Mckim, Mead & Bigelow's Nos. 62-64 E. 34th Street

photo by Alice Lum

Edward Nicoll Dickerson, by 1877, had created a name for himself and amassed a sizable fortune while doing so.   After being admitted to the bar in 1845, he practiced law in New Jersey and New York and became a household name after representing Samuel Colt and Charles Goodyear in two highly publicized cases.  All the while, he was a mechanical engineer and inventor, wrote several books, and his engineering expertise led to consulting work for the Suckasunny Mining Company and the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures.

Dickerson, his wife and their daughter, Louise, and son, also named Edward Nicoll Dickerson, had lived at No. 62 East 34^th Street for over two decades.  The house sat on the broad thoroughfare, just off Madison Avenue.  Around the corner to the north were the mansions of John Jay Phelps, Isaac N. Phelps and William E. Dodge (the John Phelps home would be purchased by J. P. Morgan in 1882); and a block away on Fifth Avenue were the twin mansions of John Jacob and William Astor.

The homes along Dickerson’s block were staid, brownstone residences, near carbon copies of one another.  While perfectly respectable, they  were slightly out of fashion in 1877.   Dickerson approached the fledgling architectural firm of McKim, Mean & Bigelow to design an updated residence.

Just a year old, the firm had been established when Charles McKim, who was already partnered with William Rutherford Mead, brought his brother-in-law, William Bigelow, into the practice.  It was given the task of designing a new home at No. 64, next door to the Dickerson mansion, and redoing the existing house.  And if Edward N. Dickerson wanted up-to-date, he definitely got it.

The architects turned to the newly popular Queen Anne style, recently introduced in England and embracing many of the Eastlake and Esthetic Movement traits.   Dickerson’s houses would practically introduce Queen Anne to New York, being edged out as the first by Sidney V. Stratton’s New York House and School of Industry by a year.

No. 64 burst forth with a showy gable.  No other wealthy New Yorker had a mansion in the innovative style.  photo by Alice Lum

The five-story brownstone-clad houses were completed in 1879 and the Dickersons moved into the slightly larger and wider No. 64.   Quite accurately, the New-York Tribune called the house “spacious and unlike any other in the city.”  Fantasies in stone, the two structures were embellished with arcades, gables, pediments and carved panels.    The bold step away from convention was too much for the often-acerbic architectural critic Montgomery Schuyler who likened the homes to “a monumental sideboard.”

Harper’s New Monthly Magazine begged to disagree.  In November 1882 it touted the Dickerson house as “one of the triumphs of both a new and admirable system of ventilation, and of internal decoration of a high order.”  The magazine praised the broad open staircases of unvarnished mahogany “with paneling of the same at the side” as a superb feature of the house.

With Queen Anne and the Eastlake Movement came stained glass and the Dickerson houses made full use of the colorful material.  “Mr. Dickerson has much beautiful stained glass; his drawing-room windows are made to repeat the delicate scarlet and dove-color of the paper and window curtains, while in a bedroom swallows fly through apple-blossoms, and are in more imperishable form represented in the glass window.”

McKim, Mead & Bigelow emphasized No. 64 by with more elaborate embellishment -- photo by Alice Lum

The interiors were decorated by the currently well-known designer Remigio Loforte, who would work with the architects for years as they became McKim, Mead & White.   The dining room walls were covered in stamped leather and the carved buffets had inset painted leather panels, imitating tiles.  The focal point of the dining room was a large stained glass window framed in Japanese carving.  “This piece has given the key-note to the room,” said Harper’s, “which has also a ceiling of painted plaques, very harmonious, curious, and ornamental.”

The Aesthetics Movement influence was evident in a bedroom paneled in ebonized cherry, “with tile fire-place, the tiles painted with bright flowers, and much ornamental brass-work about, is extremely pretty, as is the whole of this artistic dwelling.”

Two years after they moved in, the Dickersons gave perhaps their grandest entertainment in the house on January 20, 1881.  Louise was married to Charles W. Gould in Trinity Chapel in what the New-York Tribune called “one of the most brilliant weddings of the season.”  Afterward a reception was held in the 34^th Street house.  Of the 2,100 persons who received invitations, about 1,500 were present, according to the press.

Among those receiving invitations were President and Mrs. Hayes, all the members of the Cabinet, the judges of the Supreme Court of the Unites States, the German Ambassador, and European nobility.   Mrs. Dickerson worked with society’s favorite sources.  The florist was Kinnder who supplied what the Tribune called “a mass of rare flowers and plants.”   The caterers were the Pinard Brothers, who provided the mansions of Fifth Avenue and Newport with exquisite fare; and music was provided by Lauder.

Louise’s wedding gifts were on display:  a sterling tea service from her father, a full set of silverware from her brother—totaling 330 knives, forks, spoons, and other pieces—a diamond bracelet from Mrs. Gould.   There were “numerous candelabra,” a clock in the shape of “the Moscow bell,” bronze vases, mirrors and a rare cloisonné plaque.   The table was piled with a hammered silver pitcher and tray with repousse of oyster shells, an after-dinner coffee pot, a silver cream and sugar set, another silver cream pitcher, “a silver vase in the shape of a log of wood,” and a silver vase from Alexander Graham Bell (Dickerson was counsel for the American Bell Telephone Company).

Sadly, Louise lived only about three years after her wedding day.

Edward Nicoll Dickerson died on December 12, 1889.   Seven days later The New York Times reported his estate, saying “One of the shortest wills ever offered for probate is that of Edward N. Dickerson, the patent lawyer.”    Essentially one sentence long, he left “all of his estate to his wife, the principal at her death to revert to Edward N. Dickerson, their son.”

Dickerson and his mother lived on in No. 64 as he took up his father’s practice.  In the meantime, he ran the house next door as a sort of high-end boarding house.    In 1894 Captain Frank Roosevelt was living there.   The 32-year old was a member of Company E, Twelfth Regiment as was another resident, the architect S. Breck Parkman Trowbridge. 

The following winter Roosevelt was on duty with his regiment in Brooklyn.  Exposed to the frigid weather, he contracted pneumonia which led to his extremely untimely death.   A full military escort accompanied his casket from the house at No. 62 East 34^th Street to the Church of the Holy Communion on 6^th Avenue at 20^th Street.   The church was filled with important military figures including General Daniel Butterfield, Colonel Barber, Major Crocker and Colonel Dowd.

Architect Trowbridge moved out when he married in 1896.  At the turn of the century, Abel Mix Phelps, a physician and surgeon who lived across the street at No. 40, had his office in No. 62.

Before long No. 62 would become the headquarters and “exchange” for the New York State branch of the Shut-in Society.   The organization had begun in 1884 when two crippled girls wrote back and forth to brighten each other’s life.  By 1885 their two-person club had gained such popularity that it was incorporated.   As explained in The New York Times in 1911, it was an organization “of persons aiming to bring cheerfulness, contentment, and helpfulness into the lives of those who, because of sickness and injury, are unable to go outside of their own homes.” 

In its headquarters at No. 62, the Society maintained a circulating library, published a monthly magazine, The Open Window, and operated an exchange.   Invalids sent their homemade embroidery, lace, and “fancy things” for sale here.  As the First World War sent crippled soldiers back home, the Society’s outreach broadened.

In 1915 Mrs. Edward Nicoll Dickerson hosted one of the last social functions in the mansion next door.  When her sister, Josephine Ogden, married Pierpont Davis in a socially noticeable wedding, the reception was held here. 

But by now residential life on East 34^th Street had nearly come to an end.  As the mansions of Fifth Avenue were replaced by retail concerns and the city’s millionaires moved northward, the blocks immediately off the avenue followed suit.    The Shut-in Society moved further east to No. 123 East 34^th Street and the lower floors of Nos. 62 and 64 were converted to stores and the buildings combined by Abraham Reich and Adolph Fortgang.

The parlor and basement floors of the two mansions have been sadly obliterated -- photo by Alice Lum

Today the two lower floors are a mangled cacophony of signs and awnings that hawk pizza, skin care and pasta.   An incongruous penthouse has been plopped on the mansard roof of the Dickerson house.  Inside are thirteen apartments which, amazingly, according to a real estate listing “still maintain much of the original detail, especially in the upper floor apartments.”

Above the desecrated parlor level of the two houses, McKim, Mead & Bigelow’s groundbreaking Queen Anne design--an early and important commission for the young firm- still survives.  Abeit somewhat careworn.   

photo by Alice Lum

The 1884 Villard Houses

from the collection of the New York Public Library

In 1853, at the age of 18, Ferdinand Heinrich Gustav Hilgard came to the U.S. from his native Bavaria without his parent's approval or knowledge.  The boy was a progressive thinker, his father a conservative one.  Their political differences finally drove Ferdinand to board a ship for America, never to return. Upon his arrival he promptly changed his name to Henry Villard to conceal his identity and possible forced return.

Henry's early life in the States was not dull.  He became a journalist for several Midwest newspapers, accompanied Lincoln during his campaign and rode the presidential train with him.  Villard covered the Civil War for the New York Tribune, and was Washington correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in 1865.  A confirmed pacifist, after the war he married Helen Frances Garrison, the daughter of the anti-slavery advocate William Lloyd Garrison.

By 1881 Villard was president of the Northern Pacific Railway, owned the New York Evening Post and The Nation and founded the Edison General Electric Company, which later became General Electric.  It was time for the Villards, who were living in an apartment on 17th Street, to have a home deserving of their social status.

Villard commissioned the fledgling firm of McKim, Mead and White to design a complex of six unified mansions on Madison Avenue at 51st Street.  The concept of separate houses designed to appear as a single structure was not new, but was rare in New York.  The firm, only three years old, used Rome's Palazzo della Cancelleria as its inspiration.  The result was a U-shaped Italian Renaissance palace; four homes opened onto the courtyard while two had entrances on 51st Street.

from the collection of the New York Public Library

While the plans were still being drawn up in 1881, the Real Estate Record and Guide presumed that Villard's strategy behind his vision of courtyard-facing homes was to "secure privacy and get rid of tramps, and to live in a quiet and secluded way."  When completed the courtyard was accessed through a lacy cast iron fence the gateway of which was joined by an scrolled arch and lantern.

The interiors were all unique, using the finest materials and artisans.  Artists like Augustus St. Gaudens carved exquisite mantels, intricate wooden parquet floors involving tens of thousands of hand-cut pieces were installed and vaulted spaces were encrusted with elaborate mosaics.

Portions of the intricate mosaic and parquetry floors.  Images from the collection of the New York Public Library

The project was completed in 1884.  The Evening Post praised the restrained architecture, preferring it to what it termed the "vulgar" mansions a block away on Fifth Avenue.  Unfortunately, Villard lost his fortune around the time the homes were completed and Elisabeth Mills Reid, wife of New York Tribune editor Whitlaw Reid, purchased the Villard residence.  Although in a decade or two the 5th Avenue millionaires would abandon midtown, moving northward ahead of the encroaching stores and hotels, the wealthy owners in the Villard Houses remained.  As late as 1925 Mrs. Reid was still living at No. 451 with her 17 servants, including four footmen and two French cooks.

from the collection of the New York Public Library

But while the owners did not flee northward from Midtown as commerce engulfed the district, they did eventually die, leaving their grand residences to be taken over by other interests.  After her death, Mrs. Reid's home was turned into Women's Military Services Club in 1943.  Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia was there for the dedication during which he wistfully said of the old home, "You won't see any more private mansions like this."

By the end of World War II in 1945, more than a quarter of a million military women had spent the night in Mrs. Reid's glorious mansion.  Their rooms cost them 50 cents a night.

While various concerns took over different houses, Random House and the Archdiocese of New York, for example; much of the interior detailing was astonishingly preserved.  In 1974 hotelier Harry Helmsley proposed a 51-story hotel on the site.  According to his plan the interiors of the homes, which had been landmarked in 1968, would be gutted and the eastern facades stripped off.

Preservationists bristled.  And Helmsley listened.  His hotel was redesigned in a more sympathetic glass and dark metal and original interiors would be preserved.  He commissioned architects Emery Roth & Sons and Hardy Holz­man Pfeiffer to design the modern structure and integrate the 1884 houses.  Started in 1977, the project was com­ple­ted in 1980.  The brownstone blocks removed from the rear of the houses were storehoused and is used even today for reparation of the historic facade, making for seamless restoration when needed.

Despite the lost of much of the interiors, the Villard Houses as part of the hotel project mark an laudable and creative reuse of vintage structures.