Streets. Like its near twin, the northern building was
faced in beige brick above an undressed brownstone base. The rusticated first floor was clad in
variegated Roman brick and the entrance was protected by a handsome stone
portico. Keister added touches of Queen
Anne to his otherwise Romanesque Revival-style design. Completed within the year, the Northport cost
Buek $52,000 to construct, or about $1.9 million in 2025.
The six- and seven-room apartments were described in
an advertisement as being “very choice.”
Tenants enjoyed “perfect appointments and hall service,” said an ad, and
“extra store rooms.” (Hall service meant
that uniformed “hall boys” were on hand to help with packages, mail, and other
errands.) The $50 rent would translate to about $1,890 per month today.
The residents were comfortably middle- and
upper-middle class. One, however, found
himself in trouble shortly after moving in.
William P. Robinson worked as a collector for Tillotson & Sons, book
sellers. (The term meant that he would
collect outstanding amounts from retail customers.) The 49-year-old was arrested on May 22,
1895. The Yonkers, New York Statesman
explained, “He is charged with having embezzled $10,000” and said, “The
defalcation extends over a year.” The
police nabbed him just as he was preparing to leave for Chicago.
The Rev. James D. Steele lived here as early as 1900 through 1906. A Presbyterian minister,
while living here he was secretary of the Joint Committee on a Uniform Version
of the Metrical Psalms. The erudite
clergyman also held a Ph.D. and made extra money teaching on the side. In January 1900, he advertised, “Rev. J. D.
Steele, PH. D., private tutor at pupils’ homes or at 74 West 103d St.”
Although Prohibition had ended in 1933, on March 28,
1938, the Yonkers, New York Statesman reported that resident Aldo
Cipallini had been arrested “on a charge of possession of an illegal
still.” The 20-year-old was caught in a
raid of a house in Tuckahoe, New York in which a 2,000-gallon still was found in
operation. Cipallini “insisted he was
only a watchman.” He was fined $200.
image via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services.
By 1950, novelist Gordon Friesen and his wife Agnes
Sis Cunningham lived here. The couple had founded Broadside, a political song magazine and during the 1940s
were members of the Almanac Singers, a folk singing group based in Greenwich
Village. Friesen’s novel Flamethrowers
recalled his childhood in a Russian Mennonite family in Oklahoma.
The McCarthy Era was difficult for Gordon and Sis
Cunningham. They were blacklisted and
while living here subsisted on welfare.
In the "Afterward" to the couple’s joint autobiography Red Dust and
Broadsides, Ronald D. Cohen noted, “The FBI visited Gordon in 1954, who was
then living at 74 West 103rd Street, but he ‘stated he had nothing
to say to the interviewing agents.’
Nonetheless, the local agent recommended to J. Edgar Hoover that a
Security Index Card be prepared for Gordon, in addition to the ongoing file.”
In 1950, emerging artist Andy Warhol moved into a
two-bedroom basement apartment with 17 “artists, writers, dancers,” according
to Anthony Grudin in his Like a Little Dog. Warhol’s biographer, Victor Bockris, writes,
“It was a transition period, introducing him into the bohemian world of dance
and theatre people. He felt more
affinity with them than with intellectuals…and for the first time Andy began,
tentatively, exploring the homosexual underground.” Bockris quotes a visitor who said, “All I
remember is Andy sitting there drawing, surrounded by this complete chaos and
people doing things that would seem to be disruptive of any concentration. The food was mixed in with the clothes.”
Shortly afterward, the Northrup and its fraternal twin
to the south were incorporated into the Douglass Houses. They were not demolished because, according
to a 1959 report by the New York State Division of Housing and Urban Renewal,
“They were the best constructed of the older buildings and required the least
in major structural repairs.”
Living here in 1989 was 29-year-old Marcus
Bezear. That spring he raped two women
in the Penta Hotel. A similar looking
man was mistakenly arrested for the crime, but when Bezear raped another woman
in the same hotel in August, he confessed to all three crimes. He was arrested on October 15 and charged with
robbery and sexual abuse and held on $100,000 bail.
Once home to affluent, white-collar residents, the
Northrup had sorely declined in 2014. On
October 5, television station PIX II reported, “When it rains, it really
pours inside an Upper West Side apartment building. The building, 74-76 West 103rd
Street, is nicknamed the ‘forgotten house,’ part of the Frederick Douglass
Houses, operated by the New York City Housing Authority.”
Since Hurricane Sandy, the tenants told the reporter,
streams of water poured into their apartments every time it rained. Connie Taylor had lived in the building for
half a century. The reporter said, “The
61-year-old suffers from arthritis and scoliosis and has trouble walking, let
along rearranging the buckets to catch all the rain water dripping through her
leaky ceilings.”
Despite the drastic changes inside, the exterior of
the Northrup is relatively unchanged since its completion in 1894.
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