Mansion House Apartment

 apartment building, movie / film / TV location

5-story Neo-Baroque residential building originally completed in 1865 as a 4-story Italianate brownstone townhouse. It was sold in 1901 to H.H. Rogers, Jr., who hired architect Charles Brigham to design an entirely new façade. What resulted was an imposing limestone mansion overflowing with classical details—scrolled broken pediments embracing carved urns over the parlor windows, 2-story fluted Corinthian pilasters at the top two floors, menacing carved lions heads in the brackets of the limestone balcony and elaborate oversized volutes that roll away from the free-standing Corinthian entrance columns. There is a smaller balcony at the middle bay of the top floor, with wrought-iron railing.

Unusual for the East Side of Manhattan, Brigham used a dog-leg stoop. But unlike its West Side counterparts, he treated it imperiously. Squared columns with Ionic pilasters support four classical urns. Ornate ironwork provides a screen and regal iron gates protects the service entrance at the left side. The facade is crowned by a dentiled and modillioned cornice surmounted by extensions of the four piers, each topped by an urn and joined by balustrades.

Two other families later lived by turns in the mansion in the early years of the century, until it was leased as upscale furnished apartments in 1919. In 1936 the house was structurally converted to apartments—just two per floor with a doctor’s office in the basement level. Among the tenants was Leonard M. Holland who had been wine steward at the Waldorf-Astoria for 12 years when he died in his sleep in his apartment in 1945. In 2006 the house was renovated once again. The doctor’s office remains in the basement level; but now the house is divided into a triplex stretching from the parlor through the third floor, and three apartments above. Today the exterior of the imposing house is little changed from the 1902 renovation.

The exterior was used as a filming location for S5E7 of the USA Network series "White Collar".