1009 Fifth Avenue House

History and architecture

This handsome Fifth Avenue mansion, prominently located at the southeast corner of Eighty-second Street, was built during the years 1899 to 1901. It is one of the few surviving houses which once formed part of an almost uninterrupted series of palatial residences facing Central Park. In recent years the majority of these grand town houses have fallen victim to rising property values, and have been replaced by apartment buildings. Mo. 1009 is exceptional, as it remains in the possession of the family of the original owner, and today provides us with a fine example of turn-of-the-century architectural opulence.

The Manhattan architectural firm Welch, Smith & Provot, were commissioned to design the house by W.W. Hall & T.M. Hall, speculative builders specializing in the construction of large private residences. Alexander M. Welch, before entering into partnership with Bowen B. Smith and George V. Provot, had worked with the Hall brothers, and No. 1009 appears to be his design. Welch was a graduate of the School of Architecture of Columbia University and had also studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, an educational background shared by many successful New York architects of that period.

While in independent practice, Welch designed numerous Manhattan town houses, buildings which reveal his mastery of the elegant Beaux-Arts style employed by contemporary Parisian architects. Welch also received commissions for suburban houses and designed St. Stephen's Methodist Church in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, a simple but extremely handsome shingled structure. Later in his career Welch helped to restore the Dutch Colonial Dye Ion an house, ancestral home of his wife's family.

No. 1009 Fifth Avenue is one of the most impressive houses built on speculation by Hall & Hall. Soon after completion it was purchased by Benjamin N. Duke, a director of the American Tobacco Company which he and his brother, James D. Duke, had formed in 1890. The Duke brothers had begun their joint business enterprise on a North Carolina farm, and had risen from the poverty of the post-Civil War South to become wealthy industrialists, philanthropists, and residents of New York's most fashionable Avenue.

Benjamin Duke sold No. 1009 to his brother James in 1907. After James' new mansion at the corner of Seventy-eighth Street and Fifth Avenue (now the Institute of Fine Arts), was completed in 1912, No. 1009 was occupied by Angier B. Duke, son of Benjamin Duke. Angier Duke's sister, Mary, married A. J. Drexel Biddle in 1919, and the couple took up residence at No. 1009- The present owner, Mrs. Mary D.E. Semans , is their daughter.