First Avenue Estate

City and Suburban Homes Company's First Avenue Estate Historic District
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
U.S. Historic district
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New York City Landmark #1692
Location	1168--1200 First Ave., 401--429 E. Sixty-fourth, and 402--430 E. Sixty-fifth Sts., New York, New York
Coordinates	40°45′45″N 73°57′32″W Fatal error: The format of the coordinate could not be determined. Parsing failed.
Area	2.8 acres (1.1 ha)
Built	1898 (1898)
Architect	Ware,James E. & Sons; Ohm,Philip
Architectural style	Beaux Arts
NRHP reference #	86002622
NYCL #	1692
Significant dates
Added to NRHP	August 1, 1986
Designated {{{DESIGNATED_OTHER1_ABBR}}}	March 25, 1986
Designated NYCL	April 24, 1990 (most of the buildings) November 21, 2006 (York Avenue buildings)

The First Avenue Estate is a historic district on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, New York, US. It includes a series of tenement buildings on a city block bounded by First Avenue, 65th Street, York Avenue, and 64th Street. The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) in 1986 as the City and Suburban Homes Company's First Avenue Estate Historic District. It was designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in two stages in 1990 and 2006.

Description

The First Avenue Estate occupies an entire city block bounded by First Avenue, 65th Street, York Avenue, and 64th Street. The buildings were designed by James E. Ware based on a plan he submitted in 1896 to the Improved Housing Council competition. It was one of the oldest tenement projects developed by the City and Suburban Homes Company on Manhattan's Upper East Side, along with the Avenue A Estate further north between 78th and 79th streets. There are 15 buildings in the complex, which contain a total of 1,059 apartments. The buildings are one of the only examples in the US of full-block "light court" tenements, in which all apartments receive natural light from the external facade or an internal light court.

History

In the 1880s, there were 90,000 tenement buildings in New York City, which housed the vast majority of the city's residents. The First Avenue Estate buildings were built between 1898 and 1915. In 1977, Stahl York Avenue Co. bought the buildings.

The complex was originally designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) on April 24, 1990. This covered only the buildings on First Avenue (at the corners with 64th and 65th streets), along with the midblock buildings at 403–429 East 64th Street and 404–430 East 65th Street. The two buildings on York Avenue were excluded.

In 2006, the York Avenue buildings were designated as landmarks over the objections of Stahl, which had removed the facade cladding in an attempt to prevent the LPC from landmarking the buildings. Stahl had wanted to demolish the York Avenue buildings, calling them unprofitable and estimating that the building sites could be redeveloped for a profit of $200 million. This triggered a 15-year-long legal dispute. In 2016, the state's trial court, the New York Supreme Court, upheld the landmark designation. The New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, upheld the decision in 2018, finding that the First Avenue Estate buildings were a singular development and that Stahl had not sufficiently proved that the York Avenue designations amounted to a governmental "taking" of private property. The case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case in 2019.

See also

• List of New York City Designated Landmarks in Manhattan from 59th to 110th Streets
• National Register of Historic Places listings in Manhattan from 59th to 110th Streets

Sources

• Amendment to City & Suburban Homes Company, First Avenue Estate: 429 East 64th Street and 430 East 65th Street (PDF) (Report). New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. 2006-11-21.
• National Register of Historic Places Inventory/Nomination: City and Suburban Homes Company's First Avenue Estate Historic District (PDF) (Report). National Park Service. 1980.

This article "First Avenue Estate" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:First Avenue Estate. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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