In April 1898, the bohemian existence of women living at an apartment house on the corner of West 57th Street and Ninth Avenue was described in an article in ythe New York Times.

The Windemere, located at 400-406 West 57th Street, had been built in the early 1880s and was one of the city's first apartment houses. Originally it was filled with families, but by the 1890s the Windemere had undergone its first transformation, becoming a place for the "new woman" who went to work or pursued the arts outside of her family.

The present owners, Toa Construction, have applied to the City's Buildings Department to demolish the Windemere. When it was discovered that part of the building is located in the Preservation Area of the Clinton Special District (and the Buildings Department had always considered the three buildings as one) the application was rejected. Toa has announced its intention to appeal this decision to the Board of Standards and Appeals. The underlying zoning allows for greater height and bulk than the present building, and permits two floors of commercial use.

At the same time, the Windemere had been considered for landmark status at a hearing by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Part of an immense queue of buildings the Landmarks Commission has to consider, it is currently protected by the strong anti-demolition clause of the Special District.

Advocates for the building worry that the Buildings Department’s decision may be overturned by the Board of Standards and Appeals. The Landmarks Commission currently has a policy not to hold a new hearing for a building for three years. This means that it may take up to a year to hold another hearing and designate the building.

By the 1890s there were an estimated 30,000 apartment vacancies in the city. The Windemere became home to 200 residents, of whom eighty percent were women. As the New York Times article states, there was “probably no other building just like this in New York.“

Their occupations were regarded as "women's work" and they earned "a bare pittance by it." They were nurses and seamstresses, musicians and artists, but they were earning respect as bread winners and finding self confidence in their independence. Several decades earlier, the article points out, they would have been called poor old maids and been pitied.

Instead, women were a growing work force in the city and the need to secure small, affordable homes created a new market. At this time, Henry Stirling Goodale, who had just come to the city from Sky Farm, became the manager of the Windemere. Goodale was a man of artistic tastes and was interested in the study of human nature. In fact, he appears to have had just the right spirit of nonconformity and congeniality for that time.

He lived on the top floor and built a study in a little "one-roomed house" on the roof. From the peaked ceiling of the little house hung a lantern, a South American whip and long strands of Texas grass forming a canopy above the couch. Hens walked between the widely placed inner and outer windows. With the Hudson River only three blocks away, he had an unobstructed spectacular view.

The building itself was not reconstructed to accommodate the new residents. The rent roll had increased from about thirty-five to more than a hundred by 1898. But the apartments of five to thirteen rooms remained the same and the newcomers were grouped together, five people in an eight room apartment, seven in ten rooms, and so on. Each apartment had a long hall and the rooms were arranged along it. There was a kitchen at one end and a bathroom on the side.

Small gas stoves were installed in some rooms and rents varied by size and location. A large room with a window on the street with a deep closet was $12.50 a month; a smaller room with a view of neighboring walls cost $10. Some larger suites were $25 and $35, and included heat and gas. Artists were given rooms with northern light, facing the street. Nurses, who were seen as preferred tenants, were given big, light rooms. The kitchen and bathroom in each apartment were only used by members of that group.

The rooms on the top floor were the most bohemian of all, separated by partitions of boards that had been put up in a large, previously unused space. One young woman artist had a studio with a skylight on this floor and she and her mother occupied several rooms. The "duplex" was on this floor as well, similar to Goodale's at the other end of the building. It was a small-room with steps leading up to a roof house. A door opened from this house onto the "summer outing place of the roof dwellers."

The western part of the roof was a popular place to congregate, read, and relax. There were chairs, hammocks and several church pews over a hundred years old from a New York church that had been demolished.

Today, the Windemere stands nearly empty. Over the years, the tenants were harassed, relocated, or paid to give up their apartments. Between the owners who want to demolish and community leaders who want to restore the building, its future is uncertain.

The Landmarks Commission must consider the importance of the physical structure. It was designed by an undistinguished architect; it is perhaps the third (not the first) apartment house, and falls a little on the edge between an apartment house and a tenement. Its social history shows that it was part of a movement; at the same time, the YWCA was opening its doors to women throughout the city.

The rejection of the owner's application to demolish it, if upheld by the Board of Standards and Appeals, may provide adequate protection in the eyes of the Landmarks Commission. Still, there is support on the Commission for the building.

The Windemere is in the vanguard of two movements: the multiple residences that now characterize our city and the development of the women's work force.

Its fate is now in the hands of the city's bureaucracy.

by Mary Clark, published in the Clinton Chronicle, January 1993

© 1993 The Public Press