Tudor City - History

History

Before Tudor City, tenements and slums dominated the area, which bordered a power plant and slaughterhouses, along First Avenue on the East River. It was known as "Goat Hill" (goats and squatters ruled the area) and later "Prospect Hill". The area eventually developed into a shanty Irish community known as "Corcoran's Roost", founded by Jimmy Corcoran, in the 1850s and later became known as a community with a high rate of violent crime and a haven for waterfront thieves, most notably the Rag Gang, during the late 19th century.

In the 1920s, the real estate developer Fred F. French sought to lure tenants to Tudor City, his vision of an urban Utopia — a "human residential enclave" that boasted "tulip gardens, small golf courses, and private parks." The complex was built to bring in middle-class residents who had begun leaving Manhattan for the other boroughs and the suburbs. A 1994 feature in The New York Times reported:

The historicist architecture of the buildings can be classified neo-Gothic rather than Tudor or the related English revival styles Tudorbethan (Mock Tudor) and Jacobethan. An earlier 1920s residential development in Manhattan, Hudson View Gardens, also built for suburban appeal, made explicit use of such Tudorbethan features as half-timbering.

Originally, two gardens flanked 42nd Street, with the south garden featuring a "miniaturized" 18-hole golf course. The area where Tudor Gardens (Number 2) stands today was the site of the legendary tennis courts where the likes of Pancho Segura, Bobby Riggs, Rudy Vallée, and Welby Van Horn played exhibition games. On at least one cold winter, the courts were flooded to create an ice skating rink for the community.

In May 1948, Claude Marchant, a "well known dancer and teacher in the Katherine Dunham School of Dance," won a $1,000 judgement against the owners of Tudor City. Marchant, an African American, had been refused entry into the passenger elevator of the building at 25 Prospect Avenue, on the basis of race.

In the 1960s, the Fred F. French Company sold Tudor City to the Rabinowitz Corporation, which in turn sold it to the Helmsley Corporation in the 1970s. In May 1985, Harry Helmsley and Alvin Schwartz, sold their remaining properties in Tudor City to Philip Pilevsky of Philips International and Francis Greenburger of Time Equities. The new owners quickly set about converting Tudor City into co-op apartments, as was happening across the city. Conversions were completed with little problem but when the real estate market and economy slowed in 1989-1994, some co-op prices dropped significantly, as owners and investors were concerned that the co-ops themselves would become insolvent. In April 2008, New York Magazine recalled the 1989 slump:

In 1988 Tudor City was named a historic district by New York. Preservation efforts leading up to the designation had started 10 years earlier when Harry Helmsley proposed building towers atop two parks within the complex.