An isolated skyscraper, a rarity in Manhattan, One Fifth Avenue was one of the first Art Deco towers in the city and it dominates Lower Fifth Avenue, Washington Square Park and Greenwich Village.

Designed in 1927 by Helmle & Corbett with Sugarman & Berger, this is one of city’s premier residential skyscrapers.

Its dark brown masonry and strong verticality make this tall setback tower quite monolithic.

The building, Christopher Gray noted in a 1992 article in The New York Times, "is one of the city’s most illusionistic statements, where flat brickwork is made to appear three-dimensional through false shadow effects." The building that year completed a repair of its façades that gave the building, according to Mr. Gray, "an odd, spotty effect as the new horizontal ranges of brickwork clash with the old vertical detailing that was the basis of the false shadow effects." The four "turret-like corners" have a "false projection—darker vertical bands of brick look like shadows cast against the main wall" and "vertical, paired white and black brick stripes convincingly imitate angled masonry projections rising between the windows," Mr. Gray pointed out.

Harvey Wiley Corbett was a very influential architect of the early skyscraper age and, according to Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins in their book, "New York 1930 Architecture and Urbanism Between The Two World Wars," (Rizzoli, 1987, "succeeded in overthrowing virtually all specific stylistic references in...