134 East 67th Street Apartments

History and architecture

This distinguished apartment house composed in the manner of an imposing Italian Renaissance palazzo was designed as a pendant to the nearly identical adjacent apartment house, already a designated New York City Landmark, on the corner of Lexington Avenue and East 66th Street.

Built in 1907 from the designs of the noted architect Charles A, Platt, who worked here in conjunction with the architectural firm Rossiter & Wright, the building is an important early example of the luxury cooperative apartment house, then a relatively new type of residence for wealthy urban dwellers.

Although multiple-family dwellings were common for working class families from the late 1830's, the idea of an apartment house for affluent residents was first introduced in New York City only in 1869 with the Stuvyesant Apartments which stood on West 18th Street. They were designed by the prominent architect Richard Morris Hunt who had studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where apartment dwelling was a well-established manner of living for all classes of tenants.

New Yorkers, however, were somewhat hesitant about the idea at first. Although apartment houses continued to be constructed in the 1880's and 1890's, their dominance of residential Manhattan is a 20th-century phenomenon.

As late as 1907, in an article concerning these buildings on Lexington Avenue, the New York Times noted that "With the growing scarcity of dwellings, the time is surely coming when we will have our neighbor's 'houses' above and below us, instead of an adjoining lots."

The idea of the cooperative apartment house seems to date from around 1880 when the architectural and building firm of Hubert, Pirsson and Company erected the first of a series of so-callfed Hubert Home Clubs. These featured duplex apartments, elevator operators, and doormen, all intended "to reproduce ^s closely as possible the atmosphere of the private house," still the residential ideal of most city residents. However,this idea did not spread and rental arrangements continued to predominate in the early apartment buildings of the 1880's and 1890's. Thus, when William J, Taylor formed the Corporation Building Construction Company in the early 1900's to sell shares in new apartment buildings, it was considered a pioneering effort with great promise for solving the housing problem on all levels.