177 EAST 77TH

177 East 77th Street is an eleven-story-and-penthouse apartment house on the north side of 77th Street between Lexington and Third Avenues, in Manhattan. It was designed by Boak & Paris for the developers Sidney and Arthur Diamond and opened in September 1941 with fifty-two apartments, each with a private terrace.

The building was planned around a private garden behind it, in the interior of the block: about eleven thousand square feet of lawn, magnolias, hedges, paths and fountains. Along the garden's east side stood the Cottages, eight apartments with Regency-style rear fronts that the Goelet family had built over a row of Third Avenue shops in 1937. The Diamonds bought the 77th Street plot from Robert Goelet, leased the rest of the ground, including the Cottages, and bought that too in 1946. The garden was the main selling point. Every floor plan in the 1941 leasing brochure is lettered east 77th street along the bottom edge and overlooking landscaped garden along the top.

The Diamonds kept the property for fifty-five years. After Arthur Diamond died in 1996 it was sold to developers, and in 1998, after a preservation campaign failed, the garden was destroyed. A thirty-two-story condominium tower, The Empire, was built on the northern half of the site. The northern cottages were demolished. The southern half of the row was kept as a two-story wing of the new development, so the apartments on the east side of 177 East 77th Street still have open light and air.

This page reproduces the 1941 brochure and sets out the history of the site, the building, the garden and the redevelopment, with sources for each.

By 1929 Robert Goelet had assembled all twelve lots on the west side of Third Avenue between 77th and 78th, a blockfront of old-law tenements with shops beneath, facing the Third Avenue elevated railway. In 1936 the city required extensive fireproofing of pre‑1901 tenements. Rather than pay for it, Goelet demolished the row.

The replacement, designed by the architect-engineer Edward H. Faile, was a two-story taxpayer: a low, inexpensive building meant to cover the property taxes until a larger one became worth building. Taxpayers dominated new construction on the avenues during the Depression. Of the building plans filed for Madison, Lexington and Third in 1929, seven per cent were for buildings of one to three stories; by 1933 all of them were. They were usually built on land held by an estate or a chain, the only owners with money to rebuild, and they were usually Art Deco or Art Moderne, to draw passers-by into the shops.

Faile's Third Avenue front was plain brick with plate-glass shopfronts, mottled glass transoms and projecting round corner canopies. Above the shops were eight one-bedroom apartments. Because the entire ground floor was let to stores, the apartments were entered from the back.

The rear was designed in a different style, as an English Regency row: brick painted white, each apartment with a small projecting vestibule under a concave roof and delicate iron railings, reached by two flights of stairs from the block's interior. On the avenue side the windows were filled with Owens‑Illinois Insulux glass block, introduced in 1935, which let in light while deadening the noise of the el. Only the kitchens, where the code demanded operable sash, got steel casements. On the open ground behind, which included the site of this building, Goelet laid out tennis and badminton courts.

Turning a row of buildings around to face a shared garden was not Faile's invention. Vincent Pepe had done it in Greenwich Village from the late 1910s, combining thirteen houses on Minetta Street and merging their back yards into a common garden entered from the rear. His promotional brochure sold the scheme as a refuge for artists, and The Times in 1923 called it as peaceful as though miles away. Turtle Bay Gardens, Treadwell Farm, MacDougal-Sullivan Gardens and Hudson View Gardens used the same idea through the twenties and thirties. What set the Cottages apart, in the reading of the architectural historian Andrew Dolkart, is that nobody else tried it with a taxpayer.

In 1941 Goelet sold the Diamonds the East 77th Street portion of the plot, where the tennis courts were, and leased them the remainder, including the Cottages and the ground that became the garden. The Diamonds built their apartment house on the portion they owned. The Cottages stayed as they were, and the trade press pointed out the benefit: with only two stories on the avenue, nothing would block light and air to the new building's east terraces.

That protection depended on the lease. The Cottages and the garden still belonged to Goelet, and if the lease had ended and a taller building gone up on the avenue, it would have walled in every east-facing terrace at 177 East 77th Street. In 1946 the Diamonds removed the risk by buying the leased property outright. From then on they owned both lots: the apartment house on one, the Cottages and garden on the other.

Beginning in 1939 the city's Department of Taxes photographed every lot in New York for assessment purposes, hanging a numbered plate in the foreground of each shot. The survey reached this block, bounded by 77th and 78th Streets and by Third and Lexington, in the two years before the Diamonds built. The purpose was valuation, but the effect is a street-level record of the ground under 177 East 77th Street just before it was built over.

The numbered plates also show how the land was divided. 177 East 77th Street is block 1412, lot 31. The cottages and the garden are lot 33. They were never one property. The view the building was drawn around and advertised on sat on a lot the Diamonds did not own in 1941, and no lease on an apartment in lot 31 gave a tenant any right over lot 33. In 1998 the tenants of 177 argued otherwise in court, and lost.

Russell M. Boak and Hyman F. Paris met in the office of Emery Roth, one of the most prolific apartment-house architects in New York. They left to practise on their own in 1927, and like Roth they made their name on apartment buildings, with a run of Art Deco theatres alongside. Their work grew plainer as the thirties went on, moving from Deco ornament to the stripped, streamlined Moderne of this building.

Sidney R. and Arthur W. Diamond were brothers from the Bronx who both took law degrees at Columbia — Sidney in the class of 1922, Arthur in 1926 — and then went into real estate instead. With a third brother, Harold, they built out a family business of apartment houses and shopping centres across Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx; Arthur spent the war as a captain in the Army Corps of Engineers. Only Sidney and Arthur are named on this building. They hired Boak & Paris repeatedly. The firm gave them 160 East 89th Street in 1937. In 1939 they commissioned a ten-story-and-penthouse building for the site of four brownstones at 166 to 172 East 77th Street, finished the next year as 170 East 77th. In 1940 they began 177 East 77th, across the street. They held this building, and the garden and cottages behind it, until Arthur Diamond died in 1996, fifty-five years after it opened.

177 East 77th was the firm's third building for the Diamonds, put up a few doors from the second, and it repeats the firm's habits: a recessed central bay, and forty-five-degree chamfered corners that let a window turn the corner instead of stopping at it, as they had on East 89th Street three years before.

The brochure's plans show the inside of the building and nothing of the outside. From the street it is sandy-coloured brick with a recessed centre and an understated entrance carrying incised ornament of a Mayan cast. There is no other decoration on the facade. The design relies on massing, setbacks and the corner windows.

With so little ornament, the windows were an important part of the design, and the brochure lists them: steel casement windows specially equipped with fresh air ventilators, thin enough in section to let the glass wrap the chamfered corners. They have since been replaced, the one substantial loss to the elevation. Otherwise the building stands close to the way Bury Sorlien drew it.

Thurber was describing the collapse of construction in the Depression. By 1941 building had resumed, but riveting was not used on this site. In July The Times reported that all the steel girders and columns of 177 East 77th Street were bolted, which the owners said was to spare a residential block the noise.

The same report describes how the trades overlapped to save time. Concrete was poured to keep the slab within two floors of the steel. When the concrete crews reached the seventh floor the bricklayers started; when the brick reached the sixth, the partition work began. For a stretch the steel men, the concrete men and the bricklayers were all working at once.

The exterior brickwork was finished in thirty working days. By early July, with occupancy still two months off, the renting manager reported half the suites already leased from the plans. By September an advertisement claimed ninety per cent, and listed four selling points: fifty-two apartments, each with a private terrace; eleven thousand square feet of private garden; a roof garden; three and four rooms each.

Four of the brochure's six sheets are plans, printed in green-black ink with some apartments washed in pale sage. The apartments are lettered A through E on each floor, and the rooms are named in the vocabulary of the period: a bedroom is a chamber, the entrance corridor a gallery, and most suites have a dining alcove where a dining room would be. Terraces are dimensioned to the inch.

Two small annotations explain features of the building. Beside the service hall on every floor are the words incin. and flue, the incinerator shaft. Along the side walls, in small lettering, are windows on 7th, 8th & 9th floors only to the west and windows on 3rd to 9th floors only to the east. Below those floors the flanks are blind, because the walk-ups stand against the west wall and the two-story avenue building against the east.

The phrase is Sidney Diamond's, from 1966, when The New York Times sent a reporter through the gates. The Diamonds had built the garden for about ten thousand dollars and kept a gardener, Frank Lamanna, on the payroll. Behind a pair of gates on 78th Street there were magnolias, trimmed hedges, grass, fountains and footpaths, with the eight cottages overlooking the garden from its east side and two cement staircases climbing to their doors. The Times called them red-brick; if that is right, the white paint of 1937 had gone by then. The street floor beneath them, leased to a florist, a bar, a hairdresser and a supermarket on Third Avenue, could not be seen from the garden, and the garden could not be seen from the avenue.

Each cottage had a small front patio and a private lawn. Lamanna kept those up too, though some residents preferred to do their own gardening. In 1965 the cottagers used one of the lawns for summer cookouts and sunbathing and invited friends to a spring planting party. Six of the eight were rent-controlled homes at $150 to $250 a month; the other two were let to businesses as hospitality suites. The cottages at the north end went mostly to bachelors, and that stretch was known among the neighbours as Bachelor Row.

The tower built on the site is The Empire: thirty-two stories, seventy-seven apartments, topped out in the summer of 1999 and finished that year. It was built by the same RFR/Davis venture that had bought the block, to designs by Hartman-Cox Architects of Washington, with the apartment interiors by Schuman Lichtenstein Claman Efron. It is Post-Modern in style: rose-coloured brick with pre-cast stone cut to read as limestone, a six-story base, bay windows on chamfered corners, and steeply raked green gables at the top. There is a new private garden, by Thomas Balsley Associates, and planting on the terraces of the base.

Its bulk sits at the northern end of the site, on 78th Street, which is why the cottages at the 77th Street end could be left where they were. The northern half of the row was demolished for the tower. The southern half was kept, but not as cottages: it belongs to The Empire, with retail on both floors and a roof deck for the tower's residents on top. The whole of the old property, garden and cottages alike, became The Empire, though the tower itself covers only the northern half.

The garden and the cottages were entered through a gatehouse on East 78th Street, and the tower takes its address from the same street: The Empire is 188 East 78th Street.

The tower has its admirers. Carter Horsley, reviewing it for CityRealty, finds it tall and handsome, thinks the controversy was natural but the result a clear improvement, and judges the loss of the cottages not the end of the world for the Upper East Side.

Half of what the brochure promised is gone. The tower stands on the garden itself, and the terraces lettered overlooking landscaped garden along their upper edge now face a thirty-two-story wall.

The other half is still there. The eastern exposure is the side for which the Real Estate Record promised complete protection of light and air in 1941, and the side the Diamonds bought the Third Avenue blockfront in 1946 to secure. It still looks out over a two-story building, now The Empire's roof deck, because the southern half of the row is the half that was kept.

Every claim on this page is drawn from something listed below. Most of it can be opened from here. A few things are quoted at second hand, from Dolkart's report or Gray's columns rather than from the originals, and those entries say so.