121 Madison Avenue: Review and Ratings

Review of 121 Madison Avenue by Carter Horsley

Two architects, Philip G. Hubert and James W. Pirrson started their Hubert Home Clubs in 1881 with their Rembrandt apartment building at 152 West 57th Street in 1881.

Two years later, the architects who would go on to become very influential in the early years of buiding apartment houses in New York City, built 121 Madison on the northeast corner at 30th Street in collaboration with Jared Flagg, "whose son Ernest, though not yet trained as an architect, made important contributions to the Home Club duplex type," according to "New York 1880, Architecture and Urbanism in the Gilded Age," by Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins and David Fishman.

The authors described the 12-story building in which there were five duplex apartments every two floors on Madison Avenue as "the purest expression of the Home Club type," noting that it had "two obvious distinctions among all apartment houses: it is the tallest one yet built, and it is anonymous," by which the author meant that it did not bear a pretentious name but was content to be known by its street address."

"The massive red brick pile with its intricately gabled roofs," the authors continued, "loomed over the neighborhood of brownstone rowhouses. While the Rembrandt's duplex plan, based on an interlocking system of staggered floor heights to create the tall studio spaces, was ingenious, it was also awkward. For 121 Madison Avenue, Ernest Flagg, who would later study architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and rise to prominence, worked about a variation of the duplex scheme that, though more conventional, provided some apartments with bedrooms located above the main rooms."

"The building's mass, clad in brick and brownstone, was almost without articulation, breaking only for two projecting bays and two large gabled dormers, one of each on teach front," they wrote," adding The Record and Guide was not pleased with "the extensive use of sheet metal for exterior detailing....it is a pity that any sham should have been permitted in so large and costly a building. Sheet metal is scarcely a building material."

The authors also wrote that The Record and Guide found that "Of the two temptations of architects of man-storied buildings - the Scylla of monotony and the Charybdis of miscellany - the architects have steered clear of the latter."

"Principally vexing." They continued, "was the misreading of the building's internal organization, with stories of different heights on the alternately but regularly banded façade - a less honest treatment than 'in a narrow apartment house on Fifty-Ninth Street [the Hawthorne], arranged on the same system and deigned by the same architects, by a balcony on the lower floor, grouping the two stories which belong to each apartment.'

The authors' commentary on the Hubert, Pirsson buildings continued:

"Not only did The Record and Guide find 121 Madison Avenue wanting in its architecture, but less satisfying even than that of the Knickerbocker (1883) at 245 Fifth Avenue, two blocks south at the southeast corner of Twenty-Eighth Street, also developed by Hubert, Pirsson & Co. with Jared Flagg, but designed by Charles W. Clinton....An application for an injunction against the Knickerbocker, deemed too high by neighbors, aroused the press to the injuries tall buildings could inflict on the monetary value of neighboring structures. In his decision, Judge Charles H. Van Brunt declared that he could do nothing for the situation, referring the aggrieved parties to the state legislature....

"Buoyed up by these successes, Hubert conceived of more elaborate projects, the first of which was the eleven-story, red-brick Ruskinian Gothic Chelsea (1883) at 222 West Twenty-third street, west of Seventh Avenue. The Chelsea proved the most popular and profitable of the Home clubs. Its relatively long stretches of regularly fenestrated wall were brought to life by continuous filigreed cast-iron balconies that stretched between three projected full height bays. Inside, a lavish palette of materials, including marble, onyx, and polished hardwoods, enlivened the lobby, which led to a sweeping cast-iron staircase and an elevator, as well as individual apartments. A private ballroom under the roof, just above the duplex artists studios that took up the north-facing portion of the tenth and eleventh floors, and a private restaurant staffed by a French chef and a French maitre-d'hotel, catered exclusively to the building s ninety families, who lived in apartments that varied in size from three to twelve rooms. There was also a roof garden where residents could enjoy concerts on summer evenings....

"Hubert, Pirsson & Co.'s eight-building Central Park Apartments (1883-1885) for the developer Jose F. de Navarro, the city's - and probably the world's largest apartment-house complex, was the climax of the Home club movement. Navarro named each of the ten-story buildings in the group after a town in Spain, giving rise to the nickname for the group, the Spanish Flats, that belied its extensive number of duplex units....Taken as a whole, the development was one of New York's landmarks, especially when viewed from Central Park, where it s rooftop landscape of gables and chimneys, combined with the tall bay windows and the shadowy bridges that connected the buildings, presented an unforgettable picture....the buildings were arranged around a narrow, 40-foot-wide, 300-foot-long courtyard that was planted and included a fountain. Open spaces between each building provided cross - ventilation in the courtyard were bridged by arched balconies on each other floor....The building complex generated its own electricity, pumped its own water from its own artesian well, an created its own steam for heat. Each building...held twelve enormous apartments,...there were also triplex units...the buildings were essentially Queen Anne in style but overlaid with wisps of Moorish detail to reflect their developer's native culture and to help pay more than lip service to the names he had selected form...."

In his "January 13, 1991 "Streetscapes" column in The New York Times, Christopher Gray wrote that 121 Madison Avenue "is the oldest structure in New York designed as a cooperative." He noted that it was converted to a rental in 1917 and "shorn of much of is ornament," adding that "it still attracts attention, if only as an anomaly in what has became a district of lofts and offices."

Many of the bedrooms had fireplaces "and no private house could match the views from the upper floors," according to Mr. Gray, who also wrote that "early residents at 121 Madison included William H. Harriman, a partner in the Harriman & Company banking firm, Grosvenor Lowery, a prominent lawyer who was involved in the original cooperative plan, and Henry Towne, who co-founded the Yale & Towne Lock Company."

Mr. Gray said that an article in 1940 in Buildings and Building Management indicated that the Seamen's Bank for Savings, which had become the owner of the property through foreclosure, renovated the building installing new storefronts, stripping away the balconies and other exterior ornament and rebuilding the upper floors and that its architects, Mayers, Murray & Philip, gutted the interior, creating one- and two- and three-room apartments.

The building subsequently was owned by Alex DiLorenzo 3rd and then David Majier.

The building now contains 127 apartments.