The Museum began after Judge&nbsp;Mayer Sulzberger donated a collection of art to the Jewish Theological Seminary library. With the donation, he made a suggestion that a museum be created for similar works like the ones he donated. The library served as a museum until 1944 when&nbsp;Frieda Schiff Warburg donated her mansion on 92nd street to the Jewish Theological Seminary. The mansion was to be used as a museum for Jewish art, and thus, the Warburg's mansion has served as the Jewish Museum since 1947.&nbsp; However, the Museum has expanded beyond the original mansion. In 1959, a sculpture&nbsp;court was built beside the mansion. Then, in 1963, a new building, the Albert A. List Building, was constructed to add additional space for the Museum. This would only be the beginning of the Museum's expansion. Under the leadership of Joan Rosenbaum, the&nbsp;Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director of the Museum from 1981 to 2011, the Museum doubled in size to add room for educational programs and exhibits.&nbsp; During the expansion from 1990 to 1993, a permanent exhibit was incorporated into a two-floor plan. The exhibit is called Culture and Continuity: The Jewish Journey. There are 800 works of art in this exhibit, and these works trace the Jewish experience from antiquity to present day. According to the Museum's website, this exhibit explores two important questions: "How has Judaism been able to thrive for thousands of years across the globe, often in difficult and even tragic circumstances? What constitutes the essence of Jewish identity?" The exhibit tries to answer these questions by showing how Jewish culture has adapted to changing circumstances while holding strong to Jewish values.&nbsp;

The Jewish Museum of New York opened in 1904 and is the oldest museum dedicated to Jewish history in the country.

Website

Founded in 1904 with just 26 donated objects, the Jewish Museum of New York now contains almost 30,000 items including art, ceremonial objects, and media. The museum is one of the oldest museums dedicated to Jewish history in the world and the oldest in the United States. The mission of the Museum is to show how art mixes with Jewish culture. By devoting their efforts to this mission, the Jewish Museum helps expose the public to Jewish customs and history, while also helping define the Jewish identity. 

The Jewish Museum of New York

This section offers a small selection of the individual landmarks, virtual museum tours, and heritage trails that interpret Jewish history in Clio. 

Jewish History

Walk to historic mansions, museums, schools, and the apartment building of Jackie O in Carnegie Hill, east of Central Park.

In 1907, James Buchanan Duke married for the second time, to Nanaline Holt Inman. Two years later, he purchased the expansive Henry H. Cook mansion at the corner of 5th Avenue and 78th Street for his new bride. Duke originally planned to renovate the Victorian mansion, but soon changed his mind and decided to demolish the home and build something completely new. To build the new home, Duke retained Philadelphia architect Horace Trumbauer, who was known for building palatial homes. The massive new home, built to resemble a French chateau, featured a large main hall as well as eight bedrooms located on the second floor. A third floor, hidden from the street by a balustrade, was reserved for servants' quarters. For most of the twentieth century, the home was more famous for its association with Doris Duke, the daughter of James. At his death, Doris inherited roughly $50 million.The home, however, became the focus of a legal battle due to Duke's curiously worded will. Ultimately, fourteen-year-old Doris had to sue her mother for ownership of the New York mansion. By the time of her twenty-first birthday, she was believed to be the wealthiest young woman in the world. Doris was married and divorced several times and lived in the home with her mother between marriages. It was Doris who donated the home to New York University in 1958. The former Duke residence remains the home of the university's Institute of Fine Arts. Under the new owner, the mansion was renovated and is a New York City Landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Completed in 1912, the James B. Duke residence is one of a small number of remaining homes that once made up "Millionaire's Row." The home was constructed for tobacco and electric power magnate, James B. Duke. Duke's wife and daughter, Doris, lived in the home for a number of years following his death in 1925, but in 1958, the women donated the home to New York University's Institute of Fine Art. The mansion is a New York City Landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. 

James B. Duke Residence (Institute of Fine Arts, NYU)

Members of the original New York Society in 1754 numbered only six and met in a room at City Hall. The Society was granted a charter from King George III in 1772. British soldiers occupied New York City for much of the Revolutionary War and evidently the Redcoats were not fond of reading. They reportedly looted the New York Society's library and sold some of the books for rum. Other book pages were shredded to use as wadding in their muskets. They spared the king's charter, which is still owned by the society. Six hundred stolen books were later found in the tower of St. Paul's Church.The New York State Legislature recognized the charter of the library in 1783. This was the era when the U.S. Congress met in New York City in Federal Hall and the Society Library moved from City Hall to Federal Hall; this would make the Society Library the first "Library of Congress." The new nation's leaders, including George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, borrowed books from the library. Washington is said to have failed to return two books that were due in 1789! Maybe he took them with him when the Congress moved to Philadelphia.The New York Society Library moved once again, taking its 5,000 volumes to its own building on Nassau Street. In 1840 the library relocated to Leonard Street and Broadway; the Society was combined with the New York Atheneum, a scientific and literary club. The collection outgrew the space by the mid-1850s and the library and its 40,000 volumes relocated to a new building at 67 (later renumbered 109) University Place. The collection had grown to 100,000 volumes by 1911 and the Society began to look for a new location. While the University Place had been in a location central to the city's social life, by the early twentieth century, the neighborhood was surrounded by big businesses and homes converted to stores. The move to the John S. Rogers townhouse on E. 79th Street took place after the Society purchased the property in 1937. By the 2010s, the membership grew to roughly 3,000.The townhouse is five stories tall - the top floor is set back a few feet behind a balustrade. The main entrance is flanked by Doric pilasters. The second-floor front windows are the highest and widest and are topped by a pediment supported by curved brackets; this level's windows look out onto a balustrade. Some of the original features of the interior of the townhouse were retained in the 1930s remodel, including coffered ceilings, stone walls, wood paneling, and mantels. The building is significant architecturally as an example of neo-Italian Renaissance style architecture. The designers were the architectural firm of Trowbridge &amp; Livingston, also known for the design of the Banking House of J.P. Morgan at 23 Wall Street and the St. Regis Hotel at 55th Street and Fifth Avenue. The house originally contained a ballroom; a newspaper article from 1922 described a meeting of the Maternity Center Association hosted by Mrs. Rogers in her 79th Street home, with attendees "overflowing the ballroom."

Founded in 1754 as a subscription society, the New York Society Library is the oldest cultural institution in New York City. The library had four previous homes before moving to this building in 1937. The structure, also known as the John S. Rogers House, is a limestone-faced townhouse that was constructed in 1917 and listed in the National Register in 1983. The interior was remodeled in the mid-1930s to accommodate the need of the library, and in the process, 39 rooms were converted into into 24 rooms. The library houses a collection of 300,000 volumes on a variety of subjects and is operated as a non-profit. Non-members are welcome in the first-floor reading room and at some of the organization's events.

New York Society Library

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Fifth Avenue was rapidly becoming one of the most desirable addresses in Manhattan for well-heeled New Yorkers. Architect Charles Pierrepont Henry Gilbert made a name for himself by designing some of the most palatial and opulent homes for the city's upper crust. In 1897, he was commissioned by banker and railroad tycoon Isaac Fletcher to build a grand residence.Though many homes were constructed of brownstone at the time, Gilbert's charge was to build the Fletcher mansion of limestone. The white limestone mansion of the Vanderbilts, also on Fifth, caused a sensation, prompting other wealthy Manhattanites to follow suit. Gilbert designed over one hundred homes in New York, many of them among the largest in the city. His creation for Fletcher was a French Gothic chateau with a mansard roof, turrets, and a wealth of elaborately carved creatures, including monsters and dolphins, adorning the home's facade. The home was completed in 1899. Fletcher lived in the home until his death in 1917. He bequeathed the home and his art collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which sold the home. The proceeds from the sale led to the creation of the Fletcher Fund for the purchase of prints and drawings. The home's new owner was Harry Ford Sinclair, the founder of Sinclair Oil Corporation. Sinclair would gain notoriety for his role in the Teapot Dome Scandal in 1922. While the Fletchers lived sedate, respectable lives in the mansion, Sinclair and his wife Elizabeth were known for reportedly throwing lavish parties. They kept the home largely intact, the only significant change being the installation of a large pipe organ in 1922. The Teapot Dome Scandal put an end to Sinclair's indulgent lifestyle. In 1930, he sold the home to Augustus Van Horn Stuyvesant, one of the last descendants of Peter Stuyvesant. Augustus moved into the home with his sister, Anne, and the two of them lived a largely cloistered existence, preferring a quiet life at home to one of socializing. Anne died in 1938, and Augustus continued to live in the home alone until his own death in 1953. At that point, the home sat empty for a couple of years. In 1955, the Ukrainian Institute of America purchased the home. Over the years, the Institute has refurbished many of the building's opulent details to their original glory. The Institute is still headquartered in the mansion, and it is open to the public.

While many of the 19th-century mansions of New York's storied Fifth Avenue were demolished over the years, the Harry Sinclair Mansion was preserved and now houses the Ukrainian Institute of America. The home was built in 1899 by Charles Pierrepont Henry Gilbert, an architect known for his opulent designs. Originally built for Isaac and Mary Fletcher, the property was sold to controversial oil magnate Harry Sinclair in 1918. The following decade, Sinclair went to prison for tampering with a jury during the government's efforts to investigate the actions of his company in leasing federal lands in the West. The event was known as the Teapot Dome Scandal and was one of the most newsworthy events of the early 20th century. The building is unique in that it remains largely unchanged from the time of its construction. The mansion is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. 

Harry Ford Sinclair Mansion (now the Ukrainian Institute of America)

The Duke family made their fortune in tobacco in North Carolina in the years following the Civil War. The Duke empire began with Washington Duke. Duke's sons, James and Benjamin, eventually joined their father in running American Tobacco.&nbsp; In 1901, Benjamin Duke bought the spec-built mansion on Fifth Avenue which was designed by the architectural firm of Welch, Smith &amp; Provot. The home is five stories with a very narrow facade facing Fifth Avenue and a long entrance facade on Eighty-Second Street. The home features a mansard roof, which is a unique feature in a city of mostly flat-topped buildings. The terraced roof offers views of Central Park to the rear and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Benjamin Duke lived in the mansion with his wife until 1907, when he sold it to his brother, James, who was in the process of building a home at Seventy-Eighth and Fifth (now the Institute of Fine Arts). When the home was completed in 1912, James Duke moved out of 1009 and the next occupant was Angier Duke, son of Benjamin. From that time until the early 2000s, the home remained in the Duke family.&nbsp; The home has changed hands a couple of times since the early 2000s. Most recently, Mexican telecom magnate Carlos Slim purchased the property for $44 million, stating that he would use it for a place to stay when he was in the city for business. Within a few years, however, Slim put the mansion on the market for $80 million. In 2016, the mansion was removed from the market and has not been relisted as of this writing.

The Duke Residence at 1009 Fifth Avenue was built in 1901 by developers William and Thomas Hall. Shortly after the mansion's completion, Benjamin Duke, son of tobacco magnate Washington Duke, purchased the property. At the time, the mansion was one of many palatial private homes along what came to be known as "Millionaire's Row." Today this one of the last remaining vestiges of Fifth Avenue's Gilded Age Era. The mansion, which remained in the Duke family until recent years, is a New York City Landmark. The building is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places. 

Benjamin Duke Residence (Duke-Semans House)

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;On August 7, 1963, Jacqueline
Kennedy rushed her baby boy, Patrick, to Children's Hospital in Boston. Sadly,
Patrick died two days later from a serious lung ailment. Before Jackie even had
time to&nbsp;grieve the loss of her baby boy, Jackie became a widow three
months later&nbsp;as she witnessed her husband's assassination. At the age of
34, Jackie Kennedy buried a child and became a widow. Despite these agonizing
hardships, Jackie summoned her inner strength and maintained her poise. 
 
&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Since she was no longer America's first lady,
Jackie and her two children moved out of the White House and began their search
for a new home. After living at several places, Jackie and her children
eventually called 1040 Fifth Avenue their new home. This four-bedroom apartment
included several staff rooms, a library, and even a wine cellar. For the next
31 years, this apartment would be her home. 
 


&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;During
these 31 years, Jackie continued to live a fulfilling life. In 1968, she
married the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. Even though&nbsp;the
media and the Roman Catholic Church&nbsp;ridiculed Jackie for marrying a Greek Orthodox, Jackie and Aristotle&nbsp;remained married for seven
years. Unfortunately, Aristotle died in 1975, leaving Jackie as a widow for a
second time. Even though she encountered another tragedy, Jackie continued to
make the most of her life by pursuing a career. Most people label Jackie as
John F. Kennedy's wife; however, she was also a standout student who excelled
in writing stories and learning foreign languages.&nbsp;Jackie utilized these
special skills when she went&nbsp;to work for&nbsp;The Viking Press&nbsp;in
New York City,&nbsp;and she eventually worked as a senior editor for&nbsp;Doubleplay.&nbsp;

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;After 64
years filled with many adventures, heartbreaks, and accomplishments, Jackie&nbsp;Kennedy Onassis died from non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma&nbsp;cancer at the age of 64
on May 19, 1994. &nbsp;Her spokesperson, Nancy Tuckerman, reported that she
died in the apartment that she called home. During her final days, Jackie was
surrounded by her children and family. Following her death, Americans were
heartbroken to lose a cultural icon who &nbsp;had&nbsp;the perfect combination of beauty and brains. President Bill Clinton stated,&nbsp;"More than any other
woman of her time, she captivated our nation and the world with her
intelligence, elegance, and grace.”&nbsp;

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;Outside
of her apartment, people placed candles to honor her life and legacy. Even
though Jackie Kennedy Onassis lost her battle with cancer, she won the hearts
of countless people across the globe.

After the death of President John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline "Jackie" Kennedy left the White House and moved to 1040 Fifth Avenue. By moving to Manhattan's Upper East Side, Jackie hoped that New Yorkers would give her privacy as she grieved her husband's death. In this luxurious apartment, Jackie learned to live a new normal as she raised her children and found love again. Jackie and her children left 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but this apartment became their true home.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's Apartment

The Neue Galerie occupies the William Star Miller House, a historic mansion on Fifth Avenue. The home was constructed in 1914 for William Star Miller II, a New York industrialist and real estate developer. Carrère and Hastings – famous for designing the New York Public Library Main Branch, the Henry Clay Frick House, and many other buildings – were hired to plan the William Star Miller House. The exterior of the building suggests three primary stories, though there are actually five stories including a basement. The building was heavily inspired by King Louis XIII’s Place des Voges in Le Marais, France. This inspiration is evident in the mansard roof and stone balustrade that decorates the cornice. The general style of the structure is Neo-Classical, though the detailing and materials suggest a distinct Beaux-Arts influence. The building measures one hundred feet long by fifty feet wide, both an aesthetically pleasing proportion and an appropriate fit for a New York City lot.The interior of the William Star Miller House reflects an early twentieth century penchant for bright airy spaces. Darker hardwood floors and paneling are contrasted by crisp white marble pillars, plaster ceilings, and floor to ceiling windows. Carrère and Hastings’ Beaux-Arts touches are particularly prominent in the stairways, railings, and skylights. Miller occupied his home until his death in 1935. His wife, Edith Caroline Miller, maintained residence until her death in 1944. After Edith Miller died, the house was purchased by socialite Grace Vanderbilt, who also occupied the home until her death in 1953. The building was then utilized by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which stored many of their archival materials there.In 1994, art dealer Serge Sabarsky and philanthropist Ronald S. Lauder purchased the William Star Miller House. The two men had met in 1967 and bonded over their shared appreciation of Austrian and German art from the early twentieth century. Ever since their friendship began in Sabarsky’s German and Austrian Expressionist art gallery in 1967, the two had been planning to open a museum to exhibit what they felt was the pinnacle of art from this period of time. In order to make this dream a reality, Sabarsky and Lauder purchased the historic home and began renovating it into a museum space. However, Sabarsky passed away in 1996, and Lauder labored to complete the museum in his friend's honor.After extensive renovations by Annabelle Selldorf of Selldorf Architects, the Neue Galerie opened on November 16, 2001. The project’s goals were to maintain historical details while updating the museum to have necessary modern features. Fortunately for historical authenticity, the YIVO Institute boarded over the wood paneling rather than destroying it when they occupied the building. The paneling was re-revealed during the renovation. The decorative arts and fine arts intertwine throughout Neue Galerie, with furnishings and furniture complementing paintings and sculpture. The first floor serves as an entry space and hosts Café Sabarsky. The second floor is dedicated to Viennese art from the early twentieth century. Art by the Vienna Workshops, Egon Schiele, and Gustav Klimt all appear in this gallery. In 2006, the Neue Galerie purchased one of their most significant works, Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, for $135 million – at the time, the highest sum ever paid for a painting. The third floor of the Neue Galerie explores German art and also focuses on the early twentieth century. Expressionist artists Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Emil Nolde are all well represented. Other areas of emphasis are Bauhaus artists, such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Neue Sachlichkeit artists, like Otto Dix. The Neue Galerie works to juxtapose an appreciation of the current locational culture, as well as to present to visitors a view of Germany and Austria that they may not initially associate with the countries.

The Neue Galerie in New York is a museum that is dedicated to exploring early twentieth century German and Austrian art. Formed by two friends who had a penchant for art appreciation and the decorative arts, the Neue Galerie seeks to show how these two concepts intertwine through the art that the galleries display. Additionally, the museum is located in the historic William Star Miller House, which retains much of its original character. Since its founding in 2001, the Neue Galerie has continued to enchant visitors from all across the globe. The Galerie can be found on the Museum Mile in Manhattan, where it sits alongside other museums in the area. 

Neue Galerie

Ernest Flagg (1857-1947), the architect of the Lewis G. Morris House, was a relative of Cornelius Vanderbilt who built a successful practice in New York City after studying at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Flagg opened an office in New York in 1891 and designed notable buildings including the 41-story Singer Building on lower Broadway and the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washington. Flagg also designed the first cooperative apartment house in Manhattan at 28th Street and Madison Avenue. Flagg filed papers in early 1913 for building a $50,000 house on the Morris lot in Manhattan.Park Avenue was transitioning from a middle-class to upper-class neighborhood in the early twentieth century, especially after the train tracks were removed from the street and buried. A wealthy attorney named Amos Pinchot bought up land along Park Avenue and built a stately mansion. Pinchot agreed to sell lots to those who promised to build impressive mansions. One lot-buyer was Lewis G. Morris II.Lewis Governeur Morris II (1882-1967) was a descendant of governors and judges from New York and New Jersey. Morris was born in Newport, Rhode Island, and graduated from Harvard U. in 1906. Lewis married Alletta Nathalie Lorillard Bailey in 1908, a distant cousin and a champion in women's tennis in the 1910s. Morris was a member of the New York Stock Exchange and a partner in Morris &amp; Pope, a brokerage firm, founded in 1915. The firm was heavily in debt and failed in 1917. Since the house in Manhattan and their Newport mansion were under his wife's name, the family retained ownership. He and his wife were able to successfully argue that Mrs. Morris held all of the couple's assets and Mr. Morris was penniless. Mr. Morris paid a $10,000 fine and spent time in debtor's prison in 1920. He did not go back to advising others how to invest their money, understandably.Mrs. Morris fell ill in late 1934 and died in the Manhattan house in January 1934. Mr. Morris left the house and leased it in the 1930s and 1940s. Mr. Morris remarried in 1946 to Princess de Braganca, formerly Anita Stewart. The couple later moved into the Manhattan house where they lived until Mr. Morris died at age 85 in 1967. The mansion was purchased by the New World Foundation in 1968 for $400,000. The foundation provides charitable grants for education, health, and research. After decades of ownership, the building changed hands and is now owned by the Avi Chai Foundation, a private foundation founded in 1984 and dedicated to the perpetuation of the Jewish people and Judaism.The 22-room mansion is built of brick and decorated with stone. The west facade of the building, facing Park Avenue, is only 25 feet wide with two bays; there are two windows on each level, with the second-floor openings leading to a cast iron balcony and the upper level having quarter round fan windows. The main block of the house extends 40 feet along E. 85th Street from its Park Avenue corner and is topped by five dormer windows. The main block turns at a right angle from the sidewalk three times to form a courtyard along E. 85th. The main entrance faces the courtyard at the first right angle turn, reached by marble steps. Tall, narrow stairstep windows face the street from the courtyard, lighting the three levels of staircases inside the connecting wing. Beyond the courtyard is a narrower wing facing E. 85th Street, with a double-doored garage entrance on the first floor. Above the garage entrance are connected oriel windows on the first and second stories with a third-floor balcony atop the second-floor window and quarter round fan windows below the gable roof. The profile of this gable end, as well as the one facing Park Avenue, has a stepped gable top, reminding some of Dutch architecture from colonial New York. Flagg included interior architectural details suitable for his wealthy client, including fluted pilasters, paneled walls, and fancy door and window moldings.

The dark red brick house on the southeast corner of E. 85th Street and Park Avenue is the Lewis G. Morris House. The 3-1/2 story house was built in 1913 to 1914 for wealthy financier Lewis Gouverneur Morris. Although the current entrance to the house is at the northeast corner of the house near the E. 85th Street sidewalk, the building has been given a Park Avenue address (#1015). The house was listed on the National Register in 1977 and is significant for its Neo-Federal architectural style and as the work of architect Ernest Flagg. Also known as the New World Foundation Building (the new owner in 1968), the building is now owned by a private foundation, the Avi Chai Foundation.

Lewis G. Morris House

One of the improvements George Fisher Baker Jr. (1878-1937) made to the house built for Francis F. Palmer in 1918 at 75 E. 93rd Street was the addition of a ballroom wing in 1928, which has been adapted to be the church cathedral. Baker Jr. married Edith Brevoort Kane in 1911 and the couple had four children. Baker Jr. was vacationing on a yacht in 1937 when he was stricken with appendicitis. An emergency appendectomy was performed at sea by his personal physician and one hailed from a passing ship, but Baker Jr. died in Honolulu soon afterwards. It was said to be the first vacation the banker had taken in 30 years! His widow lived until 1977 but sold the house at #75 in 1958.Baker Jr.'s father, George F. Baker Sr. (1840-1931), was one of the wealthiest men in America and a close friend of another powerful financier, J. P. Morgan. For many years, Baker Sr. was the Chairman of The First National Bank of New York (later First National City Bank and even later Citibank). Baker Sr. was a noted philanthropist and donated funds to build the Harvard's Business school campus in Boston in the 1920s. The townhouse at 67 E. 93rd Street was built as a residence for Baker Sr. by his son, Baker Jr., but the elder Baker died in 1931 while still living on Madison Avenue. The Baker family installed a railroad spur line in the basement, with private cars linked to the tracks beneath Park Avenue! The townhouse was occupied or owned by succeeding generations of Bakers until 1988, when George F. Baker IV sold it to Richard H. Jenrette. Jenrette used the townhouse at #67 as one of his residences and the building at #69 as his office.Richard Hampton Jenrette (1929-2018) earned an MBA at Harvard and founded the Wall Street firm of Donaldson Lufkin Jenrette in 1960 with two of his former classmates. The company went public in 1970 and was the first investment firm in the country to do so. After the company was sold to Equitable Life Assurance Society in 1985, Jenrette served as The Equitable's Chairman and CEO from 1987 to his retirement in 1996. Jenrette was called by some "the last gentleman on Wall Street." One of Jenrette's hobbies was restoring old homes; he wrote a book on the topic in 1995 - Adventures with Old Houses - and jokingly called himself a "house-aholic." He passed away in 2018 at one of his beloved old homes, the Roper House in Charleston, South Carolina. Jenrette gifted his residence, 67 E. 93rd Street, and several other historic homes to the CAHPT - an organization he had founded - upon his death. The mission of the CAHPT is to "preserve protect and open to the public examples of classic American architecture, surrounding landscapes, and scenic trails..." His primary residence in his later years was Edgewater, an 1824 mansion on the Hudson River in Duchess County, N.Y. that Jenrette bought in 1969 from the author Gore Vidal.The building at 69 E. 93rd Street was built as a carriage house/garage with an apartment above by George F. Baker Jr. A distinctive feature of the building is a colonnade on its east facade, facing the "French courtyard." Four pairs of fluted ionic columns frame a second-floor loggia. CAHPT put #67 and #69 up for sale in 2021. Tours have been suspended due to the covid pandemic.

The George F. Baker Jr. Houses are a complex of brick buildings at 67, 69, and 75 East 93rd Street in the Carnegie Hill neighborhood of Manhattan's Upper East Side. All of the buildings in the complex, on the northwest of the intersection with Park Avenue, were designed by Delano &amp; Aldrich. The three-story house at the intersection (#75) was built for Francis F. Palmer in 1918, and bought by George F. Baker Jr. in 1927, a year after Palmer's death. Baker built the rest of the complex, edging a courtyard. #75 has been owned by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia since 1958. The Classical American Homes Preservation Trust (CAHPT) bought #69 in 1997 and used the building as its headquarters until 2020. The Baker family sold #67 in 1988 and it was used as a private residence or an art gallery until it was acquired by the CAHPT in 2018. The complex was listed in the National Register in 1982 and as part of the Park Avenue Historic District. The buildings are New York City landmarks as well as part of the Carnegie Hill local historic district.

George F. Baker Jr. Houses

William Goadby Loew was a successful stockbroker and financier, as well as a thoroughbred horse racer. He married Florence Baker, the daughter of George Fisher Baker, who was believed to be one of the three wealthiest men in the United States at the time of his death. Florence inherited $5 million at her father's death. In 1930, the couple commissioned the firm of Walker &amp; Gillette to design a home for them on E. 93rd Street, across from Florence's brother. The firm designed an expansive home in the English Regency style with a masonry facade and a distinctive concave entrance wall. The home was completed in 1932, the worst year of the Great Depression, and because of the economic collapse, it was the last of the palatial private residences to be built on the Upper East Side. For a time, the couple enjoyed a life of society parties and dinners in the home, which was attended to by their sixteen servants. Florence Loew only lived in the home a short time, however, and died in 1936. William Loew continued to live in the home until his death in 1955. The following year, the home was briefly opened to the public before the couple's collection of artworks and antiques was put up for auction. The mansion's next owner was Broadway impresario Billy Rose. Rose bought the home in 1956 and lived there until his death ten years later. Following Rose's death, the mansion became the home of the Smithers Alcoholism Center, and the elaborate interiors of the first two owners were removed to create a more clinical environment. In 1999, the exclusive private girls' school, the Spence School, purchased the Loew home. Remarkably, as the mansion was being rehabilitated for use as a school, the original Loew interiors were found in storage and were able to used in the home's most recent incarnation. The building, which is often featured in movies and television shows, is a New York City Landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The palatial home at 56 E. 93rd Street was the residence of William Goadby Loew and his wife, Florence, who was known as "Queenie." Loew was a stockbroker and ran his own Wall Street firm, which was largely responsible for managing the wealth his wife inherited from her father. In 1930, in the midst of the Great Depression, the couple commissioned the home, which has been described as "the last palace to be built on the Upper East Side."  The home, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is now home to the Spence School, a private girls' school.

Carnegie Hill Historic Walking Tour, Manhattan's Upper East Side

The Jewish Museum of New York

Introduction

Images

Backstory and Context

Sources

Additional Information