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DATELINE NEW YORK: A landmark spruces up
For almost 100 years, the magnificent limestone building at the southeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 79th Street has served admirably as the home of three influential New York families and most recently as the prestigious address of the Ukrainian Institute of America.
Christopher Gray, who described the building's history and architecture in The New York Times last year, considers the mansion "astonishingly intact, even down to the woodwork in the servants' area." He says this remnant of Fifth Avenue's chateau days evokes the "New York mansion of a time when such buildings were just dinosaurs on their way to extinction."
In recent months, the building has been draped with scaffolding and netting as workmen tackled a roof repair project expected to cost $250,000: removing and replacing 25 percent of the slate, and repairing valleys and gutters around the dormers, where leaks have been developing.
Built in 1898 for banker/broker Isaac D. Fletcher, the mansion shows a French Gothic style characteristic of the work of C.P.H. Gilbert - a profusion of crockets, pinnacles, moldings and other details that, according to Mr. Gray, make Gilbert's elaborate Warburg House of 1907 at Fifth Avenue and 91st Street (now the Jewish Museum) seem "relatively chaste."
Mr. Fletcher...