Emmet Building
95 Madison Avenue | also 95B Madison Avenue, 26 East 29th Street, 95A Madison Avenue | NoMad | built 1912
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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.
- 1872
Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet lives at 89 Madison Avenue and buys the houses beside it
Emmet, a gynecologic surgeon whose 1879 textbook was the first modern work on the subject, was living in a townhouse at 89 Madison Avenue by 1872 and added a fifth story in 1880. In the early 1880s he bought 91, 93 and 95 Madison for his medical office and inpatient surgical practice. After he retired around 1900 those houses became rentals and boarding houses. All four were later torn down for his skyscraper.
“…moving his personal residence to a town house at 89 Madison Avenue by 1872…”
- 1911
At 84, Emmet forms a realty company and hires Barney & Colt for a loft skyscraper
In May 1910 Emmet bought the house at 26 East 29th Street, creating a plot about 100 feet square. The next year he formed the Thomas Addis Emmet Realty Company with his two sons as directors, and in August the company took title to the five properties. He planned to demolish them for a commercial building of more than twelve stories costing about $500,000. By November Barney & Colt had the job and the plan grew to sixteen floors, including a penthouse for his family.
- 1912
Emmet moves into a sixteenth-floor penthouse with a library, conservatory and swimming pool
The sixteenth floor was given over to living space and roof gardens for Emmet, his son J. Duncan Emmet with his wife, and an Irish housekeeper. The suite had a study, a library, a conservatory, two kinds of dining room, kitchens, servants' quarters and its own swimming pool, and it opened onto gardens with pergolas, fountains and a solarium. The press covered it widely at the time, and the report calls it apparently the first residence atop a tall commercial building in New York.
- 1912
Silk firms fill the Emmet Building before it opens in October 1912
The building was nearly full before it opened. Its first tenants were mainly silk companies that moved their offices and showrooms north from the Broome Street district in SoHo, among them Read & Lovatt, H. L. Gwalter, Alfred H. Goldstone, F. Strahler and the Oriental Silk Printing Company. The Silk Association of America also leased space for an exchange. Other tenants included a rug importer, an advertising agency, the state Department of Labor and a civic league for immigrants.
“Even before the building opened in October of 1912, the building was nearly at full capacity.”
- 1912
Barney & Colt cover the Emmet Building in terra-cotta carvings under a lavish Renaissance crown
Construction began in 1912, with Cauldwell-Wingate as general contractor and the Alfred E. Norton Company building the steel frame. Terra-cotta carvings cover the facade, from the entrances and cornices to the dormers and roofline, above a three-story limestone base with two-story Corinthian pilasters inlaid with green marble. Gothic-inspired colonnades rise unbroken from the fifth to the twelfth floor, and a five-story crown carries Renaissance motifs. The report compares the building's vertical effect to the Woolworth Building, finished the same year.
- 1919
Emmet dies and his penthouse is converted to rental offices
Thomas Addis Emmet died in 1919, ending the household atop the building. The roof garden was glassed in and the penthouse reworked with the same open plan as the fifteen floors below, then rented as offices. Marketing for the building had stressed wide-set columns, high ceilings and fireproofing, and promised tenants less noise and air pollution than garment firms elsewhere, since manufacturing was not allowed.
“…the roof garden was enclosed and the penthouse apartment was converted into additional office space for lease…”
- 2018
The Landmarks Commission designates the Emmet Building after a hearing with no opposition
After a February 20, 2018 public hearing, six people testified in support, among them the building's owner and speakers for Community Board 5, the Historic Districts Council, the Landmarks Conservancy, the Society for the Architecture of the City and a Twenty-Ninth Street neighborhood group. No one opposed it. The commission designated the building an individual landmark on March 6, 2018, in a report written by Margaret Herman.
Further reading
- Emmet BuildingWikipedia
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