The Hendrik Hudson, 380 Riverside Drive: Review and Ratings

Review of 380 Riverside Drive by Carter Horsley

One of the city's greatest apartment buildings, the Hendrik Hudson at 380 Riverside Drive on the northeast corner at 110^th Street is an eclectic, Tuscan-style fortress that may well be the most interesting building on Riverside Drive.

Designed by Rouse & Sloan for developers George F. Johnson Jr., and Leopold Kahn, the 9-story building originally sported two large, square towers along Riverside Drive and two light-courts on both 110th and 111th Streets.

It was built in 1907 and has 134 co-operative apartments.  It was incorporated in 1971.

A 12-story annex building was erected in 1908 by the same team mid-block at 601 West 110^th Street and it is known as the College Residence Hotel.

Bottom Line

Although it has long since been shorn of one of its two glorious and very ornate towers, the Hendrik Hudson commands a highly visible site on Riverside Drive and remains an extremely impressive building with a great narrow lightwell entrance flanked by carytids with tails and a very large lobby and is no longer one of the city’s worst single-room-occupancy “slums.”

Description

In his December 29, 1996 “Streetscapes” article in The New York Times, Christopher Gray noted that the site was “a short block from the new subway station and near the civilizing influence of Columbia’s recently established campus,” adding that the building’s 8 stories were “well under the effective legal limit of about 12 stories but still the biggest private building on the upper drive.”

“With the broad prospect of Riverside Park and Drive before the site, the architects were able to expand a Tuscan villa design into a truly monumental work, with success practically unknown to the commercial builder.  Below the roof the rusticated limestone and Roman brick with recessed joints is intelligent enough, with suave panels of terracotta with the “HH” monogram and frequent balconies.  But it is at the roofline where the Hendrik Hudson rose above other efforts.  Instead of the typical project cornice, Rouse & Sloan gave the building a wide projecting red tile roof, and above the two massive but fanciful towers, also with tile roofs.  They were connected by a broad, trellis-covered promenade for tenants’ use.  Inside, the Hendrik Hudson offered a café, barber shop, billiard room and 72 apartments of 7 to 9 rooms renting for $1,500 to $3,000 a year.”

Mr. Gray described the building as “one of the few apartment houses with real architectural ambition.”

“At some point the entire tile roof of the Hendrik Hudson was removed, possibly under work done by the architect Max Horn in 1953.

In his excellent book, "Luxury Apartment Houses of Manhattan, An Illustrated History," (Dover Publications, Inc., 1992), Andrew Alpern describes the building, which is the top illustration on his book's cover: "Each of these towers is a tour de force, with open Palladian arches on all four sides, balustraded balconies and decorative terra-cotta panels. Connecting the two towers was a balustraded promenade, which for a brief time was surmounted by an open trelliswork arbor ... At the base of each tower, where it joined the main body of the building, pseudo-Palladian window was originally planned. What was actually built, however, was even more grandiose: an elliptical oeil-de-boeuf window with cartouche above, carved ornamentation around and swagged garlands flanking."

In place of traditional cornices, the building, which is on an asymmetrical site, has Spanish tile eaves supported by large bronze brackets and the beige Roman brick façades have balconies, spaced widely apart, some in bronze and some in stone. The building is ringed by a dry, railed moat and the second story windows in the two-story limestone base are arched and the main, recessed, one-step-up entrance on 110th Street is flanked by large caryatids. The building's name refers to the discoverer of the Manhattan in 1609. Alpern noted that elevators open onto windows facing a central courtyard and that the corridors were paved in Welsh quarry tiles and finished in imitation Caen stone and ended in windows overlooking Riverside Park.

Apartments had central foyers and service entrances and many bedrooms were placed at corners for improved circulation and walnut paneling, wood-beamed ceilings and mahogany doors with glass knobs were used in the apartments, Alpern reported.

The annex, which extends to Broadway, is different in style with a quite fascinating "water-borne theme" and is known as the College Residence Hotel. Many of the building's large units were subdivided, mostly in the 1940s and it was converted to a cooperative in 1970 with offering prices, according to Alpern, that ranged from $4,800 for a first-floor studio to $26,100 for a top-floor, 3-bedroom apartment with a river view and monthly maintenance of $315.

The building has a very large marble lobby and a garage.

Amenities

The building has a doorman, a live-in superintendent, a bicycle room, a laundry, storage, a garage and is pet-friendly.  It has no concierge and no health club.

Apartments

Apartment 2L is a four-bedroom unit with a 16-foot-long entry foyer that opens onto a 24-foot-long living room and an 18-foot-long dining room next to a pass-through, 12-foot-square kitchen next to an 11-foot-long, home office and near a 13-foot-foot long, media room.

Apartment 4F is a three-bedroom unit with a 21-foot-long, angled living room with a 10-foot-long dining alcove next to a 13-foot-long, pass-through kitchen and a 9-foot-long office.  Two of the bedrooms share a Juliet balcony that faces south.

Apartment 8P is a one-bedroom unit with a 27-foot-long angled living room with an open kitchen.

Apartment 2B is a one-bedroom unit with a 28-foot-long, living room and an open, 10-foot-long kitchen alcove.

Apartment 4K is a one-bedroom unit with an 18-foot-long, 7-sided, living room with an open kitchenette.

History

Despite its glorious architecture, the building fell on bad times. 

An April 17, 1960 article by Edmond J. Bartnett in The New York Times described it as “one of the city’s worst slum buildings,” noting that the death in 1958 of a 14-year old boy in an elevator accident “touched off investigations that resulted in hundreds of charges of violations of the city’s building law and the health and sanitary codes, and the jailing of the landlord.”

In 1959, the building was acquired by Robert and Sheldon Klausner and Simon and Curtis Katz and the Times article noted that “Much of the once respectable building, with its spacious ten-room apartments, had been cut up into rooming house units after World War II,” adding that “under single room occupancy, as many as 1,500 tenants had lived in the building at one time” and “police raids on one or another occupant or group of occupants occurred nightly.”

Under the new renovation, the basement was converted to a 60-car garage and apartment rents began at $125 monthly for one-bedroom apartments and $228 for three-bedroom units, according to the article.

According to Mr. Gray, Marcus Loew, then in real estate but soon to establish his motion picture company, moved in from a small apartment house on West 111^th Street” and “Abraham Lefcourt, the clothing manufacture who later built much of the present garment district, moved from the old Hotel Majestic at 72^nd Street and Central Park West.