Jacob M. Felson, who signed his drawings J. M. Felson, was born in Russia in 1886, brought to New York in 1888, trained at Cooper Union, and practiced from 1910 until shortly after the Second World War. He designed more than forty apartment buildings in Manhattan and the Bronx along with movie theaters, garages, and suburban houses, and in 1938 became president of Fleetwood Enterprises, a builder of apartment houses. His best-known work is the Art Deco group on the Grand Concourse; the Manhattan buildings are 1920s speculative apartment houses on side streets. He died in 1962. The credit carries no premium and tells you era and building type.
Who he was
Jacob M. Felson signed most of his drawings J. M. Felson, and that is how the name usually appears in city records and in our catalog. He was born in Russia in 1886, brought to New York by his parents in 1888, studied at Cooper Union, and opened his own practice in 1910. He worked steadily until shortly after the Second World War and died in 1962.
Counts of his output vary with who is doing the counting. Preservation researchers credit him with scores of buildings across the city and more than forty apartment buildings in Manhattan and the Bronx. The rest of the practice was apartment-adjacent commercial work: movie theaters, parking garages, and private houses in Westchester County and New Jersey. In 1938 he became president of Fleetwood Enterprises, Inc., a company that built apartment houses, which moved him from the drafting side of the business toward the ownership side for the last stretch of his career.
Five buildings in our catalog carry his name. Four are 1920s apartment houses and one dates from 1940.
One housekeeping note first. Felson is a different architect from H.I. Feldman, whose postwar East Side practice we cover separately. The names are close enough that listing records and occasionally city records confuse them. If an attribution matters to you, check the filing date against each architect's working years.
The work
The Manhattan work in our catalog clusters in a three-year window. 220 West 93rd Street went up in 1926. 40 West 77th Street, The Heritage (41 West 72nd Street), and 308 East 79th Street all date to 1928. These are speculative elevator apartment houses built for developers during the last building surge before the crash, on side streets a block or two off the park or the avenue, and they were built to rent.
41 West 72nd Street is the most legible of the group. Sixteen stories, beige brick over a rusticated stone base, with double-height paired arches at the second and third floors carried on spiral terra-cotta columns and fronted by stone balconies. Preservation surveys describe the treatment as neo-Romanesque. It replaced five Victorian mansions cleared in 1926 and 1927, and its original apartments ran from two and a half to four rooms — small units aimed at a professional tenant, which is typical of what Felson was hired to do. The building converted from rental to condominium in 2001. Names differ across sources: our records and the building's own signage give The Heritage, while preservation surveys call it the Hermitage.
349 East 49th Street (Beekman Court), completed in 1940, sits at the far end of his design career and in a different idiom, the stripped Moderne that had displaced 1920s historicism by then.
The buildings that get him cited are in the Bronx. The Art Deco apartment houses on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx — 1150 Grand Concourse, known as the Fish Building, from 1936 and 1937, and 1188 Grand Concourse — are the work that gets him into the survey literature. In Greenwich Village his earliest surviving work is utilitarian: a 1921 parking garage at 11–19 Jane Street and a garage at 221 Thompson Street in the South Village Historic District.
Felson took the commissions the market produced. The design vocabulary changed with the decade while the underlying job stayed the same: a code-compliant, rentable building on a tight lot at a price the developer could carry.
How the work is regarded
Felson's reputation rests on the late Bronx Deco buildings. Preservation writers describe those as among the most distinctive and characteristic structures of their type in interwar New York, and the Fish Building in particular is a fixture of Grand Concourse walking tours.
The Manhattan buildings are regarded as competent speculative work. They appear as contributing buildings in designated historic districts — his output shows up in the Upper West Side/Central Park West, Upper East Side, Riverside–West End, Riverside–West End Extension I, and Grand Concourse districts — which is recognition at the district level. We find no Felson building in Manhattan holding individual landmark designation.
He does not appear in the critical literature the way Candela, Carpenter, or Roth do. There is no monograph, no signature plan type associated with his name, and very little published criticism of any kind. For a buyer that silence simply means the building has to be judged on its own.
What the credit means for value
The Felson credit carries no premium. It tells you the era, the construction conventions of that era, and the building type. Nothing in the market prices a Felson attribution the way it prices a Candela one, and you should not pay for the name or expect a seller to.
Historic district status matters more than the architect's name. Several of these buildings sit inside designated districts, which means exterior work — windows, facade repairs, storefronts, rooftop additions — requires Landmarks Preservation Commission review. That adds cost and calendar time to capital projects. Ask what is pending and whether the building has an approved permit in hand.
These buildings were built with small original units. A 1928 building marketed at two-to-four-room apartments has usually seen decades of combinations. Confirm that any combination in an apartment you are considering was done with board approval and the required Department of Buildings sign-off, and that the certificate of occupancy and the offering plan match what you are walking through.
Age puts every one of them deep in the capital cycle. A building from 1926 to 1940 is now eighty-five to a hundred years old. Facade, elevator, riser, roof, and window cycles either have been done or are coming. Review the reserve fund, the last Local Law 11 filing, and any assessment history. Our Local Law tools will show a specific building's emissions exposure.
Verify the attribution before you rely on it. The name appears as J. M. Felson, Jacob M. Felson, and occasionally in garbled form, and it is confused with H.I. Feldman often enough to be worth a check. Where our building page takes the credit from architectural records rather than a filed drawing set, the page says so.
Buying one today
Price against the block and the line, not the architect. The comparable set is other pre-war side-street inventory in the same district, adjusted for floor, exposure, ceiling height, and light. In this cohort the difference between a low-floor rear unit and a high-floor front unit is larger than any building-level factor.
Read the capital position before you read the floor plan. Financials, reserve balance, and pending facade or elevator work will tell you more about your total cost of ownership than any architectural fact about the building.
Check ceiling heights and window sizes room by room. Speculative 1920s buildings were not uniform. Heights and proportions vary by line and by floor within the same building, and the marketing sheet will not tell you which line you are in.
Ownership structures differ across the group. 41 West 72nd Street has been a condominium since 2001; others in the group are co-ops with their own sublet, pied-à-terre, and financing rules. Read the specific building's policies rather than assuming a pre-war norm.
Working with The Roebling Team
Pre-war side-street buildings are the segment where building-level diligence pays best, because the price spread between a well-run building and a deferred-maintenance building on the same block does not show up in the listing photos. 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
- H.I. Feldman — the similarly named, similarly prolific architect Felson is confused with
- Schwartz & Gross — contemporaries working the same speculative apartment-house market
- George & Edward Blum — the other high-volume pre-war partnership on these blocks
Jacob M. Felson buildings with Roebling building pages
| Building | Completed |
|---|---|
| 220 West 93rd Street | 1926 |
| 308 East 79th Street | 1928 |
| 349 East 49th Street (Beekman Court) | 1940 |
| 40 West 77th Street | 1928 |
| The Heritage (41 West 72nd Street) | 1928 |
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.