Watch “The Paterno Family: Chronicling a New York Real Estate Legacy” video on YouTube
Read ‘The Paterno Brothers & Their Manhattan Apartment Houses‘ Look Book
This building is featured in the video The Paterno Monograms: Art of Personalizing Apartment Buildings
1911 Regnor 601 West 115th Street
1911 Regnor 2941-2949 Broadway
aka 601 West 115th Street (source)
1950 Paterno Family (Kelley Paterno page 287)
NB 691-1911
Broadway, West 115th Street, northwest corner
12-sty brick stores and apartment house, 100.11×115
COST:
$625,000
OWNER:
Paterno Bros, 600 West 115th st
ARCHITECT:
Gaetan Ajello, 1 West 34th st
ADDRESS IN REAL ESTATE RECORD:
BROADWAY, n w cor 115th st
Plans for three luxury buildings on Broadway near the Columbia campus – the Luxor, the Regnor, and the Rexor – were the brainchild of Ajello, a young Sicilian architect who had emigrated and was virtually adopted by Charles and his brothers. These three buildings were for high-class customers and were built unsparingly and with the all-Italian touch of Renaissance facades decorated in delicate pastel colors. Ajello’s signature was also expressed through the generous use of metal finishes on the facades, the oversized entrances with large glass doors, the elegant lobbies, the broad staircases concealing elevators, the spacious dining rooms, mahogany doors, large closets, and numerous electric lighting point. (Renato Cantore)
Luxor, Regnor, and Rexor on Broadway at 115th and 116th Streets
– Morningside Heights Historic District Designation Report February 21, 2017
– Luxor 1910-11 Gaetan Ajello
– Paterno Brothers (or just Joseph Paterno?)
– 12 story Renaissance Revival
– Rexor 1911-12
– STREETSCAPES A Law and the Face of the City (Grace Gold death)
After Grace Gold’s death, in 1979 Local Law 10 mandated an inspection every four years of the facade of every residential building over six stories. Unfortunately this law did not result in the restoration of apartment facades on Morningside Heights. Rather the financially strapped institution often simply opted for the less expensive alternatives of removing cornices and stripping virtually every bit of ornamental detail from the facades and crudely patching the street elevations creating some of the worst eyesores in the community. Dolkart page 336
address & date source
– Main Address 601-603 West 115th Street
– Side Address 2941-2949 Broadway
“BY 1975 the cornices on the Regnor — at 601 West 115th — and the Rexor — at 600 West 116th — had been removed, but otherwise all three facades were intact, except for grime and the characteristic jumble of storefronts. On the night of May 16, 1979, a terra cotta chunk from the eighth-floor window lintel of the Regnor came loose and fell to the sidewalk, killing a Barnard freshman, Grace Gold. Her death sparked Local Law 10 of 1980, which required the regular inspection of building facades.
The Regnor, completely stripped in 1981 of terra cotta above the limestone base, has become a curiosity — the lower part a typical early-20th-century base, the upper part a raw industrial box. Where the terra cotta was removed, the engineer Sylvan Hanauer replaced it with brick to match the rest of the wall — except that the new brick is clean, while the old brick is still stained and gray. Together the two colors produce a blocky pattern of light and dark, a kind of camouflage that disguises its consanguinity even from its next of kin. Christopher Gray, “Streetscapes: On Broadway, the Odd Threesome,” New York Times, October 15, 1995, R7.
Ephemeral New York: How a student’s senseless death led to a New York behind scaffolding
