H.I. Feldman (Hyman Isaac Feldman, 1896–1981) ran one of New York's most prolific architectural practices from 1921 to 1978, credited with somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 buildings. His career divides at the war: Art Deco apartment houses through the 1940s, praised by the Landmarks Preservation Commission and protected as contributing architecture in several historic districts, then the large modern elevator buildings of the 1950s and 1960s that fill the postwar East Side and Greenwich Village. The postwar work has drawn criticism from architectural historians for breaking the street wall, while remaining among the better-value inventory on the blocks it occupies.
Who he was
Hyman Isaac Feldman, who signed his work H.I. Feldman, ran one of the busiest architectural practices in New York for close to sixty years. Twenty buildings in our catalog carry his name, most of them postwar apartment houses on the East Side and in Greenwich Village.
He was born in 1896 in Austrian Galicia — the Landmarks Preservation Commission gives Lemberg, now Lviv; other accounts name a different town — and was brought to New York at four. He studied at City College, took up landscape architecture at Cornell on scholarship, and finished an architecture degree at Yale in 1919 after his service in the First World War. He opened his own office in 1921, practiced until 1978, and died in 1981. He later endowed an architecture prize at Yale.
Estimates of his output vary widely. The LPC credits him with well over 4,000 residential and commercial buildings; accounts drawn from his obituary put it closer to 2,500 apartment buildings across the metropolitan area. Either figure places him among the most prolific architects the city has had.
Two careers
Feldman's work divides cleanly at the war.
The first phase, from the 1920s through the 1940s, was Art Deco and Moderne: six- to sixteen-story apartment houses in tan, buff, and beige brick with terra-cotta and cast-stone ornament, decorative bandcourses, corner windows, and fire escapes composed as part of the facade. He built heavily on the Grand Concourse, in Brooklyn, and on the Upper West Side. In 1932 he won the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce's first award for best apartment-house design, for the Cranlyn at 80 Cranberry Street. This is the work preservationists praise, and it appears as contributing architecture in the Grand Concourse, Brooklyn Heights, Riverside–West End, and Upper West Side historic districts.
The second phase is what fills our catalog. From the early 1950s onward Feldman designed large modern elevator buildings — 225 East 46th Street (1955), 30 East 9th Street (1955), 425 East 79th Street (1955), 12 Beekman Place (1957), 10 East End Avenue (1957), 935 Third Avenue (1960), 799 Park Avenue (1961), 225 East 36th Street (1963), 520 East 76th Street (1964), 400 East 54th Street (1970). Efficient plates, H- and U-shaped courtyard plans, setbacks and terraces on the upper floors, compact layouts built to the economics of their moment.
Two buildings in our catalog sit outside both phases and are worth noting: 565 West End Avenue (1937), from the late Deco years, and 34 West 72nd Street (1926), credited to Emery Roth with Feldman — an early association with the architect whose Central Park West towers were going up at the same moment.
How the work is regarded
Feldman's reputation is split along the same line as his career.
The Deco buildings are treated seriously. The LPC's own language is that "many of Feldman's most interesting designs were Art Deco style apartment buildings," and they are protected as district contributors in several neighborhoods.
The postwar work draws criticism, some of it pointed. Robert A.M. Stern and his co-authors describe his 1025 Fifth Avenue as "one of the more ingenious if urbanistically destructive moves," one that "dealt a significant blow to the integrity of the avenue's cohesive urbanism," for pulling twin towers back off Fifth Avenue behind an entrance court and breaking the street wall. Carter Horsley has called the same building one of the stranger apartment buildings in the city. No Feldman building appears to hold individual landmark designation.
That criticism is architectural and urbanistic rather than a judgment on the buildings as places to live, and it is worth keeping the two separate when you are evaluating an apartment.
What the credit means for value
It carries no premium, and it should not carry a discount either. Feldman's name does not move pricing the way a Candela or Carpenter attribution does. What it tells you is roughly when the building went up and what construction conventions applied.
The postwar cohort trades below its addresses. Several of these buildings sit on blocks — Beekman Place, Park Avenue, East End Avenue, Sutton-adjacent Midtown East — where pre-war neighbors price substantially higher on comparable square footage. Some of that gap is real, reflecting ceiling heights, room proportions, and facade materials. Some of it is the market pricing an aesthetic. Which is which is an apartment-by-apartment question, and it is the reason this cohort rewards close comparison.
Age puts these buildings squarely in the capital-cycle window. A 1955 to 1965 building is now sixty to seventy years old. Facade, window, elevator, roof, and mechanical replacement cycles have either been completed or are pending, and the difference between those two states is the single largest variable in your carrying cost. Review the reserve fund, the most recent Local Law 11 filing, and any assessment history before you make an offer.
Layouts favor efficiency. Feldman's plans put square footage into rooms rather than circulation. Buyers coming from pre-war stock should expect lower ceilings, simpler entries, and less gallery space, along with more usable area for the footprint.
Confirm the attribution before relying on it. Feldman's name appears in city records as H.I., H. I., Hyman Isaac, and occasionally as typographic corruptions of the same. Several buildings in our catalog carry the credit from listing or architectural records rather than from a filed drawing set, and where that is the case our building page says so.
Buying one today
Price against the block, not the architect. The comparable set is other postwar inventory nearby, adjusted for line, floor, exposure, and outdoor space.
Read the building's capital position first. For this cohort the financials, reserve balance, and pending Local Law 11 or 97 work will tell you more about total cost of ownership than any architectural fact. Our Local Law tools check a specific building's exposure.
Look hard at terraces and setbacks. The setback massing on the later buildings produced a meaningful supply of private outdoor space at price points where it is otherwise scarce. Where it exists it is usually the strongest part of the value case.
Co-op rules vary widely across this group. These buildings converted at different moments and under different sponsors, and their sublet, pied-à-terre, and financing rules diverge accordingly. Read the specific building's policies rather than assuming a postwar norm.
Working with The Roebling Team
The postwar East Side is one of the segments where building-level diligence matters most and where the spread between the best and worst buildings on the same block is widest. If you are buying or selling in one of them, a thirty-minute consultation is the right starting point.
Corey Cohen, Principal The Roebling Team at Compass 646.939.7375 · c.cohen@compass.com
Run the numbers
Related architect spotlights
- Emery Roth — credited with Feldman at 34 West 72nd Street
- SLCE Architects — the high-volume practice that followed Feldman's generation
- J.E.R. Carpenter — the pre-war benchmark these buildings are priced against
H.I. Feldman buildings with Roebling building pages
This page reflects publicly available information and The Roebling Team transaction experience, compiled by The Roebling Research Desk from public records and the offering plans held in The Roebling Research Library. The Roebling Team at Compass does not represent any individual building's management, board, or sponsor. Where sources disagree on attribution or biography, the disagreement is noted rather than resolved. © 2026 The Roebling Team at Compass.