Right along Third Avenue, behind a facade of tired 1930s storefronts, lies an eccentric, lush and ivy-strewn Eden known as the Cottages, a row of eight miniature Regency-style residences occupied now by only five tenants–and seen by mere handfuls of New Yorkers in its 60-year history.
Designed from the start, it seems, to be torn down, the block-long, two-story development nevertheless has sailed along for decades through New York City’s tempestuous real estate markets, protected only by an aging owner who came to love this unusual brick and glass-block oasis between 77th and 78th Streets.
Here, overlooking the courtyard garden, hidden from the avenue, a retired Navy commander mows his handkerchief-sized lawn, puts away his old-fashioned red mower and strolls down the path to have tea on the terrace with his 76-year-old neighbor.
Three mornings a week, another neighbor, 81, sets off at 7:30, walking to her job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On Thursdays, her 86-year-old neighbor leaves to board a bus to Queens, where she nurses a friend recovering from a stroke.
The elderly renters of the Cottages, each of whom has lived here for more than 25 years, say the landlord always assured them they would never have to worry about anything as unpleasant as eviction.
But in this particularly New York drama, a play with a yet-to-be-determined number of acts, the renters, who pay $225 to $1,650 a month, have at last been roused from their idyll.
The owner, Arthur W. Diamond, died in 1996. This March the residents were served Intent to Evict notices from developers planning to build a 32-story tower, a condominium with three-, four-, five- and six-bedroom apartments.
The developers plan to rip out the existing garden, demolish half the Cottages and reface the other half in limestone and granite, to match their tower.
As the summer wanes, each side is feverishly staking out its positions and lining up its spokesmen and supporters in anticipation of a ruling in State Supreme Court.
The rent-controlled and rent-stabilized tenants, joined by the residents of an 11-story rental apartment house that overlooks the garden, are using every means they can think of to fight the new building.
They have filed lawsuits and hired a publicist associated with preservation struggles. They have enlisted celebrities to lend their names to their cause. They reel them off: Woody Allen, Tony Randall, Celeste Holm, Tammy Grimes and others.
They have enlisted preservationists, including Robert A.M. Stern, the architect who has called the Cottages and the garden “high-quality examples of `everyday architecture’ of a type that seems to have disappeared from our more cynical and expedient post-World War II city.” And the Friends of the Upper East Side lists the Cottages one of 11 Most Endangered sites.
“The developers’ big mistake,” said Ruth Berns, an 81-year-old statistician who lives in Cottage G, “is that they looked at us on paper and saw how old we were–and thought we were just some senior citizens they could push around.”
For their part, the developers argue that the Cottages only benefit a handful of elderly tenants in a city that desperately needs family-size housing. They dismiss the garden as “ragtag and scruffy,” “an eyesore” and a “hostile environment.” They say the storefronts need work.
Aby Rosen, a partner in the proposed development, pointed out that the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission had declined to consider landmark status for the Cottages four times, most recently this past spring. A commission spokeswoman said that the Cottages were judged not significant enough “architecturally, historically or culturally.”
The developers say they could round up some celebrities–“we could get some ex-mayors,” one said–but they are so confident they will prevail they won’t need them. Yet despite their confidence, the developers are very angry with their opponents.
His face red and his voice irritated, Trevor Davis, one of the three partners in the $75 million joint venture of Davis & Partners and RFR Holding, said the tenants seemed unwilling “to approach us directly and sit down in a civil manner and interact.”
Rosen and Davis say they have changed the original design to satisfy preservationists: they will keep four of the eight Cottages to sell as condominiums, without their current tenants.
In the space now occupied by the courtyard garden, they propose a new landscaped open space. Current drawings show a fountain surrounded by shrubs, similar to the existing fountain, and plantings covering the flat rooftops of the remaining Cottages. Altogether, they argue, they will actually increase the square footage of open space.
Their opponents scoff at their attempts, categorizing the design concessions as waffling.
“How can you trust what they’re telling people now when they’ve changed their position so many times?” said Deborah Valcourt, a leader of the tenants’ group whose apartment at 177 East 77th St. overlooks the garden.
Since they first heard about the developers’ demolition plans, the tenants of the Cottages have opened their doors to outsiders: Since April, there have been six open houses, giving the public a rare glimpse of the interiors and of the inhabitants of this cloistered setting.
Leslie L. Youngblood of Cottage H is a former Navy commander and Rhodes scholar, a hearty 76-year-old with a buxom mustache as white as an avalanche, who still keeps the pronounced drawl of his native Augusta, Ga.
On Jan. 10, 1966, Youngblood moved into what is arguably the finest of the Cottages: It is on the north end of the row and has an extra room, an elegant, slate-floored sun room, and is filled with light.
He proudly gives a tour, starting first with his little lawn, then into the sun room and on into the long living room with its wood-burning fireplace and step-up dining room, its refinished table and chairs silhouetted against the big square window stoppered with hefty 12-by-12-inch glass blocks.
The blocks serve to mask noise from Third Avenue and they endow the apartments with a shimmering light: yellow taxicabs, for instance, appear as fleeting spots of color in a shifting video-art landscape.
In the large bedroom, which faces the garden, the back wall is covered with wallpaper ornamented by sailing ships, and there are ships’ models and photographs of sailboats everywhere.
Youngblood picks up a framed photograph of himself as a young man in a Navy uniform.
“I was pretty full of myself just then,” he said with a chuckle. “That was before I saw the action off the beaches in Korea.”
In Cottage E, Rue Faris Drew is a young-looking 76-year-old blonde who, in what she laughingly calls her “photography phase,” shot two covers for Life magazine in the 1950s.
“I don’t even know how to use all that equipment they use now,” she said nonchalantly. “I just went out with my Nikon and took pictures.”
She was visiting friends in California in March when she got a telephone call from one of her neighbors, warning her of the threatened demolition. Drew flew back and, several days later, she received her Intent to Evict notice.
Then there was the visit from a developers’ representative, who, she said, offered to pay moving expenses if she would relocate.
“He was snide and sneaky,” Drew said.
From then on, she said, the tenants have sought to avoid the developers or their representatives. She expressed dismay that the developers tried to offer another of the tenants, an 86-year-old woman, one of the apartments at 177 East 77th St., a Diamond family building that the developers also plan to buy.
“It’s really important that we stick together now,” she added. “If they try to approach any of us, we tell them to talk to our lawyer.”
Drew is adamant: “I never want to leave here,” she says.
Commander Youngblood takes a slightly different tack.
“We want very much to stay here,” he said, measuring out each of his words, “but nobody can say we would never consider any offer ever.”
