Harde & Short was a New York partnership active from about 1901 to 1909, formed by Herbert Spencer Harde, born Steinhardt, and Richard Thomas Short, who met in the office of James E. Ware & Son. In nine years the firm produced a small body of heavily ornamented apartment houses clad in terra cotta: Onyx Court in 1902, the Red House in 1903 or 1904, 45 East 66th Street, 44 West 77th Street, and Alwyn Court. Two hold individual New York City landmark designation. The partnership dissolved abruptly, and neither man produced comparable work afterward.
Who they were
Harde & Short practiced together for about nine years and produced perhaps a dozen buildings. Four of them are in our catalog, and two of those carry individual New York City landmark designation. Very few firms with so short a working life left so much protected work behind.
Herbert Spencer Harde was born Herbert Spencer Steinhardt around 1873 and educated in London; he anglicized the surname before he began practicing. Richard Thomas Short was born around 1870, and at least one account describes him as Canadian. The two met in the office of James E. Ware & Son, where Short trained. Harde had been designing Upper West Side tenements through the 1890s. They formed the partnership by 1901.
Harde came from a real-estate family and worked both sides of the transaction. He founded the Eronel Realty Company — Eronel is his wife Lenore's name spelled backwards — commissioned his own firm to design its buildings, and moved into at least one of them himself. That is worth knowing because it explains the risk the firm took on ornament: the client and the architect were frequently the same person.
The partnership dissolved abruptly around 1909, shortly after Alwyn Court and 44 West 77th Street were completed. No account we have found explains why, and neither man produced comparable work afterward. Birth dates, the exact date the partnership formed, and the reason it ended are all thinly sourced; treat them as approximate.
The work
Terra cotta is the through-line. It cost roughly a third of what carved stone cost, molds could be reused across a facade, and it took detail that stone would have made prohibitive. Harde & Short pushed the material harder than almost anyone working in New York apartment design at the time.
193 Second Avenue (Onyx Court), 1902, is the early and plainest of the four. It was built by Morris Berman and Joseph Moskowitz for about $90,000, on the Second Avenue spine of the Yiddish theatre district, and laid out with large apartments for middle- and upper-class tenants instead of tenement flats. Heavy neoclassical window pediments, elaborate fire escapes, and Art Nouveau door gates survive. The composer Bernard Herrmann grew up in the building; the bass Sidor Belarsky lived there.
The Red House at 350 West 85th Street followed. Sources give 1903 or 1904 for completion. It is six stories of red brick and white terra cotta with English-country-house window walls, Gothic screens, and salamanders — the emblem read as Francis I's by most accounts and as Henri II's by at least one. Harde's own Eronel Realty developed it, and he lived there. It was designated a New York City landmark in 1982 and added to the National Register in 1983.
45 East 66th Street (The Parkview / Fred Leighton Building) went up between 1906 and 1908 — our catalog carries the start year, and published accounts vary on which year to cite. Ten stories of red brick and light terra cotta at the northeast corner of Madison Avenue, organized in three bays on each street front, with a rounded corner turret and ogee arches, finials, crockets, and tracery running the full height. Christopher Gray compared the ornament to the town hall at Leuven. The building was designated an individual landmark on November 15, 1977, after tenant advocacy and over owner objection, and listed on the National Register in 1980.
911 Seventh Avenue (Alwyn Court) is the firm's best-known building, completed between 1907 and 1909 at the southeast corner of Seventh Avenue and 58th Street. The artist Walter Russell and the developer Alwyn Ball Jr. planned it; the building takes its name from Ball. Thirteen stories, French Renaissance in the Francis I manner, with crowned salamanders, fleurs-de-lis, cameos, escutcheons, and quattrocento pilasters covering every available surface. A contemporary account called the facade "an incrustation of terra cotta, a filigree of fine ornament on every pilaster, soffit and mullion." The original plan held 22 apartments, typically fourteen rooms and five baths, with the largest running to more than thirty rooms and rents reaching $22,000 a year in 1910.
44 West 77th Street, 1909, was Walter Russell's second project with the firm and the most functional of the four. Fourteen stories facing the American Museum of Natural History, Late Gothic Revival in brick and limestone, with three projecting bays of tall north-facing glass to light artists' studios. Karl Bitter's studio on the thirteenth floor ran 44 feet long under a double-height ceiling. One observer described the ornament as looking like it had "been squeezed out of a pastry tube."
How the work is regarded
The reputation is high and it rests on the facades. Paul Goldberger wrote that at 45 East 66th Street "the eccentricity of its lavish detailing and round tower strikes just the right note" on Madison Avenue. Andrew Alpern called the same decoration remarkable for its "intricate complexity of surface treatment and flamboyance." The AIA Guide calls the Red House "a romantic six-story masterpiece." Two individual landmark designations across a nine-year practice is an unusual record.
The counterweight is durability. The ornament outran the technology that carried it. 44 West 77th Street needed facade repairs within two years of completion, and by the 1940s most of its terra cotta had been taken down over deterioration concerns; a $500,000 restoration in the 1990s brought back part of what was lost. Alwyn Court lost its cornice and balustrade in the 1938 gut. These are among the most maintenance-intensive residential facades in Manhattan, and the buildings' capital histories reflect that.
The interiors are a separate subject from the exteriors. Alwyn Court's 22 grand apartments were gutted in 1938 by the Dry Dock Savings Institution and rebuilt as 75 smaller units of three to five rooms. The building went co-op under David Walentas in 1979-80, when Beyer Blinder Belle supervised a facade restoration and Richard Haas painted the trompe-l'oeil mural that turned the old air shaft into an atrium. 44 West 77th Street reconverted to cooperative ownership in 1970. What you buy behind these facades is a twentieth-century apartment.
What the credit means for value
This is one of the pre-war credits that genuinely moves the buyer pool. At Alwyn Court and 45 East 66th Street, the architecture is the reason people bid. That is a narrow exception to the general rule that architect attribution tells you era and building type and little else, and it does not extend evenly across the four — the credit does considerably less work at 193 Second Avenue.
Landmark status governs what you can change. Alwyn Court and 45 East 66th Street are individually designated. 44 West 77th Street is a contributing property in the Central Park West-76th Street Historic District and is on the National Register. Window replacement, storefront work, and anything visible from the street runs through the Landmarks Preservation Commission, on the Commission's timeline.
Terra cotta is a standing capital liability. Ornamented terra cotta cracks, spalls, and sheds. Every one of these buildings has been through at least one major facade campaign, and the relevant question is when the last one finished and what the reserve looks like now. Pull the Local Law 11 filing history and read the reserve study before you make an offer; our Local Law tools show a specific building's compliance exposure.
The plans behind the facades were rebuilt. Room counts, ceiling heights, and layouts in these buildings reflect 1938, 1970, or a later renovation. Underwrite the apartment you are actually buying.
Attribution is clean here. The firm's catalog is small and well documented, and all four of our buildings are securely credited. Many pre-war attributions in this market are looser than that.
Buying one today
Read the facade capital history first, then the apartment. For this cohort the assessment history and the state of the terra cotta will drive your cost of ownership more than any interior finish. Ask for the last two facade inspection cycles and the minutes covering them.
Layouts vary widely within each building. These are converted plans in irregular envelopes, and no two lines are alike. At 44 West 77th Street in particular, the studio units and the conventional apartments are different products at the same address.
Confirm the ownership structure. 45 East 66th Street is a cooperative sitting above ground-floor condominium space; the others are cooperatives. Sublet, financing, and pied-à-terre rules differ building to building and should be read from the specific building's documents.
Expect thin comparables. Turnover is slow, so same-building sales are few and often stale. Pricing usually requires a broader pre-war set adjusted for designation and condition.
Working with The Roebling Team
Landmarked pre-war buildings with heavily ornamented facades are the segment where diligence pays for itself. The spread between a building that has finished its facade cycle and one that has not can run into six figures per apartment. If you are buying or selling in one of these, start with a thirty-minute consultation.
Corey Cohen, Principal The Roebling Team at Compass 646.939.7375 · c.cohen@compass.com
Run the numbers
Related architect spotlights
- George & Edward Blum — the other pre-war partnership that built its reputation on facade ornament
- J.E.R. Carpenter — the plan-driven counterpart working the same avenues a decade later
- Rouse & Goldstone — pre-war apartment specialists of the following generation
Harde & Short buildings with Roebling building pages
| Building | Completed |
|---|---|
| 193 Second Avenue (Onyx Court) | 1902 |
| 44 West 77th Street | 1909 |
| 45 East 66th Street (The Parkview / Fred Leighton Building) | 1906 |
| 911 Seventh Avenue | 1907 |
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.
Buildings designed by Harde & Short
