235 East 49th Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 235 East 49th Street by Carter Horsley

This 12-story building at 235 East 49th Street was erected in 1925 and was designed by Henry Ives Cobb.

For many years, it served as the home of the New York Theological Seminary until it was converted by George S. Kaufman, the chairman of the Kaufman Astoria Studios, in to 75 cooperative apartments.

The building has a canopied entrance and a paneled, five-step-up vestibule. The also has a roof deck, a garden, a part-time doorman, a live-in superintendent and permits cats.

The top two floors of the red-brick building are canted inwards and the mid-block building has an exposed rooftop watertank.

The seminary originally used the two-story chapel and the second and third floors as a chapel but it was subsequently converted into apartments.

The building has a basketball court in its basement which extends under the sidewalk and is used by CATS (Children s Athletic Training School) which has its own entrance at the eastern end of the building, which is across the street from the Turtle Bay houses that share common garden in the center of the block between 49th and 48th Streets.

To the west on this block is Amster Yard and the Smith & Wollensky Restaurant.

The ground floor of the building is faced with stone and has sidewalk landscaping and lighting sconces. The large, double-height window of the building's former chapel is outlined in stone above the building's entrance.

Henry Ives Cobb was a Chicago-based architect in the last decades of the 19th century, known for his designs in the Romanesque and Victorian Gothic styles who designed with his partner Charles S. Frost Potter Palmer's mansion on Lake Shore Drive, now demolished, the Newberry Library, many buildings at Lake Forest College and the University of Chicago and the King Edward Hotel in Toronto and the Liberty Tower in Lower Manhattan. His grandmother, Augusta Adams Cobb, abandoned her husband, Henry Cobb, and seven of her nine children in 1843, and married Brigham Young as a plural wife.

The New York Theological Seminary was founded in 1900 by Wilbert Webster White as the Bible Teacher's College in Montclair, New Jersey, and it moved to New York two years later when it became known as The Biblical Seminary. It changed its name to the New York Theological Seminary in 1966.

In 2002, it relocated to The Interchurch Center in Morningside Heights, holding classes in The Riverside Church.