By Carter B. Horsley
This very handsome pre-war apartment building has a very large and impressive lobby that runs parallel to the sidestreet on which it has its canopied entrance.
Designed by J. E. R. Carpenter, the foremost designer of luxury apartment buildings in the early and mid-1920's, this building was erected by Dwight P. Robinson and Company and completed in 1928 and has only 48 apartments.
The building replaced the very imposing, gracious and handsome mansion of Henry Phipps, a partner of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, whose huge home with large fenced garden is now the National Design Museum three blocks to the north on the avenue. The three-story Phipps mansion also had a very large driveway and garden on the sidestreet, albeit with only a low balustraded fence.
The window pattern on the avenue of Carpenter's apartment house, which has a three-story limestone base beneath a brown brick, Italian Renaissance-style facade, "masks an intricate set of apartments that permitted higher ceilings and larger-sized rooms on the upper floors where the views over the park were better," noted Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins in their monumental and fine book, "New York 1930, Architecture and Urbanism Between The Two World Wars," (Rizzoli International, 1987). The lower floors have 10-foot ceilings and the higher floors have 11-foot ceilings.
Many of the apartments have very wide and long entrance galleries and the sidestreet frontage, which is very deep, is indented to provide more light and air.
The building, which has a concierge and doorman, has a superb and quiet location, one block north of where most Fifth Avenue parades end and one block east of a large supermarket. It is also one block south of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. There is good bus service in the area and the neighborhood has numerous private schools, good local shopping and several religious institutions. The building has no garage, no health club and a few decorative balconies and no terraces.
The building has both its avenue and sidestreet address on both sides of its Fifth Avenue corner.
In December, 2007, Max Abelson of The New York Observer reported that Georgia Shreve sold two apartments that comprised a 17-room, 7-bedroom, penthouse duplex in the building for $46 million to Scott Bommer, the president of SAB Capital Management, making it the city's most expensive co-op apartment, a record previously held by Rupert Murdoch's purchase of an apartment at 834 Fifth Avenue (see The City Review article) for $44 million. The article noted that Mr. Bommer and his wife are moving from 1040 Fifth Avenue and that Ms. Shreve separated from her husband, Glenn Greenberg, in 2000. (12/24/07)