907 Fifth Avenue: Review and Ratings

Review of 907 Fifth Avenue by Carter Horsley

This large, lavish, Italian-Renassiance-palazzo-style apartment house at 907 Fifth Avenue on the southeast corner at 72^nd Street occupies a prime location on the avenue at a major entrance to Central Park just south of the great model-sailboat pond and the wonderful Alice-in-Wonderland statue, which is to say about as close to heaven as possible in New York. 

The 12-story building, which has a handsome, canopied entrance on 72nd Street and a center court, was built in 1916 and converted to a cooperative in 1955. It has 48 units now but when it was built it had only two per floor. 

It was designed by J. E. R. Carpenter.

Bottom Line

One block north of The Frick Collection and close to world-famous boutiques on Madison Avenue, this building has a very desirable location and very spacious and grand apartments, although it is a bit removed from the subways.

Description

The building received a Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects in 1916 and is very elegant. The lower four floors are rusticated. 

The third floor windows on the avenue have balustrades that are home to many sparrows. 

The corners have deep quoins. The cornice is quite immense. Escutcheons separate the windows on the next-to-the-top floor. 

The windows on the fourth floor alternately have handsome window surrounds, which adds significantly to the façade’s composition. 

The building's only major design "twist" is the “broken’ bandcourse above the third floor, which is a bit awkward but does not distract from the pleasing, overall composition. There is an unbroken bandcourse above the fourth floor.

Amenities

The building has a doorman, a gym, a roof deck, a common storage room and a laundry. 

It is pet friendly.

Apartments

Apartment 8W is a two-bedroom unit that has a 37-foot-long entrance gallery that opens onto a 29-foot-long living room with fireplace overlooking Central Park and corner, 20-foot-long library with fireplace and a master 17-foot-long master bedroom with a fireplace and a 26-foot-long sitting room.  The gallery also leads to a 14-foot-long foyer that opens onto a 17-foot-long dining room off a 10-foot-long pantry and an 11-foot-long kitchen and a 14-fooot-long breakfast room and a 16-foot-long double staff room and an 11-foot-long staff room. 

Apartment 8E is a two-bedroom unit that has a 47-foot-long entrance gallery that opens onto a 20-foot-long reception room with a 9-foot-wide den, a 29-foot-long living room with a fireplace, a 20-foot-long library with a fireplace, and a 22-foot-long dining room with a fireplace that is adjacent to a 16-foot-long pantry, a 16-foot-long kitchen, and a 14-foot-long service hall.  There are also three staff rooms. 

Apartment 9&10A is a duplex with a 21-foot-long entrance gallery that leads to a 26-foot-long living room, a 17-foot-long dining room and a 12-foot-wide, eat-in kitchen on the lower level and three bedrooms on the upper level. 

Apartment 11B is a one-bedroom unit with a 15-foot-long entrance gallery that opens onto a 29-foot-long living room with wood-burning fireplace and a 20-foot-long enclosed dining room adjacent to a 26-foot-long kitchen.  The apartment also has a 15-foot-long library.

History

This building replaced the James A. Burden mansion that was designed by R. H. Robertson and completed in 1893.

"Critics noted that...[Carpenter] made no effort to supply 'glazed rooms,' which were sleeping porches or sun parlors, for the simple reason that 'to the wealthy New Yorker, his townhouse or apartment is merely his winter residence and so used,'" observed Elizabeth Hawes in her fascinating book, "New York, New York How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City (1869-1930)," (Henry Holt and Company, 1993). 

"Number 907 was a revolutionary building in a more significant respect," she continued. "It was the first apartment house to replace a mansion on Fifth Avenue. Dramatically, it raised a new flag of dominion on the south side of 72nd Street, on the choicest corner of an area that was graced with some of New York's most famous private houses - Tiffany's fortress, the Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo extravaganza at Madison, the Pulitzer mansion at 11 East 73rd Street, and Henry Clay Frick's palatial mansion and at gallery on Fifth between 70th and 71st streets. The lots occupied by 907 had once been a parcel of James Lenox's farmland. In recent years, they had held a baseball field and a fine 1890's house that belonged to the Burden family, who had been trying unsuccessfully to rent it. At the first rumor that the Burden house might be replaced by a twelve-story apartment house, local homeowners had objected to the project and fought it in court, but the block was not restricted, and even the daunting presence of the Frick home had not seemed to deter ambitions. As a lawyer for the real estate speculators had explained, 'If the Strozzi Palace, or any of the other seignorial houses of Florence or Rome...were to be exactly repeated with the most beautiful part of Central Park as a background, the only possible modern adaptation of them would be to divide them - as they are today divided - into splendid apartments.' When 907 appeared, it signaled that revisionist thinking was in play in uptown real estate." 

Huguette M. Clark, a copper heiress and recluse, died May 24, 2011 at age 104, registered under a fake name at a hospital in New York City, according to an article by Bill Dedham at msnbc.com. 

Her Manhattan residence was at 907 Fifth Avenue where she reportedly had a total 42 rooms on the 8th and 12th floors. 

She was born in Paris on June 9, 1906, the youngest child of U.S. Senator William Andrews Clark of Montana (1839-1925), known as one of the copper kings who served one full term in the Senate as a Democrat from Montana, from 1901 to 1907, despite having to give up the seat earlier in 1900 in a scandal involving bribes paid to legislators to send him to the Senate. 

"While serving in the Senate in 1904, the 62-year-old widower shocked the political and financial world by announcing that he had secretly remarried two years earlier, and that he and his 23-year-old wife already had a 2-year-old daughter, Andree. A second daughter, Huguette, was born two years later. When Huguette was about 4, the family of four moved into a 121-room house at Fifth Avenue and 77th Street in New York City, stuffed with the senator's collection of French paintings," the article said. 

"Her empty mansions, and a criminal investigation into the handling of her fortune, were the subject of a series of reports last year on msnbc.com. A criminal investigation continues into the handling of her money by her attorney and accountant, with detectives and a forensic accountant poring over the many years of Clark's financial records. An assistant district attorney was able to visit with Clark in the hospital, more than once, and to have a conversation with her, in both French and English,” the article said. 

"Though she inherited one of the great mining fortunes of the 19th century, she lived quietly into the 21st century, secluded in a spartan hospital room for more than two decades despite being in relatively good physical health. 'Madame Clark's passing is a sad event for everyone who loved and respected her over the years,' said Michael McKeon, spokesman for attorney Wallace 'Wally' Bock. 'She died as she wanted, with dignity and privacy. We intend to continue to respect her wishes for privacy.' The cause of death was not disclosed," the article continued. 

"She was moved in mid-April from her private room at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York up to its medical intensive care unit, then in mid-May to a room with hospice care....Huguette Clark has been almost entirely alone, aside from her private nurse and occasional visits by her accountant. One of her attorneys represented her for 20 years without meeting her face to face, instead talking through a closed door....She was married in 1928, at 22, to William Gower, a law student and Clark family employee. The couple soon separated, had no children, and divorced in less than two years, in the summer of 1930. Thereafter she lived with her mother, Anna, in the apartments at 907 Fifth Ave. (at 72nd Street), occasionally receiving family visitors and a few friends, until Anna died in 1963," the article said. 

Her various homes, the article said, "have been carefully maintained through all these years," adding that "the oceanfront estate in Santa Barbara remains furnished, with paintings on the walls, gardens tended, furniture carefully covered, the great house ready to be opened if she should send word of an impending visit. The country house in Connecticut has had extensive repairs, watched by a full-time caretaker who said he wasn't sure whether Clark was dead or alive. And the apartments in New York, with her collections of dolls and dollhouses as well as fine paintings and furniture, are visited regularly by housekeepers and her attorney." 

In his excellent book, “The New York Apartment Houses of Rosario Candela and James Carpenter,” Andrew Alpern notes in his entry on this building that “in 1911, an editorial in The New York times decried the destruction of old mansions for apartment houses, treating them as commercial, rather than residential, and calling such development ‘deliberate incivilism and as such honestly to be condemned.’” 

He also noted that “in 1915, the entire top floor rented as one apartment of 28 rooms and eight baths for $30,000 per year by Herbert L. Pratt, vice president of the Standard Oil Company,” adding that it was “later taken by the widow and daughter of Senator William A. Clark.”