520 West End Avenue, 1924.

The little home on the corner (at right) is dwarfed by the larger apartment buildings that surround it. But, in fact, this small home is actually a mansion of considerable size. Built on a long and narrow plot (27 feet by 100 feet), the mansion, fashioned in Romanesque, Elizabethan, and Gothic Revival styles, was designed by Clarence True as a speculative development. It was purchased while still being constructed by a cotton broker named John Burgess Leech, who had nine children. The house was completed in 1892 and the family lived there until 1905. After the Leech family left, the home was converted into a school for girls and later into eight separate apartments with a doctor's office in the basement. The mansion was threatened by demolition in the late 1920s by an owner who thought the prime corner lot would better serve him financially as a large apartment building. The Great Depression halted his plans, and today the building remains apartments.