“ONE shot” just doesn’t do justice to the Noonan Plaza Apartments in hilly Highbridge Heights. Noonan Plaza, West 168th from Nelson west to Ogden, is architect Horace Ginsbern creation second only to his Park Plaza Apartments on Jerome Avenue and the Grand Concourse’s “Fish Building” in neighborhood apartment complexes. This group of buildings also echoes Mayan ornamentation, as did Park Plaza. When it was opened it was among the grandest residential residences in the borough:
Noonan Plaza was “so elegant that its doormen were attired in uniforms, adorned with small capes … Residents lucky enough to occupy apartments that overlooked the fifteen-thousand square foot interior garden were treated to a spectacular tableau; a waterfall splashing into a pool that was home to swans, goldfish, and water lilies … crisscrossed by a series of Japanese style bridges. Amenities inside included mothproof storage closets, Electrolux refrigerators, and an elevator roomy enough to accommodate wheelchairs for the elderly. Bathrooms featured built-in-tubs, colored tile walls, and hampers — all luxuries in their day.” Constance Rosenblum, Boulevard of Dreams
By 1975, according to Rosenblum, things had changed dramatically at the Noonan:
More and more welfare families were shuttled into the building where swans once swam amid water lilies in the courtyard pool, to be followed by squatters, vandals and drug dealers. The landlord who had owned the complex for less than five years abandoned the place, leaving behind 327 housing code violations… “Noonan Plaza is being torn apart,” wrote Donald Sullivan and Brian Danforth of Hunter College in their account of the decline. “Elevators, doors, windows, tiled ceilings, and garden furnishings have been brutally damaged…whole skylights have been taken off the roof and thrown to the ground below, sending broken glass in every direction, in order to sell the brass framing as scrap metal.”
You hope that equilibrium has been reached at the Noonan. In this area, Ogden Avenue in particular is an architectural hotbed and I hope to get up to Highbridge Heights sometime soon to shoot the great buildings found there.
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10/2/24