The Flats, located at 554 West 53rd Street on the corner of West 53rd Street and 11th Avenue, has a rich history in the area starting from 1915. Model Tenements such as The Flats housed workers of the area’s many factories, gas plants, and slaughterhouses that came to define the neighborhood. The Flats is architecturally significant as a rare surviving example of fireproof, affordable, open stair tenement construction in Hell’s Kitchen. Designed by architect William Emerson and constructed in 1915, this building utilizes a light-court plan that applied the principles of apartment house design to tenements and broke the existing pattern of tenement housing. William Emerson (1873-1957)—who should not be confused with his older, British contemporary William Ralph Emerson—was a great-nephew of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Educated at Harvard and Columbia University, he went on to study architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He worked in the offices of influential architects including William Tubby and York & Sawyer. Emerson’s model tenement provides increased space, light, and air, as well as steam heat, public bathing facilities, and a roof garden. The ground floor was devoted to such innovative features as a day nursery and a cooperative store for the tenants.

The building stands on an irregular site; to the south of the building, a ten-foot narrow courtyard diagonal to the site provides fire egress. This narrow diagonal is a remnant of Stryker’s Lane—a path that led to an eighteenth-century house. The Flats is a reminder of the many working-class Irish, Scottish, German, Black, Greek, eastern European, and Puerto Rican people that lived in the neighborhood.

When the urban housing reform movement began in the 1890s, there was little enforced legislation governing tenement house construction. Building speculators responded to market demands. Model Tenements differed from speculative tenements because they were financed by private investor-reformers with voluntary limits on profit and higher standards of sanitation. The Tenement House Act of 1879 restricted building to a maximum of 65% coverage of the lot and favored tenement-style construction plan of the prize-winning architect, James E. Ware. The style became known as the “dumbbell” because it conformed to the standard city lot (25’ x 100’) with narrow air shafts (4’ 8” wide) between buildings. The “dumbbell” plan quickly lost favor as reformers and health officials realized that the narrow, un-fireproofed shaft acted like a flute, and proved to be a fire hazard, a convenient place for garbage, and a conduit for cooking odors. Thus, rather than a positive solution, the “dumbbell” plan encouraged development into clusters of high-density.

Reformers recognized that the chief defect of the tenement house design lay in its adherence to the historical pattern of land usage. The narrow lot satisfied the requirements of single-family dwellings, but not those of multiple dwellings, which were more commonly used in tenement buildings. Emerson believed that the open stair design was “the essence of almost every element necessary to both the moral and physical well-being of the tenement dweller.” The Flats was designed in the shape of a reverse ‘E,’ with a large covered, arched entrance to an interior courtyard, from which the open stairs rise. The first floor contained a food store on the corner of 53rd Street and Eleventh Avenue, with a corner doorway; a large day-nursery in the center of the building, and the public baths and janitor apartments on the southern end. The remaining floors are centered around two open stairwells, with five apartments accessible from each. The Flats was the last model tenement built in this part of the city, and Emerson funded the construction of the building, which he originally called the “North River Homes” and maintained ownership for the remainder of his life.

The Flats had advantages that most other housing projects did not. It stood at the social center of Hell’s Kitchen. DeWitt Clinton Park, which lies across Eleventh Avenue, was built on the site of the longest surviving mansion in the area, the Mott Stryker House. Built in 1902 as a part of a movement to create open spaces and parks in overcrowded working-class areas, the park included a large wading pool, a pavilion with free shower facilities, a baseball field, and a playground. It was also home to the School Gardens, where Fannie Griscom Parsons and her staff supervised children’s vegetable plots. Adjacent, and now a part of The Flats development, was the Fifty-Third Street Industrial School, owned by the Children’s Aid Society. Erected in 1894, The School included a summer roof playground, English language classes and trade classes for immigrant children, an information bureau, and a Saturday morning “Locked Out Club” where as many as 200 children played on the roof, in the park, or had indoor games and stories. The School was later used for children with tuberculosis and other chronic illnesses.

The Flats is situated in the City of New York’s first City-sponsored Urban Renewal Area (CURA), designated in 1969 as a response to the Clinton community’s opposition to New York’s proposed Master Plan to extend the Midtown central business district west to the Hudson River. The City condemned a 6-square block area (bounded by 56th Street to the North, 10th Avenue to the East, West 50th Street to the South, and 11th Avenue to the West) with the intention following the now-discredited urban planning principle of complete site clearance and new construction. In the Clinton Urban Renewal Area, two towers were built, the Hudson View (747 10th Avenue) and Clinton Tower (790 11th Avenue), followed by a public housing project for families and seniors, Harbor View Terrace, and a low-rise Section 8 project for families, Clinton Manor.

Since 1980, CURA has been the subject of many political debates and struggles both within and outside of the community. Proposals have ranged from demolition and tower plans to preservation and combined new construction. The political debate intensified with the increased pressure of market developers seeking continually diminishing land opportunities on which to build new luxury residential towers. The conflict between the community’s desire to retain affordable housing in a traditionally working-class neighborhood, and the City’s desire to unload its large inventory of housing stock to private developers further exacerbated the political complications at the time.

With a long history of tenant organization, tenants of The Flats sought support to renovate this building. In 1999, an umbrella group of community organizations called the CURA Coordinating Committee (CCC) joined together to develop an updated plan for the remaining CURA sites. This plan was based on the long-term residential, commercial, not-for-profit, cultural, and manufacturing tenant group, Clinton Preservation Local Development Corporation (CPLDC)’s long-stated planning vision for the community. The 1999 CCC Plan (“1999 Plan”) continued the key vision of accomplishing, through a balance of housing preservation and new construction, the following core goals:

• Maintaining moderate- and low-income housing
• Promoting mixed use
• Protecting existing tenants
• Maximizing open space

The constituent groups of the CCC, CHDC, New York City Housing Development Corporation (HDC), the Clinton Housing Association (CHA), and Clinton Association for a Renewed Environment (CARE), began to develop proposals for individual sites based upon the new plan. Over a period of six months in 1999, CHDC and the Tenant Association worked together to develop a renovation proposal that combined 554 W (The Flats) and 552 W (the Old School) to provide 86 units of integrated affordable housing for families and formerly homeless individuals, along with a courtyard and a community room for tenants. The innovative project gained the support of Manhattan Community Board 4 in November 1999. The project received financing through the Neighborhood Redevelopment Program for The Flats building, the Supportive Housing Loan Program for the Old School, and equity through the syndication of Low Income Housing Tax Credits and Historic Preservation Tax Credits. It was a particularly complicated process to combine the two buildings into one, as The Flats and the Old School were filed as separate buildings.

At the end of the project, CHDC was made aware of a serious engineering error regarding ventilation from the laundry room and bathroom in the cellar. Instead of installing the ventilation up to the roof per building code, the ventilation had been brought to the side courtyard of the building, by residential windows, which was not permitted by building code. Further, sprinkler lines were undersized from the street, and they had already been installed in the building. The building was practically finished; however, seven floors of apartments, as well as the street, had to be broken through to install ventilation and upsized sprinkler lines to be compliant with code. Unfortunately, this reconstruction also hit the holiday construction embargo, extremely delaying the completion of the building. While the buildings were almost done for a year, CHDC was unable to occupy the building. CHDC brought legal action against the engineer responsible for the project, and prevailed. CHDC was in an urgent position to meet the tax credit deadline for occupancy, but fortunately, succeeded in occupying the building before the deadline. The building was completed in January 2007.

554 West 53rd Street has a combination of 86 Class A apartments and supportive housing units, one of the first of its kind when built. The building has a courtyard, community room, and garden next door, known as Adam’s Garden, which is scheduled for completion in 2024.