How the sewing machine gave NYC a beautiful block.

For every penny attorney Edward Cabot Clark may have spent on his JD, he likely parlayed each into at least a grand.

He partnered with Isaac Singer to obtain patents for Singer's vastly improved sewing machines, marketed the devices for home use, and conceived 'installment plans' that allowed hundreds of thousands of units to be sold to a customer base previously shut out of the market. Sales skyrocketed. As did Mr. Clark's wealth.

Not content to sit on his fortune, Clark put it to work, purchasing property on the very frontiers of Manhattan's civilization in the 1880s, today's Upper West Side. While the invasion of the Upper East Side was well under way and by some of the wealthiest families the world had ever known, the Upper West Side remained a bit of a backwater, built more on spec, the Upper West Side for the Upper Middle Class.

As magnificent as it turned out to be, both architecturally and by virtue of the star power writ large in its residential rolls, Clark's Dakota Apartments were never quite pitched towards the monied elite for whom the idea of apartment dwelling was still rather inconceivable. That's important to remember when one walks the blocks off the Park and around The Dakota, many of which were purchased for future development by Mr. Clark and his heirs. There is a freedom of form in the architecture, with more dramatic chances taken, many more whimsical elements added, and far and away more far away exotic references used, say, Scandinavian, the Turkish, than one would ever see over there on the east side of the Park. They were far too cowed by the terror of a social misstep.

Edward Clark died in 1882 before The Dakota ever opened its doors. The lots he owned on the south side of West 74th Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue transferred to his grandson Ambrose. Who was one-year old.

By the time 1903 rolled around, Frederick Ambrose 'Brose' Clark was a 21-year old English-styled, jodhpur-wearing championship horseback riding, tweedy all-around gentleman, thoroughly swept up in the allure of Anglo-American fealty. It would have been no surprise, then, he chose a very little known architect named Percy Griffen to helm the project that bears the Clark family name these one hundred plus years later. Griffen had recently designed the East 51st Street home of wealthy attorney John Stevens Melcher, grandson of millionaire hotelier Paran Stevens. It was the first home to reject the all-cosuming French influences that had captivated New York Society and our premier architects for two decades. Griffen was drawn to the cleaner lines of an emerging neo-Georgian style.

It happened again later in the 1970s I recall, a love affair with the Georgian, the warmth of red brick in flemish bond, offset with the off-white of limestone, a Greek-like love of symmetry and straight lines, but in 1903, something that would have been quite new, christened the American basement.

Percy Griffen designed a series of eighteen stately but sumptuous townhomes, numbers 18-52 on West 74th Street. They all bore nearly identical proportions, at five visible stories each, the fifth dotted with a nod to the style Beaux-arts, copper-cladded dormers. It was the basement that shocked, before becoming de rigeur. No lofty flight of steps hovering over an English half basement, servants stooping under the stoop. The three small stairs here were utterly American, welcoming, equalizing, deemphasizing class, possessed of simple elegance.

What I find most stunning about the block is the nuance in design that keeps the eye dancing while maintaining a cohesion rarely equalled in Manhattan. (I'm thinking of Hudson View Gardens, Strivers' Row, Pomander Walk, and Tudor City to a lesser extent.) While there is much repetition from townhouse to townhouse, look closely and see there is always at least one magnificent variable that lends individuality to each. Many compare it to Mayfair in London. If that reference wasn't intentional on the part of Mssrs. Clark and Griffen, it certainly would have pleased them.

The Clark Estate Houses as they came to be known have housed golden Guggenheims, heavy-hitting retailers named Saks and Gimbels, schools for the blind, a nursing home for singers from the Metropolitan Opera, and recently, the grandson of a movie mogul and a 'ghost'ly actor in his own right, Tony Goldwyn. They were lately all repointed as well. I can't imagine they've ever looked better.

Take a walk up there if you can. I'll take you! Or do it in your own living room on Google Maps. It's one of NYCs hidden treasures, sitting in plain sight.