Yorkville, Upper East Side, Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States

Summary
Built between 1898 and 1915, City and Suburban Homes Company’s First Avenue Estate is the oldest extant project of the most successful of the privately financed, limited-dividend companies which attempted to address the housing problems of the nation’s working poor at the turn of the century. The company’s investors, led by such prominent New Yorkers as Mrs. Alfred Corning Clark (later Mrs. Henry Codman Potter), Caroline and Olivia Stokes, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Darius Ogden Mills, Isaac Seligman, and R. Fulton Cutting, and Bayard Cutting, voluntarily agreed to limit their profits in order to provide wage earners with comfortable, safe, hygienic, well-maintained housing at market rates. By paying a dividend, the company attempted to establish what its president E.R.L. Gould described as a "middle ground between pure philanthropy and pure business" and encourage others to invest in housing of an equally high caliber.

The First Avenue Estate

The City and Suburban First Avenue Estate is located on the former grounds of the Colored Home and Hospital, an institution founded in 1839, that had begun to erect a home, hospital, and chapel on First Avenue between East 64th and East 65th Streets in 1849. In April 1897, City and Suburban purchased the site from the institution for $210,000, agreeing to delay possession for a year’s time.

In July 1898, James E. Ware filed plans with the Department of Buildings to erect a pair of buildings fronting on First Avenue which were completed in 1899.40 A native New Yorker,41 James Edward Ware (1846-1918) was educated at the College of the City of New York and apprenticed in the office R. G. Hatfield, a noted mid-nineteenth century New York architect whose works included the pioneering cast-iron Baltimore Sun Building (1851, James Bogardus, iron founder), the Second Empire Seaman’s Savings Bank on Wall Street, the Institute for Deaf and IXimb, and several buildings for the Department of Charities and Corrections on Randall’s Island. Ware established his own office in 1869 and continued practicing until his death in 1918. He took his two sons, Franklin B. and Arthur, into his firm in 1879 and 1900, respectively, and worked in partnership with Herbert Spencer Styne-Harde briefly in the late 1890s. Ware’s extensive practice included city and country houses, grand hotels, school buildings, churches, apartment buildings, tenements, and warehouses. Although trained in the Second Empire style, he was an early exponent of the Queen Anne style as exemplified by his group of rowhouses erected for Ira Doying on East 67th Street of 1878-80 which were published in the American Architect and Building News in September 1880. His Osborne Apartments (1883-85), a massive ten-story structure at the corner of West 57th Street and Seventh Avenue combining Romanesque and Florentine Renaissance Revival elements, was one of the city’s finest early luxury apartment buildings. Other works included the Gothic Revival Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, 917 Madison Avenue, of 1899 and the Twelfth Regiment Armory at Columbus Avenue and 61st Street of 1886. However, judging by his biographical entry in Who’s Who in New York. Ware was proudest of his experimental fireproof warehouses for the Manhattan Warehouse Company, one at Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street and another at Seventh Avenue and 52nd Street, and of his work with model tenements.

Ware’s prize-twinning design in the Plumber and Sanitary Engineer’s competition of 1878, has been criticized by modern historians as being extremely conservative, with approximately 90 percent of the lot covered by two wings linked by a narrow service core containing stairs and water closets. Nonetheless in comparison with the other entries in the competition, Anthony Jackson notes In A Place Called Home. Ware’s project was well planned: "the open positioning of the staircase with its fireproof enclosure was a great advance from the dark interior flimsy stairway. The resultant elimination of interior corridors above the ground floor and the ease of access from dwellings to water closets, … were also major improvements" and the courts though not really adequate seemed to be the "best available compromise.1142
In his design for the Improved Housing Council’s competition of 1896, Ware based his plan on Ernest Flagg’s 100-foot square light-court design, published in Scribner’s in 1894. Flagg, of course, had also reworked his design for the competition and had placed first. In his second-place project, Ware modified Flagg’s design by employing courtyard entrances with access to the street via an arched passageway. Two of these 100-foot buildings were combined at the rear to form a U-shaped complex which became the basic unit of his 200 x 400 foot block design. Arranged so that they faced onto the avenues and side streets, these units were separated by interconnecting driveways or "courtways" as Ware called them. While the passageways to the courtyard were not constructed, this U-shaped configuration was adopted for the initial buildings on First Avenue as was the system of interconnecting driveways for the block.

In his final design for the First Avenue Buildings, Ware also provided space for stores at street level. Entrances to the apartments were placed at the center of the East 64th and East 65th Street facades and in the center court separating the two buildings. Each building contained seventy-nine, two-, three-, and four-room apartments and two street-level stores (soon after the buildings were completed, two ground-story apartments facing onto First Avenue were converted to commercial use) .43 Each apartment had abundant access to light and air, was soundproofed, and was supplied with steam heat, hot water, and gas ranges and fixtures. Living rooms (combined kitchens and sitting rooms) had stationary earthenware wash tubs and large porcelain sinks as well as such built-ins as dressers, mantel shelves, and coal closets. In the bedrooms there were enclosed closets (instead of the wood wardrobes which were the common lot of tenement dwellers). Shower and tub rooms were available on the first floor and in the basement. The basement also contained locker rooms for tenant storage, a special room for baby carriages, and laundry facilities including a steam-drying system, supplied free of charge.

Ware’s plans for these buildings were much admired, as an article by T.M. Clark in The American Architect of 1907 makes abundantly clear:

The tenements in this block are intended for families of the most modest income, but they are planned by their skillful designer, Mr. James E. Ware, with as much care as if they were palaces.

Clark was particularly impressed with Ware’s varied floor plans, "spacious well-lighted stairs," convenient arrangement of living rooms which "were spacious enough to form. ..a pleasant family-sitting room," placement of water closets, "not out of the kitchen, as is often seen, still less out of the public staircase hall, but conveniently … among the bedrooms, … with a window to the outer air," and treatment of bedrooms to ensure privacy of adults and children, handled with a "sympathy and delicacy for which [Mr. Ware] cannot be too highly praised."45

In his competition project, Ware had originally envisioned an elaborate exterior treatment for the buildings, complete with roof gardens and corner towers. The realities of the limited budget, the necessity to include commercial space, and the subsequent emission of certain features in the plan, notably the courtyard entrances, apparently were responsible for the reworking of his design. His executed project drew on Ernest Flagg’s solution for the Alfred Corning Clark Estate in its use of light-reflecting brick and limestone,46 planar brick surfaces, and Beaux-Arts style decorative motifs, and in its employment of fire escapes to emphasize the attic story.

Here the facades are faced with tail Roman brick trimmed with stone and arranged in a tripartite composition consisting of a one-story base, four-story midsection and one-story attic. Windows are grouped in a 3-1-2-1-3 pattern on the avenue facades and are arranged in a 3-4-3 pattern on the side streets, though the side street pattern is slightly irregular because of the placement of bathrooms in the large front apartments. Decorative elements include raised brick Gibbs surrounds at the first story, stone belt courses above the first and fifth stories, stone sills and lintels on the upper-story windows and a dentiled cornice. On the side street facades elaborately carved stone doorways enriched with cartouches and console brackets support ledges which form the base for second-story fire escape balconies. Stone enframements with broken pediments and cartouches are employed in the gently graded entrance court off First Avenue. An iron fire escape balcony extends across the entire length of the facade setting off the attic story. The original balustraded parapet has been replaced, but the building still retains portions of its original metal-framed shopfronts.

In March 1900, only three months after the First Avenue buildings were completed, James E. Ware & Son filed plans to erect another pair of buildings at 403-409 East 64th Street and 404-408 East 65th Street which were constructed between June 1900 and June 1901.48 According to the company’s Fifth Annual Report (1908), "in appearance, design, and equipment [these] strongly resembled the First Avenue buildings except for some minor changes to improve amenities." The new buildings each contained twenty-five two-room, sixty-five three-room, and five four-room apartments. In a change from the previous project, the four-room apartments now had private baths requiring some minor adjustments in the floor plans. To the company’s mind, however, probably the most important change was the creation of "playrooms in the basements for children to play in wet weather."

Over the years the company was to construct similar playrooms in its buildings at both the First Avenue and Avenue A Estates, where they were used not just for children’s play but also for concerts, dances, lectures, magic lantern shows, and company-sponsored Christmas and May parties. It should be noted that City and Suburban prohibited children from playing in the interior courtyards of its buildings where the noise might be disturbing to others, and discouraged unsupervised play in the street where the children might be prey to unwholesome influences; hcwever, the company made a concerted effort to locate its developments near schools and playgrounds, to provide play spaces in the basements of its buildings, and to find responsible adults to supervise play groups, atheletic teams, and social groups.49

As City and Suburban’s Annual Report of 1901 suggested, the facade treatment of this second pair of buildings is very similar to that of the first buildings in the complex. The same light-colored brick and stone trim are employed, the tripartite composition is repeated, and many decorative details reappear, among them the stone belt courses, plain stone window sills and lintels, raised brick Gibbs surrounds, dentiled cornice, and crowning sixth-story fire escape. Here, however, there are entrances at either end of the facades. These have paired wood and glass doors which allow light to enter the vestibules. The doors are recessed within heavy segmental-arched enframements enriched by foliate moldings, oversized keystones and garlanded console brackets which support projecting hoods. Areaway railings run in front of the buildings.

In August 1901, only two months after the second building phase at the First Avenue Estate was completed, Ware filed plans for five buildings to be erected on sixty-foot wide lots at 411-417, 419-421, and 423 East 64th Street.50 Here, Ware adapted a solution employed by Ernest Flagg at the Alfred Corning Clark Estate, pairing back-to-back units to create alternating central and open side courts. In plan the individual units are closer to Ware’s own buildings at the First Avenue Estate though they contain more two-room units than in previous buildings in response to a demand from young couples for such apartments. The buildings also cover more of the lot than the other buildings at the First Avenue Estate, presumably as a means of compensating for rapidly escalating prices brought on by material shortages and labor unrest. Because of those conditions, City and Suburban was forced to delay the start of construction to June 1902, completing the buildings in June 1903.

In this group Ware continued the basic exterior articulation of the earlier buildings on the block but introduced some changes in detail. Again the buildings were faced with tan brick trimmed with stone. Belt courses create a tripartite story grouping, windows are arranged in a rhythmic pattern, and iron balconies extend across the facades beneath the sixth-story windows. Here stone skewbacks and keystones are substituted for Gibbs surrounds on the first-story windows, the door surrounds have broken pediments and are ornamented with garlands and cartouches, a Doric frieze has been inserted under the dentiled cornice, and the roof parapet is crenellated and ornamented with faceted terra-cotta panels.

Ware’s final involvement with the First Avenue Estate began in December 1904 when he was asked to plan a group of four tenements on seventy-five foot wide lots which were constructed at 410, 412, 414, and 416 East 65th Street in 1905-06.51 Here he again reworked a plan by Ernest Flagg, in this case a design for a seventy-five foot wide tenement that Flagg had proposed in 1900 when a group of architects were invited to test the provisions of a new tenement house act (the "New Law"). Flagg’s original design was for a rectangle with longitudinal extensions and a central court. Ware rearranged the various elements, increasing the size of the rectangle and substituting transverse arms for the longitudinal extensions to increase the size of the side courts. In terms of the amenities offered by City and Suburban, the plans document a return to larger apartments and to greater use of private baths and private halls within the apartments.

For the facades of these buildings, Ware once again reprised the theme established with his first buildings at the First Avenue Estate, using li^it brick and stone trim, a tripartite composition, and Beaux-Arts details. Attention is focused on the doorways set off by granite and limestone enframements. These are enriched by a boldly carved cartouches and broken pediments. The pediments act as the frame for the decorative iron guard rails set in front of a central second-story windows which in turn are decorated with stone skewbacks and console keystones. As in Ware’s earlier buildings, sixth-story balconies add a strong horizontal accent, but here the balconies extend only beneath the windows and not to the corners of the facades. Wide balconies, handsomely decorated with curved brackets and finials, are also placed beneath the windows at each story. The buildings are crowned by cornices decorated with modillions and corner brackets. (The brackets are missing at 410 and 412 East 65th Street.)

With the completion of these buildings in 1906, City and Suburban occupied the entire site it had acquired from the Colored Home and Hospital in 1896. The balance of the lots on the block facing onto York Avenue remained in the hands of William C. Schermerhorn and did not became available until City and Suburban purchased the site from his heirs in 1913. The company waited another year till it had completed its last building at the Avenue A Estate before filing plans to develop the new property.52 Designs for the new project were prepared by Fhilip H. Ohm, who headed City and Suburban’s construction and architectural department.

Ohm had established a private practice in 1894 and worked in Harlem until 1898 when he opened an office at 35 Broadway in downtown Manhattan.53 In 1904, City and Suburban decided to set up its own construction company, and Ohm may have been hired then to supervise the construction of two buildings, designed by Percy Griffin, at 503-509 East 78th Street and 504-508 East 79th Street. By 1906, the responsibilities of the constructive department had expanded, and Ohm had begun planning model tenements for the company’s Avenue A project. Between 1906 and 1915 Ohm designed nine model tenements and a hotel for that project, the James H. Jones Memorial model tenement at 413-417 East 73rd Street (1906), the Phipps Houses III on West 64th Street (1911), and the final two buildings at the First Avenue Estate (1914-15). With the completion of its two large Manhattan developments, City and Suburban seems to have closed its architectural department, and nothing more is known about Ohm.

In his design for 425 East 64th Street and 430 East 65th Street Ohm employed a pair of light-court buildings which shared an enclosed side court. Like the later buildings at the Avenue A Estate, these had arched passages leading to a central courtyard with corner entrances. Plans of this type were common for European apartment buildings and had been part of Ware’s original concept for this project though they were not adopted. Ohm’s interest in courtyard entrances may have been prompted by Henry Atterbury Smith’s successful design for the Shively Sanitary tenements which were located opposite City and Suburban’s Avenue A Estate. The other novel aspect of this design was Ohm’s use of stairs that are aligned in different positions to the court, a feature which presumably allowed him to create more efficient apartment layouts.

For the facades of these buildings Ohm employed materials similar to those used by Ware, light-colored brick, stone, marble, and terra cotta. Projected bays topped by shaped parapets articulate the facade. The chief decorative feature is an elaborate stone portal framed by immense brackets that carry an overhanging cornice forming the base for a fire escape balcony, a feature quoted directly from Ware’s First Avenue buildings.

Related in size, scale, use of materials and decorative detailing, the buildings of the First Avenue Estate have a strong visual homogeneity. On the Ware buildings the unbroken line of sixth-story balconies also acts as a powerful linking device. In plan, the buildings display variations of the center light-court solution, incorporating side courts and rear alleyways as well to ensure that every apartment is provided with adequate light and ventilation. Such buildings became standard for middle-class housing following the adoption of the Tenement House Act of 1901, (the "New Law"), but remained beyond the means of the working poor. Thus they are of interest both as manifestations of the work of the nation’s most successful builder of philanthropic housing and as an exploration of an important housing type.

That the First Avenue Estate is one of only two full city block developments of light-court model tenements in the country, and that there are significant variations among the buildings in the block — all employed by Ware and Ohm in order to maximize light and air and to offer greater amenities — makes it all the more important.

Subsequent History and Influence

The years prior to World War I were the period of City and Suburban’s greatest growth, though the company continued to operate housing projects including the First Avenue Estate until the 1961.54 In the period between the World Wars, the company continued to build housing though its focus shifted from Manhattan to the outlying boroughs which had been made accessible to workers by the construction of the subway and elevated lines. In 1919-20, City and Suburban built its first group of garden apartments at Homewood designed by Andrew J. Thomas, a talented young architect who was perhaps the most innovative designer of this building type in New York between the wars. In the 1930s City and Suburban developed the Celtic Park Apartments in Woodside, Queens, employing the architects Ernest Flagg (one unit, 1931-32) and Springsteen & Goldhammer (five units, 1933-38). In Manhattan, the company purchased several model tenements projects from the heirs of their original sponsors.

These included the former Shively Sanitary Tenements, renamed the East River Homes, which City and Suburban bought in 1924 and ran as low-cost rental apartments, and two properties acquired from the Phelps-Stokes Fund in 1925, the Dudley Homes at 339-349 East 32nd Street (demolished) and 52-58 East 97th Street (built 1922, Sibley & Featherston, architects) . In 1929-30, the company bought three "Old Law" tenements and five commercial buildings on Goerck and East Houston Streets which it renovated into modern rental apartments to serve the largely Jewish community of the lower East Side. The Junior League Hotel at the Avenue A Estate, which had begun losing money in the early 1930s, was taken over entirely by City and Suburban in 1933 which continued to operate it as the East End Hotel for Women. In addition, sixty-seven houses in Cedarhurst, Nassau County, erected by Mrs. Russell Sage as a model housing project, were purchased from her estate in 1920 and sold to their occupants at cost over a five-year term.
During this period, the company also made improvements to its older apartments at the First Avenue and Avenue A Estates installing electricity, baths, and modern appliances, and in some cases reconfiguring room arrangements. A 1939 Federal Housing Administration study attests to the fact that:

Although the rentals of the housing projects operated by the company increased from slightly over $4 per room per month in 1899 to a range of from $9 to $11 in 1930, all of the projects in operation in 1930 were tenanted by families in the lowest quarter of the range of rentals paid in New York at that time.55

Following World War II, material and labor shortages and the imposition of rent controls which made even modest new construction for lew-income tenants non-competitive with existing rental buildings discouraged the company from building new housing. However, it was still operating eight properties in 1950 — the First Avenue Estate, the Avenue A (York Avenue) Estate, including the East End Hotel for Women, the James H. Jones Memorial Building on East 73rd Street, the Homewood Garden Apartments, the East River Homes (formerly Shively Sanitary Tenements), the IXidley Homes, the East 97th Street property, and the Celtic Garden Apartments. One property, the Alfred Corning Clark Estate, had been sold in 1924 because it lacked central heating and bathrooms and was considered too costly to modernize, and two others, the Goerck-Houston Street buildings and the Tuskegee-Hampton Estate, were condemned for urban redevelopment projects (the IXidley was also later condemned as part of the site of Kips Bay Plaza).

The company had paid off its mortgages and made capital improvements to its remaining buildings, and still had considerable cash in hand when in December 1951, it acquired the innovative Hillside Homes,56 a multi-block low-density moderate income project, designed by Clarence Stein in 1934, located at Boston Road and Seymour Avenue in the Bronx. City and Suburban remained in operation until 1961, when the majority of its shares were acquired by the Scheuer family through the Diversified Management Corporation, a real estate holding company.57 In April 1961, City and Suburban merged with Diversified and the outstanding five percent of the stock was purchased at $50.25 per share. The First Avenue Estate remained in the hands of the Sheuer family until it was purchased by Rockefeller University in 1966 for housing. It was sold to its present owner, the Stahl York Avenue Corporation, in 1977.

The First Avenue Estate has been influential since the first buildings at the complex were completed. Widely published in the early days of the company, the initial First Avenue buildings provided a successful demonstration of the feasibility of light-court tenement design and were an inspiration to both the framers of the New Law of 1901 and the organizers of other turn-of-the-century model tenement companies.

Among the early companies which were directly related to City and Suburban were Ernest Flagg’s New York Fireproof Association, established in 1899 and originally financed by Darius Ogden Mills whom Flagg had come to know through his work with City and Suburban; the Phipps Houses, established by industrialist Henry Phipps in 1905 at the suggestion of City and Suburban’s president Elgin Gould and subsequently organized with the advice of the company and managed by its staff; and the Phelps-Stokes Fund, established by Caroline and Olivia Stokes, who were early investors in City and Suburban and served on its board and who on erecting the Dudley and 52-58 East 97th Street turned over the management of these properties to City and Suburban.58

Other light-court model tenement projects included the Billings at 326-330 East 35th Street of 1905 designed by Andrews & Withers, the Bishop at 56-82 Hester Street of 1901-02 and De Forest Fireproof Tenements at 203-205 East 27th Street of 1906-07 designed by Ernest Flagg, the Shively Sanitary Tenements of 1910-11 designed by Henry Atterbury Smith, the Hartley Open Stair Tenements at 521-531 West 47th Street of 1912-13 designed by Henry Atterbury Smith and William P. Miller, the Rogers Tenement at 425-427 West 44th Street of 1915 designed by Grosvenor Atterbury, and the Emerson Tenements at 746 Eleventh Avenue of 1917 designed by William Emerson. It should be noted that while several of these buildings were extremely experimental in design, the cost of their construction tended to be absorbed by their sponsors and not charged against operating expenses.

Even so, only a few model tenement companies, notably Ernest Flagg’s Fireproof Association, approached City and Suburban in terms of profitability or longevity and none approached it in size. It was precisely these factors which interested the next generation of housing experts as they began to study the City and Suburban Company and its projects in the 1930s.

Thus, in 1939 the Federal Housing Administration regarded "the policies and practices evolved in the successful management___[of] one of the oldest
limited dividend housing corporations in existence" worthy of study as "a guide to more recent ventures into the field of limited dividend housing operations" and hoped that by publishing a study of City and Suburban’s operations, Four Decades of Housing with a limited Dividend Corporation, "the principles of rental housing operations gleaned from the corporation’s 40-year experience would serve to further the building operation of multi-family structures for investment rather than speculation."59 After analyzing the company’s operations the report concluded:

In toto, the management has pursued a course calculated to preserve its investment while doing its share toward activating better housing for low-income groups. Its financial success is illustrated by its balance sheet. Its leadership in promoting better housing has received acknowledgement from time to time by other interested groups. Its activities have been pointed out as as a model worthy of duplication by other groups interested in attacking the same problems. Its policies and practices have been followed by other similar organizations. And today, after more than four decades of unceasing activity, it is continuing its forward movement with building activity.60

For James Ford, writing in 1936, in his monumental survey Slums and Housing, the company’s financial policies and architectural achievements were also of interest, but it was the sheer size of its projects that were most impressive. While there were other projects that covered large portions of city blocks, notably Alfred T. White’s Riverside Buildings of 1890 in Brooklyn, the First Avenue Estate is one of only two full city block developments of light-court model tenements in the nation. It can be seen as an important achievement in the social housing movement, bracketed in time between White’s English-inspired low-density developments and the postwar I projects like the Coops and Amalgamated Houses.

- From the 1990 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report

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