A Chronology of Richard H. Jenrette’s Historic Properties, Part I: The Houses

Jenrette’s first New York City residence was a one-bedroom co-op apartment located at 455 East 57^th Street.  The maisonette was, as Jenrette recalled, “the first piece of real estate I ever owned.” Located near the corner of 57^th Street and Sutton Place, the sixteen-story pre-war building was constructed in 1928.  After seeing the apartment, a colleague of Jenrette’s at DLJ encouraged him to hire North Carolina-based designer Otto Zenke (1904-1984) as a decorator. Zenke’s work will be discussed in Part II of this series that focuses on the décor and furnishing of each of the houses.

For a period of two years in the mid-1960s, Jenrette lived abroad in Europe where he worked to establish a Continental presence for Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette.  He rented an 18^th century farmhouse outside Brussels, Belgium, near the site where the Battle of Waterloo occurred in 1815. Designer Otto Zenke, working out of his London studio, also decorated this house for Jenrette.

In 1969, Jenrette purchased a ca. 1840 Greek Revival townhouse at 27 E. 11^th Street in New York’s Greenwich Village.  The house had fourteen-foot ceilings, large windows, and original wrought-iron grillwork railings on the exterior.  Jenrette occupied the first floor while the upper floors of the house contained two rent-controlled apartments.  The tenants included a Broadway dancer who tap-danced loudly on the floor just above Jenrette’s bedroom into the early morning hours.  Not able to evict the tenants through an appeal to the New York City Rent Control Board, he sold the property in August 1970 and moved further uptown.  “It was just too large and I decided I would just prefer not to be a landlord in Manhattan,” he told The New York Times in 1971, “I also don’t like people trooping over my head.”

Desirous of a weekend home that was in closer proximity to New York City than Roper House, Jenrette commissioned the well-known modernist architect Edward F. Knowles (1929-2018) to design a weekend home for a hillside parcel of property in New Jersey overlooking the Delaware River.  Knowles is best-known for designing Boston’s brutalist City Hall and The Filene Center at Virginia’s Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts.  Jenrette later described the planned house as “a series of three high-ceilinged cubes: mostly glass with connecting terraces with a ‘drop-dead view’ down the river to the distant Delaware Water Gap.”  Before construction could begin, Jenrette discovered and purchased Edgewater, which he said made him “suddenly forget the glass house I proposed to build in New Jersey.”  He later sold the New Jersey property in the fall of 1970.

Its location was ideally suited for use as a weekend home and a place to escape the traffic and noise of Manhattan.  At the time, Edgewater was owned by author Gore Vidal, who was living abroad in Italy.  Coincidentally, the day after his drive to find Edgewater, Jenrette learned from designer Anthony Hail, who had just returned from Italy, that the author was planning to sell the house.  “It’s to die for — you ought to buy it!” Jenrette later recalled the designer telling him.  Three days later, Jenrette concluded a Trans-Atlantic negotiation with Vidal and purchased the property.  As he later described, the closing took place over a drink at Vidal’s New York apartment. Actress Shirley MacLaine, who Jenrette had recently seen perform on Broadway in Sweet Charity, answered the door and handed him a cocktail and the telephone so he could speak to Vidal who was in Rome. Jenrette called Edgewater, “the love of my life, architecturally speaking” and used the property as a riverside retreat for the rest of his life.

In March of 1970, Jenrette purchased a ca. 1858 house located at 150 E. 38^th Street in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan from publisher Cass Canfield, the longtime president and chairman of Harper & Brothers. The house was unique as it was placed several yards back from the sidewalk providing space for a small garden courtyard. A loggia supported by columns and wrought-iron grillwork led from the street to an inner courtyard garden.  In 1934, tenant Russell Pettengill commissioned architect Robertson Ward to convert the house and an adjacent dwelling into his residence and office. At the time the front garden was divided by the construction of a red brick wall with a pair of arched entrance gates.  Pettengill left in 1935 when Cass Canfield purchased the property, living there until its 1970 sale to Jenrette.  The three-story house had double parlors on the first floor with bedchambers located on the second and third floors and a room across the full width of the house on the second floor that Jenrette used as an office and library. He described this house as “the perfect pied-a-terre,” noting its location on East 38^th street as convenient to both uptown and downtown Manhattan.

After selling 1 Sutton Place, Jenrette purchased a two-bedroom penthouse apartment located on the top floor of The Rockefeller Apartments, a ca. 1936 art-deco building located at 17 W. 54^th Street.  The building and a matching tower on W. 55^th Street were designed by architects Wallace Harrison and J. Andre Fouilhoux, both of whom were also involved in the design of Rockefeller Center. The apartment building was constructed on land that was owned by the Rockefeller family.  The balcony patio of Jenrette’s penthouse offered a birds-eye view into the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at the adjacent Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and “a spectacular in-your-face view of the Manhattan skyline.”  While he later recalled that he enjoyed the building’s close proximity to many of midtown Manhattan’s best restaurants, Jenrette wrote that he disliked apartment living because it forced him to spend so much time waiting for elevators

After living in the penthouse apartment for four years, he purchased a Federal townhouse located at 37 Charlton Street in 1978.  “The house seemed perfect,” Jenrette recalled, “it had been virtually untouched in its 150-year history, but structurally was still sound.”  The original architectural details throughout the house provided an ideal venue for his growing collection of Classical New York furniture by cabinetmakers such as Duncan Phyfe, and it was located in close proximity to Wall Street.

The 1827 townhouse had a storied history.  Developed by fur-trader John Jacob Astor, the block of townhouses on Charlton Street was built on what was originally the location of Richmond Hill, a mansion used by General George Washington during the American Revolution, subsequently owned by Aaron Burr, and later inhabited by Vice President John Adams as his official residence when New York City served as the nation’s capital. The federal townhouse, known as the John V. Gridley House, was one of several completed in 1827 after the block was sub-divided into lots for sale. Nearly destroyed by fire, the house was reconstructed in 1829.

In 1985, Jenrette purchased Ayr Mount in Hillsborough, North Carolina. The ca. 1815 house was the earliest brick dwelling in Orange County, North Carolina, and had been continuously owned by the descendants of its original owner, William Kirkland, since its construction. At the time Jenrette purchased Ayr Mount, he was mulling a retirement that included teaching at a university, and Ayr Mount’s location in Hillsborough was almost equidistant between Duke University in Durham and the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Any thoughts of retirement were postponed when Jenrette was asked to become Chairman of the Board of The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States.  Nevertheless, Ayr Mount was the first property that he gave to Classical American Homes Preservation Trust after he undertook a serious-two-year restoration that included paint analysis to determine the appropriate colors for walls, woodwork, and baseboards throughout the house.

In 1987, Jenrette moved further uptown in Manhattan and purchased Baker House, a 1931 Delano & Aldrich-designed townhouse located at 67 E. 93^rd Street, an address that was more convenient to his office at The Equitable than the Charlton Street house.  The townhouse was originally constructed for George F. Baker Sr. and was part of a larger complex of buildings, all designed by Delano & Aldrich, that included a large mansion at the corner of Park Avenue and East 93^rd that was the residence of Baker’s son, financier George F. Baker Jr.  The townhouse at #67 had been constructed by George F. Baker Jr. for his aged father, but the elder Baker died before he could occupy the house.  Jenrette described George F. Baker Sr. as one of his “larger-than-life heroes in business history” due to the financier’s role in endowing the Harvard University Graduate School of Business, so he felt an immediate connection to the house.

Jenrette lived in #69 for seven years, and, when the opportunity arose, he re-purchased the adjacent townhouse at #67 in 1996, at a substantially lower price that what he had sold it for in 1989.  Jenrette retained both properties, later giving #69 to CAHPT to use as its administrative headquarters, a role it served until the foundation’s headquarters officially moved to Ayr Mount in Hillsborough, North Carolina in 2021.  The townhouse at 67 E. 93^rd remained Richard H. Jenrette’s Manhattan residence until his 2018 death.

After his retirement from the Equitable, Jenrette devoted much of his time to nurturing the Classical American Homes Preservation Trust.  He and his partner, William L. Thompson, traveled frequently and spent a portion of every year at each of the properties. They typically spent late summer and fall at Edgewater in the Hudson River Valley, winters in the Caribbean at Cane Garden, and spring and early summer in South Carolina at both Roper House and Millford.

It was the 1968 purchase of Roper House that first awakened Jenrette’s interest in historic preservation. He later wrote, “my love affair with Roper House was just the beginning of what has turned out to be a fascinating lifetime career of restoring classical American homes.” He also credited his ownership of Roper House with enhancing his “appreciation of the value and importance of historic preservation” which led him to create Classical American Homes Preservation Trust in 1993.

Part II of this series will focus on the interiors of each of the properties described above and the cohort of architects, craftsmen, and designers who helped Jenrette to realize his vision for each of these houses and transform them into homes.