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Living with antiques: the rescue and restoration of a New York city landmark

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2004 by Charles Lockwood

When most Manhattan collectors want to buy a town house, they typically seek out a "brownstone" on one of the tree-lined side streets of the Upper East Side or the Upper West Side, or on one of the better historic blocks in Greenwich village or around Gramercy Park. But lifelong New Yorker Raffaello Borello is hardly your typical collector or town house owner.

"In 1976, I was riding my bike down West Fourteenth Street," recalls Borello. (1) "I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw this vacant and forlorn-looking early Italianate style house with a For Sale sign on its painted and peeling red brick facade. I knew it was unique: thirty feet wide, five stories tall, and a nearly intact facade." Built between 1845 and 1847 for Andrew S. Norwood (1770-1856), the mansion's original stoop, tall double doors, roof-line cornice, and a very rare cast-iron balcony (see Pl. II) in front of the two parlor windows had somehow survived well over a century of change.

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"I hadn't been inside this town house yet," he recalls, "but I guessed that the interior was still in fairly original condition, and I could envision exactly what this house would look like if it was properly restored and furnished with period pieces."

Several months later, Borello, a commercial real estate broker who had previously restored a Federal style house in Greenwich Village to landmark status, bought the West Fourteenth Street property, saving it from the sad fate of so many of its neighboring brown-stones. Had someone purchased the town house as simply a real estate investment, they probably would have ripped off the stoop and front entrance, removed the Italianate facade ornament and roofline cornice, gutted the interior, and converted the historic house into front and back apartments, two per floor.

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Borello, however, embarked on a labor of love, restoring the twenty-one-room town house to its early glory and filling its large high-ceilinged rooms with primarily New York furnishings of the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. Today, the Norwood town house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and has been designated an individual landmark by New York City's strict Landmarks Preservation Commission. (2)

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Many of the collector's friends originally thought him reckless, not for loving and wanting to restore the town house--it was, unquestionably, an extraordinary survivor of pre-Civil War upper-class New York residential architecture--but for wanting to make the investment on rundown West Fourteenth Street.

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Borello, however, was not put off by the milieu. "I had to save the house, I had no doubt that I would buy it, and I liked that it was in an offbeat location," he says. Moreover, Fourteenth Street had the advantage of forming the boundary between two of Manhattan's most sought-after neighborhoods: Greenwich Village, which starts to the south, and Chelsea (whose historic row houses were being rediscovered in the 1970s), which begins immediately to the north. As a real estate professional, Borello knew that change was the only constant in Manhattan real estate. He saw a future of hope for the neighborhood, built on the foundation of a once-splendid past.

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When Norwood, a prosperous bond merchant, built the house, Fourteenth Street was at the northernmost edge of development on Manhattan Island. A 150-year-old Dutch farmhouse still survived at Second Avenue and Fourteenth Street, and a Frenchman's country mansion, reminiscent of a southern plantation house, stood at Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth Street. (3) This country atmosphere was vanishing fast, however, because the city was growing quickly up the island of Manhattan. In 1845 the New York Herald declared: "The growth of the city in the upper wards is astonishing. Whole streets of magnificent dwelling houses have been erected in the vicinity of Union Square [Fourteenth Street and Fourth Avenue] within the last year." (4) As a boy, Henry James (1843-1916) lived at 58 West Fourteenth Street. (5)

By the 1850s, Fifth Avenue, which started its northward journey up Manhattan Island at Washington Square, had become New York's most fashionable address, and Fourteenth Street was a close second, because it was the first of Manhattan's occasional extra-wide crosstown streets. Its 120-foot-wide roadway offered a far grander and sunnier setting for large brownstones and mansions than the customary 60-foot-wide crosstown streets. "In it, there are no stores--nothing but the dwelling houses, which are substantial, highly finished, and first-class-ones," proclaimed the New York Herald in 1852. The street was "a noble thoroughfare ... from river to river. (6)

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Norwood's new house certainly contributed to the street's cachet. Not only was it an unusual thirty feet wide and five stories tall, but also its architecture was the last word in late 1840s taste. By then, the Greek revival style was giving way to the Italianate style for fashionable New York residences and commercial buildings. Norwood's town house combined both. It had a red brick (not brownstone) facade, which reflected longstanding Greek revival traditions, and the front doorway was flanked by Doric pilasters supporting a triglyph-adorned entablature. At the same time, the facade was graced by distinctly early Italianate touches. The doorway and window detailing was of brownstone, not the limestone or marble used for such elements in comparable earlier houses. The grandly scaled stoop had cast-iron railings employing simple oblong forms with rounded ends. The parlor windows, which stretched to the floor to bring more light inside, opened onto a low cast-iron balcony with the same rounded-end pattern. The bold handsomely detailed window frames broke the facade's planar unity and cast shadows on its surface. Finally, a large overhanging roofline cornice supported by rectangular brackets provided a handsome termination to the facade's architectural composition. (7)

Living with antiques: the rescue and restoration of a New York city landmark

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2004 by Charles Lockwood

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