| The Osborne | |
|---|---|
| General information | |
| Type | Housing cooperative |
| Architectural style | Italian-Renaissance |
| Address | 205 West 57th Street |
| Town or city | New York, NY |
| Country | United States |
| Construction started | 1883 |
| Completed | 1885 |
| Renovated | 1906 |
| Technical details | |
| Structural system | Skyscraper |
| Floor count | 11 (front) 15 (rear) |
| Design and construction | |
| Main contractor | Thomas Osborne |
| Architect | James Edward Ware |
The Osborne, a New York City apartment building, stands behind its dour and reticent rusticated brownstone cladding[1] at 205 West 57th Street, on the northwest corner of Seventh Avenue, catercorner from Carnegie Hall. The Osborne, far less prominent for the city's visitors than The Dakota, was designed and built by James Edward Ware in 1883–85 and expanded with an annex to the west in 1906, designed by Alfred S. G. Taylor and Julien Clarence Levi. The stone contractor Thomas Osborne, whose ruinous speculative investment it was, gave the building his name.[2] A visual connection to Osborne House, Queen Victoria's summer residence in the Isle of Wight is also made.
Three modillioned cornices divide the height into three broad horizontal bandings, with a two-story attic added for servants' quarters in 1891 that is capped with a top cornice. The original building is constructed of masonry bearing walls ranging from 4 1/2 feet thick at its base to 18 inches at the top floor. The 1906 Annex is constructed of steel-framing behind brick and brownstone curtain walls.
Its range of street-level shopfronts is broken at the center of the main, 57th Street front by its entrance. The unusually richly decorated lobby, in American Renaissance taste, has stuccoed and mosaic-tiled walls, floors that mix tile mosaics and slabs of varicolored Italian marble. Complementary marble was used for the wainscoting and carved marble recesses with benches. Mosaics and glazed terracotta "Della Robbia" panels cover the walls and ceilings in rich hues of red, blue and gold leaf.[3] with contributions by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the great sculptor of the American Renaissance, the muralist John La Farge, glass by Tiffany Studios and French designer Jacob Adolphus Holzer.[4]
The Osborne was uniquely designed with 11 stories on the south-facing 57th Street front, containing the parade rooms of the apartments—foyers, parlors, dining rooms, with 14-foot ceilings—and 14 stories on the back, where bedrooms and private baths were either up or down a flight of seven steps, and the ceilings were just over 8 feet high. In 1891, the 11th-floor attic, which occupied the southern section of the building only, was extended to the north edge of the building to provide additional servants quarters, making it now 15 stories in the rear. About half of the spacious Gilded Age apartments, originally just four to a floor, in a variety of spatial configurations with separate servant quarters, have been subdivided since World War I. Floors are of parquet with banded edgings, fireplaces richly carved with tiled surrounds. Insulated walls thirty inches thick insulate apartments from neighbors' noise.
Leonard Bernstein lived in three apartments at The Osborne for a number of years before he moved to The Dakota. Café singer Bobby Short moved to The Osborne from his studio in Carnegie Tower across the avenue. The actor Dane Clark lived in The Osborne, as did pianist Van Cliburn, director Harold Clurman, and actresses Lynn Redgrave and Vera Miles. The academy award-winning actor Gig Young was living there with his wife of three weeks when he killed her and then himself in a murder-suicide. Newscaster Charles Osgood has an apartment, as well as TCM's Robert Osborne.[5][6] Other residents noted in Faith Stewart-Gordon's chatty memoir[7] include pianist André Watts; Gary and Naomi Graffman; writer Hortense Calisher; Curtis Harnack; Leo Lerman; Gray Foy; Maude Franchot; Shirley Booth; Mrs Olin Downs; Larry Byden and his two children; Lynn Redgrave and her husband John Clark and their two children; Judge Joseph Proskauer; Blanche Thebom; Tom Poston; Harold Fonville; Eva Brown; Caroline Bell; Mike Midlin; Sylvia Miles; Louis d'Almeida; The Baroness Dalrup and her family; Rose Tobias and Dane Clark.
The building was designated an official city landmark in 1991.