520 West End Avenue

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.

1892
November 26
Architect Clarence True completes a mansion for cotton broker John Leech
Clarence F. True designed this corner house, drawing on Romanesque, Elizabethan and Gothic Revival styles, and developer Richard Platt began building it in February 1892. Cotton broker John Burgess Leech bought the unfinished work that March, and his wife and nine children moved in from the Hotel Bristol when it was completed on November 26. It ranked among the largest houses on the Upper West Side.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
1905
A teacher leases the Leech mansion and turns it into the Gordon-Winston School for girls
After John Leech died in 1897, his widow Isabella leased the house in 1905 to Mary W. Somerville, who converted it into the Gordon-Winston School for young girls. Somerville bought the property in 1907. In 1909 it passed to Virginia millionaire James Overton Winston, who closed the school and made the house into eight apartments with a doctor's office in the basement.
Source: Daytonian in Manhattan
1988
August
A judge strikes down the mansion's landmark status, but it is restored within two months
520 West End Avenue was designated a New York City landmark in 1987. A judge overturned the designation in June 1988, and by mid-August the house was a landmark again. Its Romanesque Revival design draws on Gothic Revival and Elizabethan Revival detailing.
Source: Wikipedia

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