A Landmark Upper West Side Mansion With a Theatrical Past Lists for $6.999M
A storied Upper West Side landmark with a theatrical pedigree has returned to the market: 323 West 80th Street, represented by Mark Jovanovic and Scott Hustis, Co-Founders of Paradigm Advisory. A six-story, 31-room limestone-and-brick townhouse on a rare 43-foot lot. Built in 1897–1898 by architect Clarence True, the Henry B. Anderson Mansion is designed in an Elizabethan Renaissance Revival style, with limestone basework, arched entrances, stained-glass windows, and an asymmetrical layout that makes the two halves appear almost like separate houses. It’s the kind of façade that stops you mid-block—grand, eccentric, and unmistakably old New York.
The home’s history reads like a series of New York chapters. After first being sold to Charles H. Davis’s family, it became home to wealthy physician H. Edward Russell, then prominent lawyer Henry B. Anderson, who purchased it in 1916 and renovated it into a 21-room residence with six baths, a solarium, tiled loggia, fountain, and gymnasium. In the 1920s, the mansion transitioned from a single-family home into mixed-use apartments—an evolution that set the stage for its most transformative era decades later.
That era began in the 1970s, when Bill DeSeta and Donna DeSeta purchased the property for $170,000 and maintained it ever since. Bill, who had a long and notable background on Broadway, approached the renovation with a showman’s eye—paying homage to theater through eclectic design and old-world charm. He created a duplex and eight additional apartments, preserving original features like a beamed dining-room ceiling and leaded glass windows, while layering in Renaissance Revival details, Gothic arches, built-ins, and entertaining-friendly spaces. Over the years, the home became a creative hub for the family, and notably housed Donna’s sister, actress Bernadette Peters.
Architecturally, the house is rich in detail. The base level is limestone, with a round-arched main entrance set in a Doric-style surround with keystone, half-columns, and small roundels. Upper-story windows are framed with classical enframements—second- and third-floor windows with keyed surrounds, and fourth-floor round-arched windows with “Gibbs surrounds.” Above, a pitched roof with stepped end-walls and chimneys is crowned by a dentil cornice, with two elaborate dormers featuring pilasters and inward-curving pediments, each topped by smaller triangular pediments.
Have a listing you think should be featured contact us or submit here to tell us more! Follow Off The MRKT on Twitter and Instagram, and like us on Facebook.
