Luxembourg House

17 Beekman Place | also 430 East 50th Street | Turtle Bay | built 1910

Open on the map4 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

  1. 1928

    May 12

    Banker James Forrestal buys the Beekman Place lot

    Dillon, Read & Company partner James V. Forrestal, the son of an Irish immigrant who had risen from cub reporter to Wall Street banker, buys an older house on the site and commissions architect Harold Sterner to design a new Georgian-inspired mansion. Forrestal later becomes Under Secretary of the Navy and the nation's first Secretary of Defense.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  2. 1932

    Harold Sterner's five-story mansion is completed despite the Depression

    The finished house pairs a white marble base with three stories of red brick and a copper-sheathed mansard roof, its entrance flanked by plain Corinthian columns. Forrestal leaves the house in 1940 for a Treasury Department post in Washington and leases it out in 1942 before selling it in 1946.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  3. 1946

    June

    Composer Irving Berlin buys the Beekman Place mansion

    Fresh off his Hollywood successes, Irving Berlin purchases the house from James Forrestal. Over the next four decades he writes scores there including Annie Get Your Gun, Call Me Madam, and There's No Business Like Show Business, living in the mansion until his death on September 12, 1989, at age 101.

    Source: Daytonian in Manhattan

  4. 1990

    Luxembourg buys the mansion for its UN mission

    The year after Irving Berlin's death, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg purchases the Beekman Place house. It becomes the seat of Luxembourg's Permanent Mission to the United Nations and its New York consulate, following a three-year renovation.

    Source: Wikipedia

Further reading

Nearby

All 32 buildings with stories in Turtle Bay