The gimmick is simple: wander down one block in New York at a time. Usually somewhere in Midtown Manhattan, but who knows where we’ll end up.
Some blocks overflow with history, cool buildings, and lots of street life and character. And some are basically a Duane Reade, a pile of scaffolding, and a bunch of dudes sorting piles of Amazon deliveries. But there’s always something to dig up.
Will I get to every block? Nope. Is this even a good idea? Who’s really to say. But it’ll be fun, promise.
Our first stop is a quiet-ish residential block of Murray Hill, nestled on the southern edge of Midtown. It’s a pretty, but mostly anonymous and understated, and bookended by a weird modernist Park Avenue office building, some pre-war mid-rises, and a dangling piece of lasagna.
I’m not quite going in order, but you can follow along in Google Maps here.
109 East 39th St (1887)
Look at this bad boy: The Helena Flint House at 109 West 39th, a bold red-brick Queen Anne rowhouse.
It was built by heiress Helena Flint, according to Tom Miller (aka Daytonian in Manhattan, who I’m probably going to be linking to a lot because of just how comprehensive his research is). By the 1920s, it was home to Princess Vilma Lwoff-Parlaghy, an eccentric artist who emigrated from Hungary in 1907 ”with a large retinue of servants and a private menagerie including an ibis, an alligator, a bear and two falcons.” She became known for her paintings of several dignitaries and in 1916 here hosted a reception to unveil one of the earliest portraits of Nikola Tesla.
But by August 1923, her fortunes had changed for the worse, following a $12,000 dispute with the Plaza Hotel over an unpaid bill as well some other loans that went bad. Appraising the townhouse, Christopher Grey at the New York Times wrote:
“A Deputy Sheriff stood watch outside her front door to take possession of the house because she had not repaid the loan. The Times noted at the time "her house resembles an art museum" with works by Van Dyck, Rembrandt and Rubens, and the sheriff was put off only by pleas from the Princess's doctor, who said she was near death. She died at 3 A.M. on Aug. 29 -- with the Deputy Sheriff in the hall outside her room.”
As it passed through various owners, the house later became a speakeasy, then a girls’ club, and since the 1990s has been home to a Jewish spiritual center.
This lil guy has seen a lot.
The Tuscany Hotel, on the left, is also a high-quality 1920s holdover. And yet, I didn’t get any photos I really liked. So we’ll keep moving.
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111-113 East 39th Street (1868)
On the north side of the block are two matching four-story Italianate rowhouses that have remained mostly residential over the decades. In 1928, the first American Waldorf school—the Rudolph Steiner School—was opened in #111. It was cramped quarters: In the morning, the teacher folded up her cot to allow her bedroom to be used as one of the classrooms. But by 1945 it was a boarding house as the neighborhood converted from single-family homes to apartments.
114 East 39th Street (1866)
This is the brownstone’s brownstone. If you asked AI to draw you “New York brownstone” you’d get something like this but with more fingers.
By the last decade of the 19th century, according to Daytonian in Manhattan, this was home to Frank Benson. After inheriting 10,000 acres of Montauk in 1893, Benson co-founded the Montauk Yacht Club and helped turn the area into a resort by 1895. The Montauk tribe later sued over the land’s legitimacy in 1906 but Benson died in 1907 before the case was resolved.
Afterward, it became a club for WWI aces and aviators returning from Europe, then a rooming house for men, one of whom was arrested in 1926 for sending erratic letters to the Governor Al Smith and President Calvin Coolidge offering a “partnership in the murdering business.” (Gotta have a side hustle, I guess.)
The south side of the street, looking east
124 East 39th Street (1860)
Over the years this dark grey brownstone was the home of a dry goods dealer, then for the presiding justice of the New York Supreme Court. It’s now the Permanent Mission of Rwanda to the United Nations, which is a few blocks to the west.
In 1994, the country’s Minister of Foreign Affairs went missing with $187,000 in cash meant for the operations at this building and the D.C. embassy which, according to the LA Times, “needed to pay telephone, electricity and other bills for the Washington embassy and the U.N. mission.” The minister later turned up in Paris, but doesn’t seem like they ever found that money.
99 Park Avenue (1953)
Park Ave side
This bulky badboy is the weird modernist building I noted earlier. Known initially as the National Distillers Building, it’s clad in prefabricated aluminum panels and was one of the earliest glass and metal boxes that soon dominated Park Avenue around Grand Central Station in the middle of the century.
For a year in the middle of the Depression, this was the site of America’s Little House, a suburban model home mentoring space starved New Yorkers how to best decorate the interiors of their sprawling suburban homes. It was complete with a picket fence, radio station, and a garden with trees bearing apples that, as the New York Times noted in 1935 were “thoroughly city-bred, breathing in the air of the busy thoroughfare fragrant with the fumes of gasoline, and thriving as well as they can on the scant sunshine that trickles in over the tops of nearby buildings.”
And until earlier this year, the corner of 39th and Lexington was home to the House of Lasagna. When I visited over the summer, the lasagna was still hanging over the corner, but it disappeared in the past couple of weeks as a new restaurant prepares to take its place. RIP.
Block Rating*: 6.5/10 - Pretty, but a little bland.
*This rating system was deployed using a proprietary blend of AI technology and the most up-to-date data analysis, spatial modeling and statistical calibration tools to ensure accuracy.