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About 1050 Fifth Avenue
This attractive, 20-story, beige-brick apartment house was built as a cooperative in 1960 and commands spectacular views of Central Park.
The building benefits from the fact that it is directly across from the very handsome and large, Georgian-style mansion at 1048 Fifth Avenue that was built in 1914 for William Starr Miller and became the home from 1949 to 1953 of the widow of Cornelius Vanderbilt III and then the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research and was converted in the late 1990's to the Serge Sabarsky Museum of German Expressionist Art.
The 90-unit building, which has many terraces and a garage, has a very large and impressive lobby with marble floors and columns. The first story of the building, which has an attractive, canopied entrance, is clad in white marble.
The building is adjacent to a westbound cross-town bus stop and is in the heart of the Fifth Avenue's Museum Mile with many major institutions just a few blocks away.
"By 1957, when Irving Brodsky purchased the Rovensky mansion (Guy Lowell, 1916) at 1051 Fifth Avenue, on the northeast corner of Eighty-sixth Street, as well as the adjoining house at 1053 Fifth Avenue (Herts & Tallant, 1904), and two nineteenth-century townhouses at 1 and 3 East Eighty-sixth Street, Fifth Avenue's postwar transformation was virtually complete. The Rovensky mansion, a last vestige of the avenue's gilded era, was still intact and still inhabited by the family that had built it. The house had been designed for the shipping and railroad tycoon Morton F. Plant and his second wife, the former Mae Caldwell Manwaring, who married financier John Rovensky after Plant's death in 1918," observed Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins and David Fishman in their monumental book, "New York 1960, Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War And The Bicentennial," (The Monacelli Press, 1995).
The location here is superb as the park views to the south are not overwhelmed by the reservoir, and a large supermarket is nearby as well as many convenience stores on Madison Avenue. Despite the cross-town buses, traffic on 86th Street is minimal here as the Central Park transverse roads in this area are at 85th and 86th Streets. Noise from parades, however, can be significant in the summer as many parades turn on 86th Street.
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