Carter's Review

This magnificent, 11-story building at 780 Riverside Drive between 155^th and 156^th streets was erected in 1914 by the Strathcona Construction Company whose other buildings include 385 Edgecombe Avenue and 48 St. Nicholas Place, both in the Hamilton Heights/Sugar Hill Northeast Historic District.

It was designed by George and Edward Blum in the Arts & Crafts style.

It has 71 rental apartments.

It is known as the Vauxhall and the designation report for the Audubon Park Historic District notes that it was “most likely named for the famous Vauxhall Gardens pleasure garden in London, which opened in the early 1660s.”

The building, the report continued, “is one of the tallest buildings of the historic district, and is also one of the more expensive structures built (at a projected cost of $600,000).”

Edward Blum was born in Paris, graduated from Columbia University in 1899 and continued his education at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1901 to 1903. George Blum attended the Ecole in 1904. The firm of George & Edward Blum received its first commissions in 1909 forapartment buildings and gained prominence for their designs of this building type. The firm was responsible for four apartment buildings in the Upper West Side/Central Park West Historic District and another three in the Riverside Drive-West End Historic District, all of them executedin the neo-Renaissance style.

The firm also designed buildings in the Expanded Carnegie Hill, Ladies Mile, and Upper East Side Historic Districts, as well as the Hotel Theresa (1912-13, a designated New York City Landmark).

The Blum brothers are noted for using glazed brick and terra cotta in a distinctive manner and for experimenting with designs that lacked traditional cornices. Many of the firm’s finest apartment houses, including 780 Riverside Drive, lack the traditional metal or terra-cotta cornices found on most contemporaneous buildings.

When it was erected it was arranged into suites of four to seven rooms with one to three baths.  In the 1920s, the building became tenant owned and by the 1940s many large apartments were subdivided.

Bottom Line

This Arts & Crafts-style building designed by George and Edward Blum is one of the city’s most attractive apartment buildings and overlooks the cemetery of the Chapel of the Intercession and the Hudson River.

Description

The building has an irregular plan with a courtyard at Riverside Drive with the building’s main entrance.  It has light wells at its north and south elevations. 

One of its brown-brick façades is highlighted by very ornate window surrounds at the 10-floor where there are balustrade balconies supported by brackets and the top of the surrounds have three-side supports for an angled balustrade.  The center two bays of this façade has a very handsome and colorful brick and tile vertical decoration and the top parapet of the building repeats the same decorative pattern horizontally and at larger scale. 

It has a very large lobby with three-steps up at one side to a decorative wall adjacent to the building’s mail boxes. 

According to the Audubonparkny.com website, the building’s entry court “de-emphasizes the main doorway and, at the same time, separates the rectangular section at the right from the curved section on the left, with its bay windows.” 

“Now look at the third story, which acts as a transition between the two-story limestone base and the upper floors, its brick and terra cotta frieze complementing the vertical bands of brick and colored tiles above.  As those bands take your eye upward, you will find differently-styled balconies on the tenth and eleventh floors and at the roof, instead of a cornice, you see a parapet, its brick and tile expanding the motif that you saw below at the third floor.  Above the first floor, all of the rooms facing the river were designed as bedrooms; the rectangular section of the first floor follows a different floor plan to accommodate the lobby, which is decorated in a Spanish motif,” the website continued. 

On its Riverside Drive elevation, the building has a tripartite vertical composition consisting of a two-story limestone base, a nine-story brown tapestry brick shaft and capital, with brick laid in an English bond.  There is a molded limestone cornice with shallow modillions above the second story supports a decorative iron balustrade. 

There is rusticated brick at the third story with brick soldier course and faience tile frieze featuring colorful geometric motif above third story and molded terra-cotta cornice with shallow scroll brackets alternating with floral panels above faience tile frieze. 

There are elaborate, molded terra-cotta windows surrounds featuring foliate details at tenth-story fenestration and balconettes with iron railings supported on large terra-cotta brackets with floral details at tenth story and three-side balconettes with iron railings supported o elaborate terra-cotta bases at eleventh story. 

There are non-original planting beds framed by concrete curbs along Riverside Drive elevation.  Riverside Drive courtyard paved with brick basketweave and two granite steps leading up to a stairway that descends into West 155^th Street courtyard with an in-ground skylight with circular glass lenses at left side. 

There is probably a non-original iron fence with gate at entrance to alley between building and the Audubon Terrace Historic District. 

The district’s designation report notes that “the primary façade of this Arts and Crafts style building features creative use of faience tile friezes, colorful, decorative brick work, and terra-cotta details, including elaborate ceremonial balconettes.” 

The building appears prominently on the front page of the historic district’s designation report in 2009.

Amenities

The building has a doorman, a live-in superintendent, and a laundry.

Apartments

Apartment 4G is a three-bedroom unit with a foyer that leads in one direction to the 12-foot-long enclosed kitchen and a 12-foot-long bedroom and in the other direction to a long hall that passes the 19-foot-long dining room that opens onto the 19-foot-long living room and leads to the other two bedrooms. 

Apartment 6G is a two-bedroom unit with a very long entry foyer that leads pasts an open, pass-through kitchen to a 13-foot-long living room.

History

The building sits on property once owned by Wellington Clapp and later by George Blake Grinnell. 

The building was acquired by 40 tenants in 1920 from Michael Kaufman for about $750,000.  Mr. Kaufman had recently purchased it from G. Maurice Heckscher, president of the Vauxhall Realty Corporation. 

Anna Quindlen devoted her December 18, 1982 “About New York” column in The New York Times to the building: 

“…In many ways, the building is like many others that went up on the West Side before World War I.  It has good, thick plaster walls, hardwood floors and high ceilings.  From the outside, it looks secret, as all apartment buildings do, a honeycomb of lives that gives away nothing, the only clues a plant at one window, a sweep of damask drapery at another.  In the summer, when the windows are open, the sounds of pianists practicing Bach and voices raised in Verdi come out the windows and down to the street.  This, and the fact that it is where the drive curves sharply inward at 155^th Street, are the only things that, from the outside, make 780 Riverside Drive different from every other apartment building in New York.

“But inside it is different in some ways from its neighbors, and one of the chief manifestations of that difference is the 780 Christmas and Hanukkah party, which has been held every year for more than a decade in the lobby….Underneath the fancy plaster ceiling,the tenants mingled: in wheelchairs, in diapers, young artists, elderly doctors, the people who have called the building home since they were children, those who found an apartment there in the last year.  Everyone had contributed food or drink to the celebration, and together they sang carols as Doris Holloway played the piano that, wedged tightly in the elevator, had been brought down from apartment 7-AA.  There was a tree, a manger scene and a menorah. 

“Everybody knows everybody here,” said Mrs. Holloway, a musician who has lived in the building for 10 years. ‘My son has been coming to these parties since he was 5, and had a school paper to write tonight.  But he said, ‘I don’t care if I have to say up until 1 or 2 o’clock, mom, I’m going to the party.’  It’s as if the warmth of this building makes it partly worth it to live here.” 

“Now what Mrs. Holloway means by that is that life at 780 Riverside is not entirely wonderful, despite the camaraderie and the six-room apartments with two bathers and the unfashionably reasonable rents.  From the lobby and many of the living rooms, the lights of highrise buildings across the Hudson on the New Jersey Palisades glow silver like white Christmas lights, but closer, around the building itself, is a neighborhood that has decayed. 

“Joan and Philip Nourse, who have lived in the building longer than almost anyone, remember when there Oriental rugs in the lobby and an in-house telephone operator behind the ornamental grill to one side of the door.  Everyone in the neighborhood, much less the building, knew one another. 

“The rugs are gone now; the neighborhood has changed.  But despite all this – or perhaps because of it – 780 Riverside has things that many buildings farther downtown, in better neighborhoods, do not.”