unreal estate
by
MICHAEL GROSS
Good Carriage A Beaux Arts landmark built in 1903 on a block famous for its carriage houses is about to change hands for the first time—at age 111.
A
Manhattan home that’s been in one family for more than a century is something rare. Rarer still may be one where the owner has title documents dating back another hundred years to when the land was purchased from the city by Nicholas Gouverneur, one of the founders of the city’s Chamber of Commerce. Sotheby’s broker Vannessa Kaufman seems astonished herself as she displays those documents, in the former carriage house at 165 East 73rd Street, now on the market for $14.5 million. The 25-foot-wide, two-story Beaux Artsstyle building by architect George L. Amoroux, built in 1903–1904, is “a fine example of . . . a beautifully massed . . . structure with a façade constructed of yellow Roman brick set on a high limestone base,” the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission said when it protected the building, with its arched carriage entry topped with a carved keystone. It is one of two adjacent houses built for Henry Harper Benedict, a founder of the American typewriter industry. Like the machine he helped popularize, his carriage house is now obsolete, but it is certainly more than an interesting antique. East 73rd Street between Third and Lexington avenues is still home to almost a dozen similar structures, constructed to stable the horses and house the carriages that moved the wealthiest around New York before the automobile. Like many of them, Benedict lived a few blocks west, far from the noise and smell of the stables; he had a 30-room mansion on 75th Street just off Fifth Avenue. The first carriage house on the block was built for Henry Marquand, the banker, art collector and president of the Metropolitan Museum. Others belonged at various times to railroad executives, stockbrokers, patrician lawyers and families such as the Vanderbilts, Goulds, Pulitzers and Harknesses. According to the architectural historian Christopher Gray, when Joseph Pulitzer died in 1912, his housed four horses, a landau, a victoria and a hansom. Benedict had risen through the ranks of Remington Arms to become treasurer of Remington Sewing Machines, when he convinced Philo Remington, the son of its founder, to buy the rights to one of 40 | AVENUE MAGAZINE • APRIL 2014
Above: The façade of the Beaux Arts carriage house Left: Henry Harper Benedict, CEO of Remington Typewriters, who commissioned it and a twin next door.
the first typewriters. Benedict moved to New York from Remington’s headquarters in the Mohawk Valley and formed a company to market them. With partners, he then bought the company and became its president, until his retirement in 1913. He was thereafter best known as an art collector, whose most unique holding was the original copper plates used to make Jean-François Millet’s etchings. Benedict was arguably better known for the vagaries of his family’s private life. Two years after his wife died in 1915, the 72-year-old married a woman 40 years his junior, at a quiet wedding. With his second wife, he lived on in his mansion until 1935, when he died at age 90. The widow, Katherine Geddes Benedict, was next in the news when she reported her 18-year-old granddaughter Gamble missing a few weeks after the Briarcliff freshman made her debut at the 1959 Cotillion Ball. Gamble had last been seen with an older man, described as swarthy and foreign. He was also married. Gamble had lived with her granny since her mother died and Katherine Benedict won custody. A few days later, Gamble turned up in Paris with a married Romanian chauffeur she’d met the previous summer in Southampton. They’d sailed there on an oil tanker. She insisted that she planned to marry Andrea Porumbeanu and would work as a typist if her family