67-69 East 79th Street Building (George Rives Residence)

History and architecture

This imposing residence designed by Carrere & Hastings in a late French Baroque style was built between 1907 and 1908 for George and Sarah Rives. The building is representative of the large town houses erected on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the early 20th century as this area became the most fashionable residential quarter of the city.

In 1926 the Rives estate sold the house to Robert Livingston Gerry (1877-1957) and his wife Cornelia Harriman Gerry (1884-1966). Robert Livingston Gerry was a prominent New York real estate broker, sportsman, and conservationist. Gerry was a descendant of Eldridge Gerry, a signer of the Declaration of independence and Gerry's wife, Cornelia Harriman Gerry, was the daughter of financier E.H. Harriman and the sister of Governor W. Averell Harriman. In 1958 the house was sold to the Kingdom of Greece.

As designed by Carrere & Hasting, the Rives Residence was modeled after the town houses that line the Place Vendome in Paris, designed in 1698 by Jules Hardouin-Mansart. The houses on the Place Vendome are more ornate than the Rives Residence, but all are similarly massed and use a similar design vocabulary.

As originally built, the George Rives Residence was a five-story building with simple restrained ornamentation. The smooth ground floor was articulated by three round-arched, ground-floor openings. This arrangement of the ground-floor openings remains as designed and is based very closely on the example of the Place Vendome. The arch to the right serves as the main entrance and originally led to a vestibule, white the subsidiary entrance to the left ted to the basement servants' area. Both of these entrances are screened by ornate iron gates. In the center is a muiti-paned window set on top of a balustrade.