Brick & Cornice

Recording NYC's Timeless Architecture

640 Park Avenue

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640 Park Avenue is an Neo Italian Renaissance style co-op in the Lenox Hill neighborhood of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Truly a spectacular building and a prime example of the style of times. Built in 1914 and designed by JER Carpenter for the developer S. Fullerton Weaver. Completely clad in limestone, the building has beautiful detailing and from the photos it’s obviously been very well maintained over the years, hardly a surprise considering that an apartment in the building will set any would be owner back at least $20 million. Perhaps what makes this building so “special” is that it only has 13 floors and 12 apartments that are all full floor sized, the epitome of UES exclusivity. While typically in buildings of this sort residents like their privacy, one of notoriety in particular who sold his apartment was Dick Fuld, of ex-Lehman Brothers.

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680 Park Avenue

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680 Park Avenue is the current and long standing home of the America’s Society / Council of The America’s: Its mission is to foster an understanding of the contemporary political, social, and economic issues confronting Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada, and to increase public awareness and appreciation of the diverse cultural heritage of the Americas and the importance of the inter-American relationship.

The building was the home of financier Percy Rivington Pyne, built in 1909 by McKim, Mead & White in the neo-federal style. Neo-Federal is something of a “made up” architectural style, simply recognizing the resurgence of the Federal Style in the early 1900’s, regardless, a well executed example.

The west side of the block from 68th to 69th Street is a beautifully maintained stretch of classic Park Avenue mansions that offers, however fleeting, a rare glimpse into how the avenue looked almost a century ago.

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660 Park Avenue

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Built in 1927 by York & Sawyer for the developers the Starrett Brothers 660 Park Avenue is a beautifully executed 12 story building designed in the Neo Italian Renaissance style fully clad in limestone. The façade, compared to many of its contemporaries, is relatively unadorned, although gracious and refined in its simplicity, it can best be described in favored term of upper east side wealth as, discreet.

660 Park, also has the distinction of sharing the dual address of the seemingly sinister, if you are of that sort, number 666. In many cases of these classic style buildings the second address was often a side entrance, or separate apartment. In this case 666 Park is so much more than that. A New York Times article from 1981 wrote: “SURELY the greatest maisonette ever constructed in New York is the 21-room triplex at 666 Park Avenue… To call it a maisonette at all is rather like calling a Bugatti a runabout – this is not the small insertion on the ground floor of an apartment building that most maisonettes are, those little and charming places that coyly pretend to be both apartments and townhouses. No mistakes can be made about this place. It is not little, it is not coy, and it is not, in the conventional sense, charming”. Mrs. William Vanderbilt is often said to be the first resident of 666, but city records show that the first permits for the apartments renovation were issued to Seton Porter, an industrialist and engineer. Further reading on the home is a must for anyone with more than a simple passing curiosity.

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770 Park Avenue

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770 Park Avenue is a 19-story 41 unit Georgian-style apartment building designed by Rosario Candela and completed in 1930. The building rests on the three story limestone pedestal, then shifts to red brick, by the twelfth story the building breaks “up into tiers of setbacks that were topped with a lantern-like penthouse tower. A year later, 778 created a similar silhouette on the northwest corner, and together, the pair framed the street like important monuments. The rooflines could be seen from far way, and they expressed the essence of these buildings elegantly, for they looked like clusters of houses or small European villages.” (Elizabeth Hawes). The buildings footprint is an “H” which allows for light and air to circulate reaching all of the apartments and in its siting also provides street views for all of the apartments.

Looking up from the avenue, this stretch of Park is a prime example of how many of the gilded age building came to resemble country estates in the sky, providing a stunning silhouette.

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903 Park Avenue

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When it was built 1912 903 Park Avenue held the title of being the worlds tallest residential building with 17 stories, and each floor having a single apartment. Despite no longer holding the world title, the building sits impressively on the NE corner of 79th Street and Park, a renaissance revival style built by Robert T Lyons, and the development team of Bing & Bing. To note, Lyons was also the architect of the more well known Gramercy Park Hotel which has come back into vogue after Ian Schrager purchased it. 903 has a single story limestone base that then transitions to brick for the remainder of the building, capped by a monumental copper capital, the oxidized green creating a striking image against the beige brickwork and the sky.

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