This is an image of the duplex penthouse living room in the fourteen-story cooperative apartment building designed by Emery Roth in 1929 at 130 East End Avenue where Ellin Mackay (US1797b), Mrs. Irving Berlin, lived with her husband Irving Berlin.
The caption accompanying this photograph reads:
Starting in 1932 Irving and Ellin Berlin took a duplex penthouse in the fourteen-storey [sic cooperative apartment building designed by Emery Roth in 1929 at 130 East End Avenue. At the edge of Carl Schurz Park and Gracie Square it looked out over Hell Gate along the East River.
Moving by 1940, Irving Berlin fifty-one-years old, a Russian immigrant who had left public school after completing the eighth grade was on top of the world. Ellin Berlin, his lovely wife was thirty-one. Their daughters: Mary Ellin Berlin, was thirteen, Linda L. Berlin was eight and Elizabeth J. Berlin just three. Living in a sedate house at 129 East Seventy-eighth Street, rented for $335.00, they were all looked after by a large household of helpers. If they no longer employed a butler. As they had at East End Avenue, they were still amply attended to.
Jenet Tennant forty-eight, was the English child nurse. Nellie Willis forty-one, was Ellin’s English lady’s maid. The parlor maid, who answered the door, served and meals and cleaned the drawing room, was Florence Phisholin, a thirty-one year old Canadian. Jessie Taylor, forty-eight was English and presided over the kitchen, assisted by twenty-two year old Rose Fore from Ireland who was kitchen maid.
See Harbor Hill, Clarence Hungerford Mackay's Mansion.
