River Mansion (Thursday Doors)

I heard them
say it was for sale–
bought and sold
and bought a
gain—each resident adding
layers of stories

you say don’t
dwell on what has passed
away—but
when you start
again, you always build on
what has gone before

This home at Riverside Drive and 106th Street can be yours for a mere 24 million.

The owner selling it now is Sherry Bronfman, who bought it with her husband, Seagram billionaire heir Edgar Bronfman Jr, in 1978, and stayed on with her children after the couple divorced.

It has quite a checkered history, as all these buildings from the beginning of the 20th century do. They’ve had a lot of time to accumulate stories. Designed by architect Robert D Kohn in 1900, its first owner was Broadway actress Julia Marlowe, best known for her interpretations of Shakespeare. It passed through a number of hands and eventually became a rooming house in the 1930s. In 1971 it was converted to a two-family home.

It recently served as a Kips Bay Decorator Show House, which is how I came to think about it, and photo it–a friend sent an over-the-top video tour of the decorated interior which has unfortunately since been taken down, although I found a more serious video which features the decorators talking about what they did and why. I’ve put a link at the end of the post, along with links where you can read about some of the mansion’s history, as well as see the sales listing.

My poem is a shadorma, written to the W3 prompt, for which Angela Wilson supplied an excerpt from a Leonard Cohen song, asking us to incorporate at least two of its lines into a poem. I don’t think this is exactly what she had in mind, but a number of the lines fit so well into a poem about this house…

And, as always, host Dan Antion has many more doors to see at Thursday Doors.

https://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2013/05/mansion-house-no-337-riverside-drive.html

https://streeteasy.com/building/337-riverside-drive-new_york#tab_building_detail=2
you can see the floor plan under “building facts”

The many lives of Riverside Drive’s River Mansion