Gaetan Ajello (1883-1983)
25 Claremont Avenue
29 Claremont Avenue
35 Claremont Avenue (aka 33-35 Claremont Avenue)
375 Riverside Drive (aka 371-375 Riverside Drive, 616-624 Cathedral Parkway)
390 Riverside Drive (aka 613-629 West 111th Street)
395 Riverside Drive (aka 393-397 Riverside Drive, 620-628 West 112th Street)
420 Riverside Drive (aka 631 West 114th Street)
452 Riverside Drive
600 West 115th Street (aka 2931-2939 Broadway)
600 West 116th Street (aka 2951-2959 Broadway)
Gaetan (or Gaetano) Ajello, was an Italian-born and -trained architect and engineer who
immigrated to the United States in 1902 where he soon established himself as an architect. His earliest recorded work in New York City was a six-story apartment house on East 115th Street that he designed in 1906. In the course of his nearly 20-year career he designed more than 30 apartment buildings for several of the Upper West Side’s major developers, particularly the Compagna [Campagna] and Paterno families. During World War I, Ajello appears to have temporarily ceased his residential and commercial work, working as an architect and engineer for Standard Aircraft Co. in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Ajello designed the Claremont Theater at 134th and Broadway (1913-14, a designated New York City Landmark) one of the first purpose-built movie theaters, and his residential work is found in the Upper West Side/Central Park West, Riverside-West End, and Carnegie Hill Historic Districts, as well as the Riverside-West End Historic District Extensions I and II, and West End Collegiate Historic District Extension. In the Morningside Heights Historic District, Ajello designed ten apartment buildings in the Renaissance, French Renaissance and Colonial Revival styles for developers such as B. Crystal & Son and Paterno Bros. Ajello left the architectural profession in the 1920s and briefly returned to Italy, returning to the United States in the 1930s. Ajello was an inventor and designed an improved reinforced concrete flooring and an airplane breaking system. Ajello died in New York in 1983, at the age of 100.
References: “Airplane Brake Tested,” New York Times (NYT), February 11, 1925, 2;
Ancestry.com, World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-19. [database on-line] Provo, UT:
Ancestry.com Operations, 2005; “Deaths,” NYT, September 5, 1983, 30; Christopher Gray,
“Streetscapes: Remembering an Architect Who Shaped the West Side,” NYT, June 11, 2006, J7; Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), “Architects’ Appendix,” West End-Collegiate Historic District Extension Designation Report (LP-2462) (New York: City of New York, 2013), prepared by Cynthia Danza and Jennifer L. Most; Office for Metropolitan History, “Manhattan NB Database 1900-1986,” (December 6, 2005) http://www.MetroHistory.com; “The Real Estate Field,” NYT, April 3, 1914, 18.
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Architectural Firm Profiles: Gaetan Ajello
GAETAN ATELLA [AJELLO] (dates undetermined)
160 Riverside Drive, 34
575 West End Avenue, 65
645 West End Avenue, 104
302-304 West 92nd Street, 233
Little is known of Gaetan Ajello. He was established as an architect in New York City by 1909 and was recognized for his apartment building designs in Morningside Heights and throughout the Upper West Side. Most of his work was carried out in conjunction with the Paterno and Carpagna [Campagna] Real Estate Companies. In the Riverside-West End Historic District,
Ajello was responsible for four apartment buildings ranging from eight to fifteen stories in height, and executed in the neo-Renaissance style. Key to the Architects of Greater New York (New York; 1900), 303, 419. Landmarks Preservation Commission, Research Files.
Norval White and Elliot Willensky, AIA Guide to New York City ( New York, 1978), 258. (source)
“Remembering an Architect Who Shaped the West Side By Christopher Gray June 11, 2006
Gaetan Ajello’s Claremont Theater at Broadway and 135th was designated a landmark on TuesdayCredit…Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times
Correction Appended
ON Tuesday, the Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the pleasant little Claremont Theater a landmark. Built in 1914 at Broadway and 135th Street, the Claremont is not too different from the typical theater building of the time, save for a movie camera in the pediment of its white terra-cotta facade.
What is notable about the Claremont is its architect, a Sicilian immigrant named Gaetan (sometimes Gaetano) Ajello. You can find his name carved in cornerstones all over the West Side, where he built dozens of distinctive apartment buildings (though only the one theater).
Born in 1883 in Palermo, Mr. Ajello (pronounced eye-YEL-low) trained in Italy and came to the United States in 1902 as part of a great wave of immigration from southern Italy, especially among those in the building trades.
His first major commissions, in 1909 and 1910, were four buildings for Bernard Crystal, a developer, all in the early Italian Renaissance style, and all north of 116th Street: 452 Riverside Drive (the Mira Mar); 25 Claremont Avenue (the Peter Minuit); and 29-35 Claremont Avenue (Eton Hall and the adjoining Rugby Hall).
Featuring richly worked white and cream marble, terra cotta and glazed brick, these early works shimmer like marble quarries in the Mediterranean sun, quite different from the red and earth tones typical of the time.
A section of an original brochure for Eton Hall, perhaps written by Mr. Ajello himself, described him as “the renowned architect” — even though, at 27, he would still have been a novice.
In 1912, he connected with two influential clients, the Paterno and Campagna families. Among the most active apartment developers in New York, they ultimately built more than 100 buildings, most of them 12- to 15-story apartment houses. Perhaps the voluptuous modeling of Mr. Crystal’s commissions had not sold well, because for these new clients Mr. Ajello developed a more subdued idiom, with simpler neo-Classical overtones in a softer white, sometimes a light gray.
Several commissions for the Paternos are particularly memorable: In 1911 and 1912 he built the Luxor, the Regnor and the Rexor on three corners on the west side of Broadway, at 115th and 116th Streets, and from 1912 to 1917, he built 885, 895 and 905 West End Avenue, at the corners of 103rd and 104th Streets.
For the same and other clients Mr. Ajello designed a dozen or so other buildings in the same style, all but one on the West Side. A typical commission, built in 1915, was 575 West End Avenue, at 88th Street.
During this period Mr. Ajello developed a thoughtful formula for urban living. His entrances are usually framed by large terra-cotta pilasters or a similar feature, often with an escutcheon bearing the initials of the owner. In the lobby, he also tried to shield the elevators from first view, presenting instead a staircase with curved balustrade, reminiscent of a single-family home. And a signature Ajello element from this period was a signature itself: his buildings commonly carry a cornerstone with the carved legend “G. Ajello, Architect.”
By the early 1920’s Mr. Ajello had begun working in red and brown brick, although he employed light colors for projects like 17 East 89th Street. Built in 1925, this was his first building on the East Side, but his 38th and final project in New York City (a full listing of his Manhattan works is on the Web at metrohistory.com/searchfront.htm).
In 1926, Mr. Ajello vanished from city records and directories. His name does not appear in the 1930 census, either. It turns out that he had given up architecture and returned to Italy to pursue several inventions he patented: airplane, railroad, bicycle and shoe designs.
He came back to New York in the early 1930’s and was still alive in 1977 when this reporter visited him in the apartment he shared with Maria Brina, his sister, at 12 East 87th Street. Although he was still physically fit, he could not conduct a coherent conversation, so Mrs. Brina provided some details of his career.
She said that her brother gave Rosario Candela, a fellow Sicilian, his first job. (As an architect, Candela is known for the apartment houses he designed in the 1920’s.)
Mrs. Brina described her brother as temperamental and artistic. “He never wanted a partner,” she said. “He couldn’t trust another person with the design.”
Mrs. Brina had saved many of her brother’s papers, which ranged from the workaday to the wonderfully idiosyncratic. Predictably there were blueprints, old photographs and a file cabinet full of client correspondence dating back to 1906, when he worked on the Schwab mansion at Riverside Drive and 73rd Street.
But there were also papers relating to a patent infringement lawsuit over wing flaps against Pan American World Airways, which he took to the United States Supreme Court but ultimately lost. There was a scale model of an Ajello Aeroplane and an advertising placard for his Metalsole, a corrugated steel shoe insert that “prevents or cures calluses, corns and sores.”
Often these and other quixotic projects had a fantastical aspect. A erotic painting titled “Conquest of Aerodynamics,” perhaps from the 1950’s, was a Van Gogh swirl of rockets, buildings and aircraft with extensive explanations invoking Dante and Archimedes. Near the center, he positioned a naked man and woman who are partly obscured by a whirling propeller. There were also several dozen highly colored paintings of female nudes.
Mr. Ajello never married, but he kept intimate letters from many women. His sister indicated he had become an embarrassment to some younger members of the family, although she retained affection for her talented and visionary brother, and wanted others to know of his work.
After the architect died in September 1983, at 100, Mrs. Brina was asked about the paintings, correspondence and drawings. Except for some she had already given away, she said, the family had destroyed them. She died that November.
E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com
Correction: Oct. 1, 2006
The credits for two photographs accompanying the Streetscapes column on June 11 about the architect Gaetan Ajello were reversed. The photo of Ajello in 1910 was from MetroHistory.com; the photo of 575 West End Avenue was from the Museum of the City of New York. The error was pointed out by a reader in late September.”
