By Carter B. Horsley

Anchoring the southwest end of Carl Schurz Park, 1 Gracie Square sports one of the city's most unusual façades. On both Gracie Square and East End Avenue, its facades are asymmetrical and quite collagist. Limestone is used on the base but at varying heights and its quoins are irregular in places.

The mixed stylistic treatment of this handsome building is not dissimilar from that used at 10 Gracie Square (see The City Review article) at the other end of this short block, but that building is a bit more formal and this is more whimsical, if not fill of fantasy.

This building, which has a very attractive rooftop watertank enclosure, was erected in 1929 and converted to a cooperative in 1965. The 16-story structure has only 20 apartments.

Anthony Paterno was the developer and he convinced Elizabeth Sanderson to sell her four-story building at the corner in return for being able to get a duplex with a 60-foot-long living room in the new building.

In early 1929 while the building was still in construction, Paterno sold its two maisonette triplex cooperative apartments, and residents were beginning to move in when the stock market crashed in October.

The building's exterior is unusual as it is asymmetrical and quite collagist.

In a March 4, 2007 article in The New York Times on a renovation of the building, Christopher Gray noted that "The Gracie Square side is an interlocking puzzle of vertical runs of quoining, horizontal courses of stone, irregular balconies and oddly placed moldings," adding that "even the brick varies: the east section is a darker shade than the west."

"On the roof," Mr. Gray continued, "the water tank enclosure, often a throwaway item, was handled like a Gothic folly, its octagonal form held up by buttresses. The crowing touch was a faceted copper roof ringed by gargoyles and topped with a weather vane in the form of a two-masted sailing ship.