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
Need photo of 174 West 76th Street building front
1924 Wellston 161 West 75th Street (aka 321-327 Amsterdam Avenue) & 174 West 76th Street (connected)
Featured in Andrew Alpern’s book The New York Apartment Houses of Rosario Candela and James Carpenter page 262
Located in Upper West Side/Central Park West Historic District designated 24 April 1990
Architect Rosario Candela; Builder 161 West 75th Street Corporation; Anthony A. Paterno President; John Pelletier Secretary (Alpern Acanthus page 262)
– Called the Wellston Buildings, these two otherwise separate apartment houses were connected below grade and operated as a unit. [edit: connected at ground level]
1924
553
$1,300,000.00
75TH ST, 161-181 W 15-sty bk strs & apt, slag rf, 120˙204
OWNER / OWNER ADDRESS
(o) 161 West 75th St. Corp., Anthony A. Paterno. pres / (o) 2300 Bway COMMENTS
ARCHITECT / ARCHITECT ADDRESS
(a) Rosario Candela / (a) 200 W 72d [72nd] (source)
Underground connection between 161 West 75th Street and 174 West 76th Street (Kelley Paterno page 286) [edit: connected at ground level]
1925 174 West 76th Street
– Anthony A. Paterno President
– underground connection between 161 West 75th Street and 174 West 76th Street (Kelley Paterno page 286) [edit: connected at ground level]
Architect Rosario Candela; Builder 161 West 75th Street Corporation; Anthony A. Paterno President; John Pelletier Secretary (Alpern Acanthus page 262)
– Called the Wellston Buildings, these two otherwise separate apartment houses were connected below grade and operated as a unit. [edit: connected at ground level]
Q. My apartment house at 161 West 75th Street, like a number of others on the Upper West Side, has two intertwined initials over the door, an “A” and something else. Whose initials? And was it the architect or developer? . . . Ivan Berger, Manhattan. A. Your building was built in 1924 to 1926 by Anthony Paterno — they are his initials — and was designed by Rosario Candela. Paterno was one of four brothers, all developers, who generally worked separately. Other brothers also used their initials on buildings they put up. Joseph Paterno’s architect on 905 West End Avenue, at 104th Street, designed an elaborate cartouche with “JP” over the door and annotated the 1917 drawing, “Architect is to approve the plaster model of this ornament before execution.” Other developers, like the Halls, the Campagnas and the Crystals, also left such traces of their ownership. I have never seen written accounts of this practice by developers, but after the turn of the century the architectural press often urged architects to “sign” their creations. However, only a few architects, usually designers of speculative apartment houses, regularly did this. The Paternos started building modest walk-ups around 1900 but by the 1920’s had become one of New York’s reigning builder-families. Joseph Paterno built buildings like 1220 Park Avenue, at 95th Street, and 30 Sutton Place, at 58th Street; Charles put up luxury apartments as well as Hudson View Gardens and Castle Village, north of the George Washington Bridge; Michael built 775 Park Avenue, at 72d Street, and 2 East 67th Street, and Anthony built 1040 Fifth Avenue, at 85th Street. Generally the Paternos’ legible presence on their buildings decreased as their product ascended the economic ladder. On Michael Paterno’s 1105 Park Avenue, built in 1922 at the corner of 89th Street, there is only the letter “P” and even such modest inscriptions largely vanished on their top-grade buildings on Fifth and Park Avenues. This is consistent with the development in the 1910’s of a general upper-class preference for apartment houses known by their street addresses rather than by a name. Streetscapes: Readers’ Questions The Beekman Theater, a French School, Old Initials September 5, 1993
Living It Up (published 1984) page 359: THE WELLSTON, 161 West 75th Street: A plain dark building of 15 stories built in 1925; Rosario Candela, architect. Nice grillwork entrance. Above the door are the initials AP for the Paterno Construction Company. [Correction: for Anthony Paterno}
