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.

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.

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."

"Duty," part of the Firemen's Memorial sculptural group in Riverside Park, ca. 1976.

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.

"Courage," part of the Firemen's Memorial sculptural group in Riverside Park, ca. 1976.

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.

Firemen’s Memorial, 1914. The Firemen’s Memorial at Riverside Park was conceived in 1907, following the death of Deputy Fire Chief Charles W. Kruger. The monument, completed in 1913, commemorates the service of the scores of New York City firefighters who perished in an era when serious fires were a frequent and perilous occurrence. The memorial consisted of a balustraded plaza by architect Harold Van Buren Magonigle, and monument including a bas-relief work (later replaced by a bronze replica) and allegorical sculptures by Attilio Piccirilli.