Today AD joins architect Nick Potts in New York City for a walking tour of the Upper West Side. At the turn of the century, apartment hotels such as The Dakota and The San Remo started populating the Upper West Side. Servants' quarters, elevators, and the realization of views were making apartment living more appealing to the upper middle classes and increasing the value of the top floors. Join Nick for an in-depth look at how the Upper West Side revolutionized apartment living and became the birthplace of the penthouse in Manhattan.
Director: Hiatt Woods
Director of Photography: Eric Brouse
Editor: Tristen Rogers
Host: Nick Potts
Producer: Skylar Economy; Vara Reese
Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi
Associate Producer: Brandon Fuhr
Production Manager: Melissa Heber
Production Coordinator: Fernando Davila
Audio Engineer: Brett Van Deusen
Production Assistant: Noah Bierbrier; Ryan Coppola
Post Production Supervisor: Andrew Montague
Post Production Coordinator: Holly Frew
Supervising Editor: Christina Mankellow
Assistant Editor: Courtney Karwal
Colorist: Oliver Eid
Director: Hiatt Woods
Director of Photography: Eric Brouse
Editor: Tristen Rogers
Host: Nick Potts
Producer: Skylar Economy; Vara Reese
Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi
Associate Producer: Brandon Fuhr
Production Manager: Melissa Heber
Production Coordinator: Fernando Davila
Audio Engineer: Brett Van Deusen
Production Assistant: Noah Bierbrier; Ryan Coppola
Post Production Supervisor: Andrew Montague
Post Production Coordinator: Holly Frew
Supervising Editor: Christina Mankellow
Assistant Editor: Courtney Karwal
Colorist: Oliver Eid
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00 These two towers could be thought of as the birthplace
00:02 of the Penthouse apartment in Manhattan
00:04 and possibly the world.
00:05 I'm Nick Potts, I'm an architect,
00:06 and today we're going to be doing a walking tour
00:08 of Manhattan's Upper West Side.
00:10 (upbeat music)
00:12 Something that was happening almost uniquely here
00:18 on the Upper West Side, at the turn of the century,
00:20 it was becoming a neighborhood where people coming
00:22 from other places who were on the make
00:23 were looking for places to live.
00:24 And the apartment hotel really was the solution for this.
00:27 These apartments didn't have kitchens.
00:29 And so they looked like an apartment.
00:31 People would live in them for a long time,
00:33 but anything dealing with service was centralized.
00:36 You never had to cross paths with staff.
00:38 We're in the 20th century here.
00:40 There's electricity on the street, there are subways.
00:42 So it's starting to get a little bit more buzzing
00:44 and the hubbub of Broadway was becoming an appeal.
00:47 The big idea of these apartment hotels
00:49 to attract the upwardly mobile middle class
00:51 was a thing that was happening here
00:53 on the Upper West Side uniquely.
00:55 And buildings like this were starting to pop up
00:58 as kind of this new nexus
00:59 of an apartment hotel neighborhood.
01:01 Right now we're in front of the Dakota.
01:05 This is really one of the first buildings
01:07 on the Upper West Side.
01:08 The name, the Dakota, was a bit of a joke
01:10 because it was so remote, both so far west and so far north
01:14 that it may as well be in the Dakotas,
01:15 which weren't even states yet.
01:17 And the building is fairly experimental
01:19 in terms of its location and also its technology.
01:22 A building of this height needed elevators.
01:25 And to have elevators, you have to have electricity,
01:27 which didn't exist here on the Upper West Side
01:29 until the subways were on in 1900.
01:30 It was the heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune
01:34 who developed this building.
01:35 He provided his own power plant
01:37 and really embarked on an almost experimental folly.
01:40 The Dakota really was the pioneer of making apartment living
01:44 for the upwardly mobile middle class acceptable
01:46 and something that would attract more residents
01:49 and ultimately more buildings.
01:50 And this was a middle class building.
01:52 And the middle class that existed in the 1880s
01:55 when this was built was very different
01:57 than what we have now.
01:57 People had staves.
01:59 People were expected to have a certain level of wealth
02:02 to buy into this.
02:04 At the same time, again, this is apartment living is new.
02:06 And the idea of living next to someone
02:08 rather than having your own individual house
02:10 and having to cross paths with their staff
02:12 was still something that a lot of people
02:14 were trying to get behind.
02:15 So in a building like the Dakota,
02:17 there was a huge amount of planning put into the separation
02:20 of front of house and back of house.
02:21 So underneath the courtyard of the Dakota,
02:23 there's an entire level of service.
02:26 And so the servants using the area beneath the courtyard
02:28 would essentially never have to cross paths
02:30 with the building's residents.
02:32 One of the most interesting things about the Dakota
02:34 is that there are no corridors.
02:36 There are these four separate passenger towers
02:38 that led to these enormous apartments
02:40 that essentially bridged an entire corner of the building
02:42 before they went to the service towers
02:44 that were in the center.
02:45 So at the time the Dakota was under construction,
02:47 apartment building design was still very modular
02:50 where people were taking as many rooms as they needed,
02:53 whether it was a suite of three salons
02:55 or something with entire residents.
02:57 And that was really appealing to people
02:58 who were trying to establish themselves.
03:00 You think about the movie "Rosemary's Baby"
03:02 that this obviously starred prominently in,
03:05 the crux of the situation with the homeowners
03:07 is that it's a combined apartment with a shared closet.
03:10 Stylistically, the Dakota is also a pioneer
03:13 or an outlier in many ways.
03:14 It was designed by Henry Hardenberg,
03:16 who eventually designed the Plaza Hotel in 1907.
03:19 It's pretty unique in that it's a German,
03:21 Germanic medieval style building.
03:23 It almost looks like a civic building
03:25 that you'd see go up in the middle of Europe
03:26 in the 1850s or 1860s, like a post office or a city hall.
03:30 So there's a monumentality to it.
03:32 And the building even has a moat if you look around it,
03:34 which wasn't meant to be like a castle.
03:36 It was meant to bring light in,
03:37 but it continues the theme of this fortress-like,
03:40 Northern European medieval sort of architecture.
03:44 This odd Germanic style really wasn't adopted elsewhere
03:48 in the Upper West Side,
03:49 but the planning of the Dakota
03:50 became a really important pattern.
03:52 And you look at buildings like the Apthor and the Belnor
03:55 that have a very similar sort of planning,
03:56 no corridors, separate elevator towers,
03:59 the central courtyard.
04:00 You see the pattern of the Dakota
04:02 really taking root uniquely in the Upper West Side.
04:04 And as other developments happened,
04:07 particularly a few blocks further west on Broadway,
04:10 they mimicked the sorts of amenity spaces
04:12 that the Dakota had,
04:13 while in a more approachable sort of building,
04:15 the apartment hotel.
04:16 This building behind me is the Hotel Belcler,
04:22 which is important for two major reasons.
04:24 The first is that it was the first major commission
04:26 by Emery Roth,
04:27 who was the architect of the San Remo, the Eldorado,
04:30 the Beresford, really the most iconic buildings
04:32 on Central Park West.
04:33 It's also important because it's emblematic
04:34 of a new building type,
04:35 which is the apartment hotel.
04:37 And this is a type that emerged really here
04:39 on the Upper West Side to suit the needs
04:42 of an up-on-the-make upper middle class.
04:44 So because in this time period,
04:46 the mixing of residents and staff
04:48 was a really important deal,
04:50 a lot of the planning of these buildings
04:51 was around the separation of service and living.
04:54 And there's always a service elevator,
04:56 the functions like the kitchens
04:58 and the servants' rooms and quarters
05:00 are always centered towards the center of the building,
05:03 usually around a light court
05:04 to kind of stay away from the salons
05:06 and the kind of the high value spaces,
05:08 which are lining the public face of the building.
05:10 And a building like this,
05:11 though it served the needs of the upper middle class,
05:13 it really wasn't something that people on the East Side
05:17 looked well upon,
05:18 where the old money lived
05:19 in their kind of proper limestone or brownstone buildings
05:23 with kind of restrained ornament.
05:25 A building like this appealed to the West Side taste.
05:28 You know, these are people who are on the make,
05:29 the excess was appealing to them
05:32 and not considered garish or in poor taste.
05:34 This building is really a unique example in New York
05:37 of the Viennese secession/Art Nouveau style.
05:40 You see a lot more of this experimentation on the West Side
05:42 because this is targeted to people who are on the make
05:44 and they're looking to impress.
05:46 And the more ornament, the more stuff added to it,
05:49 it appeals to people who are kind of looking
05:52 to make their way up.
05:53 So this building was going up at exactly the same time
05:56 as two other major apartment hotels along Broadway,
05:59 a few blocks further South, the Ansonia,
06:01 which is the largest and probably the most iconic of these,
06:04 and the Doralton, which is similar in terms of scale
06:07 and form to what you see on the Belcler,
06:08 but taller and a little more French in planning.
06:11 But the idea is the same.
06:12 It's a corner buildings targeted towards an apartment hotel
06:16 that was meant to attract people who were moving to the city
06:19 and establishing themselves.
06:20 Behind me is the Ansonia and this was built in 1904.
06:27 The reason why there is a proliferation
06:28 of these large apartment buildings
06:30 here at 72nd Street and Broadway is right underneath it.
06:33 And you can see the 72nd Street IRT subway station.
06:36 This was right around the same time, around 1901, 1902.
06:38 And because of this, there was electrification
06:40 and the means of people to get
06:42 from further downtown up here.
06:44 So the land value skyrocketed
06:46 and it was natural to build a large building.
06:48 So this is another apartment hotel.
06:50 It's the largest of any of these.
06:51 There were 300 suites when this was built.
06:53 Stylistically, it's French Beaux-Arts.
06:55 Stokes, who was the developer of the Ansonia,
06:58 hired an architect from Paris called Dubois
07:00 to design essentially a Hausmanian building.
07:02 This is very similar to what you see
07:05 in the 8th R&D Small in Paris
07:06 with the French balconies and the band courses,
07:09 but it's blown up to enormous scale.
07:11 It's three times what you would see in Paris
07:13 where the buildings are five, six stories.
07:15 He was also so involved that the architect ended up
07:18 just leaving the country.
07:19 He paid him off to go back to France.
07:20 And Stokes essentially took over the building as his folly
07:23 and lavished money on it.
07:24 There were Turkish baths.
07:26 There were shopping arcades.
07:27 Really, it was an apartment hotel,
07:29 but it had all of what you'd expect
07:31 in a five-star hotel now.
07:32 The building failed really quickly after it was built.
07:36 It built in 1904.
07:37 By the time the 1930s came around,
07:39 the kitchens were already closed.
07:41 So it went through a really rapid change
07:43 in the types of people that it housed.
07:45 It declined significantly during the 1970s.
07:48 And it really became in the 1970s
07:49 almost a plophouse and poor repair.
07:52 But because it was very well-built,
07:53 again, this was Stokes's folly.
07:55 He poured a lot of money into it,
07:56 which ultimately bankrupted the building.
07:58 It's very robustly built.
07:59 The steel is heavily fireproof with stone.
08:02 The floors are actually two layers thick.
08:04 And so it's essentially soundproof.
08:05 So this actually made it a great place
08:07 for musicians to live.
08:08 Again, we're just up the 2-3 line from Times Square,
08:12 close to the Lincoln Center when that came about.
08:14 So this became a great place for musicians to live
08:16 and to actually live work so they could teach classes
08:19 or practice in their apartment
08:20 without really bothering the neighbors.
08:22 It's just really amazing to think about
08:24 the number of people who are noted
08:26 in terms of music and performing arts,
08:28 Rachmaninoff, Mahler, Stravinsky,
08:30 Florent Ziegfeld, who have lived and worked
08:32 just in that one building.
08:33 The Turkish baths that were in the basement of the building
08:36 when it was first built
08:36 obviously didn't have a use anymore.
08:38 So by the time the 1970s came around,
08:40 it was a gay bathhouse called the Continental Baths
08:43 where Bette Midler got her start.
08:44 And you can just think about its importance
08:46 in establishing New York
08:47 and maintaining its cachet as a cultural capital.
08:50 In terms of its planning,
08:51 the Ansonia is a departure
08:52 from earlier apartment buildings, such as the Dakota,
08:55 where the vertical circulation
08:56 was split up in multiple cores.
08:58 Here, the Ansonia actually centralizes all the elevators
09:01 into one stacked core,
09:02 which is the way that a lot of hotels and office towers
09:04 and even residential towers are planned now.
09:06 So there's a bit more forward thinking
09:08 in terms of centralizing the circulation
09:10 into one spine versus dispersing it
09:12 into small neighborhoods.
09:14 (upbeat music)
09:16 The Upper West Side was really the last place in Manhattan
09:18 where townhouses were built.
09:20 And what you can see is that they're extremely eclectic,
09:22 containing everything from Moorish decoration,
09:24 classical sculpture,
09:25 and more modish sorts of arts and crafts motifs.
09:28 So really interesting and individual
09:30 as opposed to what you see on the East Side.
09:32 (upbeat music)
09:35 So these two towers behind me,
09:41 you could think of as being the birthplace of the penthouse
09:43 in New York City and possibly even the world.
09:46 It's a San Remo, this is 1930, it's Emery Roth.
09:50 So barely 30 years after the construction
09:52 of the Hotel Belcler,
09:53 you can see the drastic changes
09:55 in both the adoption of apartment living
09:57 as a proper place where people live,
09:59 and also architecturally the development
10:01 of the apartment house into its own distinct style.
10:03 The idea of the penthouse is really something
10:05 that was birthed in the United States
10:06 in the early part of the 20th century.
10:08 When tall buildings were first thought about,
10:10 the top of the building was seen as a place for equipment.
10:13 This building really comes right off the heels
10:15 of an earlier Emery Roth building, the Beresford,
10:18 just north of the American Natural History Museum.
10:20 And that building was the first to introduce towers.
10:22 In the case of the Beresford,
10:24 the towers were not for people to live in,
10:26 they were actually for equipment.
10:27 So it was the water tanks and the overruns
10:29 for the elevators took up the prominent towers.
10:32 What happened between the Beresford and San Remo, however,
10:34 was the multiple dwelling law of 1929.
10:37 That was a state mandated law that talked about
10:40 essentially how to build an apartment tower.
10:42 This law that said, if you have a hundred foot long block,
10:44 the towers can be a big and they have to be this far apart.
10:47 Previously, buildings were less valuable
10:49 as you got higher and higher up,
10:51 but the elevator made that whole getting vertical
10:53 much more seamless.
10:54 And as people started realizing views,
10:56 that whole idea flipped and the higher floor
10:59 suddenly became more valuable
11:01 because you have this added bonus
11:03 and this added value of views
11:04 that really hadn't been quantified before.
11:06 So the towers on the San Remo are really the pinnacle
11:08 of this development of a new style
11:11 and type of building, which is the apartment tower.
11:13 (gentle music)
11:16 [BLANK_AUDIO]