Top Ten New York Architecture Apartment Buildings

new york architecture

NY Site Map

contact

FEATURES

NY Galleries

NY Walks

top ten new york architecture

America’s Favorite Architecture

Use of images.

Top Ten NYC Architecture

top ten Apartment Buildings

For a more complete list, see Apartment Building

San Remo Apartments

architect	Emery Roth
location	145-146 Central Park West
date	1930
style	Art Deco, Neo-Classicism 2
construction	steel frame, limestone The building is decorated with classical details. Its limestone base is rusticated, cartouches appear above the entrance, and choragic temples cap each of its towers. Generously-scaled and well arranged apartments speak to the affluence of the residents. The building is clad in light brown brick and terra-cotta, while the three-storey base has a limestone facing. The towers have tiered tops which terminate on colonnaded top lanterns, reminiscent of a temple and topped by copper finials.
type	Apartment Building

The San Remo (145 and 146 Central Park West) is a luxury co-operative apartment building in New York City, two blocks north of the Dakota building. It is described by Glen Justice of the New York Times as "a dazzling two-tower building with captivating views of Central Park."[1] As a housing cooperative, its board has a "reputation for lenient admissions standards" compared to the conservative, old-money boards on the other side of the park.

Past and present residents of the building include such famous personalities as Steven Spielberg, Donna Karan, Steve Jobs, Demi Moore, Glenn Close, Dustin Hoffman, U2 frontman Bono, Steve Martin, Bruce Willis, Eddie Cantor, Robert Stigwood, Marshall Brickman, Jackie Leo, Don Hewitt, and Texas natural gas heiress Adelaide de Menil. Rita Hayworth spent her last years there.

The Eldorado

architect	Margon & Holder and Emery Roth
location	300 Central Park West
date	1929-1931
style	Art Deco
construction	30 floors, 42,000 square feet The building has a cast stone base with bronze reliefs and a massive un-setback bulk with a series of darker vertical bands. The towers have similar bands and end in setbacks and top finials introduced to the design by Emery Roth. A stainless steel archway leads through intricate glass doors into the classical entrance lobby, with wood panellings and marble floor, as well as muralled walls.
type	Apartment Building

The Eldorado was the fourth and the last huge apartment building Emery Roth designed for the fast-changing Central Park West after the Beresford, the Ardsley and the San Remo. As experimented in the San Remo and at the same period by Irwin Chanin with his Art-Déco Century and Majestic Apts, the plan was put up according a U-shape form, bounding an open court, the fronting side supporting twin towers. But in this work (as in the Ardsley), Roth broke from his eclectic Beaux-Arts style to a more modern geometrical abstraction. The towers are beautifully sculptured in recessed decorative vertical piers as developed in the Barclay-Vesey Bldg, but enhanced here with two additional belfries, red-lighted at night. Initially, the scheduled design was more close to the 519 Eighth Avenue Bldg.

The Dorilton

architect	developed by Hamilton M. Weed, and designed by Elisha Harris Janes and Richard Leopold Leo.
location	171 W71, at Broadway.
date	1902
style	Second Empire Baroque a "cornice-copia" Elliot Willensky
construction	steel frame, brick and limestone trim
type	Apartment Building

Paul Goldberger, "The City Observed, New York, A Guide To The Architecture of Manhattan," (Vintage Books, a division of Random House) wrote that "Now the building seems more to be pitied than censored, a rather too eager-to-please piece of Second Empire foppery. Once, some thought that a mansard roof and a lot of sculpture and cartouches make a building French; now we know better. Still, it is sad to see this building, for all its foolishness, in the sorry state of decay it has descended to, with unsympathetic storefronts along the Broadway side and a facade that clearly has not been cared for in years." (it's now been restored, needless to say...)

Century Apartments

architect	Irwin S. Chanin, Jacques Delamarre, Director and Sloan & Robertson
location	25 Central Park West
date	1931
style	Art Deco
construction	steel frame with brick cladding
type	Apartment Building

This huge apartment building, replacing the Carrère & Hastings' Century Theater, was designed by the same architects who conceived the Majestic, some blocks to the north, with a similar U-shaped main body with narrow upper setbacks arranged as terraces, supporting twin high towers. The Century combines the classical columnar skyscraper type with the premices of the International Style, and the new French Art-Déco futuristic idiom. If the first half part of the building seems less dynamic than its "sister's one", the Majestic, particularly because the beige-and-brown brick pattern doesn't replace the strenghth of the vertical piers, the dramatic crowns of the twin towers are, beyond all doubt, the most successful among the Central Park West's iconic silhouettes. They seem to have been directly sculpted from clay, with curved back elements evoking a giant machinery. Initially, the Century must be an apartment complex housing a multi-cultural French center, with a metal and glass upper part, but the Depression obliged to change the schemes. Inside, 52 types of apartments are available, from the single-room flat to the eleven-room suite!

Majestic Apartments

architect	Jacques Delamarre Like the Century Apartments, the Majestic was developed by Irwin S. Chanin (who was also behind the Chanin Building in Midtown).
location	115 Central Park West
date	1930-1931
style	Art Deco
construction	The base is of limestone, with the upper facade clad in light brown brick. The designer from Chanin's namesake building, René Chambellan, designed the patterned brickwork of the facade. The main mass below the setbacks and towers has columnless corners which form glazed solariums within the corner apartments. The wall on the slightly protruding tower facades extends as piers to the top to form riblike protrusions. On the west side, the wings of the tower have similar, albeit curved, tops of true Art Deco nature.
type	Apartment Building

The Majestic is a housing cooperative located at 115 Central Park West in Manhattan in New York City. The apartment building was constructed in 1930-1931 in the Art Deco style by real estate developed by Irwin S. Chanin. The building has 238 apartments in 29 storeys. Like the San Remo cooperative three blocks north, it has two towers facing the Central Park.

The apartment building replaced the Hotel Majestic designed by Alfred Zucker in 1894. The steel framed building was originally planned as a 45 story hotel, but the plans where changed mid way in the construction due to the depression and the passing of the Multiple Dwelling Act.

Dakota Apartments

architect	Henry J Hardenbergh
location	1 West 72nd Street
date	1881-84
style	German Gothic, French Renaissance and English Victorian
construction	Its load-bearing brick and sandstone walls are reinforced with steel and animated with balconies, corner pavilions and decorative terra-cotta panels and moldings. The structure is capped by a steeply pitched slate and copper roof decorated with ornate railings, stepped dormers, finials and pediments.
type	Apartment Building

The Dakota, constructed from October 25, 1880 to October 27, 1884, is an apartment building located on the northwest corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West in New York City.
The architectural firm of Henry Janeway Hardenbergh was commissioned to do the design for Edward Clark, head of the Singer Sewing Machine Company whose firm also designed the Plaza Hotel.
The building's high gables and deep roofs with a profusion of dormers, terracotta spandrels and panels, niches, balconies and balustrades give it a North German Renaissance character, an echo of a Hanseatic townhall. Nevertheless, its layout and floor plan betray a strong influence of French architectural trends in housing design that had become known in New York in the 1870s.
According to popular legend, the Dakota was so named because at the time it was built, the Upper West Side of Manhattan was sparsely inhabited and considered as remote as the Dakota Territory. However, the earliest recorded appearance of this account is in a 1933 newspaper story. It is more likely that the building was named "The Dakota" because of Clark's fondness for the names of the new western states and territories. High above the 72nd Street entrance, the figure of a Dakota Indian keeps watch. The Dakota was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972, and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976.

The Beresford

architect	Emery Roth
location	211 Central Park West
date	1929
style	Historicist Skyscraper Renaissance Revival
construction	limestone base and brick-clad upper floors 175 Apartments 23 Floors The building has 22 storeys with a limestone base and brick-clad upper floors. The courtyard contains a fountain and a garden. Italian Renaissance in design, the Beresford is executed in brick with limestone and terra cotta trim. Animating the walls is a distinctive blend of late-Renaissance sculpture: winged cherubs, angels, dolphins, rams' heads and rosettes.
type	Apartment Building

IN September 1929, a few weeks before the stock market crash, a three-towered apartment building in late Italian Renaissance style opened on the corner of Central Park West and 81st Street. It was named the Beresford, after the hotel it replaced, and was a masterwork of the architect Emery Roth, a Jewish emigrant from the Austro-Hungarian Empire whose background limited his chances for commissions to build on the posh east side of the park.

Perry West

architect	Richard Meier
location	173 Perry Street and 176 Perry Street, corner of West Street
date	2002
style	Late Modern (International Style III)
construction	concrete frame, curtain wall cladding
type	Apartment Building

Internationally acclaimed architect Richard Meier brings his modernist signature to the New York City Skyline with 173/176 Perry Street, a pair of minimalist transparent towers overlooking the Hudson River in the historic West Village. 173/176 Perry Street is Meier's first building in Manhattan. Set for completion in late 2001, the towers will be heralded as an architectural landmark and considered the centerpiece of the West Side and its new Hudson River Park. For the consummate design statement, residents can experience the architect's total vision through his exclusive interior design plans.

London Terrace

architect	Farrar & Watmough
location	West 23^rd to West 24^th Streets, Ninth to Tenth Aves.
date	1930
style	vaguely Spanish Revival , vaguely Romanesque Revival
construction	brick, terracotta
type	1665 apartments Apartment Building

Mandel's project was completed in two phases, with the ten smaller buildings finished in 1930 and the four corner towers constructed the following year. Despite the distinctively Southern Italian design and detailing, the complex picked the old name, London Terrace. Professor Moore himself was remembered at the cornerstone-laying ceremony, with his 15-year-old great-great-grandson doing the honors with the trowel. It was even asserted at the time that the cornerstone itself had come from the Moore's family manse Chelsea House (unlikely, since that building had been demolished some 66 years earlier).

Tudor City

architect	Fred F. French & Co., H. Douglas Ives
location	East 40^th to East 43^rd Streets, bet. First and Second Aves.
date	1925-8
style	Historicist Neo-Gothic.
construction	Steel frame, brick cladding with stone trim
type	Apartment Building

A private effort to revitalize a former slum, Tudor City was built as a new residential area to serve the thriving commercial district around Grand Central Terminal. The complex consists of 12 buildings containing 3,000 housing units, 600 hotel rooms and retail spaces arranged around gardens and raised on a platform to isolate it from the busy activity of Midtown Manhattan.