Sophians: Kyiv to New York — 1891

The Sophian family lived in Kyiv (Russia at the time, Ukraine today). Morris and Delia Sophian had five children, Meyer, Jennie, Rosie, Harry, and Abraham. They lived an imperiled life in Tsarist Russia. Kyiv (Kiev). Along with Warsaw and Odessa, Kyiv was ground zero for the Tsar’s pogroms against the Jews. As the New York Daily News reported that the great wave of Jewish immigration was “instigated by Russian massacres, ‘plagues of sword and torch,’ that have smitten their race in Russia. The violence continued for decades and prompted a continuous stream of Jews migrating to the US to escape the death march.”

1891

The Sophian family decided to make the brave move to America in the early 1890’s. There is much we do not know about their emigration. Digitized US Citizenship records and US Census records, tell us about their early life in the US. Harry and Abraham traveled on the same ship, the SS Edam, of the Holland America Line, out of Rotterdam to the Port of New York, arriving on the 25th of June 1891. The SS Edam was sailed under the Nederlandsche-Amerikaansche Stoomvaart Maatschappij, the English version was Holland Amerika Lign, today it’s known as Holland America Line. Holland Amerika Lign had its American terminus on the west side of the Hudson River, Hoboken.

Harry and Abraham were young. Harry was almost 9 years old and Abraham was 7. The rest of the family were likely on the same ship, but we have yet to locate the Edam manifest that would show all of them together. We know of Harry and Abraham’s voyage from their petitions for citizenship.

Harry and Abraham’s Declaration of Intent to become a US citizen (1908 and 1909), required each to attest: “It is my bona fide intention to renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, and particularly to Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, of which I am now a subject.” That declaration must have felt good.

Photos below: SS Edam, Holland America Line; Holland America dock in NYC (Hoboken); Steerage (emigrant) class accomodations (Library of Congress).

Holland America terminus New York (Hoboken)

Steerage (emigrant class) accomodations

SS Edam (Holland America line)

1900-1920: NYC Apartment House Living—From Squalor to Elegance

The design and construction of the Sophian Plaza is part of a larger story about the rise of the luxury apartment building at the beginning of the 20th century. The popularity of the new form of residence was developed in fever pitch in New York City, as Harry Sophian started his career. In the eight years, 1902-1910, some 4,000 apartment buildings were built.

At the end of the prior century, late 1800’s, the moneyed class considered apartment living to be the province of the poor, in the squalid tenements, derisively referred to by how many flights a resident had to climb, e.g., “fourth-floor walk-up.”

Yet, architects, engineers, and builders perfected designs, building materials, and elevators that could produce high rises, where residents floated up to their homes on upper floors. Tall buildings with elevators became a marketable feature, not an indicator of poverty. People enjoyed the relief from climbing stairs; they liked living suspended above the street chaos.

It was one thing to build a tall building, it required another impetus to make it a luxury building that would satisfy the status and amenity requirements of the wealthy. The developers adopted many features and services as enticements. First, architects adopted the Beaux Arts style (pronounced bowz-zar) that adapted the style of palazzos and grandiose public buildings of Europe. The style emerged from the premier French school of architecture, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and it draws on architectural forms of monumental Classicism, Italian Renaissance, and French Renaissance. Examples of the grand style were shown at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, to great fanfare. Beaux Arts (fine arts in English) synced with the City Beautiful Movement which inspired grand naturalistic, but composed parks.

Additionally, the new luxe apartment buildings offered the newest technologies and conveniences (electricity, central heat and cooling, telephones) far more affordably than retrofitting mansions of old. The stand-alone mansion had become an albatross, costly to operate, and downright primitive, compared with the modern paradise of new extravagant high rises.

Some commentators highlight that luxury buildings solved another upper-class problem: high turnover of servants. [Perhaps it’s no surprise that the moneyed class would consider their servants the problem, not their own behavior.] The apartment-building landlords provided door attendants, valets, elevator operators, grounds people, and the like.

Apartment “hotels” included the conveniences of restaurants that obviated preparing all meals, allowing families to have much smaller household staff. Individual apartment layouts provided service entrances for deliveries, tradespeople, and housekeepers, that were separate and distinct from the more gracious entrance for family and social guests. Many floor plans also included small bedroom(s) off the kitchen for live-in help. The new luxury apartment building allowed the affluent to live better than ever.

In NYC, apartment houses became the living style of choice

In New York City, the development of the luxury apartment hotel was energetic, creative, and experimental. By 1929 almost all upper- and middle-class residents in Manhattan were living in apartments, according to the historians describing works in the Irma and Paul Milstein Division of Local History at the New York Public Library,

“New York City’s housing law “not only legitimized the modern luxury apartment building, it bestowed a very specific blessing.””

— Elizabeth Hawes

The 1901 zoning law (called the Tenement House Law) authorized builders to erect fireproof buildings as tall as twice the width of the street. Effectively that meant 10-story tall buildings on the crosstown streets and 12-story buildings on the broad north-south avenues, with corresponding minimum building widths.

The greater building sizes allowed more creative apartment configurations. The impact of the new law has been chronicled by Elizabeth Hawes in New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed Life in the City (1869-1930).  According to Hawes, the new law “not only legitimized the modern luxury apartment building, it bestowed a very specific blessing.” Of the 4,000 apartment houses were erected in Manhattan in those early years of the 20th century, many hundreds of them were designed for upper and upper middle classes. Hawes described the impact on New York City, “Of all the buildings that were erected in the first two decades of the millennium, none transformed the city more dramatically and more definitively than the new luxury apartment houses. … [T]he luxury apartment house was one of the great products of the American Renaissance. The millionaire had propelled the Age of Elegance into flowering and it was this gilded taste that now shaped a new generation of apartment houses.””

Harry’s birds eye view of nyc apartment development

This is the apartment building fever that Harry Sophian brought to Kansas City.

In New York, like elsewhere, Jews were unwelcomed in the mansion-filled, blue-blood neighborhoods of Fifth Avenue and the Upper East Side, flanking Manhattan’s Central Park. Instead, Jews established their own enclave on the west side of the Park, the neighborhoods called the Upper West Side and Morningside Heights. That was Harry Sophian’s working territory.  The luxury apartment building blossomed in those neighborhoods. Immigrant architects (both Italian and Jewish) designed extravagant buildings that became home to the extraordinarily wealthy as well as the merely affluent.

There are a few architects and buildings that Harry might have found inspiration. Emery Roth, a Jewish architect of renown, designed many apartment buildings on the Upper West Side. His reputation bloomed after he designed the famous Chocolate Pavilion at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the showcase event for the Beaux Art movement. Notice the colonnade, Corinthian columns, balustrade, and free-standing statuary of the pavilion. Each are central features of Beaux Art design, and each was incorporated into the Sophian Plaza design.

1893 Columbian Exposition

Showcase for beaux arts architectural design

Chocolate Pavilion, architect Emery Roth

The Upper West Side apartment houses were grand, heavily ornamented, and designed in various architectural styles, most notably Beaux-Arts. These new buildings offered apartments of nine to twelve rooms. The chambers were large, with high ceilings and lavish interior details, including well-appointed bathrooms and kitchens, and ample closets.

A promotional book featuring select apartment buildings was produced annually, Apartment Houses of the Metropolis. They were created to entice potential middle- and upper-class tenants to New York City’s “principal high-class apartment houses.” It provides a glimpse into the exuberance of apartment house building on the Upper West Side. These 300-page volumes showed exterior shots of the featured buildings with description and often one or more floor plans. They were published annually from 1908 to 1913. The excerpts below are from the 1908 edition.

From these few examples, one can see parallels to the Sophian Plaza design. Limestone clad lower floors, topped with brick upper floors. Commonly, the building’s footprint was crafted to allow multiple facades for windows and air circulation.

Two of Harry’s siblings lived in buildings that were featured in these promotional books, Abraham and Rosie.

The Orienta

302 West 79th street

Abraham and Estelle Sophian’s residence, 1915 (per his passport application)

The st regis

830 East 163rd Street, Bronx

Rosie [Sophian] and Morris Rabinowitz residence, 1910 (per the Census)

Parallel Residential Forces in Kansas City  

Kansas City historians have traced the development of apartment buildings here, noting that a segment of the upper-middle class emerged as an important subpopulation of apartment dwellers in the late 1880s forward. As the old elite neighborhoods close to the business centers declined, “apartment hotels offered amenities typically provided by hotels located on major thoroughfares with streetcar lines near the City's business centers. These new residential buildings featured an array of facilities and services for those without the time or inclination to manage a large home - kitchen, laundry, and maid services; well-appointed public rooms; and private suites that included parlors, dining rooms. bedrooms, bathrooms, and maid quarters. Social registers from the first decades of the twentieth century reveal that these apartments appealed to the upper-middle classes, including professionals, businessmen, and entrepreneurs.” Working-Class and Middle-Income Apartment Buildings in Kansas City, Missouri, National Register of Historic Places Multiple Property Documentation Form (Sept. 20, 2007).

The Sophian Plaza was conceived and designed to fit this role.

1905 — Sophians move north to Harlem

By 1905, the Sophian family moved to Harlem, just north of Central Park. Jeffrey Gurock, The Jews of Harlem: The Rise, Decline and Revival of an Urban Jewish Community (2016), documented that Harlem had become the third largest Jewish settlement in the world, after the Lower East Side and Warsaw. At its peak in the 1920s, 175,000 Jews lived in Harlem.

The older Sophian children started to peel off to start their own paths. Harry and Gussie stayed with their parents and found a home at 26 East 109th Street. Meyer, started referring to himself as Michael, married Cecelia, had a son, Lawrence, and moved to 71 East 104th Street, about a six-minute walk from his parent’s place. Rosie married Morris Rabinowitz, and moved further north, to the Bronx. Jennie married Morris Berlin and moved to Brooklyn. Abraham started medical school.

It was in Harlem that Harry and Abraham likely met Jane and Estelle Felix, the women they eventually married. In another post, we describe the Felix family emigration, but they landed in Harlem in the same time period. The Sophian and Felix families moved regularly in the ensuing years, between Harlem and the Upper West Side. Over the years, the different siblings lived with the extended family, or as a boarder, or alone.

While conditions were better than the Lower East Side, quarters were still cramped.

Laundry lines, East 107th Street, circa 1900 (Library of Congress)

Two blocks from the Sophian’s apartment

Abraham became a physician, on the fast track:  Abraham Sophian won a scholarship (1902) to study and train at Cornell Medical College, directly, without an undergraduate degree. That was a lucky break for him, because by 1908, Cornell instituted a requirement of an undergraduate college degree or its equivalent to be considered for admission to medical school, just as Harvard and Johns Hopkins did. Abraham graduated in 1906. After graduation, he began a residency at Mount Sinai Hospital, founded by Jewish philanthropists when New York hospitals refused to grant privileges to Jewish physicians and kept Jewish patients out of their wards.

The hospital was first located on 28th Street. By 1904, it opened its third home on East 100th Street (where is stands today, albeit stretching many more blocks!). Its path matched the migration of the Jewish population from the Lower East Side to Harlem.

Mount Sinai Hospital

The Harlem heyday did not last long. The Jews that swelled Harlem, started to migrate to the up-and-coming neighborhood, of the Upper West Side. A new subway line was under development along the length of Manhattan on the west side. The Upper West Side saw the development of apartment building, sprouting one after the next at a startling rate. Harry and Abraham migrated to the Upper West Side as well and found a home together at 230 West 107th Street.

Harry’s early career in real estate

While Abraham was building a career as a physician, Harry started to build his career in real estate development. From that perch, Harry Sophian started his career in real estate on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Real estate transaction announcements in the New York Times, 1905 to 1912, included sales, mortgages, and rentals for multiple properties at West 107th Street to West 202nd Street. This is the time period where Harry’s sense of apartment living, posh and elegant, entirely different from the squalid tenements he once knew.

1917 — Georgian Court—Harry’s First Apartment House

The Story of the Sophian Plaza starts with . . . Harry’s first Kansas City Apartment House

Harry Sophian, a Russian emigré at age nine, lived and worked as a “real estate man” in New York City, during a time when development of tall apartment buildings (8-12 stories) was exploding, especially along Manhattan’s upper west side. As a transplant to Kansas City, he imported a well-developed vision of elegant apartment living. He arrived in Kansas City in 1916, and set to build his first apartment house, the Georgian Court apartment hotel.

Armour Boulevard and

main street

He selected a site at the auspicious corner of Armour Boulevard and Gillham Road, two blocks from the mansion of Kirkland Armour, meat packing magnate, and other Kansas City luminaries. The KC History site (Midtown KC Post) describes just how fashionable Armour Boulevard was in this time. According to Midtown KC Post, at the turn of the 20th century, Armour Boulevard was one of the most celebrated streets in town, proudly featured in numerous postcards of the day showing off Kansas City’s new boulevard system.

Harry purchased the corner lot in 1917 (Jan 2), with architectural plans already in hand. He attracted the financing might of bankers from New York and Chicago to underwrite the building, and broke ground (Jan 11) to build an eight-story apartment hotel. With speed that is remarkable in today’s terms, he declared the building would be ready for occupancy as early as October 1917. Although Harry was the man-on-the-ground, the bond financing notice shows that the new building was jointly owned by Harry and Jane, Abraham and Estelle Sophian. Shepard, Farrar & Wiser were the architects. The Kansas City Star article announcing the building’s debut, noted that its “appointments will be elaborate beyond anything yet attempted here.” (KC Star, 1-17-1917).

Georgian Court opened in 1917

The building offered 24 large apartments, most were 9-rooms, “exceptionally large and light,” including large foyers, sun parlors, breakfast rooms, and sleeping porches. A pergola and ballroom were planned for the top floor. The announcement included details about provisions for service staff, which included day and night elevator service, hall service, and footmen, all of whom would be attired in uniforms, and for whom onsite dormitory accommodations would be provided.

Architectural historians, Ellen Uguccioni and Sherry Piland noted that Georgian Court Apartment Hotel started the high-rise building boom here. The Georgian Court was deluxe and “set a standard for the others that were to follow. It had no rivals.” (Armour Boulevard, National Register of Historic Places).

Armour Boulevard (1918)

Glimpses In And Around Kansas City

(Fred Harvey)

The building filled its 24 apartments quickly. In a marketing coup, I suspect Harry Sophian nudged the folks at Kellogg-Baxter, the publishers of the Social Register, to include every family who became a tenant in the 1918-19 Kansas City Social Register. Twenty-four apartments, twenty-four families on the Social Register listed their address at Georgian Court, 400 East Armour Boulevard.

“The Georgian Court was deluxe and “set a standard for the others that were to follow. It had no rivals.””

— Ellen Uguccioni and Sherry Piland, architectural historians

1907 and 1911 - two Sophian brothers, two Felix sisters, two marriages

The Felixes emigrate and move to Harlem

Jane and Estelle Felix emigrated with their parents and six siblings from Łódź, Poland about 1890.

The family—Arthur and Emily, the parents, and children Sara, Pauline, Eva, Josef, Flora, Estelle, Louis, and Jane—found a home in Harlem by 1900. Sometime in the next few years, the Sophians and Felixes met and became close—especially Harry with Jane and Abraham and Estelle. The brothers eventually would marry the sisters.

Harry and Jane

Harry courted Jane, which appears to have included a vacation on the Jersey shore. Their arrival at one of the Asbury Park hotels, The Park View, in July 1905 was announced in the papers—“Misses Felix, Joe Felix, and Harry Sophian” arrive.  

Harry and Jane married in 1907. They welcomed their daughter Lucille into the world, 1909. And Harry applied for citizenship the same year. During this period, Harry, Jane, and Lucille lived the Felix family apartment. The 1910 census records show that nearly all the Felixes were engaged in work. Estelle was a school teacher; Pauline, a milliner; Louis, a lawyer; Josef, a salesman; Jane, a merchant; and Harry in real estate.

Abraham and Estelle

Abraham finished his medical degree in 1906, started his residency at Mount Sinai, courted and married Jane’s older sister, Estelle in 1911. Their children, Emily and Bud (Abraham Jr.) were born in 1913 and 1915.

This was an exciting time for the Abraham and Estelle. As they started their family, Abraham’s career started blooming as well. He became renowned for his work in infectious diseases and was in great demand to consult on outbreaks and epidemics. He was beckoned to Dallas in 1911 when that city suffered a particularly severe epidemic of 185 cases of meningitis. His success there was celebrated widely.

Ketubah-Jewish Marriage Contract

1919 — Sophian Plaza, the Plans and Construction

On June 7, 1919, Harry Sophian purchased a triangle of land, on Warwick Boulevard, between 46th and 47th Streets, from Henry Schott, a marketing vice president at Montgomery Ward catalogue company and former editor of the Kansas City Star.

With the announcement of the land purchase, Harry previewed his plans—a 10-story apartment building with 30 apartments of 8- to 12-rooms, each with servant quarters within the apartment. A building notably grander than the Georgian Court. Indeed, Harry raised $180,000 to build the Georgian Court apartment house. And he announced that the Sophian Plaza will be a $1,000,000 building.

According the KC Star news account (6/8/1919), Wight & Wight architecture firm was engaged to create a building of Italian Renaissance design, with every room to have windows. At the time Harry hoped for occupancy in 1920.

We found the Wight & Wight architectural plans at the State Historic Preservation Office. They developed a Beaux Arts design for a three-spoked building. But they were never advanced. Instead, Sophian switched design firms, returning to Charles Shepard, of Shepard & Wiser.

Renderings of Sophian Plaza, elevations and plan, undated, circa 1919, by Architects Wight and Wight; Engineer Tuttle Ayers Woodward, Box 137.019, Wight and Wight Architectural Records, 1904-1952 (K0825); The State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center Kansas City.

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We have yet to discover the reason for changing architectural firms. But a few things are apparent about Sophian’s connection to Charles Shepard, that may have precipitated the engagement. Charles was a familiar figure. Harry had already worked with Shepard, who designed Georgian Court. Shepard, his wife Anna, and their two sons, Theodore and C. Edwin, lived in Georgian Court and were likely next door neighbors (on the same floor) with Harry, Jane and Lucille. The 1920 census records show the Shepard family entries immediately preceding the Harry Sophian family notations. And it turned out that JC Nichols, the outsized developer of Country Club district, had just purchased a Charles Shepard designed home. Shepard’s reputation was growing brightly. (See more details on the JC Nichols home, at Shepard & Wiser, Architectural Firm of High Repute, below).

With second round of fanfare, Sophian’s new plan was revealed, including Shepard’s renderings, maps, and an extended article in the Kansas City Star, April 9, 1922.

Showing the Street plan at the time the building was planned

Kansas City Star, April 9, 1922

In several way, Shepard & Wiser’s subsequent plan shows a consistency of Harry Sophian’s vision. Colossal columns, topped with Corinthian capitals. An elaborate architrave with a balustrade railing. Free-standing statuary. These were the elements that Harry saw as indicative of Italian Renaissance style. In other ways, the Shepard & Wiser plan was more modest than first projected. Nine stories, not ten. Apartments with 4- to 7-rooms, smaller than the 8- to 12-room apartments originally projected. Sophian explained, it represented a larger investment, $1 million, of pure Italian architecture, which was intended to present an even more imposing appearance. 

Shepard & Wiser design

East (Front) Elevation

May 29, 1922 plans (not final)

Shepard & Wiser

Front Courtyard detail

The reduced profile of the building may well have been a cautious reaction to the fevered pitch of apartment construction in Kansas City at the time. In the years from 1920 to 1922, apartment building “starts” grew from buildings that totaled 382 units valued about $ ¾ million in 1920 to buildings with 1,620 units, valued at nearly $9 million, by 1922. (Kansas City Working-Class and Middle-Income Apartment Building History, National Register of Historic Places, 9-20-2007). Additionally, it appears that he raised $429,000, through issuing 30 year, 5% bonds, not the million dollars he first trumpeted. [In a later post, we will describe the financing and sales of the building over the years. Business records available in the Missouri State Historic archives provide much detail.]

The Manhattan Construction Company was engaged to handle the construction. The foundation permit was taken out in April 1922. The Manhattan Construction Company was founded in 1896, in Oklahoma. It was (and still is) family-owned. Today (2020), it touts itself as among the largest family-owned construction companies in the US. The company provides pre-construction, construction management, program management, general building, and design-build services throughout the United States, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.

As the Sophian Plaza construction progressed, Kansas City Star regularly reported developments regarding the building, with renderings, photos, and news updates.

The Sophian Plaza, A New Million Dollar Apartment Building

And on February 25, 1923, the Kansas City Star trumpeted the opening with the headline, “The Sophian Plaza, A New Million Dollar Apartment Building Is an Imposing Structure of Italian Architecture.” According to the Star report, the Sophian Plaza “stands as a structure of high character.”