Little Rebels of the Upper West Side

Yvonne Vávra

No goodbyes. I knew its days were numbered, but it still startled me when I walked past 67th and Columbus the other day and saw that the ABC building was gone. The whole corner—razed, knocked down, wiped away. The future had taken a big bite out of the block between West 66th and West 67th, leaving nothing but nothing where there once was a building I can’t even picture clearly anymore. All I remember is the ABC studio on the ground floor and the posters of TV hosts with big smiles. Now the block is just staring back at me with a gaping mouth.

I have no idea how long it’s been gone. The last time I walked by, workers were already busy stripping it down and hauling its bones away. But it was still there. And now: poof.

In its place, a giant could rise. A structure so tall, Empire State Building tall, that the whole Upper West Side would shrink beneath it. What now feels big would suddenly seem tiny. Even 200 Amsterdam, which stands at 668 feet a few blocks northwest and sparked outcry for sticking out of the neighborhood’s height vibe, would look like a toddler. The building now planned would be twice as high.

But it wouldn’t be the first time the neighborhood experienced a dizzying shift in scale.

In the late 19th century, development on the Upper West Side picked up speed, and row houses sprang up everywhere. At the same time, wealthy New Yorkers were warming to the idea of luxury apartment living, and developers couldn’t tear down small single-family homes fast enough to make way for taller, more profitable apartment buildings.

But some smaller houses stubbornly clung to their spots. They’re the Upper West Side’s little rebels—row houses that survived while everything around them grew taller. One of my favorites is the defiant little building at 249 West End Avenue, between West 71st and 72nd streets. At the end of the 19th century, it was just one of five Gilded Age row houses that were similar in design and attached in a way that made them look like a single unit.

249 West End Avenue was home to Mary Cook, mother of five and widow of Ferdinand Huntting Cook, the director of the New York College of Dentistry. On a January night in 1913, just a few days after New Year’s, Ferdinand left the house to go to a liquor store at 72nd and Columbus but never came home. Mary turned to the police, hospitals, and newspapers to search for him, until a month later his body was found in a forest in Queens, where he had apparently shot himself.

After everything she had been through, Mary was uniquely prepared to stand up to the developers who came after her property. While the owners of the other four row houses took the money and left, she refused to sell and endured the demolitions on either side of her walls followed by the construction of a 15-story building on one side in 1917 and, a few years later, another 15-story building on the other. Thanks to her stubborn will, developers had to build the future around her, and we got lucky: 249 West End still lets us see the block’s smaller past, before the neighborhood grew tall.

Another scrappy little five-story fighter stands on 63rd Street between Broadway and Central Park West. Completely isolated, it sits stubbornly among huge apartment buildings that “loom over it like bullies ganging up on an old lady,” as The New York Times once wrote.

The owner, Colonel Jehiel R. Elyachar—described by a former tenant as “a tiny, skinny, bent over little gnome of a man”—refused to get out of the way of the powerful developer Paul Milstein, who wanted to build a 43-story giant in the late 1960s. For a while, Milstein seemed willing to play a never-ending game in which the 70-year-old Elyachar kept changing his price, his demands, and his mind. Eventually, however, the developer had had enough and walked away from the deal. He tore down everything except Elyachar’s little red tenement and built his tower, One Lincoln Plaza, around it. Whether Elyachar ever seriously intended to sell remains unclear.

There are so many more. I love the three townhouses on the corner of West 85th Street and Central Park West, the only survivors of what was once a whole block full of them. Their luck in escaping demolition in the 1920s came thanks to the owner of 249 Central Park West, the corner building, who refused to sell and, in the process, saved his two neighbors as well.

I also love 112 West 86th Street, which in the late 19th century had four-story companions along the block but has been squeezed since the 1920s by two 16-story towers.

And even if it isn’t technically a stubborn holdout, I love the way 2465 Broadway accepts its fate beneath the 20-story Westly on the corner of 91st and Broadway. Because it wasn’t allowed to grow higher into the sky, the Westly simply grew sideways instead, elbowing into the profitable air above our three-story underdog, who now forever sits frozen in a game of Tetris after an unfortunate opening move.

Who knows how high the Upper West Side will stretch into the sky in the centuries ahead? Who knows which of today’s high-rises will one day stand like a lone wolf, sandwiched between giants? What we do know: The joy of spotting these little rebels will be just as much fun then as it is now.