A famous row on 23rd Street of four-story townhouses with large front gardens known as London Terrace and a similar row of two-story townhouses on 24th Street known as Chelsea Cottages, both designed by Alexander Jackson Davis in 1845, were demolished to make way for this gargantuan, 1,670-unit, full-block apartment project, which was completed in 1930.

The history of the site is wonderful described in a well-illustrated chapter in Andrew Alpern's superb book, "Luxury Apartment Houses of Manhattan An Illustrated History" (Dover Publications, 1992).

Captain Thomas Clarke bought part of the Somerindyke farm in 1750 and named it Chelsea after part of London in his native England and built a "snug harbor" that he called Chelsea House, Alpern relates. The building was destroyed in a fire in 1776 but the property stayed with his family and the house was rebuilt by his widow. Their daughter, Charity, inherited it and "added it to the holdings of her husband, Benjamin Moore, the Episcopal bishop of New York and president of Columbia College and in 1813 they ceded it to their son, Clement Clarke Moore, who wrote the poem that begins "'Twas the night before Christmas." Moore joined with James N. Wells, a local real estate broker, to develop the block with wood-framed, two-story houses on 24th Street for "working people" and 36 "grand brownstone row houses, all set well back from the pavement behind hedges and trees. "Each dwelling was designed in the popular Greek Revival style, creating a uniform vista of three-storied pilasters and recessed spandrels with Greek key carving." The 23rd Street row was called London Terrace. Moore died in 1863 but Alpern wrote that his estate was not settled until 1907, a year of financial panic that marked "the beginning of the original London Terrace's decline" and soon many of the townhouses were subdivided into rooming houses and apartments and some were "thrown together as institutions."

The block was acquired by developer Henry Mandel and, "pleased with the round-arched and highly ornamental Tuscan style he had used repeatedly before," according to Alpern, he instructed his architects, Victor Farrar and Richard Warmough to design 12 buildings of 16 stories each and a cross-shaped tower, about twice as tall along Ninth Avenue.

That design, however, was modified, perhaps because of the Depression, and the Ninth Avenue tower was eliminated and the new design called for ten midblock buildings and four corner buildings a few stories taller, all connected. The midblock buildings were completed in 1930 and the corner buildings the following year.

The long courtyard was foreshortened for a large swimming pool pavilion at Tenth Avenue and a large restaurant at Ninth Avenue.

"With more than 4000 residential rooms, the density was vastly more than the worst slums of Calcutta," Alpern noted.

In addition to the courtyard and swimming pool, the project boasted a supervised rooftop children's play area, an equipped gymnasium, a penthouse recreational club, a sun deck, a rooftop deck along Tenth Avenue overlooking the river that was designed in an oceanliner style, "page boys for delivering messages within the complex or running nearby errands; a telephone message receiving service that would bring the message slips the apartments; and a mail and package room that would deliver to the apartments on call," Alpern wrote.

While one cannot describe the new London Terrace as stately or elegant, it is imposing. Indeed, it is the most monumental residential structure in Chelsea and one of the largest such full-block complexes in the world.

There are gardens between the two slabs of this "courtyard" development, the last of its kind prior to the new housing code.

"London Terrace was unprecedentedly dense, is clifflike mass rising sixteen stories from the street and interior courtyard with no setback," noted authors Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins in their book, "New York 1930, Architecture and Urbanism Between the Two World Wars" (Rizzoli, 1988).

"Small gardens buffered the buildings along Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth streets, in part a means of complying with zoning restrictions, and in part a rather feeble homage to the gardens of the Greek Revival style London Terrace townhouse development, which was torn down to make way for the new apartment building. Breaking with the traditional courtyard apartment, the London Terrace's narrow and very long courtyard did not function as a cour d'honeur - the individual buildings were entered directly from the street, and ground floor shops were located along the avenues. In many ways the London Terrace qualified as a city-within-a-city," the authors noted.

Elliot Willensky and Norval White described this huge development as a "vast brick pile, in proto-Modern planar style with faintly Gothic verticality" in their masterful book, "The A. I. A. Guide to New York City, Third Edition," (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988). "When the present complex was new, doormen were dressed as London bobbies to play the game," they added.

Megastructures like this were briefly popular with planners in the 1960's, but fell out of favor as housing activists argued for smaller, more humane, less monolithic projects.

Paul Goldberger notes, in his book, "The City Observed New York A Guide To The Architecture And History Of Manhattan" (Vintage Books, 1979), that this project makes "a great wall across Chelsea."

"One thing like this is acceptable in each part of town: two can destroy a neighborhood, as happened in the East Sixties after other buildings set out to imitate Manhattan House, itself a postwar version of London Terrace. Happily there is only one London Terrace in Chelsea, and thus the effect of the monster is not so disturbing as it might be - although it is obviously far worse on the dark north side of the complex than it is on the sunny south side. And any monster with Romanesque details and decent apartments is not, by definition, quite so much of a monster. Imagine London Terrace's bulk in raw concrete or unrelieved red brick, and the complex as it now stands seems far more palatable."

Built at the start of the Depression, the development did not spur any significant redevelopment of the Chelsea neighborhood, which fell into a decline until the 1980's when it became to experience a major renaissance as a desirable residential community.