The captivating architecture of Rosario Candela on West End Avenue of Manhattan
- Rossella BLUE Mocerino
- Jul 19
- 5 min read
Updated: Aug 12
Guest writer: Christine Despas
Rosario Candela's buildings on West End Avenue dominate, indeed, perhaps even define one of the loveliest areas of this dazzling, majestic enclave on West End Avenue. Surely passersby find his buildings exceptional amid the many others because they begin a conversation in the stroller’s mind. At the start of our stroll up this gently inclining hill is 755 West End Avenue where a plaque testifies to Candela's quiet reputation; similarly, the opening statement of our conversation is made. The topic is grandeur, grandeur infused with understated beauty, consistently. At the hilltop, one discovers a reply.
This article refers to seven works Candela designed and built on West End Avenue from 97th Street to the hilltop at 105th Street. They gravitate towards the intersection of northernmost West End Avenue with Broadway and Duke Ellington Boulevard (West 106th Street). Quite the setting in our exploratory stroll, the intersection converges at lovely Straus Park, a not wide but long triangular park thick with foliage, urban wildlife, sculpture, fountain and grill, where every turn of head yields a pastoral surprise.
Of the many grand façades here in the Riverside West End Historic District II, why would Candela's win one’s particular attention? Perhaps it’s because of a consistent perfection of combined elements.
The first element is their reticent external beauty. Minimal ornamentation draws attention to the careful proportions of an immense neo-Renaissance façade; so do detailed entrances underscored by forest green canopies supported on polished brass posts or contrasted against a quietly ornate limestone base. Such intensive aesthetic consideration soon becomes obvious. Passing by and viewing it happens with a sigh of relief. Stress dissolves and everything becomes possible.
On West End Avenue, stunning howsoever understated these exteriors are, and maybe because his façades don’t flaunt any extras, it becomes clear that Rosario Candela knew to let the color and texture of his brickwork combine with sky colour and setting, building height and width, to subtly, suddenly, even insolently move us.
There is something irksome about the exterior of this 755 West End Avenue. First, the angularity of the incline runs downhill right underneath the entrance. Second, the base has four decorative limestone piers with flanking pilasters, they are two stories high; this, on both façades of this street corner building. There is a marked contrast of mood between the serene white limestone and the red bricks that form the building's overall exterior. Generous amounts of white molding applied between the bricks matches the limestone, while the bricks' emphatic orthogonality suggests an argument between the two, as if for territorial dominance.
How can one artwork amid the many others be so quietly captivating? our conversation goes on as we stroll uphill. Sparsely ornamented expansive façades is a Candela signature, but 875 West End Avenue's remarkable features can stop us in our tracks. A rusticated limestone base of two stories is centered by a finely crafted, subtle and stunning entrance surround replete with the more recently installed dark green canopy on brass posts whose flanking pair of lanterns (historic additions is suggested) look like an archaeologist’s Renaissance treasure. A red brick exterior with twin rows of brick quoins lightly decorating each corner, a string course above the third story and an upper string course two stories below an understated cornice and running underneath windows paired into four two-story series of arcades with each pair underlain by balconettes, amaze. Nothing about the detail in this exterior shouts. It’s not necessary: We get it.
There's no difference in general style between 875 West End Avenue, 865 West End Avenue and 878 West End Avenue. Their details differ slightly, however, and persuade the viewer to notice them. Even the simpler designs among them make you stop and wonder, Why does Candela not embellish his façades with more balconettes, more terracotta ornaments, more lintels, more anything? But for a few air conditioner units, the vast spaciality of his Renaissance palazzo exteriors remains free of clutter.
If the external beauty particular to Candela exteriors has an exceptional effect on viewers, there are still two other elements of his craft that combine with it to make him (who never promoted himself commercially) a phenomenon of art history, a turning point in architecture and real estate. The other two elements are part of floor planning: they are off-the–foyer planning and separation-of-three spatial types.
One of the patterns that sometimes happen in life is not deliberately panning for gold, then finding it. My response to the exteriors of Rosario Candela's buildings is partly euphoric and partly puzzlement. This wonderment of mine becomes a quest. My question, Why do his buildings move me so? opens the door to a mystery that gets more magical and mythical the further I go.
Firstly, I view his façades as gilded by the setting sun of the Victorian era’s unimpeachable hauteur and modulated by the Jazz Age. In Candela’s world, those two elements are connected. His art is poised in two historic eras simultaneously. That unique era is made visual in the rooftop set design for the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance duet, “Let’s Face the Music and Dance”, in the movie Follow the Fleet, where the new vision of New York City residential luxury inspired one of the greatest movie moments ever.
An ambitious Sicilian immigrant and a student with a rigorous work ethic, Rosario Candela graduated the Columbia University School of Architecture in 1915, where he studied the American version of design that originated at Beaux-Arts de Paris. Considering his European origins and his diligent success in the Beaux-Arts principles, one sees the aesthetic principle of courtly majesty steering his artistic vision. It’s always there in earnest and not merely as glamor.
Secondly, the façades I refer to in this post are of seven buildings that lay claim to being ‘only’ high-rise rental apartment buildings, yet they embody aesthetic values of the highest order and an elegance and urbane dignity one rarely expects to see in 20th and 21st centuries here in the USA. The interiors, i.e., their floor plans, bear an innovative design concept – the separation-of-three spatial types, where public, private and service areas are ‘protected by means of design’ from one another. Candela developed this unique new statement from his West End Avenue buildings on into his mature works on the Upper East Side which became the most in-demand, expensive and prestigious residences of their type down to today – the prewar luxury residence – whose social status and price remain the very highest even today, 100 years after their construction.
The third compelling element of Candela-designed floor plans is off-the-foyer planning of the entrance area inside a residential unit. It’s not a Candela innovation but a centuries old Beaux-Arts principle of refined living that signifies civilized entry into a residence.
The Upper West Side is where Candela developed his craft. His first buildings are here, the very first being 915 West End Avenue. He designed these seven independently of his usual collaborators like Gaetan Ajello, Joseph Paterno and Ralph Ciluzzi. From here, his technical and aesthetic logic change architectural history with a new, totally unanticipated level of engineering and artistic development, later, on the Upper East Side.
Christine Despas is a widely published UK-award-winning artist and belletrist. She has fans here, has published with the US previously and is expanding her geographic range abroad. The Painter's Eye has also published two previous posts by this writer: 'Monet and the passage of time & the constancy of light' and 'Francisco Goya, modern but not Modern'.
All photos by Sherry Fyman. Sherry has also contributed two scholarly posts for The Painter's Eye. 'Bologna and The Scholar in Art' and 'Marc Chagall. The Crucifixion, 1964'.