The Archer Milton Huntington House -- 1083 Fifth Avenue

photo by Alice Lum

While railroad mogul Collis P. Huntington was in Richmond, Virginia during Reconstruction, he noticed the 19-year-old daughter of a boarding house operator, Arabella Yarrington.  Encouraged by her mother, the two began a steamy affair.  When Huntington’s business in the South was completed in 1869, he returned to New York City.  Not far behind was Arabella and her mother, along with John Worsham who posed as Arabella’s husband.

The following year Arabella bore a son, Archer,—the paternity of whom was never quite decided—and not long afterward she was tragically widowed.  (In actuality, John Worsham had returned home to his real wife in Richmond; but the story of his death was sufficient for newspaper accounts.)

Huntington's wife, Elizabeth, died in 1883, and on July 8, 1884 the millionaire and his mistress were married.  Archer was now 12 years old.  It is unclear whether his step-father ever officially adopted the boy, but Archer Worsham became Archer Milton Huntington.

At his impressionable age, the young boy entered a life surrounded by art and culture. The Huntington mansion at 2 East 57th Street was “a monument to American architecture and art,” as Archer would later describe it. In addition to Huntington’s private art collection, the rooms in which the boy lived “were all highly decorated by artists whose reputations were great,” as he described them decades later.

While Collis P. Huntington ran railroads from his offices in the Mills Building on Broad Street, Arabella took young Archer on tours of Europe where he marveled at the great museums. The seed was planted that would grow into a life-long mission of creating and funding art collections and museums.

On August 13, 1900, Huntington and Arabella were spending time at the luxurious Pine Knot Camp in the Adirondacks.  Just after 11:00 p.m. the millionaire was fatally stricken with cerebral apoplexy.  The now 28-year-old Archer Milton Huntington was suddenly a multimillionaire.

In May of 1902, The New York Times reported that Huntington purchased from developer George Edgar the adjoining mansions at 1082 and 1083 Fifth Avenue between 89th and 90th Streets.  In order to protect the light and air behind the properties, he purchased the land directly to the rear as well, for $150,000 more.  Huntington would sell 1082 Fifth Avenue to Charles S. Phillips of C. D. Barney & Co. in 1908.

Huntington and his wife Helen, moved into 1083 and leased the other properties.  Catered to by the 14 live-in servants, Huntington had time to devote to his passion: art. He donated the land for the group of museums to be called Audubon Terrace, at Broadway and 155th Street in 1904.  It would be just the beginning. That same year he founded the Hispanic Society of American to advance “the study of the Spanish and Portuguese languages, literature, and history, and advancement of the study of the countries wherein Spanish and Portuguese are…spoken.”

While Huntington was busy establishing and donating museums he also set to work remodeling his home. The decorator Ogden Codman, Jr. was extremely popular among the moneyed set and Huntington commissioned him to renovate 1083.  Although Codman had been born in Boston, he grew up in Paris and his love for all things French was deep-rooted.

Codman transformed the mansion into a Parisian row house - photo by Alice Lum

In 1913 he began transforming the façade into a limestone-clad 18th century French townhouse. A four-story bowed front with a rusticated base culminated in a deep balcony behind a stone balustrade at the fifth floor. A stately mansard roof with copper trim composed the sixth floor. Tall French doors above the entrance were finished with a segmental arched pediment.

Codman made use of Huntington’s vacant plot behind the property to enlarge the house with an addition creating an L-shape that extended to East 89th Street. The second floor was dedicated solely to entertaining. The Huntingtons’ living quarters were on the third floor and the top two floors were outfitted as servants’ rooms – enough to accommodate 25 servants.

In time Archer Huntington’s involvement with the arts turned into an involvement with an artist; the sculptress Anna Hyatt whose powerful bronze statue of Joan of Arc in Central Park had been dedicated in 1915. In 1923 the Huntingtons divorced and Archer married Anna Hyatt. Part of the fifth floor was outfitted with a large skylight and remodeled as a studio for the artist and a five-room suite was arranged for her on the fourth floor.

Huntington was busy building museums, editing and writing books such as his “Note Book in Northern Spain,” and was a member of no fewer than eight societies such as the American Geographical Society, American Numismatic Society and the New York Zoological Society; and more than seven social clubs.

By 1940 Archer Milton Huntington had built or helped establish the Museum of the American Indian, The Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina, The Hispanic Museum, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, and an art museum in Austin, Texas among others. On June 12 of that year he announced that he was donating his home to the National Academy of Design, of which his wife was a member, for its new headquarters. The Academy was founded in 1825 and was one of the oldest organizations of artists in the United States.  The Academy offered free instruction in painting, sculpture, drawing and other artistic areas to students between 15 and 30 years of age.

The Huntingtons moved to their 27.5-acre country estate,” Pleasance,” in what is now Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx. After Archer Huntington died in 1955 Anna Hyatt Huntington kept a small apartment and studio in the Academy until her death at the age of 97 on October 4, 1973.

In 1997 the organization changed its name to the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts; a title more descriptive of its functions. Fully 8,000 works of art are displayed in the permanent collection.

A year later the architectural firm Buttrick White & Burtis initiated restoration and renovation of the mansion, including a new roof, masonry repairs and updating of the heating and air conditioning systems.

The Museum's alterations sensitively melt into the architecture -- photo by Alice Lum

The outward appearance of Archer Milton Huntington’s stately mansion is essentially unchanged since Ogden Codman, Jr. revamped it in 1914. While the three other homes purchased by Huntington in 1902 have been demolished and replaced with a sterile white brick apartment building, 1083 Fifth Avenue elegantly survives.

The 1913 Ogden Codman Jr. House - 7 East 96th Street

photo by Manhattan Country School

Although Ogden Codman, Jr. was born in Boston to a prestigious family, he grew up in Paris.  Upon his return to the States, he decorated the mansions of New York’s old guard, refusing commissions from the nouveau riche, and wrote the widely-read Decoration of Houses in partnership with Edith Wharton.

Codman’s Parisian background left deep impressions on him and when he began designing houses as well as decorating them, his love for all things French was obvious.

In 1907, he purchased the vacant lot at 7 East 96th Street, still several blocks north of the area where the main thrust of mansion building was going on.  While they were still contemplating their new home, Codman’s wife of only six years died in 1910.  Now alone, Codman set about designing the elegant residence his wife would never share.

Completed in 1913, it was a slice of Paris set down on 96th Street.  Half a century later the Landmarks Preservation Commission would comment, “On approaching the house Paris and the Champs Elysee immediately comes to mind.”

Codman sat the house upon a rusticated base above which a stone balcony with an elegant iron railing stretched along the full width of the home.  Three sets of arched French doors opened to the balcony.  From the sloping mansard roof, three deep, hooded dormers lined up along the cornice.  The structure echoed perfectly Ogden’s manifesto, “proportion is the good breeding of architecture.”

Ogden Codman lived in his grand home with six servants and his chauffeur until 1920 when he left New York for his beloved Paris.  In December of that year, he negotiated a lease by telegram to rent the house furnished to George Edward Kent. Kent paid an annual rent of $25,000.

The following year, Ronald Tree, cousin of Marshall Field III, and his decorator wife, who was known professionally as Nancy Lancaster, moved in.

By 1924, the family of E. Oliver Iselin owned the house.  Iselin was a dynamic force in the New York Yacht Club and the America’s Cup races.  The family also had a summer cottage in Saratoga, a winter home in Aiken, South Carolina, an estate in Upper Brookville, Long Island called Wolver Hollow, and a race horse farm in Mount Vernon, New York.

Here on January 10, 1925, Hope Iselin, who was the daughter of millionaire William Goddard, hosted a glittering dance after a dinner at Sherry’s in honor of their debutante daughter, Edith Hope Iselin, and their niece, Dorothy Iselin.

No. 7 East 96th Street temporarily boarded up in 1927 after the departure of the Iselin family -- photo NYPL Collection

Following the Iselin family in the house were William Scoville Moore and his wife the former Edith Pulitzer, daughter of millionaire publisher Joseph Pulitzer.  The Moores purchased the house in 1927.

Although William and Edith Moore would retain possession of the property until 1948, they apparently spent little time here; instead leasing it to other moneyed New Yorkers.  By 1932, attorney James Randall Creel was living here when he secretly married Alexandra Diodati Gardiner in the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, Long Island. Hearing of the elopement, the bride’s mother, Mrs. Robert Alexander Gardiner, rushed to the church to stop the ceremony.

Mrs. Gardiner caused such an uproar that the Dean of the Cathedral had to summons the police to “calm the society leader,” as reported in the press.  The marriage went on despite the commotion, however two weeks later Mrs. Gardiner was not yet “calm.”

“Mrs. Robert Alexander Gardiner, Park Avenue society matron, forwarded by registered mail to the Long Island diocese of the Episcopal church charges against the Very Rev. G. T. P. Sargent, dean of the Cathedral of the Incarnation at Garden City, who, on Friday night last, officiated at the wedding of her daughter,” reported The New York Times on June 13, 1932.

Another lawyer, Richard Allen Knight, and his wife moved in after the Creels moved on.  Knight had been a respected attorney until he was unsuccessful in litigation connected to the $14 million estate of his father-in-law, Lewis Cass Ledyard, Jr.  The incident unnerved him and he sent a string of harassing letters to many prominent lawyers and a judge.

Knight pleaded guilty in July 1942, was disbarred, and sentenced to three months in the workhouse.  In the meantime Dorothy Ledyard Knight filed for divorce, charging cruelty.

It was all too much for Knight.  His peculiar behavior in public drew wide-spread attention.  When his butler found him dead in the house at 7 East 96th Street on January 10, 1948, The New York Times remembered his “many eccentricities, including standing on his head in the foyer at a Metropolitan Opera performance.”

Not long afterward William and Edith Moore sold the mansion.

For several years the Nippon Club was headquartered here, its Japanese Flower Show being an annually-anticipated event.

architectural rendering provided by Andrew J. Hickes (rendering.net)

The Manhattan Country School purchased the house in 1965.  In 2000 a restoration of the façade, including slate roof and copper dormer replacement, and masonry cleaning was completed.  The interiors remain almost perfectly intact.  The little slice of Paris created by Ogden Codman, Jr. looks much today as it did when he moved in nearly a century ago.

The Mary A. King Mansion (American Irish Historical Society) - 991 Fifth Avenue

photo by A. Balet

By the turn of the 20th century, the exodus of Manhattan’s wealthy from Millionaire’s Row on Fifth Avenue below 59th Street was well under way.  In 1900, Mary Augusta King commissioned architects James R. Turner and William. G. Killian to design her new residence at 991 Fifth Avenue just steps from the corner of 80th Street and far north of the encroaching hotels and businesses.

Mary was the widow of Edward King, who had died in September 1875 leaving an estate of around $5 million--in the neighborhood of $113 million today.  The King cottage in Newport, completed in 1847, was the largest and more impressive mansions of its day.  

Included in her husband's will were his extensive real estate holdings both in Manhattan and Newport.  Mary was not only a highly visible socialite; but a shrewd businesswoman.  She continued to wheel and deal in real estate, including converting her four-story former mansion at 431 Fifth Avenue for commercial purposes.

Completed in 1901, her lavish Beaux Arts-style mansion was a showplace. With a rusticated limestone base, the first three floors were bowed, creating a stone-balustraded balcony at the fourth floor.  The architects chose ruddy-colored brick with carved limestone detailing for the middle three floors, capping it with a dramatic mansard roof with three elegant copper-clad dormers.

Mary Augusta King's house (second from right) abutted the massive Frank Woolworth residence at the corner.  At the far corner is the mansion of Louis Stern, and next door the bow-fronted limestone residence was home to the Philip Livingston family.  photograph from the collection of the New York Public Library

Mary lived here with her five Irish servants for only a few years before her death in May 1905.  Banker David Crawford Clark purchased the home on April 16, 1906.  A member of the firm Clark, Dodge & Co., Clark and his wife were socially prominent and in 1911 commissioned Ogden Codman, Jr., to redesign the interiors.

In the meantime, millionaire William Ellis Corey, the president of the United States Steel Corporation, was raising eyebrows. The year that the Clarks bought No. 991, the steel magnate became smitten with an actress, Mabelle Gilman.  In a string of events that shocked New York society, Corey divorced his wife and openly courted the entertainer, finally marrying her in the Gotham Hotel on May 14, 1907.

As a wedding present, the giddy Corey gave his new bride a French chateau valued at around $1 million, while public opinion boiled over.  The New York Times referred to Miss Gilman as, “the actress for whom he had already sacrificed the wife of his youth,” and a spokesman for the United States Steel Corporation hinted that the president would be forced to resign, saying:

When a man occupies a position as prominent as that of President of a great corporation like the Steel Corporation, or the Pennsylvania Railroad, or any similar semi-public position, he is expected to observe the ordinary forms of propriety.

In 1918, Corey purchased 991 Fifth Avenue and the house became, according to The New York Times years later, “the scene of brilliant functions.”  Neither the grand home nor Corey’s millions would keep Mabelle happy, however, and in 1923 she divorced, leaving him to live out his life alone in the Fifth Avenue mansion.

William E. Corey died on May 11, 1934, leaving the house to his son.  In 1939, the American Irish Historical Society purchased the residence for $145,000 and moved in a year later after renovations were completed.

The Society, which was founded in 1897, houses a vast collection of Irish and Irish-American artifacts, newspapers, rare books and papers and hosts lectures, readings, concerts and other events.

By 2006, the house was what the president-general of the Society, Dr. Kevin Cahill, described as, “in a state of utter disrepair.”  The basement regularly flooded, the electrical and plumbing systems were outdated and the masonry required overall restoration.

An aggressive, two-year restoration and renovation was initiated under the direction of Joseph Pell Lombardi.  In some cases, the walls were taken down to the studs and lath before the building could be brought into the 21st century and returned to its original grandeur.  Original drawings by Ogden Codman Jr., maintained in the New York City Department of Buildings, were consulted to ensure accuracy.

The $5 million restoration was completed in March 2008.

Wurts Bros. photographed the much-changed block on August 28, 1942 from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York

Today the rich Beaux-Arts-style mansion with its equally-rich social history is vised between soaring 21st century structures, while losing none if its century-old architectural integrity.

The Dahlgren-Cartier House -- 15 East 96th Street

In March 1912 Eric B. Dahlgren learned a painful lesson – do not cheat on Lucy Drexel Dahlgren.

Lucy was a member of the socially prominent and fabulously wealthy Drexel family of Philadelphia. Her father had founded the Parisian banking firm of Drexel Harjes Company, later to be part of the Morgan firm.  Eric Dahlgren was known as a playboy millionaire, the son of Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren who invented the Dahlgren gun during the Civil War.

On December 11, 1890 the pair was married in Philadelphia’s cathedral by Archbishop Corrigan in the social event of the year and shortly thereafter moved to New York City.  Over the course of their 22 year marriage, Lucy bore eight children. They had an imposing mansion at 812 Madison Avenue at 68th Street as well as a “country seat” at Lawrence, Long Island.

While Dahlgren was comfortably wealthy, Lucy's personal fortune was substantial.  Upon the death of her father she inherited $20 million and in 1912 she received another $5 million from her mother’s estate.

Things in the Dahlgren household soured when the devout Catholic Lucy discovered that her husband had committed “misconduct” on the 13th and 14th of March 1912 at an apartment house at 54 East 59th Street, just two months after her mother’s death. Within a week she filed for absolute divorce in a handwritten complaint. The New York Times reported “the reason it had not been typewritten was that Mrs. Dahlgren wished the suit to be filed at once.”

Lucy gathered up her eight children, ages 9 through 21, and steamed off to Paris to wait out the proceedings. Eric took up lodging in the University Club. When it seemed that her husband might make things difficult, Lucy threatened to make the already-scandalous hearings public. Eric relented.

While abroad, Lucy was introduced to Ogden Codman, Jr., an architect and interior designer born to a prestigious old Boston family who had grown up in Paris.  Codman had fallen in love with everything French, including its architecture. He wrote, in partnership with Edith Wharton, the widely-read Decoration of Houses and from his office in New York City had decorated mansions for New York's old guard including Cornelius Vanderbilt II – refusing commissions from the nouveau riche. The pair became socially friendly.

A year later, the divorce decree was granted and Lucy Drexel Dahlgren returned to New York, establishing herself temporarily at 11 East 45th Street. She was, however, not done with Eric Dahlgren.

Immediately after the divorce was finalized, Lucy’s attorney demanded the keys to the Madison Avenue mansion from Eric Dahlgren. Insisting that the furnishings had been purchased with her money, Lucy wanted them back.  Eric resisted.

She had the house burglar-alarmed (The Times reported that “The Holmes protective wires, which were so skillfully eluded by the robbers in the Hester Street pawnshop, were strung about the house, so that no raid on the property could be made without causing complications”) and stationed sheriff’s deputies at the door. Once again Eric was forced to give in and the house was emptied of the furniture, artwork, silver and glassware. “The one room which the movers left untouched was the big room at the second story back – Mr. Dahlgren’s bedroom,” said The Times.


Unable to maintain the upkeep, Dahlgren lost the Madison Avenue house to foreclosure by the Mutual Life Insurance Company.  On November 3, 1914 a “To Let” sign was hung on the door.

In the meantime Lucy moved on.  In February of 1915 she purchased a plot at 15 East 96th Street, just east of the French townhouse Odgen Codman had built for himself two years earlier.  It was here that he envisioned a picturesque enclave of French houses lining both sides of 96th Street.

photo from the collection of the New York Public Library

Lucy commissioned Codman to design her home, which was completed in 1916. The 30-room, three-and-a-half story, Louis XVI-style house was as Codman intended – a slice of Paris in New York. The limestone façade, the slate mansard roof and the arched dormers echoed the French architecture he so admired.  Inside were two marble fountains, eleven bathrooms, an octagonal dining room, a sweeping marble staircase, and carved marble fireplaces. To accommodate her motor-cars, a turn-table at the back of the property would reverse the direction of the parked cars so they could easily drive out again.  Three turbines ran the two-manual Estey organ and roll player installed in the second floor drawing room.

The attraction of New York had faded for Lucy Dahlgren, however. Except for occasional entertainments for her daughters at Sherry’s or The Colony Club, she spent more and more time in Paris, Florence and Newport . By 1922 she left 15 East 96th for good, renting it to Pierre Cartier and finally selling it to him in 1927.


The Cartier family used the Dahlgren house as a pied-a-terre only, preferring to stay in their 35-room, 19-acre estate in Roslyn Harbor, Long Island. The 96th Street house was used for entertaining French dignitaries, intellectuals and artists, and was frequently used during World War II to entertain exiled French countrymen. Poet and playwright Paul Claudel was often a guest in the house.

photo NYPL Collection

Upon his retirement, Cartier sold 15 East 96th Street to the Roman Catholic Church of St. Francis de Sales, which used it as a convent. Little alteration was done to the interiors while the nuns lived here and in 1981 it was sold to financier Barry Turpin for $3 million to be used as a private residence once again. Turpin updated the plumbing, wiring and temperature control systems.

A full restoration was initiated when, in 1987, businessman Paul Singer purchased the house for $5.7 million.  Singer brought in European architects most familiar with the Beaux Arts period for advice, after which a two-year restoration was executed by Thompson/Robinson/Toraby Architects, winning them the “Friend of the Upper East Side Historic Districts” Award in 1989.

In 2004 a second restoration was completed by Preserv that repaired and replaced copper cladding, replaced and restored the decorative railings, replaced the roof, and patched and repaired the limestone façade. The following year the organ, thought to be the last extant Estey Player Organ in the city, was removed to storage in order to make space for an additional bathroom.

Lucy Drexel Dahlgren’s French townhouse – at once charming and imposing -- has never been seriously altered.