The Lost J. D. Rockefeller Jr. House -- No. 10 W 54th St.

The completed house looked as much like an apartment building as a private mansion -- NYPL Collection

While other millionaires were building ostentatious mansions that spread northward along Central Park, John D. Rockefeller preferred to purchase an already aging brownstone at No. 4 West 54^th Street.  A devout Baptist, he eschewed display and raised his family in a comfortable yet restrained environment.

Son John Junior would not share his father’s disdain of flamboyance.

On October 9, 1901 John D. Rockefeller, Jr. married Abby Green Aldrich in a major social event of the period.   The wedding took place in the Aldrich summer estate in Rhode Island.  Rockefeller arranged for the 500 guests to be transported there on two private steamers from Manhattan and 45 special train cars.

The newlyweds lived in the Rockefeller mansion for a few years before moving across the street to No. 31 in 1905.  He was earning a salary of $10,000 (about $200,000 today) working as one of three advisors to his father.    But as Junior’s family increased, so did his fortune.

By 1912 John and Abby had five children who taxed the size of their home.   John Senior gave his son some Manhattan property and his entire holdings in the American Linseed Company.     It was time for a larger house.

John Junior purchased the property at No. 10 West 54^thStreet, abutting the side garden of his childhood home.    He demolished the mansion of Colonel John J. McCook on the site and commissioned William Wells Bosworth to design a gargantuan residence, eight stories tall, that would dwarf his father’s Civil War period home next door.



The rising house dwarfs the nearby brownstown rowhouses in 1912 -- NYPL Collection

The entrance opened into a large vestibule and two reception rooms.   In an unusual move, the first floor was devoted to utilitarian purposes rather than entertaining.  Rockefeller’s office, a breakfast room and the servants’ quarters were all on this floor.  Upstairs things were a bit more impressive.

The Sun, on October 27, 1912, described the house as it neared completion.  “The second floor is planned to be one of the most attractive suites in the city.  Here will be the dining room, the drawing room and the music room, all of large dimensions, with plenty of window space.”

The newspaper took a swipe at other Standard Oil transplants from Ohio.  “Specially designed furniture and hangings are being made by the best manufacturers for this apartment, which while not intended to be as lavish or ostentatious as those in the homes of some of the Western men of means who have built homes on or near Fifth avenue will be unusually attractive.”

The floors above were devoted to the family.  The entire third floor was reserved for John and Abby, including a library.  The fourth housed the children’s bedrooms and rooms for nurses and personal attendants of the family.  The fifth floor was entirely devoted to guestrooms, as was part of the sixth.

The upper two floors were for recreation.  The seventh floor contained “as perfectly equipped a gymnasium as it is possible to have in a house of this kind,” said The Sun.  There were also a squash court and “baths of various kinds.”  The uppermost floor contained an open air playground for the children, a roof garden, and a huge open sun parlor with glass walls.  In the days before air conditioning, the family could retreat here at night to the open air sleeping pavilion.

The completed 102-foot tall house was the tallest private home ever built in New York.

John Junior's soaring house rises above his father's Civil War period brownstone -- photo from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York

Rockefeller’s new mansion was completed in 1912—a year when unions and capitalists were butting heads, sometimes violently.  The Labor Defense Committee and the IWW staged protests that met with rough police reaction.   Labor versus management differences would be manifested on the threshold of the new house.

In May 1914 news was reaching New York about a tragic and violent end to a miners’ strike in Ludlow, Colorado.  Workers at a company owned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.  had demanded in 1913 that the company obey labor laws regarding safety and cash payment of wages.   An angry Rockefeller responded by having the workers—mostly immigrants—evicted from company-owned housing.

The homeless miners erected a tent city nearby where families suffered through a severe Colorado winter.   As the standoff continued, Rockefeller ordered the National Guard to attack the settlement with machine guns and rifles and set fire to the tents.

When the smoke cleared, 22 people were dead—workers, women and children—from beatings, bullet wounds and suffocation.

In response, activist and author Upton Sinclair organized a demonstration of peaceful resistance.  Rows of “silent mourners” paraded past the Standard Oil offices and, then, showed up at the 54^thStreet house.

On the afternoon of May 2 five “mourners” showed up at 5:30 and walked back and forth before the mansion for four hours.  When it became obvious they were not going away, Detective Billy Ward “decided that the promenade was too short and compelled the walkers to lengthen the laps until they extended from Fifth avenue almost to Sixth avenue,” said The Sun the following day.  The detective’s ploy did not succeed; however when one demonstrator attempted to make a speak from the mansion steps, “Ward made him scoot.”

Five days later the group of five silent mourners had grown to a crowd.  On May 7 traffic police were astonished to see “hundreds” coming up Fifth Avenue headed towards the Rockefeller mansion.  Leading them was a man in the black robe of Death.  The demonstrators marched from Sixth Avenue and 50^th Street.  The Sun reported that “By the time Fifth avenue was reached the crowd was so big that it cut off all traffic for between ten and twenty minutes.”

The man in the Death costume, Albert Turner, was arrested and the mob turned away before reaching the Rockefeller house.  Turner was sentenced to two months in the workhouse.

While the disturbances were taking place on West 54^thStreet, Rockefeller and his family were entrenched in their heavily-guarded Pocantico Hills estate.

Priceless porcelains and French furniture decorated a sitting room -- photo from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York

Things eventually calmed down and life returned to normal in the house that looked rather like a hotel.  Despite his reaction to the Colorado miner strike, Rockefeller, like his father, was a devoted Baptist.  On April 19, 1917 his Bible class and others—nearly 300 persons in all—attended a service in the house by the Reverand Billy Sunday.   Referring to the lure of the lights and sins of Broadway, the preacher prayed “for those who tread the ‘Gay White Way,’ and said he hoped religion might touch their hearts and turn them to better things.”

The Rockefellers filled the mansion with an extensive art collection.   David Rockefeller would later remember that “Mother loved beauty wherever she found it, but Father’s taste was restricted to the more conventional and realistic art forms.”

Unbelievably, the massive house quickly became too small for the art collection.  The house next door was purchased and an entrance cut through on three floors.  The extension was used to display, among other valuable artworks, ten 18^thcentury Gobelin tapestries woven for Louis XIV and the early 15^th century French Gothic tapestry set depicting the “Hunt of the Unicorn.”

John Rockefeller, Jr. discovered the following winter that even the Rockefeller name was not always enough to get him what he wanted.  The house was heated by a coal-powered heating plant that serviced several other homes in the neighborhood as well.  When the plant ran out of coal in January 1918 and the temperature in his house plummeted, Rockefeller sent a requisition to the Standard Oil Company for 36 oil stoves.

The answer he received was not what he expected.  “Supply exhausted.  Can’t get them for you or anybody else.”

The manager of the distributing station was more pointed.  “Rockefeller looks like anybody else to me,” he told a reporter.  “If he walked in here with an oil can he wouldn’t get it filled any quicker than the dishwasher at that restaurant down the street.”

Unfortunately, the brutal winter with its accompanying lack of coal and heaters resulted in the pipes bursting in the 54^thStreet mansion.  “The Rockefeller pipes froze and burst just like ordinary pipes, and the result was precisely the same as elsewhere.  Icicles and miniature glaciers became prominent features of the interior decorations of the house,” reported the New-York Tribune on January 6.

The family retreated, again, to Pocantico Hills where coal was in ample supply.

Life for the Rockefeller family was apparently happy in the big house.  On New Year’s Eve 1920 Rockefeller wrote to his father, “We spent a very happy Christmas here in New York, with the tree up in the big nursery and great mounds of presents all about the room for the different members of the family.” 

John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s prized collection of porcelains spilled over into a family dining room -- photo from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York

Nevertheless, the children were raised with the typical Rockefeller discipline.   Nelson would recall that he was responsible for mending his own clothes, weeding the garden and keeping detailed accounts of his 30 cent allowance.

But by now the neighborhood was not the residential enclave of millionaires it once had been.  David Rockefeller wrote in his biography “Memoirs,” “With the advent of Prohibition in the mid-1920s, nightclubs and speakeasies selling bootleg liquor also appeared, and there were rumors that a number of brothels had opened as well.  The neighborhood, once the exclusive preserve of the Vanderbilts and Astors, had become seedy and down-at-the-heels.”

John D. Rockefeller, Sr. died on May 23, 1937 just weeks before his 100^th birthday.   The family homes would not survive much longer.  The following year John Rockefeller, Jr. announced plans to raze the houses as Abby Rockefeller’s vision of the Museum of Modern Art took form.

Twenty-five years after it was constructed, the towering John D. Rockefeller, Jr. house was demolished to make way for the sculpture garden of the museum.

photo by Alice Lum

The 1924 neo-Federal Nos. 121-123 E. 65th Street

photo by Alice Lum

As the turn of the last century came and went, the brownstones built just after the Civil War that lined the blocks off Central Park were demolished or remodeled as wealthy New Yorkers updated and upgraded the neighborhood.   Two such prim rowhouses, Nos. 121 and 123, had been erected in 1869 as part of a string of thirteen matching residences.

Although the homes were clearly out of date, the block retained its exclusive character.  In 1918 The Sun mentioned that “Mr. and Mrs. Arthur W. Rossiter, who have been passing the summer in Glen Cove, L.I., will be for the Winter at 121 East Sixty-fifth street.”   The Rossiters leased the home from attorney David Funk.

Two years later, in March 1920, Charles H. Sabin purchased the house at No. 121 from Funk’s estate, completing his quiet accumulation of connected properties.  Sabin was the president of the Guaranty Trust Company and lived with his wife nearby at No. 14 East 62^nd Street.   His latest purchase now provided him with the two houses at Nos. 121 and 123 East 65^th Street, and two directly behind them at Nos. 118 and 120 East 66^th Street.   The New-York Tribune said Sabin “intends to erect a fine residence for himself;” plans that included a 40-foot wide residence on 65^th Street and “access to the garage, to be on the Sixty-sixth Street end of the plot.”  The wealthy banker paid cash for the four properties.

A month later the houses were being emptied.  The Tribune reported that “paintings, furniture, art objects, and Persian and Chinese rugs” from the house at No. 121 were being sold at auction.

Months passed, however, and the four old back-to-back brownstones remained. 

For unexplained reasons, Sabin and his wife changed their minds about an opulent block-through residence and on October 20, 1921 the New-York Tribune announced that Colonel William Barclay Parsons had purchased the two 65^th Street houses from the Sabins.  “The alterations Colonel Parsons plans practically mean the rebuilding of the houses,” said the newspaper.

The two 1869 brownstone residences as they looked when Parsons purchased them -- New-York Tribune, October 30, 1921 (copyright expired)

William Barclay Parsons had acquired his “Colonel” appellation during World War I when he commanded a regiment of engineers that saw action in France.  But his reputation came from his domestic engineering accomplishments.   A well-regarded railroad engineer, he was appointed by the New York City Board of Rapid Transit Railroad Commissioners in 1891 to help design an underground railway.  After several setbacks, he saw the completion of the first sections of the New York Subway system, before he retired from the post of Chief Engineer in 1904.   His accomplishment did not escape even himself.  He said years later “For a subway of this character and in the rock and fine sand, there were no precedents.”

He would also be responsible for the Hudson River tubes, the Cape Cod Canal and was a member of the engineering team in charge of building the Panama Canal.  The New York Timeswould call him a “militant genius of the city age.”

Unlike the Sabins, Parsons wasted no time in setting to work on his new home.  The Tribune’s assessment that the renovation would mean practically rebuilding the houses was an understatement.  The engineer called upon architect William Welles Bosworth to transform the two old homes.   The architect had recently completed a major commission—the designing of the new campus for MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Unlike his campus buildings--classical, columned buildings appropriate to an academic environment--Bosworth would turn to neo-Federal architecture for the Parsons house.   The clean, formal lines of the period had been popular with Manhattan’s millionaires for over a decade; replacing the gushing, overly-ornamented styles of the Gilded Age.

Assisted in the project by architect E. E. Piderson, Bosworth sat three floors of Flemish-bond brick on a stone base.  Burned header bricks gave the appearance of age.  The entrance, at the left end of the structure, was framed by two Ionic columns and was balanced by a service entrance at the opposite end. 

The entrance was clearly distinguished from the service entrance on the opposite end of the residence by a restrained portico -- photo by Alice Lum

Openings on the upper three floors grew successively shorter, maintaining the visual proportions of the exceptionally wide house.  Paneled lintels, a stone course below the top floor, and a handsome stone balustrade along the roof line added to the dignity of the design.  Inside, at least one period pine-paneled room taken from a colonial home in Massachusetts was installed, carrying on the early American motif.

Apparently the Parsons moved into the house as construction continued.  On February 10, 1921, The New York Times reported that Parsons, “of 121 East Sixty-fifth Street has gone to Yucatan.”  The house was officially completed on February 21, 1924.

photo by Alice Lum

Parsons and his wife, the former Anna Reed, spent their summers in their New Jersey estate, Crossways, or traveled abroad.  For years when they returned to the city they would live at the Savoy-Plaza while they waited for the 65^thStreet house to be reopened.

Parsons continued on with engineering projects.  He became one of the three advisers to the Royal Commission on London traffic, was appointed by President Roosevelt to the Isthmian Canal Commission and was chairman of the Chicago Transit Commission.  In the meantime, Anna Parsons worked for her favorite charities, serving as chairman of the Woman’s Auxiliary of the New York Lying-In Hospital, and establishing a visiting nurse service in the city.

William Barclay Parsons -- photo Library of Congress

Parsons died on May 9, 1932.  Among his many accomplishments, his obituary in The New York Timessaid “But he will be chiefly remembered as the valiant engineer—an underground builder of ‘towered cities,’ where civilization, as he once said, rests on engineering.”

Anna Reed Parsons retained possession of the house; but possibly she was emotionally unable to stay in the home she built with her husband.  In November she leased it to Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Auchincloss; The Timesnoting that “There is a garden in the rear of the house.”

An attorney, Auchincloss gained distinction through his marriage in 1912 to Janet House, the daughter of Colonel Edward Mandell House, a close friend and advisor of President Woodrow Wilson.   Through his father-in-law, House had been introduced to the President and other administration big-wigs.  House took him on as his secretary during the Armistice negotiations and the Paris Peace Conference.

Now back in New York, Auchincloss had resumed his law practice, but remained involved in Democratic Party politics.  The couple was highly visible in New York society.

Gordon Auchincloss died in 1943.  A year later Anna Parsons sold the 65^thStreet house; assessed at the time at $100,000—just around $1 million today.

Over half a century later, the wide Federal-style home of William Barclay Parsons remains a private residence.   Little has changed in the dignified façade; a quiet reminder of the short, contented period between a World War and a Great Depression.

Thanks to reader zcapresso for requesting this post