Art Nouveau, as an architectural style, is quite rare in New York, which is odd if you think about it. The style was popular in the 1890s and up to World War I, which is a period when NYC had an enormous building boom. You’d expect some link there. Instead, you have to search for any examples at all. I’m sure there’s a rational reason – or reasons – but maybe the answer is as simple as architectural styles are styles and so vary by society, by location, by time, and so on. Maybe developers and architects in New York at the turn of the twentieth century simply didn’t like it?
A postcard from the 1930s of the 1903 Hotel Belleclaire on the Upper West Side:
It’s not even all that extreme; it’s just very different from its neighbors so it looks odd. It’s famous these days – as much as anyone thinks about it at all – for being a rare example of the Art Nouveau style and for being one of the first big buildings designed by Emery Roth, who went on to a long career designing Manhattan high-rises.
As always, the postcard art is so crude as to approach cartoon level. Here’s the tax photo from a few years later:
So, yeah, that’s what it looks like. The vague sense that you’re in Europe rather than NYC is quickly dispelled by the messy storefront construction and the neighbor’s water tank.
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