51 Fifth Avenue: Review and Ratings

Review of 51 Fifth Avenue by Carter Horsley

This handsome, 16-story apartment building at 51 Fifth Avenue on the southeast corner at 11th Street in Greenwich Village was erected in 1929 and converted to a co-operative in 1988.  It has 89 apartments.

The building is across Fifth Avenue from two very attractive churches, the Ascension on the northwest corner at 10th Street and the First Presbyterian Church that occupies the west blockfront between 11th and 12th Streets.  It is also directly across the Avenue from 40 Fifth Avenue, the most attractive, pre-war apartment building in the Village.

Bottom Line

A pleasant, dark-brown pre-war apartment building with a sublime location and some unusual layouts on Lower Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village.

Description

The dark-brown building has a one-story limestone base with a canopied entrance. 

Its second story on the avenue has impressive window surrounds with pediments at its north and south ends and is topped by a thin bandcourse.

Amenities

The building has a doorman, a fitness center, fireplaces, a bicycle room, a live-in superintendent, storage and is pet-friendly.

Apartments

Penthouse B is a two-bedroom duplex with an 8-foot-wide entry that leads to a 34-foot-wide living/dining room next to a 15-foot-long library and a 14-foot-long kitchen surround by three large terraces on the lower floor and two bedrooms with two terraces and a 45-foot-long greenhouse on the upper floor. 

Apartment 17B is a two-bedroom unit with a 12-foot-wide entry foyer that leads in one direction to a 24-foot-long living room with a fireplace and in the other to a long kitchen/dining room area. 

Apartment 11C is a two-bedroom unit with a 12-foot-long entry foyer next to a 17-foot-long, windowed kitchen and leads up four steps to a 23-foot-long living/dining room with an angled corner fireplace. 

Apartment 9D is a one-bedroom unit with a 22-foot-long entrance gallery that leads to a 20-foot-long living/dining room with a fireplace and a 12-foot-long enclosed kitchen. 

Apartment 2A is a two-bedroom unit with a small entry foyer next to a 15-foot-long kitchen with an angled pantry next to a 19-foot-long, windowed dining room that opens onto a 21-foot-long living room with a fireplace.

History

One of the building's penthouses was long occupied by Jane Frelicher, an artist who died in 2014 at the age of 90. 

In her obituary in The New York Times, William Grimes described her as "a stubbornly independent painter whose brushy, light-saturated still lifes and luminous landscapes set in the marshes of eastern Long Island made her one of the more anomalous figures to emerge from the second generation of Abstract Expressionists." 

She studied with Hans Hofmann and "put her expressionist style of paint-handling and allover approach to the canvas at the service of recognizable images, a course that made her an outsider in an era dominated by abstraction." 

"Influenced by Bonnard, Vuillard and Matisse," the article continued, "she took as her subject matter the cityscape outside her Greenwich Village penthouse apartment, interiors with sill life objects and, after she began spending summers in Water Mill, N.Y., in the 1950s, the marshes and potato fields of eastern Long Island. 

"I'm quite willing to sacrifice fidelity to the subject to the vitality of the image, a sensation of the quick, lively blur of reality as it is apprehended rather than analyzed.  I like to work on that borderline - opulent beauty in a homespun environment." 

The article added that she had a romantic relationship with Larry Rivers, the painter, and she "counted among her circle of admirers the New York poets Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch and, above all, John Ashberry.