Building: 50 Riverside Drive

On August 12, 1928, a prominent headline in the New York Times proclaimed that “New Park Plans Revive Building on Riverside Drive.” Currently, a large project costing “millions of dollars” (which was quite a sum in 1928) was underway to “cover over the railroad tracks that now disfigure the waterfront,” transforming the western riverside from what was ostensibly a rail yard from “seventy-second Street north into a beautiful park.” It was this beautification project, so to speak, that compelled one real estate developer to state that “on the Drive it will only be a few years” before “all the older apartment houses will come down and this, our finest thoroughfare from a scenic standpoint, will present a solid mass of high-class apartment houses that will dwarf their five- and six-story predecessors.” Overall, many believed that there would be an “even greater metamorphosis on Riverside Drive” after the railways were concealed and new and much larger apartment houses constructed, “that that which took place on Park Avenue.”

Of course, looking back from the twenty-first century, the article and its many predictions have proven correct. Riverside Park is a jewel of the Upper West Side, and its beautiful and luxurious apartment houses with their unobstructed views of the Hudson certainly rival those lining Park Avenue. But in 1928, as the improvements to the park were still underway, constructing such a residence on the hopes of the Drive’s bright future was still a gamble. And, as the story went to press, one such gamble had just begun. “A few days ago,” the story explained, a site had been “assembled” and purchased “for prospective improvement” at 50 Riverside Drive. Given the attention focused on the Drive, it should come as no surprise that the press followed the progress on the new building site closely. Less than four months later the Times reported on the financing for the sixteen-story apartment house “under construction” at 50 Riverside Drive. The short announcement also made sure to mention that the “structure” would “contain about 491 rooms, divided into ninety-one suites of four to eight rooms in addition to two penthouse apartments,” all of which was designed by the New York architectural firm of Gronenberg & Leuchtag…

Description provided by Deanna Kory