Architect Explores New York City's Upper East Side

My name's Nick Potts, I'm an architect.

Today we're on the Upper East Side of Manhattan

and we're going to be doing an

architectural walking tour of the neighborhood.

[mellow music]

So Manhattan's development was really

a continual march upward up until we got

to this point where we are now.

The wealthy originally lived down towards the Battery,

around Bowling Green.

In the 1830s, they moved further uptown

to around Washington Square Park.

Before the 1890s, they were all centered

south of Central Park South.

So it really wasn't until 1895 when Caroline Astor moved

to 65th and Fifth Avenue that it became acceptable

for the old money New York classes to live this far uptown.

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We are at the corner of East 79th Street and Fifth Avenue.

The building behind us,

which is currently the Ukrainian Institute,

is the centerpiece of what was known as the Cook Block.

When the Upper East Side became acceptable

for people to live as far uptown as we currently are,

there was a bit of a land rush where people started

buying and developing parcels of land

for the next big round of where the upper class will live.

And the Cook Block is really kind of

the most perfectly intact example of this

and what a lot of the Upper East Side was,

which is single family houses that were developed

and built as residences for their owners

as they were moving further and further uptown.

And you can see it's a very eclectic group of styles.

The Ukrainian Institute is a French Chateauesque building.

The architect was C.P.H. Gilbert,

who did a lot of these kind of Revivalist-style buildings

both here and in Brooklyn,

really taking a lot of particularly

French Gothic influences, almost like the chateau

of the Loire Valley brought down and shrunk

and put on a street corner.

A lot of the elements of this building, like the spires,

the carvings, they're really drawing from

French medieval and religious or ecclesiastical architecture

but translating them into a residential building form.

The rest of this block has other examples of Jacobian style,

Beaux-Arts, so it's really the greatest hits

of what people were building

for upper class residences at the turn of the 19th century.

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Right now we're in front of 998 Fifth Avenue.

So this is really one of the most important

communal apartment buildings that

remade the Upper East Side.

When this was developed, it was around 1910.

An apartment building of this scale

really hadn't been taken up.

It was rental, which may look interesting

because it's a very large, very grand building,

but the whole notion of someone owning a house

in an apartment building was kind of knocked on.

And this was a first experiment

with A, attracting upper class buyers and B,

getting homeowners and urban dwellers to buy off in

the idea of living in a communal building

as opposed to a single-family house.

The architects of this, McKim, Mead, and White,

were kind of the masters of reusing historic forms.

This is essentially a giant renaissance plaza

stretched up to gargantuan scale,

and you can see in order to calm the scale

of taking something that was originally much smaller

and blowing it up to three times its size,

they combined elements.

The base of the building, with this really kind of

great pulmonated, which are the rounded edge,

almost pillow-like rustication of the stones.

It's three stories tall as opposed to one.

Things that would be cornices are turned into entire floors,

such as the cartouche level

and the level with the marble band,

and then the top, which would be a cornice level.

So they're kind of smartly taking the elements

of a much smaller building

and turning them into entire floors

to help calm and balance the composition

of the building's form.

Now inside of this building, it's actually quite interesting

because the apartments themselves are,

they're really mansions in the sky.

If you think about arranging the scale of a house

in a rectangle with multi-floor apartments

and kind of these sprawling layouts

that you expect a mansion.

It's kind of a almost like a work of Jenga

trying to fit the pieces together,

and McKim, Mead, and White masterfully did that.

You don't even notice if there's a double height

or duplex apartment.

Everything looks very even.

It's a very kind of calm and proper arrangement

of many apartments in one ultimately very simple rectangle.

This actually predates the large additions

to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

So McKim, Mead, and White did this in 1910

and there were late additions to the Met Museum

in kind of the left and right wings

were actually after this.

So this was the pioneer

and the museum kind of grew up around it.

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So right now we're outside of

the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue.

We look at the building,

we kind of see this grand Beaux-Arts facade,

but actually within the building,

way buried inside of it is a much smaller,

more high Victorian gothic building

that slowly grew over the years as the museum grew and grew.

The facade as we see it now

is also concealing a few secrets.

It's actually an unfinished building.

If you look at the top of the columns,

you'll see those big awkward blocks

which were meant to be sculptural groups.

No one really knows what the sculpture was going to be,

which makes it even more intriguing.

It's also showing a bit of the problematic nature

of preservation, and particularly in a stone building.

Gravity really doesn't like stone and as things deteriorate,

particularly a limestone building like this

that can't really survive a lot of free saw cycles,

you end up having to put netting

as we're waiting for buildings to be restored.

It's interesting to think that the same architects

who were working on this were working on

the same apartment buildings that we've been looking at

throughout the neighborhood.

So these architects, as the profession is growing,

people really didn't specialize in being a museum architect

or an apartment architect.

You were really just an architect

and taking on a bunch of different typologies.

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Right now we are on Park Avenue near 67th Street

in front of the Park Avenue Armory.

So the Park Avenue Armory is a survivor

from the pre-electrification of the Park Avenue rail line.

It's essentially a military building where

the Seventh Regiment, who was primarily made up

of people who lived in the neighborhood.

It was nicknamed the Silk Stocking Regiment.

So it was, you know, people who had served

in the military who were from slightly fancier background.

It's kind of a high Victorian gothic fantasy

on a castle that's a little bit polychrome.

It is missing its central tower.

It originally had a much taller tower

in the center which didn't survive.

What's most notable about the building, however,

is its interiors, because this was the neighborhood

Louis Comfort Tiffany and some very well-heeled veterans,

their meeting rooms are incredibly opulent

and these continue to this day.

If you go there for an event there are

these very ornate club rooms for the people

who use the building in addition to the massive drill hall,

which is still used.

The language of the building really

proclaims its military use.

Particularly if you look at the top of the building

there are these corbels that kind of poke out.

It almost looks like the rampart on the top of a castle.

And if you look at the bottom of the building

it's the same sort of fortified,

do not mess with me sort of language.

The walls get wider and thicker.

There's almost a perceived moat around it.

So it really doesn't project a whole lot of welcomeness.

It projects solidity and strength.

You know, just like Park Avenue went from being a rail yard

to this upscale residential corridor,

this building has gone from being, you know,

something really about the military to an arts center.

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We're on the corner of 76th and Madison

outside of the Carlyle Hotel.

So the Carlyle is really important to the Upper East Side.

It's really the social heart of this neighborhood.

It's also a really interesting moment

in the acceptance of a hotel

as an acceptable living environment.

And this building, it may operate as a hotel,

but it's a combination of long term co-op living

and hotel rooms.

So for someone who doesn't wanna buy into an apartment,

this sort of building, when it was built in 1930,

was exactly what they were looking for.

In terms of its built form,

this building is also really fascinating

in that it's almost perfect encapsulation

of what happened after the 1916 zoning code

which reshaped what a New York skyscraper is.

Following 1916, there was a need for setbacks

to preserve the light and air on the streets

surrounding tall buildings.

And you see that with the Carlyle.

There's a limited street wall and the building cascades

and steps further and further and back

from the sidewalk as it gets taller.

Because it was built in 1930,

it's also a really great example of

art deco streamlined style, which is kind of

a perfect stylistic move for a setback tower like this.

The detailing, kind of the hallmarks of art deco style,

you can see in the parapets there's chevrons.

There's very abstract, modern, optimistic high-tech shapes.

You see it in the simplified form,

the use of materials such as aluminum.

It's really kind of taking advantage of technology

and creating something that is really wholly modern

for this new modern, tall building type.

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So now we're outside of the Duke Mansion

on the corner of East 78th Street and Fifth Avenue.

The Duke Mansion is a Louis XV

kind of severely neoclassical house.

It actually replaced a Victorian house that had existed here

for only 26 years.

So the people who built this, the Dukes,

were really trying to make a statement,

and the statement they decided to make was one of relevance.

And by taking this, you know, royal style,

this is the Petit Trianon brought to Fifth Avenue.

They're really trying to legitimize themselves

and their wealth, which maybe wasn't as old money

or as rooted as some of their neighbors.

This is really a house that was designed for entertaining.

If you watch The Gilded Age,

this house is essentially the Russell's house.

It's a place to make a statement,

to show that you've arrived in New York

and New York society.

And what other way to do that

than to build, essentially, a royal palace?

One of the major motifs of a palace of this style,

which this is aspiring to be, is a bel etage,

which is a room for entertaining.

Usually if you're in France it's upper level,

'cause the street is for animals, it's for business.

Because here we don't have that,

it's slightly lower and it's a residential neighborhood.

And so the entertaining floor is brought a little bit low.

And one of the nice things that happens here is

that you can actually see into the rooms,

you can see the gilding on the ceilings in the ballroom.

So there's a little bit of kind of public display

by lowering that and putting a little bit of the, you know,

the interior wealth on display, almost like a jewel box.

The scale of this building is really almost civic.

If you think about it as a public building

or a public display of wealth, that kind of makes sense.

This Louis XV style as opposed to

some of the more flamboyant

gothic and revival styles on the block.

It's very restrained, it's very severe.

The ornament is actually quite minimal.

There are some garlands, there are some panels,

but as opposed to huge sculptural groups

and large band courses, it's actually quite plain.

The limestone is kind of plainly dressed.

There's not a lot of rustication.

In that restraint,

there's a little bit of a game being played.

The scale of the building is quite ostentatious,

but the building is making the show

as opposed to the elements decorating it.

[mellow music]

We are on the corner of 75th and Madison,

outside of what used to be

the Whitney Museum of American Art.

This building has several interesting stories behind it.

The first, if we look purely in terms of style

it's a bit out of place for what we've been seeing in,

you know, the Upper East Side.

It's a brutalist building, it's very aggressive in its form.

It steps out over the sidewalk.

It has very blank faces towards the street,

and that was intentional.

This is a building that was designed to stand out

and to be something totally different

than its surrounding environment.

And if you think about the townhouses and the hotels

and the former mansions of the Upper East Side,

this is something totally other and it's befitting

of a modern museum building that is meant to exhibit art.

The museum is really a work of art in and of itself.

It's a sculptural building,

but it's not totally without context.

Most brutalist buildings of the period,

this is the late 1960s, were made of concrete,

and here it's clad in stone,

a warmer, more natural material that is responsive

to the context and the materiality of the buildings

in the Upper East Side.

In terms of its form, it also,

it may look very aggressive and out of scale,

but if you see the cornice line

of the houses to the south, it is more or less carried over.

So there's a a little bit

of a play and a subversion of the scale

of the neighborhood and its surrounding buildings.

It's definitely trying to stand out,

but it's doing so by responding to and rejecting

the rules of the game of the neighborhood that surrounds it.

It's also responding to its interior layout and its use,

which is something that in a lot of the apartment buildings

you don't really see, or are using,

the facades are concealing the complicated nature

of the interior plan.

Here in the Whitney galleries you can see

the three floors of galleries,

each expressing itself as a volume

as it faces the street and the windows give little glimpses.

Art doesn't really like direct light,

so it's doing it in a very minimal way

that makes the interaction of the the public

in the interiority of the galleries and the neighborhood

a kind of availed and framed one.

The Whitney, as it was built here in 1968,

almost became a victim of its own success.

It was so popular that it needed to expand

and the building being so sculptural and also

in a historic district made that actually impossible.

There were a lot of proposals thrown around,

including expanding where the townhouses to the right are,

but simply it couldn't be done

and they ended up moving off site.

And one of the ironies of the building being a victim

of its historic district is that it itself

is now considered an historic building

and really can't be modified.

What we have here is the triumph

of preservation over everything else.

[mellow music]

Right now we are in front of 740 Park Avenue,

probably the most well-known

of any of the Upper East Side co-op buildings.

What makes it really interesting,

it exists on land that was originally

not very well thought of.

Park Avenue, so up until 1910, was a railroad yard.

It was, you know, coal-fired trains in a trench,

belching out fuel, and a lot of the houses

around here were tenements.

After the rail lines were electrified in 1910,

the neighborhood was marketed as something totally other,

and rather than a kind of downtrodden railroad yard

it was renamed Park Avenue

and became a place where the ultra wealthy

would start building these apartment houses,

such as this one.

It was designed by Rosario Candela,

who was the kind of great co-op apartment building master.

And his mastery was both in terms of planning

and fitting these very complicated

sprawling multi-layer apartments

in a fairly sedate-looking container,

but also riffing on the exteriors of these buildings

in kind of right, somewhere between

neoclassical and art deco style.

Here there's a reeded bottom to the base of the building.

It's almost as if you had took a column that had flutes

and rolled it out onto a flat sheet of paper.

It's almost a fun detail for something that's,

it's a pretty sedate building.

There are other moments of kind of whimsy in here.

The dental moldings are a little bit fun.

They are arches, there are bull noses.

It's exuberant, but it's never doing too much

or calling too much attention to itself.

Whenever you're designing a tall building like this,

it's really important to spend your money

where it's gonna get the most bang for your buck.

So what Candela did here, by putting the reeding

on the bottom two floors,

a lot of the the resources that went into stone carving

went where someone can touch it and interact with it,

whereas the detailing on the top of the building,

it's larger and more scaled to seeing it

from 1000 or 2000 feet away.

So it's upscaled.

It's maybe not quite as fine in its grain,

but at the street level it reads almost as equal.

There's a bit of visual perspective

of correction on a tall building like this.

And when this building was built in the 1930s,

was a really significant change,

both in terms of this neighborhood

but also in the types of buildings.

Park Avenue is really the last place where

people built single-family houses in Manhattan.

There are really only two on this street

that were even built.

By this point, most people were moving

into these large luxury apartment buildings

in the newly gentrified Park Avenue corridor.

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