The Windermere

History and architecture

The Windermere, constructed in 1880-81, is significant as the oldest-known large apartment complex remaining in an area that was one of Manhattan's first apartment-house districts. With its exuberant display of textured, corbelled, and polychromatic brickwork, the Windermere complex is a visually compelling, imposing, eclectic, and unified group of three buildings anchoring the southwest corner of Ninth Avenue and West 57th Street. Adding to its significance is the Windermere's role in the history of women's housing in New York City. In the late 1890s, in an era in which housing options for single, self-supporting women were relatively limited, the Windermere was recognized as a remarkable home for a substantial population of these so-called "New Women." As such, it appears to have anticipated later residential projects in the city catering specifically to bachelor women.

Upon its completion, the Windermere, which is attributed to architect Theophilus G. Smith, stood within an area that had been sparsely settled only ten years before. By the mid-1880s, this area was home to several prominent examples of the apartment house, which was then a new and evolving residential building type. Today, the Windermere and the later, 1883-85 Osborne (a designated New York City Landmark) are the only- known large apartment houses or large apartment complexes dating from this district's early years.

The seven-story Windermere buildings are of impressive scale, topped by story-high cornices, and crowned, at No. 400 West 57th Street, by a high, false pediment with an inset, blind brick arch. Although they vary in width, the three Windermere buildings are united by common materials, decorative elements, and design into an asymmetrical group combining features of the Queen Anne style with brick polychromy and horizontal banding typical of the High Victorian Gothic, and with Romanesque elements including round- arched windows and the round arches of the Windermere's massive, machicolated cornices.

Among the Windermere's most notable features are the three-story bowed oriels at No. 400 West 57th Street; the segmental arches used as a framing device on both the 57th Street and Ninth Avenue facades; the use of contrasting Ohio stone trim; and the robust, channeled brick pilasters, which corbel upon reaching the cornices. Changes to the buildings over the years have included the addition of windows at the cornice level on the Ninth Avenue façade, and alterations to the ground floor of No. 400, including the removal of the original paired entrance portico and stoop, and the resurfacing of the façade with stone veneer. The Windermere's primary facades, which remain substantially intact after nearly 125 years, are among the features that distinguish the Windermere as an outstanding example of a large apartment complex of its time.

DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS

The Early New York Apartment House

Although merchants in Colonial New York lived "over the store" with their families, servants, and apprentices, by the early nineteenth century, new residential neighborhoods were developing away from Lower Manhattan's business district. By the 1830s, with the weakening of the apprentice system, New York's wage- earners found lodging in boarding houses, rented rooms, or the early tenement buildings, while artists and merchants typically lived in private three- or four-story rowhouses.

But by 1860, New York's skyrocketing population - which increased from 33,171 in 1790 to more than half a million in 1850 - had pushed private- house prices out of the reach of most members of the middle class. By 1866, those who could not afford their own houses included "professional men, clergymen, shopkeepers, artists, college professors, and upper-level mechanics." Some middle-class families adapted by moving into boarding houses, but living with other families in a subdivided former rowhouse conflicted with the era's middle-class values, which stressed the "individual private house as the protector of family privacy, morality, and identity."

In the years following the Civil War, new types of multiple dwellings emerged to cater to those of greater means than the poor or working-class, who remained largely confined to the tenement or rooming house.

Among New York's first apartment houses were two designed by Richard Morris Hunt: the Stuyvesant Apartments (1869-70, demolished) at 142 East 18th Street, and Stevens House (1870-72, demolished), on the south side of 27th Street between Fifth Avenue and Broadway. Buildings such as these led one observer to write in 1874 that "the successful establishment of a few elegant apartment houses for the rich demonstrated to those of moderate means the possibility of multiple tenancy without the risk of social debasement."

Although the Panic of 1873 slowed the construction of flats buildings in New York, construction took off, with an improving economy, after 1876. (As opposed to tenements, in which residents shared bathing facilities and toilets, both flats buildings and apartment houses had self-contained suites of rooms; the latter term generally referred to the more luxurious buildings, particularly those with elevators.) Between 1875 and 1879, approximately 700 new flats buildings were erected in New York; 516 were built in 1880 alone. By 1880, "the French flat, catering to the middle class, was a fixture of the city's architecture." Relatively few of these new buildings were architecturally distinguished; nevertheless, a "revolution in living," as the New York Times deemed it in 1878, was occurring, and by the mid-1880s, more New Yorkers lived in multiple dwellings than in rowhouses.

Most of the early flats buildings were located on the Upper East Side, east of Third Avenue. But as the city's architects moved, in the late 1870s, toward the creation of the "mammoth apartment house," much of the new apartment house construction occurred in the Ladies' Mile district and in "the new apartment district west of the luxury quarter." This area in the West 50s and low West 60s, largely undeveloped in the early 1870s, was bordered on the east by Fifth Avenue, then the city's poshest residential street; it was above the infamous Tenderloin, and east of the Lower West End, a working-class neighborhood between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues that would later become known as San Juan Hill.

The extension of the Sixth Avenue Elevated to West 58th Street, and of the Ninth Avenue Elevated through the Upper West Side in the late 1870s, sparked the area's growth, particularly along West 59th Street; the pioneering apartment house there was the Bradley (John G. Prague, 1877, demolished), a luxury building at 30 West 59th. Nearby, directly on Fifth Avenue between West 52nd and West 53rd Streets, was a slightly earlier luxury building, the first Osborne (Duggin & Crossman, 1876, demolished), which was considered at the time to be "the finest apartment house in New York."

Despite their importance as early luxury apartment houses, both the six-story, six-bay-wide Bradley, and the five-story, seven-bay-wide Osborne, were relatively modest in scale. By the late 1870s, numerous medium-sized and larger apartment houses would fill the blocks of this rapidly developing area. To these were added the 80-foot-high, seven-story Windermere, in 1881.

The early 1880s would see a huge leap in apartment-house scale and sophistication, epitomized by such massive structures as the eleven-story new Osborne (James E. Ware, 1883-85, a designated New York City Landmark) at Seventh Avenue and West 57th Street; and by the Central Park Apartments, or "Spanish Flats" (Hubert, Pirsson & Co., 1883, 1885, demolished), a complex of eight, ten-story buildings located east of Seventh Avenue between West 58th and West 59th Streets.

Farther uptown, on Eighth Avenue between West 72nd and West 73rd Streets, Edward Clark would build the Dakota (Henry J. Hardenburgh, 1882-84, a designated New York City Landmark), the first major residential building on the Upper West Side. Construction of such large apartment buildings was halted soon afterwards, however, as the 1885 passage of the Daly Law limited dwelling houses to 80 feet in height on the avenues, and 70 feet on side streets.

These height restrictions would remain in effect until 1901.

During its early years, the apartment house remained "an experiment," as "what constituted the best or the most convenient or the most luxurious flat had to be subjected to constant revision, for there was no body of experience or literature to guide either architects or architectural critics." Architects drew upon various styles, often mixing them together. Developers and architects sought to strike a balance between communal living and the privacy of the rowhouse, in a climate in which the apartment house's long-term success was not a foregone conclusion.

In 1877, with large numbers of vacancies in the Albany and Osborne, the Real Estate Record concluded that apartment houses were failing to draw the "better class of people" from private houses; by the mid-1880s, with the Dakota half-vacant, the Spanish Flats a financial failure, and numerous examples existing of unprofitable apartment-house ventures, some concluded that "the majority of upper- middle- and upper-class people still preferred houses over apartments."

By 1885, during the early years of the New York apartment house, the "new apartment district" west of Fifth Avenue had seen the construction of a diverse array of medium and large apartment houses, from the early luxury Bradley building, to numerous five- and six-story buildings like the Albany and Sonoma, to massive, towering apartment houses and apartment complexes like the 1883-85 Osborne and the Central Park Apartments. The Windermere, with its imposing bulk - its massive, story-high cornice and false pediment making it appear even larger than its seven-story height - is distinguished from the modestly scaled, pre-1885 residential buildings remaining in the area.

Older than the Osborne Apartments to its east, the Windermere constitutes the oldest-known large apartment house or large apartment complex remaining in this district. With the exception of the Manhattan (Charles W. Clinton, 1879-80) at Second Avenue and East 86th Street, the Windermere may be the oldest large apartment house or large apartment complex remaining in New York City today.