Fouchaux's 1900 No. 39 East 19th Street

The brownstone-wide structure overshadows its next-door neighbors -- photo by Alice Lum

As the 20^th century approached the glory days of Union Square as a fashionable residential neighborhood were gone.    Mansions circling the park were demolished to build tall commercial buildings and along the side streets residences were razed or converted for business purposes.

Already, in the 1880s, Dr. Lewis T. Warner had joined the trend when he converted his residence at No. 39 East 19^th Street to a store and apartment building.  Following his death in 1898, the house—sitting squarely in one of the most exciting real estate districts for speculators and developers—was offered for sale.

In October 1898 “the old four-story house 39 East Nineteenth Street” was purchased by Jacob D. Butler, then quickly resold to John F. Scannell.   The brownstone home which had shared the block with the likes of Horace Greeley at No. 35 had come to the end of its road.  A week after the purchase, on November 5, the New York Daily Tribune reported that Scannell “will erect an eight-story fireproof building,” on the site.   The New York Times noted that the sale exhibited “a favorite field for improvement buying in the section just north of Union Square, between Broadway and Fourth Avenues.”

The district had good cause to be a “favorite field for improvement.”  Even before the old brownstone at No. 39 East 19^th Street was demolished Scannell had “already leased the basement, ground and first floors to a restaurant for twenty years,” according to the New York Daily Tribune. He commissioned architect Henri Fouchaux to design the new structure.

Unlike many Europe-trained New York City architects, Fouchaux had attended night classes at Cooper Union.  His diploma, signed by Peter Cooper, was one of his most cherished possessions.  The architect was busy at the time designing scores of houses in the burgeoning Hamilton Heights neighborhood far uptown, but added the 19^th Street project to his workload.

Fouchaux’s limestone-clad neo-Renaissance loft and retail building edged up to the property line—a potential problem with city officials.  Every possible inch of rentable space was optimized, so when decorative elements were added they overstepped the boundaries.

On January 24, 1899 The Committee on Streets and Highways considered Scannell’s proposal to erect “two stone pilasters projecting three inches beyond the building-line” and “on the third story of the front thereof to erect, place and keep four stone columns, eleven inches in diameter, and six pilasters, eleven inches in diameter, all resting on a stone corbel and capped with a stone cornice, and not to project more than eleven inches beyond the building-line.”

Scannell’s request stressed that the columns and pilasters were “for ornament only, and in no way to increase the floor space of the building.”  Thankfully, for our later visual enjoyment, the offending projections were approved.

The first two floors were designed for Childs Restaurant, whose name was originally displayed between the intricate cast iron knots between floors -- photo by Alice Lum

Completed in 1900, Fouchaux’s building blended function with handsome design.  The two-story restaurant space was framed in cast iron, affording spacious window openings.  Two highly unusual cast iron brackets supported the second story lintel.  Above the entrance a cast panel originally advertised the Childs Restaurant, flanked by creative cast iron rope work that included intricate decorative knots.  The limestone façade included elaborately carved cartouches and an arched pediment (supported by the four projecting columns the Street Commission mulled over) that gave a pseudo-Palladian feel to the second story windows.

The slightly-projecting courses that provided rustication of sorts to the third through seventh floors performed cartwheels over the fourth openings, transforming into radiating voussoirs.

photo by Alice Lum

The new building filled with a variety of tenants:  P. F. Collier & Sons, publishers; cloakmaker Harris Blumenfield; Jalliet, “ladies tailoring; and E. de Grandemont, sellers of corset materials among them.   In June 1900 Luyties Homeopathic Pharmacy Company, headquartered in St. Louis, announced it had opened a “branch house” in New York here.   The company was experiencing heightened prosperity partly because of a mail-order tonic.

“The one thing that bids strongest to be a big factor in the earning of good dividends is our wonderful tonic-reconstructive, Manola,” a letter to stockholders reported.  “The sales of this excellent preparation have been something wonderful, considering the short time it has been on the market.  This splendid showing is due to its true value as a tonic reconstructive.”

Not all the customers of Manola used it as a reconstructive tonic.  When Daniel Coit Campbell, a farmer of Chesterfield, South Carolina was involved in a runaway wagon accident it triggered a court case and investigation.   Dr. Newsom testified on May 22, 1916 that, despite South Carolina's being a “dry territory,” “on the day of the runaway [Campbell] was mighty near drunk and had been drunk about all day.”

If the cod liver oil and Mani Nut extract did not make the user feel better, the 18% alcohol content almost surely would -- Homeopathic News, June 1900 (copyright expired)

Druggist W. G. White testified that Manola “contains 18 percent alcohol” and that Campbell had purchased a quantity of it that morning.  “When Campbell bought the Manola the witness had an idea what he wanted to do with it,” said court documents.

On March 15, 1906 Harry Blemenfield’s cloak and suit factory on the seventh floor caught fire around 4:45 a.m.  Fire engines rushed to the scene where, according to The Evening World, “fire was raging.”

 

The house of Dr. Warner, which No. 39 replaced, would have been similar to the brownstone that survives next door --photo by Alice Lum

The blaze caused consternation to the guests of the two nearby hotels.  “Next to this building is a Japanese boarding house and also the Continental Hotel.  The engines frightened the Japanese from their beds and they fled to the streets in Oriental costumes.  The guests of the Continental Hotel were also aroused.” 

Damage to the building was assessed at approximately $1,500.

By 1919 the Childs Restaurant’s lease ran out and Wilbur Veitch rented the store and basement level.  The Volunteers of America had been in the building for several years now, providing bread and coffee to impoverished New Yorkers.  The lines of desperate men, women and children gave rise to the well-known term “bread line.”

On February 24 1915 the Connecticut newspaper The Day reported “The bread line wends it way slowly into the zone of bread and coffee every evening from 5 to 7 o’clock.  Six hundred men and 40 women are fed each night.  Occasionally small children are brought with their parents.”

Especially heart-breaking was the 70-year old woman who had stood in line the night before.  “She said she had had nothing to eat for four days,” said The Day.  Rev. Alton M. Young, who ran the facility, gave her three cups of coffee, “all the bread she could eat and two loaves to take home.”

Sadly, the minister said the old woman’s plight was not unusual.  “Why, one day this week a refined, well dressed young woman came in here.  She said that she had come to this city from Philadelphia with $50, but her money was spent before she could find any work.  She was a milliner.  For nearly a week she had been walking around the city in search of employment.  We found a room for her and soon arranged to get her work.”

Various small manufacturers, like the Atlas Yarn Manufacturing Company which was here in the 1930s, came and went.   The building changed hands infrequently; once in 1920 when the Goroka Realty Company purchased it, and again in 1945 when William B. Cravis, manufacturer of washing machines, bought it.

Just as the Union Square neighborhood had changed a century earlier, it changed again by the end of the 20^th century.   By the 1990s old loft and office buildings were being recycled as trendy restaurants and shops.   Young couples dined in the grand spaces of former banks and emporiums while factory space was renovated to luxurious apartments.

In 1990 No. 39 East 19^th Street was converted to one spacious apartment per floor above street level.  Café Beulah opened in the former Childs Restaurant space.   Opened by former baritone opera singer Alexander Smalls, the restaurant quickly caught on.   Smalls called the food “Southern revival cuisine based on traditional low-country cooking” and Monte Williams of The New York Times said “The food is so highfalutin that the term ‘soul food’ isn’t even used.”

Café Beulah remained for nearly a decade, replaced in November 1999 by Caffe Adulis, a branch of the popular Eritean restaurant in New Haven, Connecticut.  The restaurant was redecorated and renamed Lumu three years later; to be replaced in 2004 by ORA, a Mediterranean-American restaurant.

Through it all most of Henri Fouchaux’s handsome neo-Renaissance design survives.   The cast iron ground floor entrance area has been replaced, but happily those carved pilasters that project three inches over the property line are intact.

CCNY's President's Mansion -- No. 280 Convent Avenue

No. 280 anchored the impressive row of limestone rowhouses.

As the 19^th century drew to a close Harlem had developed from a rural area of small farms to a suburb of New York City whose streets and avenues were lined with homes, churches and businesses.  The extension of the elevated railroad in 1880 made the area accessible and developers responded to its potential with blocks of brick and stone speculative rowhouses.

In 1899 architect Henri Fouchaux designed ten harmonious limestone houses on Convent Avenue in the Morningside Heights section for speculators Hyman and Henry Sonn.  The pair originally had approached F. C. Zobel to design the row.  Zobel’s plans called for wider homes (resulting in eight rather than ten).  The projected cost of construction was $15,000 each—about $407,000 today.  That price was perhaps a bit too rich for the Sonns’ taste and they called in Fouchaux.

His proposed row, filling the block from 141^st to 142^nd Street, would be high-end residences as well; yet would cost nearly half as much at $8,000 apiece.  Fouchaux designed them as a mirror-image set.  The five homes from the 141^st Street corner to the middle were each different but complimentary.  Then the pattern reversed itself—the sixth residence matched the fifth next door, the seventh matched the fourth, and so on until the two corner homes served as the show-stopping bookends.

The row was officially completed on January 31, 1902.  The two end homes turned their backs to the row, opening on to the streets while retaining the Convent Avenue addresses.  No. 280, at the southern end of the string, pretended to be nothing less than a mansion.  It sat imperiously back from the sidewalk, surrounded by an areaway protected by a stone and metal fence.  The façade featured the scrolls and carvings expected in a Beaux Arts structure; yet Fouchaux handled the ornamentation with reserved dignity.

It appears that No. 280 was first owned by James J. Phelan.  In 1901 he applied for a reduced assessment because of the “paving with asphalt pavement” of Convent Avenue that ended at 141^st Street. 

In 1906 the City College of New York had completed its striking Collegiate Gothic campus directly to the south of No. 280 Convent Avenue.  A year later, on August 25, 1907 the Phelans were apparently packing up and considering selling the mansion.  An advertisement in the New-York Tribune that day sought a caretaker “by married couple, one child; care of private house for sale or during family’s absence; experience; with first class city reference from present employer.”  Applicants were instructed to contact Mrs. Phelan at the service address, No. 451 West 141^stst.

The house was purchased by the City for $39,000 “For the use of the College of the City of New York as an addition thereto.”  By 1911 it was home to Herbert R. Moody and his wife, the former Edna Wadsworth.  Moody was Professor of Chemistry at the college and had been director of chemistry laboratories since 1905.  Dr. Moody would later serve as chief of the technical branch of the chemical division of the War Industries Board during World War I.

But before that came to pass, the College spent $4,500 to renovate the house in 1915 as the official residence of President Sidney Edward Mezes, appointed the year before.  Three years later the Board of Estimate and Apportionment approved a budget of $2,600 for painting buildings at the college, including the President’s house.

Sidney Edward Mezes -- photogrpah Library of Congress

Like Dr. Moody, Sidney Mezes would be called upon with the United States’ entry into the war.  In 1917 he was appointed a member of “the Inquiry,” a committee set up by President Woodrow Wilson to prepare peace negations following the expected victory.  (It was probably no coincidence that the group’s director was Presidential adviser Edward House, the brother-in-law of Mezes’s wife, Annie Olive Hunter.)

In June 1921 Mezes reached the top of his salary, $12,500 per year, as allowed by the City Charter.  City Comptroller Craig decided that the President’s rent-free status equated to a higher salary than he was permitted.  His solution was that Mezes should pay $6,000 a year rent going forward and reimburse the city $9,000.  “The Comptroller described the house, which is a four-story and basement dwelling, as a mansion,” reported The Evening Worldon December 29, 1922, “and says he is advised that $6,000 a year is fair rental.”

“In a description of the residence, the Comptroller calls attention to two wine cellars…The house contains a large billiard room trimmed with quartered oak, a large parlor trimmed with white mahogany, a foyer and dining room trimmed with quartered oak, a smoking room fitted with red mahogany paneling.  A floor above the parlor is finished in white and birdseye maple.  The third floor contains five rooms, three of which are for servants.”

Whether Mezes ever, indeed, was forced to pay rent is unclear.  Following his departure in 1927 No. 280 Convent Avenue became home to Frederick Robinson, the last of the City College Presidents to live here.  Robinson’s presidency lasted from 1927 through 1938, after which the mansion’s glory days came to an end.

For a while the house was used as a “student boarding house,” then became the headquarters of the Alumni Association around 1945.  Named The Alumni House, it suffered use as offices and sleeping rooms for more than a decade.  As the Alumni Association prepared to move to the fifth floor of the Finley Student Center in 1957, an historic treasure was uncovered in the attic.

Townsend Harris had founded City College in 1847 and is credited as the diplomat who opened the Japanese Empire to foreign trade and culture.  In December 1857 he marched 100 miles from the port village of Shimoda to Yedo (now Tokyo) to negotiate the first trade and amity treaty between the United States and the Japanese Empire.  A flag bearer headed the procession carrying a 31-star American flag made of Japanese crepe.

Following the signing of the treaty Harris wrote “The American flag was carried before me for more than 100 miles through this country.  I displayed it in the streets of this great city, and it daily waves before my residence, so that we can say that the first foreign flag ever hoisted in this city was the Stars and Stripes.”

Townsend Harris brought the flag back with him to the United States in 1862 when he retired as consul general.  It was eventually framed and hung in the Townsend Harris Hall High School, the preparatory school of City College.  When the school was closed in 1942 the flag disappeared and was assumed lost.

Then, on September 21, 1958, The New York Times reported “The first foreign flag raised in the city of Tokyo after the opening of Japan has been found in the attic of an old brownstone building at 280 Convent Avenue, just north of the City College campus.”  As the Alumni Association emptied the attic, the framed flag was found hidden behind some dusty cabinets.

The once-grand mansion now became something of a white elephant for City College.  For a period it was used by the Hamilton Grange Conservation Office, and in 1968 became an incidental part of the anti-Vietnam protests.

When potential employers arrived on campus in November that year, students whom The New York Times deemed “radical” were offended by the presence of representatives of General Dynamics, Hughes Aircraft, and other firms manufacturing war-related products.  The protesters disrupted the scheduled interviews at the School of Engineering, resulting in about 600 engineering students pushing back.

The engineering students marched to the Administration Building carrying signs reading “We Want Action.”  The Times revealed its own political stance in reporting that they “denounced the radical students and threatened to march on the South Campus, several blocks away, which is the setting of most of the college’s hippie, yippie and antiwar activities.”

Although the engineering students were unhappy with compromise (“Why the hell should we give them this concession,” shouted one student), the administration moved the interviews to No. 280 Convent Avenue, off campus, “until the situation cools.”

The mansion sat empty and neglected for the next four decades, suffering from fire and water damage.  Then in 2013 City College announced plans to build a sleek three story addition as part of a conversion to the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership.  Neighbors and preservationists were enraged.  The Historic Districts Council called the proposed addition “out of character” with the district.  Much to the community’s dismay, the Landmarks Preservation Commission approved the ultra modern glass and metal addition.

City College provided a rendering of the proposed glass-and-steel addition   http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20131206/hamilton-heights/opponents-hope-city-college-will-change-design-of-colin-powell-school 

The battered mansion sits waiting.  In the meantime, preservationist Yuien Chin of the Hamilton Heights-West Harlem Community Preservation Organization complained to journalist Jeff Mays of DNAinfo New York “The process was circumvented.  The project was approved.”

photographs by the author