House of Sweetness and Spite

IT looks as if the battle of Beekman Place is over. A new owner is renovating the picturesque little town house at 50th Street, built in 1926 by the landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman, and also demolishing a two-story-high spite wall that blocked river views from the adjacent house and led to years of legal struggle.

Mrs. Shipman was one of the trailblazers who in the 1920s discovered far Beekman Place and pronounced it charming, with its oddball location and varied East River panoramas. In 1919, she bought one of its aging brownstones, today No. 19-21, at the northeast corner of 50th, backing on to views of the river.

Ellen Biddle was born in 1869, and in 1893 married Louis Evan Shipman, a writer; the 1920 census taker recorded Mr. Shipman’s occupation as “playwright” and Mrs. Shipman’s as “none.” But in fact, Ellen Shipman was one of an emerging cadre of women in the profession of landscape architecture.

Nancy Angell Streeter, her granddaughter, says that Mr. Shipman was “an unreliable source of income” and that at some point Mrs. Shipman studied landscape architecture at what was later Radcliffe College.

By the time the Shipmans moved to Beekman Place, Mrs. Shipman had at least 10 commissions to her credit. Judith Tankard’s 1996 monograph “The Gardens of Ellen Biddle Shipman” (Saga Press) says that she was working with the architect Charles Platt no later than 1913; it was he who encouraged her career.

She became one of the most prominent landscape architects in the United States, working for the Fords, Astors, du Ponts and other families, with 40 commissions alone in Grosse Pointe, Mich. She designed Longue Vue Gardens in New Orleans, now reopened to the public after damage from Hurricane Katrina.

The Shipman marriage fell apart, and in 1925, Mrs. Shipman undertook to remodel the house completely. She hired the architects Butler & Corse, who created a dwelling and ground-floor office for Mrs. Shipman overlooking the East River. It is peculiar that she did not hire her mentor, Mr. Platt.

The architects stripped away the old brownstone and remade the front as a Boston-prim red brick facade with black-painted shutters, a small gallery facing Beekman Place, and a striking two-story-high oriel in the Gothic style above the front door on 50th Street.

In 1927, Elizabeth Russell, writing in The House Beautiful, said that a visitor to Mrs. Shipman’s office could glimpse “girls in blue smocks bending over drafting boards.” Mrs. Streeter says that her grandmother always had young women working for her because “she felt she had to give them a chance.”

Elizabeth Russell was entranced by the “plant room,” in the three-sided window oriel, home to pots of daffodils, Chinese lilies and freesia, and wished that everyone could have “such a haven of peace.” According to Mrs. Tankard, in 1945 Mrs. Shipman described her house by saying, “There is not in all New York another piece of property like it, for it has the seclusion of Beekman Place, southern exposure, beauty of architecture combined with the extended view of the East River.”

In 1938, Mrs. Shipman told The New York Times that “before women took hold of the profession, landscape architects were doing what I call cemetery work,” whereas she and her new cohort were using plants “as if they were painting pictures as an artist.” She sold Beekman Place in 1946, and died in 1950.

The exterior of the house was intact in 1980, but some later owner added heavily modeled window lintels, along with an extra cornice at the attic story. The delicate Gothic-style windows, with their intricate quatrefoil designs, were replaced in favor of the standard model.

The changes might have been made by William R. Rupp, the Florida businessman who bought the Shipman house for $8.8 million in 2001. It was definitely he who added the aggressive, four-foot-high double-R monogram emblazoned on the entrance gate.

Mr. Rupp soon became embroiled in a dispute with the owner of the next-door building: the hulking modernist town house built by the architect Paul Rudolph in the 1980s. Mr. Rupp put up a two-story-high spite wall, blocking some river views from the Rudolph house; it survived one legal challenge. He died in 2007, and his estate offered the property in the spring of 2008 for $25 million.

Last October a financier, Peter Novello, got it for $10.6 million. Mr. Novello lives in an apartment at 2 Beekman Place and says “the thing that sold me was the view from the living room and terraces.” He can see up and down the East River, and across the water are the picturesque ruins of the old nurses’ residence on Roosevelt Island.

Mrs. Shipman’s interiors are long gone; about all that’s left from her hand is a pair of blind arches sunk into the walls of her former breakfast room.

In June, Mr. Novello’s house was at its barest, down to the studs and bare walls. As Mrs. Shipman did, he is working from ground up.