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About 907 Fifth Avenue
This large, lavish, Italian-Renassiance-palazzo-style apartment house occupies a prime location on the avenue at a major entrance to Central Park just south of the model sailboat pond and the great Alice-in-Wonderland statue, which is to say about as close to heaven as possible in New York.
After a facade cleaning in 1998, sparrows quickly rebuilt nests in the narrow spaces of the small balustrades beneath several third-floor windows on the building's avenue facade, clearly a good omen.
The 12-story building, which has a handsome, canopied entrance on 72nd Street and a center court, was built in 1915 and converted to a cooperative in 1955. It has 48 units now but when built it had only two per floor. It was designed by J. E. R. Carpenter.
The building received a Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects in 1916 and is very elegant. The lower four floors are rusticated. The corners have deep quoins. The cornice is quite immense. Escutcheons separate the windows on the next-to- the-top floor. The building's only major design "twist" is the broken stringcourse above the third floor, which is a bit awkward but does not distract from the pleasing, overall composition.
When the building opened, its large 28-room apartments rented for about $30,000 a year. Close to several prominent schools, The Frick Collection and world-famous boutiques on Madison Avenue, this building has a very desirable location although it is a bit removed from the subways.
This building replaced the James A. Burden mansion that was designed by R. H. Robertson and completed in 1893.
"Critics noted that...[Carpenter] made no effort to supply 'glazed rooms,' which were sleeping porches or sun parlors, for the simple reason that 'to the wealthy New Yorker, his townhouse or apartment is merely his winter residence and so used,'" observed Elizabeth Hawes in her fascinating book, "New York, New York How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City (1869-1930)," (Henry Holt and Company, 1993).
"Number 907 was a revolutionary building in a more significant respect," she continued. "It was the first apartment house to replace a mansion on Fifth Avenue. Dramatically, it raised a new flag of dominion on the south side of 72nd Street, on the choicest corner of an area that was graced with some of New York's most famous private houses - Tiffany's fortress, the Gertrude Rhinelander Waldo extravaganza at Madison, the Pulitzer mansion at 11 East 73rd Street, and Henry Clay Frick's palatial mansion and at gallery on Fifth between 70th and 71st streets. The lots occupied by 907 had once been a parcel of James Lenox's farmland. In recent years, they had held a baseball field and a fine 1890's house that belonged to the Burden family, who had been trying unsuccessfully to rent it. At the first rumor that the Burden house might be replaced by a twelve-story apartment house, local homeowners had objected to the project and fought it in court, but the block was not restricted, and even the daunting presence of the Frick home had not seemed to deter ambitions. As a lawyer for the real estate speculators had explained, 'If the Strozzi Palace, or any of the other seignorial houses of Florence or Rome...were to be exactly repeated with the most beautiful part of Central Park as a background, the only possible modern adaptation of them would be to divide them - as they are today divided - into splendid apartments.' When 907 appeared, it signaled that revisionist thinking was in play in uptown real estate."
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