have been a fan of Joseph Urban for a long time and like so many other quiet fans of his decorative art and architecture, I welcomed the recent coffee table volume on his work. I was surprised, however, not only to see that he was a Yonkers resident but also that he maintained a studio in a still existing building just below our Park Hill home.

Joseph Urban was born in Vienna in 1872 and died in New York in July of 1933 at the age of 61. He bought a house from Edward Sheldon, playwright of the Garden of Paradise, a play Urban had done sets for around 1917. This house at 93 Hudson Terrace was completely remodeled in Wiener Werkstate style to Urban’s taste. He remained there with his second wife, Mary Beegle, until his death. His daughter, Gretl, describes the home as a vaguely Victorian affair of gables and verandas built on a terraced bluff facing the Hudson and descending 4 stories into a garden area. Besides Urban and his wife, it was also occupied by 6 or 7 large sheep dogs that lived in kennels in a lower garden where flower beds were sown to cover the droppings.

At the same time as he bought the house in Yonkers, Joseph Urban also purchased the enormous stucco building on South Waverly Street where subsequently the sets were made for the Metropolitan Opera, as well as the Ziegfeld “Follies.” Among his many well–connected friends, he included Florenz Ziegfeld and Billie Burke who lived on a vast estate in nearby Hastings called “Burkeley Crest.” Besides the Ziegfelds, Urban was very close to William Randolph Hearst and his mistress, Marion Davies, and did many sets for her movies as well designs for the Hearst Building on 57th Street and 8th Avenue.

Joseph Urban’s training in architecture was during the turn of the century in Vienna, and his colleagues included Otto Wagner, Adolph Loos and Josef Hoffman among others. He co–founded the Hogenbund in 1901 as a rival to the more famous “Secession” founded by Hoffman and his friends.

After coming to America in 1911 to do sets for the Boston Opera, he decided to make America his home. Gradually he gravitated to New York and its greater theatrical activity. Ziegfeld’s “Follies” was one of his chief clients after 1914. It was in doing sets for the “Follies” that Urban’s unique “Deco” style began to evolve. The great culmination of this collaboration was the Ziegfeld Theater which stood on 6th Avenue and 54th Street from 1927 until 1966 when it was torn down. One of the problems with the failure of Urban to retain the reputation he deserves is that so much of what he did was lost and so little remains intact. The great interiors of his Central Park Casino were torn down by Mayor LaGuardia to erase the “evil” memory of “Gentleman Jimmy” Walker. The beautiful facade of the Bedell department store on West 34th Street is also lost. Two structures not lost are Mar del Lago in Palm Beach and the New School for Social Research in New York. They exemplify the contrast and the paradox of this huge and hugely talented man. The former is a magnificent Hollywood fantasy palace where even a Queen Ivana or Princess Marla could play. The latter is a lean, modern, forward–looking structure ahead of its time. Even today we must marvel at the beauty of its auditorium that predates and anticipates Radio City Music Hall and lament the loss of its sunken library which was a masterpiece of play between stairs and bookshelves.

Yonkers should be very proud to have had this citizen for almost 20 years, and we hope his legacy will be unearthed here as well as elsewhere.

—Richard Haas

EDITOR’S NOTE: Richard Haas is an internationally–known trompe I’oeiI artist and Yonkers resident.