Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [853]
Lenox Hill remained Society’s outer periphery until the 1890s, when mansions advanced up Fifth to Prospect Hill, encouraged by the new Eighth Regiment Armory (1894) on Park Avenue between 94th and 95th, which bulwarked the area against laboring masses to the east. Even so, only a handful of the wealthy—chiefly Germans like the Rupperts, Untermeyers, and Ehrets—braved such proximity to the tenement world.
Not everyone in Châteaux Country could afford a grand-scale mansion, and some who could afford luxurious-but-not-magnificent accommodations found the cooperative apartment house an appealing alternative. In 1880 Philip G. Hubert, a French emigré architect, organized his first Hubert Home Club, a device for allowing “gentlemen of congenial tastes, and occupying the same social positions in life,” to buy shares in a joint stock company, which then bought land and erected an apartment building. Each cooperator got a perpetual lease to an apartment, its size dependent on how much he put in (costs ranged from ten to fifty thousand dollars). Each was assessed a share of the combined operating expenses: taxes and insurance, light and heat, janitors and elevator boys. Each got the right to approve, together with other leaseholders, the mere tenants to whom some suites were rented in order to pay off the mortgage.
The cooperative apartments of the 1880s, as well as those raised wholly by speculators for rental purposes, were a cut above the French Flats of the previous generation. They were huge—eight to twelve stories in height, as tall as or taller than most downtown skyscrapers. They were elaborate, châteauesque, awash in turrets and gables. The suites, which could include as many as twenty rooms, came with the parlors and reception rooms that guaranteed cachet. They offered all sorts of conveniences, grand public spaces and courtyards, dining facilities, and building staffs that, as Harper’s noted in 1882, allowed families to make do with half the usual number of servants.
Luxury apartments tended to cluster in or near already affluent areas and to bear distinguished-sounding names. There was the Gramercy (1883) at Gramercy Park, the Berkshire (1883) on Madison at 52nd behind St. Patrick’s, and the Chelsea (Hubert’s most popular project), an immense, red-bricked, multigabled cooperative on West 23rd near Seventh Avenue.
The densest concentration, however, lay just south of Central Park. Hubert’s first Home Club, the Rembrandt, went up on West 57th Street in 1882, next to the future site of Carnegie Hall. Nearby were the Plaza at 59th Street, the Osborne Apartments at Seventh and 57th, and the grandest of them all, completed in 1885, the Central Park Apartments (a.k.a. the Navarro Flats, after their builder) at Seventh and 59th. From a distance the Navarro appeared a single Moorish mass of turrets and dormers. In fact it consisted of eight ten-story personalized towers, each with its own entrance and name (Granada, Valencia, etc., hence yet another nickname, the Spanish Flats), all of them wrapped around a tremendous courtyard filled with trees, flowers, and fountains. Each apartment had its own floor; most had views of Central Park. It was by all accounts the largest and most elegant apartment house in the world.
The Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide called these behemoths “tenements of the rich,” and with the cost of ground and building easily topping a million dollars, most cooperative shareholders were among the city’s most affluent. But very well off professionals and managers could handle the rental prices: a ten-room in the Spanish Flats could be had for eighteen hundred dollars a year, and the Chelsea, which rented out thirty of its ninety apartments, embraced an even wider spectrum of tenants.
There was, however, another alternative for venturesome