William and Helen Martin Murphy Ziegler, Jr. House

History and architecture

The William and Helen Ziegler, Jr. House was built in 1926-27, at the end of the era of large single-family town houses for the wealthy in Manhattan. It is one of the most distinguished New York City residences by architect William L. Bottomley, who established a reputation as one of the preeminent American architects of neo-Georgian style residences in the 1920s and 30s, often inspired by eighteenth-century Virginia plantation prototypes. William Ziegler, Jr., a prominent businessman, sportsman, and head of several foundations for the blind, moved into this house after his marriage in 1927 to Helen Martin Murphy. East 55th Street, between Park and Lexington Avenues, was one of the fashionable side street blocks of Midtown Manhattan, where older rowhouses were replaced by new town houses or altered with new facades.

The Ziegler House, quite substantial at four-and-a-half stories (plus basement) in height and thirty-seven-and-a-half feet in width, has a beautifully detailed, symmetrical three-bay front facade. Bottomley successfully and creatively adapted an elegant neo-Georgian style design to an urban town house. Among its notable features are the Flemish bond brickwork with burnt headers, splayed lintels, and end quoins; the entrance with a bowed-arched pediment; multi-pane wood sash windows and paneled shutters; the modillioned cornice; the steeply-pitched, grey slate-covered roof with dormers and end chimneys; and the wrought-iron fence with brick piers at the sidewalk line.

Since William Ziegler's death in 1958, the house has been used for offices, including those of architects Welton Becket & Associates, the Radio Advertising Bureau, Inc., and Allied Bank International. The Ziegler House is a rare surviving unaltered, revival-style town house in Midtown, an area dominated by tall office buildings.