The Riverton Houses is a large (originally 1,232 unit)

residential development A residential area is a land used in which housing predominates, as opposed to industrial and commercial areas. Housing may vary significantly between, and through, residential areas. These include single-family housing, multi-family residen ...

Harlem Harlem is a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, New York City. It is bounded roughly by the Hudson River on the west; the Harlem River and 155th Street (Manhattan), 155th Street on the north; Fifth Avenue on the east; and 110th Street (Manhattan), ...

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

Ownership

The project was proposed by the

Metropolitan Life Insurance Company MetLife, Inc. is the holding corporation for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (MLIC), better known as MetLife, and its affiliates. MetLife is among the largest global providers of insurance, annuities, and employee benefit programs, wi ...

in 1944, and largely served an

African American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...

population, in contrast to Met Life's

Parkchester Parkchester is a planned community and neighborhood originally developed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and located in the central Bronx, New York City. The immediate surrounding area also takes its name from the complex. Its boundari ...

in the Bronx (1940),

Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village, sometimes shortened to StuyTown, is a large post–World War II private residential development on the east side of the New York City borough of Manhattan. The complex consists of 110 red brick apartment b ...

in Manhattan, Park La Brea in Los Angeles, Parkmerced in San Francisco, and

Parkfairfax Parkfairfax is a neighborhood in Alexandria, Virginia, United States, located in the northwestern part of the city near the boundary with Arlington County. Nearby thoroughfares are Interstate 395 (Shirley Highway), State Route 402 (Quaker Lane) ...

in Alexandria, Virginia, which were restricted to a

whites White is a racialized classification of people and a skin color specifier, generally used for people of European origin, although the definition can vary depending on context, nationality, and point of view. Description of populations as " ...

-only tenancy at the time of their construction. The development consists of seven 13-story buildings situated on a site located between 135th Street and 138th Street, and

Fifth Avenue Fifth Avenue is a major and prominent thoroughfare in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. It stretches north from Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village to West 143rd Street in Harlem. It is one of the most expensive shopping stre ...

and the

Harlem River The Harlem River is an tidal strait in New York, United States, flowing between the Hudson River and the East River and separating the island of Manhattan from the Bronx on the New York mainland. The northern stretch, also called the Spuyte ...

. Some of the units on upper floors had views into the

Polo Grounds The Polo Grounds was the name of three stadiums in Upper Manhattan, New York City, used mainly for professional baseball and American football from 1880 through 1963. The original Polo Grounds, opened in 1876 and demolished in 1889, was built fo ...

. In August 2008,

Laurence Gluck Laurence Gluck (born 1953) is an American New York-based real estate investor, landlord, and the founder of the real estate company Stellar Management. Early life and education Gluck was born to a Jewish family, raised in a two bedroom, one bathr ...

's Stellar Management LLC notified its mortgage servicer that it anticipated defaulting on the property's $225 million mortgage within a month, since it was unable to convert half of the property's 1,230 rent-stabilized apartments to market rate; Stellar had owned the property from 2005. CWCapital won control of the complex in an auction held March 11, 2010, and began operating it through Rose Associates Inc. As of mid-2013, Riverton Houses was managed by CompassRock Real Estate. A&E Real Estate Holdings purchased the development for $201 million in 2016.

Notable residents

*New York State Assemblyman

Keith L. T. Wright Keith L. T. Wright (born January 3, 1955) is an American politician and a former member of the New York State Assembly. He was first elected to the assembly in 1992 and was re-elected eleven times. In early 2007, he proposed a bill limiting reta ...

(current as of April 2008) *Mayor

David Dinkins David Norman Dinkins (July 10, 1927 – November 23, 2020) was an American politician, lawyer, and author who served as the 106th mayor of New York City from 1990 to 1993. He was the first African American to hold the office. Before enteri ...

(former) *Jazz pianist

Billy Taylor Billy Taylor (July 24, 1921 – December 28, 2010) was an American jazz pianist, composer, broadcaster and educator. He was the Robert L. Jones Distinguished Professor of Music at East Carolina University in Greenville, and from 1994 was the ...

References

External links

{{commons category, Riverton Houses
Riverton Houses2005 purchaseRiverton Historical GroupRiverton Square
Residential buildings in Manhattan Harlem

Ownership

Notable residents

See also

References

External links