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About Grand Chelsea, 270 West 17th Street
Chelsea is one of the city's most fascinating neighborhoods, one that has had its ups and downs.
Its major landmarks - the General Theological Seminary, the Chelsea Hotel, the London Terrace apartment complex, the Joyce Theater - are few.
In the early part of the 20th Century, many of its brownstones were converted to rooming houses and industrial uses took over much of the area, but in recent years the renaissance of Midtown South, centered around the Flatiron District, to the east, has attracted a wide array of residents and enterprises and gentrification is visible in most quarters.
Chelsea now abounds in attractive restaurants and bars and art galleries, but is still short on modern residential accommodations. One of the pioneering projects was the Grand Chelsea, which opened in early 1989.
A 21-story, 157-unit condominium, the development by 128 Eighth Avenue Associates, Philip Pilevsky and others was designed by James Stewart Polshek, whose architectural firm also designed such superb residential projects as Washington Court on the Avenue of the Americas in Greenwich Village in 1984 and 500 Park Avenue Tower on 59th Street in 1980.
This red-brick project is a very strong composition of a low-rise base with a slab tower at one end. Many of the apartments have corner windows and some have fireplaces. The smallest apartments are one-bedroom units. The facades are finely detailed and delineated and a large sundeck is tucked behind the low-rise frontage.
The final building is not quite as interesting as early renderings of the project that featured seven groups of windows highlighted in different façade materials that appeared to have been hang in frames from exposed structure on the low-rise setback. As built, however, the building is still one of the most attractive in Chelsea.
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