Skinny Building

Cosmo: 30th Aug 2006 - 20:12 GMT

Excellent! But it's not even wide enough for a stairwell...how do they get to the upper floors?

Biff: 30th Aug 2006 - 22:42 GMT

Is that building even safe??....Looks like a pretty strong wind would make the building sway.....

EvilGentleman: 31st Aug 2006 - 00:09 GMT

jeez, you've been here two weeks and already you have seen so much I have not in 37 years. I gotta get out on my bike more often. Nice find.

Sirhcbre: 31st Aug 2006 - 04:31 GMT

I need to get on my bike more too before summer ends. Most of the exploring I've been doing has been around Metro stops. I went out to Bois-Franc on my bike last night and explored a bit. It's an interesting place.

We should take a trip to the East End on Friday. I waited around all day for my friend's friend to call or email and she never did. She had said that it might be Thursday that she'll be coming into the city so I have to wait again!

Franny Wentzel: 9th Jan 2009 - 14:13 GMT

Brings to mind the notorious 'spite house' of NYC

Curious Notoriety
 
The spitefulness of Mr. Crocker and his spite fence fades into the minor leagues, however, when compared with the spitefulness of Joseph Richardson and his Spite House. What is a mere fence when one considers a 100-foot-long four-story brick and stone house? 

Many building lots in New York City antedate the mapping of the adjoining streets, so when those streets were cut through, odd-shaped parcels were left over. It wasn't until the 1870s that upper Lexington Avenue came into being on the East Side of Manhattan, and when it was laid out, a narrow piece of land at the northwest corner of 82nd Street was left over. It was 102 feet long but only five feet wide, so it appeared not to have much use. 

It was part of a large parcel of land that had been assembled by Thomas W. McLeay and inherited by his wife Emma Jane when he died in 1865. In 1881 the skinny site was bought by Emily Emmett, along with two more conventionally shaped adjoining lots. Although Emmett's name appears on the deed, the actual owner was her uncle, Joseph Richardson. Mr. Richardson was a building contractor, a sometimes-developer, and a real estate manipulator who considered it prudent to keep many of his assets in the names of various relatives. He executed projects for the Vanderbilt and Gould families, and was responsible for constructing the expansion of the original Grand Central Depot (now known as Grand Central Terminal). Within the context of the normal business practices of that time, his actions in concealing assets from potential creditors were not especially unusual. 

It is not known which was the outgrowth of the other, but besides indirectly buying Emma McLeay's land in 1881, Mr. Richardson became engaged to her the same year. Early in 1882 they were married, and concurrently Mr. Richardson's eccentric behavior gained him a curious notoriety. 

Patrick McQuade intended to build a pair of walk-up apartment houses on land he owned on 82nd Street directly adjacent to Mr. Richardson's five-foot strip on Lexington. He felt it would be more profitable if one of his houses could enjoy the benefits of a corner location. He assumed that nothing could be built on the leftover five feet, so he offered $1000 for the strip — $200 less than the figure at which the city had assessed it. Mr. Richardson was said to have had more grandiose ideas, and to have held out for $5000, a price Mr. McQuade was unwilling to pay. 

The Bay Window Clause 

Undaunted, Mr. McQuade hired the prolific architect Alfred B. Ogden to design his apartment buildings, including windows on the lot line under the assumption that Mr. Richardson's lot would forever remain vacant. Construction of the pair of buildings began on May 22, 1882, triggering Richardson's spitefulness. Fresh from just having completed the construction of a marble-fronted row of three conventional one-family residences adjoining to the north, he returned to the drafting board and less than a month later, filed plans for a pair of buildings of his own, each 51 feet long, on the Lexington Avenue sliver lot. While each house was nominally only five feet wide, advantage was taken of a clause in the New York City building regulations that permitted corner houses to have bay window extensions. This enabled the main rooms on each floor to be a little more than seven feet wide. Since the Richardson buildings were much smaller than those of Mr. McQuade, they took less effort to construct, and were completed in November 1882, almost five months earlier than the side-street houses. Perhaps exhausted from the battle with Richardson, Mr. McQuade sold his two apartment houses on September 1, 1884, to Heyman Sarner, a local clothier. 

While Richardson must have been a trifle odd to have built such a pair of houses just for spite, he proved himself even stranger, because he actually moved into one of them and lived in it. He rented the other out to tenants at $500 per year. Furnishing a house as narrow as Richardson's required specially made furniture, the dining table being only 18 inches wide and the chairs proportionately small. The kitchen stove was the smallest the manufacturer had ever constructed, and the beds were barely wide enough to hold their occupants. The staircase and halls in the Spite House were too narrow to permit two people to pass, and for some they weren't even wide enough for one. The story is told that Deacon Terry, a reporter for The American, was sent to the house one summer day to interview Mr. Richardson and got stuck in the winding staircase. Despite the efforts of neighbors to push him one way or the other, the broad-girthed Mr. Terry remained firmly wedged in. Only by wriggling out of his clothes was he able to extricate himself, and he finished the interview on the roof in his shorts. 

Having arrived in New York from his native England in 1833, Mr. Richardson forged a successful career as a contractor and accumulated significant wealth in the process. Despite this, he was frugal in the extreme and went to great lengths to conserve his funds. For years he carried his lunch to work with him in a paper bag (reused until it wore out), and Richardson himself confirmed that he had once persuaded a physician to halve his bill, much in the manner of the infamous multimillionaire Hetty Green, by disguising himself in the raiment of a hod carrier and pleading poverty. 

Joseph and Emma Richardson were content to live in the Spite House, but Dellaripha Richardson, Joseph's daughter by his first wife, refused to visit it, declaring that it was "too swell" for her tastes. She preferred to remain where she had long lived, in a dwelling on East Houston Street called by her neighbors "the Prison House." Reflecting her father's penchant for odd behavior, she was seen by the neighbors only in the early morning, when she swept the steps, visited the grocery store for some bare necessities, and returned to immure herself behind barred windows, where she refused to see any visitors. 

Spitefulness in the Family 
The daughter was as avaricious and parsimonious as the father, and after his death in 1897, she brought suit to contest the will, which gave her stepmother a portion of her father's estate. Joseph Richardson's holdings were said to have been worth something between $4 million and $30 million, but little could be located. Dellaripha herself refused to turn over to the Surrogate's Court some strongboxes of her father's she had been keeping, and did so only when threatened with jail. When the boxes were opened, the bonds they were supposed to have contained had vanished. Other assets similarly disappeared, showing up later in her vault and that of her brother George. When the legal battle over the will was finally resolved and the document admitted to probate two years later, barely enough cash was realized to pay the $50,000 legacy Mr. Richardson had left to his Baptist pastor, the $17,500 he left to pay off the mortgage on his church, and to reimburse the $200,000 his widow asserted she had spent on legal fees. 

Emma Richardson was not finished fighting with her stepdaughter, however. In August 1900 and again the following November, Dellaripha brought a claim against her stepmother in an attempt to dispossess her from the Spite House so it could be sold for the daughter's benefit. Although Joseph Richardson had transferred ownership of the Spite House to his wife in 1892, in 1896 he gave his daughter a deed to the same property. Thinking she owned the building, Dellaripha claimed the old woman was merely a tenant-at-will and could be evicted. The judge who dismissed the suits expressed regret that he couldn't find some harsher way to deal with the difficult stepdaughter. 

Mr. Richardson's Spite House cramped his neighbor's building, and was a local landmark for more than thirty years, but in September of 1915 it vanished, a victim of progress. The real estate development firm of Bing and Bing bought the Richardson property as well as the adjacent Sarner houses and tore them down to make room for a newer and larger apartment house. Mr. Richardson's adjoining marble-fronted row remains, however, converted to stores on the ground floor with apartments above. 

Peter: 9th Jan 2009 - 14:15 GMT

hahaha franny, thats classic. thanks for sharing.