Woody Crest Home (Highbridge-Woodycrest Center)
936 Woodycrest Avenue | Highbridge | built 1902
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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.
- 1901
The American Female Guardian Society trades Madison Square for a Bronx bluff
Pressed by state charity and health boards to modernize its children's home on East 29th and 30th Streets, the Society's leaders judged their neighborhood too valuable to keep the work there and wanted the children in a fireproof building. In February 1901 the Real Estate Record & Guide reported that the Women's Hotel Company had bought the Society's Manhattan property and the Society had acquired a plot on Woodycrest Avenue overlooking the Harlem River. Architect William B. Tuthill, a board counselor since 1899, helped with the search.
- 1901
Carnegie Hall architect William B. Tuthill designs the children's home to look like a mansion
In May 1901 William B. Tuthill, best known for Carnegie Hall, filed plans for the four-story home on a bluff above the Harlem River Valley; it was built in 1901-02. He used a pavilion plan, then favored for hospitals and institutions for its light and ventilation, and terraced the building down the hillside to disguise its size. Gray brick, stone and terra cotta facades with rustication, garlanded brackets and a red tiled mansard roof make it read as a large private house rather than an institution.
“…the building appears to be a large mansion rather than an institutional structure.”
- 1902
Helen Miller Gould attends the dedication of the new Home for the Friendless
The Society's offices moved into the finished lower floors in September 1902, and 124 children and their supervisors arrived in October. The Home was formally dedicated on November 8, 1902, with philanthropist Helen Miller Gould present; she had given $20,000 toward construction and furnished two playrooms and a kindergarten room. Caroline and Olivia Phelps Stokes and Mrs. Russell Sage were also donors, and Tuthill equipped the boys' playroom and gymnasium in his son's name.
- 1991
The former orphanage reopens as the Highbridge-Woodycrest Center for people with AIDS
Renamed Woodycrest Youth Services in 1965, the Society merged with another charity and left for Rockland County in 1974, and the building passed to the Masjid at Taqwa Wajhad. After the lot was split in 1988, Housing & Services, Inc. bought the main building and rebuilt its interior in 1989-91 with private apartments for 100 residents and a new elevator. Licensed as a health care facility, the Highbridge-Woodycrest Center opened in 1991 to house single adults and families living with AIDS.
“The Highbridge-Woodycrest Center opened in 1991 and continues to serve the community.”
- 2000
The city landmarks the Woody Crest Home after two decades of hearings
The Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the former home a city landmark on March 28, 2000. The Commission had first heard the item in November 1980 and took it up again in 1985 and 1992 before a final hearing in December 1999, where the Historic Districts Council and the Bronx Landmarks Task Force spoke in favor. The Highbridge-Woodycrest Center, which owned the building, also backed the designation.
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