Over the years, this block has been home to the silk trade, a hairman to the stars, pulp publishers, cigar pushers, and some leather couches and embroidered velvet chairs getting a little, uh, use.

As with many of the neighborhoods in Manhattan, this East Side stretch was initially a well-heeled district of townhouses and mansions, but became a place where the early outward respectability of Murray Hill collided with commerce and vulgarity.

Toward the start of the 20th century, the buttoned-up homes gave way to commercial development with the Lexington Avenue subway opening around the corner at Park and 33rd Street in 1904, as well as a convenient technicality that allowed a 16-story building to shoulder its way into high society.

Today, you’ll see some restaurants, bus lanes, a pharmacy once named New York’s best soap museum, dorms for Yeshiva University, a doctor’s office I used to go to, and luxurious furniture showrooms.

These photos were taken May-September.

Got silk?

Well, this corner apparently did in the 1920s, when the silk trade concentrated around this corner. The Madison Belmont Building was designed by Warren & Wetmore (who also worked on Grand Central Terminal), while much of the metalwork was designed and fabricated by Edgar Brandt and assembled in France and shipped to Manhattan. (Unfortunately, developer Robert M. Catts suffered a catastrophic financial collapse just a couple of years after this opened.)

The Cheney Brothers silk showroom featured lots of metalwork, including these amazing wrought iron display trees to hang fabric on.¹ And now the showroom is a high-end home furnishings showroom and upstairs is home to your typical office-building-type stuff. But you can still step inside and relive the delights of the Coolidge Administration.

The lobby is marble and bronze, and decked with imagery from ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt. “The design and materials of the building’s lobby immediately give visitors an impression of great luxury and refinement, a desirable effect for those originally shopping for fine silk goods,” according to the landmark designation. And—at least when I visited—it’s overseen by one of the nicest doormen in Midtown.

Now that’s class!

Let’s start with this pair of red ornamental townhouses that somehow survived the march to modernity.

According to Daytonian in Manhattan, these were an early contribution by McKim, Mead & Bigelow, the precursor to the firm that would go on to design some of the best buildings in New York. It was the home of Edward Dickerson, a bigtime lawyer and inventor, who had a pre-existing house renovated and another built next door featuring stained glass, rich ornamentation, and even an observatory.

He raised his family here and his daughter was married here in 1881. She died shortly afterward and her grieving husband commissioned a wax bust of her, which now sits in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

By 1912, Number 64 was Studio Hall, a rehearsal space for musicians. It was also supposedly home to a drag performer of the 1920s who was later killed by a bolt of lightning on a Long Island beach.

In 1916, a pair of caterers took hold of the buildings to replace them with a high-rise, but that never happened. Whether it stays for long is unclear. When it sold in 2012, one of the stakeholders told The Real Deal the property “has enormous upside because of its unused air rights and current zoning, which would allow for hotel, residential, commercial, or community development.”

Starting in 1847, the heirs of the Murray family—whose massive estate gave Murray Hill its name—insulated much of the neighborhood by placing restrictive covenants on parcels of the former property.

But in 1909, developer Margaret Cameron bought two brownstones here for nearly $7 million (inflation adjusted) and quickly demolished them with the intention of building this 16-story structure. The patrician guardians of Murray Hill—who included tycoon John Pierpont Morgan—fought back and one neighbor even offered her three times that amount to preserve the low-slung residential character, according to one blogger.

The inevitable lawsuit followed, but the building was allowed to rise, based on a technicality: An old pre-grid road dubbed the Middle Road once ran diagonally through most of the building site when the protected zone was declared. The road disappeared once Madison Avenue was formally developed, but the boundaries of the deed covenant were never adapted, leaving this plot just a scooch enough outside the protected area to allow the development to proceed.

(That aside, the judge noted, many of the townhouses already had businesses operating inside them, and delivery wagons for the B. Altman department store across the street were causing “considerable disturbance and discomfort to the residents.”)

Even J.P. Morgan couldn’t stop the totems of corporate capitalism from arriving at the doorstep of its biggest evangelists. “The erection of this building was the rudest commercial shock that the district ever experienced,” wrote the Times in a 1914 article unearthed by the neighborhood association a few years back.

The neighborhood got over the rude shock, but by the mid 1960s, two publishers arrived to peddle their pulpy paperbacks: Lancer Books, which explored the reaches of outer space, the world of Conan the Barbarian and, of course, lesbian erotica; and Midwood Books, which pushed spicy novels with bawdy covers with titles like “The Professor's Naughty Wife” and “Resort Secretary.”²

Crime writer Lawrence Block recalled one stint pumping out smutslop for Midwood’s Harry Shorten:

“There was one scene in which the titular heroine (and that’s the right adjective, trust me) has it off with a gas pump jockey in the service station’s grease pit, and Harry thought that scene was the cat’s pajamas. It blew him away, so to speak, and he wanted more.”

But over the years the Cameron Building housed plenty of staid, sedate businesses or those trying to at least manufacture respectability.

In 1948, the New Yorker paid a visit here to the offices of the Cigar Institute of America. Their job was to rebrand stogies by taking them from the on-screen mouths of gamblers, gangsters, and small-time gumshoes and into those of wholesome leading men to push the idea of cigars “as an asset to good living among pleasant people of good taste.”

“It was beautiful,” Director Harry McHose told the magazine of one recent film’s smoky scene between Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman: “Bergman looked up at Cooper with those eyes of hers and said, ‘A house isn’t really a house unless it has about it the scent of a good cigar after breakfast.’”

One well-known adman whose memoir helped inspire Mad Men got his start here. In a 2010 interview with NPR, Jerry Della Femina recalled shouting with glee in the lobby after getting his first job offer in the biz.

“I can still hear the scream. Fifty-two hundred dollars was the most any Della Femina in the history of the Della Feminas had ever been paid—and this was a token salary,” he says. “I had found my business.”

Here you’ll find someone else who’s found their business. In Number 53, on the right, is the studio of the man the Observer once called the “Toupee Titan of New York.”

Joseph Paris, born Joseph Guarnera in Bensonhurst, got attention after winning the Empire State Master Hairdressers Guild competition and ultimately began selling wigs and toupees to clients including Andy Warhol, Charlie Sheen, and King Hassan II of Morocco. For Frank Sinatra, he developed “a proprietary cutting technique to achieve the perfect balance of tapered sides and a subtle wave.”

He’s touted his professional relationship with ol’ Blue Eyes in his book “Hairman of the Board” (an excellent title) in which he recounts “Vegas antics” and episodes like “giving the boot to the Righteous Brothers for infringing on Sinatra's steam room at the Sands Hotel.”

Hey boys, give Frank some room!

This is no one’s favorite design, but notable because a decade ago, the state Attorney General found that the operators of this high-rise had turned the building into a hotel while receiving millions of dollars in tax breaks meant to encourage affordable housing development, according to the New York Times. After the investigation, they had to pay a hefty fine and turn the building back to housing.

Here’s a little loft building that’s held on for more than a century hosting small businesses. Since I took this photo earlier this summer, it was painted all white. Cleaner, yeah, but I like the character here. Over the years, it’s been home to a trunk company, a small art school, a psychic, and in 1958, to Hide-a-Way Records, which launched with its first single, “Mission by the Sea” by the Four Winds. (Not really my thing.)

About 10 years ago it was home to the developer of ChumChum, an app to “anonymously rate one another on a scale of 0 to 100 in the categories of generosity, loyalty, kindness, and fun.”

If the stuffed mushrooms smothered in cream sauce at the kosher restaurant downstairs aren’t decadent enough for you, you would have enjoyed a night out on the third floor. In 2013, a venue called Taste was accused of hosting booze-filled swinger parties, as the Observer gleefully noted at the time.

The website archived by the publication advertised “blissful parties for beautiful people”: Exposed brick. Leather couches and embroidered velvet chairs. Real beds!

(The brick wasn’t the only thing exposed hey now.)

Well, we’re a wholesome crowd over here, so let’s just cover our eyes and instead gaze at this side-by-side comparison of how the building looked in the neighborhood in a 1928 silent film.

What’s Good: “Real beds!”

What’s Not: I picked this location because I liked the cool old apartment buildings on the corner of Park Ave, which I didn’t even end up including. And the block as a whole is hard to get a handle on: sharing the block are nice buildings, modified townhouses, some decent-looking restaurants, construction sheds, dated brutalism, a bunch of NYPD pavers in the middle of the sidewalk.

But, hey, sometimes you reach for silk and a fine cigar and find yourself in the grease pit. Whatever works for you.

Block Rating: 4.5/10

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