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06/24/2026 |
Last Saturday I went to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where I was born and lived for many years, to check out what turned out to be an unimpressive museum show. The plan was to take advantage of beautiful weather and commute back home with a ferry ride downtown instead of the standard subway ride. (NYC is a watery town, with not only spectacular beaches and bridges, but also ferry rides for commuters and day trippers - the world famous Staten Island ferry between Staten Island and Manhattan is one of many ferries between various boroughs and neighborhoods.)
This plan brought me from the museum on a northern stretch of Fifth Avenue to the ferry dock on 90th Street and the East River in the Yorkville neighborhood. 100 years ago Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest people in the United States, lived nearby on 5th avenue and 90th Street. Only four avenue blocks away from Carnegie's home, the Ruppert's Brewery cranked out millions of bottles of a really excellent dark beer that I miss to this day. Ruppert's and the industrial businesses all around the area east of Park Avenue employed thousands of people who lived in walk-up apartments all around that area. The factories are gone, the ethnic (mainly German and Hungarian) enclaves are gone, but some of the housing remains, even as the overall area has become probably the most densely populated residential area in the country.
The explosive growth of the area - from pretty empty to dense rows of walk-ups - was triggered by the explosion in population in post-Civil War NYC, along with some amazing foresight by the leadership of New York City before Civil War. The city ran out of water. The city also had no recreational space. Before 1850, the only real parks in the city were small, one- or two-block affairs like Madison Square Park. While adding parks and water could and did trigger a lot of corruption, the city elders realized that without a proper source of water, the city would die. Between 1850 and about 1870, the water system was installed, Central Park was built and the New York City took on a lot of the character it has today.
During this time Yorkville was rapidly built up. While the area near the river stayed pretty industrial until after WW1, The few existing private houses and farms were torn down for block after block of apartment buildings, mostly five-story walk-ups. But a few buildings from before the boom survive, including these three wooden frame houses on 92nd Street near Lexington Avenue. The oldest, #160, dates from 1853. Built by carpenter Albro Howell, these houses were built as middle-class housing, not the mansions of Fifth Avenue. The first resident of #160 was bookkeeper and mirror salesperson, Robert N. Hebbard. #120 and #122 are similar and were built in 1871 .
Because of the danger from fire, New York City zoning laws banned wooden buildings - first, in lower Manhattan from about the 1830s and, and for all neighborhoods south of 155th street from 1882.
In the 1898 insurance maps, these three wooden structures, along with a few other long-gone buildings, are the only wooden framed houses in the area. The rest of the blocks are already built up with walk-ups.
These three surviving wooden houses look a lot like similar wooden houses that you'll find all over other parts of NYC, especially in Brooklyn. Same time. Same technology. Same construction techniques. The original walls would have had three coats of plaster. The floors would have been heavy parquet. How much of the original interiors of these buildings still exist? I don't know. These are all private homes. The outsides are landmarked. They're also well maintained and each worth in the millions.
By the end of the 19th century, Manhattan was no longer a single-family home city.
Note: the walkups were pretty much capped at five stories because a building would not have enough water pressure (unless it had a water tower). While I am not positive that they came with electricity, the walkups probably did - but it was DC. - and remained that way for a lot of buildings until the 1960's. While such housing may be standard elsewhere in the world, walk-ups are relatively unusual in the US but still abound in NYC. If you help a friend move in or out of a 5th floor walk-up apartment, they owe you big time!
N.B. for those who are curious: Blogs are rarely planned much in advance. If we have a new product line, I'd want to talk about it. But most of the time, blog posts are like this one - inspired by something on the fly. On Saturday when I unexpectedly walked by a couple of houses I found so interesting I took some pictures, and then, when I returned home, I did some research about what I saw. I found out a lot more about these buildings, and located an archived 1898 insurance map and the 1940s municipal archive of photographs. The larger idea which I realized as the entry came together, was the role government had in shaping the neighborhood.
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