The Schwab House, 11 Riverside Drive: Review and Ratings

Review of 11 Riverside Drive by Carter Horsley

The plain, red-brick, full-block apartment building at 11 Riverside Drive, which is also known as 285 West End Avenue, was erected in 1950 and replaced the spectacular, 75-room mansion of Charles M. Schwab, a steel magnate.

The 17-story building, which is known as Schwab House, was designed by Sylvan Bien, and has 654 co-operative apartments.  It was sold in 1955 by the developer, Julius Perlbinder, to a syndicate headed by Mr. and Mrs. Isidore Korein.

The relatively plain building was converted to a cooperative in 1984. Today, amenities include two doorman entrances, a concierge, a live-in super, elevator operators, handyman on duty 24 hours, on-site private management, two landscaped roof decks with river and city views, four landscaped gardens, a gym, a community room/playroom, storage, bike room, two laundry rooms, and a lending library with more than 8,000 books. Pied a terres are allowed, as are co-purchasers, guarantors, and parents buying for children.

Bottom Line

Lots of red bricks in a huge, full-block building with indented landscaping on all sides.  It is not far from the 72^nd Street subway station at Broadway and the entrance to Riverside Park.

Description

The building has no entrance on Riverside Drive but one with a long canopy and several steps down on West End Avenue flanked by lush sidewalk landscaping and one at 312 West 73^rd Street with two 3-step-up entrances beneath a stainless-steel porte-corchere.

The center of all street frontages are deeply indented and have landscaping.

The one-story masonry base of the building is rusticated and the building allows protruding air-conditioners.

Amenities

The building has a roof deck, 24-hour elevator operators, a health club, a garage, a playroom and a washer/dryer.

Apartments

Penthouse ES is a five-bedroom unit with a 45-foot-long entrance gallery that leads to a 27-footwide living room that opens onto a 15-foot-wide dining room nest to a 24-foot-oloot family room adjacent to an open kitchen. The unit has four distinct terraces, one 22-foot-wide, one 25-foot-wide, one 43-foot-wide and one 21-feet-wide, two of which have large trellises.  The united also has a 15-foot-long guest room.

Penthouse FW is a three-bedroom unit with a long entry foyer that leads to a 21-foot-long living/dining room, a 20-foot-long family room and a 39-foot-long terrace.

Apartment 5O OPRE is a four-bedroom unit with a 24-foot-wide entry foyer that leads to a 22-foot-long living room that opens onto a curved 16-foot-wide dining room with an open 10-foot-long kitchen.  The 20-foot-wide master bedroom and study has a curved wall.

Apartment 16NE is a two-bedroom unit with a 9-foot-wide entry foyer that opens onto a 21-foot-long living room with an open, eat-in, 12-foot-long kitchen.  The unit has a 53-foot-long terrace.

Apartment 12JE is a two-bedroom unit with an 11-foot-wide entry foyer that opens onto a 17-foot-long enclosed, eat-in kitchen and leads to a 23-foot-long living room that opens onto a 22-foot-long dining room  and a 22-foot-long library.  The unit also has a 14-foot-long study.

Apartment C on the 1^st to 11^th floors is a one-bedroom unit with a 13-foot-wide entry foyer that leads to a 22-foot-living room with an 11-foot-long dining alcove next to a 10-foot-long, enclosed kitchen

History

In 1907, steel magnate Charles M. Schwab moved into his new, 54-room mansion designed in French chateau-style by Maurice Ebert on the block bounded by 73rd and 74th Streets, West End Avenue and Riverside Drive.

The site had formerly been occupied by the New York Orphan Asylum and had been purchased by financier Jacob Schiff.

According to Peter Salwen, Schiff's wife worried that "would never see her fashionable friends again if she had to live on the Drive" and reluctantly Schiff sold the property to Schwab, who was an associate of Andrew Carnegie's in running United States Steel.

In his book, "Upper West Side Story, A History And A Guide," (Abbeville Press, 1989), he noted that the cream-colored granite structure had 116-foot-high pinnacles and was impressive enough to lead Carnegie, who had recently built his own mansion on Fifth Avenue and 91st Street that is now the home of the National Museum of Design, to ask a friend, "Have you seen that place of Charley's..., it makes mine look like a shack."

When he died in 1939, Schwab bequeathed his magnificent house set in lush gardens behind handsome fences to the city for the mayor's residence, but, Salwen recounts, "a proletarian Mayor LaGuardia indignantly rejected it" 'What me in that?'" (In 1943, the Mayor moved into Gracie Mansion in Carl Schurz Park on the Upper East Side.)

The Schwab mansion was torn down in 1948. "One of Manhattan's last free-standing mansions, and one of the grandest ever constructed in the city,...its passing [went] largely unnoticed and completely unprotested," observed Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins and David Fishman in their book, "New York 1960, Architecture and Urbanism Between The Second World War And The Bicentennial," (The Monacelli Press, 1995).

The opulent Schwab edifice was replaced by a 17-story building, in 1950. The structure occupies about 60 percent of the site with landscaped courtyards providing light and air for the building's indented form.

"By 1950 it was clear that the Upper West Side was not only declining as a desirable middle-class area but more seriously was in danger of slipping into a state of uncontrollable decay, of becoming a slum," Stern, Mellins and Fishman noted.

The neighborhood, of course, stopped deteriorating and now is one of the most desirable in the city and Schwab House with its prime Riverside Drive location and proximity to an express subway station and Lincoln Center is more desirable than ever.