The picture above shows the Central Park Apartments, also known as the Navarro Flats, also known as the Spanish Flats, a complex of eight buildings constructed in the 1880s and demolished in the 1920s so that the valuable site – facing the south end of Central Park – could be redeveloped with much larger buildings. Christopher Gray gives a good capsule history here. It’s worth noting that the only thing Spanish about the buildings was their developer, José Francisco de Navarro: the exterior architecture was a mish-mash of various styles popular in New York at the time, and the interior had a series of narrow courtyards surrounded by the 13-story mass of the buildings. The architects, Hubert & Pirsson, also designed the Chelsea Hotel, and there is some similarity between the buildings.
The complex plays a major role in an 1893 discussion of the new idea of living in high-rise apartments, “The Cliff-Dwellers of New York,” published in The Cosmopolitan magazine, which dropped “The” from its title a long time ago. The article emphasizes the verticality of the buildings, which from a modern perspective are neither particularly tall nor vertically-oriented. This sketch of the central courtyard shows why the buildings became functionally obsolete: because they pre-dated the long discussion about light and air for tall buildings, about half of their windows had the kind of cramped views we associate with tenement air-shafts:
The article also emphasized the views from the street-facing windows. Here’s a view of Central Park looking north and west:
The tall building in the distance is the Dakota, half a mile away. The subsequent development of the Upper West Side – everything to the left of the park – means that the Hudson River is no longer visible from the 13th floor of a building on Central Park South. Here’s a view west and south, with a lot of rowhouses:
Much of the article text is boosterism of the most boring sort: “In New York City alone has the apartment-house attained almost perfection.” Besides that sentence being wrong in multiple ways, it’s another reminder of the changes in perspective over time. No one today would call that courtyard “perfection”, and few people today would be impressed by a view simply because it was from some 150 feet above grade.
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