Harry F. Sinclair House

The Harry F. Sinclair House, also called the Isaac D. Fletcher House, is a mansion at the southeastern corner of East 79th Street and Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. The Sinclair House was built in the last three years of the 19th century. Over the first half of the 20th century, the house was successively the residence of magnates Isaac D. Fletcher and Harry F. Sinclair, and then the descendants of Peter Stuyvesant, the last Director of New Netherland. In 1955, it became the home of the Ukrainian American Institute, which began restoring the Sinclair House. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places and was named a National Historic Landmark in 1978.
The mansion was designed in the Châteauesque style by C.P.H. Gilbert and built by foreman Harvey Murdock. The building largely retains its original design, except for a tankhouse on the roof. Gilbert and Murdock constructed the bulk of the mansion with brick, which was then faced with limestone ashlar. The northern façade on 79th Street, containing the main entrance, is characterized by multiple windows in square recesses or semi-elliptical and fully Gothic arches. The western façade on Fifth Avenue is symmetrical and dominated by a curved, projecting pavilion. The interior of the Sinclair House comprises 27 rooms on six floors, for a total floorspace of .
History.
Private residence.
Isaac D. Fletcher, an industrialist and art collector, had hired architect C. P. H. Gilbert to design the Sinclair House by late 1897. The house was developed on the "Cook block" between Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue, and 78th and 79th Streets. The block had been nicknamed for Henry H. Cook, who had owned all lots on the block and only sold lots under the condition that every lot be used as a private dwelling in perpetuity. Construction was undertaken by stonemason Harvey Murdock and was completed in 1899 at a total cost of $200,000 (). The Fletcher House, as it was originally known, was one of several ornate residences on the south side of 79th Street, which had been undeveloped until the end of the 19th century. Satisfied with the design, Fletcher commissioned a painting of his residence from Jean-François Raffaëlli.
Fletcher died at the house in 1917. He bequeathed the property and his art collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met sold the house the next year to oil magnate Harry F. Sinclair, who had founded Sinclair Oil in 1916 and recently moved its headquarters to New York City from Oklahoma. At the time of the sale, the house was described in the "Real Estate Record and Guide" as "one of the finest on the avenue". Sinclair was in residence at the house throughout his involvement in the 1922 Teapot Dome scandal, which resulted in his being sentenced to prison for six months for contempt of court.
Sinclair sold the house in 1930 to Augustus Jr. and Anne van Horne Stuyvesant, the last direct descendants of Peter Stuyvesant, the final Dutch governor of New Netherland. A skylight above the staircase in the middle of the house was covered in the late 1940s. The siblings lived quietly in the mansion and died within its walls; Anne died there in 1938, as did Augustus Jr. in 1953. In his final years, Augustus Jr., his butler, and his footman were the only occupants of the house.
Ukrainian Institute.
The executors of the Stuyvesant estate sold the Sinclair House in 1954 to a group of investors. The investors sold it in 1955 to the Ukrainian Institute of America (UIA), a nonprofit founded by Ukrainian businessman William Dzus in 1948 to promote Ukrainian culture. The UIA's purchase of the Sinclair House gave the structure a "temporary reprieve" from demolition, as described by "Newsday"; at the time, several other mansions on Fifth Avenue were being demolished. The mortgage on the building was repaid in 1962.
In 1977, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the house as part of the Metropolitan Museum Historic District, a collection of 19th- and early 20th-century mansions around Fifth Avenue between 78th and 86th Streets. That June, the American Association for State and Local History filed paperwork with the National Park Service to nominate the Sinclair House for the National Register of Historic Places. The next year, on June 2, 1978, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
The UIA began repair work on the roof of the Sinclair House in late 1996 at an estimated cost of $250,000 (). In an interview with "The New York Times" that year, a member of the board described this work as "just a Band-Aid", as the building was in a poor state. At the time, the UIA was spending an estimated $150,000 () annually on upkeep. During the renovation, one-fourth of the slate tiles were replaced and some drainage systems around the dormers were replaced. In November 2003, the US government made a matched grant of $270,000 () to the UIA through the Save America's Treasures initiative to cover the costs of modernizing the building's electrical wiring and plumbing. The state government's Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation granted the UIA another $70,000 () for restoration in June 2004. Because the grants were "matching funds grants", the UIA was required to raise $340,000 () on its own before accepting them. By July 2009, the UIA had completed improvements to the electrical wiring, installed a security system, replaced windows, and restored design elements. The skylight above the central stairs was also restored.
Architecture.
The Sinclair House stands on a lot at 2 East 79th Street, on the corner of East 79th Street and Fifth Avenue, measuring by . The dimensions of the building itself are , along East 79th Street, and on Fifth Avenue. It has a height of about . The Sinclair House abuts the James B. Duke House and Payne Whitney House immediately to the south. The building is surrounded by a lawn, sunk into the ground, that is itself enclosed by a wrought iron fence, broken only by a stair and balustrade approaching the main entrance, on the north side.
The mansion was designed and built in the Châteauesque style, the signature style of its architect, C.P.H. Gilbert, who had already built several mansions along Fifth Avenue. A small number of mansions, such as that of Frank W. Woolworth at Fifth Avenue and 80th Street, also had narrow frontages along Fifth Avenue. The foreman, Harvey Murdock, was also prolific both in the construction of private residences in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and had worked with Gilbert several times prior to the Sinclair House. The only additions to the building since its construction – a tankhouse on the roof and its concrete supports – were made by Gilbert in the 1920s.
Gilbert and Murdock constructed the bulk of the mansion with brick, which was then faced with limestone ashlar. The north façade is characterized by multiple windows, housed in either square recesses or semi-elliptical and fully Gothic arches, and adorned variously with colonnettes, drip moldings, ogee arches, and foliate reliefs around the glass. The main entrance is a frontispiece, a staple of French Renaissance homes, placed just to the left of the façade's center. It is made up by a portal that contains six wrought iron and glass doors, all fashioned in the Gothic Revival style. On top of the portal is a balcony, in front of a second-story window in a rectangular recess embellished with hanging crockets. The balustrades flanking the entrance and the balcony above it are decorated with graven images of seahorses. At the top of the façade are wall dormers, topped with pinnacles, upon a cornice that frames a mansard roof shingled in slate. At each corner on the cornice are small turrets ornamented with crockets and finials. To the left of the entrance is a three-sided bay window rising from the basement to the third floor, and to the left of that is a copper conservatory in a corner recess. The western façade is symmetrical and dominated by a curved, projecting pavilion, rising from the basement to the cornice. Every floor on the project has a three windows, which again mix square frames and elliptical arches. Belt courses run along the entire façade, separating the floors and terminating at the corners with sculpted gargoyle heads.
The interior of the Sinclair House comprises 27 rooms on six floors, for a total floorspace of . The first three floors retain their original appearance, but are devoid of their furnishings. The first floor is filled by a reception hall that separates the main entrance from the main staircase, on whose carved wooden balustrades the seahorse motif returns, at the south wall. Also on the first floor is a kitchen, a smaller, more enclosed staircase, and a pantry. The second floor is delineated into a ballroom and a dining hall, while the third has a library, master bedroom, and a dressing room. The fourth floor, formerly occupied by bedrooms, is now exhibit space but still contains two original marble bathtubs. The top two floors, within the mansard roof, have been transformed from servants' quarters into office space for the UIA's staff.
Critical reception.
An 1899 article in the "Real Estate Record and Guide" generally praised the composition of the Sinclair House, but noted that it had a rather ecclesiastical appearance and did not much resemble other, then-contemporary New York manors. An unnamed writer for the same journal characterized the house two years later as being part of "the two best-developed blocks on upper Fifth Avenue", namely between 77th and 79th Streets. John Strausbaugh, writing for "The New York Times" in 2007, described the Sinclair House as a "fairy-tale palace". The 2010 "AIA Guide to New York City" characterized the house as "a miniature French-Gothic chateau squeezed into the urban context". Architectural historian Andrew Dolkart said of the Sinclair House in 2020, "The corner chateau, for example, both fits in and stands out." He praised the "whimsical details", including what he described as "the carved dragon fish in the railings and those figures in funny hats holding up the windows".