The house built on the site of an Ursuline school

Francis Fletcher Palmer bought the lot at 75 East 93rd Street in early 1916. The site had been occupied as recently as 1913 by a Roman Catholic school for girls run by the Ursuline order. To facilitate construction, the school buildings were demolished. The architects Delano & Aldrich designed a neoclassical house featuring a white-marble balustrade, which separated a three-story brick facade from a two-story slate mansard roof. The house occupied the eastern fifty-five feet along 93rd Street, while the western forty-five feet was dedicated to an enclosed garden with a central, circular fountain.

Palmer died of pneumonia in 1923, and in May 1926, the house was sold to financier George Fisher Baker Jr. Baker expanded the house and purchased adjacent lots to the north and west. He demolished a thirty-seven-foot wide, five-story residential building at 1190 Park Avenue to build an annex and a ballroom wing completed in 1929. He also demolished a thirty-nine-foot wide, five-story residential building at 69-71 East 93rd Street. To decorate his new living room, Baker installed two mantels and an ornamental plaster frieze from the Henry Brevoort Mansion.

In 1930, the Bakers purchased a bronze triton fountain created by Swedish sculptor Carl Milles. The property sat vacant during the war years and for thirteen postwar years until 1958, when the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia purchased the property. The church converted the four-story main house into administrative offices for the Synod of Bishops, the three-story north annex into a school, and the two-story ballroom wing into the Synodal Cathedral.

Today, the George F. Baker Jr. Houses comprise a complex of three residential buildings at 67, 69, and 75 East 93rd Street. Each of the three buildings is a New York City designated landmark, and the entire ensemble was added as a group to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons