A Midtown Loft Where Leonard Bernstein Once Lived Is Now a PR Office

When Stu Loeser went looking for new office space two years ago, he wanted room to grow and, ideally, a terrace for book parties and other events. The political consultant, a former press secretary to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and earlier a communications director to Chuck Schumer, had been running his namesake consultancy and PR firm out of the Chrysler Building. His broker offered a different kind of pitch: a big, bright top-floor loft at 1239 Broadway, just south of Herald Square, with roof decks. The broker also mentioned that it had once been the apartment of “some musician.”

The musician, Loeser soon learned, was Leonard Bernstein, who lived there in 1945 and 1946. According to a profile in Curbed, the previous tenant, an architecture firm, had polished the place up, but it remains fundamentally the space it was some 80 years ago, with a fireplace at its center and rough brick parapets outside. Loeser signed the lease.

Then he became, in his own telling, a self-taught exhibition designer. Library visits, eBay searches and dives into archives filled a collection of display cases and frames, and much of what he found was edited into large illustrated wall-text posters. Beside the central fireplace hangs an oversize photograph of Bernstein at the piano in front of that same hearth, studying the score of Marc Blitzstein’s Airborne Symphony. An LP of the performance he conducted soon afterward, with Orson Welles narrating, is framed beneath it. Out on the terrace, a pair of photographs shows Bernstein by a parapet that has barely changed.

Elsewhere, a blown-up image reproduces one of Bernstein’s first interviews, from Seventeen magazine, in which the reporter describes meeting the young conductor at “his apartment, which is a stunning penthouse on top of a tall office building in a business section.” There are framed ticket stubs, Playbills and album jackets, plus some visual jokes: a unisex restroom door bears icons of a shark and a jet rather than the usual figures, and another is labeled “Lavatory Bathroom,” with the initials L.B. emphasized. Shelves are dotted with vintage media hardware, including a movie projector, press cameras and radios, none Bernstein-specific but all fitting for a communications shop.

The apartment was not either of Bernstein’s best-known homes. In the 1960s and early 1970s he and his wife, Felicia, lived on Park Avenue, where, in 1970, Tom Wolfe covered a party that became infamous. The family later moved to the Dakota, where Bernstein lived for the rest of his life. This was a young artist’s first apartment after arriving in New York, taken about a year after his breakthrough in 1943, when he stepped onto the New York Philharmonic podium at age 25 on a few hours’ notice for the ailing Bruno Walter. He wore his one good suit, a gray sharkskin, and the programs had to be corrected by typewriter. By the time he moved into the loft, On the Town, his first musical-theater hit, had just opened.

Loeser, who is observant and does not take calls on Shabbos, is by the account of the Curbed writer, who discloses a friendly relationship with him, an animated tour guide. He points to an RCA Victor console radio-phonograph by the door that was made in Long Island City. “Its entire life has been within ten miles of where it was built,” he says. An end table topped with a Bernstein LP was custom-built by an Etsy maker; Loeser deliberately hunted down a scratched record for the carpenter so no one’s good copy would be sacrificed.

His favorite corner, the piece suggests, echoes his own career: it concerns Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, an opera enthusiast who in 1943 directed public funding to a new institution, the New York City Symphony.

For a political operative, the result is a workplace that doubles as a small, personal museum of a New York origin story, one that visitors, including, as Loeser recalls, Kathy Wylde, seem to find entirely in character.