Approx. Prices for Apartments at Trump Park Avenue, 502 Park Avenue

One of Park Avenue's most distinctive towers, this 32-story building was erected in 1929 and designed by Goldner & Goldner.

It has had a varied life.

Originally known as the Viceroy Hotel, its name changed not long after it opened to the Cromwell Arms and then to Delmonico's after the fabled restaurant that moved into it after a succession of uptown moves on October 1, 1929, a few weeks before the stock market crash.

Built at a cost of about $5 million, the 525-room property was sold at auction in 1936 for 1.8 million.

Over the years, it switched from hotel use to rental to cooperative and back to hotel use and then in 2005 to condo use.

In 2002, Donald Trump acquired the property from the estate of Sarah Korein for $115 million and started its $80 million conversion to condominium apartments while changing its name to Trump Park Avenue. The sale did not include a small adjoining building at 59 East 59th Street that was being donated to a private foundation for use as a not-for-profit theater.

Trump Park Avenue has a duplex penthouse with 17-foot ceilings and 42 oversized arched windows that had a price tag of $30 million.

In "Park Avenue, Street of Dreams," published in 1990 by Athenaeum, James Trager wrote that the building had an apartment "that was called the highest-priced apartment in the world, a fifteen-room triplex occupying the three top floors and rented for $3,750 a month."

Most of the residential rooms, however, were quite small, but tenants in 1935, when the building was already in default on its bonds, included former New York Governor Charles S. Whitman and Oliver Harriman, Trager noted.

William Zeckendorf Jr. bought the hotel in 1975 and converted it back to a 193-unit rental apartment building and greatly improved the building's image by leasing space to Christie's, the auction house, and Regine's, the expensive disco and restaurant run by Regine Choukroun.

Before long, the building turned into a cooperative only to be turned back into an all-suites hotel in 1990.

Zeckendorf subsequently built Delmonico Plaza, a mid-block office building at 55 East 59th Street, and in 1998 Christie's announced it was relocating to Rockefeller Center.

The handsome proportions of this building inspired Charles Sheeler, one of the great American modernists, to paint it, surprisingly from its back rather than its handsome, well-proportioned, set-back front.

With its three-story limestone base, pitched red-tile roof and brown brick facade, the building has always marked the northern end of the commercial section of Park Avenue and has complemented the taller, grander and flashier Ritz Tower two blocks south across the avenue.

Because 59th Street is a major access route to the Queensborough Bridge to the east, there is considerable traffic at this location.

The building’s tower remains highly visible in part because a major mixed-use tower that uses the air-rights of the former Pepsi-Cola and former Olivetti building at 500 Park Avenue – a sleek metal-and-glass box designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill – was set back considerably from Park Avenue.

As part of his conversion, Mr. Trump added space to several of the tower's floors on the north and west sides that were glass-clad and not in context with the building's architectural style.

Costas Kondylis was the architect for Mr. Trump’s conversion.

Trump Park Avenue offers a fitness center, maid service,

valet/laundry service, valet parking, a doorman, a concierge and a live-in resident manager. The lobby has been restored to its original height and, according to the project’s website, “graced with an elegant crystal chandelier from Mr. Trump’s private collection.”

In 1964, the Beatles stayed at the hotel here.

A few years before Mr. Trump took over this property he converted the Mayfair Hotel a few blocks north on Park Avenue, a smaller pre-war property.