By Gus Saltonstall
J. Robert Oppenheimer was an Upper West Sider.
The 96th Academy Awards took place on Sunday night and Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” was the big winner of the evening. The movie about the process of building the atomic bomb during World War II won Best Picture; Nolan won Best Director; and Cillian Murphy, who played Robert Oppenheimer, won Best Actor.
But long before last night, long before the debut of the film this past summer, and even long before Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project that developed the devastating atomic bomb, the famous physicist grew up on the Upper West Side.
Oppenheimer was born in 1904 into a family that originally lived in a building on Broadway and West 94th Street. That address is now known as the Stanton apartments, but in 2008, the building’s residents included “Oppenheimer” as a possible new name for the development. Eventually, they decided to honor suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton, instead.
The Oppenheimers wouldn’t stay long on West 94th Street. They soon moved to 155 Riverside Drive, near the corner of West 88th Street, where Oppenheimer spent the majority of his childhood years.
His father Julius was a wealthy textile importer, who adorned the family’s new apartment with original paintings by Picasso, Rembrandt, and Van Gogh, according to Upper West Side preservation organization Landmark West, which has a fantastic blog about Oppenheimer’s life in the neighborhood.
“Oppenheimer grew up in privileged surroundings,” Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird wrote in their biography of the physicist. “His parents owned a chauffeur-driven Packard, and the Oppenheimer apartment was hung with magnificent modern artworks, which dominated a living room wallpapered in gold gilt.”
The Oppenheimers lived on the 11th floor of the 12-story building. The 155 Riverside Drive address has another claim to fame as well: it is the exterior of Will Truman and Grace Adler’s apartment in the sitcom “Will and Grace.”
Oppenheimer also went to school on the Upper West Side — and it is one that many Rag readers will recognize.
He attended the Society for Ethical Culture School at 33 Central Park West, which was constructed in 1904.
Oppenheimer would go on to spend much of his adult life on the West Coast, but in 1947, returned to the East Coast to lead the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University in New Jersey. He also spent significant time in the U.S. Virgin Islands during the last 20 years of his life. He died in his sleep at his Princeton home in 1967 at the age of 62.
For more information on Oppenheimer’s childhood on the Upper West Side, check out Landmark West’s blog on the subject.
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Excellent. Thank you. Never knew that.
Love the local angle! Thanks for the smiles.
Very interesting. Two comments: No need for the “West” in “155 Riverside Drive, near the corner of West 88th Street”. If the building is on Riverside Drive, we know it’s on the west side. Same for Broadway and 94th street. If we’re on the Upper West Side, we know it’s west 94th.
Also, the Society for Ethical Culture School does not house Fieldston’s lower schools. The Ethical Culture School is a separate building next door to the society. And Fieldston lower is in Riverdale next to the upper school.
https://www.ecfs.org/who-we-are/
Like it or not, the street names include “West”. You may know where the street is, but that doesn’t change its name.
I thought the Ethical Culture school was the. Fieldstone elementary school. Is there any connection?
The Institute for Advanced Studies is not part of Princeton University. It is a separate study center with a world renown faculty and its own beautiful campus. I worked there for a short while and too many people link it to Princeton University which is nearby but is not connected.
Sent this to NYMag for Approval Matrix “Brilliant” corner, because I laughed out loud at the extreme UWS angle. Headline s priceless!
Wonderful discussion of Oppenheimer’s UWS connection. Thank you.