Category Archives: Manhattan

Manhattan

235 W 76th Street

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235 W 76th Street, aka The Colorado,* is a pre-war apartment building in Renaissance Revival style, enlivened by colorful terra cotta in the base and crown.

The building’s architect – Robert T. Lyons – is best known for his Beaux Arts masterpiece on Central Park West, the St. Urban.

* Not to be confused with the same-named Upper East Side condo.

235 W 76th Street Vital Statistics
  • Location: 235 W 76th Street at Broadway
  • Year completed: 1925
  • Architect: Robert T. Lyons
  • Floors: 15
  • Style: Renaissance Revival
235 W 76th Street Recommended Reading

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334 Amsterdam Avenue

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334 Amsterdam Avenue, aka Samuel Priest Rose Building, is the home of the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan. The gray brick and blue glass cube is striking; its materials, style and colors stand out on an avenue dominated by earth-tone classic masonry structures.

The building’s recreational facilities – including a gymnasium and tenth-floor swimming pool – created unusual design challenges.

Architectural trivia: The center’s after-school activities include construction classes for budding architects! Dubbed “Crazy Constructions,” the program lets 6- and 7-year-olds “Design and build towers, bridges, houses, rollercoasters, and other superstructures. Join Dazzling Discoveries as you explore and experiment with plastic bricks, wood, paper, and many other materials. Students will learn about engineering, architecture, and physics while inventing and creating their own toys and projects.”

334 Amsterdam Avenue Vital Statistics
  • Location: 334 Amsterdam Avenue at W 76th Street
  • Year completed: 2002
  • Architect: Diamond Schmitt Architects
  • Floors: 13
  • Style: Postmodern
334 Amsterdam Avenue Recommended Reading

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The Laureate

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The Laureate is a modern condominium in a neighborhood dominated by landmark buildings almost a century older. The building is striking for its rounded corner, plentiful, ornate balconies, and sparkling white facades.

The Laureate Vital Statistics
  • Location: 2150 Broadway at W 76th Street
  • Year completed: 2010
  • Architect: SLCE
  • Floors: 18
  • Style: Postmodern
The Laureate Recommended Reading

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Beacon Hotel and Theater

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Beacon Hotel and Theater share a Broadway facade, but it’s the theater’s interior that keeps getting rave reviews. Conceived as part of the Roxy theater chain, the showplace was described by the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) as “…a lavish space with stylistic effects drawn from the traditions of Greek, Roman, Renaissance, and Rococo architecture.”

The buildings are a collaboration of Samuel L. Rothafel – better known as Roxy – and The Chanin Construction Company. LPC explains, “Undoubtedly pleased with the success of combining three theaters with the Hotel Lincoln, thereby providing common building services for all, the Chanins saw a combination theater-hotel structure to be a logical solution for the site.”

Alas, Roxy’s plans did not pan out. Warner Bros. Pictures wound up with the theater lease. The Beacon continued as a movie theater until 1974, when the programs switched to live performances. The LPC designated the interior a landmark in 1979. In 1986 developers wanted to convert the Beacon to a disco – plans that were halted by a judge who said the conversion would irreparably harm the landmark’s architecture. Madison Square Garden Entertainment’s parent company, Cablevision, leased the Beacon in 2006. Cablevision restored the theater at a reported cost of $10 million. Madison Square Garden Company now manages the Beacon.

P.S. It’s called Beacon Hotel because of an airplane beacon on the roof.

Beacon Hotel and Theater Vital Statistics
  • Location: 2130 Broadway at W 75th Street
  • Year completed: 1929
  • Architect: Walter W. Ahlschlager
  • Floors: 24
  • Style: Beaux Arts
  • New York City Landmark: 1979 (theater interior)
  • National Register of Historic Places: 1982
Beacon Hotel and Theater Recommended Reading

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West End Avenue (W 76 – W 86)

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West End Avenue – the stretch of 11th Avenue above W 59th Street – is one of New York’s architectural time capsules. The avenue boasts four historic districts, from W 70th Street to W 94th Street. The West End Preservation Society even argued that the entire avenue should be an historic district.

Personally, I find this half-mile section between W 76th and W 86th to be the most picturesque.

West End Avenue Selected Buildings

Odd-numbered buildings are on the west side of the avenue; even-numbered buildings are on the east side.

  • Address/Name | Architect | Year Completed
  • W 75th – W 76th Streets
  • 333 WEA | Emery Roth | 1925
  • 336 WEA | Boak & Paris | 1932
  • W 76th – W 77th Streets
  • 341 WEA | Lamb & Rich | 1891
  • 343 WEA | Lamb & Rich | 1891
  • 345 WEA | Lamb & Rich | 1891
  • 347 WEA | Lamb & Rich | 1891
  • 349 WEA | Lamb & Rich | 1891
  • 351 WEA | Lamb & Rich | 1891
  • 353 WEA | Lamb & Rich | 1891
  • 355 WEA | Lamb & Rich | 1891
  • 357 WEA | Lamb & Rich | 1891
  • 340 WEA | Edward L. Angell | 1890
  • 342 WEA | Edward L. Angell | 1890
  • 344 WEA | Edward L. Angell | 1890
  • 346 WEA | Edward L. Angell | 1890
  • 348 WEA | Edward L. Angell | 1890
  • 350 WEA | Clarence True | 1892
  • 352 WEA | Clarence True | 1892
  • 354 WEA | Clarence True | 1892
  • 356 WEA | Clarence True | 1892
  • 358 WEA | Clarence True | 1892
  • W 77th – W 78th Streets
  • 365 WEA | Sugarman, Hess & Berger | 1924
  • 375 WEA | Schwartz & Gross | 1911
  • 360 WEA – West End Collegiate Church | Robert W. Gibson | 1892
  • 378 WEA | Schwartz & Gross | 1915
  • W 78th – W 79th Streets
  • 380-390 WEA – Apthorp Apartments | Clinton & Russell | 1908
  • W 79th – W 80th Streets
  • 411 WEA | George F. Pelham, Jr. | 1936
  • 400 WEA – Wexford | Margon & Holder | 1931
  • W 80th – W 81st Streets
  • 425 WEA | Townsend & Harde | 1900
  • 431 WEA – Calhoun School | Costas Machlouzarides | 1975
  • 420 WEA | Schwartz & Gross | 1916
  • W 81st – W 82nd Streets
  • 441-451 WEA | George F. Pelham | 1926
  • 440 WEA | Schwartz & Gross | 1928
  • 450 WEA | Boak & Paris | 1931
  • W 82nd – W 83rd Streets
  • 460 WEA – Mickey Mantle School (Public School 9) | C.B.J. Snyder | 1896
  • W 83rd – W 84th Streets
  • 483 WEA | Schwartz & Gross | 1915
  • 495 WEA – Hohenzollern | George F. Pelham | 1907
  • 490 WEA | Neville & Bagge | 1913
  • W 84th – W 85th Streets
  • W 85th – W 86th Streets
  • W 86th – W 87th Streets
  • 263 W 86th Street – Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew | R.H. Robertson | 1897
West End Avenue Recommended Reading

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215 W 75th Street

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215 W 75th Street, aka Majestic Towers, is a sedate Upper West Side cooperative now – but it roared in the ’20s as a brothel and speakeasy!

According to a history originally published on the building’s now-dormant website, the structure was designed as a bordello. Celebrities and celebrated madam Polly Adler called this home. During police raids, patrons could escape via reputed “secret” staircases. (Naysayers pooh-pooh the idea, and say the stairs were just fire escapes required by the building code of the time.)

Architecturally, the building follows the traditional base-shaft-crown organization. The three-story crown is the most expressive feature, with white terra cotta decoration.

Majestic Towers became a cooperative in 1989.

215 W 75th Street Vital Statistics
  • Location: 215 W 75th Street at Broadway
  • Year completed: 1924
  • Architect: Schwartz & Gross
  • Floors: 15
  • Style: Renaissance Revival
215 W 75th Street Recommended Reading

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2 Park Avenue

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2 Park Avenue is “one of [Ely Jacques] Kahn’s most dramatic and successful works and survives today as one of the most beautiful and distinctive office towers of the Art Deco period,” in the words of the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC).

LPC continued, “Kahn was able to successfully integrate a new decorative type produced by the application of colorful terra-cotta panels in geometric designs to a tall, commercially successful office/loft structure. 2 Park Avenue was one of the important late 1920s buildings that helped create the visually lively and iconic city of the early 20th century.”

According to the commission, the building’s developers were not sure what they wanted to do with the structure. The neighborhood was in transition, and the dominant commercial tenant was unknown. The owners asked Kahn to design a building that could be used as offices and showrooms or for light manufacturing.

2 Park Avenue Vital Statistics
  • Location: 2 Park Avenue between E 32nd and E 33rd Streets
  • Year completed: 1928
  • Architect: Ely Jacques Kahn (Buchman & Kahn
  • Floors: 29
  • Style: Art Deco
  • New York City Landmark: 2006
2 Park Avenue Recommended Reading

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767 Third Avenue

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767 Third Avenue represents the personality of developer Melvyn Kaufman more than it stands for an architect or style of architecture.

FxFowle Architects designed a beautiful building, to be sure. Subtle brick detailing outlines the ribbon windows; corners are sinuously rounded; the whole tower is raised on pilotis, revealing a lobby sheathed in oak-framed glass (instead of metal or stone). The more playful details are on E 48th Street, in the courtyard behind the building. A three-story chessboard adorns the wall of 212 E 48th Street; huge steel footprints are welded to the sidewalk utility grates; a stage coach and a 1929 Ford truck are parked in the plaza.

The New York Times’ obituary for Melvyn Kaufman noted, “Though he was not an architect, his buildings were generally acknowledged to have sprung as much from his own vision as from the architect of record’s — a vision Mr. Kaufman realized with the aid of designers like Pamela Waters and Rudolph de Harak.”

The Times continued, “Mr. Kaufman had a lifelong fascination with office buildings as public spaces with which tenants and passers-by could engage. If one was going to erect a leviathan, his design philosophy seemed to go, at least make it leviathan with levity.

“He deplored lobbies, the sine qua non of office buildings since the dawn of recorded history. ‘Marble and travertine mausoleums are bad for the living and terrific for the dead,’ Mr. Kaufman told The Times in 1971.”

Kaufman seemed fond of this stretch of Third Avenue: He built other office buildings at 711, 747, and 777.

767 Third Avenue Vital Statistics
  • Location: 767 Third Avenue at E 48th Street
  • Year completed: 1981
  • Architect: FxFowle Architects
  • Floors: 40
  • Style: International
767 Third Avenue Recommended Reading

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Lincoln Square

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The Lincoln Square neighborhood got its name in May 1906, but it took the Lincoln Center Redevelopment project to really put the area on the map. The 1955 public/private urban renewal project turned a slum into a cultural complex. Some fifty years later, the center was renovated and extended with the addition of less formal features, such as the Illumination Lawn and the plaza, grandstand and cafe on Broadway between West 65th and West 66th Streets.

The project’s enduring flaw is the lack of mass transit: A single subway stop – and a local stop at that – serves Lincoln Center.

Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus occupies two square blocks south of Lincoln Center; Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School and Martin Luther King, Jr. High School occupy two blocks west of Lincoln Center. Capital Cities/ABC has a cluster of four buildings at Columbus Avenue and West 66th Street. Retail culture – in the form of Tower Records and Barnes and Noble – used to be Lincoln Center’s neighbors on opposite sides of Broadway at West 66th; they’ve been succeeded by Raymour & Flanigan furniture and Century 21 discount department store.

The slide show begins with Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, then continues with the Lincoln Square neighborhood outside Lincoln Center.

Lincoln Square and Lincoln Center Suggested Reading

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Governors Island

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Governors Island is open only during the summer on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and holiday Mondays. Free ferries run approximately every half hour from The Battery in Manhattan and every ten minutes from Brooklyn Bridge Park in Brooklyn. Visit The Trust for Governor’s Island for the 2015 schedule.

The island has two forts – Fort Jay and Castle Williams – that date back to 1806. (Castle Williams, which had been closed for renovations, has been reopened.) Other structures were added by the U.S. Army over the years; the island ended its military career as First Army HQ in 1966, when Governors Island was turned over to the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard moved out in 1996; in 2001 the forts (and the land between them) were designated a National Monument. The federal government sold the island to the City and State of New York in 2003; “Open Access Weekends” began in 2005. Currently, Governors Island Alliance, the Trust for Governors Island, and the National Park Service are expanding the island’s park facilities and programs.

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