Скачать или смотреть 973 Fifth Avenue: NYC Home of the Week (plus the wild way its architect died)

The NYC Home of the Week is 973 Fifth Avenue, in the Upper East Side 👇

Completed in 1907, it’s one of a VERY few remaining Gilded Age mansions on Upper Fifth Avenue still used as a home. Many were torn down and replaced by apartment buildings. A large number of those that survived are now being used as something other than a home. Great examples being the buildings immediately adjacent to this one. The exceptional building to the north is now the Ukrainian Institute of America. The lovely bowed building to the south now houses the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.

973 Fifth was built for Henry Cook, who already owned a much larger one on the northeast corner of 77th and Fifth. He was downsizing (to a 16K+ square foot home). The shift was easy, in 1880 he’d purchased for $500K the entire block between Fifth and Madison from 78th to 79th Streets. Known as the “Cook Block.” Though he sold off many lots on the block, he restricted their deeds so that only homes up to 6 stories could be built, a restriction that continues.

In 1902, Cook commissioned Stanford White as the architect for what would be his new home at 973 Fifth. White probably seemed a natural choice, he a famous Gilded Age architect and part of “high society.” Before the house was completed in 1907, Cook and White were both dead. Best I can tell, Cook passed away of natural causes at age 83.

White’s death was different. It has always seemed to me that most do not know White’s full story, somehow. He’s a celebrated architect, those describing his surviving work always eager to note his involvement. Until I began researching other NYC buildings, I didn’t know the story of how he died. That he had been murdered, in public, during a performance in the now gone old Madison Square Garden (designed by White), by a man obsessed with the allegation that White had drugged and rapped his wife when she was 16. It was a huge scandal that seemingly rocked the “high society” world in which White and Thaw existed. It might be because so many worked so hard to distance themselves from White in the aftermath of that scandal that the story seems buried to me. Or maybe I was the only one who didn’t know it?