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About 998 Fifth Avenue
One of the world's grandest apartment buildings, 998 Fifth Avenue was designed by McKim, Mead & White, the architectural firm that designed the Pennsylvania Station that was demolished in 1964.
An inflated Italian Renaissance-style palazzo structure, the building would delight the Medicis and is widely credited with convincing New York's very rich that apartments were acceptable habitats.
"At the time 998 was built, apartment house living had not yet been widely accepted by the very wealthy, but as The Real Estate Record noted, 998 helped to change the 'deep-seated repugnance' that 'families of high social position' had for apartments," noted Andrew S. Dolkart in his book, "Touring the Upper East Side, Walks in Five Historic Districts," published in 1995 by the New York Landmarks Conservancy.
Although only 12 stories tall, its limestone rustication, yellow Sienna marble panels on the 8th and 12th floors and large cornice topped by a pitched, cooper roof convey a marvelous sense of monumentality. Almost square, the building has a large court on which only servants and service rooms faced, but the court was lined with stone rather than brick to improve the view.
When it opened as a rental in 1912, the building stood as an isolated and not necessarily popular tower along Millionaire's Row on the avenue until Douglas I. Elliman, the rental agent in his older brother's real estate firm, Pease & Elliman, convinced Senator Elihu Root to move from his Park Avenue home at 71st Street by reducing his rent from $25,000 a year to $15,000. After loss-leader Root signed up, the building filled quickly with such residents as Murray Guggenheim, former U.S. Vice President Levi P. Morton and a granddaughter of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt.
The building was developed on a site that had been owned by August Belmont II, the financier who was involved in building subways, by Century Holding Company, headed by lawyers Charles R. Fleischmann and James T. Lee. It was converted to a cooperative in 1953. In 1974, the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission described it as the city's "finest Italian Renaissance-style apartment house."
Andrew Alpern noted in his book, "Historic Manhattan Apartment Houses," (Dover Publications, Inc., 1996), that the building has a "central vacuum-cleaning system, jewelry and silver safes anchored in the walls of each apartment, remote laundries with ventilated steam-drying devices, basement storage rooms, refrigerated wine cellars and additional servants' quarters of the roof." The handsome, large marquee over the sidestreet entrance still exists, although it has lost some of its decorative elements as Alpern noted and illustrated in his book.
"The lobby was lined in Italian marble, the halls were floored in durable Tennessee marble (Like Grand Central Terminal), and the elevators were paneled in French walnut. Some doors throughout all apartments were framed in marble, and each front door was fireproofed with a sheet of galvanized steel that was painted to simulate fine wood. Ceilings measured ten and a half feet high, except on the fifth floor, where there were a foot higher. The interior design of 998 provided three apartments for every two stories, which added up to six duplexes, located in the advantaged southern corner, and eleven seventeen-room simplexes," wrote Elizabeth Hawes in her book, "New York, New York, How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City (1869-1930)," Henry Holt and Company, 1993).
Stanford White, the legendary partner of the architectural firm, had been killed a few years before this project, but the firm obviously still had plenty of genius left and William Richardson, a partner in the firm, was responsible for this design.
The building is a very elegant masterpiece.
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