New York’s Rare Family Compounds (Published 2010) (2024)

RESTORATION work is under way on the facade of the town house at 16 East 84th Street, one of a neo-Georgian triplet of dwellings built in 1901 by the socially prominent King family.

Family compounds are not uncommon in the suburbs, but urban real estate is so costly that they are rare in the city. In Manhattan it is possible to identify only a handful of these enclaves, where a single family took a contiguous plot of land and built three or more similar or at least complementary private houses.

Of these, it appears that the oldest compound, or trace of one, may be the bookstore of the Morgan Library and Museum, at Madison Avenue and 37th Street. Originally one of three mansions running down Madison to 36th Street, this group went up in 1853, built by the Phelps/Dodge family, with a fourth on an inside lot on 37th Street.

A real estate survey of 1865 shows the houses set well apart from one another, separated by gardens and plantings, with a carriageway and two-story stables at the rear. It could well have been the most expansive family compound in the history of New York.

In the 1880s the banker J. P. Morgan, who could have built a mansion to rival a Vanderbilt’s, moved into the southernmost house. He ultimately bought all the Phelps/Dodge properties on Madison, although only the northerly one survives.

Another long-gone compound in Manhattan was that of the Steinway family. Heinrich Steinweg — later Steinway — brought his piano business from Germany in the early 1850s, and by the 1860s had built a piano factory on 52nd Street and Park Avenue, then still a middling industrial thoroughfare. The family took over some half-completed houses around the corner, at 121-125 East 52nd Street, and finished them to their taste, which turned out to be the usual brownstone.

The Steinways thought well enough of their homes to pose in front of them for a family photograph, with the factory in the background. Soon the members scattered to more prestigious addresses, like Gramercy Park.

A family compound of an entirely different kind stood on the south side of 84th Street, just east of Fifth Avenue. Arnold, Constable & Co. was one of the big department stores in Manhattan, and the Arnold and Constable families had at least two town houses on the north side of 83rd Street. In 1886 they built a remarkable stable and greenhouse complex on 84th Street backing up to their homes. Their architect was William Schickel.

The largest stable, at 4 East 84th, was 85 feet wide and had a large rear yard, rare for a 19th-century property in the city. The stables had an ecclesiastical look, red brick and stone, like an Episcopal parish house. The complex was conveniently available in the 1950s for the construction of the three-winged apartment building at 1025 Fifth Avenue: houses, stables, yard, all gone, poof!

Five blocks north, the family of the aristocrat and reformer R. Fulton Cutting put up four houses on a through-block site between 88th and 89th, from Fifth Avenue to Madison. This remarkable group went up in stages, from 1919 to 1922. Delano & Aldrich gave the quartet a severe neo-Georgian appearance. St. David’s School occupies the three 89th Street buildings, and they now appear as a single unit.

The Cutting compound is similar to the King family group, built in 1900 at Nos. 16, 18 and 20 East 84th Street. It’s in a tasteful neo-Georgian style, although the street is so choked with deafening traffic you hardly notice; it’s like sticking a hairdryer in an ear.

But the houses rise above the din. By Clinton & Russell, they are almost exactly alike. Although side-street dwellings, these were not dinky row houses; the 1910 census lists 10 servants in No. 16, and 8 each in Nos. 18 and 20. They tended various members of the King family, which was active in society in New York and Newport, R.I.

In 1909 the Kings decided they needed stabling for their cars and had Lawrence White, the son of Stanford White, design a two-story brick garage at 22 East 84th Street, along the lines of a Florentine market or loggia, even though only 12 feet wide.

The King family left their houses in the 1940s, and in 1944 a group of investors assembled Nos. 18 and 20 (and 22) intending to clear the site for an apartment building. That project never went ahead, and in 1947 a group of veterans took over No. 16 on a quasi-co-op basis; the mortgage insurance application was signed by Gen. Omar N. Bradley.

Now 16 East 84th is a condominium, and 18 and 20 have been joined into a single co-op. The group is more or less unchanged, although the mansard of No. 16 has been sliced off. The curtains are almost always drawn, but in the evenings a Nosy Parker may peer through the leaded glass sidelights to see what remains of the upper-class togetherness of another century.