This was the 48 acre property of the Rhinelander family that had arrived here in 1686 as refugees from the persecution of Protestant Huguenots in France. Over the course of a century the family prospered through a variety of enterprises, including shipbuilding, importing, sugar refining, and real estate.

William Rhinelander started buying the Yorkville property in 1797, and built his country home there two years later. Overlooking the turbulent but scenic waters of Hell Gate, he joined a number of prominent New York families whose homes shared those East River views, including the Beekmans, Primes, Jones, Schermerhorns, and Gracies. When Rhinelander died in 1825, his will stipulated that his Yorkville property not be developed until the death of the last of his seven children, which occurred in 1878.

As the Second Avenue El train stopped at 86th Street in 1880, passengers could see the first new building erected by the family, and it would have surprised them. On the southwest corner of the intersection, the building was four times larger than the familiar tenement, taking up an entire site, 100 x 100 feet. This was a sharp contrast to the ubiquitous 25 foot width of tenements all over the city, a size that was dictated by the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan that divided the entire city into uniform sized lots. More remarkable were its apartments, intended for the middle class, with features like private bathrooms, hallways within units providing separate entrances to bedrooms, and ample windows for light and air on the long facades. In addition, to create it Mr. Rhinelander chose Charles Clinton, a distinguished architect and designer of the Park Avenue Armory, and even gave it a name – The Manhattan!

This was quite a new idea in New York City, where the ideal had been the single-family home, and multiple-family dwellings had been firmly associated with the lower and working classes. A few very lavishly designed and appointed apartment buildings had appeared for the upper classes, but The Manhattan was meant for the middle class. It has been described by historians and by the Landmarks Preservation Commission as “one of the earliest apartment houses in New York City.”

Today we can start our Rhinelander Walking Tour at 86th and Second. Perhaps you will get there on the still new Q Train! Or maybe you will arrive on the not-so-crowded-anymore 4/5/6 Lexington Avenue line. You also will be able to take the whole tour with us online! In any case, take another look at The Manhattan, and then let’s go together to the corner of 89th Street and Lexington Avenues.

Let’s look first at the south side of 89th Street, east of Lexington Avenue, where there is a row of homes by Hubert, Pirrson & Co. They were leading designers and promoters of apartment houses and cooperatives, but also a firm that was deeply concerned with developing smaller, affordable options to address the city’s housing needs. Each house is small indeed, a mere 12 ½ feet wide (two per 25 foot lot). Built between 1886 and 1887, these six remain of an ensemble that continued around the corner with four more on Lexington Avenue, for a total of ten little houses. They make up in charm for their small size with a varied array of detailing so that each unique facade stands out from its neighbors.

The interiors were described in detail by the Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, an invaluable and comprehensive resource for architectural history, published from 1868 to 1922. The designers squeezed in a series of halls on the ground floor for reception, as well as a “well-lit kitchen, fitted with every possible convenience.” On the floor above was a butler’s pantry “which open[ed] into a fine dining room en suite with the parlor.” On the upper two floors were four “bed-chambers”, two servants’ rooms, and one bathroom. The interior finishes were of high quality – fine wood carving and paneling, glazed tile, and stained glass – in sum, says the writer, “a great step forward towards the era of perfect homes.”

The other two sets of buildings here on 89th Street and Lexington were by Henry Hardenburgh, whom the Rhinelanders hired to design a majority of their commissions in Yorkville. He had made his reputation in 1880 at the early age of 33 by receiving the commission to design the famous Dakota Apartments in the then unlikely location of the Upper West Side.

The Historic District includes six single family rowhouses on the west side of Lexington (numbers 1340-1350) made of the very familiar New York City materials of brick, brownstone, and terra cotta. Notice the symmetry of the set, with classically inspired cornices on the end houses and the middle pair, and triangular pediments breaking the linearity of the other two. Built between 1888 and 1889, the six facades have been painted different colors over the years, adding to the pleasing variety. Each is either a little over 16 or 17 feet wide, for a total of 100 feet of frontage, or four of the standard 25 foot lots. The house at 1342 Lexington Avenue is notable as the home of Andy Warhol and is considered his first “factory.” He lived there with his mother between 1959 and 1974.

The single building around the corner at 121 East 89th Street, also by Hardenburgh and part of the historic district, is in the same style, but a different layout. This is what was known as a “French Flat”, in which a single apartment would take up the whole depth of a building, what we would today call a “floor-through”. This permitted more spacious rooms with a private hallway linking them, in addition to private toilets, and improved light and air, again appealing to a more middle-class tenant – still a multiple dwelling, but with a difference.

On the northeast corner of the intersection Hardenburgh designed a second set of 10 rowhouses at the same time as those in the historic district that were demolished around 1960. These were in an utterly different aesthetic from those across the street, in a French Renaissance Revival style with circular turrets topped by conical roofs, bulky building masses that alternately project and recess, irregular cornice lines, and stepped gables, creating a powerful and unusual presence on both the side street and Lexington Avenue. What a difference from the elegant symmetry of its neighbors across the street! (and to the plain brick box that we see now).

Even more unusual were the varied sizes, and therefore the layouts, of some of these houses. Departing from the more conventional divisions of the usual lot, these homes had widths that ranged from 17 ½ to 29 feet, and depths from 40 to 75 feet. These varied dimensions created an irregular set of rear yards that we can see on contemporary maps, but we don’t know about the interiors. At least one critic, however, from the Real Estate Record and Guide, deemed the complex in general as suffering from “an excess of variety…with a manifest aversion to continuous lines.”