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

Karl Bitter’s equestrian statue of General Franz Sigel, Riverside Park, 1907. Bitter, a Viennese-born architectural sculptor, rose to prominence after winning a design contest for Trinity Church bronzework, and became a frequent collaborator of the prominent architect Richard Morris Hunt. Sadly, Bitter’s career came to a premature end in 1915, when he was struck and killed by an out-of-control car as he exited the Metropolitan Opera. This statue, completed in 1907, depicts General Franz Sigel, a German-born veteran of the Civil War, and later a civil servant in New York City.

Morningside Heights is graced with the highest concentration of institutional complexes built in a relatively short period at the turn of the 20th century, both in the city and anywhere in the United States. It is home to monumental places of worship, higher learning and healing, which accentuate its backdrop of rowhouses and apartment buildings, culminating in streetscapes that are both elegant and eye-filling. Topographically, it is situated on a plateau historically known as Harlem Heights, while geographically it is bounded by West 110th Street to the south, West 125th Street to the north, and two Frederick Law Olmsted–designed parks to the east (Morningside Park) and to the west (Riverside Park). The first institution to move into the area was New York Hospital, which began purchasing land in 1816 to establish the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum (on the present-day campus of Columbia University) and the Leake and Watts Orphan Asylum (on the present-day campus of St. John the Divine) in 1821 and 1834, respectively. The stigma of an insane asylum, compounded by inadequate transit access to the area, hindered other development until the late 19th century, when the hospital auctioned off its real estate holdings and relocated to White Plains in favor of more space and fresher air. The asylum’s relocation prompted a flurry of development by other institutions intent on expansion, starting with the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1887 and followed by St. Luke’s Hospital, Columbia College and Teacher’s College in 1892. The introduction of the subway into Morningside Heights in 1904, coupled with the neighborhood’s magnificent parks and prestigious institutions, led to a frenzy of speculative apartment house construction, attracting middle-class residents who could now commute directly downtown to work. Even before the advent of zoning regulations for land use, developers erected rowhouses and modest apartment buildings on the side streets and grand apartment houses on the avenues, with particularly monumental examples on Riverside Drive, Claremont Avenue and Cathedral Parkway, and mixed-use commercial buildings along Broadway, giving the neighborhood a heterogeneous yet cohesive character. Morningside Heights’ unorthodox yet distinctive sense of place comes from the coexistence of residential and institutional clusters, as exemplified by elegant rowhouses and apartment buildings just steps away from renowned academic institutions and houses of worship. Today the neighborhood still enjoys this singular sense of place. Its institutions are impressive examples of Beaux-Arts planning and design, including the graceful approach to Grant’s Tomb, the entrance façades of St. John the Divine and Riverside Church aligned with the axes of 112th Street and 122nd Street, and especially Charles McKim’s plan for Columbia University, whose symmetry and axial layout emphasize the monumentality and unity of the surrounding architecture. The residential architecture, though sometimes grand, offers a human scale and balance to the whole neighborhood.

Hendrik Hudson Apartments, ca. 1910. Completed in 1907, the Hendrik Hudson Apartments occupy the entire block between Riverside Drive and Broadway and 110th and 111th Streets. The building was modeled on Italian villa with a Spanish tile roof. Of the two tall towers seen in this circa 1910 photograph, once one remains today. The units were spectacularly upscale (unsurprising in this neighborhood of early 20th century luxury apartments). Decorating the 7-9 room apartments was walnut paneling, wood-beamed ceilings, mahogany doors with glass knobs, and the newest technology in porcelain bathroom features. The building itself also boasted a billiard parlor, a cafe, a barber shop, and a ladies hairdressing salon for the exclusive use of tenants and their guests. The original costs for the apartments ranged from $1500 to $3000 a year.

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.

Manhasset Apartments ARCHITECT: Joseph Wolf DATE: 1899-1901 STYLE: Beaux-Arts Erected at the turn of the century, when the Upper West Side of Manhattan became the center of apartment house construction in the city, the Manhasset is one of the city’s most imposing apartment houses. The building was designed and constructed in two phases. The lower eight stories of 1899- 1901 were designed by Joseph Wolf. The second phase, consisting of grand entrance pavilions and three additional stories incorporating a two-story slate-covered mansard, was added in 1901-05 by a new owner to the designs of Janes & Leo, a firm responsible for several of the Upper West Side’s most prominent apartment buildings. The handsome limestone, brick, and terra-cotta Beaux-Arts style facades of the Manhasset continue to attract attention, creating an important anchor at the northern edge of the Upper West Side.

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.

Schinasi Mansion, ca. 1909. Built in 1909 for the Turkish-born tobacco magnate Morris Schinasi, this mansion is the largest single-family residence on Riverside Drive. Schinasi enlisted William Tuthill, the architect of Carnegie Hall, to produce a heavily ornamented, French Renaissance style residence in white marble. Some sources claim the home included a Prohibition-era trap door leading to the Hudson River below, but these claims do not appear in Landmarks Preservation Commission documents. After Schinasi’s death, the home was a finishing school, before being acquired by Columbia University. The house was bought privately by a Columbia law professor in 1979 and sold again in 2013.

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.

Morris and Laurette Schinasi House ARCHITECT: William B. Tuthill DATE: 1907-09 This two and a half story building is basically rectangular in plan, accented by an interplay of projected and recessed wall sections. The flush entrance facade, facing Riverside Drive, is pierced by windows on each floor. The main doorway, located to the right, is approached by steps flanked by wing walls. These wing walls terminate in high, square, newel posts that, in turn, connect with the balustraded yard railing.

"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."

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.

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.

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.

The Manhasset is an 11-story apartment house located on Broadway between West 108th and 109th Streets on the Upper West Side. Apartment houses were a brand new building type imported from France. When they began appearing on the Upper West Side in the 1880s, families had to adjust to the idea of living in the same building as other families. Advantages of apartment living included not needing so many servants and having elevators, which were new technology then. Built in 1899, the Manhasset is colorful and grand. The top floor roofs have a special form called mansard. The building covers the entire block-front, and, because it is located where Broadway makes a curve, it can be seen from many blocks away. Originally, the Manhasset was an eight-story apartment house. A few years later it was redesigned by two famous architects, Janes and Leo. In addition to making it taller, they added many shops on the first floor after the opening of the subway in 1904. The original 77 apartments, planned for upper middle class families, contained six, seven, or nine rooms with one to three baths. In 1905, the New York Census records the presence of many professional and business people. Most of the renters were born in the United States, but there were also a number of adults who were immigrants from Germany as well as others from Ireland, France, and Canada. As would be expected on the diverse Upper West Side, the residents appear to have been from various ethnic groups and religions and included Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Each apartment included a single servant’s room, and most residents had one or two live-in servants.

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.