William M. Dowling's 1939 Regent House - 25 West 54th Street

photo by Lowell Cochran

In 1935, Nathaniel Wallenstein, head of the Wallenstein Realty Corporation, hired architect George F. Pelham to design an Art Moderne style apartment building at 411 West End Avenue.  In 1938, two years after that structure was completed, William M. Dowling started plans for another building for Wallenstein, at 25 West 54th Street.  His plans projected the cost of the 12-story structure at $450,000--about $9.73 million in 2025.

Dowling's design for Regent House moved away from Art Moderne and towards Midcentury-Modern.  Its spartan, yellow brick facade relied on its geometric shapes and complex casement windows for interest.  The windows of the slightly-projecting central section wrapped the corners, and those of the set-backs were angled.  Sleek metal railings protected the terraces of the upper floors.  The design did not impress The New York Times architectural columnist Christopher Gray half a century later.  On March 12, 2006, he described it as, "just a plain-vanilla box."

The complex windows are seen in this photograph of the newly-completed building.  via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services.

Among the initial residents were journalist Cecil Broida Brown and his wife, the former Martha Leaine Kohn.  Born in New Brighton, Pennsylvania in 1907, Brown graduated from Ohio State University in 1929.  He and Martha were married in Rome, Italy in 1938 where, in 1940, he was hired by CBS as their Rome correspondent.  That quickly ended when he criticized the Mussolini regime and was ousted from Italy.

In his Cecil Brown, The Murrow Boy Who Became Broadcasting's Crusader for Truth, Reed W. Smith writes that the Browns moved into "a penthouse apartment in a co-op complex at 25 West 54th Street, just north of the Museum of Modern Art."

Brown left CBS in 1943 after a heated disagreement with news director Paul White.  On the air on August 25, Brown editorialized his newscast with the comment, "a good deal of the enthusiasm for this war is evaporating into thin air."  White insisted on non-bias reporting, while Brown said he could not abide with the CBS policy of "non-opinionated" news.  

Cecil Brown, 1961 NBC Television promotional photo

Following the end of World War II, he worked as a correspondent for ABC and for NBC.  While living here Brown wrote Suez to Singapore, Cecil Brown's Story, a retelling of the sinking of the HMS Repulse in December 1941.  He and Martha left Regent House in 1967, moving to California to teach at Cal Poly Pomona.

On April 20, 1957, The New York Times reported, "A corporation formed by tenants in Regent House, a fourteen-story apartment building at 25 West Fifty-fourth Street, has purchased the property and will operate it on a cooperative basis."  

Among the residents at the time was theatrical booking agent Charles Rapp.  His business, The American Guild of Variety Artists, was in the Brill Building at 1650 Broadway.  (The impressively named firm consisted of a single room and two employees.) He explained to the U.S. Congress Senate Committee on Government Operations in 1962, "I am primarily engaged in supplying entertainment to resort hotels in the Catskill Mountains."  Indeed, he was.  The New York Times later commented, "Mr. Rapp was considered the biggest one-man buyer and supplier of talent in the city...From July 1 to Labor Day, year after year, he booked all but a tiny fraction of the acts in the Borscht Belt."

Rapp started his career when he was 12.  Aware that the son of his building's superintendent could sing and that a caterer (a friend of his father) needed entertainment one Saturday night, he introduced them.  He divided his $10 fee with the singer.

Charles Rapp booked unknown singers, comedians, and dancers, many of whom went onto stardom.  He discovered Jack E. Leonard, Buddy Hackett, Rip Taylor, Alan Kind, Jackie Mason and Henny Youngman among many others.  Two of his clients, Red Buttons and Jan Murray, were working as social directors when he found them.

Among Rapp's neighbors in the building were attorney Sidney S. Bobbe and his wife, author Dorothie de Bear Bobbe.  Born in 1895, Dorothie wrote historical works, including the 1929 Abigail Adams, the Second First Lady; Mr. and Mrs. John Quincy Adams, published in 1930; and her 1939 De Witt Clinton.  She contributed articles to The New York Times Magazine and American Heritage.

photo by Lowell Cochran

Living here in the late 1970s was television host and journalist Ponchitte Pierce.  Born in Chicago in 1942, she started her career as assistant editor of Ebony magazine.  She first appeared on broadcast news in 1967 and in 1973 was made a special correspondent at CBS News.

Ponchitte became close friends with another resident, Megan Marshack.  She was an aide to Nelson Rockefeller, whose office in the vintage rowhouse at 13 West 54th Street was just steps away.  The two women were pulled into a nationwide scandal on January 26, 1979.  At about 10:50 that night, Ponchitte received a panicked phone call from Marshack.  Ponchitte told Jet magazine, "She told me that Governor Rockefeller had suffered a heart attack and she asked me to come immediately to 13 West 54th Street."

Pierce arrived to find her friend trying to perform mouth-t0-mouth on Rockefeller, who had suffered his heart attack during sex.  Pierce said, "It seemed to me that the best thing I could do was call '911.'"  She left immediately afterward and on the way to Regent House, "I saw a police car approaching and I directed the policeman to 13 West 54th Street."  Craig Shirley, in his Citizen Newt, writes, "A longtime Rockefeller aide, Hugh Morrow, appeared and tried to assemble what was left of the old man's dignity before the paramedics, the police and the cream of the New York media showed up."  According to Shirley, Marshack's apartment had been purchased by Rockefeller.

Ponchitte Pierce resided here as late as 1996 when she was included in Notable Black American Women.

Steven M. Kaufmann, who moved into Regent House when the building opened in 1939, was still here in 2004 when he died in his apartment in May at the age of 91.  One of the most colorful residents in the building's history, he had retired at the age of 25.  The New York Times journalist Cathy Horyn interviewed Kaufmann in his apartment earlier that year.  She wrote,

Although I knew that name-dropping would be an inevitable part of a 90-year-old's memories, I was unprepared for what I heard: Gertrude Lawrence, Lena Horne, the 1950s star Ross Hunter, the grande dame Kitty Miller, the investor and art collector Jacques Sarlie, and Rock Hudson.

During the interview, Kauffmann motioned to a chair in his living room.  It was legendary actress Greta Garbo's favorite spot when she visited.  "She used to sit over in that chair," he mentioned.

Kaufmann shared the apartment with his partner of 19 years, Edward DeLuca.  They met in an art gallery in 1985 when Kaufmann was 71 and DeLuca was 24.  Kaufmann told Horyn, "That was the beginning of what I call the glorious years.  All the events in my life cannot compare to what this relationship has meant to me."

photo by Lowell Cochran

William M. Dowling's windows have been replaced.  The laudable attempt to honor the originals falls short.  Nevertheless, the Regent House does not deserve the denigration of "just a plain vanilla box."

many thanks to reader Lowell Cochran for suggesting this post

William M. Dowling's 1937 19 East 88th Street

 

In 1935, William M. Dowling designed a 15-story-and-penthouse apartment building for Nathaniel Wallenstein on the northeast corner of 88th Street and Madison Avenue.  His bold, late Art Deco design included triple-height fluted pilasters on either side of the entrance that terminated in stylized scallop designs.  The address was announced in jazzy Art Deco figures within the spandrel between the second and third floors, directly above the doorway.  By contrasting light and dark brick, Dowling created vertical central sections on both elevations.  

The street address, in a jazzy Art Deco font, is integrated into the spandrel above the second floor.

Architects had been wrapping casement windows around the corners of buildings for several years.  But Dowling took his design a step further by chamfering them within the sharply angled corners.  The streamlined terrace and balcony railings have been compared by architectural historians to ocean liner designs.

No. 19 East 88th Street was completed in 1937.  An advertisement called it "this ultra-modern new building" and a "town residence for a selected tenancy."  The apartments, ranging from three to five rooms, were described as, "individually planned--No two alike!"  An ad touted, 

Most modern appointments.  All electric kitchens! Dropped living rooms; spacious foyers' dressing rooms with triple mirrors; glass-enclosed showers; recessed radiation.  Central Park--in all its beauty--just beyond your w-i-d-e casement corner windows.

Among the initial residents was investment adviser Russell Field Prudden.  Born in Lockport, New York in 1894, he had been senior bank examiner of the State Banking Department from 1930 to 1933.  Prudden was the founder and publisher of Prudden's Digest of Investment and Banking Opinions and the author of The Bank Credit Investigator.  

The New York Times described Prudden as being "active socially here and in Palm Beach, Fla., and Southampton, L.I.,"  where he maintained homes.  His entertaining in town was typified in The New York Times reporting on December 3, 1937, "Russell F. Prudden of 19 East Eighty-eighth Street entertained with a dinner last night at his home for Mr. and Mrs. Knox B. Phagan of Bronxville, later taking his guests to a theatrical performance."  

Another early resident was Allen Boretz, who signed a lease in December 1937.  The songwriter and playwright had scored a Broadway hit seven months earlier when Room Service (co-written with John Murray) opened at the Cort Theatre.  It would run for 500 performances, closing on July 16, 1938.

The Federal Theatre Project produced Room Service in San Francisco in 1938.

In 1939, his play Off to Buffalo opened, while Room Service resulted in offers from Hollywood.  Boretz would write or co-write screenplays into the 1940s.  Among his credits were the 1943 It Ain't Hay and the 1946 Ziegfield Follies.

Typical of the early tenants were Bert Kulick, vice president of the Syndicate Exchanges, Inc., proprietors of motion picture theaters; Daniel I. Crowley, president of the Crowley Tar Products Company of New York and Chicago; and Hugo F. Jaburg, president of R. C. Williams & Jaburg Bros., a food products firm.

image via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services.

Dr. N. Philip Norman and his wife lived here by 1944.  The Consultant Nutritionist for the New York City Department of Heath and Hospitals, he was described by Dr. Francis M. Pottenger, Jr., president of the American Academy of Applied Nutrition in 1947 as "one of the well known nutritionists in the east, and...the author of many excellent articles and books along these lines."  Recognized as a pioneer nutritionist, in 1948 he co-authored Tomorrow's Food with James Rorty.

Norman's leisure time was devoted to an expertise far afield of his professional bailiwick.  In 1944, the New York Sun described him as "for many years a maker of river steamboat models."  His hobby made him a leading authority on steamboats and their architecture and history.

Architect Daniel Paul Higgins and his wife Anna lived here by 1944.  A partner in Eggers & Higgins, The New York Times said he was...

prominently or exclusively responsible for a long list of architectural successes, including Constitution Hall for the Daughters of the American Revolution, the National Gallery of Art, the American Red Cross Building and the great-columned Pantheonistic Jefferson Memorials--all in Washington; interior designs for the S. S. America and four Grace Line ships and innumerable libraries and office buildings (example--the Aetna Life Insurance Company headquarters in New York and the Senate Office Building in Washington).

The Higgins's apartment was furnished with 18th and early 19th century American furniture.  images from the collection of the Library of Congress.

In addition to his busy architectural career, Higgins was a member of the Board of Education and "served on the board of so many youth movements that he could not remember all the names," according to The New York Times.  Among them were the Boys Clubs of America, the Police Athletic League, the Boy Scouts of America and the Catholic Youth Organization.

from the collection of the Library of Congress

Daniel and Anna Higgins had two adult children.  They maintained a country home in Carmel, New York, and a Colonial period house in Truro, Massachusetts.

The Higgins's country house in Massachusetts.  from the collection of the Library of Congress.

On December 18, 1953, the Kingston, New York newspaper The Daily Freeman reported, "Daniel P. Higgins, 67, widely known architect...is seriously ill in New York Hospital."  He died the following week, on December 26.  His lengthy obituary in The New York Times mentioned, "he left the ranks of fledgling draftsmen to create his own blueprints and culminate his career as partner in one of the country's foremost architectural firms, Eggers & Higgins."

Influential in his own sphere was Russian immigrant Jacob Potofsky, who lived here with his wife Blanche Lydia Zetland by the 1960s.   The couple was married in 1951.  (Potofsky's first wife, Callie Taylor, had died five years earlier.)

Potofsky started his career at the age of 14 as a "floor boy" in a Hart, Schaffner & Marx garment factory.  He rose through the ranks of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America until, in 1946, he became its president.  The New York Times would call him "a man renowned for his skills as a conciliator within the union movement."  Potofsky died at the age of 84 on August 5, 1979.

A maid in a duplex apartment was the victim of a terrifying incident on May 14, 2004.  After hearing a noise in the upstairs bedroom, The New York Times reported she "encountered the burglar, who...said he would not hurt her.  The burglar restrained her and robbed the apartment of jewelry and other items."  

In an article in The New York Times on March 12, 2006, Christopher Gray mentioned, "most of the casement windows are intact.  Julian Berkeley, the managing agent, said that although the co-op has suggested replacements, 'people just love those windows' and most have kept them."  The old casements have since been replaced with windows that admirably attempt to reflect William M. Dowling's 1936 design.

photographs by the author

many thanks to reader Lowell Cochrane for suggesting this post

no permission to reuse the content of this blog has been granted to LaptrinhX.com