AMTICO FLOOR TILES

Ward Hill , Staten Island, New York City, New York, United States

The Caleb Tompkins Ward Mansion is an imposing Greek Revival structure built about 1835 on the crest of Ward's Hill ccermanding a magnificent view of the New York Harbor and the metropolitan area. Originally surrounded by an estate of 250 acres, the Ward Mansion is one of the last great houses remaining from a period of the city's history when the north shore of Staten Island was a fashionable resort for wealthy New Yorkers.

Development of the area, began shortly after the close of the War of 1812, influenced by Daniel D. Tompkins (1774-1825) , Governor of the State of New York from 1807 to 1816, and Vice President of the United states under James Monroe from 1817 to 1825. Tteipkins purchased large tracts of land on the island, amounting to about 700 acres and started the village of Tompkinsville. Further changes began to take place after the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 which caused a. period of rapid econcmic growth in New York. This economic growth coincided with the spread of the Greek Revival style and some of the finest examples of it were built on Staten Island. Sailors' Snug Harbor was begun in 1831, the Seamen's Fund and Retreat in 1832, and Thomas E. Davis formed the New Brighton Association in 1834 which began to erect Greek Revival residences along Richmond Terrace. The Caleb T. Ward Mansion is one of the great houses built during this era.

Caleb Tompkins Ward (1789-1850) was descended from the prominent family of Eastchester and may have bean a nephew of Daniel D. Tompkins. Ward began to acquire his estate in October of 1826 when he purchased a large parcel of land from Thomas Hulme . In February 1829, he had his land surveyed and in January of 1833, he filed the land map with the county government It is likely that the house was built within a few years of the filing date. After Caleb's death in 1850, the land passed to his son, Albert, a prominent jurist on the island who had served as the first judge of the Court of Common Pleas for Richmond County from 1844 to 1846.

Albert Ward is responsible for building St. Paul's Memorial Church (1866-70) on St. Paul's Avenue in memory of his sister, Mary Mann Ward. The Church and Rectory were designated New York City Landmarks in July, 1975. Albert Ward died in 1878 and is buried in the family plot at St. Paul's Church, Mt. Vernon, N.Y,

In December 1904, Sally Lewis Wood Nixon acquired the house from the trustees of the Ward estate -. Mrs. Nixon, a descendant of General Andrew Lewis, a Revolutionary patriot, was originally from Washington. In 1891, she married Lewis Nixon, a prominent naval architect and pioneer in the use of steel construction for shipbuilding. Lewis Nixon (1861-1940) was born in Leesburg, Virginia, where he received his early education.

In 1878, he was appointed to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis from which ha graduated first in his class in 1882. He was then sent to the Royal Naval College in England where he continued his studies in naval architecture, marine engineering and gunnery. While in Europe, he studied at the great ship, gun and armor works of England and France.

After his return to this country, he was assigned to the John Roach Shipyard at Chester, Pennsylvania. He also served under the Chief Constructor at Washington and at the Brooklyn Navy Yard- Nixon, to a great degree, is corrected ,with the design and construction of the entire, U.S. Navy Fleet at the and of the 19th century. In 1890, he resigned from the Navy and, for the next five years served as superintendent of construction at Cramp & Sons in Philadelphia. Ha purchased the Crescent Shipyards at Elizabethport, New Jersey, where, within six years, he built one hundred vessels«. He organised the Standard Motor Construction Co., the Lev/is Nixon Shipyards and was president of the International Smokeless Ponder and Dynamite Co., the Nixon Nitration Works, the Raritan River Sand Co. , vice-president of the New York Auto-truck Co., and director of the Idaho Exploration and Mining Co. Prior to World War I he was asked to design ships for Czar Nicholas II.

Nixon was also actively involved in New York City politics, serving ess head of Tammany Hall from 1901 to 1902. He was commissioner of Public Works for Richmond County in 1914-15 and was appointed Superintendent of Public Works for New York City in 1919. Later, he was named Public Service Commissioner.

In 1923, Sally Nixon sold the rams ion to the Ward Hill Realty Corporation which converted the house from a single family residence to a Multiple dwelling. In order, to comply with the then existing building codes, a number of alterations ware made to the exterior and interior of the building.

The architect of the mansion is unknown although George B» Davis (1806-1869) is credited with building it, Davis, born in Somerset, Massachusetts, came to Staten Island about 1832 in connection with the construction of the Seamen'

THE Fabbri mansion, at 11 East 62d Street, sold for $21 million last month, but that's not the only noteworthy thing about the house. The 1900 double-width mansion is miraculously intact -- not just the sumptuous entertaining rooms but the servants' rooms, the bathrooms, the kitchen and even the stove. The government of Japan bought the house for its permanent representative to the United Nations, and what remains to be seen is how it will strike a balance between the history of the house and actually using it.

In 1900 Margaret Vanderbilt Shepard, granddaughter of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, built two double-width houses for her two daughters, 5 East 66th Street for Maria and William Schieffelin, who was in the pharmaceutical business, and 11 East 62d for Edith and Ernesto Fabbri, head of the Society of Italian Immigrants. (Mr. Fabbri's father was a New York merchant who had been born in Italy.)

Perhaps it was the daughters who chose the architects: the prominent firm of Hunt & Hunt designed the Schieffelin house, but the Fabbri house was designed by the relatively unknown firm of Haydel & Shepard. Abner Haydel and Augustus Shepard had one advantage: Augustus Shepard was Edith Fabbri's cousin.

Haydel & Shepard designed one of the most exuberant Beaux-Arts houses in New York, with a double-height midsection framed by giant pilasters, lavishly detailed French windows, large dormers and elaborate chimney stacks projecting well beyond the roof line.

In 1901 the magazine Architectural Review praised the building as ''a decidedly delicate and consistent structure with detail well placed and gracefully conceived.''

Original plans show the 45 1/2-foot-wide house with seven principal bedrooms and nine servants' bedrooms. The 1910 census recorded Ernesto and Edith Fabbri in the house with a daughter and Ernesto's brother, Alexandro, along with 11 servants, including two Swedish cooks, an English butler, two English footmen, a Finnish lady's maid and an Italian valet.

A listing in the Social Register for the Fabbris suggest that after they moved into 11 East 62d they were abroad much of the time. By 1911 they had moved to Paris, and in 1912 they sold the house that had been built for them only 12 years before.

The new purchasers were Charles Steele, a partner at J. P. Morgan & Company, and his wife, Nannie. Beginning in 1919, Mr. Steele gave at least $400,000 to help establish the St. Thomas Choir School. He and his wife were able to get along more modestly than the Fabbris -- the 1925 census found them alone in the house, with no live-in servants.

It may be that the Fabbris had become disenchanted with their high-style house. In 1914 they came back to the United States and began work on a new house, at 7 East 95th Street, completed in 1916. Now the House of the Redeemer, an Episcopal religious retreat, 7 East 95th was almost as grand as 11 East 62d, but it was Italian to 11 East 62d's French. Augustus Shepard was still in practice, but for their second house the Fabbris used Grosvenor Atterbury as architect.

The Steeles died in the 1930's -- Mr. Steele left an estate of more than $30 million -- and in 1941 the house was taken in foreclosure by the Bowery Savings Bank. In 1943 it was purchased by the Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation, which tests aptitudes. Thousands of people have taken its unusual battery of tests, which include tweezer dexterity and ideaphoria -- how quickly one can come up with ideas -- in the imposing rooms of the Fabbri house.

THE foundation put the house on the market in 1997 for $30 million, and last month the government of Japan bought it for $9 million less. Sharon Baum at the Corcoran Group was the exclusive broker for the owners; Jed Garfield, at Leslie J. Garfield & Company, represented Japan.

Motohide Yoshikawa, minister and head of administration for the Japanese Mission to the United Nations, said that Japan had purchased the house to serve as the residence of Yukio Satoh, its ambassador to the United Nations. Ambassador Satoh lives in a Park Avenue apartment house where ''the space is just too small to give receptions,'' Mr. Yoshikawa said.

John Foreman, a vice president at the Halstead Property Company who both showed the house and wrote a book on the Vanderbilt family houses, ''The Vanderbilts and the Gilded Age'' (St. Martin's Press, 1991, co-written with Robbe Pierce Stimson), called it ''a trophy house and a trophy sale.''

Mr. Foreman said that Ms. Baum had showed him the house ''just before she showed Donald Trump.'' The building, he said, is ''a time capsule, unutterably beautiful and incredibly intact.'' Big town houses commonly have some major rooms intact, but Mr. Foreman said that even the service spaces of the Fabbri house survive.

''The pantry has rolling cabinet doors, unpainted oak, the leather-studded door to dining room,'' he said. ''The kitchen has the tiles, the stove. I walked around gasping -- the bathrooms are fabulous ant