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About 3 East 85th Street
This very attractive 9-story, Italian Renaissance-style apartment house is one of the city's most attractive sidestreet buildings.
The limestone-clad building has lovely proportions, a large cornice and a particularly fine and delicate ironwork entrance door inside the glass doors on the street.
Erected in 1913, it has 31 apartments and was converted to a cooperative in 1947.
The building, which has a canopied entrance and small and attractive lobby but no doorman, has an unusual fenestration pattern reflecting that some rooms are taller than others in the interior.
For many years, this block was rather dull except for this building and the larger apartment houses on Fifth Avenue. A major new luxury apartment tower, however, was erected on the south side of the street at Madison Avenue and two modern townhouses soon were built next to it, giving the street much more liveliness and character. The street, however, is a major approach to a Central Park transverse road so it has considerable traffic, although cross-town buses run on 84th and 86th Streets and not this block.
Interestingly, a very similar building is one block south at 3 East 84th Street, only it is Art Deco-style and has considerably fewer apartments.
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