Where Historic Town Houses Still Hold Court

Correction Appended

IT was around 1900 that 78th Street from Fifth Avenue to Madison began to make the transition from rows of brownstones to individualized town houses. Apartment buildings never invaded the block, as they eventually did most others, and their absence leaves a street unusually rich in the details of private house architecture.

The original architectural rendering of the homes now numbered 10 through 20 East 78th, which were built in 1887.

The exteriors of Nos. 22, 24 and 26, which were constructed in 1871.

It is an airy, gentle street, with three of its four corners occupied by low buildings, allowing light and air into the midblock.

On the south side, the red brick and brownstone house at 4 East 78th Street was designed and built in 1889 by the developer Edward Kilpatrick. It was first occupied by Arnold Falk, whose Water Street company imported Sumatran tobacco. High up, on the second balcony, Mr. Falk and his family may have passed summer evenings under the pierced ironwork hanging lamp that has somehow survived both the weather and the drastic removal of the stoop.

Next door, the imposing limestone house at No. 6 was built in 1914 by Artemas Ward and designed by the architect John H. Duncan. Mr. Ward, an advertising entrepreneur, was vilified upon the opening of the subway in 1904 because the Rapid Transit Commission had sold advertising space on its platforms. Within a week of the opening, Mr. Ward’s company had plastered signboards for constipation cures, plays and the like all over the new tile work and mosaic decoration.

The line of town houses on the north side of the block — Nos. 3, 5, 7 and 9 — went up around 1900 in a sweep of limestone. The suave neo-Gothic No. 3 was designed by C. P. H. Gilbert for Edmund C. Converse, the first president of the Bankers Trust Company, who amassed the estate now known as Conyers Farm in Greenwich, Conn.

No. 7, designed by Hoppin & Koen, was occupied by Ormond G. Smith. At his death in 1933, The New York Times said Mr. Smith and his brother George were credited with discovering and first promoting the author O. Henry.

The north-side buildings are mostly cut up into apartments and have seen hard wear. But when it is dark, one can sometimes get a glimpse of elaborate interiors from across the street. And the vestibules are works of art, like that of No. 9, with its intricate mosaic floors, a barrel-vaulted ceiling and walls of luscious book-matched marble — in which the adjacent panels are sliced from the stone so that the veins meet. The sidewalks are lovely bluestone flags extending all the way out to the gutter, detailed so they don’t even need curbstones — masterworks of the mason’s art.

The south side of the block is built up from the framework of two rows of houses: Nos. 10 to 20, built in 1887 by Charles Graham; and Nos. 22 to 26, built in 1871 by Silas M. Styles. The men were both developer-architects, but Mr. Graham carried house design to a particularly high level.

Both rows are fragmented by later alterations, but the high stoop at No. 12 is almost completely intact (albeit slathered in taupe-colored paint). From the top step, it is possible to see the spectacular random-laid mosaic tile floor in the vestibule, as if someone had dumped a bushel basket of semiprecious stones onto the floor.

Another Graham house, No. 14, was altered to its present neo-Classical exterior in 1917, and then had its insides gutted in 1983 by New York University for its Fine Arts Conservation Center. A great light well reaches down through several floors — an elegant, contemporary touch.

The house at No. 16 had a conventional 1920s alteration, but the dense plantings of bamboo brush the arms of passers-by, an unusual experience in the asphalt-and-concrete world of New York City.

No. 18 was modernized in 1955; the architect, Rollin Caughey, included a remarkable spidery iron balcony, a basket-weave exemplar of the metalworker’s art. And at curbside, nature shows its resilience: a London plane tree was once hemmed in by an iron tree guard. But the tree enveloped the guard, most of which was cut away. A few parts remain trapped inside the growing trunk.

The last house in Mr. Graham’s 1887 row, No. 20, is fairly intact, and has an exquisitely patinated brass railing on its fourth-floor balcony.

At Mr. Styles’s No. 22, the owners, Robert and Roxana Tetenbaum, have EdsonUSA rebuilding the lower section — the stoop and lower floors — in brown stucco to something like the 1871 appearance.

For some reason this type of repair is considered acceptable in preservation circles. But passers-by may judge for themselves whether applying a coating of stucco is really restoration, as it is often called, by comparing No. 22 with its mate at No. 26. The latter has most of its 1871 brownstone facing intact.

Brown stucco is opaque and uniform, like imitation-wood paneling, but real brownstone is one of our most beautiful building materials, rich and nuanced and translucent. The lintel over the main doorway at No. 26 has the intricate warp and woof of layers and layers of sediment from millions of years ago.

E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com

Correction: December 30, 2007

The Streetscapes column on Dec. 23, about 78th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues, misspelled the given name of the advertising entrepreneur who built 6 East 78th. He was Artemas Ward, not Artemus.