Where the Secrets Were Kept
IN New York City, houses and apartment buildings typically conceal their private sides when you are introduced to them. But tap the walls or peer into the back of a closet, and who knows what you might find? A hidden staircase, a secret passageway, or walls that pivot could lead to unknown territory.
Some of these oddities are legacies of singular historic moments, like Prohibition. At a town house for sale in Greenwich Village [41 Charles Street, listed by Corcoran agent Susan Lamia], which operated as a speakeasy in the 1930s, a second-floor window was a false door that led to the fire escape and from there to the adjoining yard — very handy when enforcement agents raided the place. Other secrets were the work of architects with a flair for tricky detail, or reminders of an era in which building codes were less rigorous and apartments were reconfigured with impunity. Still others had specific purposes, like hiding the family silver or keeping servants out of sight, that are less relevant today.
Such secrets are often unearthed unexpectedly. A sixth-floor co-op in the Osborne, which was built on West 57th Street in the 1880s, has a staircase that was hidden when the original apartment was divided into four parts. The staircase was discovered in the 1990s, when parts of the original apartment were reassembled into a single unit, now listed for sale at $1.7 million. In an apartment on East 67th Street, a closet hidden for decades in the master bedroom was revealed when the place was being prepared for sale. In an 1840s row house in Chelsea, soon to go on the market for about $8 million, original knotty pine wide-plank flooring was discovered beneath the parquet during renovation.
Some secret spaces are winsome, among them a hard-to-reach room in a house in Prospect Park South, Brooklyn, that looks like something out of “Alice in Wonderland.” Others, like the gloomy tunnel leading away from the basement of a mansion on Riverside Drive in Manhattan, probably served less innocent purposes.
In the opinion of S. J. Rozan, a New York architect and the author of multiple crime novels, some of which feature construction as a theme, hidden details are especially cherished by New Yorkers. “In this city, everybody’s an architecture critic,” Ms. Rozan said. “And so a secret about a building is a secret New Yorkers can get behind.”
When these properties go on the market, the hidden details become part of the sales pitch. Here are five homes in which all is not what it seems.
A Place for Spirits
During Prohibition, many New Yorkers considered the 18th Amendment to the Constitution more a suggestion than the law of the land. City residents created ingenious places to conceal their liquor, and Eric Schiller was thrilled to discover such a place in the Victorian house he bought last year on Westminster Road in Prospect Park South.
Mr. Schiller, an architect, was inspecting the original oak staircase when he noticed a rectangle outlined on the first-floor landing. The rectangle turned out to be a slab of wood that could be lifted by using a discreetly incised thumbhole. Underneath lay a four-foot-deep space lined with shelves and containing a ladder down which a relatively nimble individual could have made his way to retrieve a well-concealed bottle of port or aged whiskey.
“This was an affluent area during Prohibition,” Mr. Schiller said, “and it was in these spaces that people kept their private stashes of illegal booze.” He likes to picture long-ago owners eluding authorities through the magic of architecture.
Not Everyone Has a Tunnel
Even given the opulent construction of the day, the Schinasi Mansion at Riverside Drive and West 107th Street was a showstopper. Built in 1909 for Morris Schinasi, a tobacco importer and cigarette manufacturer from Turkey, the 35-room white marble structure was richly embellished inside and out. Ornamental carving took inspiration from the foliage of the tobacco plant, and when the owner’s daughter went off to school in the morning, she used to pet the sleeping stone lions flanking the front steps and kiss them goodbye.
The mansion’s most beguiling feature is a tunnel in the basement that was thought to have extended west to the Hudson River. But exactly what had the tunnel been used for? To smuggle in Turkish tobacco, or perhaps alcohol or hashish? Or as a conduit for ladies of the evening? Equally mysterious, which of two subterranean openings led to the tunnel in question? “We’re not sure,” said Tod Mercy, the Corcoran broker handling the sale of the mansion, which is listed for about $15 million. “Maybe it’s whichever one you believe it to be.”
Copyright © 2012 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission.