New York’s Secret Doors and Hidden Rooms
Featuring Rodolfo Lucchese and his listing at 398 Westminster Road, Ditmas Park, Brooklyn; and Robby Browne and his listing with Chris Kann & Jennifer Ireland at 101 Warren Street, Tribeca, Manhattan.
Hidden spaces have an inescapable allure. For the photographer Albert Watson, hiding a room behind bookshelves created a secret space and also gave him more shelf space. Credit: Albert Watson [listed by Corcoran’s Robby Browne, Chris Kann & Jennifer Ireland]
When Sandra Williams and Frank Milliron tore out a second-floor wall in their house in Ditmas Park, they discovered an unfinished attic space big enough to create a new room. [Featuring Corcoran's Rodolfo Lucchese] Credit Ramsay de Give for The New York Times
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I have a recurring real estate dream in which I find an extra room in my home, tucked behind a door I have never noticed before.
The décor inside is usually worn and dated, with shag carpeting, wood paneling and terrible lighting. But the room’s potential never escapes me. All my clutter troubles are solved. Finally, I have space.
Then I wake up to a reality shared by many New Yorkers: There are no hidden rooms to house all the junk currently shoved in those plastic bins under the bed.
But I’m not the only one dreaming about newfound and secret rooms. Tales of hidden spaces and passageways have long held a place in city lore, capturing our collective imagination. Dignitaries, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, once used a train platform tucked beneath the Waldorf Astoria to discreetly access the hotel. The prohibition-era speakeasy “21” has a disappearing bar and secret wine cellar that it boasts about on its website — not such a secret anymore.
There must be others. How else did Eloise putter around the Plaza Hotel with such ease in those children’s stories? And how did Katie Holmes miraculously appear with a shopping cart in Whole Foods in Chelsea without ever walking through the front door?
We may never know Eloise’s tricks. But last year, an enterprising reporter at Gawker uncovered a plausible route for Ms. Holmes to travel from her apartment in the Chelsea Mercantile through a cellar door to the neighboring grocery store.
But such things are not just the stuff of imagination and intrigue. Last year, Sandra Williams and Frank Milliron bought and renovated a two-family Victorian in Ditmas Park. During the project, their contractor tore out a wall on the second floor, and to their surprise, revealed unfinished space behind it. The space had a sloped ceiling beneath the dormered roof and amounted to a sprawling unfinished attic, measuring 23-by-11 feet. An ambitious homeowner could raise the roof, which is over six feet at its highest point, and make it a full-height room — or a small child could use it as a hide-out. “We saw the space and thought ‘This is magical,’ ” said Ms. Williams.
The couple already had whimsical aspirations for the home, building a tiny door in the back of their daughter’s bedroom closet that opened into the back of their own. “We thought it was really cool if I could disappear through the closet,” said Ms. Williams, who likened the doorway to the wardrobe in C. S. Lewis’s “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”
For Ms. Williams, the discovered room became another opportunity to create a home “with quirks” for their daughter Emme Milliron, who is now 3. (The family now also has a 5-month-old son, Owen Milliron.)
The discovered space could have become a playroom, complete with a door disguised as a bookshelf, like “an eerie Victorian entrance to a secret room,” said Ms. Williams, who works in fashion and has a clear flair for the dramatic. Mr. Milliron is a property manager.
But before the family could realize their vision, Ms. Williams took a job in Portland, Ore., and the family moved in January. They listed the house at 398 Westminster Road for $1.399 million in early October.
Secret spaces are not just in the past. Some developers have designed hidden doors and passages into their recent projects.
In TriBeCa, the residents of 30 Park Place, a condominium that opened this summer, have a discreet passageway all their own. Open a nondescript door in the condo lobby and you come to a winding staircase with just five steps. Walk through the door at the bottom and you are transported to the back of the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel, which opened this month in the same tower, designed by Robert A. M. Stern Architects. The unmarked door from the Four Seasons side can be opened with a key fob.
Such discretion has practical benefits in a luxury tower where a five-bedroom duplex penthouse is listed for $32.5 million. It means not needing to venture outside on a bitter January night to dine at the hotel restaurant, Cut by Wolfgang Puck.
“Through a secret door, they can experience another world,” said Robert Vecsler, the president of residential development for Silverstein Properties, which developed the 82-story tower.
Indeed, the stairwell feels like a threshold between two worlds — an innocuous space where the serene black-and-white marble lobby of the condo ends and the boisterous energy of the hotel begins.
It’s not just New Yorkers who want to disappear into other worlds. Films and books are rife with fantastical destinations. Harry Potter’s Hogwarts School exists in a world accessible by an invisible train platform. What would “Alice in Wonderland” be without the rabbit tunnel? “The Secret Garden.” “Rosemary’s Baby.” “Clue.” “Panic Room.” The list goes on.
“Humans all are on a quest for a secret space,” said Elizabeth Goodenough, a lecturer at the University of Michigan and the editor of “Secret Spaces of Childhood” (University of Michigan Press, 2003). Without such retreats, “We’re at risk of not growing or developing into our true selves.”
Throughout history, hideaways have not just been a novelty, they have also provided a lifeline for people fleeing war, persecution and slavery. I grew up hearing tales of my great-grandmother hiding in a spot beneath the floorboards of her home during pogroms in Odessa. We would never have had Anne Frank’s diary if not for the attic that, for a time, shielded the Frank family and their companions from their terrible fate.
Consider the Underground Railroad. Its very name conjures an image of a clandestine tunnel winding its way through the American landscape. Stories of hollows tucked behind walls and in the cellars of old homes have become part of a collective (and sometimes unreliable) narrative.
“People did hide in false places and attics, places that were inaccessible in houses,” said Manisha Sinha, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut and the author of “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition,” (Yale University Press, 2016). “What I think is a little questionable is when everyone claims today that the attic in their house hid fugitive slaves.”
But in Brooklyn Heights, which was once a hub of Abolitionist activity, fugitive slaves did take refuge at the Plymouth Church on Orange Street, according to church records. They likely hid in the basement, which is accessible by multiple staircases. The vast cellar, with a dirt floor and brick archways, spans a city block.
“That would seem very likely to me,” said Dr. Sinha, largely because the church’s first pastor, Henry Ward Beecher, “clearly was involved with the fugitive slave issue.”
In an era of mass government surveillance, hacked emails and Facebook over-sharing, secret hideaways take on a new significance. “We live in an age of surveillance and insecurity, so that idea of hiding has taken on a kind of scary potential,” said Dr. Goodenough.
Steve Humble, the president of the Arizona-based Creative Home Engineering, builds concealed rooms, doors and passageways for clients around the world. “Not all of them expect a zombie apocalypse scenario,” said Mr. Humble. “But some of them are building their forever house and say, ‘Who knows what’s going to happen in 30 years?’ ”
Others have something to hide, like the New Yorker who asked Mr. Humble to disguise a laundry room to conceal her washer and dryer from the super, since the building prohibited such appliances.
These spaces do not come cheap. Sara Nainzadeh spent $25,000 adding a camouflaged door designed by Creative Home Engineering in her three-bedroom apartment on 15th Street and Fifth Avenue.
Walk inside her master bedroom, and the wall-length bookshelf looks unassuming enough. But tug on a copy of Shel Silverstein’s “A Light in the Attic” and a portion of it swings open, revealing another full bedroom. Ms. Nainzadeh, who works in finance, uses the room as an office and stores her safe there. Mostly, she likes having a retreat. “Sometimes I lock myself in there and relax,” she said. “When you’re in there, you really don’t hear anything else going on in the apartment.”
Condo residents at 30 Park Place can reach the lobby of a Four Seasons hotel via a secret door and a winding set of steps. Credit Ramsay de Give for The New York Times
The photographer Albert Watson had a decidedly New York reason for disguising a door as a bookshelf in his TriBeCa penthouse. He needed more space — even with a 3,800-square-foot apartment.
“I never have enough space for books,” said Mr. Watson, whose portraits of luminaries like Alfred Hitchcock, Andy Warhol, B.B. King and David Bowie have filled the pages of numerous books and magazines. The photographer claimed another 72 square feet of space for his collection by adding shelves to an 8-foot-high door separating the library from the guest room. Still, stacks of books are piled around the apartment, and even more are in storage.
Sitting in the library, you would never know that part of the wall-length bookshelf opens. When overnight guests come to visit, some are baffled after he brings them to his library. “I’ve actually had a relative say, ‘Where’s the bed?’ ” And that’s when he surprises them, pushing open part of the wall of books to reveal a serene bedroom behind it.
“It’s quite fun because it’s so unexpected,” said Robby Browne, an associate broker with Corcoran Group, the listing agent for Mr. Watson’s apartment, which has been on the market since January. “If you shut the door, you feel like you’re in a whole other world.”
Mr. Watson and his wife, Elizabeth Watson, are asking $19.5 million for the duplex at 101 Warren Street, with plans to use the proceeds to build a photography museum in Scotland. The museum, near the town of Gullane, will be situated on a peninsula in the North Sea, replacing a World War II-era radar station, which presumably houses mysteries of its own.
Copyright © 2016 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission. Ramsay de Give/The New York Times.
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