Tenth Street Studio Building‎

{{Use American English|date=January 2025}}

File:Tenth Street Studio Building, 51 West 10th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, New York, New York LCCN2014645393 (cropped).jpg and Sixth Avenues in New York City, photographed in 1870]]

File:Studios, 51 West Tenth Street, Manhattan (NYPL b13668355-482793) (cropped).jpg

The Tenth Street Studio Building, constructed in New York City in 1857, was the first modern facility designed solely to serve the needs of artists. It became the center of the New York art world for the remainder of the 19th century.{{cite web |url=http://www.mcny.org/collections/abbott/a312.htm |title=Studios: 51 West 10th Street |website=Museum of the City of New York |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071225112915/http://www.mcny.org/collections/abbott/a312.htm |archive-date=December 25, 2007}}

Situated at 51 West 10th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, the building was commissioned by James Boorman JohnstonJames Boorman Johnston (1822-1887) was a son of the prominent Scottish-born New York merchant John Johnston, in partnership with James Boorman (1783-1866) as Boorman & Johnston, developers of Washington Square North, and a founder of New York University; an 1831 Johnston Children group portrait [http://siris-artinventories.si.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?uri=full=3100001~!43361!0 is in the inventory] of the Museum of the City of New york. and designed by Richard Morris Hunt. Its innovative design soon represented a national architectural prototype,{{citation needed|date=October 2014|reason='PAM' is inadequate as a reference. If some institution is capable of verifying the statement, how to accomplish that verification must be made clear.}} and featured a domed central gallery, from which interconnected rooms radiated. Hunt's studio within the building housed the first architectural school in the United States.{{citation needed|date=October 2014|reason='MCNY' is inadequate as a reference. If some institution is capable of verifying the statement, how to accomplish that verification must be made clear.}}

Soon after its completion, the building helped to make Greenwich Village central to the arts in New York City, drawing artists from all over the country to work, exhibit, and sell their art. In its initial years, Winslow Homer took a studio there,{{cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/17/realestate/evoking-the-world-of-winslow-homer.html |title=Evoking the World of Winslow Homer |work=The New York Times |date=August 17, 1997}} as did Edward Lamson Henry, and many of the artists of the Hudson River School, including Martin Johnson Heade and Albert Bierstadt. Perhaps the most famous tenant of all was Frederic Edwin Church, who held a landmark single-picture exhibition of The Heart of the Andes in the building's central atrium.{{cite web |url=https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/10481 |title=Heart of the Andes |website=Metropolitan Museum of Art|date=1859 }}

In 1879, Johnston deeded the building to his brother John Taylor Johnston, who later became the first president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In that same year William Merritt Chase moved into the main gallery, and was joined in the building by Walter Shirlaw and Frederick Dielman. Chase's studio in particular represented the sophisticated taste which came to characterize the building.{{citation needed|date=October 2014|reason='autogenerated' is inadequate as a reference. If some institution is capable of verifying the statement, how to accomplish that verification must be made clear.}}

In 1895, Chase departed the studio, and the building subsequently lost its prominence as an art center.

Kahlil Gibran lived on the third story from 1911 until his death in 1931.

In 1920, the building was purchased by a group of artists in order to forestall commercial takeover. From that time forward, a number of New York City artists rented studio space in the building.

In 1942, the building's basement became the meeting place for the Bombshell Artists Group, an alliance of 60 modernist painters and sculptors, a number of whom had studios in the building. Henry Becket, writing in the New York Post newspaper on March 2, 1942, noted that "The artists meet in a cellar that they call The Bomb Shelter at 51 West 10th Street." He also stated that the Bombshell Group's "exhibition chairman" was Joseph Manfredi and the Group's first show was then on display at the Riverside Museum.{{cite news |first=Henry |last=Becket |title=Rembrandt Doesn't Eat, Bombshellers Do - Hence an Exhibit |work=New York Post |date=March 2, 1942}}

In 1956, the Tenth Street Studio Building was razed to make way for an apartment building.{{cite book|editor1-last=Jackson|editor1-first=K. T.|editor2-last=Keller|editor2-first=L.|editor3-last=Flood|editor3-first=N.|title=The encyclopedia of New York City|date=2010|publisher=Yale University Press|location=New Haven|isbn=978-0300182576|page=1291|edition=2nd|chapter=Tenth Street Studio Building}} A penthouse apartment in the subsequently constructed apartment building, 45 West 10th Street, was purchased by the actress Julia Roberts in 2010.{{cite news |last=Gould |first=Jennifer |date=October 21, 2010 |url=http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/realestate/residential/city_woman_qSfHy5QZHP7D36ynnQltJP |title= City woman |work=New York Post |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101024033559/http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/realestate/residential/city_woman_qSfHy5QZHP7D36ynnQltJP |archive-date=October 24, 2010}}