Emery Roth’s New York Apartment Buildings Book Launch with Andrew Alpern

Talk Highlights:

• Join Andrew Alpern, noted historian and author of Posh Portals, for a look inside his new book, Emery Roth’s New York Apartment Buildings
• Explore numerous landmarked buildings, as well as many lesser-known beauties, including The San Remo, the Ritz Tower, the Beresford, and the Ardsley
• Admire the contemporary Art Deco designs, Beaux Arts, and historical revival styles of Roth-designed residences and hotels of the 1920s and 1930s
• Learn how Roth’s buildings shaped the ideal of residential luxury that is still called to mind by the phrase “prewar building”

About this Virtual Talk:

As many history-loving New Yorkers know, the first truly luxury apartment building, the Dakota, was completed in 1884 at West 72nd Street. Fifteen years later, Emery Roth’s first apartment house design was built at Broadway and 82nd Street.

Roth was a teenager when he arrived in America with little beyond a talent for drawing, but that skill enabled him to obtain work and to develop sufficient architectural knowledge to be hired as a draftsman for work on the buildings of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. When the Fair closed, he moved to New York and established a modest practice of small houses and commercial renovations, which blossomed when Albert Saxe commissioned Roth to design the existing apartment house at 250 West 82nd Street, the Saxony. Saxe’s subsequent commission was for the Hotel Belleclaire (Broadway and 77th Street), and then Roth’s career took off.

Emery Roth’s New York Apartment Buildings, the first book to be published on this essential architect in nearly forty years, has an adroit guide in Andrew Alpern, an architect himself and a resident of Manhattan since 1938. Alpern’s text covers all 175 apartment buildings, including seven which have been demolished and 27 which were never built. Join us for a virtual tour of numerous landmarked buildings, as well as many lesser-known beauties!

About Andrew Alpern:

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. Alpern has also published scores of articles about historical architecture and particular buildings. He donated to the Columbia University Libraries his 50-year archive of the work of writer/artist Edward Gorey, and his 50- year collection of 300 years of architectural drawing instruments, which have been made obsolete by computer drafting. He has been a resident of Manhattan since 1938.