Manhattan Country School

History and architecture

There is an air of gaiety and frivolous vitality in the architectural character of this French Renaissance townhouse, that is both refreshing and stimulating. Typically French are not only the plan of this four-story house and its handsome, limestone facade, but also its garden court elevation.

On approaching the house Paris and the Champs Elysee immediately come to mind.

The Parisian character of the house is most emphatically to be found in the street elevation, with its strong, rusticated first floor and high double carriage-door entrance, which serves also as vestibule. It is again expressed in the second floor stone balcony supported on carved brackets, with beautifully detailed wrought iron railing extending across the width of the entire front.

The second floor windows are very high with arched heads indicating the importance of the drawing room behind them. The third floor windows are square in shape with heavy molded stone frames with swags beneath the sills. All windows of this three story section are shuttered in a typically French manner.

Completing the composition of the facade is a well proportioned stone cornice at the fourth floor level behind which rises a slate Mansard roof with three unusual dormer windows, distinguished by their handsome semicircular stone frames and arched roofs.

This is one of the last three family residences built in 1915 still standing on East Ninety-Sixth Street.

Through the years this street has become a busy thoroughfare and family houses have yielded to multi-unit Brownstones and large apartment houses. All three townhouses were designed by Ogden Codman, Jr. who, although trained as a decorator, practiced architecture in New York City and was responsible for many fine buildings and houses here as well as others in Boston and Newport.

Having spent a good part of his life in France, it is quite natural that Codman designed No. 7 (now the Manhattan Country School), No. 15 (now the Convent of St. Francis de Sales), and No. 12 (now the Emerson School), in the French Louis XV style. The first mentioned, No. 7, was built for his own use, and as his home the appointments received the most scrupulous attention.