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Streetscapes/The Charles Scribner House; A Quintessential Flagg Building Is Being Restored

Streetscapes/The Charles Scribner House; A Quintessential Flagg Building Is Being Restored
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October 23, 1994, Section 9, Page 7Buy Reprints
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NEW YORK'S blocks are full of hidden networks, families of buildings related by appearance, type or design. One of these is now in mid-restoration as the Polish Mission cleans and repairs the facade of the 1912 Charles Scribner house at 9 East 66th Street, one of six buildings in Manhattan designed by Ernest Flagg for the publishing family.

In 1879 Charles Scribner took over the family publishing company, founded in 1846. For the next half century he groomed its list until it stood for the most cultured taste, "a kind of blue ribbon" for authors, according to the Dictionary of American Biography.

Scribner was married to the former Louisa Flagg and in 1893 he gave her brother Ernest one of his first major architectural commissions, a new store and office building at 155 Fifth Avenue, near 22d Street. In 1903 Charles Scribner's brother Arthur hired Flagg to design a new town house for him at 39 East 67th Street and in 1908 the Scribners built a giant printing plant at 311 West 43d Street, also designed by Flagg, and still in use as a commercial loft building.

In 1909 Charles and Louisa Scribner asked Flagg to design their new town house at 9 East 66th Street. Completed in 1912, it has many of the earmarks of the Flagg style: a grid-like order to the facade, intelligent ironwork designs, contrasting red brick and light-colored stone, the use of marble instead of the more common limestone, and large windows.

The "AIA Guide to New York City," by Norval White and Elliot Willensky, calls it "an airy and masterful facade with so much glass that it presages . . . curtain walls by half a century."

This was another instance in which Flagg persuaded a client to adopt an interior garage instead of keeping the family automobile at a public garage or converted private stable. At the Scribner house, what appears to be simply a grand entryway is a double door at grade leading into an interior driveway and a vehicle elevator to the basement.

The tiled vaulted driveway also leads to a side-facing door into the main hall. The hall interiors are finished in plain plaster, with black and green marble trim of refined but vigorous beauty. The paneled main salon at the front of the second floor is conventional in style, but the dining room at the rear is covered with painted panels in ivory and brown with scenes of cherubs, urns and foliage. A concealed door from this room leads to a small, square, skylit library.

An early census shows Mr. and Mrs. Scribner in occupancy with six servants.

Soon after the 66th Street house was completed, Scribner called on Flagg to design a new headquarters for his company, a tall limestone building with an elegant selling floor at 597 Fifth Avenue, near 48th Street. Many New Yorkers still remember buying books in that sophisticated, vaulted room, the equivalent of Grand Central Terminal for book retailing. Three years later Scribner also retained Flagg to design a refined loft building on the site of his old house at 10 East 38th Street.

At the time that Charles Scribner built his 66th Street house, his company had reached the pinnacle of impeccable taste, with authors like Edith Wharton, Henry James, George Santayana, John Galsworthy, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling. But the company is better known today for the younger generation of writers it brought along: It published F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, "This Side of Paradise," a sensation in 1920.

FITZGERALD also enthusiastically recommended a promising writer he referred to as "Ernest Hemmingway," and in 1926 Scribner's brought out "The Sun Also Rises" to critical acclaim. Charles Scribner admired the two authors' vigor and inspiration but was shocked by their use of vulgar words, and only the influence of his editor, Maxwell Perkins, got them published intact.

Scribner died in 1930 and Mrs. Scribner in 1937 and 9 East 66th Street passed out of the family in 1943. Poland bought the house in 1959 and uses it as its mission.

Zygmunt Matynia, the Second Secretary of the mission, said that exterior leaks led to an overall facade restoration that began this summer. Workers from Artenova, a Brooklyn masonry restoration concern, have cleaned and repointed the brick and the company is trying to develop a process that will safely remove the paint that now conceals the rich veining of the marble trim.

Although the Scribner family still runs Charles Scribner's Sons it sold the last of the Flagg-Scribner buildings, 597 Fifth Avenue, in 1984; a Bennetton Sportsystem showroom now occupies the former bookstore. But all the structures survive, a distinct group that -- for those who care to look for it -- gives a certain order to New York's often chaotic streets.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 9, Page 7 of the National edition with the headline: Streetscapes/The Charles Scribner House; A Quintessential Flagg Building Is Being Restored. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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