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About The Horizon, 415 East 37th Street
One of the city's most handsome high-rise apartment towers, The Horizon has a plan that angles its center facades to its wings, a simple but superb form that works well here.
The 44-story tower was developed by Jeffrey, Reuben and Daniel Glick of the Glick Organization, which also developed the nearby Manhattan Plaza project just to the south and had plans, subsequently aborted, for a twin-towered, full block residential complex just to the north of the Queensborough Bridge. The latter plans would have significantly improved the ambiance of that neighborhood just as the organization's two large towers here have helped substantially to create a major new "luxury" residential enclave in a site that was formerly predominantly industrial and commercial.
This very attractive, 381-unit tower boasts a good color palette of rich, dark reds and browns and blacks and strong horizontal banding. Its proportions are excellent for a free-standing, full-block tower. The tower was designed by Costas Kondylis of Philip Birnbaum & Associates, one of the city's most prolific designers of apartment towers, and this is one of his best.
This slick building has a spectacular rooftop health club with awesome vistas.
The developers of the project also were responsible for rebuilding part of the East River esplanade and its landscaping and design were integrated into the design of the entire project very nicely.
"Though ordinary in most ways," Robert A. M. Stern, David Fishman and Jacob Tilove wrote in their book, "New York 2000, Architecture and Urbanism Between The Bicentennial And The Millennium," "the Horizon did at least provide 800 feet of a riverfront esplanade outbound of the East River Drive between Thirty-sixth and Thirty-eighth Streets. The waterfront amenity was realized through the efforts of a community coalition, established to reclaim the once-industrial river's edge for recreational use; in 1984, the coalition hired Thomas Balsley Associates to prepare a master plan for the esplanade stretching from Thirty-fourth to Forty-first Street. Because the city had no funds for the project, the plan depended on private developers looking for ways to appease neighborhood residents. Glick, the first to bite, hired Balsley for a two-block stretch, which was transformed into a Battery Park City-inspired esplanade (1992) paved in brick and granite with a curving riverfront railing, 1939 World's Fair-style benches, rows of trees and ornate lampposts, and an ornamental fountain marking the entrance, a necessarily low-ceilinged portal tunneling beneath the FDR Drive at Thirty-seventh Street."
This project would be very much at home on Brickell Avenue in Miami, which is to say that it is sleek and good-looking. It is, however, quite robust in both its plan and its facade and these strengths make it one of the better modern apartment towers in the city.
While not the tallest of the high-rise group that is clustered around the Manhattan entrance to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel that sprang in the late 1980's, this project was a significant addition to Manhattan's East River skyline. Normally, such a location would not be conducive to luxury housing, but the Glicks and Bernard Spitzer, the developer of the nearby Corinthian apartment tower, were confident that good-looking high-rises with plenty of modern amenities would overcome qualms about such a high-traffic location.
On the negative side, the building is located adjacent to the elevated East River Drive and its traffic. Residents in this neighborhood also waged a long fight to minimize noise from a nearby heliport on the East River.
Residents in this neighborhood also waged a long fight to influence the plans of Sheldon H. Solow to redevelop the Con Edison sites in the immediate vicinity. Mr. Solow commissioned Richard Meier and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to design six residential towers and one office building south of the United Nations complex and the community groups were able to lower its heights and densities in 2007 but still were unable at the time to extend the esplanade because of an elevated exit ramp for the FDR Drive just to the east of Solow's properties.
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