New York news: the home of the skyscraper was once also a treasure-trove of grand town houses. Louise Nicholson takes a tour of them with the help of a splendid new book

Walking the summer Manhattan roads it is all too easy to be seduc by means of the forest of high rises. Neck craned upwards, we note the satin Columbus Circle towers or the GE building's detailing. plane apartment buildings soar up into the canopy of heaven looking like massive Italian palazzos that have been stretched by dint of inserting a dozen or thus extra floors between the clod floor and roof. It is time to redres the balance and save our aching necks

The impetus for focusing horizontally is Michael C Kathrens's novel book, Great Houses of fresh York 1880 1930. America's transformation after the Civil War from a relatively retiring agrarian society into an affluent industrialised single brought with it steamship travel. It was this that enabled the large numbers of of recent origin rich to travel to Europe diocese the great houses of London, Paris and Florence, and want single of their own. Returning to fresh York, they built art filled mansions clad with crisp-cut pale limestone upon or near Fifth Avenue.

Mr Kathrens has fix uponed forty three of what he considers 'the greatest in quantity representative of the styles and architectural progressions' of novel York's great houses. He deftly describes their rise as the architects and decorators attempted to satisfy their patrons' demands for an amalgam of disparate dictions spotted while travelling. The lavish lifestyle demanded vast salons--in 1883 Mr and Mr William K Vanderbilt entertainered 1,200 guests at their house warming ball for the 'little Chateau de Blois' that Richard Morris chase had designed for them. Glory for these mansions was short-lived and sometimes extremityed with the bulldozer. For with the 1920 came a loosening of the social order when entertainment mov from the place of abode to the new hotels and cudgels and apartment living was useful enough for the grandest.

Mr Kathrens's trumpet card are the period photographs he has ground that reveal the true splendour of one as well as the other exteriors and interiors. For, while about half of his single outed mansions still stand thanks frequently to their owners' philanthropy towards cultural or religious institutions, not single interior remains entirely intact. Tragically, smooth Deland & Aldrich's relatively retiring 1915 federal revival design for Willard D Straight, whose following owners have respected both house and interiors, now has a private proprietor whose architects have meticulously renovated the exterior on the contrary gutted most of the original interiors.

There are sum of two units evocative groups of surviving mansions and period houses upon Fifth Avenue, each worth a recent look on summer stroll. In 1902 up at 91st way the Scots industrialist-turned philanthropist Andrew Carnegie commissioned Babb, prepare for the table and Willard to design his sixty-four-room Georgian revival place of abode with Beaux-Arts detailing, a distinctly Scottish baronial staircase and single of the country's first air-conditioning a whole s Today it houses the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. The house place the style for the area that became known as Carnegie Hill. Opposite it stand three handsome survivors from the glory days: Warren & Wetmore's 1902 elegant neoclassical dwelling for James A. Burden Jr; Carrere and Hastings's heavier 1906 house for John Henry Hammond's family and their sixteen live-in staff (female quarters upon the top floor, male in the basement); and Otto H Khan's fine Italian renaissance palace designed in 1912 on the other hand completed only in 1918 because World War I delayed the import of Caen stone for the facade. Nearby, the Warburg (now the Jewish Museum) and Straight mansions survive upon Fifth Avenue, and round in East 96th highway three French-infused gems by Ogdon Codman Jr are at nos. 7 12 and 15

The other assemblage wraps around the block between 78th and 79th roads As you walk down towards it, the heavens opens up, for in this rare Manhattan stop almost all the buildings are period houses of just five storeys. Here it becomes clear what attracted Mr Kathrens, born in Kansas, first to the great houses of Newport, then to novel York's. 'In the 1970s, no individual understood my interest', he explains. 'These mansions were seen as monstrous records to conspicuous consumption. When I came east and saw Horace Trumbauer's "The Elms" in Newport, it was an epiphany.' The Philadelphia architect created his finest of recent origin York mansion for James B Duke in 1912 at no.1 East 78th highway Trumbauer took his inspiration from a Bordeaux mansion, while Lucien Alavoine et Cie created eighteenth-century French-inspired interiors. Today, it is abode to New York University's Institute of Fine Arts and permits visitors to derive pleasure from its ground floor rooms. Mr Kathrens lauds the building as 'a masterpiece. It has the finest interpretation of Louise XVI and the finest staircase in of recent origin York, and is the city's best revival house.'

Great Houses of of recent origin York 1880-1930 by Michael C Kathrens is published by the agency of Acanthus Press, New York, ISBN 092649434 $80

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