A New Emery Roth Book Details His Uptown-Downtown Range

It’s impossible to talk about prewar New York apartments without mentioning the architect Emery Roth. Best known for his buildings that define the Central Park West skyline — the Beresford, San Remo, and the El Dorado among them — Roth’s name has long been a real-estate status symbol, synonymous with elegant apartments that have only become more desirable over the years.

But beyond being a prestigious architect, he was an incredibly prolific one. From 1899 through his death in 1948, not counting the later work his children carried on under the name Emery Roth & Sons, Roth designed for downtown as well as uptown, in neighborhoods all over the city, and for many building types, not just the ones with sprawling suites and park views. For the first time, the breadth of his career is captured by the architectural historian Andrew Alpern in his latest book, Emery Roth’s New York Apartment Buildings. As the author of ten other books on prewar apartments and New York City buildings, Alpern is perhaps one of the most qualified to catalogue Roth’s accomplishments.

Curious to understand a career that brought Roth from Central Park West to more modest buildings downtown like 299 West 12th Street (which is now anything but — Andy Cohen purchased one of its penthouses for just over $18 million in 2022), we sat down with Alpern to talk about Roth’s floor plans, building styles, and the art of creating a successful apartment.

Why now?
After participating in a talk for Emery Roth’s 150th birthday a few years ago, I had the idea to update Steven Ruttenbaum’s 40-year-old book on Emery Roth. When I realized how many buildings Steve had bypassed, I conceived of the two-part volume presenting Steve’s book unchanged and a complete catalogue raisonné of all of Emery Roth’s apartment buildings. I was astounded to discover that Roth designed 175 apartment buildings, of which seven have been demolished and 29 were never built — most of those were in 1929, doomed by the stock-market crash.

What were some of the more surprising omissions in the Ruttenbaum book that you are glad you included in this book? 
Steve focused on the large apartment houses that are obviously the most important, but he missed all but a few of the ones that were never built, and he also left out a large number of lesser-known projects in upper Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. We now have a definitive record of Emery Roth’s astounding output of 175 apartment projects in just 50 years.

What was Emery Roth like as an architect and person? 
Emery Roth was a hardworking family man, not a starchitect, at least, not as we have them today. He wasn’t on a quest to change the world with his aesthetic views. He just wanted to have clients—real estate developers—get projects, and hopefully make a profit before going on to the next one.

Most people know Roth for his uptown buildings. But how different were his downtown buildings from the ones he designed for the Central Park West crowd? 
Well, the first difference between projects like the San Remo or El Dorado and 299 West 12th Street was the size and shape of the plot! Of course, the market on Central Park West was certainly very different from down in the Village. The developers, Roth’s clients, would see the local markets differently and would structure their set of requirements based on that vision.

Almost all of Roth’s clients wanted a range of apartment sizes and qualities to offer potential tenants. And Roth was particularly good at providing that kind of hierarchy of apartment size, which would translate into things like bedroom count, but also the size and type of dining area. Back then, there was a lot of variety in it, whether you had a full dining room, a small dining room, something even smaller just off the kitchen, or in some cases just an enlarged foyer. All that would help the client to have the expanded offering.

What factored into the stylistic differences between his uptown and downtown buildings?
For buildings like the El Dorado, its cutting-edge Art Deco design was a way to attract tenants, which in the case of Central Park West was the upper-middle class. What’s interesting is that Roth’s initial design was more classical like the San Remo, but the client rejected that and brought in the firm of Margon & Holder, which was likely behind the Art Deco façade, although Roth handled the apartment planning.

The layouts of the El Dorado, San Remo, and Beresford offer a range of apartments, but they’re not that large, mostly around eight or nine rooms, some smaller. The San Remo was originally designed with some larger apartments in the south tower, which was supposed to have stacked, full-floor duplexes. By the time the building was underway, the Depression was in full swing. It was obvious those apartments wouldn’t rent, and they were reconfigured as very large, about ten-room simplexes. Still, quite sizable! But not as large as the original duplexes.

In the Village, at buildings like 59 West 12th and 299 West 12th Street, the surrounding architecture was, and is, very eclectic. That’s part of the local neighborhood charm. Roth tried to emulate that certainly with 299 on Abingdon Square. It’s quite distinctive in its architecture. There are only a few other buildings he did with that sort of detailing. Less so with 59 West 12th Street, but that block is very different from Abingdon Square, so the architecture would be different.

If there is one thing to single out about Roth’s work, what would it be? 

At the individual apartment level, he was brilliant at doing layouts. He was very, very good, just as Candela and Carpenter, at organizing a floor plan that revolved around an entrance foyer as the hub, with the public spaces going in one direction, the private bedrooms in another, and service areas arranged so they could serve both public and private conveniently. The door placements of the closets, bathrooms, entrances, were all thoughtful. There were obvious plate wall sections where furniture could be placed. He really thought through to the ultimate user, the tenant.

Then, he would fit those layouts, which incorporated a hierarchy and variety of sizes to meet client needs, into a floor plate for the building, which of course also had to comply with building codes and zoning.

And, as you were saying, he wasn’t wedded to a single style. 
Yes, on top of doing layouts, he was excellent at sketching out a variety of façade styles based on different aesthetics. In a meeting with a client, he could impressively take a piece of paper mid-conversation and easily sketch up, complete with details, what the building would look like in one style. Then he’d roll a fresh piece of paper and sketch it in a different way! His facility with doing that enabled him to be very responsive to the aesthetic interest of the client. Every part of the process was highly considered: He’d even run a whole budget and execute on an efficient timeline.

That carried on after he passed away. When his two sons, and later his grandson, carried on the practice as Emery Roth & Sons, they may have shifted to office buildings, but their clients still benefited from that same level of service — just a different type of building.

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