Fifth Avenue and Central Park West may have views of Central Park, but the centerpiece of this complex on Battery Place overlooks not only Battery Park but also the Statue of Liberty, the Castle Clinton National Monument, Ellis Island, Staten Island, Brooklyn, New Jersey, and Pier A, the city’s colorful fireboat station.

The southernmost building, 17 Battery Place, was long known as the Whitehall Building and was designed in 1902 by Henry J. Hardenbergh, the architect who would design the Plaza Hotel a few years later. It was expanded in 1910 with designs by Clinton & Russell, best known for the great tower at 70 Wall Street and the Apthorp Apartments on the Upper West Side.

With its great arched roofline, it was an important part of the city’s famed skyline that romanced the world after the turn of the 20th Century and up to the erection of the Chase Manhattan Plaza tower that disrupted its neo-classical spires with its bulky modernity, a prelude, of course, to the subsequent architectural jolt from the twin bolts of the World Trade Center.

Thanks to the great former U. S. Customs House at the foot of Broadway two short blocks to the west, this building faces on one of the world’s most elegant vistas.

The complex of three buildings also includes a 22-story office building that was erected in 1972 facing the windowless, limestone-clad, Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel Ventilation Building between Washington and Greenwich Streets that was erected in 1950.

GFI Capital resources bought...