52E4, 52 East 4th Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 52 East 4th Street by Carter Horsley

One of the sentinels of the new Bowery, this 15-story residential condominium building at 52 East 4th Street in NoHo is a sleek and interesting building designed by Robert M. Scarano Jr., one of the city's well-known architects. 

The project, which was completed in 2009, has 14 apartments and three floors of retail space. 

The 210-foot-tall building also has an address of 351 Bowery, which is mid-block between East 3rd and East 4th Streets. 

351 Bowery Associates LLC, which is part of the HK Organization of Elmont, NY, of which Harry Kotowitz is president, is the developer. 

Andres Escobar & Associates designed the interiors.

Bottom Line

One of the city’s more complex towers, this building has diagonal trusses not only on the outside but also on the inside in an intriguing asymmetrical plan that is not discernible on its exterior - a Bowery Boogie-Woogie.

Description

The building’s plot has 8 sides, three of which are angled and dramatic angled trusses inside the apartments as well as in the center of its main façade facing the Bowery.

The building has a high fenestration pattern with multi-pane, clear windows and crisp lines. 

The building has a long and narrow, landscaped entrance ramp adjacent to its garage entrance and the tower has one setback. Diagonal braces are also applied to the ramp’s and the garage’s gates. 

Its rear façade has no angled trusses on its exterior but its very large windows are alternately slighted canted.

Amenities

The building has a part-time doorman, a concierge, a roof deck with pool and a 3-car garage with an electric gate entrance.

Apartments

Many apartments have 13-foot-high ceilings, SubZero refrigerators, Bosch appliances and Corian kitchen countertops. 

The building has one studio unit with terrace, three one-bedroom apartments, one two-bedroom unit with wrap-around terrace, eight two-bedroom apartments with two-and-a-half baths and one two-bedroom unit with two-and-a-half baths and private rooftop outdoor space. 

Apartment 4N is a one-bedroom unit that has a large living/dining room with an open kitchen and a small terrace. 

Apartment 5N is a one-bedroom unit that has a small entry foyer that leads into a angled dining room that flows into a 17-foot-wide living room with a open, pass-through kitchen. 

Apartment 5S is a one-bedroom unit that has a 5-foot-wide entrance foyer that opens onto a 15-foot-long living/dining room with an open 10-foot-wide kitchen with an island. 

Apartment 10 is a two-bedroom unit that has an angled entry foyer that leads to an angled, corner living room with an open kitchen.

Location

The building is just to the north of the site of a former low-rise Salvation Army building that is being redeveloped by the Paris-based Louzon Group into an 11-story, 72-room, white hotel structure with red balconies designed by Gene Kaufman. 

This building won the Society of American Registered Architects 2008 Design Award. 

Mr. Scarano has designed scores of developments in Brooklyn with rather boldly juggled designs from many influences. 

Here, however, he has taken subtle and restrained hints from the Switch Building at 109 Norfolk Street where nARCHITECTS had the façade’s bay windows alternately protrude and recede and from Skidmore Owings & Merrill’s Gordon Bunshaft’s design for Sheldon Solow’s sloping tower at 9 West 57th Street where he exposed diagonal bracing in the center of the side façades. 

In the early years of this millennium, the skyline of the Bowery, long the city’s skid row, began to change very dramatically with such stunning projects as the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Cooper Square Hotel, the Thompson Hotel, the apartment building at 445 Lafayette Street and the spectacular new Cooper Union Building between East 6th and East 7th Street designed by Thomas Mayne. 

This building may not be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but its less than flamboyant appearance belies its quite tipsy innards.