5271 Independence Avenue

Riverdale | built 1956

Open on the map3 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. 1853

    Auctioneer Samuel H. Foster builds an Italianate villa on the estate later divided for this house

    Samuel H. Foster, an auctioneer and broker whose brother Charles belonged to the syndicate that laid out Riverdale, owned a roughly 1.2-acre estate here. His villa, in the bracketed Italianate style with a square footprint and porches front and back, already appears on the 1853 Map of Riverdale; a photograph from about 1938 shows it had gained a mansard roof of a kind typical of the 1870s. The villa, torn down sometime after 1938, stood partly on the site of this house.

    “Foster's villa (no longer extant) first appeared on its roughly 1.2-acre estate on the 1853 Map of Riverdale…”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  2. 1955

    Hood & Manice design a low modern house overlooking the Hudson for Dr. Robert E. Hall

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    Dr. Robert E. Hall had this one-story wood-frame house built in 1955-56 to plans by the firm of Hood & Manice. It has a broad, shallow gable on the street side, natural wood siding and Masonite panels, and a back wall that is mostly glass, turned toward the Hudson River. Its siting leaves undisturbed many landscaping features from the days of the Foster estate, among them a large weeping beech at the rear.

    “Designed by the firm of Hood & Manice, this house was built in 1955-56 for Dr. Robert E. Hall.”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

  3. 1955

    Two Yale-trained architects from Harrison & Abramovitz take on the Hall house

    Theodore Hood and Hayward F. Manice, the architects of this house, met while both worked at Harrison & Abramovitz. Hood, born and educated in Romania, also earned a Yale architecture degree and worked on the United Nations Headquarters Planning Commission; Manice, another Yale graduate, had worked for the National Broadcasting Company. Their partnership ran from 1954 to 1959.

    “In 1954-59 he was in partnership with Hayward F. Manice. Manice, also a graduate of Yale, met Hood while in the Harrison & Abramovitz office.”

    Source: NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

Nearby

All 301 buildings with stories in Riverdale