James Buchanan Duke was born in
North Carolina in 1856 He grew his family's tobacco enterprise significantly, and he became president of the
American Tobacco Company in 1890 after several U.S. tobacco companies merged. James and his brother
Benjamin Newton Duke moved the company's headquarters to New York City in the 1900s. Even after the American Tobacco Company was dissolved by antitrust action in 1911, Duke remained a wealthy businessman, organizing competing companies and founding the Southern Power Company (later
Duke Power) and
Duke University.
Construction After the Dukes married, they sought to move to
Fifth Avenue, where many of the city's wealthiest lived. Duke considered buying Cook's 78th Street mansion as a wedding present. Duke began negotiations for the Cook house in 1907, and discussions continued for two years. and borrowed $700,000 to fund the renovation. By August 1909, Duke planned to construct an entirely new residence and was already demolishing the Cook house.
The New York Times wrote, "Is it possible that twenty-five years hence people will be talking about the 'old' Duke house?" Many of the furnishings in the Cook mansion were sold at deep discounts: for instance, a $15,000 fireplace was sold for $300, and individual panels worth $55 were sold for $3. It is unknown why Duke selected Trumbauer specifically. Many of Duke's peers had hired
McKim, Mead & White to design their own houses, and, at the time of the Duke House's construction, Trumbauer had completed few other buildings in Manhattan. In September, Duke sold a small parcel on the north side of the site, measuring , to his neighbor
William Payne Whitney. The next month, Trumbauer filed plans for a three-story Renaissance-style residence on the site, to cost $365,000. The
1910 United States census records James and Nanaline Duke as living in Benjamin's house at 1009 Fifth Avenue. By mid-1910, the masonry at the ground story had been laid. Had Duke not bought the old Cook house, he likely would have been forced to buy land further north in
Carnegie Hill, where the Carnegie, Straight, Kahn, and Warburg mansions were located.
Duke residence Early years During 1912, Duke and his pregnant wife Nanaline moved into the house with their fourteen servants; the house had ultimately cost $1 million. Their only child,
Doris Duke, was born the same November. Among the events the Dukes hosted in their new house was a dinner dance in March 1913.
The New York Times dedicated a page in an illustrated supplement to photographs of the house, which it dubbed the "costliest home opened on Fifth Avenue within a year". According to New York state census records from 1915, the three Dukes lived with two relatives and thirteen servants. The
1920 United States census showed that all of the servants working at the house at that point had been hired after 1915, except for their 50-year-old cook Mathilda Andrews. Nanaline did spend significant amounts of time at the 78th Street house, but James preferred to live in his other homes after World War I. James Duke also obtained the
Lynnwood house in
Charlotte, North Carolina, and lived there in the 1920s, just before his death. In James's will, Doris received $50 million from her father's $150 million estate Due to an unusual clause in the will, James had stipulated that these properties be sold immediately, but Doris was to be given sufficient funds to purchase the properties back. Doris successfully sued her mother for control of the house in early 1927 as part of a "friendly" lawsuit. As a teenager, Doris continued to reside in the family house on 78th Street, referring to it as "the rock pile" in her adulthood. By the late 1920s, apartment buildings were being constructed on the adjacent blocks. This prompted Nanaline Duke to ask the
New York Supreme Court in 1929 to reduce the house's valuation from $1.6 million to $970,000, citing the apartment construction. The house was assessed at $1.5 million in 1931, prompting Nanaline to sue again to reduce the value to $975,000. When Doris Duke turned twenty-one years old in 1933, she received a substantial part of the bequest that had been held in trust for her. A little more than a year later, in February 1935, Doris married
James H. R. Cromwell at the 78th Street house. Even when Doris Duke remarried to
Porfirio Rubirosa in 1947, she retained ownership of the 78th Street house and several other properties. The house was mostly used by Nanaline by the 1950s, and Nanaline stayed there until 1957.-->
Institute of Fine Arts 1950s to 1990s In January 1958, Nanaline and Doris Duke donated the building to the NYU Institute of Fine Arts. Most of the art in the mansion was moved to Rough Point. The renovation, Venturi's first project, involved preserving most of the interior spaces. NYU dedicated the institute's new quarters in the Duke House in February 1959. The
New York Landmarks Conservancy praised the Duke House's "superb adaptive reuse" when the NYU renovation was completed. The LPC designated the house as an individual landmark on September 15, 1970, calling it "one of the adornments of Fifth Avenue and one of the last reminders of the Age of Elegance". The same year, the LPC designated the house as part of the Metropolitan Museum Historic District, a collection of 19th- and early 20th-century mansions around Fifth Avenue between 78th and 86th Streets.
Richard Foster renovated the house again in the late 1970s, adding an 80,000-volume library on the second floor.
John L. Loeb and the
Hagop Kevorkian Fund financed the renovation, which cost $1.2 million. For his work, Foster received an award in 1978 from the
Connecticut Society of Architects, and the New York Landmarks Conservancy gave the project an award for "excellence in the redesign of a landmarks building".
1990s to present By the 1990s, the house was visibly deteriorating, and
sidewalk sheds had to be erected to protect visitors. The James B. Duke House was renovated starting in 2012. The facade, roof, and basement were preserved, and the existing materials were retained as much as possible. Also in 2012, NYU started negotiating with the condominium board of the neighboring 3 East 78th Street to expand into that building. The dispute was based on the fact that, while NYU owned the ground-floor condominium in the neighboring building, it did not own the exterior wall. NYU renovated the neighboring condominium unit in 2020. ==See also==