This apartment house was built in 1929 by Arthur Brisbane, a journalist who four years earlier had developed the far larger and more prominently located Ritz Tower on the northeast corner of Park Avenue and 57th Street.

This neo-Romanesque structure was designed by Schultze & Weaver, the architects of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street. It was converted to a cooperative in 1978 and now contains 62 apartments.

"Brisbane was the highest-paid newspaperman of his day, perhaps of any day in terms of purchasing power of money. In the early 1930’s William Randolph Hearst paid him two hundred fifty thousand dollars a year to write a six-day-a-week column entitled ’Today,’ which appeared on the front page of the Hearst tabloids and hundreds of other newspapers in the United States," wrote Jerry E. Patterson in his book, "Fifth Avenue, The Best Address," (Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1998).

"Brisbane," Patterson continued, "was astonishingly prolific: he wrote five hundred thousand words a year; in fifty-three years of journalism, he calculated that he had written 25 million words. Most of them might as well have been written on the wind so far as posterity was concerned. He was a master of superficiality and platitudes; his columns required the minimum effort on the part of readers; no long words, no opinions that would bewilder them. Although his superficiality was complete, he was energetic; he had a dictaphone (one of the earliest) in his...