New York news: the home of the skyscraper was once also a treasure-trove of grand town houses. Louise Nicholson takes a tour of them with the help of a splendid new book

Apollo, July, 2005 by Louise Nicholson

Walking the summer Manhattan streets, it is all too easy to be seduced by the forest of high rises. Neck craned upwards, we note the sleek Columbus Circle towers or the GE building's detailing. Even apartment buildings soar up into the sky, looking like massive Italian palazzos that have been stretched by inserting a dozen or so extra floors between the ground floor and roof. It is time to redress the balance and save our aching necks.

The impetus for focusing horizontally is Michael C. Kathrens's new book, Great Houses of New York 1880 1930. America's transformation after the Civil War from a relatively modest agrarian society into an affluent industrialised one brought with it steamship travel. It was this that enabled the large numbers of new rich to travel to Europe, see the great houses of London, Paris and Florence, and want one of their own. Returning to New York, they built art filled mansions clad with crisp-cut pale limestone on or near Fifth Avenue.

Mr Kathrens has selected forty three of what he considers 'the most representative of the styles and architectural progressions' of New York's great houses. He deftly recounts their rise as the architects and decorators attempted to satisfy their patrons' demands for an amalgam of disparate styles spotted while travelling. The lavish lifestyle demanded vast salons--in 1883 Mr and Mrs William K. Vanderbilt hosted 1,200 guests at their house warming ball for the 'little Chateau de Blois' that Richard Morris Hunt had designed for them. Glory for these mansions was short-lived and sometimes ended with the bulldozer. For with the 1920s came a loosening of the social order when entertainment moved from the home to the new hotels and clubs, and apartment living was good enough for the grandest.

Mr Kathrens's trump card are the period photographs he has found that reveal the true splendour of both exteriors and interiors. For, while about half of his selected mansions still stand thanks often to their owners' philanthropy towards cultural or religious institutions, not one interior remains entirely intact. Tragically, even Deland & Aldrich's relatively modest 1915 federal revival design for Willard D. Straight, whose subsequent owners have respected both house and interiors, now has a private owner whose architects have meticulously renovated the exterior but gutted most of the original interiors.

There are two evocative groups of surviving mansions and period houses on Fifth Avenue, each worth a fresh look on summer stroll. In 1902, up at 91st Street, the Scots industrialist-turned philanthropist Andrew Carnegie commissioned Babb, Cook and Willard to design his sixty-four-room Georgian revival home with Beaux-Arts detailing, a distinctly Scottish baronial staircase and one of the country's first air-conditioning systems. Today it houses the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. The house set the style for the area that became known as Carnegie Hill. Opposite it stand three handsome survivors from the glory days: Warren & Wetmore's 1902 elegant neoclassical home for James A. Burden Jr; Carrere and Hastings's heavier 1906 house for John Henry Hammond's family and their sixteen live-in staff (female quarters on the top floor, male in the basement); and Otto H. Khan's fine Italian renaissance palace designed in 1912 but completed only in 1918 because World War I delayed the import of Caen stone for the facade. Nearby, the Warburg (now the Jewish Museum) and Straight mansions survive on Fifth Avenue, and round in East 96th Street three French-infused gems by Ogdon Codman Jr are at nos. 7, 12 and 15.

The other group wraps around the block between 78th and 79th Streets. As you walk down towards it, the sky opens up, for in this rare Manhattan block almost all the buildings are period houses of just five storeys. Here it becomes clear what attracted Mr Kathrens, born in Kansas, first to the great houses of Newport, then to New York's. 'In the 1970s, no one understood my interest', he explains. 'These mansions were seen as monstrous monuments to conspicuous consumption. When I came east and saw Horace Trumbauer's "The Elms" in Newport, it was an epiphany.' The Philadelphia architect created his finest New York mansion for James B. Duke in 1912, at no.1 East 78th Street. Trumbauer took his inspiration from a Bordeaux mansion, while Lucien Alavoine et Cie created eighteenth-century French-inspired interiors. Today, it is home to New York University's Institute of Fine Arts and permits visitors to enjoy its ground floor rooms. Mr Kathrens lauds the building as 'a masterpiece. It has the finest interpretation of Louise XVI and the finest staircase in New York, and is the city's best revival house.'

Great Houses of New York 1880-1930 by Michael C. Kathrens is published by Acanthus Press, New York, ISBN 092649434, $80.