The 1898 David Seymour Willard House - 304 West 81st Street

 

The original arched doorway has been converted to a window, while the former service entrance now functions as the door.

Clarence F. True started his career in the office of esteemed architect Richard M. Upjohn.  When he struck out on his own in 1884 the Upper West Side was emerging as Manhattan's newest residential frontier.  True would be responsible for scores of houses and commercial buildings, rarely working elsewhere in the city.

In 1897 he was hired by E. L. Schiller's Metropolitan Improvement Co. to design seven 20-foot-wide houses stretching west on West 81st Street from the corner of West end Avenue.  Before construction was completed, in March 1898, Schiller and True joined forces to create the Riverside Building Company with True as president.  The new firm would finish the project.   

On September 22, 1898 The New York Times reported that Clarence True had sold 304 West 81st Street "for about $34,000."  (That amount would top $1 million in today's money.)   The western-most of the row, it, like the others, was five stories tall.  Its American basement plan forewent the high stoop that was rapidly losing favor.  True, known for his working in historic styles, designed the house in his take on the Elizabethan style.  The arched entrance was centered in a three-story bowed bay.  Above the limestone base the facade was clad in beige Roman brick and trimmed in limestone.  A single dormer with a swan's neck pediment graced the mansard roof.

The home's owners were David Seymour Willard and his wife, the former Amelia Bowers.  The couple had married in Brooklyn in 1878 and had two children, Amelia, born in 1880, and Henry Bowers, born in 1881.  Willard was a member of the brokerage firm, Lapsley, Field & Company.  (One of his partners was Cyrus West Field, who was greatly responsible for laying the Transatlantic cable in 1866.)  

Following Amelia's marriage to Robert Peck in 1901, her parents were mostly alone in the house with their servants.  Howard entered Harvard that year, studying to become an architect.

The Willard summer home was on Hunter's Island, New York.  Following Howard's graduation in 1905, the family closed the townhouse for the summer season.  Often well-to-do families left a live-in servant behind to watch the house.  But Albert Banks, who lived in a fine home just a block away on West 81st Street, agreed to check on the house each day.  Banks had worked for Lapsley, Field & Company since 1899 and he and Willard were well-acquainted.

Banks checked the house just before midnight on August 30 and found everything in order.  But then, according to The Sun, "Next morning he returned to find the place turned up by the roots."   The World reported:

Half the furniture throughout the house was turned upside down.  The hall way at the entrance to the house was littered with furniture and draperies.  Running upstairs, he found that the burglars had gained an entrance to the house by smashing in the skylight...From rooms on the lower floors the thieves took rugs, paintings and small pieces of furniture and bric-a-brac.  They did not bother with the silver plate in the dining-room.

Suspicion fell on a servant.  The Sun reported on September 3, "It has rather the look of an inside job."  Police noted that there were several trunks in the basement, one of which belonged to Willard's mother and only it contained jewelry and furs.  That trunk was broken into while the others were ignored.  It is unclear whether the perpetrator or his accomplice was caught.

Amelia's marriage did not last and she was quietly remarried in the West 81st Street house to Robert White Conrow on May 6, 1908.  A simple one-line announcement appeared in the society columns. 

Around 1914 the Edward Davis family moved into 304 West 81st Street.  Davis and his wife, the former Wilma Wise, had two children, Aaron W. and Ruth M. Davis.  Ruth had graduated from Barnard College in 1913.

Davis was president of the cotton goods manufacturing firm Davis & Catterall.  He had co-founded it in 1897 with Adam Catterall.  Active in the Jewish community, he was a founder of the Free Synagogue on West 68th Street in 1906, and was a member of the exclusive Harmonie Club.

Ruth's engagement to Maxwell Steinhardt was announced in December 1915.  The wedding took place in the 81st Street house on June 5 the following year.

A much more somber ceremony took place in the drawing room the following year.  Wilma's father, Rev. Dr. Aaron Wise, had been rabbi of Temple Rodeph Sholom.  Her widowed mother, Sabine de Fischer Wise, died at the age of 81 on November 29, 1917 and her funeral was held here.

Two weeks later the family's name appeared in newspapers again.  The Davises' chauffeur turned the corner of Eighth Avenue and 44th Street and hit a popular actress.  The Dramatic Mirror reported on December 15, "Mrs. Harry Clay Blaney, professionally known as Kitty Wolfe, was run down by an automobile...last week and severely injured."  The chauffeur had driven her to her home where she remained under the care of a doctor.

In October 1933 the Davises leased the house to "a doctor," according to The New York Sun.  The New York Evening Post added that he "plans to redecorate the house before occupying it."  Redecorate he did.

It became home to the Hamilton Institute, established in 1892.  On July 27, 1935, the New York Post note that the school "has enjoyed years of successful intensive preparation for admittance to leading colleges in the United States."  Describing the school's location as being "in a very accessible portion of the city, away from all the downtown heat, noise and turmoil," the article said that students received "almost individual intensive instruction and preparation."

The Davises retained possession of 304 West 81st Street.  In July 1939 they leased it to S. Bossack who announced plans to renovate it.  Edward Davis died at the age of 75 on May 28, 1942.  Five years later the West 81st Street house was renovated to apartments, one per floor.  It was no doubt at this time that the former entrance was converted to a window to provide more interior square footage.

A year before the conversion, the centered entrance was intact.  302 East 81st Street, a near match, is to the left.  via NYC Dept of Records & Information Services

But major change would come in 1982 when the house was purchased by internationally famous English singer, songwriter, actor, film producer and co-founder of the Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger, and his model girlfriend Jerry Hall.   Jagger had it returned to a single family home.  In his 2009 book, Under Their Thumb, Bill German wrote, "Mick had hoped he could move in quietly, but a deranged groupie graffitied the front wall, 'Jerry Hag Hall pant pant filth filth,' it said.  If the yentas at Zabar's deli counter didn't know who their new neighbor was, they knew it now."

On July 26, 1985 Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall were photographed as they  left 304 West 81st Street headed to his birthday party at the Palladium nightclub.  photo by Frankie Ziths

The couple were married in an unofficial private ceremony in Bali, Indonesia on November 21, 1990.  (The marriage was declared "invalid, unlawful, and null and void" by the High Court of England and Wales in Britain in 1999.)   In his 1993 New York City Starwalks, Larry "Wolfe" Howitz wrote, "Don't be shocked if you see Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall on the Central Park bridle path.  Mick and his glamorous wife enjoy Manhattan's finest pleasures, including horseback riding, clubs, and lots of shows.  Most of his friends in town are ordinary nine-to-fivers."

When Mick Jagger purchased 304 West 81st Street, it was the last house to survive of the 1898 row.  The others had been demolished around 1975 to make way for the Calhoun School.  The institution purchased 304 West 81st Street from Jagger in 2001 for use as an administration building.  Happily, it now sat within a historic district, which precluded the school from demolishing it as it had the others along True's row.  An interior renovation completed in 2008 resulted in offices throughout the building.

photograph by the author

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The Charles and Anna Sewall Mansion - 320 West 81st Street

 

By 1897 architect Clarence Fagen True had become successful enough to form his own development firm, the Riverside Building Co.  That year he designed and began construction of six upscale homes that wrapped the southeast corner of Riverside Drive and West 81st Street.  The architect had made his mark working in historical styles and this group would be patently Clarence True.

Completed in 1898, of the three 81st Street residences, 320  stood out with its vivid red brick and stone façade.  Inspired by the Elizabethan Renaissance, it rose four-and-a-half stories to a stepped gable.  A two-story bowed oriel dominated the design; its white limestone standing out against the deep red brick.  It provided a solid-walled balcony to the fourth floor.

True sold the residence to Charles Joseph Sewall and his wife, the former Anna Brooks Wellman.  The couple had been married in 1875 and had four children, Henry Foster, Edith Brooks, Otis Prescott and Duer Irving.

Charles Sewall was president of the Commercial Union Insurance Company of New York.  He came from an old New England family and among his early ancestors in America was Samuel Sewall, the first chief justice of Massachusetts.

He was born in Brooklyn in 1848, the son of merchant and print collector Henry F. Sewall.  Henry had died in 1896 and his astonishing collection--some 23,000 works by artists like Rembrandt, Dürer and Whistler--was sold at auction in 1897.  Charles "inherited his father's fondness for books and art," according to The Weekly Underwriter, and filled the new residence with a fine library and collection of paintings.  

Late in November 1898, only a few months after the family move into their new home, Charles became too ill to go to the office.  Doctors diagnosed Bright's Disease, a kidney disorder known today as nephritis.  The Weekly Underwriter said, "an unfavorable diagnosis of his condition by his physicians greatly depressed him, and apparently he gave up hope and the fight at once."  

Five weeks later, around midnight on December 28, Charles died in his sleep at the age of 50.  Black and White, a monthly insurance journal, reported, "His funeral was from his residence, 320 West 81st street, New York city, and was largely attended by the fire underwriters of that city."

The Sewall children were all approaching or had reached young adulthood at the time.  Henry, Edith, Otis and Duer were 22, 20, 19 and 17 years old respectively.  Otis was attending Harvard University.  Five years later, in 1903, Anna moved to Bronxville, New York and leased 320 West 81st Street to David Walter McCord.

McCord was vice president of the Western Steel Car & Foundry Co.  He and his wife, the former Fannie Eliza Davis, had had a nine-year-old daughter, Dorothy Davis.  Shortly after moving into the 81st Street house, on June 7, 1903, a second daughter, Janet, was born.

By 1909 Anna Sewall was leasing the mansion to Andrew Mills, president of the Dry Dock Savings bank founded by his father, also named Andrew Mills, in 1848.  The younger Mills had been president since his father's death in 1879.   He and his wife, Aimee Gabrielle Alexander had a son, Herbert Lawrence Mills.

Still unmarried, Herbert, lived in the residence with his parents.  A graduate of Princeton University, he was the bond salesman of the Wall Street brokerage firm of Edward B. Smith & Co. 

Anna Brooks Wellman Sewall died in Bronxville on March 14, 1917 at the age of 69.  The estate continued leasing the 81st Street house to the Mills family for five more years, selling it in 1922 to Dr. Hugo Julius Leobinger and his wife, Sophia M.

The 59-year-old Leobinger was educated at the Universities of Erlangen and Heidelberg in Germany, where he held the title of Baron.  He established his medical office in the mansion.  The widely-talented Sophia Monte Neugerger Leobinger was journalist, singer, orator and pioneer suffragist.  She was editor of The American Suffragette.

A determined-faced Sophia addresses a rally outside City Hall.  from the collection of the Library of Congress

Just two years after moving in, Leobinger was in serious legal trouble.  Police raided his office, arrested and jailed him without bail.  On September 6, 1924 the Medical News reported, "Dr. Hugo J. Loebinger and three ex-convicts were arrested, August 23, charged with attempting to swindle a wealthy Manhattan furrier out of $7,000."  The article said Loebinger "is alleged to have been the go-between for the ex-convicts and the furrier."

Happily for the doctor, Magistrate Simpson of the West Side Court dismissed the charges against him on September 15.  The severe damage to his reputation and his practice had already been done, however.  Before the year was out he sued three members of the Bomb Squad and two others for $202,642 in damages for false arrest.  The New York Times reported on December 25, "The police, he said, entered his office, accused him of leading 'a Jekyll and Hyde' existence, and contended he was mixed up with a gang of international crooks."

In 1954 the upper floors of 320 West 81st Street were converted to two duplex apartments.  The ground floor continued to house the doctor's office.  While the doctor's office remained after 1964, the upper floors returned to a single residential space; and a subsequent renovation, completed in 2003, returned it to a true single-family home.

photographs by the author

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