Building: 246 West End Avenue

246 West End Avenue, designed by J.E.R. Carpenter for real estate developer S. Fullerton Weaver, was completed in 1913. James Edwin R. Carpenter was born in Tennessee in 1867, and educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He eventually founded his architectural practice in New York City, doing commissions for S. Fullerton Weaver. Later, he designed buildings for other developers as well as for a consortium in which he was also an investor. His design for 246 West End Avenue is very similar to a design he did for Weaver at 960 Park Avenue, completed a year earlier.

Like 246 West End Avenue, many of his pre-World War I designs featured two grand apartments per floor, with two or three major reception rooms end-to-end along the major façade, four or five bedrooms along the exterior of the property, and multiple servants rooms, servants’ hall and kitchen open to an interior court. To maximize privacy, there were separate elevators for each line of apartments. Other buildings designed in this manner include 550 Park Avenue at 62nd Street (1917), 950 Park Avenue at 82nd Street (1921), 920 Fifth Avenue at 73rd Street (1922) and 1172 Park Avenue at 93rd Street (in 1926). Carpenter’s only other West Side building, 173-175 Riverside Drive, between 89th and 90th Streets (completed in 1927) is typical of the structures Carpenter designed in the later 1920’s which generally featured somewhat smaller apartments (and lower ceiling heights) on larger plots of land. Besides apartment buildings, Carpenter also designed the 54-story Lincoln Building at 60 East 42nd Street (across from Grand Central Terminal) in 1930.

Description provided by Deanna Kory