1009 Fifth Avenue - New York

It took time for all of Fifth Avenue along Central Park to be developed and this block of Fifth Avenue was not developed until 1899 when four French Beaux-Arts houses at 1006, 1007, 1008, and 1009 Fifth Avenue were under construction. While 1006 Fifth Avenue was designed by Richard W. Buckley and built for William H. and Katherine T. Gelshenen, the three houses at 1007, 1008, and 1009 Fifth Avenue were built as a group under the same building permit and were completed in 1901. Designed by the firm of Welch, Smith & Provot, they were constructed for William W. Hall and Thomas M. Hall, prominent New York City builders and developers. The two houses at 1006 and 1007 Fifth Avenue were demolished in 1972 and the much-altered house at 1008 Fifth Avenue was demolished in February 1977.

From Left to Right, 1009, 1008, 1007 and 1006 Fifth Avenue

1009 Fifth Avenue Today

The surviving house at 1009 Fifth Avenue, like the others in the row built by Hall & Hall, was built on speculation. Soon after completion it was purchased by Benjamin Newton and Sarah Pearson Angier Duke. Duke was a director of the American Tobacco Company which he and his brother, James B. Duke, had formed in 1890. He was also a member of the Calumet Club and Ardsley Club and the Automobile Club of America.

In late 1901 the critic Montgomery Schuyler ridiculed this building and others in an article in the magazine Architectural Record entitled in “The Architecture of the Billionaire District.” Schuyler conceded some competent touches in the house, but generally dismissed 1009 Fifth Avenue (and other mansions on Fifth), singling out the sheet-metal cornice painted to imitate stone. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Schuyler wrote, “that, when a man goes into ‘six figures’ for his dwelling house, he ought not to make its upperworks of sheet metal. That is a cheap pretence which nothing can distinguish from vulgarity.”

East Eight-second Street Facade

This five-story corner mansion has a narrow exposure facing on Fifth Avenue and a long entrance facade on East Eighty-second Street. A moat-like areaway, surmounted by a cast-iron railing, separates the house from the street. The basement and first floor are executed in rusticated limestone, while the upper stories are of brick (now painted), with heavy limestone trim. Limestone quoins outline and clearly define the major architectural components of the design. The roof, with two towers rising above the ends of the main block of the house, is covered with red tiling and crowned by handsome, boldly scaled copper cresting. The main block of the Eighty-second Street facade is symmetrically composed; two slightly projecting corner pavilions flank a central four-story curved bay, a tripartite composition very typical of Beaux-Arts design.

Main Entrance

The main entrance, at the first floor of the curved central bay, has an elegant glass and iron marquee. Glass and wrought-iron doors are separated from similarly treated side windows by engaged columns. Stone balconies on carved brackets appear below the windows of the second floor. These second-floor windows are surmounted by handsomely carved cartouches in the curved bay, and by pediments in the flanking pavilions. Limestone enframements link the windows at the third and fourth floors where low wrought-iron railings are employed as window guards. Above the fourth floor there is a projecting continuous band course on brackets, a horizontal accent which is repeated with stronger emphasis by the elaborate modillioned roof cornice. The roof cornice is crowned by a stone balustrade behind which appear dormer windows with richly adorned arched pediments. At the east end of the Eighty-second Street facade is a four-story wing which lends a sophisticated note of asymmetry to the over-all design.

Curved Conservatory Window

A curved metal conservatory window supported by a fluted corbel appears at the second-floor level. Delicate floral borders surround the transoms of this window which is surmounted by a profusion of carved ornament. The Fifth Avenue facade is dominated by a broad, curved limestone bay which extends from the basement through the fourth floor. Like the curved bay of the entrance facade, it is crowned by a balustrade. Rich garlands adorn the wall of this bay between the second and third floors, and iron window guards appear at the third and fourth floors.

Second Floor Landing

Fourth Floor Bedroom

Former Conservatory in the Foreground

Benjamin Duke sold the house to his brother James in 1907. After James' new mansion at the corner of East Seventy-eighth Street and Fifth Avenue, was completed in 1912, the house was occupied by Angier B. Duke, son of Benjamin Duke. Angier Duke's sister, Mary, married A.J. Drexel Biddle in 1919, and that couple took up residence in the house. It was during their occupancy that the modern designer Karl Bock added to the existing French-style interiors. At various times in the 1930’s and 1940’s Bock installed a ribbon-striped sycamore dressing room, an oval, black-marble-and-mirror bathroom, and a royal-blue glass-tile bathroom with a modernistic sink that looks like a robot. These are among the most unusual interiors on Fifth Avenue. In 1984 the exterior was restored by the architects Gerald Allen & Associates.