The northern limit of mansion building was a topic of concern after Andrew Carnegie built his big house at 91st Street in 1903. In 1913 The Real Estate Record and Guide predicted that Mount Sinai, then held in check between 100th and 101st Streets, would form the barrier. Any hospital, it said, was “objectionable to the best type of private families.”
The mansion builders didn’t go past 96th, and apartment house construction swept up Fifth Avenue in the 1920s — but how far up was again the question. In 1924 Arthur Brisbane, a columnist for the Hearst newspapers, bought the northeast corner of Fifth and 102nd, a block north of the hospital. His initial purpose is not clear, but The New York Times predicted that a garage would be erected on the site. Simultaneously, Mr. Brisbane was developing the Ritz Tower, at Park Avenue and 57th Street.
Notwithstanding The Times’s suggestion of an impending garage, in 1926 the developer Nathan Raisler built 1212 Fifth Avenue at the south corner of 102nd. A Romanesque thing of brownish brick and terra cotta, it is nothing remarkable, with apartments more modest than in the usual Park or Fifth Avenue type of building. Then, in 1928, Mr. Brisbane hired Schultze & Weaver, hotel specialists, to design the medieval-style 1215 Fifth Avenue, with its agreeable contrast of light masonry and caramel-colored brick, on his plot on 102nd.
A year later, the developer Joseph Ravitch retained Emery Roth to put up 1200 Fifth, a pleasant beige brick design with some Classical engaged columns and a colossal roof tank house, at the 101st Street corner. By this time, the adventurous three were boxed in by Mount Sinai to the south and the New York Academy of Medicine to the north.
At 1200 Fifth, the tenants included Walter Hochschild, an industrialist whose penthouse had an outdoor dance floor. One of his neighbors was Walter Seligman, who worked as a laborer in Montana before joining his family’s long-established banking house. Interior photographs of the Seligman apartment are on the new photograph Web site of the Museum of the City of New York. A third resident was Philip Truex, an actor who played the much-traveled corpse central to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 movie “The Trouble With Harry.”
Allen W. Dulles lived at 1212. In 1926 he had been a rising diplomat when he left the Foreign Service, saying that he could not live on $8,000 per year. He then came to New York and joined the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. He returned to government work in the 1940s, became head of the C.I.A. in the 1950s and was a key influence in the 1961 invasion of Cuba, known as the Bay of Pigs.
Mr. Brisbane moved into 1215 Fifth Avenue, taking a triplex at the top befitting a star columnist who ultimately earned $260,000 a year. His aerie had 30 rooms with 7 fireplaces, 18 baths and a private entrance on Fifth leading to his own elevator.
He was an early 20th-century Tweeter, writing short, aphoristic columns, with simple observations like: “Who makes the drunkard? His enemies? No. The drunkard is made by his friends.” (That’s only 64 characters.) He wrote on nudists, Upton Sinclair, Hitler, the Jewish New Year, crime in Oklahoma, the Paris stock market and hundreds of other subjects. The Times said he had 30 million followers, which is what we once called readers. (His grandson Arthur S. Brisbane is now the public editor of The Times.)
In the three Fifth Avenue buildings, as with others of their class, black people had a minuscule presence; the 1930 census records only two, both housemaids. But in 1954 the magazine Jet said 1200 Fifth had become the “ultra-ritzy residence of Harlem’s top-drawer society,” mentioning Dr. George Cannon, a radiologist and civil rights activist, and Juanita Hall, the actress who played Bloody Mary in “South Pacific” beginning in 1949.
Marian Anderson moved into 1200 in the 1950s. She was the first African-American to sing at the Metropolitan Opera, performing in Verdi’s “Ballo in Maschera” in 1955.
The Brisbane building, 1215, was converted to co-ops years ago. Mr. Brisbane’s apartment has been subdivided, but his sealed-off private elevator shaft is visible on rental plans of the building. When 1200 was converted to co-ops in 2006, studios started at $767,000, two-bedroom apartments at $3 million. If there was a discount for location, it was not much.
By the 1970s, Mount Sinai owned 1212 Fifth Avenue. The 1926 building was recently gutted and rebuilt as condominiums, a joint venture of the hospital and Durst Fetner Residential. As part of the deal, the developer is constructing a residential building for Mount Sinai’s use on an adjacent site on 101st Street.
The hospitals are closing in on this little outpost.
E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com
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