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About Manhattan Place, 630 First Avenue
This mammoth, 35-story slab placed on a diagonal on its site is deceptive.
It appears larger than it is because its broad side faces southwest toward the Manhattan entrance to the Queens Midtown Tunnel across First Avenue.
The angling of the brown-brick and bronze-glass tower, which was completed in 1985, creates a large plaza facing west which is graced with a very impressive, tiered fountain. Thomas Balsley designed the fountain and its large, triangular plaza.
The developer, the Glick Organization, and the architect, Costas Kondylis, then design partner at Philip Birnbaum & Associates, also developed, four years later, the Horizon just to the north and both projects are unusually sleek for Manhattan residential towers.
The sleek, strongly patterned facades of both buildings are designed to also lessen the visual bulk and both are a cut, or two, above typical high-rise construction of the period, especially in a neighborhood traditionally considered less than prime.
The ends of Manhattan Place are angled and its broad façade is divided into six slightly protruding sections that provide bay windows. Both gestures are designed to mitigate the tower's bulk, but the visual scale remains pretty much unrelieved because this is essentially a very large sheer tower without setbacks.
It is interesting that the developer and the architect made no special effort to tie the two large towers together schematically or thematically. Each one, however, reflects the exigencies of the city's zoning and the pragmatic realities of the marketplace. Just to the south of Manhattan Place is a very large huge, boxy, white-brick residential project that was built a few years earlier.
The angling of Manhattan Place, therefore, not only maximizes more vistas for its residents and minimizes views of the large project to the south but also moves the major portion of the tower away from the elevated FDR drive overlooking the East River.
Like the Horizon, the quality of detailing at Manhattan Place is very high and the communal areas such as the lobby are very ample and lushly impressive. The building typifies "modern" luxury apartment tower living with plenty of amenities such as video security, a garage, a doorman, a concierge and a health club.
Its major drawback is its proportions. With 487 apartments, there are a lot of apartments on each floor, and they should have been in a taller, slimmer tower with fewer apartments per floor, but that would have substantially changed the project's economics.
Because of the large open area to the west, this project offers smashing and protected views from many of its apartments.
While the area was for decades an industrial backwater that separated the United Nations complex a few blocks to the north from the corridor of hospitals a few blocks to the south, it is now a luxury high-rise enclave that is a dramatic example of Le Corbusier's famous "tower in-a-park" scheme as is the nearby Kips Bay Towers designed by I. M. Pei several years earlier a few blocks to the south.
In 2008, plans advanced for Sheldon H. Solow's enormous plans to redevelop the former Con Edison sites just to the north along First Avenue with about 4,000 apartments in several tall buildings, a plan that would significantly add to the area's population and traffic.
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