The Dahlgren Residence
No. 15 East Ninety-Sixth Street, New York
THE UPPER EAST SIDE is crossed by a number of wider cross-streets, of which 96th Street has long been agreed as the northern boundary of the neighborhood. (Overeager real estate agents have recently taken to advertising properties above that boundary as being located in the "Upper Upper East Side"). At number 15 on East 96th Street sits a splendid townhouse of superb design and execution often known as the Dahlgren residence. (Seen above, before and after complete restoration).
Lucy Wharton Drexel was of the Philadelphia Drexels, from which also came Saint Katharine Drexel, the founder of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, as well as the initiators of Drexel University in that Pennsylvanian city. Young Miss Drexel married Mr. Eric B. Dahlgren, son of Admiral John A. Dahlgren, inventor of the Dahlgren Gun used during the Civil War at a ceremony in the Philadelphia cathedral officiated by Archbishop Corrigan of that see, and the couple soon moved to Manhattan where Mr. Dahlgren had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. The Dahlgrens themselves were a prominent Catholic family, with Eric and his brothers attending Georgetown University, where to this day the main chapel bears the Dahlgren name. (Well-to-do Catholics must have been in short supply at the time, because after Lucy and Eric's marriage, Lucy's sister Elizabeth was married to Eric's brother John).
Un petit peu de Paris dans le meilleur arrondissement de New York.
The Dahlgrens (Eric & Lucy, that is) raised eight children at their house at 812 Madison Avenue as well their country house in Lawrence, L.I., but despite the bountiful progeny, the marriage was not a happy one. Only two months after Lucy's devoutly Catholic mother died, Mrs. Dahlgren initiated a suit for divorce from her husband in March 1912, citing his infidelity. Escaping to Europe with the children for the duration of the proceedings, she returned to New York in 1915 after the divorce was settled and purchased the 38' x 100' plot at 15 East 96th Street.
Lucy chose the renowned architect and designer Ogden Codman Jr., who had written the influencial Decoration of Houses alongside Edith Wharton, to design a beaux-arts townhouse in the wide Parisian style. Codman himself had built his own beaux-arts townhouse a few doors down at No. 7 East 96th Street, and the architect hoped that the wide thoroughfare could be developed as an elegant Parisian residential boulevard.
For the Dahlgren residence, he created a building with thirty rooms, eleven bathrooms, seven fireplaces, a grand marble staircase, an octagonal dining room, and a ground-floor carriageway that went through the house to an auto turntable at the back. Lucy Dahlgren, however, did not spend a great deal of time in the elegant edifice, and she leased the house out from 1921, and later selling it in 1927. She died in 1944, aged seventy-seven years, in Newport, Rhode Island.
The man she leased and finally sold No. 15 to was Pierre C. Cartier, the founder of the eponymous jewelry firm, who moved into the townhouse with his wife and children. The Cartiers were great hosts and held dinners for many French dignitaries, artists, and intellectuals, especially during the Second World War when many of the aforementioned chose New York as their place of exile.
Paul Claudel: poet, playwright, diplomat.
One of the most prominent of their frequent guests was the celebrated poet and playwright Paul Claudel during his tenure as the Ambassador of the French Republic to the United States from 1928 to 1933. Claudel, whose elder sister was the sculptress Camille Claudel, had been a diffident, conflicted young man until the night of Christmas Eve, 1886. It was that night that he drifted into the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris and heard vespers being sung, and began his return to the Church. Coincidentally (if we dare call it coincidence), that very same evening of Christmas Eve, 1886, the young Thérèse Martin — St. Thérèse of Lisieux — experience a conversion of her own, later writing in her spiritual biography that "On that luminous night, Our Lord accomplished in an instant the work I had not been able to do during years".
While the Dahlgrens could not find enduring love at No. 15, the home was more than a blessing to the Cartiers… and the Claudels. In 1933, Marion Rumsey Cartier, Pierre & Elma Cartier's daughter, and Pierre Claudel, Paul & Sainte-Marie Claudel's eldest son, were joined in holy matrimony. In 1946, Paul Claudel was named to the Académie française (where the seats of the ostracized Marèchal Pétain and Charles Maurras were left empty out of respect until their deaths in 1951 and 1952, respectively). The following year, the Cartiers shifted to their house on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where Mrs. Cartier died in 1959, and Pierre following her in 1964.
With Pierre Cartier's death, No. 15 was sold to the Convent of St. Francis de Sales, who remained there for seventeen years. In 1981, the Convent sold the house to financier Barry Trupin (arrested, in 1997, for the honorable crime of tax evasion) for $3,000,000, who in turn sold it to businessman Paul Singer in 1987 for $5,700,000. Under Singer's watchful eye, the building was carefully restored from the ground up, and used to display his large collection of porcelain vases. (The following three photographs are from the Singer restoration). No. 15 is currently valued at over $17,000,000.
The library.
The octagonal dining room.
Speaking, as we were, of Christmas Eve, Ogden Codman's residence down the block at No. 7 was sold by Codman to Edith Moore, the daughter of Joseph Pulitzer, and her husband William S. Moore, great-great-grandson to Clement Clarke Moore, purported author of the Christmas classic A Visit from St. Nicholas ("Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house…"). The Moores sold it on in 1948, and donated the books Codman has left in the house to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1965, No. 7 became home to the Manhattan Country School, which continues to use the Codman residence as its seat to this present day. Codman's dream of a Parisian residential boulevard in New York was not to be, as the remaining properties on the block were developed as apartment buildings in the 1920s. The only other townhouse on the block is the more narrow No. 12, which today serves as La Scuola d'Italia "Guglielmo Marconi", Italy's answer to the Lycée Français de New York.
Previously: The Neue Galerie | The Goodwin Mansion | The Goodwin Mansion II
