Watch “The Paterno Family: Chronicling a New York Real Estate Legacy” video on YouTube
Read ‘The Paterno Brothers & Their Manhattan Apartment Houses‘ Look Book
1928 1 Gracie Square
– Anthony A. Paterno (Kelley Paterno page 287)
Featured in Andrew Alpern’s book The New York Apartment Houses of Rosario Candela and James Carpenter page 291
NB 618-1928
East End Avenue, 93-95
14-sty bk apart, 79×51
Cost:
$400,000
Owner:
1 Sutton Square Corp., Anthony A. Paterno, pres, 578 Madison av
Architect:
Rosario Candela, 578 Madison av
Address in Real Estate Record:
EAST END AV, 93-95
Architect Rosario Candela; Associated Architect William Lawrence Bottomley; Architects for cooperative tenant/owners Shreve & Lamb; Builder Anthony A. Paterno – southeast corner 84th Street and East End Avenue (Alpern Acanthus page 291)
It was presumably Mr. Paterno who worked through the First Avenue Association to rename the area after the Gracie family’s mansion, built in 1799 at 88th Street and East End Avenue, which itself started life as plain old Avenue B. Mr. Paterno was known mostly as an Upper West Side developer before his involvement with Gracie Square. For his project, Mr. Paterno worked with Rosario Candela, who would achieve renown for luxury buildings like 740 Park Avenue, and with William Lawrence Bottomley, a country-house architect who also built town houses and clubs. Together, they designed a 15-story co-op building suggesting a replica of an old English castle, with simplex, duplex and triplex units of 6 to 11 rooms. What purchasers got on the outside was a single structure so variously adorned that it looked like half a dozen. The Gracie Square side is an interlocking puzzle of vertical runs of quoining, horizontal courses of stone, irregular balconies and oddly placed moldings. Even the brick varies: the east section is a darker shade than the west. The theme is carried down to the first-floor walls, where the limestone was carefully cut and laid in irregular blocks, as if they had been built with scavenged material. On the roof, the water tank enclosure, often a throwaway item, was handled like a Gothic folly, its octagonal form held up by buttresses. The crowning touch was a faceted copper roof ringed by gargoyles and topped with a weather vane in the form of a two-masted sailing ship. STREETSCAPES | 1 GRACIE SQUARE It’s One Building, but It Looks Like Six By Christopher Gray March 4, 2007
After her parents divorced, Jackie moved with her mother, sister, and servants to another building developed by James Lee, 1 Gracie Square (at 84th Street), near Yorkville, on the upper East Side. The 1929 building (an innovative development) was another Rosario Candela design. Candela, along with developers James Lee and Anthony Paterno, and architect William Lawrence Bottomley, created a new kind of apartment cooperative (with huge closets, views of the East River, and outdoor space) that was designed to appeal to well-to-do families. Jackie, A New Yorker November 16, 2014
Pictured (artist’s illustration) in Andrew Alpern’s book Historic Manhattan Apartment Houses on page 45.
