A ‘spaceship’ in the heart of Manhattan: Can New York’s most distinctive building be saved?

The so-called “Bubble House” has found a buyer. Unfortunately, the new owners do not seem especially inclined to preserve the distinctive facade that makes it unique. Last spring, Adriane Quinlan, a writer for the New York magazine Curbed, contacted them to ask about their plans for the property and received a far from reassuring response: “We don’t know yet.”

Richard Prestfelder, the real estate developer who handled the sale of the house at 251 East 71st Street, is convinced that it “needs a gut renovation,” with little concern for preserving its original character. After all, the owners have just spent $4.99 million on a 500-square-meter property in the heart of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, in the increasingly gentrified neighborhood of Lenox Hill. Their likely priority will be a major overhaul, adapting it to the style of the surrounding brownstones and renting out its four stories and basement to the highest bidder.

Against that backdrop, the four rows of raised oval windows decorating its pink stucco façade are seen more as a liability than a selling point. In Prestfelder’s view, the house is an architectural oddity, a last outpost of late modernism and pop avant-garde architecture in the far more conventional surroundings of Lenox Hill. It also presents practical challenges, such as the difficulty of keeping the convex windowpanes free of insects during the summer months.

Speaking to the New York Post weeks before the sale closed, Prestfelder noted that the building attracts an unusual amount of attention.

“Unlike almost any house I’ve ever heard of, people would actually stop and knock on the door sometimes — which is not particularly common in New York,” he said. At the time, Prestfelder still viewed the property’s unusual appearance as an asset.

In his opinion, the bubbles on the façade made it an ideal property “for a discerning buyer who values history, design, and individuality.” He even acknowledged that the $5.75 million asking price included a modest premium for its “architectural distinction,” one that, in the end, no buyer proved willing to pay. Having ultimately sold the property below the original asking price, Prestfelder concluded that there is a difference between being captivated by a building whose character makes it stand out and actually wanting to live in it.

Not even an NBA star could save it

One person who came close to taking the bait was NBA star Jaylen Brown, a guard for the Boston Celtics. Brown, whose annual salary exceeds $50 million, became interested in the property after noticing that its spaceship-like windows bear a striking resemblance to an element in the logo of his signature sneaker brand. In the end, however, that happy coincidence was not enough. The basketball player was one of the few prospective buyers who openly said he intended to leave the facade intact, but in the end he did not to come to the rescue and purchase the Bubble House.

At this point, the odds that the building will retain its identity are slim. It is not on any register of protected buildings for historical, cultural or aesthetic value, and no municipal rules safeguard it. Experts even disagree about whether it deserves preservation.

Architect and blogger Helena Ariza seems to think it does, although her appraisal of the building comes across as faintly condescending. She regards it as a striking eccentricity (“a photomontage inspired by the futuristic drawings of the 1960s”), an interloper in a neighborhood not especially known for architectural originality. Little more than that.

History of the Bubble House

In truth, the Bubble House has never enjoyed particularly good press. Although architecture and travel blogs, along with Instagram accounts, have given it a certain visibility in recent years, the building spent most of its more than 150-year history largely unnoticed.

In fact, its first century of existence was thoroughly unremarkable. Number 251 East 71st Street was part of the first wave of brownstones and townhouses built in Lenox Hill in 1865, when the neighborhood was still in the early stages of urban development. The farms that once occupied what was then the northern edge of Madison Avenue were gradually being replaced by rows of Italianate-style buildings near the tracks of the Harlem Railroad and the old German Hospital, and the future Bubble House was simply one of them, virtually indistinguishable from the rest. One of its earliest residents was a certain William G. French, an Episcopal minister who worked as a missionary among the working-class communities, many of them European immigrants, settling in the area.

The turning point that would eventually put the building on the map did not come until the 1960s. The story is recounted by New York-based historian Tom Miller on his blog. Miller is among those who believe the building deserves to be preserved. In 1961, a real estate investor bought the property and converted it into an apartment building. Several years later, in 1969, in an effort to increase its value and adapt it to the increasingly upscale character of the Upper East Side, he commissioned a complete renovation from the architectural firm Hills & Metcalfe, located a little farther south on Madison Avenue.

Maurice Metcalfe, one of the firm’s two partners, took the owner’s call to do something “creative” very seriously and, according to Miller, proposed a building “suited to the Space Age.” In July 1969, the first crewed Moon landing sparked a wave of space enthusiasm around the world. Metcalfe sought to pay a modest yet eye-catching tribute to NASA’s aesthetic with a stucco-and-glass façade and windows that resembled a cross between portholes and spacecraft hatches.

For Miller, the result was something like the dramatic arrival in Lenox Hill of one of the campy spaceships from Barbarella, the comic book-inspired film released the previous year.

In Ariza’s words, “the Bubble House, as the neighbors started calling it, was nothing more than a townhouse with an ultra-modern design that stood out from the homogeneous architecture of the neighborhood. The façade, painted in a pink tone and without any ornamentation, allows the extravagant oval windows to take a starring role. They seem to watch the street like stalking eyes.”

Metcalfe was never a major architectural star. The Bubble House is undoubtedly his best-known building, the only one that appears to have truly stood the test of time. Ariza once wrote that it is a building capable of taking you “from Manhattan to the moon.” Today we know that 251 East 71st Street’s journey was a round trip: from the modest conventionality of late 19th-century brownstones to a world of pop, retro-futuristic fantasy, and from there, barring a miracle, back again to convention, albeit a wealthier version of it. Not even NBA stars have been able to save the bubble façade.

In the view of nostalgically minded observers such as Pierre Markuse, a contributor to Medium, New York is losing its distinctiveness and old-world character at an alarming pace. Which is why the likely loss of one of Lenox Hill’s most distinctive façades feels, to some, like yet another small urban tragedy.

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