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About Park Regis, 50 East 89th Street
This 33-story cooperative tower is one of the most attractive and interesting modern towers on the Upper East Side.
Designed by Emery Roth & Sons and completed in 1974 for developer Peter Sharp, who owned the Carlyle Hotel further south on Madison Avenue, this is a boldly formed tower that may well be the best new mid-block, sidestreet building in the city in decades.
The attractive tower is distinguished by its dark brown brick masonry with boldly formed exposed concrete balconies, but what is special are its maisonette units and its large park on 88th Street.
The context here is unusual.
On the north side of the street at Madison Avenue is the much taller reddish-brown brick tower known as 45 East 89th Street (that actually has its entrance on the avenue). Although very handsome that building, which was erected five years earlier, was very controversial because of its height and lack of contextual design.
To the east of the Park Regis is 1088 Park Avenue, a pre-war apartment building that is notable for its very large rear garden in the middle of the block.
Sharp and his architects situated their tower and park so as not to overwhelm the garden of 1088 Park Avenue and their good-neighborliness actually improved the views of the residents at 1088. (In 1987, the building's surroundings improved considerably with the construction of 60 East 88th Street, a very attractive mid-rise luxury apartment building, designed by Beyer Blinder Belle, setback from the street with its own driveway.
The Park Regis "park" is actually quite deceptive as its four maisonette units, which have their entrances on 89th Street, all have very large terraces abutting and overlooking the park, further opening up the midblock space.
The maisonettes are all different and quite large. Maisonettes were once quite popular but over the years many became occupied by doctors' offices and at the time of the construction of the Park Regis, one broker estimated there were probably less than 50 maisonettes in luxury apartment buildings in Manhattan.
Richard Roth Jr., the architect of the Park Regis, said that maisonettes provide "a different kind of street atmosphere: from the relatively barren bases of typical high-rise towers. The diversity of the street façade is an important selling point, Sharp maintained in an interview during construction. A major factor in his decision to build them, he added, was the location across the street of the Roman Catholic Church of St. Thomas More, which provides attractive views at street level. The maisonettes are duplexes and their first floors consist of a foyer, powder room, kitchen and dining room and they have their own entrance directly from the street with their own and slightly different front garden and stoop, both of which were designed to afford the residents some privacy. The maisonettes have their own addresses.
The tower's entrance has a driveway and a very modern and large lobby. The building contains 203 units.
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