Riverside Drive-West 80th-81st Streets Historic District

Tucked between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive on Manhattan's Upper West Side, this small district preserves 35 buildings from the 1890s: 32 row houses and three six-story apartment buildings, along with one later high-rise intrusion at 80 Riverside Drive, built in 1919. Charles H. Israels designed the earliest group, a Romanesque Revival row of 1892 on West 81st Street, followed by a Venetian Gothic row on West 80th Street in 1894. Clarence True, an architect and developer who trained in the office of Richard M. Upjohn, designed twenty-one of the houses in 1897 and 1898, using Beaux Arts forms with Elizabethan, Flemish and French details. True laid out the lots so each house gets light and air, including a side window, which is unusual for New York row houses. The apartment buildings were designed by well-known firms. Because most of the surrounding low-rise neighborhood was rebuilt with tall towers, the district is an unusual survivor from the area's first era of development.