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About 1060 Fifth Avenue
This large and very attractive apartment building has a very large and impressive lobby and an entrance on the sidestreet.
Designed by J. E. R. Carpenter, the foremost designer of luxury apartment buildings in the early and mid-1920's, this building was completed in 1929 and has only 48 apartments.
The building replaced the very imposing, gracious and handsome mansion of Henry Phipps, a partner of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, whose huge home with large fenced garden is now the National Design Museum three blocks to the north on the avenue. The three-story Phipps mansion also had a very large driveway and garden on the sidestreet, albeit with only a low balustraded fence.
The window pattern on the avenue of Carpenter's apartment house, which has a limestone base beneath a brown brick, Italian Renaissance-style facade, "masks an intricate set of apartments that permitted higher ceilings and larger-sized rooms on the upper floors where the views over the park were better," noted Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin and Thomas Mellins in their monumental and fine book, "New York 1930, Architecture and Urbanism Between The Two World Wars," (Rizzoli International, 1987).
Many of the apartments have very wide and long entrance galleries and the sidestreet frontage, which is very deep, is indented to provide more light and air.
The building has a superb location, one block north of where most Fifth Avenue parades end and one block east of a large supermarket. It is also one block south of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
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