329 West 85th Street House

History and architecture

Constructed in 1890-91 for the builder-speculator Perez M. Stewart at a time when the blocks in the Eighties west of Broadway were first developed is a row of five nearly identical houses on the north side of West 85th Street between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. Ralph S. Townsend, the noted architect, employed an eclectic architectural vocabulary — Romanesque Revival elements as well as Queen Anne motifs — to create an original facade design that can be seen as a late but highly successful example of the architecture of the Aesthetic Movement.

Although the horizontal architectural elements and the picturesque towered silhouette relate it to the other four facades in the row, No. 329's facade of three stories with a basement, executed in contrasting brownstone and brick, is designed as a vertical unit. The expressive correspondence between the exaggerated and superimposed architectural components within this facade — the coupled windows, their segmental, flat, and round-arched window heads, the smoothfaced and rough-cut voussoirs — suggest structural support for the towerlike western bay.

The carved foliate motifs provide details of special interest. Townsend's inventive facade treatment survives largely intact.