INVESTMENT INCOME FORMULA. INVESTMENT INCOME

Highbridge, The Bronx, New York City, New York, United States of America

Noonan Plaza Apartments, in the Highbridge section of the Bronx, is one of the most impressive Art Deco style apartment complexes in the borough. Built in 1931 for Irish-born developer Bernard J. Noonan, it was designed by the firm of Horace Ginsberg, with the exterior credited to Marvin Fine. The prolific Ginsberg and Fine helped to provide the Bronx with one of its architectural signatures, the urban modernist apartment building, including Park Plaza Apartments (1929-31) on Jerome Avenue. Noonan and Ginsberg had previously collaborated on a number of speculative 1920s apartment buildings in Highbridge, prior to Noonan Plaza.

Situated on a large sloping site, with frontages along Ogden and Nelson Avenues and West 168th Street, the complex is six-to-eight stories with a sophisticated site plan – it is divided into units with exterior perimeter light courts and an interior garden court, an arrangement that provided for apartment layouts with multiple exposures for maximum light and air. The building is clad in tan ironspot brick, with a vertical emphasis consisting of continuous piers contrasting with brown-and-black brick spandrel panels and black brick and geometric pattern accents on the top story. The main entrance, at the corner of Nelson Avenue and West 168th Street, has an angled portico leading into the garden court, flanked by towers (originally with ornamental lanterns) with corner windows.

Apartment Buildings in the Bronx in the 1920s-30s

Noonan Plaza Apartments (1931), in the Highbridge section of the Bronx, is one of the most impressive Art Deco style apartment complexes in a borough characterized by its number of significant urban modernist apartment buildings. The enormous growth of New York City’s population in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was accompanied, after World War I, by a housing shortage. As observed by Carla Breeze in New York Deco (1993),

Manhattanites turned to suburbs in Queens and the Bronx where reasonably priced apartments and houses were available, often in more pastoral surroundings. The garden apartment complex, built around a green commons, was appealing in comparison to the vertical congestion of Manhattan. … The Bronx became a viable suburb as railroad and subway lines opened vast tracts of land to development. Open space was assiduously protected, and six major parks were within reach of the major new projects along the Grand Concourse.3

Many of these Bronx apartment buildings, for professionals and upwardly mobile middle-class families, were among the best in the city in terms of architecture, planning, size of living space, and amenities. Housing historian Richard Plunz identified the garden apartment as a short-lived phenomenon in New York City development, reaching its apogee in the 1920s. It was (and still is) among the most liveable housing in New York. It set a standard of urban housing that has remained unmatched since. Fundamental to the success of the garden apartment was the balance between building mass and open space so that a level of proximity was maintained which involved a strict definition of the public realm to be shared by neighbors.

Important to this neighboring was a sense of theater, which required use of architectural language bordering on the scenographic. The language of the “garden” of the garden apartment, together with its enclosing facades, was critical to the transformation of housing from a consequence of economic formulas to a unique environment. This entered a realm of fantasy, providing every building with an identity that called forth particular places or tenants. The garden was a critical symbol of arrival for the new middle class, while also facilitating the making of a kind of public theater in which the most joyous myths of urban existence could be acted out.

The conception and development of speculative garden apartments was influenced by two movements in New York City by the beginning of the 20th century: the “model tenement,” or improved housing, movement, and “Garden City” movement. Exemplars of these were the City and Suburban Homes Co. Estates, First Avenue (1898-1915) and Avenue A (1900-13), Manhattan, and Sunnyside Gardens (1924-28, Clarence Stein and Henry Wright), Queens. Architect Andrew J. Thomas, in the Jackson Heights neighborhood in Queens in the 1910s-20s, developed by the Queensboro Corp.,5 and elsewhere, was one of the masters of garden apartment design in a wide variety of styles. Plunz wrote that

Jackson Heights… [was] unusual for the notable concentration of a wide range of garden apartment types, but similar building was prominent throughout the city for moderate-income private housing development until the end of the 1930s. The “garden” spaces tended to become more elaborate as time went on. The Queens, Bronx, and Manhattan versions varied, however, with coverages reflecting their differing conditions of den

23 Beekman Place, Turtle Bay, Manhattan

Paul Rudolph, one of the most celebrated and innovative American architects of the 20th century, was associated with 23 Beekman Place for more than 35 years, from 1961 until his death in 1997. Trained at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in the 1940s, Rudolph was a second-generation modernist who grew dissatisfied with functional aesthetics but remained committed to exploiting industrial materials to create structures of great formal complexity. From 1958 to 1965, he served as chairman of the Department of Architecture at Yale University, where he designed the well-known Art and Architecture Building, now called Paul Rudolph Hall. Rudolph began leasing an apartment on the fourth floor of 23 Beekman Place in 1961, which became his full-time residence in 1965. He purchased the building in 1976 and converted it into five apartments in 1977-82, adding a remarkable multi-story penthouse that suggests a work of architectonic sculpture. New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger praised the steel-and-concrete design, calling it “a handsome composition, a neat arrangement of geometric forms that is visually pleasing in itself and a welcome addition to Beekman Place’s already long list of architectural styles.”

23 Beekman Place was also home to actress Katharine Cornell. Dubbed by drama critic Alexander Woolcott the “First Lady of the Theater,” she purchased the building with her husband, director-producer Guthrie McClintic, in 1922 and lived here until the early 1950s. Although the elaborate multi-level interiors have been modified by subsequent owners, the exterior is virtually unchanged. Rudolph completed only six buildings in New York City. 23 Beekman Place stands out as one of his most personal and experimental designs, drawing on themes that he explored throughout his prolific career, as well as anticipating aspects of his later work in Southeast Asia.

DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS

Beekman Place

The Paul Rudolph Penthouse & Apartments is located on Beekman Place, a small residential enclave in the Turtle Bay section of Manhattan. Close to the East River, this street extends just two blocks, from Mitchell Place (aka East 49th Street), past 50th Street (aka Dunscombe Place), to 51st Street. Topography has always played a significant role in this neighborhood’s appeal. Because the numbered cross-town streets end slightly to the east, for more than a century Beekman Place developed in quasi-isolation, standing above and apart from early industrial activities in the area, and construction of the United Nations, which began in the mid-1940s. Furthermore, due to the street’s unique and secluded character, it attracted a continuously changing roster of prominent residents, from the late 19th century to the present day.

Beekman Place was first opened in the mid-1860s. Most of the property in the area was owned by Samuel W. Dunscombe, a former minister. Four-story houses, faced with brownstone and classical detail, were soon erected on both sides of the new street, as well as a stone retaining wall to separate the rear yards from a narrow piece of river front property that James W. Beekman and family continued to own. These single-family houses were similar to those along 48th and 49th Streets, in what is now the Turtle Bay Gardens Historic District; each building was 20 feet wide, with a continuous metal or wood roof cornice, as well as a stoop rising to the first or parlor floor. Early residents included author Henry Harland, who produced popular novels under the pseudonym Sydney Luska. In Mrs. Peixada (1886) he described the street’s character:

Beekman Place, as the reader may not know, is a short, chocolate-colored, unpretentious thoroughfare, perched on the eastern brink of Manhattan Island, and commanding a fine view of the river, of the penitentiary, and of the oil factories of Hunter’s Point.

When Beekman sold the property, he promised that any future development would rise no higher than Dunscombe’s retaining wall – about 40 feet. He also promised that “nothing could be built there considered dangerous, noxious or offensive.” In 1914, the estate’s lawyers asked that these restrictions be nullified to allow improvements to the property. They claimed that commercial use was part of the “natural progress of the city,” but the New York State Supreme Court upheld the 1865 agreement, maintaining restrictions. Such litigation had a significant impact on Beekman Place; in addition to protecting views from the houses that faced east, these events brought the area increased attention and a large number of buildings were sold, substantially altered, or demolished.

Residential Beekman Place

Actress Katharine Cornell (1893-1974) and producer-director Guthrie McClintic (189361) acquired 23 Beekman Place in 1922. They purchased the former town house from Charles Schmid, who acquired it from Maria L. Higgins in 1906. It seems likely that one of these owners