When plans were announced in 1906 for the Hendrik Hudson apartment building, newspapers eagerly reported its unusually luxurious features.

“The facade in scheme would be that of an Italian villa,” wrote New York Times, calling out the limestone, brick, and terra cotta building materials to be used for this new 8-story residence at 380 Riverside Drive, which would span 110th to 111th Streets.

“The Riverside Drive elevation will have two towers connected at the roof connected by a pergola. There will be nine apartments on a floor, consisting of six, seven, eight, and nine rooms, with two and three baths.”

By the time it opened a year later, The Hendrik Hudson took its place as New York’s newest high-class apartment building.

“Amenities included a billiard room, café, and barber shop, which along with its magnificent views of Riverside Park attracted many new tenants,” wrote The West Side Rambler in 2016.

The close proximity to the new subway stop at 110th Street added convenience to its fashionable features, which included a red tiled roof and beautifully carved (if somewhat unsettling) figures at the entrance, along with a proud “HH” monogram in terra cotta.

And as the 1915 ad (above) boasts, the roof contains a “children’s playground” and the gym offers “needle baths”—basically jets on the sides of the shower spraying water horizontally.

It was the latest of the elegant apartment houses to go up along the Morningside Heights section of Riverside Drive, bringing stye and exclusivity to an area that a generation earlier had been sparsely settled countryside.

With so much going for this posh palace, it’s hard to believe that just five decades later, the Hendrik Hudson would be harshly denounced by community advocates as “a slum with a view.”

It’s unclear who exactly coined that phrase, but it stuck for years. (Above, a Columbia Daily Spectator headline from the 1950s.)

So what happened to bring on the building’s decline? A couple of factors appear to play a role.

The building survived the financial panic of 1907 and the Depression. But by the 1940s and into the postwar years, wealthy residents left and the neighborhood faced an economic downturn, per The West Side Rambler.

Then, the 1943 introduction of rent control—supposedly a wartime stopgap to ease housing shortages—”limited the profitability of landlords, who nevertheless maintained their buildings in their prewar form,” wrote Andrew Alpern, architectural historian and author of Luxury Apartment Houses of Manhattan: An Illustrated History.

“This law encouraged the conversion of grand old apartments into multiple units, the subdivisions being done as cheaply as possible. . . . Subjected to overcrowding and further subdivision into single-room occupancies, the Hendrik Hudson deteriorated rapidly,” continued Alpern.

By the 1950s, the Hendrik Hudson had become the Hendrik Hudson Hotel, and its 72 spacious apartments now 301 separate one-room units, according to a 1958 New York Times piece.

“A six-year resident said that fights, marijuana-smoking, dope-needling, and prostitution were rampant on Saturday nights,” reported the Times.

Following the death of a 14-year-old boy in a malfunctioning elevator that year, the building was hit with “47 violations of the housing law, including faulty elevators, defective and leaking faucets, and accumulation of rubbish, junk and disused furniture,” wrote the Columbia Daily Spectator.

The outcry from community groups and city housing officials led to new ownership of the Hendrik Hudson in 1960. After much investment and the restoration of multiple-room apartments, the building was converted to a co-op in 1970.

In the ensuing decades, Riverside Drive became a desired residential avenue again. Today, the Hendrik Hudson resembles the Tuscan villa it originally was—without its red roof tiles and one of the towers, alas.

Want to learn more about the hidden history of Riverside Drive’s oldest apartment buildings? A few spaces are still open for Ephemeral New York’s Gilded Age Riverside Drive walking tour this Sunday, March 22 at 1 p.m. It’s the first tour of 2026—sign up here!

[Top image: NYPL Digital Collections; second image: MCNY, X2010.11.3129]