Just off Fifth: Butterfield House

A discreet presence on West 12th Street, Butterfield House has long been celebrated as one of the city’s great postwar apartment buildings. Designed in 1962 by William J. Conklin and James S. Rossant of the architectural firm of Mayer, Whittlesey & Glass, the building consists of two separately conceived structures, a small 4-bay 7-story façade on West 12th linked to a much larger 12-story building on West 13th Street, the two connected by a glass-walled passageway and central landscaped courtyard.

Steel frame bay windows and variegated brown brick give the building a wonderfully crisp appearance and an intriguing balance of lightness and presence.  Although Butterfield House was designed and constructed before the institution of the Greenwich Village Historic District and its resultant codes, it does an excellent job of respecting neighboring architecture and the scale of each street it fronts while clearly representing the culture and aesthetic of its own period.

In 1963 the Municipal Art Society awarded a certificate of merit to Mayer, Whittlesey & Glass for Butterfield House and the firm’s “contributions to the beauty of the city.”  Paul Goldberger, writing in The New York Times in 1979, included Butterfield House in his list of the 10 “Top Postwar Apartment Buildings, “ and historian Andrew Alpern praised its “sensitive and tasteful façade” in his seminal book New York’s Fabulous Luxury Apartments.

The building is named after General Daniel Butterfield, an officer with the Union Army during the Civil War.  General Butterfield was credited for revising and popularizing the funerary bugle piece Taps: his home was on the site of Butterfield House’s 12th Street building.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.