Esther Crain's Blog, page 12

The story of a Brooklyn dead end that evokes Elizabethan England off Flatbush Avenue

One of the delights of New York City is its varying styles of row houses, from early 1800s Federal style with dormer windows to high-stooped post-Civil War brownstones to the 20th century bow-front Beaux-Arts townhouse.

But it wasn’t until 1911 when Tudor-style row houses (likely) debuted in the cityscape, thanks to a Brooklyn architect and developer inspired by a visit to Chester, England.

The result is Chester Court, a cul-de-sac off Flatbush Avenue south of the Prospect Park subway station. Here, Elizabethan England reigns in the form of 18 three-story, single-family attached homes with steeply pitched, clay tile roofs, second-floor orioles, and imitation timber frames.

Adding to the sense of a “self-contained enclave”—as the Historic Districts Council described Chester Court—is a Flemish bond brick wall at the end of the street designed to obscure the nearby tracks of the Brighton subway line.

If you’re thinking that you’ve seen older examples of Tudor architecture on nearby Brooklyn streets, you’re not wrong. At the time Chester Court was developed, Tudor Revival had become a stylish design for freestanding houses.

But Tudor Revival “had not been widely used for row houses, and the Chester Court houses are likely among the earliest Tudor Revival style row houses in the borough, if not the entire city,” stated the Historic Districts Council.

The architect and developer of this enchanting block, Peter J. Collins—the Brooklyn-born son of Irish immigrants—was a well-known figure in the early 20th century. He studied architecture at Pratt Institute and later served as Superintendent of Buildings in Brooklyn.

His visit to Chester, England in the summer of 1910 was a turning point. “The city (above, in 1895) is known for its historic timber-framed buildings known as ‘black-and-white’ or ‘magpie’ buildings for their white stucco facades and black timber framing,” noted the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) report on Chester Court.

“Many of these buildings were built in the 16th and 17th centuries, but most are products of the so-called Black-and-White or Timber-Framed Revival, which spanned from the mid-19th century into the early 20th century and was part of the broader Tudor Revival movement.”

After Collins returned to Brooklyn, he bought parcels of land from the old Vanderbilt Homestead, owned since 1661 by the “Vanderbilts of Flatbush,” as a Brooklyn Eagle article in 1910 called this branch of the family. Collins also bought the colonial-era Vanderbilt House, an unofficial landmark dating back to the agrarian beginnings of Flatbush in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Chester Court sits to the right of where the Vanderbilt house once stood (below image, with Chester Court in the background). The tear-down of the Vanderbilt house didn’t happen until the 1920s, part of a wave of old Brooklyn farmhouses meeting the wrecking ball so new streets like Chester Court could rise and serve the needs of 20th century Brooklyn home buyers.

These buyers desired new “easy housekeeping dwellings,” as they were called, because they contained modern appliances and didn’t require costly servants to run the household, per the LPC Report. The Chester Court houses fit the bill.

The first occupants of Chester Court were upper middle class families, with fathers who held white-collar positions and mothers who stayed at home.

By the Depression, the householders became less well-off, with a fair number of widows, the LPC Report found. After World War II, Jewish, Latino, and Asian residents were followed by Caribbean owners, as Flatbush Avenue transitioned into the spine of a Caribbean immigrant neighborhood.

It might be a stretch to credit Chester Court with inspiring other Tudor Revival row houses in New York City, though Collins himself developed another row of Tudor-style attached homes on Rutland Road in 1914-1915.

The Tudor row I’m thinking of is Pomander Walk, an enchanting, fenced-off court of merry old England between West End Avenue and Broadway and West 94th to West 95th Streets. Built in 1921, its origin can be traced to a popular Broadway play from 1910, “Pomander Walk,” which told the story of an imaginary court set in London.

Though Collins apparently never said the 1910 play helped inspired his Tudor Revival block, early articles about Chester Court call it “Pommander [sic] Walk,” according to the LPC Report. Meanwhile, the Tudor style became fashionable for apartment houses—like the many buildings that make up Tudor City at East 42nd Street.

Today, more than 110 years after its creation, Chester Court and its distinctive homes remain remarkably intact yet with a lived-in authentic feel. The cul-de-sac was granted landmark status in 2014.

The Tudor style, with its gingerbread house and storybook vibe, fits nicely during the holiday season. Instead of peering through the fence around Pomander Walk on the Upper West Side to experience the enchantment of Tudor-esque architecture, take a walk along this ungated side street off Flatbush Avenue.

“Which ones are prettier?” asked William B. Helmreich in his 2016 book, The Brooklyn Nobody Knows. “Who can say, but Chester Court is worth the trip.”

[Fourth image: Wikipedia; fifth image: Brooklyn Eagle; sixth image: NYPL Digital Collections; seventh image: Brooklyn Eagle]

The slow slide of a postwar Bronx hotel once patronized by the New York Yankees

In the shadow of Yankee Stadium in the South Bronx stands the postwar-era Stadium hotel. And unlike the 2024 pennant-winning baseball team, this hotel building is in rough shape.

It wasn’t always so rundown. Apparently in the early 1960s, with the Yankees dominating the league thanks to players like Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, what was known then as the Stadium Motor Lodge “was the in-season home of some Yankee ballplayers,” according to deadmotelsusa.com.

Not only was it a home away from home for some Yankees, but a restaurant that was part of the hotel was co-owned by Clete Boyer, according to a 1963 Dick Young column in the Daily News. Boyer played third base for the Yankees from 1959 to 1966. A 1964 newspaper item refers to Boyer as co-owner of the hotel.

It must have been a hopping place, with MLB players, fans, and locals indulging in an unofficial Yankee-branded hotel, complete with the unique baseball icon on the enormous sign.

But according to newspaper archives, things soon started to slide. In the early 1970s, the hotel is referenced in articles as a welfare motel; another story cited a drug bust.

In 1980, the hotel ran the below ad in the Daily News, positioning itself as a sleazy place for short-stay rendezvous. A 1987 ad in Newsday had the tagline: “Stadium Motor Lodge—where the game is love.”

At some point the name changed to Stadium Family Center, where it served as a shelter for homeless families, per a 2011 Daily News article.

The letters have been removed (traces remain but are hard to read). Now it’s simply the Stadium. The place appears to still house homeless adults—and gets poor Google reviews from residents.

[Second image: deadmotelsusa.com]

This closed-up relic of 1860s Central Park helped bring fresh water to New York faucets

One of the wonderful things about Central Park, which opened in stages beginning in 1858, is how many of its earliest structures are still with us in the contemporary city.

Bethesda Terrace, Belvedere Castle, the stone arches and iron bridges, the Cherry Hill fountain for thirsty horses—each of these delightful features was part of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s 1850s Greensward plan for the park (or a later 19th century addition).

But there’s another still-standing building dating back to Central Park’s earliest days sitting at the foot of the Central Park Reservoir (now the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir) at about 86th Street off Fifth Avenue. Built during the Civil War, it has visual appeal. And until the early 1990s, it served an important function as well.

This is the South Gate House, a granite-block fortress with long slender windows and four lookout tower–like posts. Flanked by a lamppost and just steps from a lovely wrought iron footbridge, the Gate House has a charming (and still working) clock on the pediment, added later.

The shaded windows and locked door tell us that this little building is no longer in use, giving it a forlorn and abandoned feel.

But imagine the Gate House in 1864, the year it opened, when it began playing a crucial role in the health and growth of New York City by supplying Manhattan residences and businesses with the lifesaving commodity of fresh, clean water. (Building the Gate House lithograph, above)

The Gate House’s story actually begins in the 1842, when the Croton Aqueduct—a design marvel that replaced New York’s brackish and polluted well water with pure water from the Croton River upstate. The Aqueduct worked by sending untainted water through tunnels and embankments down to the city via gravity.

Once in Manhattan, the water was held in a rectangular receiving reservoir (below in 1869, with the new reservoir to the north) where Central Park’s Great Lawn currently lies. From there it was sent to the imposing distributing reservoir on 42nd Street.

But as New York’s population boomed in the mid-19th century, it took less than a decade for city officials to realize another receiving reservoir would be needed, according to the Architectural League of New York.

The new reservoir, dubbed Lake Manhattan, had a circular shape that melded well with the natural landscape of the newly opened park it was part of. Along with this new reservoir came the Gate House. It held pipes and machinery that engineers were so proud of, they invited the public too see it before the reservoir filled with water.

“No one can stand upon the massive coping, peer down the deep walls, or descend the winding staircases that lean to the subterranean abyss, without being oppressed with a testing of awe,” stated the excited New York Times on June 30, 1862.

(The Croton Aqueduct blog has more detail about how the gate house released the water the reservoir held so it reached Manhattan faucets, hydrants, and fountains.)

For more than a century, the Gate House did its job of bringing clean water to the city. But Gotham’s expanding population called for many upgrades to the Croton Aqueduct system. (The Gate House in 1891, above)

“In 1917, the City finished construction on the first water tunnel from reservoirs upstate, which greatly expanded capacity and made the Park’s first reservoir obsolete; by 1937 it had been filled and redesigned as the Great Lawn,” states the Central Park Conservatory, which noted that two additional gate houses housing pipes and other infrastructure were built along the 1864 reservoir.

It wasn’t until 1993 when the remaining reservoir was decommissioned, “in part because of concerns about contamination from algae, and because of the ongoing expansion of the system, including the construction of the third water tunnel,” explains the Conservatory.

With the reservoir no longer part of the city’s water system, the Gate House was decommissioned as well.

These days, it’s a lovely relic along the path encircling the reservoir, a popular place for runners and strollers seeking a water view in the city. And it’s a symbol of two engineering marvels that defined 19th century New York: the Croton Aqueduct and Central Park.

[Third image: lithograph, Invaluable; fourth image, NYPL Digital Collections; fifth image: New-York Historical Society]

The Brooklyn Bridge casts a mesmerizing magic spell over the city in this early 1900s painting

Since opening in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge has been captured in paintings, photographs, and illustrations by scores of artists, each rendering the Bridge’s beauty and power in their own way.

But it’s the poetic, enchanting Brooklyn Bridge depicted by Johann Berthelsen, which he titled “New York Skyline From the Brooklyn Navy Yard,” that I find most mesmerizing.

Born in Denmark the same year as the Bridge was completed, Berthelsen moved to the Midwest in 1890. He studied voice and became an opera singer, but after relocating to New York in the 1920s he decided to pursue painting. By the 1930s, he’d sold several works and was building a reputation as a powerful Impressionist painter.

I’m not sure when Berthelsen painted this nocturne of the Brooklyn Bridge. Considering the heights of the Manhattan-side buildings and the electric lights almost twinkling from their many windows, I would guess the 1920s.

It’s a transfixing collage of color and light, just like New York at street level. I can’t take my eyes off the graceful, flowing bridge span that bisects the painting, separating the towering buildings, piers, and ship traffic from the heavens above.

A Thanksgiving dinner menu from 1899, and the rise and fall of a legendary Downtown hotel

What was on the minds of the well-heeled New Yorkers who chose to celebrate Thanksgiving 1899 at the Broadway Central Hotel—a French Empire–style beauty on Broadway between West Third and Bond Streets?

Most likely the dinner menu, for one, which was loaded with French-inflected options worthy of a gluttonous holiday feast. Numerous starter courses included oysters, two soup options (cream of artichoke, mmm), and stuffed olives.

After the starters, it was time to order an entree. Which one to choose—the classic “Vermont” turkey with chestnut stuffing and cranberry sauce? Or perhaps something less Thanksgiving-ish, like the stewed terrapin, Baltimore style; Boston gosling and apple sauce; or broiled quail on toast with watercress.

Salads, cold meats (“home-made hog’s head cheese,” yum!), and vegetables would be served next, followed by the dessert and cheese courses. It stands to reason that no one staggered out of the dining room (one of three in the Broadway Central) at the end of the meal without a full stomach.

What else would diners be thinking that night? Many might have reflected on the hotel itself. An eight-story, 600-room hotel opened in 1870, the Broadway Central—known as the Grand Central until 1892—was long an opulent resort for Gilded Age New York’s political and business elite.

Diamond Jim Brady and theater stars were regulars as well, according to Village Preservation’s Off the Grid blog.

Some Thanksgiving guests may have recalled the spectacular crime that took place there 27 years earlier, a murder fueled by lust and greed in full view of the public.

“On Jan. 6, 1872, James Fisk Jr., a playboy financier who had helped milk the Erie Railroad into bankruptcy, was shot to death on the hotel’s staircase by Edward Stiles Stokes, his former partner,” recalled the New York Times in 2015. “The two men had fought in a bitter lawsuit, and Mr. Stokes had fallen in love with Mr. Fisk’s mistress, Josie Mansfield.”

What the 1899 Thanksgiving customers probably weren’t considering was how the hotel would fare in the 20th century—when the city’s power brokers followed the flow of commerce to Midtown, and the Broadway Central would begin its slow decline.

As the 1900s progressed, “the hotel was the scene of many weddings, and a few murders and suicides,” wrote the New York Times in the 2015 article. “As the years passed, it went through a series of owners and financial difficulties.”

“By the late 1960s, it had become one of the city’s largest welfare hotels. Six theaters, called the Mercer Arts Center, were built inside in hopes of perking up the place, and it was renamed the University Hotel, but it had severe structural problems.”

By the early 1970s, the hotel was at the center of controversy. Locals didn’t appreciate having a welfare hotel in the neighborhood, and New York Attorney General Louis J. Lefkowitz deemed it a “den of rape, dope, and murder,” per a 1973 article in New York Newsday.

And then it was gone. Around 5 p.m. on August 3, 1973, residents inside the hotel began hearing rumbling noises. Plaster fell from the ceiling, and the noises escalated. “It sounded like a rifle shot,” one resident told Newsday, “and then the whole structure collapsed.”

After years of neglect and structural damages, the center of this formerly fashionable hotel was reduced to a pile of rubble. Four residents died in the collapse, and about 300 others, many elderly and impoverished, lost their home. No one was ever charged criminally.

In its place now stands a New York University dormitory for law students. If that dorm is open this Thanksgiving, I doubt the dining hall will serve a meal quite as impressive as the Broadway Central did 125 years ago.

[Top image: via Reddit; second image: NYPL Digital Collections; third image: lawbookexchange.com; fourth image: AP via Staten Island Advance; fifth image: MCNY, x2011.34.239]

In praise of a Midtown Italian restaurant founded in 1944 and its wonderful old-school neon sign

There’s a lot to love about Patsy’s, the three-generation family-run restaurant celebrating its 80th year on the far off-Broadway, low-rise block of West 56th Street off Eighth Avenue.

This old-school Italian spot offers highly rated red sauce classics, old-school ambiance, and a connection to Frank Sinatra, who considered Patsy’s one of his favorite New York haunts (and in the early 1950s had the staff open one Thanksgiving, just because he wanted to have his holiday meal there).

Still, there’s one more thing that makes Patsy’s special, at least to me: its vintage neon signs.

Not only does “Patsy’s” light up in pink and “restaurant” glows green, but a vertical sign—also becoming a rarity in contemporary New York City—illuminates the night as well.

Oddly, this mini-restaurant row has a few other vertical signs, though no restaurant here is named D’Angelo. Which makes that one behind Patsy’s in the second photo something of a ghost sign—another fun find.

Fifth Avenue officially opened 200 years ago—here’s what it was like in its early, country road days

Roughly seven miles long and running from Greenwich Village to Harlem, Fifth Avenue is arguably New York’s best-known avenue.

It begins at the triumphant arch at Washington Square Park, passes through elegant residential and museum districts as well as pricey retail blocks (and some traffic-choked ones as well), then dead ends at 143rd Street and the Harlem River.

But before Fifth Avenue became synonymous with luxury, style, and architectural beauty, it was just another sparsely populated country road flanked by unspoiled countryside miles from the main city. (Below, the Spingler farmhouse at Fifth Avenue and 14th Street)

This month marks the official opening of the Avenue in 1824, when its first seven blocks went from being a line on the 1811 city street grid originally called Middle Road to an actual (though unpaved) street.

Fifth Avenue’s birthday serves as an appropriate time to look back on its modest beginning. The avenue’s development coincided with Washington Square’s transformation from a potters field to a parade ground (fourth image). The mansions, monuments, and elite shops Fifth Avenue became known for were decades away.

So what was Fifth Avenue like just before the street was laid out? A passage from a 1918 book about Fifth Avenue by newspaper writer and editor Arthur Bartlett Maurice creates a picture of sandy hills, trout-filled waters, and farmland.

“Beginning at the Potter’s Field, the line of what is now Fifth Avenue left the ‘Road Over the Sandhills” or ‘Zantberg’ of the Dutch, later known as Art Street, long since gone from the map, and crossed the Robert Richard Randall Estate.”

For reference, Art Street was the former name of Waverly Place. Robert Richard Randall was a sea captain who owned a 24-acre tract of land north and east of today’s Washington Square. He died in 1801, and his will stipulated that a “sailors’ snug harbor” for aged seamen be built on his property—but ultimately Snug Harbor ended up on Staten Island.

“Thence it ran through the Henry Brevoort Farm, which originally extended from Ninth to 18th Streets. . . .Crossing the tributary stream at 12th Street, it passed a small pond between 13th and 14th Streets, and then ran on, over low and level ground, to 21st Street, then called ‘Love’s Lane.’ To the right was the swamp and marsh that afterwards became Union Square.”

(The map image above notes the Brevoort Farm at about 10th Street, as well as Minetta brook crossing the avenue.)

“Following the trail further, the hardy voyager wandered over ‘hills and valleys, dales and fields’ through a countryside where trout, mink, otter, and muskrat swam in the brooks and pools; brant, black duck, and yellow-leg splashed in the marshes and fox, rabbit, woodcock, and partridge found covert in the thicket.”

Admittedly, Maurice makes the area sound like a paradise of animal life. Yet other early accounts paint an image of colonial Manhattan as rich with all kinds of creatures normally found in woodland regions.

“Here and there was a farm, but the city, then numbered 100,000 persons, was far away,” continues Maurice. “Then, in 1824, the first stretch of the Avenue, from Waverly Place to 13th Street, was opened, and the northward march of the great thoroughfare began.”

That northward march helped turn Washington Square into a park and brought Fifth Avenue its earliest residences. One of the first was a stately Greek Revival home (above image) at the corner of Ninth Street, the site of balls and dinners with well-heeled guests.

This lovely home was occupied by Henry Brevoort, the son of the the farmer whose 84-acre farm was bisected by the new avenue.

“The Brevoorts and other farm owners began building houses that would serve as anchors for other houses to be built and sold on the vacant lots laid out along the avenue and radiating down the adjoining side streets,” wrote Charles V. Bagli in recent New York Times piece on Fifth Avenue’s anniversary.

In the 1840s and 1850s, elite New Yorkers relocated to Fifth Avenue from the posh enclaves of Bond Street and Stuyvesant Square, moving into new and fashionable brownstones. One still extant is the brownstone at Number 47 owned by the Salmagundi Club (above photo), built in 1853 and home to this arts club since 1917.

As more stretches of Fifth Avenue were laid out, more houses were built. Churches came too, including the Church of the Ascension on Tenth Street and Marble Collegiate Church on 29th Street. Farmhouses held out; the above sketch shows one in the 1830s at 23rd Street.

Empty parcels remained as well. One New Yorker who recalled them was Edith Wharton.

Born in Manhattan in 1862, Wharton charted the manners and morals of Gilded Age New Yorkers in fiction and then published her autobiography, A Backward Glance, in 1934.

In her autobiography, she remembers walking up Fifth Avenue as a young child with her father in the 1860s. Possibly she was departing from her family’s home, then on 23rd Street just off Fifth Avenue. Her walk ended at the distributing reservoir (above, in 1845) at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, where the New York Public Library stands today.

“The little girl and her father walked up Fifth Avenue: the old Fifth Avenue with its double line of low brown-stone houses, of a desperate uniformity of style, broken only—and surprisingly—by two equally unexpected features: the fenced-in plot of ground where the old Miss Kennedy’s cows were pastured, and the truncated Egyptian pyramid which so strangely served as a reservoir for New York’s water supply.”

“The Fifth Avenue of that day was a placid and uneventful thoroughfare, along which genteel landaus, broughams, and victorias, and more countrified vehicles of the “carry-all” and “surrey” type moved up and down at decent intervals and a decorous pace.”

Once the Gilded Age began, however, Fifth Avenue’s days as a small town, slow-poke road came to an end. From now on, it would be Gotham’s millionaire mile. (Above photo, Fifth Avenue looking north from 21st or 22nd Street in 1855)

“The directory of 1851 includes a large number of vacant lots between Washington and Madison Squares,” noted Henry Collins Brown, president of the Fifth Avenue Association in 1924 and author of a book honoring the avenue’s centennial, Fifth Avenue Then and Now.

“But after the Civil War, progress was immediate and on a scale of elaborate grandeur never before witnessed in this city, or in the country at large.”

By the early 1900s, you know the rest of the story. This avenue once surrounded by woods, streams, and the occasional farmhouse cemented its place as an iconic New York City address.

[Top image: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, via geographicguide.com; second image: Fifth Avenue Old and New; third image: The Greatest Grid/MCNY; fourth image: Metmuseum.org; fifth image: NYPL Digital Collections; sixth image: Fifth Avenue Old and New; seventh image: NYPL Digital Collections; eighth image: Fifth Avenue Old and New; ninth image: New York Historical; tenth image: geographicguide.com]

What John Sloan saw one Saturday night outside a butcher shop on Bleecker Street

Maybe it’s a holiday evening, or perhaps the bright corner street lamp makes late-day shopping easier for these mostly faceless residents of Greenwich Village.

Whatever the reason, there’s a line outside this corner meat market, with customers eyeing the goods while others gather outside a dry goods shop, its entrance also illuminated in the night.

“Bleecker Street, Saturday Night” is a 1918 painting by John Sloan. Born in Pennsylvania, Sloan but by this time was a Village denizen who famously depicted the ordinary street life of his new neighborhood—from the flower vendors on Sixth Avenue to the rush of the elevated train and crowds of commuters scurrying under the track.

There’s a lot going on in this highly detailed image. Sloan introduces us to a cross-section of people, from young children to older adults, all going about their lives amid the Belgian block pavement and wood and brick buildings of a corner I wish I could identify. The rooftops get higher from right to left, shifting the perspective. The open basement doors add more drama.

“Bleecker Street, Saturday Night” is part of the collection at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which has this to say about it:

“When Sloan painted this scene, the city was undergoing rapid change. Residents navigated the streets and shops late into the evening hours thanks to the recent introduction of electric lighting. New construction projects led to buildings, such as the white one pictured here, getting partially or fully demolished. The painting represents both what once was and the inevitable change that comes with industrial development.”

A dramatic Victorian building with an understated bronze tablet honoring World War II veterans

At the corner of Pitt and Stanton Streets is a magnificent Victorian building—dark red brick, a slate roof, and a statue of the Virgin Mary holding her child high on the Pitt Street side.

The former school building for Our Lady of Sorrows Church next door, it’s a curious (and rather spooky) architectural relic. But much less showy is this tablet placed beside a first floor window on the facade.

Probably bronze when it was created and now green with time, it consists of about 200 names—all from the parish and community—who served the U.S. during World War II.

Though Our Lady of Sorrows was founded in 1867 when this swath of the Lower East Side was a German community, the names reveal a different ethnic mix—primarily Italian, many Jewish. Several of the last names are the same, suggesting that some are related.

This kind of neighborhood war memorial exists in communities all over New York City, often affixed to churches or schools. They’re not as commanding as many of the city’s great sculptures and monuments that honor veterans.

But on Veterans Day, there’s an understated power to seeing each individual name and wondering about the fate of these men and women—where they fought, and if they returned to families and neighbors who stayed behind on Lower East Side.

This might be the most beautiful and historic fraternity house in New York City

It looks similar to any other elegant, well-tended Beaux-Arts townhouse on Riverside Drive.

The lovely house has a brick and limestone facade, copper-topped dormer windows, iron-railing balconies, and an arched window framed in stone. The unusual roof is a hipped roof, meaning all sides slope downward.

But the cartouche at the top embossed with Greek letters reveals that this residence near West 116th Street joined the cityscape with a special purpose in mind.

Completed in 1899, it’s the longtime home of Delta Psi—a fraternity at Columbia University, whose campus is centered a few blocks east on Broadway.

Also known as Saint Anthony Hall, it was the first fraternity to build a chapter house after Columbia’s 1897 move from today’s Rockefeller Center to its current Morningside Heights location.

The designers of the building had Columbia connections: Henry Hornbostel was an 1891 grad, and George Palmer, a Delta Psi member. (Above, the house in 1906)

A fraternity that owns a house as beautiful as this one must have a deep history at Columbia. “Saint Anthony Hall, founded in 1847 as a literary society to promote a love of literature among its members, is Columbia University’s oldest and most distinguished fraternal organization,” states the fraternity website.

“Saint Anthony Hall” comes from the day the organization was founded, January 17, which is the feast day of St. Anthony the Great.

The fraternity’s first house was an 1879 stunner at 29 East 28th Street (above). Designed by James Renwick (also a Columbia grad), this red and yellow Renaissance-style holdout still stands. It has a curious resemblance to the Riverside Drive house, perhaps serving as architectural inspiration.

In 1903, the presence of the Riverside Drive fraternity house met with praise from the New York Times, describing it as “one of the handsomest college society houses in the country.”

Though Delta Psi/Saint Anthony Hall is a fraternal organization, it’s clearly not the Animal House kind.

Coed since 1969, the chapter house, according to the fraternity website, “serves as a haven from the bustle of its urban environs, providing members with a secluded space to pursue academic and extracurricular endeavors.”

[Third photo: Wikipedia]