This building is a rarity in Brooklyn Heights, a high-rise apartment building.

It was built by Ian Bruce Eichner in 2000 and designed by H. Thomas O'Hara. Mr. Eichner sold it to Archstone-Smith in 2006 for $101 million and it is now known as Archstone Brooklyn Heights.

The 33-story, red-brick building has 186 rental apartments.

The upper floors - from the 10th floor-and-up on the south side; and from 14th floor-and-up on the north side - have great views of Lower Manhattan and the harbor.

The building has a sundeck, a concierge, a fitness center and a garage and has a gourmet food store in its retail spaces.

The mid-block building is setback in a plaza on Montague Street. It is not in the Brooklyn Heights Historic District. (Mr. Eichner did get involved in a landmarks controversy in the district when he sought in 1980 to build a 15-story, 51-unit cooperative on the site of the old Hotel Margaret on Columbia Heights at Orange Street. The battle ended in the developer's favor, but the building's height was lowered to 11 stories, and the site ultimately was sold to the Jehovah's Witnesses for use as a dormitory.

This site was formerly occupied by a two-story building and Mr. Eichner acquired unused air-rights from adjacent properties and planned a new building on the site.

Mr. Eichner, a veteran developer in Manhattan, was the builder of CitySpire on 56th Street between the Avenue of the Americas and Seventh Avenue and adjacent to the City Center for the Performing Arts, and America, an apartment building on the southeast corner of Second Avenue and 85th Street. Both buildings were designed by Helmut Jahn, the architect of the State of Illinois Center building in Chicago.

Mr. Eichner also was the developer of several other Manhattan apartment buildings including the Kingsley on First Avenue, the Royale and Richmond on Third Avenue and the Boulevard on Broadway.

He was also the developer of the striking, blue-glass-clad office tower in Times Square at 1540 Broadway and the Continuum in Miami and the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas.

An article by Dana Rubenstein in the June 7, 2010 edition of observer.com said "he's entered into contract for two development sites in the New York metropolitan area" and that "by year's end, he wants to have acquired between eight and 10."

In 1946 Charles E. Smith founded The Charles E. Smith Companies, which became the largest real estate company in the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area and in 1994 it formed a publicly-traded real estate investment trust and in 2001 it merged with Archstone Communities of Denver and in 2007 it announced it would be taken over by Tishman Speyer and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., for $15.5 billion.

This building is within one block of the Court Street subway and within two blocks of the Borough Hall subway, providing easy access to Wall Street and Midtown. The Brooklyn Bridge and Brooklyn-Queens Expressway are within four blocks of the community, providing convenient access to Manhattan, Long Island and other destinations in the Northeast.