Streetscapes | Lenox Hill: A Hospital?s Journey

THE northwest corner of Park Avenue and 70th Street has almost disappeared under construction netting. From the side street, it’s as if the big 1927 apartment house at 720 Park Avenue, designed by Rosario Candela, had never been built. In fact, it went up at the same time as everything else on the block, replacing the old Presbyterian Hospital, built in 1872, long before the Upper East Side became a desirable neighborhood.

At the time of the Civil War, James Lenox owned a great swath of land from 68th Street to 74th and from Park Avenue to Fifth — the crest of what was called Lenox Hill. It was still mostly vacant in 1868 when he circulated a letter to fellow Presbyterians offering the block from 70th Street to 71st and Park Avenue to Madison as the site of a new hospital.

There was a sectarian aspect to Lenox’s generosity, as Dr. John F. Richmond described things in his 1872 book, “New York and Its Institutions.” “The Jews, the Germans, the Roman Catholics and the Episcopalians had established a hospital for themselves,” he wrote, while the Presbyterians had not.

Lenox contributed $250,000 to the effort, and Richard Morris Hunt, the first American architect trained at the ?cole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, was selected to design the structure.

Hunt’s plan was never realized in its entirety, but it called for a network of French-style pavilions spread over the perimeter of the block, connected by covered walkways.

The main building, at the center of the 70th Street side, was an effervescent mix of hot red brick and bright white limestone with a complicated mansard roof topped by a slender spire — all “Parisian chic,” Montgomery Schuyler wrote in The Architectural Record in 1895. He found Hunt’s design dissonant; in an 1871 newspaper article in The World, he criticized Hunt’s “most extraordinary fancy for these excessive, violent contrasts of materials.”

Presbyterian Hospital opened in 1872 with beds for 300 patients, who would also receive “the ministrations of the Gospel agreeably to the doctrine and form of the Presbyterian Church,” Harper’s Weekly said. The hospital was open to all, but many patients claimed to be Presbyterians, just in case, The Times reported in 1891.

The system of separate pavilions was meant to block contagion. Another such measure — the use of large fans to vent stale air up and out — became important to hospital administrators once the surrounding area began to be built up.

In 1888, the hospital put up a great Romanesque-style tower, designed by J. C. Cady, perhaps 80 feet high, at the corner of 70th and Madison. It drew the air from all the hospital buildings through basement vents and expelled it out the top of the tower.

In 1891, Presbyterian Hospital treated about 1,600 patients in its wards and 1,150 in the emergency room.

The well-to-do avoided hospitals, which were considered retreats for the poor, and only a handful of patients could actually pay. Expenses for treating the indigent that year were $61,000, apparently absorbed by the hospital. The few patients who could afford private rooms paid $20 to $40 a week.

Gradually town houses took over Lenox Hill — the block on which the Frick Collection now sits was built up in the 1910s — and Presbyterian Hospital and its grounds became a comfortably familiar landmark for the emerging neighborhood. But the hospital needed more space and newer buildings, and in the 1920s it moved to Washington Heights.

The entire block was sold to a syndicate of investors in 1925, and two years later Louis Abrons told The New York Times about his plans to erect ”the finest apartment house in the world” on the property.

But the owners changed their plans and divided up the block into four parts: one for a full blockfront rental apartment house on Madison Avenue; two for co-ops on the Park Avenue end; and plots for seven individual houses on the side streets, three on 70th and four on 71st. The houses originally shared a single open garden, and their low scale protected the apartment buildings’ light.

But the hospital’s great catalog of Victorian buildings remained vivid in the minds of East Siders long after their disappearance. One neighbor, Alice Sturges, who grew up in the house at 19 East 70th Street, recalled in a 1981 interview that, in the 1920s, the hospital complex had loomed particularly large. “I thought the end of the world had come when that came down,” she said.

E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com