38 West 95th Street

The new-building application for this house went in as NB 710 of 1892, filed for the developer James B. Gillie, who was putting up a row of brownstones on West 95th Street just off Central Park West. His architects were Neville and Bagge, the partnership of Thomas Neville, a builder from Ireland, and George Bagge, an architect from Manchester, and the row came in the firm's founding year. Over the next twenty-five years Neville and Bagge would put their name to hundreds of buildings across Manhattan; this block is where that run begins, Renaissance Revival fronts in brownstone with ironwork at the stoops, finished in 1893.

Little of it has needed correcting since. The house still reads as built, three stories over a raised basement with a straight stoop and wood one-over-one windows, and it stands inside the Upper West Side/Central Park West Historic District, designated in 1990, its entry recorded in Volume 3 of the designation report.

The house is divided as a two-family today, and this is the better half: the owner's duplex, entered through its own door up the brownstone stoop. Eight rooms and more than 2,000 square feet across the top two floors, three bedrooms and three baths, with a fireplace, hardwood floors, a washer and dryer in the residence, and a balcony that takes in the gardens and the skyline beyond.

What the arrangement gives a renter is the townhouse itself, without the whole townhouse: the stoop, the private front door, house-scale rooms, and no lobby between the street and your keys.

West 95th Street runs a single long block from Central Park West to Columbus Avenue, and the end nearest the park keeps its 1890s streetscape: brownstone rows under mature street trees, most of them, like this one, buildings of the historic district. Central Park is at the corner, and the B and C at 96th Street are under five hundred feet from the door, one stop of practicality on a block that otherwise looks much as it did when Gillie's row opened.