

50
Riverside Drive
Southeast
corner at 77th Street
50 Riverside Drive
By Carter B.
Horsley
This
attractive, light-beige-brick apartment house was built in 1930 and
converted
to a cooperative in 1979. The 16-story
building has 94 apartments.
The building, which has fine
views
of Riverside Park and the Hudson River, has a sidestreet, canopied
entrance
flanked by lanterns and the facade is accented with two belt courses
and topped
by a pleasant small cornice. The
building has a full-time doormam. a live-in superintendent and a
bicycle room. It has inconsistent fenestration and no sidewalk
landscaping.
It has designed by Gronenberg & Leuchtag.
This site has an interesting
history
that Peter Salwen recounts in his excellent book, “Upper West Side
Story, A
History And Guide,” (Abbeville Press, 1990):
“Luminous, golden-haired Laurette
Taylor, the most worshipped actress of her day, occupied a large town
house at
50 Riverside Drive in the twenties with her playwright husband Hartley
Manners
and their children, Dwight and Marguerite.
The Mannerses’ dinner parties were famous, peopled by the likes of
Herbert Hoover, the Douglas Fairbankses, Alla Nazimova, John Barrymore,
Herbert
Bayard Swope, and Alexander Woollcott.
This was all the more remarkable since, as theater historian Sheridan
Morley put it, ‘they were by all accounts a highly strung family,
deeply
theatrical and prone to elaborate after-dinner charades and word games
which
always ended in hysteria while the entire family abandoned their guests
to find
their own coats and way home.’ One such
guest was Noel Coward, then an unknown on his first visit to America,
but he
didn’t mind; he used the experience as the basis of his wickedly
hilarious
‘comedy of appalling manners,’ 'Hay Fever.'”