History and architecture
Built between 1898 and 1915, City and Suburban Homes Company's First Avenue Estate is the oldest extant project of the most successful of the privately financed, limited-dividend companies which attempted to address the housing problems of the nation's working poor at the turn of the century. The company's investors, led by such prominent New Yorkers as Mrs. Alfred Corning Clark (later Mrs. Henry Codman Potter), Caroline and Olivia Stokes, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Darius Ogden Mills, Isaac Seligman, and R.
Fulton Cutting, and Bayard Cutting, voluntarily agreed to limit their profits in order to provide wage earners with comfortable, safe, hygienic, well-maintained housing at market rates. By paying a dividend, the company attempted to establish what its president E.R.L. Gould described as a "middle ground between pure philanthropy and pure business" and encourage others to invest in housing of an equally high caliber.
The First Avenue Estate
The City and Suburban First Avenue Estate is located on the former grounds of the Colored Home and Hospital, an institution founded in 1839, that had begun to erect a home, hospital, and chapel on First Avenue between East 64th and East 65th Streets in 1849. In April 1897, City and Suburban purchased the site from the institution for $210,000, agreeing to delay possession for a year's time.
Sources and further reading
This history comes from the Landmarks app’s historical catalog. Names and building uses may reflect the period described.