332 West 83rd Street House

History and architecture

The 332 West 83rd Street House, designed by well-known architect and developer Clarence F. True, was built on speculation in 1898-99 as one house of a picturesque group of six houses on the southeast corner of Riverside Drive and West 83rd Street. Today the 332 West 83rd Street House is architecturally significant and as one of the five extant houses in this group represents the first period of development on Riverside Drive. True designed several hundred houses, primarily in groups, on the Upper West Side in the years between 1890 and 1901, and was largely responsible for promoting the development and establishing the character of lower Riverside Drive.

The houses in the group at Riverside and West 83rd Street were designed in True's signature "Elizabethan Revival" style based on French and English Renaissance prototypes and built by True's development firm, the Riverside Building Company; they are the northernmost of True's designs built along the Drive. The design of the 332 West 83rd Street House is characterized by such picturesque elements as an asymmetrically-placed bowfront, contrasting red Roman brick and limestone facing, segmentally- arched and rectangular openings, keyed surrounds, decorative ironwork, a steeply-pitched tile roof with a gable, a dormer, prominent chimneys, and end-walls.

All of the houses in the group were originally designed with projecting bowfronts or bays and low stoops, but these features on the houses along Riverside Drive became the focus of an interesting legal controversy several years after construction.

As the result of a lawsuit brought by an adjacent property owner, the court ruled in 1903 that no one had the authority to place permanent encroachments onto public thoroughfares, and the owners of the houses facing onto Riverside Drive were thus ordered to remove the projections. In 1911 these facades were removed and rebuilt to follow the diagonal of the Riverside Drive property lines. The 332 West 83rd Street House (owned by Robert E. Dowling, president of the City Investing Co.) apparently was not subject to the lawsuit as it does not face the Drive. It remains unaltered in its original picturesque Elizabethan Revival design.