Garden and Forest
A Journal of Horticulture Landscape Art And Forestry
May 25, 1892
The Morningside Plateau, New York.
MUCH has been said of late about Morningside Park in this city and the various large buildings which it is proposed to erect in its neighborhood. But comparatively few persons, even in New York, understand what a great feature of New York these buildings and their surroundings may eventually become. The site and character of Morningside Park itself are pretty well known. The tract where the proposed buildings will stand is called Morningside Plateau, and extends from Morningside Avenue at the east, where it forms a high bluff overlooking the park, with a distant view of Long Island and the Sound, to Riverside Drive, which follows the brow of lofty banks of the Hudson. This commanding plateau extends north and south for nearly a mile and a half and varies in elevation from 110 to about 145 feet above tidewater level, and the only buildings which now stand upon it, with the exception of scattered cottages relics of the time when the city was far away are the Leak and Watts Orphan Asylum, the old De Peyster house, once a noted country seat, and the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum. The presence of this last named institution had, for more than a generation, deterred people from purchasing land in the neighborhood for private residences, and it was owing to the exertions of local property owners, intent upon redeeming their possessions and bringing them into a profitable market, that the rugged tract along its eastern skirts was set apart for public use and transformed into a pleasure ground.
Then, several years later, the ground owned by the Orphan Asylum was purchased by the trustees of the proposed Protestant Episcopal Cathedral, and at about the same time the property owners, determined to get rid of the Insane Asylum, induced the Legislature to pass a bill opening One Hundred and Sixteenth Street, through to the river. This action induced the governors of the New York Hospital, which owns the Insane Asylum, to decide upon its removal to land purchased long ago at White Plains, and to offer its present site at public sale in lots suitable for private building. But then the trustees of Columbia College obtained an option on the entire property, and a bill, which had been introduced into the Legislature to provide for the cutting of another cross street through the plateau, was defeated in order that the college might have an undisturbed site of suitable extent. All indications point to the fact that work on the cathedral will shortly begun; and there is likewise no doubt that Columbia College will soon raise the money needful to purchase the land now reserved for it and erect a fine group of buildings.
The Cathedral Parkway will be a wide avenue crossing the southern end of this plateau on the line of the northern boundary of Central Park that is, at One Hundred and Tenth Street and from this point for the distance of three city blocks is the site of the future cathedral, while the new site for St. Luke's Hospital adjoins it on the north. A little farther north and west, between One Hundred and Sixteenth and One Hundred and Twentieth Streets, is the proposed site for Columbia College, and immediately north of this again, extending to the line of One Hundred and Twenty-second Street, is the proposed site for tie College for Training Teachers. The space between the Boulevard and Riverside Drive is narrow, and, as a rule, somewhat sloping; so there will be a magnificent view from all these structures that are to be, while, if their architecture is what we may expect, they will vastly increase the attraction of the eastward outlook from the beautiful drive, forming, for a great part of its length, a background of stately buildings lifted above those on its immediate edge. Nothing, therefore, could be more fortunate for the city than this agreement between several very wealthy corporations to erect their buildings in this place; and, of course, the profit will not simply be the presence of these buildings themselves. Once the Insane Asylum is removed, the old prejudice against the plateau as a place of residence will vanish, and the existence of the ecclesiastical and collegiate groups will, indeed, bring it into the very highest esteem for this purpose. The value of any land within the borders of New York is and always will be too great for us to cherish the hope that building sites, even in this locality, will be laid out on the generous scale which has been found practicable in other cities, especially in the west, and which adds so greatly to their dignity, beauty and individuality. We cannot expect, even in the neighborhood of the grounds of the cathedral and of Columbia College, to find private houses surrounded by lawns and gardens of any great extent. But many recently erected buildings along Riverside Drive prove that it is possible for the wealthy, even in New York, to build houses which do not actually touch each other, and even this much isolation gives the architect a great opportunity to improve upon the average New York house and secure both a greater degree of architectural dignity and a fuller expression of what we may call domestic personality. All the architects who have built along the drive have not used this opportunity well. Sometimes an effect of rampant ostentation has been secured instead of dignity and the home-like look which every private house, however large and costly, ought to wear; and instead of an artistic design we see one which is no more than artfully elaborate, or just as artfully and inappropriately rugged and rude. But as the years go on we shall learn more and more what true architectural elegance and true architectural simplicity mean. And as it will be a good many years before Morningside Plateau is covered with buildings, we need not doubt that it will eventually be a district in which NewYorkers can feel genuine pride.
It is interesting to know that when, about the year 1815, the New York Hospital found its city building too crowded for the accommodation of its insane patients and accordingly purchased the " Bloomingdale Farm," the price paid was $4,000, although this farm was of greater extent than the property now owned by the institution, and that two years ago, when a hundred building lots of ordinary size were cut off from this and sold, some of them individually brought $4,000 in spite of the fact that they lay on still unopened streets. With the recent promise of the advent of the cathedral and the college, values have vastly increased again. Lots in the neighborhood of the asylum property could now be sold at from $15,000 to $20,000 each, and few owners are willing to sell at all.
