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About 55 Central Park West
One of the city's authentic and important Art Deco gems, this 20-story apartment house is noted for its rakish fluted finials and its subtle shading of bricks, which range from dark at the base to light at the top.
Designed by Schwartz & Gross, this 109-unit cooperative apartment building was completed in 1930 and is modest but memorable in its design consistency. All of the setbacks have protruding vertical design elements that are also placed around the building above the ground floor. These elements rise towards the center of the park-facing façade from one-story to three stories in height, mirroring the top of the building, which has its centrally placed watertank in a decorative tower.
"It romanticized modern imagery so unabashedly that it might have been drawn by Hugh Ferriss. Everything about it - the stepped tower form, the façade overlaid with a pattern of vertical bands, the stylized fluting, like vestigial wings on the top stories - focused upward. The structure seemed to celebrate the height it achieved; this impression was reinforced even by the coloring of the brickwork, shaded in tones from red at the base to pale tan at the top - forty different hues of earth colors, Lewis Mumford reported - done, it was said, to create the illusion that the sun was always shining on the building," observed Elizabeth Hawes in her excellent book, "New York, New York How The Apartment House Transformed The Life Of The City (1869-1930)," An Owl Book, Henry Holt, 1993.
The architects, she continued, "were the first to treat the apartment house as a unified whole from sidewalk to summit." "The building rose on its own like an organic growth, unencumbered by demarcations of house line or balustrades or cornices. Even the stylized portal blended into the surface…. It was a twentieth-century habitat in which form, height, and light, all by-products of the new technology, counted most. Old architectural habits had been sloughed off much as the skin of old social habits. Inside the apartments, there was evidence of an honest and economical mind at work. The gracious basics were there - a large entrance gallery, a living room, bedrooms, good closets, maid's rooms - but no hall, no extras, no surprises, no conspicuous waste, no historical debris…. The building at 55 Central Park West was neither the most sophisticated nor the most explicit example of the modern ideology to appear at the end of the twenties, but the very naiveté of its winged setbacks and soaring water tower made it the most passionate."
The same architects also designed 101, 241 and 336 Central Park West.
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