The Northrup, 74-76 West 103rd St.

by Tom Miller

In 1894, developer Charles Buek commissioned George Keister to design two similar apartment buildings on the western blockfront of Manhattan Avenue between 102nd and 103rd Streets.  Like its near twin, the northern building was faced in beige brick above an undressed brownstone base.  The rusticated first floor was clad in variegated Roman brick and the entrance was protected by a handsome stone portico.  Keister added touches of Queen Anne to his otherwise Romanesque Revival style design.  Completed within the year, the Northport cost Buek $52,000 to construct, or about $1.9 million in 2024.

The six- and seven-room apartments were described in an advertisement as “very choice.”  Tenants enjoyed “perfect appointments and hall service,” said an ad, and “extra store rooms.”  (Hall service meant that uniformed “hall boys” were on hand to help with packages, mail, and other errands.) The $50 rent would translate to about $1,890 per month today.

The residents were comfortably middle- and upper-middle class.  One, however, found himself in trouble shortly after moving in.  William P. Robinson worked as a collector for Tillotson & Sons, book sellers.  (The term meant that he would collect outstanding amounts from retail customers.)  The 49-year-old was arrested on May 22, 1895.  The Yonkers, New York Statesman explained, “He is charged with having embezzled $10,000” and said, “The defalcation extends over a year.”  The police nabbed him just as he was preparing to leave for Chicago.

One, however, found himself in trouble shortly after moving in.

The Rev. James D. Steele lived here at least from 1900 through 1906.  A Presbyterian minister, while living here he was secretary of the Joint Committee on a Uniform Version of the Metrical Psalms.  The erudite clergyman also held a Ph.D. and made extra money teaching on the side.  In January 1900, he advertised, “Rev. J. D. Steele, PH. D., private tutor at pupils’ homes or at 74 West 103d St.”

Although Prohibition had ended in 1933, on March 28, 1938, the Yonkers, New York Statesman reported that resident Aldo Cipallini had been arrested “on a charge of possession of an illegal still.”  The 20-year-old was caught on a raid of a house in Tuckahoe, New York in which a 2,000-gallon still was found in operation.  Cipallini “insisted he was only a watchman.”  He was fined $200.

By 1950, novelist Gordon Friesen and his wife Agnes Sis Cunningham lived here.  The couple also founded Broadside, a political song magazine and during the 1940s were members of the Almanac Singers, a folk singing group based in Greenwich Village.  Friesen’s novel Flamethrowers recalled his childhood in a Russian Mennonite family in Oklahoma.

The McCarthy Era was difficult for Gordon and Sis Cunningham.  They were blacklisted and while living here subsisted on welfare.  In the Afterward to the couple’s joint autobiography Red Dust and Broadsides, Ronald D. Cohen noted, “The FBI visited Gordon in 1954, who was then living at 74 West 103rd Street, but he ‘stated he had nothing to say to the interviewing agents.’  Nonetheless, the local agent recommended to J. Edgar Hoover that a Security Index Card be prepared for Gordon, in addition to the ongoing file.”

In 1950 emerging artist Andy Warhol moved into a two-bedroom basement apartment with 17 “artists, writers, dancers,” according to Anthony Grudin in his Like a Little Dog.  Warhol’s biographer Victor Bockris writes, “It was a transition period, introducing him into the bohemian world of dance and theatre people.  He felt more affinity with them than with intellectuals…and for the first time Andy began, tentative, exploring the homosexual underground.”  Bockris quotes a visitor who said, “All I remember is Andy sitting there drawing, surrounded by this complete chaos and people doing things that would seem to be disruptive of any concentration.  The food was mixed in with the clothes.”

Shortly afterward, the Northrup and its fraternal twin to the south were incorporated into the Douglass Houses.  They were not demolished because, according to a 1959 report by the New York State Division of Housing and Urban Renewal, “They were the best constructed of the older buildings and required the least in major structural repairs.”

“The FBI visited Gordon in 1954, who was then living at 74 West 103rd Street, but he ‘stated he had nothing to say to the interviewing agents.’  Nonetheless, the local agent recommended to J. Edgar Hoover that a Security Index Card be prepared for Gordon, in addition to the ongoing file.”

Living here in 1989 was 29-year-old Marcus Bezear.  That spring he raped two women in the Penta Hotel.  A similar looking man was mistakenly arrested for the crime, but when Bezear raped another woman in the same hotel in August, he confessed to all three crimes.  He was  arrested on October 15 and charged with robbery and sexual abuse and held on $100,000 bail.

Once home to affluent, white-collar residents, the Northrup had sorely declined in 2014.  On October 5, television station PIX II reported, “When it rains, it really pours inside an Upper West Side apartment building.  The building, 74-76 West 103^rd Street, is nicknamed the ‘forgotten house,’ part of the Frederick Douglass Houses, operated by the New York City Housing Authority.”

Since Hurricane Sandy, the tenants told the reporter, streams of water poured into their apartments every time it rained.  Connie Taylor had lived in the building for half a century.  The reporter said, “The 61-year-old suffers from arthritis and scoliosis and has trouble walking, let along rearranging the buckets to catch all the rain water dripping through her leaky ceilings.”

Despite the drastic changes inside, the exterior of the Northrup is relatively unchanged since its completion in 1894.

Tom Miller is a social historian and blogger at daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com