The early 1880s apartment building you’ve probably never noticed on Seventh Avenue

Today, Seventh Avenue and 55th Street is surrounded by an unbeautiful streetscape of hotels, office lunch spots, touristy trinket shops, and random spillover from the Theater District of Times Square.

The Ontiora, 200 West 55th Street

But picture it in the 1880s, when it was fresh Manhattan real estate. Back then, this was a centrally located intersection just blocks from the calming landscapes of Central Park.

Edward Clark decided to take advantage of this premium location. of the Singer Sewing Machine Company and was now a developer, purchased land at three of the four corners here in the late 1870s.

Clark wasn’t planning to construct row houses or another kind of single-family home, the preferred type of domicile for the city’s Gilded Age rich. Instead, his goal was to bring luxury apartment houses to what would eventually become part of Midtown.

Clark and his architect, Henry Hardenburgh, worked fast. By 1879, they had completed the Van Corlear, an apartment building that spanned Seventh Avenue between 55th and 56th Streets, according to Christopher Gray in a 1997 New York Times piece.

The two also began work on the Wyoming, at the southeast corner of 55th and Seventh Avenue, as well as the Dakota, way up on Central Park West at 72nd Street. (“Clark’s folly,” it was called, because it was so far from the bulk of the city at the time.)

The final building Clark and Hardenburgh collaborated on is the mysteriously named Ontiora. Unfortunately, Clark never saw it rise: he died in 1882, when the building was in the planning stages.

But almost a century and a half after its 1883 opening, this early example of Queen Anne-style “French flats” still stands, a little rough around the edges, at the southwest corner of 55th Street and Seventh Avenue.

Only part of the Ontiora fronts Seventh Avenue. Turn the corner, however, and you can imagine the Gilded Age grandeur of living in this red-brick beauty, with its iron balconies, stained glass, and porthole window under the cornice.

Seventh Avenue and 55th Street outside the Ontiora, surrounded by a low fence

Apartments here were roomy, with just one per floor. “The Ontiora’s five families had 2,000-square-foot apartments, about two-thirds of the average Dakota apartment at the time,” wrote Gray. “From later plans of the building it appears that the kitchens and service areas were at the west end, with a parlor at the corner and other rooms in between.”

It didn’t take long for other apartment houses to pop up near the Ontiora. The Osborne, two blocks away at Seventh Avenue and 57th Street, was built between 1883-1885. The Navarro, or Spanish Flats, was a spectacular early co-op on Central Park South between Sixth and Seventh Avenues that opened in the mid-1880s.

The Ontoria in 1920, with a subway entrance and ground floor commercial space

Of course, the neighborhood’s fortunes changed as the 20th century went on. Clark’s Wyoming building was knocked down in 1906 and replaced with another of the same name. By the 1920s, the Navarro bit the dust. The Van Corlear met the bulldozer as well.

The Ontiora, anonymous and subdivided into smaller units, is still with us. A ground floor commercial space was added before 1920, based on the photo above. Gray’s article, from 1997, stated that the 45 apartments in the building now are rent-regulated, but that may not be the case in 2022.

Whatever is going on with the apartments inside, at least the exterior retains its Gilded Age bearings and stands as a reminder of New York City’s first luxury apartment house district.

[Fifth image: NYPL; sixth image: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]