By Carter B. Horsley
This sedate and attractive apartment building was erected in 1929 and designed by Pleasants Pennington and Albert W. Lewis.
The 16-story building was converted to a cooperative in 1956 and has only 21 apartments.
It has considerable "light and air" because it is diagonally across the avenue from the Roman Catholic Church of St. Ignatius Loyola and its school and related facilities.
James Trager, the author of "Park Avenue, Street of Dreams," (Atheneum, 1990), has noted that this building "replaced Park Avenue’s last remaining frame houses" and that it "had taken three years to buy the property, because within its 100-foot avenue frontage was a one-foot-wide strip owned by the heirs to an old estate."
"This was believed to represent a faulty transfer of part of the land sometime in the past," Trager continued, "but the deal could not go through until the heirs could be located. The new building was originally supposed to have one apartment per floor, each with three rooms, five baths. It wound up with six-, nine-, and thirteen-room apartments."
The dark beige-brick building, which has a three-story limestone base and sidewalk landscaping, has inconsistent fenestration and protruding air-conditioners. It has no garage and no health club.
The building is not far from to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue and there are other schools and religious institutions nearby. Cross-town buses run on 86th Street and an express subway station is at Lexington Avenue and 86th Street.
It has considerable "light and air" as it is diagonally across the avenue from the Roman Catholic Church of St. Ignatius Loyola.