Tudor City
DEVELOPED BY the Fred F. French real-estate company, Tudor City was the first residential skyscraper enclave in the world. Ensconced on a naturally occurring bluff overlooking what was then New York’s slaughterhouse district, the five-acre site comprises
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STREETS , BETWEEN FIRST AND SECOND AVENUES
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e v e l o p e d b y the Fred F. French real-estate company, Tudor City was the first residential skyscraper enclave in the world. Ensconced on a naturally occurring bluff overlooking what was then New York’s slaughterhouse district, the five-acre site comprises seven apartment buildings, with four 10-story apartments flanking a phalanx of three central 22-story towers on the east side. The Woodstock Tower, an apartment hotel on East 42nd Street, is the tallest at 32 stories. Overall, the complex was built to house 2,200 families, but the scale is right; the buildings are neither overwhelmingly tall, nor are there too many of them. French succeeded in luring middle-class residents to the gritty east midtown area by dressing up his high rises in the familiar garb of Tudor styling, which bespoke history, tradition, and comfort. Tudor was an apt symbol for the middle class because the era represented a shift from medieval living to the pleasures of domesticity. The style had a strong hold on the public imagination in the 1920s, with private enclaves such as Pomander Walk (which was actually patterned after the stage sets of a play of the same name) being built on the Upper West Side. Tudor styling was also popular in newly emerging suburbs, and carried associations of trees,
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lawns, and privacy. The apartments were rented on the concept that midtown office workers could now walk to work rather than commute. The styling of red brick trimmed with terra-cotta ornament on four-story limestone bases softens the blunt outlines of the towers and brings them down to a human scale. The mullioned windows are small-paned, with stained-glass insets, lending a fantasy air to the whole. From the distance, roofline sculptures of unicorns and lions holding stiff pennants enliven the silhouette. Whatever the limitations of historicism, Tudor City functions wonderfully as a neighborhood—at day’s end, kids Rollerblade on the nearly private, dead-end street of Tudor City Place, and the pleasantly landscaped, handkerchief-sized park is used by bench-sitters and dog walkers at all hours. There are many proprietary “eyes upon the street,” in Jane Jacobs’s phrase, from shopkeepers to restaurant diners and the flow of residents, one of the key elements that make a neighborhood safe. The complex has a small-town feel, with its own tiny post office and ZIP code, and a half-timbered, Tudor-style church, the Church of the Covenant, at the foot of the Woodstock Tower. Tudor City literally turns its back on the environs of the East River. The walls facing the river on First Avenue are blank brick with windows only for stairwells because the original view of Manhattan’s abattoirs was unsightly and, in summer, malodorous. In the late nineteenth century, the neighborhood was notorious for its criminal gangs, and was nicknamed Corcoran’s Roost. The gang leader, Paddy Corcoran, is memorialized in a Gothic inscription above the entrance of the centr
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