- These two towers could be thought of
as the birthplace of the penthouse apartment
in Manhattan and possibly the world.
I'm Nick Potts.
I'm an architect, and today we're going
to be doing a walking tour of Manhattan's Upper West Side.
[light music]
Something that was happening almost uniquely here
on the Upper West Side.
At the turn of the century
it was becoming a neighborhood where people coming
from other places who were
on the make were looking for places to live.
And the apartment hotel really was the solution for this.
These apartments didn't have kitchens
and so they looked like an apartment.
People would live in them for a long time
but anything dealing with service was centralized.
You never had to cross paths with staffed.
We're in the 20th century here.
There's electricity on the street, there are subways
so it's starting to get a little bit more buzzing.
And the hubbub of Broadway was becoming an appeal.
The big idea of these apartment hotels
to attract the upwardly mobile middle class was a thing
that was happening here on the Upper West Side uniquely.
And buildings like this we're starting to pop up
as kind of this new nexus
of an apartment hotel neighborhood.
Right now we're in front of the Dakota.
This is really one of the first buildings
on the Upper West Side.
The name, the Dakota was a bit of a joke
because it was so remote, both so far west
and so far north that may as well be in the Dakotas
which weren't even states yet.
And the building is fairly experimental
in terms of its location and also its technology.
A building of this height needed elevators
and to have elevators, you have to have electricity
which didn't exist here on the Upper West side
until the subways were on in 1900.
It was the heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune
who developed this building.
He provided his own power plant
and really embarked on an almost experimental folly.
The Dakota really was the pioneer of making apartment living
for the upwardly mobile middle class acceptable
and something that would attract more residents
and ultimately more buildings.
And this was a middle class building
in the middle class that existed
in the 1880s when this was built
was very different than what we have now.
People had staffs, people were expected
to have like a certain level of wealth to buy into this.
At the same time, again, this is apartment living is new
and the idea of living next to someone
rather than having your own individual house
and having to cross paths with their staff
was still something that a lot of people
were trying to get behind.
So in a building like the Dakota
there was a huge amount of planning put into the separation
of front of house and back of house.
So underneath the courtyard of the Dakota
there's an entire level of service
and so the servants using the area beneath the courtyard
but essentially never have to cross paths
with the building's residence.
One of the most interesting things
about the Dakota is that there are no corridors.
There are these four separate passenger towers that led
to these enormous apartments that essentially
bridged an entire corner of the building before they went
to the service towers that were in the center.
So at the time of the Dakota was under construction,
apartment building design was still very modular
where people weren't taking, you know,
as many rooms as they needed
where it was a suite of three salons
or something with entire residence.
And that was really appealing to people
who were trying to establish themselves.
If you think about the movie "Rosemary's Baby"
that this obviously starred prominently
in the crux of the situation
with the homeowners is that it's a combined apartment
with a shared closet.
Stylistically the Dakota is also a pioneer or an outlier
in many ways.
It was designed by Henry Hardenbergh
who eventually designed the Plaza Hotel in 1907.
It's pretty unique in that it's a German,
Germanic medieval style building.
It almost looks like a civic building that you'd see go up
in the middle of Europe in the 1850s or 1860s
like a post office or a city hall.
So there's a monumentality to it.
And the building even has a moat if you look around it
which wasn't meant to be like a castle
it was meant to bring light in.
But it continues the theme of this fortresslike
Northern European medieval sort of architecture.
This odd Germanic style really wasn't adopted elsewhere
in the Upper West Side, but the planning
of the Dakota became a really important pattern.
And you look at buildings like the Apthorp
and the Belnord that have a very similar sort of planning,
no corridors, separate elevator towers,
the central courtyard.
You see the pattern of the Dakota really taking root
uniquely in the Upper West side.
And as other developments happened,
particularly a few blocks further west on Broadway,
they mimicked the sorts of amenity spaces
that the Dakota had
while in a more approachable sort of building
the apartment hotel.
[bright music]
This building behind me is the hotel Belleclaire
which is important for two major reasons.
The first is that it was the first major commission
by Emery Roth who was the architect of the San Remo
the El Dorado, the Beresford
really the most iconic buildings on Central Park West.
It's also important because it's emblematic
of a new building type, which is the apartment hotel.
And this is a type that emerged really here
on the Upper West Side to suit the needs
of on the make upper middle class.
So because in this time period the mixing
of residents and staff was a really important deal,
a lot of the planning of these buildings was
around the separation of service and living.
And there's always a service elevator.
The functions like the kitchens
and the servant's rooms and porters are always centered
towards the center of the building,
usually around a light core to kind of stay away
from the salons and the kind of the high value spaces
which are lining in the public face of the building.
And a building like this
though it served the needs of upper middle class,
it really wasn't something that people
on the east side looked well upon
where the old money lived in their kind of proper limestone
or brownstone buildings, a kind of restrained ornament.
A building like this appealed to the west side taste.
You know, these are people who are on the make
the excess was appealing to them
and not considered garish or in poor taste.
This building is really a unique example in New York
of the Viennese Secession/Art Nouveau style.
You see a lot more of this experimentation
on the west side because this is targeted to people
who are on the make and they're looking to impress.
And the more ornament,
the more stuff added to it,
it appeals to people who are kind of looking
to make their way up.
So this building was going up at exactly the same time
as two other major apartment hotels along Broadway
a few blocks further south, the Ansonia
which is the largest and probably the most iconic of these.
And the Dorilton, which is similar in terms of scale
and form to what you see on the Belleclaire
but taller and little more French in planning.
But the idea is the same.
It's a corner buildings, targeted towards an apartment hotel
that was meant to attract people who were moving to the city
and establishing themselves.
[light music]
Behind me is Ansonia, and this was built in 1904.
The reason why there's a proliferation
of these large apartment buildings here
at 72nd Street and Broadway is right underneath it.
And you can see the 72nd Street IRT subway station.
This was right around the same time around 1901, 1902.
And because of this, there was electrification
and the means of people
to get from further downtown up here.
So the land value skyrocketed
and it was natural to build a large building.
So this is another apartment hotel.
It's the largest of any of these.
There were 300 suites when this was built.
Stylistically it's Beaux-Arts,
Stokes who is the developer of the Ansonia
hired an architect from Paris called Duboy
to design essentially a Haussmannian building.
This is very similar
to what you see in the eighth arrondissement
in Paris with the French balconies and the band courses
but it's blown up to enormous scale
almost three times what you would see in Paris
where the buildings are five, six stories.
He was also so involved
that the architect ended up just leaving the country.
He paid him off to go back to France
and so essentially took over the building
as his folly and lavish money on it.
There were Turkish baths, there were shopping arcades.
Really, you know, it was apartment hotel
but it had all of what you'd expect
in a five star hotel now.
The building failed really quickly after it was built.
It built in 1904.
By the time the 1930s came around,
the kitchens were already closed.
So it went through a really rapid change
in the types of people that it housed.
It declined significantly during the 1970s
and it really became in the 1970s almost the flop house
in poor repair.
But because it was very well built, again,
this was Stokes's folly.
He poured a lot of money into it
which ultimately bankrupted the building.
It's very robustly built.
The steel is heavily fireproof with stone.
The floors are actually two layers thick
and so it's essentially soundproof.
So this actually made it a great place
for musicians to live.
Again, we're just up the two three line
from Times Square close to Lincoln Center
when that came about.
So this became a great place for musicians to live
and actually live/work so they could teach classes
or practice in their apartment
without really bothering the neighbors.
It's just really amazing to think
about the number of people who are noted
in terms of music and performing arts.
Rachmaninoff, Mahler, Stravinsky, Florenz Ziegfeld,
who have lived and worked just in that one building.
The Turkish baths that were in the basement of the building
when it was first built obviously didn't have a use anymore.
So by the time the 1970s came around,
it was a gay bathhouse called the Continental Baths
where Bette Midler got her start.
And you can just think about its importance
in establishing New York and maintaining its cachet
as a cultural capital.
In terms of its planning, the Ansonia is a departure
from earlier apartment buildings such as the Dakota,
where the vertical circulation was split up
in multiple cores.
Here the Ansonia actually centralizes all the elevators
into one stacked core, which is the way
that a lot of hotels and office towers
and even residential towers are planned now.
So there's a bit more forward thinking
in terms of centralizing the circulation into one spine
versus dispersing it into small neighborhoods.
[bright music]
The Upper West Side was really the last place
in Manhattan where townhouses were built
and what you can see is that they're extremely eclectic
tightening everything from Moorish decoration,
classical sculpture and more modish sorts of arts
and crafts motifs.
So really interesting and individual as opposed
to what you see on the East Side.
[light music]
So these two towers behind me, you could think of
as being the birthplace of the penthouse in New York City
and possibly even the world amidst the San Remo
it's is 1930, it's Emory Roth, so barely 30 years
after the construction of the hotel Belleclaire,
you can see the drastic changes in both the adoption
of apartment living as a proper place where people live
and also architecturally the development
of the apartment house into its own distinct style.
The idea of the penthouse is really something
that was birthed in the United States
in the early part of the 20th century
when tall buildings were first thought
about the top of the building was seen
as a place for equipment.
This building really comes right off the heels
of an earlier Emery Roth building, the Beresford
just north of the American Natural History Museum.
And that building was the first introduced towers
in the case of the Beresford, the towers were not
for people to live in,
they were actually for equipment.
So it was the water tanks and the overruns
for the elevators took up the prominent towers.
What happened between the Beresford and San Remo,
however, was the multiple dwelling law of 1929.
And that was a state mandated law that talked
about essentially how to build an apartment tower.
This law that said, if you have a hundred foot long block,
the towers can be yay big
and they have to be this far apart.
Previously buildings were less valuable
as you got higher and higher up, but the elevator made
that whole getting vertical much more seamless.
And as people started realizing views,
that whole idea flipped
and the higher floor suddenly became more valuable
because you had this added bonus and this added value
of views that really hadn't been quantified before.
So the towers on the San Remo are really the pinnacle
of this development of a new style and type of building
which is the apartment tower.
[light music]