Midtown Theater ARCHITECT: Boak & Paris DATE: 1932 STYLE: Art Deco The Midtown Theater (now Metro Theater), a rare surviving small Art Deco style neighborhood movie theater, has one of the finest facades of its type in New York City. Among the Art Deco buildings in New York City, many of the most notable are skyscrapers and tall apartment buildings, but small buildings including banks, stores, and some theaters were also constructed in this style. The Midtown was designed and built in 1932-33 by Boak & Paris, an architectural firm involved mainly with the construction of apartment houses in the 1920s and 30s. The theater is distinguished by a glazed terra-cotta facade, executed in various colors, predominantly beige and black. A central medallion features bas-relief stylized figures holding theatrical masks representing comedy and tragedy, symbolic of the use of the building as a theater. Constructed during the Depression, when small neighborhood theaters were built instead of the popular large movie palaces of the 1920s, the Midtown is one of the few functioning Pre-World War II movie theaters of the many which once lined Broadway on Manhattan’s Upper West Side

The Alimar entrance detail, ca. 1975. Designed in 1899 as a set with four row houses along West 105th Street, the Alimar Apartments were the ambitious project of builder Hamilton M. Weed. The Alimar was constructed to attract wealthy new-comers to the expanding neighborhood at a time when apartment living (seriously luxury apartment living) was becoming acceptable among well-to-do New Yorkers. The Jane & Leo-designed building has a facade like an explosion of Beaux-Arts features from the ornate two-story rusticated limestone base to the copper mansard roof to the dormers, described by one architectural historian as "frothy." (Jane & Leo also created the equally, if not more, frothy Dorilton at 71st Street for Hamilton Weed.) The interiors were also lavishly designed. The eleven-room apartments included a library, parlor, servant room, and numerous bedrooms. Residents and visitors tread on hardwood parquet floors and sat in dinning rooms and libraries paneled in mahogany. The building suffered in the second half of the 20th century, with its mansard and much of its facade ornamentation removed. A renovation in the late 1990s re-fabricated new facade features and added a flat cornice roof, a convincing recreation.

P.S. 165, ca. 1897. This C.B.J. Snyder-designed public school was the first to make use of the H-plan, a floorplan designed to maximize light and airflow by incorporating recessed courtyards partially surrounded by “wings.” Since 1936, the school has been named for Robert E. Simon, the philanthropist and real estate developer who was president of Carnegie Hall from 1925-35.

Marseilles Hotel ARCHITECT: Harry Allan Jacobs DATE: 1902-05 STYLE: Modern French The Hotel Marseilles, clad in brick with limestone, wrought-iron, and terra-cotta trim and crowned with a sloping mansard roof, illustrates the rise of the “Modern French” style in commercial and hotel architecture. The appearance of this style in the United States was the result of a sharp increase in the number of American architects attending the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the concomitant ascent of France as the dominant influence in American architecture in the late nineteenth century.

The Metro Theater (formerly Midtown Theatre), ca. 1994. This landmarked, Depression-era theater has since closed, and, as of March, 2016, is slated for retail conversion. The Midtown Theater was completed in 1933, replacing the seven-story tenement building which had occupied its site. Described by the Landmarks Preservation Commission as “a rare surviving small Art Deco style neighborhood movie theater” with “one of the finest facades of its type in New York City,” it recalls a specific era of theater construction, when 1930s austerity led developers to eschew the grand theater architecture of the previous decades. In Edmund Vincent Gillon’s 1994 photo, the marquee advertises showings of “The Client,” a legal drama starring Tommy Lee Jones, Susan Sarandon, and Brad Renfro.

Master Building STATUS Designated Individual Landmark 310-312 Riverside Drive ARCHITECT: Harvey Wiley Corbett; Helmle, Corbett & Harrison; Sugarman & Burger DATE: 1928-29 STYLE: Art Deco, Skyscraper The Master Building, erected in 1928-29 to house an apartment hotel and museum, is an innovative and significant example of the work of Harvey Wiley Corbett, an architect influential in skyscraper design, and expresses his successful employment of sculptural massing, vertical emphasis, and the minimal, yet elegant, use of surface ornamentation and historically-inspired detailing. The design of the building includes many strong and well-integrated features representative of the best of New York City’s Art Deco style skyscrapers, including patterned brickwork which varies in color from dark at the base to light at the tower, setbacks, irregular and faceted massing of the upper stories, and an ornamental cap.

The Braender apartment house, ca. 1910. The Braender, named for its German-born developer Philip Braender, is a ten-story apartment building designed by Frederick Browne and completed in 1903. Architecturally, the Braender incorporates a variety of influences into what the New York Times calls a “complicated, even chaotic mix of French Renaissance, Spanish and Baroque styles.”

2641 Broadway, the only surviving 19th century wood-frame building on the Upper West Side, May 9, 1938. When Henry Grimm completed a three-story wood-frame house in 1871, his was the only building on the block. Grimm, an entrepreneur, anticipated the development of the Upper West Side and decided to set up a grocery business to serve the residents who would arrive once paved roads, public transit, and other infrastructure reached the neighborhood. Unfortunately, Grimm ran out of funds before his clientele arrived. The Italianate building was soon converted into the Boulevard House saloon, with rooms for rent upstairs. In 1894, the successful Lower East Side brewer Peter Doegler purchased Grimm’s building, keeping the saloon open to promote his popular German-style lager. Following Prohibition, the ground floor cycled through retail businesses, including the cigar shop and grocery pictured above, while the upper stories were modified to support billboard advertisements. These alterations have damaged recent appeals for landmark designation.

ST. MICHAEL’S EPISCOPAL CHURCH COMPLEX, MANHATTAN Address: 227 West 99th Street New York, NY 10025 The congregation of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church has been worshipping on this site since 1807, outgrowing its previous two buildings before this complex was constructed. The church, parish house and rectory were completed over roughly 25 years, all in the same rock-faced Indiana limestone. The church was designed in the Northern Italian Renaissance or Romanesque-Byzantine style and completed in 1891. Its square clock and bell tower is visible throughout the surrounding neighborhood. It also features Spanish tile roofs and magnificent stained glass windows by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The parish house, set back from the street, was completed in 1896-97, and the rectory, the final piece of the complex, was completed in 1912-13. The complex is striking in its materials and monumental scale. St. Michael's Church, Parish House and Rectory form one of the finest ecclesiastical complexes in Manhattan. The church building of 1890-91 was designed by Robert W. Gibson. Gibson was a major figure on the New York architectural scene during the late 19th century and was proficient at designing buildings in a great number of stylistic variants. He is best known for the West End Collegiate Church and School designed in the neo-Flemish style. The St. Michael's complex is Romanesque Revival in style, but the Romanesque forms are used in an unusual manner and are combined with a variety of other stylistic motifs to create a singularly eclectic composition. All three buildings are constructed of rock-faced limestone blocks laid in a random pattern and all are strikingly monochromatic. The most powerful feature of the church is the massing of the various liturgical elements --the long nave, apsidal chancel, unevenly-sized transepts, cloistered arcade, tall clerestory, steeply-pitched tiled roof, and most notable, the tall corner clock tower. The square tower, located at the corner of the building, nestled between the apse and the east transept, is based on Italian, Early Christian precedents. Topped by two tiers of open arcades and a pyramidal roof, it is visible for many blocks. The parish house of 1896-97 on West 99th Street is a picturesque, asymmetrically-massed structure set back from the street behind a garden. The building, designed by F. Carles Merry, is Romanesque Revival in form, with rock-faced stone facing, round-arched openings, and stone transom bars. The boldness of the Romanesque Revival forms is tempered by the asymmetrical massing reminiscent of a mid-19th-century picturesque villa and by the Palladian window motif in the gabled projection. The rectory of 1912-13 is located to the west of the parish house and is built out to the lot line, serving to enclose the garden on the third side. Although more austere than the other buildings of the complex, it is designed by Robert W. Gibson in a similar manner and is an integral part of the complex. The church is well known for its series of Tiffany windows and for its acoustics. A new organ was installed in 1967 and is used for recitals. All three buildings are remarkably intact and are in an excellent state of repair.

Bronze statue by Augustus Lukeman, in memory of Isidor and Ida Straus, ca. 1975. Lukeman’s statue depicts a nymph gazing into water, representing “memory.” The statue is situated in Straus Park, where it was dedicated in April, 1915.

View west from 2760 Broadway, at 106th Street, 1928. In the foreground is Straus Park, named for Isidor and Ida Straus, Upper West Side residents who perished aboard the Titanic. Isidor Straus and his brother Nathan were partners in Abraham & Straus department store, and later Macy’s, where the brothers became co-owners and opened the flagship Herald Square store. Isidor Straus also held office as a United States Representative for New York. The park, previously known as Schulyer Square and Bloomingdale Square, features a bronze statue in memory of the Strauses by the sculptor Augustus Lukeman. In the background, Riverside Park and the Hudson River are visible. At the foot of 106th Street is a bronze equestrian sculpture by Karl Bitter, depicted General Franz Sigel, a German-born Civil War veteran.

Master Apartments, 1930. The Master, a 27-story Art Deco skyscraper — the tallest on Riverside Drive — was commissioned by financier Louis Horch to house the Master Institute of United Arts, a school founded by the Russian artist, explorer and theosophist Nicholas Roerich. The new building included 24 stories of residential apartments, intended to generate rental income to support the Master Institute and Roerich Museum of the building’s lower floors. Roerich, a painter, set designer (best known for Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”), philosopher, and mystic who traveled extensively through East Asia, immigrated to the United States in 1920, having left Russia shortly after the October Revolution of 1917. In New York, he found an audience for his theories about the relationship between art and daily life — as well as benefactors, including Horch, whose Riverside Drive townhouse previously occupied the site of the Master building. For the Master, Horch and Roerich enlisted Harvey Wiley Corbett, a noted skyscraper architect. Corbett’s Art Deco design featured colored brick gradually shifting to lighter tones in the building’s upper stories, and the first instance of corner windows in a New York skyscraper. The Master was completed in October, 1929, shortly before the market crash, and immediately came under financial pressure. Horch spent much of the early 1930s attempting to sort out its various debts and liabilities, and was eventually able to wrest control of the building in 1935. Roerich, meanwhile, got out of town — he continued his Asian expeditions, and would eventually settle in India. In 1938, Horch closed the Roerich Museum (the patronage relationship had become strained), and opened the Riverside Museum in the same space. That museum operated until 1971, when its collection of contemporary American art was transferred to the Brandeis Museum. The Equity Library Theater hosted productions at the Master from 1961-1989. In 1988, as the surrounding Manhattan Valley neighborhood began to rebound from a period of blight, the Master was converted to a housing co-operative. During the mid-90s, this new ownership structure undertook a multi-year restoration project.

891 Amsterdam Avenue, 1937. The Association for the Relief of Respectable Aged Indigent Females (ARRAIF) was conceived in 1813. During the "Second Great Awakening," a time when the church aimed to reassert itself, mostly through charity, a group of women established a society to help elderly women who "once enjoyed a good degree of affluence, but now reduced to poverty due to the vicissitudes of Providence." The ARRAIF aimed to aid widows of both the American Revolution and the War of 1812. The first years of the society consisted of raising donations and giving clothing, furniture, and other household items to elderly women in need. In 1837, they established their first brick-and-mortar asylum at 226 East 20th Street with the help of John Jacob Astor and Peter G. Stuyvesant. In the late 1870s, the group purchased new land at 891 Amsterdam Avenue to construct a larger building. The building here was completed in 1883. Architect Richard Morris Hunt created a Victorian Gothic style structure. The new building was open to “any respectable non-Roman Catholic gentlewoman over sixty years of age, on payment of $150 and the surrender of any property she possessed." The building operated as the ARRAIF until about 1968. In 1990, it became a branch of Hostelling International and is currently the largest hostel in North America.

"Hotel Marseilles, ca. 1912. The Hotel Marseilles was part of a flurry of Upper West Side “apartment hotel” construction in the opening years of the 20th century, spurred by the extension of the IRT Broadway line, completed in 1904. Apartment hotels — essentially apartment buildings with centralized “hotel” kitchens on lower floors, rather than in each unit — took advantage of loopholes between the Tenement House Law of 1901 and city building codes, allowing developers to build larger, higher density, and less strictly regulated buildings. As building codes were adjusted, apartment hotels fell out of fashion and units in the Hotel Marseilles were converted to traditional apartments, equipped with in-unit kitchens. In 1979, the building was converted to subsidized housing for elderly New Yorkers."

General Memorial Hospital, 1917. This still standing fortresslike French Renaissance building was constructed in 1887 as the New York Cancer Hospital, the first medical facility to focus solely on cancer. The planning and design of the building reflected prevailing ideas about illness, its causes, and treatment on that era. The hospital was funded by, among others, John Jacob Astor III, who wished to refute the stigma of cancer (in the Victorian period, cancer thought to be contagious and a disease of the poor or those with lacking hygiene). The patients were kept in the round towers, as it was believed that germs flourished in corners. The large windows in the circular towers allowed for more light, better ventilation, and a better view of the patients for the medical staff. Given the low survival rate of cancer patients in the early years of cancer research, the building became known as a death trap (with cancer advancement came an improved reputation). In the 1950s the building became a nursing home, but the operation shut down in 1974 with claims of patient abuse and crumbling facilities. The city designated the building a landmark in 1976, which saved it from demolition over the next few decades as plans were put forth for reuse, but none came to be. All the while the building continued to deteriorate and became a den for drug addicts during New York's roughest years. Finally, in 2001 a new owner began work on a residential tower on the west side of the lot. September 11th halted work, but in 2002 new loans and Columbia University's purchase of apartments in the new tower turned the tide. The tower was completed and the old hospital was restored and renovated into 17 luxury units. The roofs were fixed, the mortar repointed, and original windows were replicated.

Grace Methodist Episcopal Church, ca. 1905. The original Grace Methodist Episcopal Church was a small wood-frame chapel on West 104th Street, constructed in 1870. As the once sparse population of the neighborhood boomed around the turn of the century, the need for a larger space became apparent. In 1894 the cornerstone for a new church was dedicated. The resulting structure was a Lombardic-Romanesque building and one of the first churches in the city erected with an iron frame skeleton. Its most defining feature was the 156-foot tower at the southwest corner of the building. Unfortunately the church was destroyed in a 1983 fire. It was replaced in 1990 with a contemporary complex that includes a small church and an apartment building for clergy and low-income families.

450 Columbus Avenue, date unknown. Originally intended to be luxury apartments, the two buildings (connected on the Columbus Avenue front by a cornice) were completed in 1890 and 1891 as the Endicott Hotel . The hotel was quite opulent, with steam heat, electric lighting, and a glass-roofed restaurant. At the time of its opening, the Ninth Avenue El's 81st Street station ran just next to the hotel's third floor windows. A location for high society and political events, the hotel also had an unusually high rate of disasters and scandals, including assaults, murders, suicides, and plenty of mafia activity. By the middle of the 20th century the building was a cheap welfare hotel. As the city and neighborhood revitalized and gentrified in the 1980s, the once grand, then seedy hotel, was completely renovated and converted to condos.

At the same time as architect Henry F Kilburn was completing work on West-Park Presbyterian Church on West 86th Street, he was building another masterpiece 20 blocks north. Both churches were built to accommodate the Upper West Side’s rapidly growing population. This church, with its light-yellow, speckled brick and detailed terra-cotta banding, once housed the largest Presbyterian congregation in New York City.

New-York Cancer Hospital ARCHITECT: Charles C. Haight DATE: 1884-86 STYLE: Hospital Although the construction of the hospital was essentially finished in 1886, the opening was delayed a year because of difficulties in establishing proper sewer connections and the necessity of erecting two additional buildings; one a small mortuary building, no longer standing; the other, a boiler-house. laundry, and servant dormitory, still standing at 32 West I06th Street. When the New York Cancer Hospital opened, it was the first hospital in the United States and only the second in the world to be devoted exclusively to cancer patients (the other was the London Cancer Hospital). The death of President Ulysses S. Grant from cancer in 1885 was a factor which helped arouse public interest in the funding of the hospital. It was not until the 1880s that cancer was being seriously studied for the first time, and the New York Cancer Hospital was anxious to establish itself as a proper scientific institution. It promoted the use of surgical techniques for cancer treatment and the belief that this helped save lives. Many of the cancer patients were treated free of charge.

The Midtown Theatre, 1933. The Marquee advertises “Double Harness,” a 1933 film starring Ann Harding and William Howell.

The Alimar Apartments, ca. 1905. A seven-story Beaux-Arts apartment building commissioned by developer Hamilton Weed and completed under the ownership of E.G. Thiery. The Alimar, which opened in late 1899, featured stylish and spacious Colonial Revival interiors and amenities including state-of-the-art refrigerated storage.

St. Michael’s Protestant Episcopal Church, viewed from 99th Street, ca. 1907. The church’s 160-foot tower is, according to the Landmarks Preservation Commission, “based on Italian, Early Christian precedents.”

Atlas Motor Company Garage, ca. 1907.

St. Michael's Protestant Episcopal Church, ca. 1915. St. Michael’s parish was founded in 1807 as an outpost of the Trinity Church on Wall Street in Lower Manhattan. Bloomingdale, as the Manhattan Valley section of the Upper West Side was then known, was a largely rural district, close to the Hudson River and the summer country homes of Trinity pewholders. Accordingly, the first church was a simple wooden structure at the corner of 99th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The second church, built in 1854, was another wooden structure in the Carpenter Gothic style. The present St Michael’s church, a 1,500-seat Romanesque structure by Robert W. Gibson, was completed in 1891. The church features several works designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, including a set of seven stained-glass lancet windows, a reredos mosaic in the Chapel of the Angels, and various decorative elements. St. Michael’s was designated a New York City Landmark in April, 2016.