Look for the narrow limestone building featuring a striking, arched window separated by columns on the second level and decorative carved ledges stretching across the upper floors.
This is number ten West Fifty-Sixth Street. Back in eighteen ninety-nine, a stockbroker named Frederick Edey and his socialite wife, Birdsall, bought this lot. Frederick and his business partner, H-B Hollins, bought adjacent lots, planning to build twin mansions side by side.
Hollins started building immediately next door at number twelve. But Frederick hit a snag. An old property covenant, a legal restriction tied to the deed, prevented him from building all the way to the sidewalk for two whole years. Hollins just kept building, leaving Frederick staring at an empty dirt patch.
By the time the Edeys could finally build in nineteen zero one, they ditched Hollins's architect and hired the firm Warren and Wetmore instead. The original construction cost was fifty thousand dollars, which is roughly one million eight hundred thousand dollars in today's money. They built this six-story French Renaissance Revival townhouse, a style inspired by grand European chateaus, giving it a much more rigid, formal look than the neighbor's house. You can check your screen to see a photo of these two completely mismatched buildings side by side. An architecture critic once described their contrasting styles as an uneasy dance, with one house doing the lively cancan and this one doing a stiff minuet.
The Edeys finally moved into their grand home in nineteen zero three, complete with an elevator and ten servants. If you pull up the before and after pictures in the app, you can see how this pristine facade looked back then compared to the modern towers surrounding it today. The Edeys threw grand parties here, but the house is also famous for a truly bizarre burglary in nineteen twelve. A thief broke in, locked a servant in a closet, and then fled the scene stealing absolutely nothing except the key to that very closet door. I guess he just really hated open doors.
By nineteen nineteen, Midtown was becoming a busy commercial zone, and the Edeys sold the house. Over the next century, it transformed into a high-end dressmaker shop, a cosmetics headquarters, and eventually a retail space arranged entirely by feng shui principles, the ancient Chinese practice of harmonizing individuals with their surrounding environment. It even hosted Hollywood royalty, as the actress Elizabeth Taylor lived right here for a few years in the mid-nineteen fifties.
More recently, in twenty eleven, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim bought the townhouse for fifteen million five hundred thousand dollars. He leased it to a luxury hair salon for over a million dollars a year, but the salon stopped paying rent. Slim had to drag them to court twice just to get them out and recover his money.
Even billionaires have landlord troubles, but at least they own a magnificent piece of architectural history. Take your time admiring this surviving mansion, and when you feel ready, continue along the route.
