Tudor City Historic District

A pioneering venture of urban renewal, Tudor City is a complex of apartment houses built for the middle class on the East Side of midtown Manhattan overlooking the river. It was located on “Corcoran's Roost,” a working-class neighborhood of row houses and tenement buildings named for Jimmy Corcoran, a well-known nineteenth century Irish immigrant, contractor, and champion of his compatriots.

Tudor City was conceived in 1925 by the Fred French Company as a city within a city, with an emphasis on its sense of place and human scaled spaces. The ten original residential buildings, completed from 1927 to 1932, are in the Tudor Revival style, with elaborate skyline profiles complemented at the street level by fine ornament and stained glass windows, some illustrating scenes from New York City history.

The district provides a generous amount of open space, including two private greens, two open parks, and a landscaped core, called Tudor City Place, with shops and services for tenants. The original scheme even included a small eighteen-hole golf course, complete with traps, nighttime illumination, and golf pro. Tudor City was an early forerunner of subsequent twentieth-century planned urban communities. ©2014