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About The Empire, 188 East 78th Street
With its very tall gables, this 32-story condominium apartment tower would seem more at home near the peaks of the Dakota apartment building on Central Park West at 72nd Street than in the middle of a fairly bland stretch along Third Avenue in the 70s.
It replaced a two-story building that ran between 77th and 78th Streets along the avenue and hid a spacious private garden enclave that had been known as The Cottages that was designed by E. H. Faile in 1937.
The Cottages, which contained stores on the first floor and eight one-bedroom apartments on the second floor with glass-block windows facing the avenue, were undistinguished architecturally, but the charm of the garden and the anachronism of such underdevelopment in such a prime area of the Upper East Side led to one of the city's more heated landmark controversies in the 1990s.
"A gatehouse on Seventy-Eighth Street marked the building's entrance and opened onto an 11,000-square-foot garden that originally contained two tennis courts and two badminton courts, which were eliminated with the construction of the apartment house at 177 East 77th Street in 1941," noted Robert A. M. Stern, David Fishman and Jacob Tilove in their wonderful book, "New York 2000, Architecture and Urbanism Between The Bicentennial And The Millennium" (The Monacelli Press, 2006.)
"In contrast to the Modernism of the glass and brick Third Avenue-facing facade, the garden front, with its flights of stairs leading to the raised terrace, had overtones of the late Georgian and Regency styles," the authors wrote.
A local coalition rallied to have the enclave declared a landmark but eventually the site was not so designated and five of the eight residents accepted a settlement to move and the building, which was topped out in the summer of 1999.
The design for the site incorporates part of the Cottages at the northwest corner at 77th Street, but the main portion of the development is on the northern end of the site, which give the apartments considerable "light and air."
The tower has a very handsome, six-story base on its north end of rose-colored brick and pre-cast stone that simulates limestone, the same material as used on the tower. The base is very attractive with large, arched windows on the second floor and a two-story pre-cast stone lower section at the south with pilasters and a top floor with pre-cast stone window reveals.
The tower has chamfered corners with bay windows and curved brick spandrels and some curved balconies. The corner bay windows detract somewhat from the otherwise excellent sense of pre-war solidity, but they are also very desirable for their dramatic views.
Hartman-Cox Architects of Washington is the architectural firm and Schuman Lichtenstein Clamon Efron are the designers of the apartments, which have 9-foot-high ceilings and washers and dryers.
The building has a new private garden designed by Thomas Balsey Associates and some landscaped rooftop and terrace areas in the base including a pergola.
The developer of the building, which has 77 apartments, is RFR/Davis, a venture of Davis & Partners and RFR Holdings, developers previously of rental projects.
Most of the apartments have two or more bedrooms, foyers, formal dining rooms and marble baths and there are 36 storage rooms and 36 wine cellars available for purchase in the building. Some apartments have fireplaces. The building has a 25-car garage.
It also features the Empire Club, designed by Birch Coffey Design Associates and accessed by a grand staircase from the building's marble lobby. The club has a fitness center, a children's playhouse, a cinema room and a private dining room with adjoining terrace and a sundeck on the third floor.
While Manhattan is sorely needs as many tennis and badminton courts as possible, the loss of The Cottages was not the end of the world for the Upper East Side and the new, setback tower's Post-Modern modeling is generally cheery and warm.
There is excellent cross-town bus service one block to the north and a local subway station is at 77th Street and Lexington Avenue, where Lenox Hill Hospital is located. This neighborhood has many pleasant restaurants, although there are no nearby parks.
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