I was out in Turtle Bay (AKA the eastmost part of midtown) and took some pictures of a construction site:
The site is the northeast corner of 51st Street and First Avenue. The First Avenue blockfront is that site, a thin (one 25-foot lot wide) slab apartment house (with the white paint on its side) and then three Old-Law or pre-Old-Law tenements to 52nd Street. The building on the right with yellow bricks and multiple setbacks is an apartment house fronting on 52nd Street and abutting the First Avenue slab.
The block’s history is simultaneously boring and illustrative of the neighborhood, which started as poor and industrial and is now quite tony. Here’s 1910, with the East River on the right:
Pre-Old-Law tenements facing First Avenue, some rowhouses on both side streets, Old-Law tenements on both side streets, an ice company and a construction company. Yellow buildings are wood framed, pink are brick-walled with wood interiors. Ten years later, the only major difference is that the ice company has changed names:
By 1930, things are looking up, in terms of social class:
The contractor’s yard and the adjacent 51st Street tenements have been replaced by four modern and (based on what I otherwise know about the area) high-end apartment houses. Nine-, ten-, and eleven-story apartments built in the 1920s would be steel-framed buildings. On 52nd Street we’ve got three modern buildings where the ice company was, and a cleared site. By 1955, it’s pretty close to the modern condition:
The entire 52nd Street blockfront is a series of steel-framed apartment houses, and the slab building noted earlier appears to be physically part of the eastmost in the line. It’s weird that its architectural style doesn’t match, unless that was intended to make a distinction between the nicer buildings on the quiet, dead-end side street and the slightly-less-nice building on the avenue. The irregular waterfront has been replaced by the East River/FDR Drive. And the three southernmost First Avenue tenements have been replaced by a six-story apartment house on the corner. Looking at the Department of Buildings filings, we’re going to get a 30-story building on that corner lot, leaving the handful of rowhouses on 51st Street and the three First Avenue tenements north of the slab as the last remnants of the old neighborhood.
Now for the ghost:
The rough brick below the fifth floor of the slab apartment house is the old party wall between two buildings now gone: the tenement where the slab was built and the one that has just been demolished between the slab and the six-story mid-1900s building. Those diagonal channels are tying the party wall to the steel frame of the slab. Two two chimneys running up the side of the slab were extensions for the recently-demolished tenement, and you can see the scars of the fireplaces below on the masonry of the party wall, in line with the chimneys. So far, so good, but now the weirdnesses: First, there are six depressions in the party wall: three just to the right (east) of the west chimney line, and three just easy of the east chimney line. What are they? Even if there were doors between the adjoining buildings (very unlikely) putting them right next to the chimneys seems like a terrible idea. Are they somehow extensions of the fireplaces?
Weirdness number two: the white paint covers some brick irregularities far above the roof of the old tenement. At the highest point of the white paint, there is a horizontal stripe that almost looks like a flashing line. Are these lot-line windows that were bricked in some time in the past? The only info I can readily access between 1955 and the 2010s is the 1980 tax photo and it doesn’t show if there were windows below those still visible today.
So, some things are clear, some are not. Life goes on.
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