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Then and Now on the Upper West SideTo someone whose English ancestors worshipped in a church built in 500 AD, preserving an architectural heritage that didn’t exist before 1900 can seem like an oxymoron. But in the here and now of New York City, buildings that were put up as recently as 1904 are historic landmarks. And so they should be. But where do we find the elusive link that connects West Siders with our neighborhood’s distant past, when it was rolling farmland and the southern tip of the Manhattan was New Amsterdam? To Broadway itself, which spans the centuries and defines the development of the West Side. Originally an Indian trail, it has been successively a Dutch settlers' cartway, the Bloomingdale Road, the Boulevard, and finally, since 1899, Broadway. One source notes that the Indian nations spread out east to west, with hostile tribes doing the same to the north and south. Hence, east-west trails were peace paths. Broadway, running north-south, was a warpath. When I moved to the West Side in 1953, it was still a warpath. Around 1670 an enterprising Dutchman persuaded some of his compatriots to join him in settling the rich farmland at what is now 125th Street and Broadway—hostile Indian territory then. The settlement of New Harlem Heights used the warpath as a cartway connecting it to New Amsterdam at the southern tip of the island. The fertile soil and lovely countryside along the trail soon attracted both farmers (tobacco was a popular crop) and wealthy downtown merchants, who built their splendid country estates along the banks of the Hudson. By the 1700s there were two new villages, Bloomingdale and Harsenville. The Dutch often named places in their new homeland after the towns they'd left behind: New Amsterdam, New Harlem, and Bloemendahl, after the flower-producing town near the original Harlem in Holland. Mrs. Trollope, visiting the West Side from England in the 1830s, regarded Bloomingdale Village, lying on the bank of the Hudson from 100th to llOth Streets, as the loveliest place on the upper island.
It takes a village…Harsenville, which started at 68th Street, took its name from the first farming family on the site. In 1701, Cornelius Dyckman purchased a 94-acre farm at Broadway and 73rd Street for £450. His daughter Cornelia married young Jacob Harsen, and there was a Harsen living on the land until 1804. The Harsen homestead was not torn down until 1893. When the Central Savings Bank (now Apple Bank) opened its new branch at Broadway and 73rd in 1924, they published an illustrated booklet on West Side history. The writer remarks: "If anyone had suggested 75 years ago that such an establlished financial institution should erect a massive building for its business as far north as the hamlet of Harsenville, he might have been considered a fit subject for treatment at the newly established asylum of the New York Hospital at Bloomingdale." Today, Apple Bank, which is a replica of the Medici Palace in Florence, Italy, is one of the West Side’s protected historic landmarks. Columbia University's Low Library now occupies the site where the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane stood. Next to the Harsens, the other great farming family in the area were the Somerindycks, whose land stretched from Columbus Circle into the 70s. Some historians believe that Louis Philippe of France lived with other exiled princes at the Somerindyck house at Broadway and 75th Street until he was able to return home as the King of France. The Fashionable Bloomingdale RoadNew Yorkers, who had been predominantly Tory during our own Revolution, had Francophile tendencies, which made the area popular with French émigrés—it didn't matter much whether they were fleeing the Bonapartists or the Bourbons. Mme. D'Auliffe, a former lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, built her 16-acre estate, Chevilly, on the Bloomingdale Road at 73rd. The charming lady enlivened the social life of the neighborhood, counting among her frequent guests the Duc D'Orleans and Talleyrand, who had rented an impressive white frame mansion up the Road at 75th Street. The great estates along the Bloomingdale Road belonged to Baron John Cornelius Vandenheuvel, whose town house was opposite City Hall (a New York street directory of the period lists him at Park Lane). Vandenheuvel built his country house at 79th Street; the grounds sloped down to the riverbank and enjoyed an unrivalled view of the Jersey Palisades. The baron married a local girl, daughter of a wealthy lawyer, Charles Ward Apthorpe, whose estate stood at what is now Columbus and 91st Street.
Story has it that General Washington headquartered at the Apthorpe house after his defeat at Kips Bay and was about to dine with his staff one evening when he got word that the British were fast approaching. Washington made a hasty departure with his troops, and the English General Howe sat down to the meal. In the 1800s, the Vandenheuvel and Apthorpe mansions became fashionable resorts. The Apthorpe estate was a popular inn and picnic ground called Elm Park, and it was still standing in 1892. The Vandenheuvel estate was leased by Tom Rogers, landlord of the well known and fashionable Burnham's Tavern. Burnham's, established in 1820 on the Bloomingdale Road at 74th Street, catered to day trippers, who came in their horsedrawn carriages (or, in winter, their sleighs) for a day in the country. So successful was Burnham's that by 1833 Rogers was ready to expand. He leased the Vandenheuval place for $600 a year and called his new roadhouse The Mansion. The Mansion was a stop on the Broadway Stagecoach line, which had one car, one driver, a once-an-hour run, and a 25¢ fare, making it transportation for the affluent. History…same old, same oldIn 1861, New York's Mayor Fernando Wood lived in a big white frame house on the Bloomingdale Road at 77th Street. When Abraham Lincoln was elected President, it seemed certain that the Southern states would secede from the Union. Mayor Wood proposed to the Common Council that New York City also secede from the United States, establishing Manhattan as a free and independent city. He addressed the Council: Why should not New York City, instead of supporting by her contributions in revenue two thirds of the expense of the United States, become also equally independent? As a free city, but with a nominal duty on imports, her local government could be supported without taxation upon her people. Thus we could live free from taxes, and have cheap goods nearly duty free. When disunion has become a fixed and certain fact, why may not New York disrupt the bands which bind her to a venal and corrupt master—to a people and a party that have plundered her revenues, attempted to ruin her commerce, taken away the power of self-government…? Raise your hand if you remember a mayoral candidate making a similar proposal just decades ago. Nor is our romance with royalty new. In 1860, Wood thrilled the West Side neighborhood by feting Baron Renfrew, as the British Prince of Wales (later Edward Vll) like to style himself when traveling abroad, with a lawn party that rivaled the garden parties at Buckingham Palace. Resistance to proposals that would alter our accustomed traffic flow has been characteristic of West Siders from the start and can lead to unexpected alliances. We can thank real estate interests for their critical role in preventing the New York City end of the George Washington Bridge from being at 72nd Street. Just imagine what our neighborhood would be like today if proponents of the 72nd Street terminus to the Bridge had won. East Side/West Side rivalries have roots in our past, as do complaints about city services. Records of a West Side Improvement Association meeting in the late 1800s record a Dr. Leonard's remarks: "This wicked street cleaning department…carrying garbage through the Central Park transverse and dumping it on the West Side " And when, in 1886, smallpox broke out in the neighborhood and was traced to a shanty family in the West 8Os, the shanty dwellers were evacuated—to the East Side. Evacuating the problem was a common solution. Boss Tweed succeeded in domiciling a flock of sheep in Central Park. They grazed by day on the Sheep Meadow and slept at night in what is now the Tavern-on-the-Green, along with the resident shepherd. Olmsted, the Park's architect, objected that they would disrupt traffic when they were driven across the drive to and from the Meadow twice a day. Olmsted was right, of course. The sheep did disrupt traffic, right up until 1934, when a reform administration claimed that the now inbred flock was producing malformed lambs. What to do? Why, banish them to Prospect Park in Brooklyn! And so it goes. Change and growth march right along side more of the same. The rise of our own West SideLittle more than a century ago, the Upper West Side was still open country, an area of farms, colonial mansions, country estates of the wealthy, shanties of the poor. Although the street plan had been accepted in 1821, actual cutting of the cross streets did not begin until the 1860s. Why the late development? Real estate records of 1898 suggest that it was just easier to continue the avenues northward in their straight lines. Nor did they want to interfere with the magnificent views, believing that this was to become the choicest area in the city.
By 1879, the els were operating all the way to 155th Street and Eighth Avenue, and between 1885 and 1900 the West Side was transformed almost overnight from rolling countryside to an urban environment. To avoid falling hot oil and sparks from the el, main building entrances were on the side streets, and building cornerstones at second floor levels served as station references for el riders. Two notable apartment houses date from the arrival of West Side transportation: the Dakota, built in 1884 and so named because it was so isolated it might has well have been in the Dakota territory, and the exuberant Ansonia, erected from 1899–1904. They stood alone, awaiting further residential development..
Henry J. Hardenbergh, the Dakota architect, went on to design the Plaza Hotel. The Ansonia's guests and residents over the years include opera stars Geraldine Farrar, Feodor Chaliapin, Lauritz Melchior, Ezio Pinza, Lily Pons, musicians Arturo Toscanini, Igor Stravinksy, Mischa Elman, Yehudi Menuhin and impresarios Florenz Ziegfeld and Sol Hurok, authors Theodore Dreiser, Cornell Woolrich, and Elmer Rice, athletes Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth, among others. On the cross streets, Riverside Drive, and West End Avenue, the standard lot size of 25' x 100' dictated the builders' choice between large houses for the affluent or tenements for the poor. At a time of abundant capital, when a New York City of private homes still seemed possible, speculative builders erected the architecturally sophisticated row houses that are characteristic of the West Side. (There were no professional architects in New York until 1853, according to Henry C. Brown, founder of the Museum of the City of New York. Most building was the work of contractors who hired the necessary masons and carpenters to follow not-too-complicated plans. Hence the blocks of unvaried brownstone facades you see elsewhere in the city.) The first West Side row houses went up on West 73rd Street alongside the Dakota. They were described in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians as "stripped down chateauesque." Four-story structures with high stoops, their facades were of contrasting textures and colors: olive sandstone at basement level and brick, by then cheaper and more durable than brownstone, on the upper stories. The fronts along the row varied, with second-story bays alternating with recessed arches over balconies. The result was a "ripple of light and shadow" that set the look of the West Side. As the neighborhood grew, often a single architect would create an entire block of residences, giving it variety with harmony.
Writing in the late 1870s, the NY Daily Tribune said "that this section is possessed of advantages superior to any other part of Manhattan Island is no new discovery…unequaled views, pure air, proximity to the city's pleasuring grounds are substantial inducements for residential settlement." Except for the pure air, that could have been written about the West Side today. Among the city's turn-of-the-century multimillionaires, only Charles Schwab chose to live on the West Side. Where Schwab House stands today, Charley's chateau was the most lavish of the villas on Riverside Drive. Intent on outdoing Andrew Carnegie, his partner in the United States Steel Corporation, Schwab purchased the site of the Orphan Asylum Society, which encompassed the entire block between West End Avenue and the Drive, 73rd and 74th streets, for $865,000. It was an unprecedented sum for a building lot in 1901. Construction began in 1901 and lasted six years. Read more about Charley's castle on the Hudson in a Block Association newsletter (November 2004). —Mary Ratcliffe West 75th Street Block Association Home | About Us | Calendar | News | Resources | Contact Us | Membership/Support | Site Map |
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The West
Side Association agreed about the superiority of the area, but
had also recognized in 1871 that there would be no development
without public transportation. 
The
fashionable district was bounded by 72nd and 82nd Streets, close
to the North River as the Hudson was then called. In 1898, the
NY Herald listed a six-room apartment at 166 West 79th Street
for $30 a month and a seven-room for $40–45 a month.