Building: The Palmer-Starr House

As Central Park neared completion the streets between Fifth and Madison Avenues quickly filled with chocolate-colored brownstone residences. Intended for the middle and upper-middle classes, they were mostly carbon copies with shared cornices, steep stoops over deep basements, and rows of windows that lined up down the block.

In 1871 developer James E. Coburn commissioned J. W. Marshall to design a long row of ten such homes along East 73rd Street, stretching from No. 13 to 31. The five-story residences featured attractive details like bay windows at the parlor level and incised window enframements.

The merchant class neighborhood began changing as the turn of the century neared. Fifth Avenue along the park saw the arrival of the grand limestone and marble mansions of New York’s wealthiest citizens. One by one the brownstone homes of a generation earlier on the side streets were either razed or converted to fashionable showplaces for the rich.

In 1908 Nicholas Fletcher Palmer, president of both the Leather Manufacturers National Bank and N. F. Palmer & Co., a shipbuilding firm, purchased No. 19. The Palmers chose what was by now an impressive residential block. Five years earlier publisher Joseph Pulitzer had commissioned Stanford White to erect a Venetian Renaissance palace on the site of five brownstone houses just east of the Palmer House. Next door to them at No. 17 was Pulitzer’s son, Ralph who had renovated the outdated house to a neo-Renaissance mansion. Other millionaires on the block would include Albert A. Berg, Robert Cuddihy, president of Funk & Wagnalls; George Doubleday, chairman of Ingersoll-Rand; and Albert Blum.

The Palmers put architect F. H. Dodge to work on transforming their somewhat stuffy brownstone into a socially-acceptable home. Dodge had recently returned to New York after having designed a servant quarters and laundry building for the massive Henry M. Flagler mansion in Palm Beach. For the Palmer house he would turn to a variation of the newly-popular Federal Revival style.

Dodge removed the brownstone facade and dropped the entrance to street level. A formal, Ionic portico sheltered the centered entrance in the rusticated limestone base and provided a small balcony at the second story. Here three limestone arches framed delicate multi-paned windows capped with fanlights. French doors opened onto the miniature balcony. Above red brick contrasted with white limestone as the house rose to the dignified mansard roof with segmental-arched dormers.
Starr tempered his expertise in the jewelry field with an unlikely interest in technology. He was perhaps as well known as a prominent electrical engineer as he was as a jeweler. The family pedigree included Dr. Comfort Starr, a founder of Harvard College. Susan Starr’s family tree included George H. Danforth, a founder of the New York Bank Note Company

Unlike the Palmers, the Starr family would make No. 19 East 73rd Street home for decades.

The family included six children—V. Rosamond, Natalie, Theodore, H. Danforth, Louis and Malcolm. V. Rosamond, the elder daughter, was introduced to society in 1926 at a dinner dance at Pierre’s given by her father. Four years later her wedding reception was held in the house which “was decorated with butterfly roses and Southern smilax.”

Howard and Susan lived on in the house as their children grew, married and left. In 1945 the aging couple moved to an apartment at No. 800 Park Avenue. Here Howard died on November 29, 1946 at the age of 74.

That year in 1946, the house on 73rd Street was converted to apartments—one per floor. Over sixty years later it remains.

Building Description Provided By Gabriella Dufwa