820 Park Avenue, originally built for
Elizabeth Millbank Anderson c. 1920 by
John Mead Howells of
Howells & Stokes at the corner of Park Avenue and East 75th Street in
New York City. Anderson died in 1921 and in 1924 the house was sold to
A.J. Kobler, publisher of
American Weekly, who retained Howells to remodel and redecorate the house (seen here in these 1924 photos). The following year Kobler tore the house down and hired
Harry Allan Jacobs to design an apartment house as a replacement. Click
HERE for more on 820 Park Avenue and
HERE to see what stands there today on google street view.
Photos from the Museum of the City of New York.
6 comments:
This mansion is very prominent in New York apartment house books. Especially because its very short life and the awesome mega mansion apartment building .its a very colorful and unusual building.
And yet when Kobler died, on New Year's Eve, 1936, he left an estate of less than five thousand dollars. (He seems to have previously sold his 12,000 square foot triplex, which occupied three floors in the tower of the new building.)
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F30B11F83A5E177A93CBA8178ED85F438385F9
It's not that the exterior is so bad, it's just that it is not so good. Although I appreciate austere classicism, and what can be wrong with an all-limestone facade, the corner Park Avenue site called for something more. The interior was much better, though.
I have to agree with classicst. The exterior lacks "oomph" but the interior seems gracious. Perfectly porportioned rooms (and not too large) and great details such as that breakfast room vaulted ceiling with globe fixture and garden murals.
Some interiors are great, others I'm not crazy about. The drawing room is beautifully done & love the stairway. However, the furnishings in the stairhall and dining room just look musty to me.
What DC and AD said. The exterior just doesn't quite hit it, even though it has all the qualities I like most.
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