LONELY WINDOWS . . . characterize the seventy-two private houses still standing on Fifth Avenue. Of the seventy-two, thirty-three are already closed, as is the case with the former residence of the late Isaac Brokaw shown BELOW.
IN LONDON there is Belgrave Square, in Paris there is the Boulevard St.-Germain. In Baltimore there is Charles Street, in Spokane, Washington, there is Rockwood Boulevard, in St. Louis there is Lindell Boulevard. The aristocrats of Philadelphia at one time took over Rittenhouse Square and upper Walnut Street, and millionaires of the West Coast set up their lavish encampments on Nob Hill in San Francisco.
Every city, every town in the world, has a street or a district in which it is accounted a special privilege to live. In New York Fifth Avenue has been that street. Fifth Avenue runs right up the middle of Manhattan, and during the days of the city’s greatest expansion—from the Civil War until the depression of 1930—it became the residence of some of the richest and most powerful people in the world. Certain famous New York families have avoided the Avenue: the J. P. Morgan residence, for instance, is on Murray Hill, bounded by Madison Avenue and Thirty-sixth and Thirty-seventh streets; and the George F. Bakers and the Rockefellers do not live on Fifth Avenue. But, with some exceptions, the city’s great families have lived, entertained, brought forth their children, and died behind the windows and forbidden doorways of New York’s most glamorous thoroughfare.
There has been, too, an evolution in the Avenue corresponding to the evolution of the words “great family.” In the 186o’s the lower Avenue from Washington Square to Twelfth Street was a place where families like the Schermerhorns, Rhinelanders, Delanos, and de Rhams lived graciously a la Edith Wharton. Then, beginning in the 1870’s, the Avenue was invaded by a new kind of creature. First came the railroad barons—the Vanderbilts and the Goulds; then the masters of steel—Frick and Carnegie; and the traction men—Ryan and Yerkes. The push of the newcomers was northward, and by the time of the World War the residential limits of the Avenue were approximately what they are today: Fifty-ninth to Ninety-fourth Street, along the east side of Central Park. During the twenties there was one final invasion of barbarians, when great bull-market operators such as Charles E. Mitchell moved in to take their places among the giants.
Never in the history of the world has so much private wealth been concentrated in a single street. Here was no mere king surrounded by a rich nobility; here were dozens of kings and petty emperors, vying with each other in power, in splendid appointments, in social position, in art collections, and in indigestible food. It is true that they were brash. It is true that their notions of splendor were more superficial than those Europe. Nevertheless their houses symbolized the most important social group of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-the unregenerated dollar makers. Their huge mansions were hung with imported tapestries: furnished with antiques; equipped with ballrooms and fancy bathrooms; staffed with one to two dozen servants dressed in extravagant livery, from the great foyers where the butler and footmen stood to receive the guests, wide marble stairways led to ornate music rooms and salons decorated with crystal chandeliers, palms, exotic flowers, and inevitable gilt and plush chairs. Though he never entered them, the common man read about those houses with a feeling of awe and secret desire. They symbolized the land of opportunity in which anybody could succeed.
At 857 Fifth Avenue at Sixty-seventh Street is the house once occupied by Mrs. George Gould, who slept in black satin sheets and draped in two million dollars' worth of pearls around her neck. The house is now owned by Countess Laszlo Szechenyi, born Gladys Vanderbilt, who divides her time between 857 and the biggest pile of masonry in Newport—the Breakers. Countess Szechenyi is the daughter of the late Cornelius Vanderbilt, and her sister is Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney,...
...who lives one block away at 871 Fifth Avenue. Mrs. Whitney cares more for her sculpture than for keeping up her residence and has only part of it open. Her husband's will stipulated that after her death the house must be demolished and the fittings, fixtures, and building materials sold. |
| ABOVE the upper Avenue’s only rooming house. It is inhabited by a U.S. Army colonel, a doctor, and some girls studying dressmaking. |
Just vacated is the Adolph Lewisohn house at 881, between Sixty-ninth and Seventieth streets, which contained a special gallery filled with superlative modern paintings and the handsomest ballroom in the city. Adolph Lewisohn, who died in August, 1938, bought the house from E. H. Harriman. Four years ago he sold it to a Scottish syndicate, then leased it from them. Mr. Lewisohn was the donor of the Lewisohn Stadium (summer concerts). He had more fun out of life than most. At eighty-nine he took singing lessons, lunched at the Voisin restaurant, and danced at the Persian Room. His house was so big that he made an apartment in it, complete with separate kitchen and dining room, for his son and daughter-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Lewisohn, and their four daughters, spinster sisters lived with him; but one died fifteen years ago, the other. Miss Ann, succumbed last year to the aftereffects of measles.
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MRS. ANDREW CARNEGIE . . . lives in the red brick house above, surrounded by a lot of lawn and a garden of rhododendrons. The property is assessed at $2,500,000, the highest of any residence on the Avenue, and taxes in 1938 were over $70,000.
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Between Ninetieth and Ninety-first streets blooms one of the most expensive gardens in the world. It belongs to Mrs. Andrew Carnegie, who was taxed over $70,000 in 1938 on her property. The Carnegie house, red brick with heavy white granite trim and a Tiffany glass porte-cochere, fronts along Ninety-first Street. It is uncompromisingly Victorian and gloomy inside, with overwhelming masses of carved-oak paneling. There is a conservatory and an organ; Mrs. Carnegie is the only hostess on Fifth Avenue who still gives Sunday afternoon organ recitals followed by tea. Contrary to general public opinion, she is neither stingy nor dowdy. She is merely undeviatingly conservative. Slight, remarkably young looking for her age, she dresses inconspicuously (though she owns handsome furs), wears no jewels, lends her house for charitable functions, and gives occasional dinners in quiet style with excellent food and wines.
Mr. Stuyvesant was dependent on his sister because he has an unfortunate speech defect. Since her death he has admitted hardly anyone to his house. He eats utterly alone at the big dining--room table, hardly tasting the meals cooked by his chef and served by Vernon, the butler, and an assisting footman. Much of the Stuyvesant money is in real estate, and so comfortable is the income that Mr. Van Home can afford a private garage at 146 and 148 East Fifty-seventh Street, assessed at $185,000. At his death most of his fortune will go to form a trust to found a memorial hospital.
Along the “upper” Avenue above Fifty-ninth Street, the first house is that of Mrs. Marcellus Hartley Dodge, the dog-loving daughter of the late William Rockefeller. The Dodge residence, No. 800, is opposite the Hotel Pierre on the north corner of Sixty-first Street. Built of sedate brick, with small windows almost always shrouded with brown blinds, it is rectangular and painfully plain. Mrs. Dodge, who has strong opinions on almost every subject, is said to have scorned an architect. She hired a construction firm to set up the frame of the house; then, when each floor was completed, partitioned it into rooms by laying a trail of bricks on the floor. The system worked fairly well except that certain essential plumbing and electrical outlets were omitted. Mrs. Dodge's somewhat original ideas included building the kitchen on the Fifth Avenue frontage and the living quarters on Sixty-first Street, which was supposedly quieter. A dog run on the roof is used occasionally by Mrs. Dodge's champions and is the daily exercising ground of a police-dog bitch, a permanent resident.
The cloths are cleaned at great expense after each big dinner and are so old that they have to be handled with extreme care. Though the gold and silver plate glitters expensively, observing eyes cannot help noticing that the rugs have holes, the curtains are discreetly patched. One feels that neither will be replaced. Taxes on the house have not been paid for the past two years, and a report is current that it will be sold. Since the house is across Fifty-first Street from Rockefeller Center, its value has been greatly enhanced, and there is said to be a standing offer of $3,500,000 for it
IN 1939 these same houses are symbols not of power but of decay. Seven of them, of which the Frick mansion is the biggest, have already become semipublic institutions or museums. Only seventy-two large private houses are standing along the Avenue—four below Fifty-ninth Street, sixty-eight above it. Thirty-three of these houses are closed, their windows boarded up, their shades pulled down behind dirty glass, their stoops cluttered with rubbish, their facades smeared by the pigeons. In the thirty-nine houses that remain open, there live approximately eighty people—including some of the most eccentric, loneliest in all of New York.
Among them there is only one baby, the three-month-old daughter of the Albert Bostwick's, and less than twenty children of college age and under. There are, of course, active and influential families who live on Fifth Avenue. Almost all of these, however, live in the apartment houses that have replaced the great mansions along the Park; only a handful still maintain houses of their own. In this latter group are Bernard Baruch, Gordon Rentschler, President of the National City Bank, Edward S. Harkness, the philanthropist, Joseph Feder, the oilman, James W. Gerard, former Ambassador to Germany, and Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney, sculptor and donor of the Whitney Museum. But these persons are exceptions. Few Avenue householders play active roles in business or national affairs.
The most tangible factor in the collapse of Fifth Avenue as America’s greatest residential street is taxes. Whereas land for a house at 882 Fifth Avenue (near Seventieth Street) is assessed at $42 per square foot, land for a residence around the corner on Seventieth Street is assessed at $27 per square foot. The Vanderbilt house on the comer of Fifty-first Street is assessed at $2,450,000, and for the privilege of sleeping in it Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt therefore has a tax bill of $197 per night. The total assessed value of all the houses now standing on Fifth Avenue is over $33,000,000 and total taxes levied last year amounted to nearly $ 1,000,000.
Such taxes would be almost insupportable under any circumstances; but they must met out of incomes already slashed by the high-bracket federal and New York state income taxes. At the same time the expense of operating a great residence on the Avenue is fantastic. One of its smaller houses, assessed at $250,000, supports a staff of ten servants (butler, chef, valet, lady's maid, footman, parlormaid, chambermaid, two kitchenmaids, and a laundress), the yearly payroll being $14,000. Food for this staff costs about $80 a week or about $4,000 a year. The cost of outfitting the butler and footman alone is $600 a year. Repairs on such a house will total at least $3,000 a year, electric light at least $1,000, heating at least $2,000. These charges, plus incidentals, will bring the cost of operation to an absolute minimum of $30,000 a year, before the family can even begin to use the house the way it is supposed to be used.
Few modern families will put up with such expenses when piled on top of Fifth Avenue taxes. Instead, the rich have abdicated their thrones, have abandoned the symbols of their power. They have dodged around the corners of Fifth Avenue into the side streets, where they live luxuriously but inconspicuously in houses whose architectural taste is certainly an improvement upon that which the Avenue displayed in its heyday. They have left the Avenue in possession of apartment dwellers and a rear guard of householders, many of whom linger here simply because they have enough money to indulge themselves in their eccentricities and memories unique, for they cover the immense expanse and sweep the ground.
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