Posh Portals

Posh Portals: Elegant Entrances and Ingratiating Ingresses to Apartments for the Affluent in New York City

Andrew Alpern, with Simon Fieldhouse (Illustrations), Kenneth Grant (Photographs)

Abbeville Press, October 2020

Hardcover | 9-1/2 x 12 inches | 286 pages | English | ISBN: 978-0789213792 | $75.00

PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:

This handsome, oversized book introduces us to the grandest entrances of New York City’s residential buildings. These posh portals come in an array of forms and styles, such as the porte cochere, with a passage to admit carriages or motor cars; the classic awning, originally meant to be retracted in good weather; and Neoclassical, Romanesque, and Gothic revivals. 

Architectural historian Andrew Alpern highlights approximately 140 entrances, from the nineteenth century to the present, including those of the Dakota, the first true luxury apartment house in New York; San Remo, one of Central Park West’s most impressive apartment houses; and the Ansonia, at one time the largest hotel in the world. Each entrance is accompanied by a description of its signal features and the history of the building that surrounds it. All are represented in splendid color photographs, and many by charming watercolor drawings.

These ornate entrances offer a glimpse into New York’s past, as well as its future―for today, once again, entryways have begun to feature heavily in the marketing of residential buildings. Posh Portals will be an inspiration for architects and a delight for city dwellers.

Andrew Alpern is an architectural historian, architect, and attorney who is an expert on historic apartment houses in New York. He has ten prior books, six of which tell the stories of some of New York's architectural assets and the people behind them. Kenneth Grant is an architectural photographer with a special passion for the buildings of his native New York. Originally a journalist and web producer, he now records the buildings around him in New York, showing the results at www.newyorkitecture.com. Simon Fieldhouse is an Australian artist who was struck by the elegance of the entrances to so many of New York's apartment buildings when he first visited the city. He has also painted historic buildings of England, Italy and Australia.

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dDAB COMMENTARY:

Must a portal be traditional in order for it to be posh? The answer is clearly "yes" upon flipping through the more than 100 entrances to New York City apartment buildings gathered in the latest book by Andrew Alpern, author of the classic Apartments for the Affluent. That earlier book's title comprises part of the lengthy alliterative subtitle to Posh Portals, whose "elegant entrances and ingratiating ingresses" date from the late 1800s to just a couple years ago. The buildings appearing from this century were almost exclusively designed by Robert A.M. Stern, the former dean of the Yale School of Architecture and the unofficial dean of neotraditional Manhattan luxury apartment buildings.

One wouldn't know it looking through this new coffee table book, but distinctive portals are now in abundance in high-end NYC residential buildings of all styles, especially modern and contemporary. I think of portals as openings that lead to courtyards or porte cochères (witness my #astoriaportal posts on Instagram). In Manhattan they can be found in Renzo Piano's 565 Broome SoHo, Herzog & de Meuron's 160 Leroy, and Isay Weinfeld's Jardim, among others, as well as SHoP Architects' 111 West 57th Street, which will have a porte cochère on 58th Street in the renovated Steinway & Sons building once the project is soon completed. A few of these projects were actually rounded up in a New York Times article late last year that asserts "high-end buildings catering to car owners are bringing it back," "it" being the porte-cochère.

Is Stern in that article? Yes, but not by name (it's one of those frustrating articles that is about something architectural but doesn't credit architects). Stern's 70 Vestry in Tribeca, completed in 2018, is there. It has a gated portal — one I discovered around the time of the Times article — and is one of five RAMSA projects in Posh Portals. All of them are gathered near the end of the book, but this is not because the buildings are presented in chronological order; rather, as Alpern explains in the preface, "the arrangement here is a visual and stylistic one that provides the justification for the transition from each two-page spread to the next." This means that Stern has certain visual and stylistic tendencies in the entrances to his firm's residential buildings, be they a gated porte cochère, a generous drop-off, or merely an entry covered by a canopy (the last is a traditional element Alpern illuminates in his all-too-brief introduction).

I gather that Stern and other neotraditional contemporaries are included in Posh Portals because their buildings do not stand out from those designed 100 years ago. Flipping from one building to the next, the photographs by Kenneth Grant and watercolors by Simon Fieldhouse have a pleasing consistency that emphasizes the human-scale details at the "elegant entrances and ingratiating ingresses": carved stonework, ornate wood or metal doors, Ionic columns and pilasters, and so forth. Alpern's text for each building is short, just long enough to point out the architect and include one or two things of interest about the building, in architectural or social/historical terms. For 70 Vestry Street he mentions the French Beuamarière limestone covering the building and the "motor-court entry and its through-block driveway," the latter referencing 10 Gracie Square. 

So how about 10 Gracie Square? Wanting to see that nearly 100-year-old project, I flipped to the handy endpaper map only to find my main issue with the book has nothing to do with style. All the buildings are numbered 1 to 133 on the map and adjacent list per the order they appear in the book, where they are also numbered. I found 10 Gracie Square on the Upper East Side: #17 on the map and #17 in the book, where photos reveal its very private gated porte cochère. Fine, but why is neighboring 7 Gracie Square #99 on the map but #105 in the book? Turns out there is a clump of Brooklyn buildings that are numbered 94 to 99 but do not appear on the Manhattan-only map. Accordingly, 1 to 93 correspond between the map and their two-page descriptions in the book, as they should, but numbers 94 to 133 do not. No wonder the list of projects on the map is keyed to page numbers. This derailing of the logical numbering is hardly a huge issue, but having written two guidebooks I'm all about making architecture books easy to use — not just, like this one, enjoyable to look at.

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