As the city's longest major cross-town street, 14th Street runs the gamut from slums to luxury high-rise towers and from power plant to disco. When it was erected in 1963, this 18-story apartment house was in a transitional area between the huge and famous middle-income development known as Stuyvesant Town on the east side of First Avenue and the faded glories of the Union Square Park environs a bit to the west. Since then, the area has gone through considerable change and the Union Square area has undergone a major renaissance and with the Flatiron District just to the north is now one of the city's most vibrant districts. Some important landmarks, however, have gone such as Luchow's, the famous German restaurant, and the Palladium, the spectacular disco that was formerly the Academy of Music Theater. New York University, centered around Washington Square Park, has continued to acquire properties in this area and redevelop them as dormitories, a trend that is likely to continue. This building is just around the corner from Stuyvesant Park to the north, which is very similar to Gramercy Park, only not private. The building, which was converted to a cooperative in 1991, is one of the best looking on 14th Street and its quite bold fa??ade has very broad windows between light-colored piers, or vertical elements, culminated in a stepped roofline.