Barrie, Ontario, population a hundred and twenty-eight thousand, is a bedroom community for Toronto. It’s also the location of Upper West Side, a new real-estate development that started construction this month. Upper West Side’s three buildings, which are four stories tall, are called the Rockefeller, the Bloomingdale, and the Empire; the community picnic area incorporates design elements from Tavern on the Green; and a three-bedroom condo, with underground parking, costs two hundred and eighty-nine thousand dollars. “How delightfully posh!” the developers write, in their brochure. On West Side Rag, the blog for New York Upper West Siders where I first heard about the development, people had a different attitude. “Where will the Duane Reade be? Three buildings, must have at least three Duane Reades,” one reader wrote. Another pointed out that the development will be missing “Kvetchers and Komplainers Kvetching and Komplaining About Whatever It Is Somebody Else Likes Just to Prove Their Superiority.”
Upper West Side was created by Karen Hansen and her husband, Heljar, who run a building company called Pratt Homes. Over the phone, Karen, whose maiden name is Pratt, told me that her family has been building homes in Barrie for six generations. The 2008 real-estate downturn created a small condominium boom as buyers sought to save money. Hansen said that people have been drawn to the idea of an affordable condo complex “with the glitz of the Upper West Side.”
Upper West Side is Pratt’s second New York City-themed development. The first, called Manhattan, went up a few years ago. The company’s urban planner happened to lay out the buildings of a then unnamed development around a central green space; Hansen and her husband, who love New York, renamed the field Central Park, and modelled its gazebo on the Central Park carrousel. They gave the buildings black balconies designed to mimic the “fire-escape look” of Manhattan, and, in designing the garbage bins, plantings, and street lights, consulted photos that they’d taken on visits to the city. (On one recent trip, Hansen was delighted to find that one of New York’s biggest construction firms is also called Pratt: “I took pictures of their signs and thought, Ha!”) The Hansens built a twelve-foot-high version of Cleopatra’s Needle, the ancient Egyptian monument in Central Park, at the entrance to the condo complex. Local schoolkids studied Egyptian hieroglyphics, then drew them on the column’s base; neighbors buried a time capsule beneath it, to match the one beneath the Needle in New York. The response to Manhattan was so positive, Hansen said, that they decided to expand on the idea. There are still lots of architectural details to work out for Upper West Side, and so, in July, Hansen and her husband plan to visit the neighborhood to take more photos.
Curious about the architectural history of the original Upper West Side, I spoke to Ted Barrow, an art-history graduate student at the City University of New York. Barrow lives in the neighborhood and gives architectural tours of it for Big Onion, a tour company. “I kind of want to say that the Upper West Side is already the Ontario of Manhattan,” he joked. But seriously: “It was mostly farmland, up until the Civil War. Not even good farmland—it was so rocky that a Dutchman named Theunis Idens had the first recorded nervous breakdown in New York, because he got overworked trying to clear his land.” Then, in the eighteen-seventies, the construction of an elevated train on Ninth Avenue—it suspended service in 1940, after the A/C/E subway lines began service—inspired a building boom. (The extension of a commuter train line to Barrie, in 2007, is part of the reason its housing market is growing: people with jobs in Toronto’s financial-services sector are moving there.)
When the neighborhood had its building boom, Barrow continued, much of the construction was in a style known as Ruskinian Gothic, with arches, towers, and elaborate, multicolored trims. “It was bombastic architecture, referencing an earlier historical period,” he said. In fact, Barrow explained, many of the Upper West Side’s most famous buildings are essentially imitative of other styles from other countries. The Dakota, built in 1883, has a German Renaissance, or “château-slash-castle,” aesthetic. The Dorilton, built in 1900, at Seventy-first and Broadway—“it’s that crazy Beaux-Arts building with the over-the-top roof encrusted in sculpture”—was designed to appeal to wealthy New Yorkers who had travelled to Paris; at fourteen stories, it had an outsized, cartoonish quality. In the early twentieth century, an “austerity” movement swept the neighborhood, with the result that “every apartment building had to look like an Italian palazzo”: think of the Apthorp, at Seventy-ninth and Broadway, with its airy central courtyard. Even those small, frieze-like faces you see on the exterior of some of the neighborhood’s brownstones are referential. They were designed in imitation of the interiors of English country homes, where decorators placed them to evoke ancient Roman houses. “It was all part of the self-fashioning of this Upper West Side as an escape from the city,” Barrow said.
Many features of today’s Upper West Side are, unfortunately, impossible to replicate. In Barrie, one of the few pizza options is called Boston Pizza; for bagels, there’s either Tim Hortons or the Great Canadian Bagel. (There are upsides: “We hear all those stories about the condo boards, and how you have to beg to get into a building in the Upper West Side. Certainly nothing like that happens here,” Hansen said.) But there’s no need to be literal-minded: the point, she went on, is to live somewhere that’s “inspired by life in a big, exciting city.”
Pratt is already planning another development, a little to the south of Upper West Side, called Greenwich Village. It will be a mixture of four-story apartment buildings and townhomes, and will incorporate elements from Washington Square Park, including, perhaps, a fountain. Hansen told me that she occasionally wonders, “Will a sophisticated, ‘Sex and the City’ New Yorker think what we’re doing is cheesy?” But then she thinks about how, when she was a kid, her mom took her on a trip to New York; later, to celebrate her mother’s fortieth birthday, the whole family went. “I’ve gone back and forth my entire life,” she said. “To me, imitation is the highest form of flattery.”
Photograph of Barrie’s Upper West Side, at top, by Pratt Homes. Photograph of the Dakota by Bettmann/CORBIS.
