Look Up: The Uptown Mansion That Could Double as a Vampire's Residence

Image via Complex Original

The house in fact was commissioned by Isaac Dudley Fletcher, an equally impressively successful banker/railroad tycoon as Sinclair was an oilman. Though neither was a Vanderbilt or Rockefeller, their wealth and power was quite influential. Fletcher, perhaps not wanting to be seen in Vanderbilt’s shadows, wanted his home to rival William’s, the Commodore’s son, home at 660 Fifth Avenue. Fletcher hired C.P.H Gilbert with the freedom to design as he chose. Gilbert’s results were spectacularly eclectic, far outshining his other Gold Coast mansion at 92nd and Fifth.

The home is considered to be French Gothic, but it truly looks more ecclesiastical than any home of that period. The ornamentation is wild and chaotic and features numerous figures, both large and small scattered around. The entrance is on 79th Street and in fact its frontage on Fifth Avenue is quite small, compared to many of the other buildings, perhaps a testament to the comparatively smaller wealth of its owners.

Fletcher died in 1917 and it was then the building ended up with Sinclair, after briefly being held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sinclair’s only modification it is said was the addition of a player organ by 1922, just before the Teapot Dome scandal broke. Sinclair served a brief sentence and when he returned to New York was so disgraced that he reluctantly decided to put his home and refuge up for sale to leave the city permanently. It was purchased by the last remaining heir of the Stuyvesants. When Augustus died in 1953 it eventually ended up with the Ukranian Institute of America.

The building is occasionally open to the public, most notably during Open House New York in October, and it is definitely worth the visit. Unlike so many other mansions in the area that have been almost completely gutted inside to make room for the ever expanding needs of the current occupants, the Institute was barely able to earn the minimum $150,000 needed per year to just maintain the building and as a result much of the original remains intact. The building was designated a National Landmark in 1978 and was only modestly restored in 1997.