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650 West End Avenue

Southeast corner at 92nd Street

Block 1239 Lot 61

650 West End Avenue

650 West End Avenue

By Carter B. Horsley

This 13-story, red-brick apartment building was erected in 1917 around an interior court that opens to the east and designed by Schwartz & Gross.

Entrance

The entrance

The entrance has a double-height stone surround crowned by a semicircular transom and the second story above the entrance has paired windows with transoms flanked by pilasters and capped by a dentiled cornice,. The three bays that flank the entrance have double-height brick pilasters and the first-story windows are topped by brick arches with stone keystones and tympanums filled with brick headers. The tenth story has two beltcourses and the 11th and 12th stories have double-height brick pilasters with stone capitals similar to those at the base and these are surmounted by a bandcourse with a dentiled cornice. The 13th story is topped by a brick parapet with terracotta coping and volutes flanking the stepped center.

Mosd of the building's windows are original. The building was erected on the site of five brick-faced rowhoses of five stories.

The building has a canoped entrance and a doorman but no garage and no sidewalk landscaping.

In a March 21, 1997 article in The New York Times, Rachelle Garbarine wrote that "One of the West Side's largest landlords has begun the process, rare in recent years, of converting a 48-unit prewar rental apartment building on the Upper West Side into condominium apartments." The sponsor of the conversion, according to the article was Henry Moskowitz, the chairman of the family-owned Argo Corporation, which then managed about 6,300 apartments in the city.

"Under the conversion plan, the per-square-foot asking price for tenants to buy their units, as is, will be $170, but the bargaining that typically goes on between renters and sponsors has not yet started. For outsiders, the asking price will be $360. At those prices, a 1,576-square-foot two-bedroom would cost current residents $259,000; those living elsewhere would pay $575,500. The projected monthly charges, including real estate taxes, range from $308 to $1,730," the article said, adding apartments ranged in size from 309 to 2,594 square feet.

 

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