A row of five, 1889
The house went up in 1889 on the north side of West 74th Street, one of five raised together under a single New Building application, No. 1615 of that year. Thom and Wilson were the architects; Patrick Farley was the developer and owner. The five were drawn to alternate, two facade designs repeating down the row in an ABABA rhythm, faced in brick and stone in the Northern Renaissance and Renaissance Revival manner then arriving on the Upper West Side. Four stories over a raised basement, a straight stoop, masonry bearing walls.
City tax records date the building to 1901, and the listing follows them. The Landmarks Preservation Commission's survey of the block does not.
The firm that built the Criminal Courts
Arthur M. Thom and James W. Wilson ran one of the busiest residential practices in the city through the 1880s and 1890s, and they had already designed a row of fourteen further west on 74th, between Columbus and Amsterdam, for Margaret Brennan in 1886. The critic Montgomery Schuyler dismissed them as architectural contractors. The record is less dismissive. The firm beat Napoleon LeBrun in the competition for the Manhattan Criminal Courts Building, completed in 1894 and demolished around 1939, and designed the Harlem Courthouse of 1891 to 1893 at East 121st Street and Sylvan Place, which still stands and is a designated landmark. The Commission credits their terra cotta on brick fronts with shaping the character of the Upper West Side/Central Park West Historic District, which took this house in at its designation in 1990.
The vine that renamed the house
Nothing in the designation report calls this the Wisteria House. The city did that on its own. Two wisteria vines climb the front and, for two or three weeks in early May, drop the facade behind a purple curtain that turns the sidewalk into a line of cameras. It is now the best known wisteria address on the Upper West Side, a strange sort of fame for a rowhouse built to look like its four neighbors.
The lower triplex
Unit 1 takes the bottom three floors, about 4,135 square feet, with four bedrooms and three and a half baths and a private garden off the lower level. A two year renovation left the historic fabric in place, the original mantels, the moldings and interior shutters, and the plaster fleur-de-lis running the halls and stairways, then put entirely new kitchens and marble baths behind it. The roof is new and the skylights sit flush. There is an elevator, a wine cellar, a library, a home office, central air, and a washer and dryer. It has not been lived in since the work finished.
The upper duplex is offered separately, which means the whole house is available to anyone who wants it back as one.
The block
West 74th between Central Park West and Columbus is one of the few Upper West Side blocks still townhouses end to end. Directly across the street stand the eighteen Clark Estate houses at Nos. 18 to 52, commissioned by Frederick Ambrose Clark and designed by Percy Griffin in neo-Georgian between 1902 and 1904, landmarked in 1977 as their own small district. At the Central Park West corner is the San Remo, Emery Roth's twin-towered co-op of 1930, the first of the four paired towers that gave the avenue its skyline, and an individual landmark since 1987. The park is half a block east.
