Carter's Review

This 26-story-high, Art Deco-style building at 3 Mitchell Place in the Beekman Place neighborhood in East Midtown  was designated an official city landmark in 1998 and was originally known as the Panhellic Tower and then the Beekman Tower Hotel.

It was erected in 1928 by Emily Eaton Hepburn, the wife of Barton Hepburn, who would become president and chairman of the Chase National Bank, as a residence and clubhouse for women belonging to Greek-letter college sororities and designed by John Mead Howells.  It originally had 380 rooms.

Mrs. Hepburn had become the majority stockholder in the Panhellic Association and its president in 1926.  According to the landmark designation report, “inspired by the success of Anne Morgan, Elsie de Wolfe, and Elizabeth Marbury in redeveloping Sutton Place, Hepburn opted for a site on the far East Side at the corner of First Avenue and Mitchell Place, a small private street on a rise overlooking East 49^th Street.”

“There were slums and slaughterhouses to the south and west, transportation was bad, and neighborhood shopping was non-existent.  However, Mitchell Place intersected with the southern end of Beekman Place which was beginning to be developed following the construction of two large apartment buildings, Beekman Terrace (1924) and Beekman Mansion (1926), on East 51^st Street.  Concerned that she might lose the site, Hepburn bought the property in her own name in the spring of 1926.  She turned it over to the Panhellic Association in 1928,” the report continued.

Howells, the son of novelist William Dean Howells, had been a partner with I. N. Phelps Stokes and they designed St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia University and the Royal Insurance Company Building at Maiden Lane and William Street.  Their firm dissolved in 1917 and in 1921, Howells collaborated with Raymond Hood on an entry for the Chicago Tribune Building competition, which they won, beating out 259 applicants in the most famous architectural competition of the 1920s.  The pair also designed the apartment house at 3 East 84^th Street in 1928 and the Daily New Building on East 42^nd Street in 1930.

The building is also known as 876 First Avenue and is just to the north on First Avenue from the west tower of the two-tower United Nations Plaza apartments at the north end of the gardens of the United Nations.

Bottom Line

A major Art Deco tower near Beekman Place that was originally built for sorority ladies but forced by the Depression to take men as well, it had a delightful, glass-enclosed cocktail lounge on its roof and the building was converted to 181 rental apartments in 2016.

Description

The orange-colored brick tower has chamfered corners.

The complex consists of the tower, a three-story wing that originally contained a dining room and an auditorium, and a narrow, 10-story, mid-block apartment wing.

The designation report contained the following commentary:

“In designing the exterior of the Panhellic Building, Howells drew on three sources: his and Raymond Hood’s prize-winning design for the Chicago Tribune Building, Eliel Saarinen’s influential second-place design for that competition, and Raymond Hood’s American Radiator Building (1923-24).  Howells reinterpreted the setback massing and composition of Saarinen’s design and the angled corners, crenelated decorations, and vertical lines of the Tribune tower and the American Radiator Company Building to create a design of unusual power ‘which provided the next dramatic step toward astylar skyscraper composition.’  Howells stripped away the Gothic ornaments and buttresses of his prototypes, simplified their forms, and transformed their angled corner bays into monolithic piers pierced only by a single column of windows.  He turned the need for light courts on the sides of the Panhellic into a virtue, creating a powerfully modeled design that made the building seem ‘more a solid mass than a hollow container.’ This impression of solid mass is enhanced by the bold vertical striping of the deeply recessed window and spandrel bays between wide piers.  Vertical recesses at the top of the piers, just below the setbacks, reinforce the vertical shadow pattern and enhance the telescoping effect of the setbacks.  Great attention was given to creating a unified surface treatment.  The brick, stone, and mortar were matched in color and the mortar joints laid flush with the brickwork ‘to produce the impression that the building had been built out of, or carved out of one material.’  The base of the building is articulated with pilaster strips, incised Greek lettering, and stylized cartouches and finials that suggest Gothic forms but are Art Deco in style.  On Mitchell Place, the main entrance to the hotel is set off by Art Deco sculptural panels designed by the noted sculptor Rene Chambellan who had worked with Howells on the Tribune Building and Pratt Memorial Hall.  Leaded-glass windows are the second story echo the Art Deco foliate forms of the sculpture ornament.  The building terminates in an openwork parapet of rounded arches and spiked forms suggesti8ve of Gothic finials.  The Panhellic tower was lit with spot floodlights that highlighted the setbacks and deep corners of the building.”

Sidney Goldhammer was the architect for the recent rental conversion.

Amenities

The building has an attended lobby, a fitness center, a full-time doorman, a roof terrace, a laundry room and a business center.

Apartments

Apartment 24A is a one-bedroom unit with a 23-foot-long living/dining room and an enclosed 8-foot-long kitchen.

Apartment 23B is a two-bedroom unit with a small entry foyer that leads to a 9-foot-long dining area adjacent to an enclosed kitchen and the 27-foot-wide living room with an angled corner.  Its second bedroom has an angled wall with a window.

Apartment 7Q is a one-bedroom unit with a small entry foyer leading to an 11-foot-long dining area next to the 20-foot-wide living room with a windowed, pass-through kitchen.

History

Because of the Depression, the hotel decided to accept male residents and to supplement its income cocktail lounges were installed in the ground floor restaurant and the top floor solarium which was renamed the Tower Room.  The designation report noted that “Renowned for its spectacular views, this popular gathering space was enlarged in 1959, when the outdoor porches were enclosed.”  “By 1959 the commercial space on First Avenue had also been converted to restaurant use.  In 1960 the entire building was air-conditioned using through-the-wall air-conditioners,” the report continued.

In his 1978 book, “The City Observed, New York, A Guide to the Architecture of Manhattan,”     Paul Goldberger, then architecture critic of The New York Times, noted that the building “is a lovely little skyscraper, very much of a tower for all of its modest 28-story height, utterly expressive of the desire to celebrate verticality.”

In their great book, “New York 1930, Architecture and Urbanism Between The Two World Wars,” authors Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins observed that the tower “seemed to rise in one unbroken leap from a three-story base…to become one of the city’s most spectacular images of unbridled vertical force.”

“While the individual rooms were decorated in a rather dull, early American manner, the snappily decorated public rooms were notable.  In the lounge at the top of the tower, dark tones and sinuous patterns on the walls helped obscure the awkwardness of the room’s shape, while pendant light fixtures, waving fronds of metal foliage, applied around the central elevator door, tall lancet windows, and French-influenced furniture gave the room a welcome note of romantic mystery,” the authors continued.

In 1964, the building was sold to 3 Mitchell Place Inc., headed by Benjamin J. Denihan and Arthur W. Bresiani Sr., who converted it to an apartment hotel with new bathrooms and kitchenettes.

In 2013, Silverstein Properties, Fisher Brothers and Capstone Equities acquired the property for $82 million and planned to convert it to a luxury corporate apartment building with a minimum stay of 30 days.

In 2015, Chaim Miller entered a contract to buy the property for $138 million with partners Sam Sprei and Steven Wu, according to a May 8, 2015 article at therealdeal.com.  He was subsequently sued by Silverstein for failing to pay an additional deposit when he failed to close the deal on time.  Miller later paid Silverstein $8 million more to close the deal.