Mary Hale Cunningham House

History and architecture

The Mary Hale Cunningham House resulted from the 1909 remodeling, with a front extension, of a French Flats building originally constructed in 1880-81. The new facade was designed by Harrie T. Lindeberg, of the firm of Albro & Lindeberg. who was one of the leading American specialists in large revival-style country houses in the first half of the twentieth century. Mary Hale Cunningham was the widow of lames Cunningham, a partner until his death in 1890 in the successful San Francisco firm of Cunningham, Curtiss, & Welch, importers, jobbers, book publishers, and stationers.

Sometime before 1905. Mary Cunningham moved to New York City, where she had family and financial interests, and later commissioned this house for her family and servants. East 55th Street, between Park and Lexington Avenues, was one of the fashionable side street blocks of Midtown Manhattan, where older rowhouses and multiple dwellings were replaced by new town houses or altered with new facades.

The Cunningham House, four stories (plus basement) in height and twenty-five feet in width, is clad in rough-faced purplish brick with limestone-colored terra-cotta trim above a marble base.

The abstracted neo-Tudor style facade features a ground-story enframement with paired fluted Doric pilasters; a monumental keyed enframement on the second and third stories, capped by a drip molding, with long, narrow windows with multi-pane sash and ornamental terra-cotta spandrel panels; a fourth-story band of windows; a brick gable flanked by crenels; and wrought-iron railings. From at least 1925 to 1941, this was the home of real estate investor-broker Richard Collins and his wife, Harriet de Raismes Cutting, an interior decorator.

From 1941 to 1978, it was the noted antiques gallery of the firm founded in 1906 by Arthur S. Vernay, later known as Vemay & Jussel, specialists in One English furniture and art. The Cunningham House is an unusual example of a neo-Tudor style town house and is a rare surviving unaltered, revival-style town house in Midtown, an area dominated by tall office buildings.