History Buff: The Riverside Apartments

Over a year ago, we posted Francis Morrone‘s take on the Riverside Apartments. Flipping through our new (used) copy of the door-stop sized New York 1880, we came across a little more color on the building’s history:

In 1890, on a site near the docks bounded by 2-34 Columbia Place, 315-345 Furman Street , and 20-26 Joralemon Street, Alfred R. White, a civil engineer who had graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and inherited considerable wealth from a family-owned mercantile fur business, commissioned William Field & Son to create a version of the highly successful worker housing, the Tower and Home Buildings, that White had sponsored and Field had designed thirteen years before in South Brooklyn. Field’s fortresslike, red brick and terra cotta Riverside dwellings, his and White’s largest undertaking in the field of affordable housing, accommodated 280 families in nine buildings that wrapped a 255-by-115-foot landscaped courtyard and covered only 49 percent of the lot. The court featured a children’s play area and a rustic, open-roofed circular bandshell where White sponsored Saturday concerts. Though the rooms in the Riverside complex were small, the shallow plan ensured that they were bright and well-ventilated. In a three-room apartment, two of the rooms were designated bedrooms while the third was reserved for living, dining, and, in a separate extension, cooking. Each apartment had its own toilet at the end of the kitchen but bathing facilities were communal and in the basement. There were a variety of unit sizes, ranginf from two to four rooms. Rents were skewed, based on floor, location, and sice of the rooms. In his influential book How the Other Half Lives (1890) , the reform-oriented journalist Jacob Riis applauded the Riverside apartments as “the beau ideal of the model tenement.”

We’d love to see some interior photos of the apartments (and common spaces) in this building. Do any readers live there?
Architecture 101: The Riverside Apartments [Brownstoner] GMAP
Photo by Tim McCormick