This massive, white-brick rental apartment building was a pioneer in the redevelopment of the East Midtown area near the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.

It was erected in 1985 by the Zucker Organization and was soon followed by several luxury condominium towers to the north that are south of Tudor City and the United Nations and a massive mixed-use project that was approved in 2008 on former Con Edison property by Sheldon Solow.

This huge building, which is known as Rivergate, rises with three setbacks to its 35-story height facing the East River and the FDR Drive, which is elevated at this location. The Water Club restaurant is a few blocks south along the river.

Most of the apartments in this building have spectacular views.

The building has a large plaza on First Avenue, part of which is used as an ice-skating rink in the winter.

There is a health club, a garage, a doorman, a concierge, a bicycle room, an outdoor playground and garden, video security, many balconies, some terraces, storage space, a sundeck and valet service.

This project transformed a non-descript area north of Hospital Alley along First Avenue into a new residential neighborhood and while many of the newer towers are flashier, none have better views.

There are entrances to the FDR Drive nearby and together with the nearby tunnel there is considerable traffic here.

The building has 706 rental apartments, some with 10-foot-high ceilings and some with fireplaces, and it was renovated in 1997.

The site was formerly occupied by a Coca-Cola bottling plant and Mr. Zucker acquired it in 1978 but had to negotiate for several years with the community board that successfully argued for a 20 percent reduction in its bulk and a public park on First Avenue.

The apartments are above three retail floors.

In their great book, "New York 1980, Architecture and Urbanism between The Bicentennial and the Millennium," Robert A. Stern, David Fishman and Jacob Tilove noted that "The building's banal, multi-balconied, brown brick-clad mass was dressed up with a 6,000-square-foot, three-story glass-covered atrium lobby embellished by waterfalls and Frank Stella's thirty-two-by-eight-foot Damascus Gate Variation I (1969). But Thomas Balsey's public plaza along First Avenue had some real style, providing the real amenity of an ice-skating rink, a happy contribution to the developing neighborhood that was unfortunately removed in 1996 when the plaza was redesigned by Landgarden Landscape Architects."

In a May 12, 1985 article in The New York Times, Dee Wedemeyer wrote that "Mr. Stella, who has been an established artist for more than two decades, is getting considerable attention in Manhattan's development community these days. Not only has he been commissioned to do a huge work of public art for the [599] Lexington Avenue building, but the lobby of a new downtown office building at 199

Water Street, a block-square rental apartment house at 401 East 34th Street, and a collection of Stella lithographs has been installed in a Murray Hill condominium, the Pierpont at 111 East 30th Street. Earlier, in 1981, the Fisher Brothers put a 45-foot-long Stella in the lobby of Park Avenue Plaza, at 55 East 52nd Street.

The building has a circular driveway, a sundeck, an attended garage, a bicycle room, a landscaped park, a fitness center, 24-hour doorman and concierge service, balconies, icemakers and triple-glazed windows.