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About 1000 Park Avenue
This large, brown brick apartment house with terra-cotta decoration in a neo-Gothic style was designed by Emery Roth for Bing & Bing, one of the city's major developers of luxury residential buildings in the first half of the 20th Century.
Roth collaborated with the Bings over four decades and in 1915 they commissioned him to design three buildings, 601 West End Avenue and 570 and 1000 Park Avenue.
In his book, "Mansions in The Clouds, The Skyscraper Palazzi of Emery Roth, (Balsam Press, Inc., 1986), Steven Ruttenbaum wrote:
"Flanking the main entrance on Park Avenue are two Gothic figures, one a medieval warrior and the other a builder, replete with masonic symbolism. Legend has it that Roth modeled these two figures after his clients, Leo and Alexander Bing. There are additional terra-cotta figures, executed in a grotesque manner, that depict the builders of Greek temples and medieval cathedrals. Proving even more visual interest are heavy terra-cotta loggias, string courses carved in luxuriant foliate motifs and punctuated with owls and squirrels, and spandrel panels molded with coats of arms and Gothic-style tracery. All this unusually styled ornament brings rich visual pleasure to the walls of this bulky structure."
The building has 70 cooperative apartments.
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