Few Are Expected to Mourn the Loss of a Gilded Age Building

Katie Orlinsky for The New York Times The building at 815 Fifth Avenue, center, is six floors high and 25 feet wide.

The brownstone may be the oldest building on Fifth Avenue â€" a 143-year-old townhouse that witnessed the dawn of the Gilded Age, the completion of Central Park and an unsolved murder. But even the Landmarks Preservation Commission did not raise much objection when a developer proposed demolishing most of it for a highrise.

Renovations over the years have hidden so much of the 19th century Italianate original that once stood at the spot, 815 Fifth Avenue, that a historic district report said the current incarnation had no architectural style.

The new iteration of the building, designed by T.P. Greer Architects, will be 14 stories and sheathed in Indiana limestone. It will blend in more seamlessly with 812 and 817 Fifth, its neighbors on the block between East 62rd and 63th Streets. Work is expected to begin on the building this spring.

The original, and now unoccupied townhouse at 815 Fifth, six floors high and 25 feet wide, was designed by Samuel A. Warner for William N. Raynor and William R. Stewart. It was built as a twin with 814, with construction starting five years after the Civil War, as Boss Tweed consolidated his control of city government and the development of Central Park continued.

A remarkable number of bold-face-names, even before the phrase existed, would come and go from this corner of Manhattan as 815 Fifth traveled through the decades.

By the end of the 1870s, neighbors included a former president of the New York Central Railroad, a partner of the financier (or robber baron, if you prefer) Jay Gould, and a patron of astronomy after whom an asteroid was named.

In 1885, residents of the block unsuccessfully petitioned the city’s Board of Estimate in a not-in-my-front yard protest against the “offensive and unwholesome” Central Park Zoo across the street.

By 1923, as the block became home to taller buildings with full-floor apartments, 815 survived. It was sold by William and Gladys Ziegler to James Stewart Cushman, a Mayflower descendant, and his wife, Vera, a philanthropist. They removed the front stoop and balconies. In 1952, the townhouse was converted to apartments.

Three years later, at 814, the financier Serge Rubinstein was found murdered. The crime remains unsolved. By the early 1960s, 812, 813 and 814 were razed for what became 812 Fifth Avenue, home to former Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, among others.

No. 815 was purchased several years ago for about $32 million by JHSF Participacoes, a Brazilian development company. Some neighbors groused about the company’s original plans, worrying that the height and design of the proposed building would block their views from upper-floor windows.

Last fall, though, the Landmarks Preservation Commission granted a certificate of appropriateness to demolish most of the existing building and construct a replacement because “it is not one of the buildings for which the Upper East Side Historic District was designated.”

That 1981 designation report describes the building’s present style ignominiously in a word: “none.”

“It had almost nothing left of its original architectural character,” said Timothy P. Greer, the architect of the replacement high-rise. “It was denuded of its original elements. It was sort of an eyesore.”

“Oldest isn’t always best,” he added.