1025 Park Avenue

History and architecture

The 1025 Park Avenue House was constructed in 1911-12 for the well-known composer of light opera and popular music, Reginald DeKoven and his wife Anna. The house is a rare surviving mansion from the period when Park Avenue was being developed into a grand and exclusive boulevard bordered by private homes and elegant apartment houses. It was designed in an unusual urban adaptation of the Jacobean Revival style by John Russell Pope, one of America's leading architects.

The dominating, symmetrically arranged bay windows and the solid brick facade with stone trim are reminiscent of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century manor houses of Britain from which this style is derived. This stately home with its vast halls and elegant spaces was the scene of numerous gatherings and concerts for the DeKovens and their friends from socially elite circles of New York.

The Development of Park Avenue

Park Avenue was not always the fashionable place to live which it is today. Before 1872, railroad tracks carrying steam locomotives with their accompanying dirt, noise and fire-producing cinders, ran down the center of Fourth Avenue, making the area quite undesirable. At that date, however, the Fourth Avenue Improvement Scheme, to lower and partially enclose the tracks in an open tunnel beneath the Avenue, was instituted by New York City and the railroad.

With the grime and noise decreased, development followed in the late 1870s and 1880s with tenements and rowhouses, as well as institutional buildings, being constructed in the area. Only a scattered few examples of these buldings still remain on the Avenue, and these are greatly altered.

The street remained in this condition until 1902 when a serious train accident in the tunnel motivated the state legislature to pass an act requiring that all passenger trains in New York City be electrified by 1908. With this modernization, the tracks could be completely covered over and Park Avenue (the name of the street had been changed from Fourth Avenue in 1888 by the Common Council) finally started to live up to its name.

The street was gradually transformed into a broad, peaceful parkway, lined with a mixture of harxisome private residences and elegant apartment houses, many designed by the city's leading architects for prominent residents. Architects whose work could be found on this street included such well-known names as Trowbridge & Livingston, Delano & Aldrich, Ernest Flagg, and Walker & Gillette, among others.

Over the years however, many of the early private homes have been replaced by large apartment buildings. One of the first mansions constructed on Park Avenue, and the oldest still extant was that for Elihu Root, built in 1903 by Carrere & Hastings.

The Percy Pyne House at No. 680 Park, designed in 1906 (but not constructed until 1910-12) by McKim, Mead & White, is the second oldest bulding remaining from this period, while the Jonathan Bulkley House, built 1910-11 by James Gamble Rogers is the third oldest.

In 1909, when the Avenue was still undergoing change, Mr. Amos Pinchot built a large mansion on the northeast corner of Park Avenue and 85th Street, Pinchot was a man known for sound judgment in real estate matters, and he purchased numerous lots on the surrounding blocks for speculative purposes, in addition to the one for his own home.

In 1910, Pinchot sold the lot just to the north of his own white stone house to Reginald and Anna DeKoven who built their house in 1911-12.6 Thus today the house at 1025 Park Avenue is the fourth oldest surviving mansion on Park Avenue.