City and Suburban Homes Company's York Avenue Estate and Shively Sanitary Tenements Historic District

Two groups of model tenements face each other across York Avenue in Manhattan's Yorkville neighborhood. The northern group is the City and Suburban Homes Company's York Avenue Estate, built between 1901 and 1913 to designs by Harde & Short, Percy Griffin and Philip Ohm. To the south are the Shively Sanitary Tenements, designed by Henry Atterbury Smith and built in 1910-1911 for families of tuberculosis victims. Together they hold eighteen buildings, mostly six-story brick structures with large courts that bring light and air to every apartment. Ornament is limited but stylish, drawing on Beaux-Arts details, with the Bishop Potter Memorial Buildings done in a Neo-Gothic manner. The district matters because both complexes were funded privately rather than by government, one by investors who accepted limited dividends and the other by a gift from Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt. They show how reformers tried to provide healthful, well-built housing for working people. A former hotel for working women is the only substantially altered building.