The John Henry Hammond House is a mansion at 9 East 91st Street in the Carnegie Hill section of the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, New York, US. Designed by architects Carrère and Hastings in the Italian Renaissance style, it was completed by 1906 as the residence of lawyer John Henry Hammond and his wife Emily Vanderbilt Sloane Hammond. The Russian Federation owns the house and has used it as the Consulate General of Russia to New York City since 1994. The mansion is a New York City designated landmark.
The Hammond House is five stories high, with its fifth story set back from the facade. The mansion's limestone facade is rusticated on its lowest two stories, and each corner of the building has vertical stone quoins. The second story of the facade is designed like a piano nobile, while the upper stories have progressively smaller windows. The rooms were designed in the Louis XVI style, with features such as elevators and a squash court. When the house was built, the ground (or first) floor had a "T"-shaped entrance hall, a billiards room, a dining room, and a breakfast room. The reception rooms on the second floor—which included a ballroom, library, and music room—could accommodate hundreds of guests. The third and fourth floors were used as bedrooms. There is also an attic, which originally contained female servants' quarters and an infirmary, and a basement, with male servants' quarters.
Andrew Carnegie purchased the site in 1898 to protect the value of his nearby mansion. William D. Sloane, of the W. & J. Sloane furniture family, acquired the site from Carnegie in 1901 and commissioned the Hammond House and the adjacent James A. Burden House for his daughters. The house served as the Hammond family's home from 1905 to 1946, when the eye surgeon Ramón Castroviejo bought the house and slightly modified the interior. He used the house as his office and residence while operating an eye hospital on the top floors. The Soviet government bought the house in 1975 and renovated it, but the consulate's opening was delayed due to an agreement with the U.S. After the U.S. expelled Soviet diplomats in 1980, the house was abandoned and fell into disrepair. It was renovated from 1992 to 1994, allowing it to serve as the Russian consulate to New York City.
Site The John Henry Hammond House is located at 9 East 91st Street, in the Carnegie Hill section of the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, New York, US. It stands on the north side of 91st Street, just east of Fifth Avenue. The site has a frontage of on 91st Street and extends northward. On the same city block to the west are the Otto H. Kahn House and the James A. Burden House, while directly to the east is the John and Caroline Trevor House. The Felix M. Warburg House, containing the Jewish Museum, is on the block to the north. Just south of the John Henry Hammond House is the Andrew Carnegie Mansion at 2 East 90th Street, housing the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. The townhouses on 11, 15, and 17 East 90th Street and the Spence School are located on the same block as the Carnegie Mansion, southeast of the Hammond House.
Facing the Burden House to the west is a courtyard, which was originally enclosed behind heavy doors. The courtyard occupies the gap between the Hammond and Burden houses. Ever since the government of the Soviet Union took over the Hammond House in the 1970s, the courtyard has served as a parking lot, which is closed off by a rolldown gate.
Architecture The mansion was designed by Carrère and Hastings, who were also responsible for the design of the New York Public Library Main Branch. It is designed in a High Renaissance style with elements influenced by 16th-century Italian buildings.
Facade The Hammond House is five stories high, with its fifth story set back from the facade. In general, the window openings contain casement windows with wooden frames, which date back to the house's construction in 1903. The first story's facade is made of rusticated blocks of limestone. At the center of the facade's southern elevation is a round arch with a pair of wrought-iron entrance doors. On either side of the entrance are large console brackets, which contain leaf and fruit motifs. The brackets support a balcony on the second story, thus giving the balcony the appearance of a deep cornice. There are round-arched window openings on either side of the entrance.
The second through fourth stories feature quoins at each corner of the building. The second story of the facade is designed like a piano nobile, with three vertical bays of high French windows, each flanked by columns in the Ionic order. Above each pair of columns are entablatures, which support segmentally arched pediments; the columns and pediments give the windows the appearance of aediculae, or Roman temples. Both of the outer second-story windows are recessed from the facade, and there were formerly wrought-iron window guards in front of each of these windows, with leaf and fruit motifs. By the 1990s, the window guards in front of the outer windows had been removed. There is also a balcony in front of the central window, with wrought-iron balustrade.
The upper floors contain masonry panels and are intended to complement the elaborate entablature, frieze, and heavily projecting cornice immediately above. The windows of the third floor are smaller than those on the second floor, and the windows on the fourth floor are even smaller than those below. Atop the third-floor windows are brackets which support cornice shelves. Panels with egg-and-dart moldings separate the fourth-floor windows. An ornate frieze and cornice run above the fourth floor, blocking views of the fifth floor from the street. There is a plain cornice above the set-back fifth floor. The western elevation, facing the private courtyard, is made of limestone. The southernmost two bays of the western elevation are similar to those on the southern elevation, except that the windows on the second floor do not have arched pediments. The rest of the western elevation is made of plain limestone. There is a horizontal string course, a frieze with fleurs-de-lis, and a protruding cornice with lions' heads above the western elevation.
Features The building was constructed with a ballroom and 16 bathrooms. The historian Christopher Gray wrote that interior photos from the early 20th century display a "rich series of Louis XVI-style rooms with elaborate marbles, carving, tapestries and furnishings". There were also two elevators. The building was extensively redecorated in the 1990s as part of its conversion into a Russian consulate.
First floor The "T"-shaped entrance hall at the first, or ground, floor has white walls with marble pillars, as well as busts and pedestals made of Caen stone. On the right (east) side of the hall, a grand marble staircase ascends to the second floor. Doors on the left (west) side lead to the courtyard shared with the Burden House. A reception room is located at the southwest corner of the house, west of the entrance hall. Originally designed in the Louis XVI style, the reception room had gilded furniture and brocades made of satin. The walls had green-and-white panels with carved-stone frames, above which was a gilded screen with painted panels; there was also a fireplace mantel topped by watercolor paintings. The reception room is complemented by a similarly sized billiards room north of the entrance hall's eastern end, which was originally decorated with dark wood panels and green velours. East of the entrance hall, at the southeast corner, is a study or private library, which had an elaborate fireplace mantel and a vaulted ceiling.
A hallway continues north from the reception room toward the dining room; when the house was built, the hallway had a carved mantelpiece, a marble bust, and draperies. The rooms in the northern portion of the first floor were originally used as dining and breakfast rooms. The dining room originally had French walnut furniture, including a table running for its entire length, and the white-painted French-walnut woodwork was covered with Louis XVI-style red tapestries. There were carved stone decorations throughout the dining room as well. Attached to the dining room is the breakfast room, a circular space. The breakfast room originally had green furniture and a green carpet; the walls were initially covered by stone latticework, and the room was topped by a domed skylight.
Second story The second floor has the most elaborately decorated spaces in the house, with a ballroom that could fit 250 people and a music room that could fit 100 people when it was built. These spaces have ceilings measuring high. The ballroom and music room take up much of the second floor, with the remainder of the space being occupied by a library. The ballroom occupies the entire southern frontage of the house, the music room occupies the entire northern frontage, and the library occupies the western frontage between the ballroom and music room. All these spaces are accessed by a reception hall, an elevator, and a grand staircase on the east; the library could also be accessed from both the ballroom and music room. The second-floor reception hall was simple in design, with Spanish tapestries.
The ballroom is variously cited as measuring or . It was originally designed in the Louis XVI style with a white-and-gold color scheme, satin brocades, satin window draperies, and two crystal chandeliers. In the 1990s, the ballroom was redecorated with daisy-and-rose motifs. The music room, meanwhile, is decorated with an arabesque motif. The music room originally had gilded furniture, cabinets with old hand fans, pale-gray wall panels with gilded reliefs, and satin brocades hung next to the windows. The music room had paneled doors, which led directly to the ballroom and could be opened during private events. The second-floor library's decorative features include a barrel vaulted ceiling with strapwork motifs. The library was decorated in an old English style, with walnut paneling and green-velour tapestries.
Other stories On the third story were five bedrooms, including the Hammond parents' bedrooms and the guest bedroom. Emily Sloane Hammond had her own bedroom, which was larger than the house's master bedroom, while her husband John Henry Hammond had a second study room on the third floor. The children's bedrooms and a family room were on the fourth story. In addition to a set of rooms for John Henry Hammond Jr., their only son and youngest child, there were a nurse's bedroom and two additional bedrooms on the fourth story. The male servants slept in the basement, as far away as possible from the female servants' bedrooms on the fifth floor. The female servants' quarters consisted of eight rooms. Also on the fifth floor was an infirmary for the Hammond children, in addition to a squash court, which was used for roller skating by two generations of Hammond children.
History In December 1898, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie bought all of the lots on Fifth Avenue between 90th and 92nd streets, with the intent of building his mansion on some of these plots. Carnegie ultimately decided to erect his mansion on only the plots between 90th and 91st streets.; He retained ownership of several nearby lots to protect his home's value,; selling them only to "congenial neighbors". Carnegie sold four land lots on 91st Street to the businessman William Douglas Sloane in December 1900.; The assemblage is approximately wide. Sloane intended to build two houses on the site, one for each of his daughters: Florence Sloane Burden, who was married to iron entrepreneur James A. Burden Jr., and Emily Sloane Hammond, who was married to John Henry Hammond. The Burden and Hammond residences were to be separated by a courtyard. Sloane acquired further land on 91st Street in November 1901 as part of a land swap with Carnegie.