![]() More than that it was a triumph of space planning and decorating on the part of my mother and her interior designer, Horace Terrell. Although I missed the big living room in Boston (and my school, and my friends, and my father), I could tell, even as a little girl, that there was something special about our new little apartment. I was pleased to see that at least one of the double-ended mahogany beds that had been in my room in Boston had made it to New York. A kitchen, breakfast area, and bathroom were in the middle. There was one for me done up in red-and-white candy stripes, and at the end of the hall was my mother’s room with its wall of mirrors and built-in mirrored dressing table and its ingenious parallelogram-shaped desk nestled into the bay window. Our apartment was on the top floor of two contiguous, very narrow brownstones and was composed of four rooms connected by a U-shaped corridor: a double sitting room in front, on the street, which functioned as a living room/library (the two yellow sofas from Boston were combined into one for that room), a sort of dining room/guest space/study, and two bedrooms in back overlooking the gardens and into the rear windows of the Barbizon Hotel for Women. It was dominated by the relentless rattling and rumbling of the Third Avenue el. We took a taxi from La Guardia airport to our new apartment on East 62 nd Street-then, a blue-collar Italian neighborhood just two blocks north of Bloomingdale’s. She would have to find a new job as a lawyer, not easy for a woman in the late 1940s. My mother, close to broke, was moving us to New York, where she had been raised. The summer I was seven my parents had divorced. What I cherished most about this room, and this apartment, was that it was the only environment in which I experienced my parents together and us living as a family. It was a party room, and my hard-working young parents – my father was a doctor and my mother, a lawyer – had plenty of parties. ![]() Two stubby yellow love seats and a low, square, oak Parsons table with a red leather inset panel were centered on the fireplace. My parents’ books filled two tall, inset bookcases below each window. ![]() High clerestory windows on either side of the chimney breast gave on to the alley that was Primus Avenue and admitted a few rays of sun for several minutes each day. Centered on the opposite wall was a tall fireplace with its chimney breast tapering as it reached the ceiling. At the bottom of the stairs, huge windows gave on to the concrete paving of a courtyard that would be better described as a glorified airshaft. A narrow stair with a wrought-iron railing led down a side wall to the living room floor. On the upper entry level, my parents’ and my bedrooms flanked a short hall ending in an arched opening that gave on to what I then perceived as a huge, double height living room. Ours was a duplex that was dark and dingy and, at the same time, spacious. One Primus Avenue was a stepped alley off Phillips Street that opened on to a series of entries to apartments on either side. Here I spent the first seven years of my life. ![]() One Primus Avenue, Phillips Street, Boston, MA Then my love of design and my commitment to modernism in general (but not in the particulars) determined the function and “feel” of the houses I created within these various brownstone types and lived in as an adult. My mother’s taste colored each of the houses I lived in as a child. Some of the houses where I lived were floor-throughs, others the front or back half of a floor one was a floor added to an old tenement building. Houses for me have generally been apartments that are part of or added to New York City brownstones-named such for the inexpensive sandstone with a high concentration of iron that was used to clad the facades of many late-nineteenth century New York row houses. Perseverance, a memoir.) Brownstones by Leslie Armstrong (1984), and in 2020, Girl Intrepid: A New York Story of Privilege and Macmillan (1979) and Space for Dance: An Architectural Design Guide Leslie Armstrong has published three books: The Little House, Collier March 2023 El Portal Web feature by Leslie Armstrong
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |