Phipps Houses, May 28, 1944.

Henry Phipps was a steel magnate and the partner of Andrew Carnegie in the Carnegie Company. In 1901 he sold his holdings in the firm to J. P. Morgan for more than $50 million. With these funds, he built himself a couple of homes in New York, one more splendid than the last. But he also used this money to establish a fund for the creation of model tenements to be called the Phipps Houses. These tenements (four six-story buildings) on 63rd Street were the second project to utilize the fund. Completed in 1906 or 1907 the apartments were rented to African Americans, who suffered increasingly from housing discrimination. The look of these plainly designed buildings (the work of architects Whitfield & King) differed from the earlier Phipps Houses on 31st Street, which had varied brickwork, overhanging tile roofs, and elaborate central roof pergolas. The Phipps Houses organization still exists, but their earliest project, including this still extant one, were sold off to finance other developments in the mid century.